There have been multiple bomb attacks in London. Eyewitnesses are reporting many casualties.
Google News has summaries from many sources.
Police report 6 bombs.
Category Archives: Writing
National Library of Australia Web Crawl
Michael Still mentions my experience with the NLA crawler, and along with Steven Hanley speculate about how the NLA is choosing sites to crawl.
Looking at my Apache logs I can see that their is a reference in their browser info to this webpage about their current crawl, which says:
While the Library and its PANDORA partner institutions have been selectively archiving online publications since 1996, this current and first comprehensive crawl of the Australian web domain was begun in June 2005. For the purpose of this collection, the Australian web domain includes .au domain sites. In addition some sites identified by DNS lookup as having an IP address in located in Australia may be included.
The really interesting thing is that my website satisfies neither criteria, being a .org and hosted in the US, although it may be because the little box on this end of my ADSL connection (which redirects everyone to the main site if they forget the www at the start of the URL) does indeed have an Australian IP address..
However, their overview page says:
The purpose of the PANDORA Archive is to collect and provide long-term access to selected online publications and web sites that are about Australia, are by an Australian author on a subject of social, political, cultural, religious, scientific or economic significance and relevance to Australia, or are by an Australian author of recognised authority and make a contribution to international knowledge.
If that’s why I’m in there then I’m realy flattered!
Of course, it’s much more likely to be just be the fact that I got a link from here… 😉
Recent quakes on the Western Coasts of the Americas
I’ve mentioned before that I get earthquake alerts from the USGS, and over the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed that most of the emails I’ve gotten have been about the western coast of the Americas.
Looking at their front page shows that currently all of the past 7 big quakes they list lie around the west coast (4 off California and 1 each near Alaska, Chile and Nicaragua) where there are a number of plate boundaries. The mag 6.7 quake off Nicaragua was followed in less than 2 hours by a mag 5.9 quake which is below their threshold for a big quake.
The USGS has maps of earthquakes over the last week for North America and South America (which looks a lot quieter). Both maps show the Nicaraguan quakes due to overlap.
A Trip to Walhalla
We’ve been away for a few days as Donna took me away to Gippsland to visit the old gold mining town of Walhalla for my birthday. We also took a trip up to Aberfeldy, which had over 1,000 people, 2 hotels and a school there at its peak, but now has about 7 houses in total left in occupation.
Photos later, when I’ve got them off the camera, but here’s a site with photos of what you can find if you *really* know what you’re looking for..
Sudan Clamping Down on Criticism, Arrests Two MSF Staffers
The Government of Sudan is clamping down on those who publicise the appalling level of abuse in Darfur (PDF document) by arresting two MSF staffers, one of whom is the head of MSF‘s mission in the Sudan.
Feasting on Jerusalem Artichokes
Back in the spring (that’s September/October for you northern hemisphere lot) we bought some small Jerusalem Artichoke plants from a garden that was open as part of the Australian Open Garden Scheme and we proceded to plant them in our back garden.
Over the summer we had a number of large (6+ foot), sunflower like plants appear (not suprising as they’re not artichokes and are, in fact, part of the sunflower family) and eventually some nice yellow flowers appeared, looking like the following ones from this web site.
Now they’ve died back and Donna has dug up 4 of the plants and harvested a complete kitchen sink full of tubers for us to eat, so we’re going to eating these lovely veggies for some time to come I reckon. 🙂
We roasted a tray full of them tonight, with just a sprinkle of salt, along with some grilled lamb and steamed leeks and they were absolutely wonderful!
Holiday snaps from our UK trip now up
I’ve now put a small selection of photos up in the photo gallery from our trip to the UK this year! They’re not great quality, being done with my camera phone which had a bit of a smudged lense. 🙂
A quick example, this is Donna on the beach at Towyn..
America to Accidentaly Prohibit Buying Computers for Dept of Homeland Security ?
Quoted from CNet, found via the infamous /.
The legislation was authored by Rep. Don Manzullo, an Illinois Republican, and passed by the House on Wednesday. It would require more than 50 percent of the components in any end product procured by the department to be mined, produced or manufactured inside the United States.
“With this purchasing prohibition, I guess (the department) will have to learn to do without computers and cell phones,” ITAA President Harris Miller said in a statement. “I cannot think of a single U.S. manufacturer that could meet this 50 percent threshold for these devices, and I doubt that those charged with protecting our safety here at home can either.”
The ITAA is the Information Technology Association of America.
Australian Autumn
Whilst Australia is not perfect it’s really, really nice to come back to autumn here from late spring in the UK and find that the weather is warmer and sunnier than any day you’ve had in the UK for the last 3 weeks.
21C, cloudless skies, not a lot of wind or people.. Fab! 🙂
Back in the sun!
After 3 weeks in the UK for CCGrid 2005 plus Donna’s talks, not to mention a slightly early celebration for my fathers 80th (we had to fly back the day before alas)! For his birthday we presented him with a Clarks Pie with lit candle on top as a tidy treat for him!
Unfortunately whilst we were away our ADSL modem got reset as part of a blackout here and came back up in the wrong configuration, which stopped our email working here at csamuel.org, plus the Nobody Nowhere and Auties.org websites. Despite sterling work by our house sitter via an hour long phone call to me in a car park on my mobile I couldn’t properly diagnose what was wrong and it was only when we got back last night that I was able to figure out what was wrong and revert it to the correct configuration.
Unfortunately as part of “fixing it” I streamlined some of the firewall rules by merging some together, forgetting that the rule I was merging them into only applied to a single class C subnet, so even though ADSL was up and running email came to a screeching halt. I spotted my thinko today and corrected it, leading to a new law: Never Change Firewall Rules When Jetlagged.
Now it seems like everything is tickety-boo again, so if you’ve emailed me or Donna and had it bounce then can you please retry it!