Bushfires continued

The mercury hit 38C yesterday and peaked at a bit above 42C in Melbourne today - the fires are still burning.

Here's another site from the Department of Sustainability and Environment showing the Statewide Fire Situation map.

And here is Today's Fire Update.

Here is an historic Bushfires Photo Gallery and a few photos of the current fires.

The weather is cooler tomorrow, 20C, but will it rain ??

Bush Fires in Victoria

* Photo courtesy Skynews

Some of you will know that I live in Nillumbik Shire which is a semi-rural area in the city of Melbourne, state of Victoria in Australia.

Melbourne is generally well known for its skittish weather as it is situated at the southern end of mainland Australia (hence, winds from the desert/outback north are damn hot and winds from the icy Antarctic south are damn cold) and wind changes bring huge variations in weather conditions. One of most common jokes is that if you don't like the weather, then just wait half an hour!

Anyway, we in Melbourne (and Victoria, and lots of Australia) are in the grips of probably one of the worst droughts in history. Bad enough are the growing water restrictions due to the falling water storage levels, but right now it's the bush fires which are the major concern. Huge fires are already burning and today its predicted to hit 37C in Melbourne and higher in country areas.

The Country Fire Authority site has a lot of information and a summary page of current fires. You can also keep up to date via Google News.

Unfortunately (in this context), summer has just commenced and what we are currently experiencing may occasionally have happened in the past towards the end of summer every couple of years - what lies ahead over the next 3-4 months has the potential to be quite horrific. Ugly.

Good luck everyone, be prepared!

Photosynth Technology Preview

This one might worth a peek - something new from the Microsoft Labs - Photosynth. It's a technology preview which they reckon is a few steps short of a beta - so...up to you if you think it's worth the effort!

As they say it's a...
"...taste of the newest - and, we hope, most exciting - way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.
In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor."

Have Fun!

Trawling around for New Sites

Been trawling around the RSS feeds with Google Reader - a lot of new sites I find go directly into the Black Stump directory but there are too many reasonable sites out there for me to add. So here's a selection of sites that didn't quite get there but are certainly worthy of a peek...

The BigBands Database
Internet Resources in Music
Photos: The best of Google Earth
Collarity Search
Space Audio
Cheat Sheet Round-Up: Ajax, CSS, LaTeX, Ruby
Google Earth and Geography Awareness Week 2006
Browser Wars: Internet Explorer 7
Dorkbot ...people doing strange things with electricity
Monster of the Milky Way
and finally for now...
101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived

Have Fun!

Inventions YouTube and PodMailer

Lots of news lately about YouTube and its purchase by Google. Seems like a lot of people are worried by this. As a matter of coincidence (?), YouTube has been named by Time as the best invention of 2006.

Another interesting site you may like to check out, but not about inventions per-se, is the cutely named Cocktail Party Physics which is well worth a wander thru.

To round off this little ramble is a neat little app, PodMailer, which allows you to share files by e-mail - regardless of their size - without clogging your inbox.

In case you didn't know, the Black Stump also has a list of invention related sites for your perusal.

Happy Inventing!

Flying and Invisibility

Having flown in and out of Hong Kong many times in the past, I just loved this little entry in the Humour Cafe. I recall the first time I flew into Kaitak and saw people seemingly only a few metres away working at desks in buildings! Some fantastic photos there and the new airport and landing is nothing by comparison. Just the view of Hong Kong Island as you landed was super spectacular.

Couple of other articles recently about invisibility. This one appeared in the New York Times and there is another article from Discover about "How to Build an Invisibility Cloak" - hmmm, what's next? The human Teleport ? Been waiting for that ever since I latched onto the BBC series Blake's 7 many moons ago. Gotta save a load of jetlag!

Stay well!

No Vegemite for You!

The US has banned good old Vegemite ??? I don't like the stuff personally but it's a bit of an Aussie institution - Ok, you lot can keep your McDonalds and KFC within your own borders!

Vegemite is banned because it contains folate which is Ok to put on your cereal but, no no no, not on your toast, brother.

They have to be kidding...everyone knows this stuff is great for fixing holes in asphalt!

More New Sites

Here are a few extra new sites I've stumbled across recently...no theme, just a random ramble!

2.0 Websites
A Boat Show on the Internet
Ainu-English Word List
Anousheh Ansari Space Blog
Death Education
Atomic Bomb: Decision
Become Shopping
NIST-F1 Cesium Fountain Clock
Charlie Chan
Top 10 College Pranks
Planet Audio Australia
The 1421 Myth Exposed
Cruise Critic

Enjoy!

Software - Eudora Zoho Google Virtual PC

Seems like a whole raft of neat software announcements have been made lately - the first was the announcement of Google Docs & Spreadsheets which is a combo job of the Google Spreadsheet and (the ex) Writely. I still find the Google Spreadsheet a bit rudimentary but it has got better over time - if only they'd support a nice red colour for negative values I could almost use it.

Next was Zoho which I mentioned back in June. Looks like Zoho Single Sign On is On - take a look-see, you won't be disappointed with the range of options and things to fiddle with!

Next I read about the news from Qualcomm about Eudora - I'm a huge Eudora fan, have used it since day dot and now it appears it's going Open Source and Free of Charge sometime in 2007. Here's the FAQ.

Lastly, one of software technologies I'm interested in from a big computing point of view, but haven't really embraced personally as yet, is Virtualisation. Microsoft have just announced the Virtual PC 2007 Beta Program which I might take a peek at sometime - it also comes with Vista support now as both host and guest.

Happy Downloading!

HTML Validation and Flash EMBED tag

EMBED, Google video and html validation......a trail littered with one-way streets and dead-ends...

I decided to give Google Video a go on my site. All pretty easy - just view a video in Google Video and click on the "embed html" button and there's your code. Just insert that into your webpage and you're all done....or so I thought!

First problem - I ran the W3C HTML validator and, of course, it bombed out on the EMBED statement. Ok, off to Google and run a search on embed and html validation - up pops a couple of likely looking sites - the first by J.J.SOLARI details a way to include the EMBED into the HTML 4.01 Transitional DTD - must have been having a bad hair day, but I couldn't get the damn thing to work for me - gave up, rationalised my decision by saying I didn't want to butcher the standard anyway.

Ok, back to Google again....

This time I find a forum which basically says "don't use EMBED, use OBJECT instead and your page will validate nicely". Yup, I did, and yup, it did. But...now Firefox downloads the goddam video whether the user wants to run it or not - and I couldn't find any way to stop that happening. So, I don't want to annoy the 11% of my visitors who use Firefox by artificially loading (unwanted) videos and bumping up their transfer rates...so back to the drawing board yet again.

I gave up trying to Validate via W3C - I use CSE HTML Validator across my site before running the W3C validator anyway, so any page with video on it will be validated with that. A small concession to "purity" but I can sleep at night knowing my pages are valid but I'm also not ticking people off! I also had to include the following metatag to keep the validator happy with the generated EMBED code:

meta content="text/css" equiv="Content-Style-Type"

Oh well, what's a few more lost hours lost spent gnashing and cursing at the keyboard!

Happy EMBEDding!

Free Spyware and Antivirus Programs

Featuring two sites today, Grisoft.com and Grc.com.

Grisoft.com features both free anti-virus and anti-spyware programs. Not much else to say - go for it.

The GRC site features many tools and utilities that are really useful as well. In particular, check out Shields Up! and the Freeware page which has loads of goodies.

That lot should keep you busy for another week!

September 20 - Lying Camera

Someone once told the camera never lied - and like most people, I don't like most photos that are taken of me....and make up your own mind what that means.

Two sites that may be of interest - check the HP Slimming Photo camera ! Hey, way to diet folks!

...and here's a whole bunch more lying photos!

Gotta fly and get me a HP R967...cya

September 15 - Mixture

Thrill-riders? ... the Segway to my latest blog entries is Segway Stumbles in Europe and Glitch Leads to Segway Recall. Ooh-ah, expensive way to possibly hurt yourself!

Be careful ! - Phishing exploit sort of via Google.

Would you believe it ? Finally Get Smart is almost here!

..and Pirate Pete sez talk like him on September 19! Yohoho...

Avast me hearties!

September 6 - Word

Be on the lookout for nasty Word documents in the next few days. Here is an FAQ on this issue.

More info in these sites:
Trojan.Mdropper.Q
Trojan.Mdropper.Q / Email Attachment Practices
Security Focus
Secunia


Happy Blocking!

September 3 - Phoneboxes and Skating

Phones these days can just about do everything except slice bread - but for a blast from the past check out the Payphone Project. Still some good old payphones around - I like the one from the Bay of Islands in New Zealand -looks like Dr Who could step right out!

Lots of more interesting sights in the gallery.

For something different check out the inline skating Speed World Championships being held in Anyang, Korea this week. Exciting stuff and little bit of danger too - Aussie Andy Finster crashes in his first race breaking both wrists, getting 8 stitches and a dislocated finger to boot ! All that training, just to do that.

Happy skating!

August 29 - Still Ugly

Wow, we must be sooo Ugly! - have fought our way right back up the chart to Number 1 position after dropping out of the Top 20 momentarily. Like I said before, happy being ugly!

One of the sites I like to use these days is Bloglines. I mentioned a while ago that I'm a big advocate and user of Web Watcher but Bloglines is a great complement to this for watching your favourite RSS feeds - in fact, I find Bloglines easier to use when "watching" sites like ResourceShelf which gets updated a lot and sometimes hard to track all the changes.

ResourceShelf is a terrific site, by the way, to find out about lots of new things and happenings on the Net. A couple of other good sites for finding new things are the Librarians' Internet Index and the Scout Report.

Happy Surfing!

August 22 Site Advisor

Hi Folks,

Two sites worth taking a peek at today - the first is the McAfee Site Advisor which some of you might find useful. SiteAdvisor is a downloadable tool that works with the browser to help you stay a bit safer whilst browsing. (and I'd appreciate if anyone felt the inclination to rate the Black Stump site, but that's entirely up to you, of course).

The second site is a bit of a fun site (at least I'm taking it that way!) - the Hot or Not Designs site is rating all sorts of sites (sights?) from hot to ugly. I'm pleased to say the Black Stump site has featured quite high on the list (well, Ok, in the ugly section!) - but I can tell you I'm Ok with that as the site is designed for information help and quality resources not to look like every other blogsite out there. And yes, I know it's a bit of an anachronism from the 90's, but there you go!

Happy being Ugly!

August 14 Sites

Oh well, the feedback was a bit light on !!

Here's a random selection of a few more new sites I fell over this week.....

Wildcam Grizzlies ...world's largest gathering of brown bears in Alaska

An Inconvenient Truth ...Climate

The Infamous AOL Data and NYT Locates One AOL Searcher

The BBC News Styleguide ...pip pip

Caddy Map ...next round of golf??

How to Present to Investors

Yodel Anecdotal ...a look inside Yahoo!

The List of Proverbs

Star of Bethlehem

Games, Simulations and Quizzes

Happy Linking!

August 7 Wimps?

Hmmm, well the broken arm needed to be "reset" - don't like to think too much about the word "reset" or "re-align" for that matter in this context - ouch...and they say we might be A Nation of Wimps ? Well, maybe, but if you ask my kids, I don't think they'd agree just at the moment. Three hospital visits in 10 days is way, way too often for me!

Onto matters more useful and interesting....a couple of neat sites for finding out stuff - the first being DNS Stuff - quite a tidy lot of tools. Take a look, you'll be glad you did.

Second site is Karen's Powertools. I use a number of these little freebie programs of which the Replicator is the best - it is a very easy way to backup my *really* important files from one hard drive to another each day. Also take a look at the Whois and URL Discombobulator as well which I also use regularly (but there are a lot more, and sure to be something of interest for you).

Now, a request - what do you you want to see here ? Any feedback ?

Take it easy!

August 2 Mix

Well, the hospital saga continued this week with another child in hospital having his appendix removed - been a week and a half!

Might have to get around the fire and have a game of Monopoly - I see times have moved in Monopoly and new versions can be played with a credit card!!

If any of you have websites, you should probably read Matt Cutts blog. Obviously very Google oriented, but well worth the effort. He's addressed a whole bunch of new questions on video this time around. Interesting!

And, to finish with today, here's information and a newsletter on interactive television when you get bored of playing Monopoly (or max out your credit card!)

Happy playing!