vk7hse.hobby-site.org

First the Ady Gil… now the MV Bob Barker ???

Scott Evans — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:14:57 +0000

Back in early January the Ady Gil was damaged and sunk by the Shonan Maru 2 in the Souther Ocean off Antarctica during protest action by the organisation Seashepherd and now the MV Bob Barker has suffered damage at the hands of the Japanese Illegal Whaling crew from the Yushin Maru 3. It is time that the international community takes action to put a stop to Japanese “Scientific Research” (AKA Whaling) and end this ruthless act…

Bob Barker Rammed by Illegal Whaler

At 1209 PM Fremantle, Australia time, the Yushin Maru 3 intentionally rammed the Sea Shepherd ship Bob Barker, penetrating it’s hull and endangering the lives of it¹s crew. The collision occurred at 65 degrees 21 South, 67 degrees 58 East, about 180 miles off Cape Darnley in the Australian Antarctic Territory.

The Bob Barker had been actively blocking the slipway of the Nisshin Maru, the Japanese whaling fleet’s factory ship when the collision occurred. Four harpoon ships, the Yushin Maru 1, 2, and 3 and Shonan Maru 2, were circling and making near passes to the stern and bow of the Sea Shepherd vessel. The Bob Barker did not move from its position. At which point, the Yushin Maru 3 intentionally rammed the Bob Barker, creating a 3-foot long 4-inch deep gash in the mid starboard side of the Sea Shepherd vessel above the waterline.

No crew was injured during the collision. The Bob Barker continues to block the slipway of the Nisshin Maru, preventing the transfer of slaughtered whales and effectively shutting down illegal whaling operations.

The incident demonstrates a continued escalation of violence by the illegal whalers in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.

Said Captain Paul Watson from the bridge of the Steve Irwin, currently en route to join the action, “Because the whalers got away basically scot-free with the outrageous sinking of the Ady Gil, they now apparently think they can do whatever they want and they appear to have no qualms about endangering Sea Shepherd crew. What we really need is for the governments of Australia and New Zealand to step up and start enforcing maritime laws in these waters, or who know what the whalers will do next. Australian and New Zealand lives are at risk every day in these waters.”

The crew of the Bob Barker noticed that the Yushin Maru 3 stopped moving in the water shortly after the impact, and appeared to be falling behind as the Bob Barker maintained its position on the stern of the Nisshin Maru. It’s possible the Yushin Maru 3 damaged itself in the collision.

The Japanese whalers are far more aggressive this year than in past campaigns.

Sourced from www.seashepherd.org

The Australian Government has let not only the people of Australia down by not sending a Naval Vessel to the area to ensure that no further aggression from the Japanese Whalers, but also that of the international community as well. What will it take to end this pointless practice? and should the scientific community be requesting proof of “Research” as claimed by the Japanese as their primary reason for such need to “cull” whales in the Southern Ocean.

In my opinion the only thing scientific here is the weight in tonnes of whale meat ending up on the tables of Japanese restaurants! see the following article from NewScientist Although this article is a little old, it still raises many valid questions into the practice.

Wayatinah Fires

Scott Evans — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 11:25:33 +0000

On January 31 a fire was reported in central Tasmania. This fire is is located in some rather inaccessible terrain and also has some logging coups that if they go up in flames will make controlling the fire all the more difficult. So why am I mentioning this? well, there is a group of enthusiastic amateur radio operators that have assisted with helping the Tasmanian Fire Service (TFS) by providing their time to operate with the Incident Management Team (IMT) as radio operators. This is a job that not only requires great attention to detail, but also the ability to ensure that the information from the fire ground (where the fire is burning) to the relevant person in the IMT.

So far this fire has been burning for 8 days and I’ve been assisting with radio operations for 7 of these days! and as such I just wanted to make you aware of some of the on-line resources that the TFS have.

For a listing of all current bush fires you can get a summery from www.fire.tas.gov.au this listing is updated frequently from information received from the units attending the fires etc. There is also RSS feeds that you can subscribe to as well thus keeping the page requests to a minimum! for example… when the smoke from the Wayatinah fire drifted over Hobart the TFS website did suffer from a lot of requests for current information as to where the smoke was coming from!

There are also KML Google Map Feeds for use with Google Earth to get a birds eye view of the area affected!

The current information for the Wayatinah fire is available from here

The current map showing the fire size & burnt out area is available from here

“Control” will the end-user be recognised?

Scott Evans — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:55:13 +0000

Well the campaign against mandatory ISP filtering by internetblackout.com.au has certainly been causing a stir both in the media & on-line forums. Some statistics are always good viewing!

500+ verified participating sites

296,000+ unique visitors to the campaign site

438,000+ views of the blackout info popup

Here is some information provided by Jonathan Barnett (via facebook) detailing the history of the proposed bill…

Internet Filtering Policy

Stuart Fenech

28 January 2010

The Internet filtering policy has changed around six times since it was an election policy back in 2007. The office of Brett Raguse MP has constantly raised concerns of constituents in this area since the 2007 election. This document aims to provide an overview of the current state of the policy.

Overview

The Internet filtering policy, originally a 2007 election policy, has evolved as a result of industry and community feedback. The current policy proposes two levels of Internet filtering:

1. Mandatory Internet filtering of Refused Classification (RC) material.

RC material includes child sex abuse, bestiality, sexual violence and similar material. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) already orders his material to be ‘taken down’ if is hosted in Australia. There is a credible debate about what this may mean on the edges and public consultation is taking place on this subject.

This system is proposed to block a list of Internet sites called a blacklist. This relatively simple technology is quick and used in many countries. I am advised by Information Technology professionals that this system will have a negligible impact on Internet connection performance.

The policy in this area was originally that there would be a mandatory blocking of ‘offensive material’. This was narrowed to the ‘ACMA blacklist’ and has now been narrowed further to RC. This is a far more limited scope than that used in countries such as China and is similar to the systems in the UK, Norway, Denmark and Sweden.

2. Optional Internet filtering of broader ‘offensive material’.

The second level of Internet filtering is the one that has attracted the most controversy. This is an optional higher level of Internet filtering to be offered by some Internet Service Providers (ISP’s). Individuals will only have this ‘clean feed’ on their service if they request it. ISP’s do not have to offer this ‘clean feed’ but may access Federal Government grants for providing this service.

Originally, it was planned for this level of Internet filtering to be mandatory for individuals and ISP’s, with an ‘opt out’ option for individuals. This has been sensibly altered to the current policy, where individuals have to ‘opt in’ if they want a ‘clean feed’ and ISP’s are not forced to offer such a service.

Current technologies for this level of censorship present technical issues including overblocking, underblocking and performance impacts. There are also critical social issues relating to the role of government in censorship. As technical barriers are inevitably eventually overcome, the social issues will become of more importance than the technical issues in the long term.

Policy

The following issues have been overcome:

The policies as proposed will not slow down the Internet unless people deliberately choose a censored connection.

Scope of censorship issues have been largely resolved – RC for all Internet connections, and higher levels only for people who want it.

Cost issues have been reasonably contained by limiting the scope and not forcing Internet Service Provider’s (ISP’s) to offer censorship beyond RC.

ISP competition issues have been resolved by assistance to implement the blacklist filter and not forcing them to implement higher levels of censorship.

The following issues remain:

The Internet filtering technology is likely to be overcome by technical experts.

The optional higher level of Internet censorship will still have overblocking, underblocking, effectiveness and speed issues, but this will not affect most people.

Oversight of sites to be blocked, though a discussion paper has been released by Minister Conroy on this subject.

Risks of scope creep in censorship.

There is a technical issue relating to the boundary between RC and illegal material.

So will you just sit and watch as your internet freedom is taken from you (like you are a child) or will you make a stand and voice your opinion to your local MP? The decision is yours to make, but do nothing… and well you just may not be able to view my blog as who knows it may get “FILTERED” …

Take “Control” of your Internet…

Scott Evans — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:09:41 +0000

Have your say against internet censorship

Who will be the one to decide what you will be “allowed” to do & see? and do you want Australia to be blacklisted as a rouge state?

It’s time to act… Say No to Internet censorship!

What’s the problem?

The Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste millions of dollars and won’t make anyone safer.

It won’t protect children: The filter isn’t a “cyber safety” measure to stop kids seeing inappropriate content such as R and X rated websites. It is not even designed to prevent the spread of illegal material where it is most often found (chat rooms, peer-to-peer file sharing).
We will all pay for this ineffective solution: Under this policy, ISPs will be forced to charge more for consumer and business broadband. Several hundred thousand dollars has already been spent to test the filter – without considering high-speed services such as the National Broadband Network!
A dangerous precedent: We stand to join a small club of countries which impose centralised Internet censorship such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The secret blacklist may be limited to “Refused Classification” content for now, but what might a future Australian Government choose to block?

Help turn the lights out on the proposed Internet filter by joining the Great Australian Internet Blackout.

[source: http://www.internetblackout.com.au/]

I have implemented the internet blackout on my Home page, Blog and Profile avatars…

Statistics do provide interesting viewing!

Scott Evans — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 13:44:43 +0000

I have the Awstats service installed on my server, I realised recently that I was getting a lot of hits from one particular IP range. On further investigation it was reviled that they are (providing the IP isn’t being spoofed) not too far away! (within 3Km)

whois 147.66.8.158

OrgName:    Asia Pacific Network Information Centre
OrgID:      APNIC
Address:    PO Box 2131
City:       Milton
StateProv: QLD
PostalCode: 4064
Country:    AU

ReferralServer: whois://whois.apnic.net

NetRange:   147.66.0.0 – 147.66.255.255
CIDR:       147.66.0.0/16
NetName:    APNIC-ERX-147-66-0-0
NetHandle: NET-147-66-0-0-1
Parent:     NET-147-0-0-0-0
NetType:    Early Registrations, Transferred to APNIC
Comment:    This IP address range is not registered in the ARIN database.
Comment:    This range was transferred to the APNIC Whois Database as
Comment:    part of the ERX (Early Registration Transfer) project.
Comment:    For details, refer to the APNIC Whois Database via
Comment:    WHOIS.APNIC.NET or http://wq.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl
Comment:
Comment:    ** IMPORTANT NOTE: APNIC is the Regional Internet Registry
Comment:    for the Asia Pacific region. APNIC does not operate networks
Comment:    using this IP address range and is not able to investigate
Comment:    spam or abuse reports relating to these addresses. For more
Comment:    help, refer to http://www.apnic.net/apnic-info/whois_search2/abuse-and-spamming
RegDate:    2003-10-08
Updated:    2009-10-08

OrgTechHandle: AWC12-ARIN
OrgTechName: APNIC Whois Contact
OrgTechPhone: +61 7 3858 3188
OrgTechEmail: sear...@apnic.net

# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2010-01-21 20:00
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN’s WHOIS database.
#
# ARIN WHOIS data and services are subject to the Terms of Use
# available at https://www.arin.net/whois_tou.html

Found a referral to whois.apnic.net.

% [whois.apnic.net node-1]
% Whois data copyright terms http://www.apnic.net/db/dbcopyright.html

inetnum:      147.66.0.0 – 147.66.255.255
netname:      ANARE-NET
descr:        Australian Government Antarctic Division
country:      AU
admin-c:      TP161-AP
tech-c:       TP161-AP
status:       ALLOCATED PORTABLE
mnt-by:       APNIC-HM
mnt-lower:    MNT-ERX-AUSTANTDIV-NON-AU
changed:      host...@arin.net 19920420
changed:      hm-c...@apnic.net 20030910
changed:      hm-c...@apnic.net 20070125
source:       APNIC

person:       Tim Parr
address:      203 Channel Hwy
address:      Kingston, TAS
address:      Australia 7050
country:      AU
phone:        +61 3 6232 3140
fax-no:       +61 3 6283 2140
e-mail:       tim....@aad.gov.au
nic-hdl:      TP161-AP
mnt-by:       MAINT-NEW
changed:      hm-c...@apnic.net 20070125
source:       APNIC

Now the person/persons who have some interest in my server kindly like to explain them selves?

Cyclophosphamide, Doxorubicin, Vincristine and Prednisone.

Scott Evans — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:05:56 +0000

Did I get your attention from the title? and what are those names?

Well for anyone who has recently or is still under going treatment for Lymphoma then these are some words that will affect you in a rather personal way. These are the chemicals that make up the treatment called CHOP. This is of course not the only treatment for such blood cancer, As this will vary depending on your individual type (B-cell, T-cell)

Now for me the word CHOP means a lot, but also disappointment! as I underwent 4 cycles of CHOP to only relapse part way through the 4th cycle. Of course this was no fault of the treatment, it had a lot more to do with the disease that was consuming me. The next move for me was Radiotherapy, its strange how this is called a therapy! because depending where you have it it can be quite uncomfortable. The side effects don’t usually present until you are well into your treatment. In concert with radiotherapy I was also subjected to a very high dose of Methotrexate, this is a nasty chemotherapy! as it made me very ill and I was left with a residual level in my body 3 weeks after it was administered. Folinic Acid is used to neutralise the effect of this when used in such high doses, this was also administered via IV. On the day that I went into hospital to have the Methotrexate chemo, there was a pretty purple sign on the wall (to indicate that I will be cytotoxic) this had 48 hours written on it, and I thought that it meant I would be home in 2 days! hmm… try 3 1/2 weeks

Extranodal NK/T cell lymphoma, nasal type (Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma) was my official diagnosis back in September 2006. I’m almost 3 years in remission and life has certainly changed since that day that I received the news. The person I have to thank for keeping me in good spirit and constantly being there is my wife Clare, with out her I certainly wouldn’t have continued the journey I was subjected to…

If in doubt… get it checked out!

Me TV 1.1.5

Scott Evans — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:36:53 +0000

I realise that there has been a run on updates for Me TV of late! but any way here’s another…

Here are the list of changes that were addressed in versions 1.1.4 & 1.1.5…

1.1.5

More tweaks to the EPG event UI

Added check for EPG events before starting EPG thread

Fixed information on meters dialog

Changed demux filter to only except exact table types by default

1.1.4

Heap corruption during channel scanning (LP: #505454)

EPG Detail “description” shows only the subtitle (LP: #503051)

Not removing display stream when stopping recordings (LP: #506078)

Added sl translation

Slow performance on my blog…

Scott Evans — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:09:36 +0000

Over the last few days I have noticed that the performance has been rather “average” on my Blog! This is notably worse on the admin pages (taking anything between 30-60 seconds to load!) So I’ve gone through the usual debug things like firstly to disable ALL installed plugins (yes performance is restored!) So I then go onto enabling each plugin one by one to attempt to locate the plugin that is causing the grief, only to find that once I have 4 plugins enabled things start to slow down, So I’ve then gone back to disabling all and select another couple and again as soon as I hit 4 plugins enabled I was suffering again! So what is causing me this grief?

Well reviewing the logs there is nothing indicating that there is a problem! So I have upped the memory limit in PHP5 (was 64M now 128M) but his hasn’t seemed to remedy the situation either! So I decided it was time to test a fresh install of WordPress to see if this suffered the same, and it did

So I’m still attempting to resolve the issue, all the other web applications installed are not affected it’s only WordPress. I’ve been using the bleeding edge for a few months now (currently at 3.0 alpha) but the test install I used 2.9.1 (current stable) So I’m still scratching my head to find out where things aren’t working as they should. I’ve also run some tests over the SQL table and they all check out just fine!

If you have any advice … I’m listening!

Web of Trust (WoT)

Scott Evans — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 03:26:55 +0000

It was recently brought to my attention that my website domain had a very poor rating on WoT. I was concerned about this as I host a wiki for the TinyTrak4 community and also I mirror the TinyTrak4 Yahoo Group mailing list using mailman.

However unless you have the pluging that is available from WoT, then you wouldn’t have been alerted to such! So I have added some widgets to my blog and main page indicating my WoT rating.

I thoroughly recommend installing the add-on for FireFox & IE as this gives you a better way to distinguish a site rating, and the ability to rate sites yourself.

To get more information about WoT and the browser add-on, then please visit http://www.mywot.com/

Me TV 1.1.3 released

Scott Evans — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 00:06:27 +0000

In this release the following issues have been addressed…

Use GLib/Gio instead GNet (LP: #503214)

Removed deprecated libgnome/ui dependency (LP: #503219)

Applied patch from Ludwig Nussel to fix compile error on glibmm 2.16.1

Added PES type 0×80 to be a recognised video stream

Fix for FTBFS on Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (LP: #503910)

Removed GTK+ 2.16 requirement from UI file

EPG now honours the version number field and updates EPG events

The main differences here are that the dependencies for libgnome* have been removed and now is using libgtk* When you update to this version you will be prompted to either remove or update the SQLite database (Channel/EPG information)