The earthquake caused substantial damage - Treasury NZ

I love the understatement and the New Zealand Treasury has issued this pearler of one in its latest economic indicators report. To be fair, the report's target audience includes people who are overseas and may have had minimal exposure to the direct information on the earthquake we've had here. The treasury is tasked with providing a best estimate of the amount of damage caused, and without even a reliable deathtoll it must be almost impossible to come up with a financial cost, still they try and only give themselves a 33% confidence level:

"It is still too early to estimate with confidence the financial cost of the damage caused by the February earthquake, but it is likely to be [...] we estimate the combined financial cost of the two earthquakes at around NZ$15 billion. There is considerable uncertainty associated with this estimate (and its components) which is best described as a working assumption rounded to the nearest $5 billion."

Repairs could take over four years They later say

"it is unlikely that all this work will be completed within our four-year forecast period. Except for important infrastructure, this recovery will mainly occur from 2012 onwards because of the planning required and the extent of the damage."

It's worth remembering this. In Bob Parker's famous words, "Christchurch is currently munted" but it will be rebuilt eventually. Full Report

Christchurch Earthquake Community Response

A dedicated volunteer team of Internet people, web masters, programmers, and computer savvy helpers have built the Christchurch Earthquake Community Response site to coordinate help efforts. Anyone who is able to offer help or who needs help because of the earthquake should go there.

Useful Resources Christchurch Earthquake

Christchurch Earthquake Community Response
A dedicated volunteer team of Internet people, web masters, programmers, and computer savvy helpers have built the Christchurch Earthquake Community Response site to coordinate help efforts. If you need help or can offer help, please go there.

Because of the dedicated site, this page is no-longer being maintained.

Christchurch Earthquake Update - Support and Condolences

The following message was sent by The Queen to John Key:

"I have been utterly shocked by the news of another earthquake in
Christchurch. Please convey my deep sympathy to the families and
friends of those who have been killed; my thoughts are with all those who
have been affected by this dreadful event. My thoughts are also with the
emergency services and everyone who is assisting in the rescue efforts.

ELIZABETH R " (Link)

Christchurch Earthquake Update

Edit 28 Feb 2011: The death toll is now nearly 150. The 38 was the confirmed death toll when I wrote this, less than 1 day after the quake. There's about 200 reported missing, so it's reasonable to assume that the confirmed number of quake deaths will grow before the recovery effort is over.

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The official death toll from yesterday's earthquake in Christchurch has been reduced to 38. Looks like they double counted the dead yesterday - with the stress and confusion that was going on I suppose that can be forgiven.

The news media is reporting that the death toll could reach 300 once the rubble is cleared away, one person in 1,000 of the Christchurch population.

 The TV feed continues this morning and the rescue workers are all looking like they had no sleep last night. Two that are being interviewed as I type just said they had about an hours sleep.

Kia kaha Canterbury.

Christchurch Earthquake Two

TV One and TV3 are running continuous programming on the Christchurch earthquake that went off at lunchtime today. To their credit, both of these channels have suspended advertising so we are getting no breaks in the coverage.

It's hard watching it, nothing like as hard for the watchers as for the people there on the ground though.

Back on the bike

Having managed to reunite it with my helmet I was back on my bike today.

Coming home I was stopped on Broadway at the red light at the corner with Khyber Pass  when this idiot on a bike whizzed straight past me at maybe 30km/h straight into the turning traffic from Khyber Pass. How he avoided being hit eludes me. Idiots like him are too stupid to ride push bikes in public and should stick to driving cars.

Go By Bike Day: I missed another one

Normally I ride my push-bike to and from work. 5 days a week. It's my only source of exercise.

Every year they promote have a ride your bike to work day, with a free healthy breakfast if you can be bothered biking into Aotea Square in town ... that's about 4km from work so I can't ever be bothered. This year it's today and it seems to be called "Go By Bike Day"

Last year, for the second year in a row, I wasn't able to ride my bike that day. I can't remember exactly why, but I remember being annoyed that I couldn't ... note to self: blog more often.

Yesterday I was nearly home when my head felt a bit funny, I put my hand up to check my helmet and discovered to my horror that I wasn't wearing it, so I hopped off the bike and walked the rest of the way home. Somehow I'd managed to take my gloves and goggles out of the helmet, put them on and leave my bike helmet on my desk.

This meant I was on the bus today and missed it yet again. In the immortal words of A. A. Milne ""Bother!" Said Poo"

Zinc an effective defence to colds

Finally some good news on alternate medicine NZ Herald: "Zinc supplements have been confirmed in a large international study as an effective treatment of the common cold, shortening symptoms by nearly one day." I'll have to remember this come winter.

Fruit and fruit juice harm fetuses?

The Herald reports:

"An expectant mother could be putting her unborn child at risk by drinking as little as three glasses of juice a day or eating five apples." More...

Well, in rats anyway and the quantities are scaled up from a study done on rats. Humans and rats are both omnivores, but while rats descend from grain eaters, we descended from largely fruit eating ancestors so I really wonder if you can extrapolate from rats to humans in this case. It would be interesting to see if vegans and fitness fanatics, both of whom consume more fruit than the average person have a higher incidence of fetal abnormality. Somehow I doubt it as I'm sure we would have been told if health conscious people were having deformed babies in any significant numbers.

The worst of times, the best of times

There's an old saying "Just once I wish I could have the silver lining without the cloud?" well once again it wasn't my turn.

A week ago I mentioned how I was exhausted after cleaning up domains and sites. Well I continued cleaning and improving over the weekend and by Sunday night was ready for a distraction. I had an on-going problem that my VM was CentOS 4 and current versions of Mediawiki won't run on the XML library in there. I've been looking at upgrading to version 5 for a while but the documentation is scary and advises starting again from scratch. The problem is I didn't really have a good way of doing that, so I decided I needed a distraction. I decided to have a play with the b2evolution blogging software instead. What makes this interesting is that with some minor set-up in the control panel it can support multiple blogs in the one directory. Unlike its cousin (both descend from the now dead b2/cafelog) Wordpress they did this years ago with no add-ins, tweaks, etc. Just point both domains at the save virtual server & tell b2evolution about the blog and you're going.

Although not ideal, blog software will usually do service as CMS substitutes, and Wordpress is often used as a straight CMS so I think b2evolution should easily be able to be made to do the same.

---

Unfortunately my experimentation was cut short by the arrival of 9:37 PM. Suddenly my site was dead. Not just the domains on b2, but all of them. Dead, dead, dead. I went to my hosting company's control panel & the log-in was broken. It flashed up something about not being able to contact the machine my VM was on then reloaded itself ... in a loop. I logged onto their CRM and raised a support ticket. Just over half an hour later they let me know that the disk had crashed hard and they were creating a new VM for me on a different node, what operating system would I like. I decided to ask for CentOS 5 ... at least Mediawiki should work :)

Getting a handle

Today has been flat-out. Actually all week has been much that way. I've made some dreadful mistakes setting up my little mini-site empire:

• Domains that aren't delegated
• Domains with no content
• Domains with no incoming links

You name it, and it exists somewhere in my portfolio. Yesterday I sorted out the domains that are part of the mini-site group that should be delegated or have content ... sorted out meaning I know what they are, not that I've fixed them. On the other hand I've found a new writer and tasked him with completing the work I had started on wales.co.nz a year or so back. If his work is OK, I'll get him onto the next domain and so forth.

Web Directories

I'm taking time out from my normal activities to be a little self serving. In the beginning, the world wide web was both small and either academics or closely related hobbyists. They built small sites and links between their pages based on shared interests. People would find interesting sites based shared interests following links from sites to site. The web grew, the founders of Yahoo came along and built a massive directory, then the search engines arose and largely supplanted the directories. These days web directories are nowhere near as important as they used to be, but some still have a reasonable amount of influence on some web surfers. I've applied to list this blog on a few of the more important and have created this post to share some of the love back at them.

Tessa's big day in

Today has not been a great day.

Earlier this week Tessa had to have a small surgical procedure under a general anesthetic. Today Tessa & I were delivering a wedding cake she'd made for a friend's wedding tomorrow. She is still in a bit of pain so I was doing chauffeur duty.

On the way she was suddenly nauseous so we stopped for a bit then started again, about 1 minutes down the road, same again so we stopped for about 15 minutes while she sat on a park bench. Then we went down to Albany shops & she had a herb tea but still didn't feel any better. We went to the Albany village care pharmacy and Sue Jan, the pharmacist, suggested I should take Tessa straight to hospital. They gave Tessa a couple of ginger lozenges and some tissues and Anne, the assistant, spent some time with us while waiting for Tessa to be well enough wouldn't even accept payment. How's that for kindness to strangers?

Round The Bays

I've just signed up for the annual Round the Bays run, except I'm going to walk it. I have some old damage to a tendon in my leg ... normally it's no problem but the jarring of running can cause it to fire up. Walking, cycling, etc aren't a problem.

It's not until 13 March, so I have 6 weeks to make sure I'm up to walking 8.4km at a steady clip. Look forward to progress reports.

Ironically I haven't been on my bike all week ... need to get back on the bike as well.

The price of Internet is eternal vigilance

I feel I've just done something really dumb. For some time now I've been buying content as part of my project to turn my parked domain names into small sites. I've been offering to buy up unsold articles from article writers at a reduced price. When I wasn't ready to deploy I've simply been archiving.

Unfortunately I've got way behind on developing the sites and I've had a slowly growing backlog of unused articles. In some cases I didn't even read the articles before filing them away. As time has gone on this tendency has got worse.

Icelandic Espionage, perhaps

There's something not quite right in my mind about the recent computer bugging reports from the Icelandic parliament, Althingi. See, for example, the report in Iceland Review Online. As reported, a computer was found attached to the parliamentary LAN in an empty room next to the offices of two minor parliamentary parties, The Movement and the Independence Party. This was back in February 2010. Some key "facts" that have been revealed include

• “All identifiers had been wiped off the computer, all numbers and such, so it couldn’t be traced back to the owner. It was a very suspicious computer but we just couldn’t figure it out and neither could the police,”
• "When the computer was disconnected a program automatically started which deleted all data on the hard drive."
• There has been speculation that Wikileaks may have been behind it (denied by Birgitta Jónsdóttir)

Personally I doubt the Wikilinks speculation. Their style isn't to plant bugs, but to accept data leaked by others, nor was it likely to be a serious attempt to bug Wikileaks collaborators. According to this time-line Wikileaks wasn't to publish the Apache Helicopter video for another two months. At this time very few outside Iceland knew much about the link between Wikileaks and Birgitta Jónsdóttir. Sure the CIA, FSB, MSS, and so on would have had a pretty good idea what was going on, but I can't believe they would employ such a crude bugging attempt ... unless they wanted to send a message.

Next question, if a program started which deleted all data on the hard drive (presumably including system logs) how do they know there was ever anything there to delete? Did it give a nice little "Deleting files" progress bar?

I also find the whole business of the computer wiping its disk when it was found suspicious in the extreme. Any computer forensics worth its salt wouldn't give the rogue computer time to change anything on its disk. I would have thought any parliamentary IT service would have standing instructions to immediately take steps to prevent the computer taking any further activities, naively cut the power ... but I'm not an expert. Perhaps the IT "experts" are genuinely clueless, perhaps they were in on it.

So, who are the culprits? Perhaps an insider in The Movement or Independence party, wanting to monitor their own party, perhaps someone in one of the other minor parliamentary parties, perhaps the whole computer was a dummy designed to send a message and if so, why weren't the affected parties informed for ten months?

This whole thing raises far more questions than have been answered.

Edited to fix some badly worded text regarding knowledge of Birgitta Jónsdóttir - 24/1/2011 07:39 NZT

Unwashed jeans don't get any dirtier

In his book The Naked Civil Servant Quentin Crisp famously remarked "There was no need to do any housework at all. After four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse."


The Herald is reporting that the same applies to denim jeans, only more so "Great news for students - jeans left unwashed for a year are no dirtier than those that have been worn for a fortnight."


There is, of course a gotcha ... the wearer's personal hygene becomes very important to the process and the jeans need to be aired.


Seems to me it would just be easier to wash them

Real Physical Security

This photograph is a brilliant metaphor for security mistakes - TechNet Blogs.

Bicycle Typogram

This is absolutely brilliant.  Aaron Kuehn has drawn this typogram of a bicycle. Every element of the bike is made of the name of the element as text (although he does stretch it a little with the front forks). The S of the saddle is superb.

He offers it in a limited edition screen printed form or you can download the PDF from his site and print it yourself.

He even allows re-use of the graphic, with credit.

Way to go Aaron.