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Happy Birthday Bitcoin!!!
Posted by Nad on 3 January 2019 at 09:41
This post has the following tags: News
The genesis block was created ten years ago today at 18:15, and the first bitcoin transaction ever, the genesis block reward, was sent! This first transaction contains the famous message "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" which suggests that Satoshi created bitcoin as a means of resolving the enormous problems that the current financial system has.

The EOS network launch is under way
Posted by Nad on 11 June 2018 at 16:26
This post has the following tags: News
EOS is a new Ethereum-like crypto-currency designed by Dan Larimer who also built Steem and BitShares which are both very successful blockchain projects that both have proven scalability. Unlike Ethereum, EOS allows free transactions and is aimed at full-stack application development with familiar development languages and tools, rather than focusing on contracts using specialised languages and tools. The network itself is not being launched by Larimer or his company Block.one, rather it has been left entirely up to the community to launch it and build applications on it. For the last year, there has been an ICO under way for EOS using the Ethereum network, then on June 1st snapshots were taken by a number of teams involved in EOS and validated together to arrive at a final single agreed upon snapshot which became the "genesis block" on the official EOS chain. There were a number of different contenders of EOS chains as well, but the one that the community at large has settled on is the one with the ID of aca376f206b8fc25a6ed44dbdc66547c36c6c33e3a119ffbeaef943642f0e906. Now that we have an official chain, the next step is to vote for 21 "block producers" who will play a role similar to that of mining in the Bitcoin network. There are around 200 block producer candidates, and it's up to the community to vote for who they want to be managing the network. The strength of a vote is proportional to the amount of EOS you "put at stake" - to make a vote you do a special kind of transaction that locks the EOS away for 3 days. Since voting involves your private key, it's very important to do it securely - many block producers have forms on their websites where voting can be done, but I strongly discourage the practice of entering your private key into the browser since there can easily be malware running. A single transaction can vote for up to 30 block producer candidates, and you can change your vote at any time effective immediately. This means that block producers have to stay committed to their goals and behave well all the time, or they can lose their position in the network instantly. The power of a vote slowly diminishes by half each year, so people are encouraged to keep an eye on what's going on and vote regularly. 15% of the tokens in the network (that's 150 million EOS) have to be used for voting before the network activates and becomes available for public use. The Crypto Lions block producer candidate from Ukraine have made a useful page here, where you can see how much EOS has been staked for voting so far and the current rankings of all the block producers. There are two methods of voting I recommend, the first is the EOS voter desktop app by block producer candidate Team Greymass. This is much safer to enter your private EOS key into than the browser, and it's very easy to use - you can also select an option specifying to not save your key to disk which is even safer. But for those with big balances to protect, the secure offline voting tool by block producer candidate Tokenika from Poland, allows you to sign the transaction completely offline on a computer that has never even been on the internet, this is a more time-consuming method, but it's extremely secure. But who to actually vote for? Well CryptoLions, Team Greymass and Tokenika mentioned just above are all good candidates ;-) You can look through the list of all candidates at random and find teams that share your values, or otherwise here is a good list of well thought out recommendations to get you started. Remember, if you find more good candidates, or any that you've already chosen turn out to be less than what you expected, you can update your vote at any time :-) Update!!! The network has just reached the minimum votes required for activation! It happened very suddenly with whales stepping up at the last minute to place their votes, mainly accounts gm3tombuguge with 32 million EOS and ge3dkmbwgyge with 25 million (the 7th and 8th largest accounts in the genesis block) who voted only for EOS Canada. The next biggest whale who voted around the same time was account ha2tsmzqhege ranked 16th with 11.7 million EOS who voted for two Chinese block producers folowed by geztomjzhage ranked 27th with 3.1 million EOS who voted for Bitfinex and EosDAC.

22 August 2009
Posted by Nad on 22 August 2009 at 04:42
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Organic Design server upgrade We've been having a few "Too many database connections" messages being reported so we've had the RAM upgraded from 2GB to 4GB which should hopefully fix it. Also a second 500GB disk has been added so that one can be dedicated to content and the other to backup.

16 May 2008
Posted by Nad on 17 May 2008 at 21:36
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Predictable random number generator discovered in the Debian version of OpenSSL A major security hole was announced on May 13, 2008 in the pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) of the Debian version of OpenSSL, one of the most used cryptographic programming libraries. The problem affects all the Debian-based GNU/Linux distributions, like Ubuntu and Knoppix, that was used to create SSL/TLS keys since September 17, 2006. The bug was discovered by Luciano Bello, a Debian package maintainer. ([random number generator discovered in the Debian version of OpenSSL|read the rest on WikiNews...]) This bug affects Organic Design because our servers are Debian and workstations Ubuntu, but all have been updated now and the compromised keys regenerated. The problem affected the MediaWiki SVN users as well because it uses SSH keys for authentication, so anyone's keys that were generated on affected systems had to be replaced including ours.

8 June 2007
Posted by Nad on 8 June 2007 at 04:03
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format EmailArticle Extension Ready The EmailArticle extension is ready for use and testing. The documentation is on mediawiki.org, but the code is being maintained here in the Extension:EmailArticle.php article. We had this functionality before in the XmlWiki environment and the new one is based on its email-article.php component. The new one is a special page called Special:EmailArticle and is used from in the "this article" menu in the navigation tree. The new version allows more diverse recipient selection and custom CSS stylesheets. The EmailArticle extension uses Brent R. Matzelle's phpmailer class which hasn't been under active development since 2005, but is still being maintained at sourceforge.

Sortable tables example
Posted by Nad on 19 June 2007 at 13:09
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format MediaWiki Sortable Tables It says in M:Help:Sorting that MediaWiki version 1.9.x now has native support for sortable tables. But actually the method they're using is fully a client-side JavaScript solution developed here by Joost de Valk. So by adding the source code to your MediaWiki:Common.js article (and enabling it by setting $wgUseSiteJs to true in your LocalSettings.php file) any wiki can do it. This will compliment the new display filter and upload CSV extensions perfectly. The following example also demonstrates another useful feature which is the alternate striped background colours making the table much easier to read, these stripes are maintained regardless of the sorting order of the table. City January (Low) January (High) July (Low) July (High) Amman 4°C 12°C 18°C 32°C Baghdad 0°C 16°C 24°C 43°C Cairo 8°C 18°C 21°C 36°C Damascus 0°C 12°C 16°C 36°C Dubai 15°C 23°C 30°C 39°C Jerusalem 5°C 13°C 17°C 31°C Riyadh 8°C 21°C 26°C 42°C Tehran -3°C 7°C 22°C 37°C See M:Help:Sorting for details about syntax and usage Get the JavaScript code from www.joostdevalk.nl/code/sortable-table Seems to have some problems determining sort method based on content, this change helped.

25 December 2008
Posted by Nad on 24 December 2008 at 20:51
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas to the OD developers, users and to all our visitors :-) The picture on the right is a flowering Pōhutukawa tree which is New Zealand's natural Christmas flower since they come into bloom in December. It's been a very good year for Organic Design in terms of building potential, we have a lot of new work under way which will be bringing in resource over the coming year to help move The Project forward.

16 April 2007
Posted by Nad on 18 April 2007 at 12:41
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Site now running MediaWiki1.9.3 I've finally abandoned the legacy XmlWiki and upgraded us to the most recent version of MediaWiki. It was just getting to broken and difficult to maintain. The other major reason for the upgrade is that all the new Wiki-desktop functionality that's in the pipeline requires at least MediaWiki 1.6.0 but XmlWiki was only compatible with 1.4.x.

31 August 2007
Posted by Nad on 31 August 2007 at 08:05
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format OD/Wikia Upgraded Our wikia setup has been upgraded today which allows new domains to be added or removed without any need to configure or restart the web-server, even if the new domain uses different MediaWiki version or even completely different LAMP software. See OD/Wikia for details.

14 May 2012
Posted by Nad on 14 May 2012 at 22:21
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Bitcoinica site hacked! During an attack on the Bitcoinica exchange, hackers managed to steal 18,547 BTC – valued at approximately US$100,000. The operators have taken their site offline for the time being. Bitcoinica says that no bitcoins were stolen from users during the incident; apparently, the intruders only accessed the organisation's accounts. Exchanges like Bitcoinica are a great resource allowing people to easily purchase BTC with normal currency, but to use the exchange as if it were a bank defeats the purpose of the decentralised structure of the Bitcoin system. You should always transfer your Bitcoins to your own personal wallet so that it is under you own control. If everybody looked after their own Bitcoins then there wouldn't be huge repositories that become attractive proposition for cyber-criminals. See also: Bitcoin - our local bitcoin article RT's article on the hack

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