News (blog)

From Organic Design wiki

1 October 2011[edit]

Posted by Nad on 1 October 2011 at 23:11
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Occupy Wall Street spreads around the World[edit]

MoneyTalks.png
On the 17th of September, hundreds of people gathered in Wall Street, New York to protest against the corrupt financial system that has systematically taken over the US government and enslaved the people. This movement became known as Occupy Wall Street and has now begun to spread to hundreds of other locations around the US and the world, including here in Auckland. Other groups such as Occupy Together, October2011.org, LA Activist and People's Conferences are springing up to help organise people and raise awareness of the problems and groups dedicated to solutions.

For regular news updates on the Occupy movement, see RT news.

8 April 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 7 April 2007 at 20:57
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Server problems :-([edit]

Our VPS seems to have been cancelled, or maybe just shutdown. I can't access it with the passwords I have and the account holder, Peder, has gone AWOL. I've temporarily set OD up on a client VPS until we know the situation, but Peerix, WikiFS and Zenovia are still down. Yesterday's edits have been lost, but there wasn't much activity anyway.

Thank you for contacting customer support.
Please note that at this time it appears that due to the level of the custom modifications/changes that have been done on this instance we are unable to recover this server. You will need to re-provision this server now to correct the issues of the server. Please note that this will cause the loss of all data and custom changes uploaded/made to the server. Please let us know if you have any further issues or concerns that you need to have addressed.
Best regards,
John S.S.
Godaddy Advanced Hosting Support
Damn - I knew there'd have to be a downside to our Debianisation of the server :-( --Nad 13:57, 8 Apr 2007 (NZST)

29 February 2008[edit]

Posted by Nad on 29 February 2008 at 03:37
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MediaWiki 1.12 installed for testing extensions[edit]

I've installed an instance of MediaWiki 1.12 at http://www.mediawiki-1.12.organicdesign.co.nz so we can test our code and extensions in it.

Occupy[edit]

Posted by Nad on 5 October 2011 at 05:12
This post has the following tags: News
On the 17th of September, hundreds of people gathered in Wall Street, New York to protest against the corrupt financial system that has systematically taken over the US government and enslaved the people. This movement became known as Occupy Wall Street and has now begun to spread to hundreds of other locations around the US and the world, including here in Auckland. The video on the right explains in more detail what Occupy is about and how they organise and make decisions with direct democracy.

6 February 2013[edit]

Posted by Nad on 6 February 2013 at 12:30
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Organic Design webmail updated[edit]

We've upgraded our version of Roundcube webmail from 0.71 to 0.85 which is a great improvement. It's more snappy and looks a lot slicker too :-) See our email configuration procedure for details about installation and upgrading of Roundcube, or Roundcube mail website for more information about the software.

Rc-screenie.jpg

18 September 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 18 September 2007 at 08:57
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Dynamic image resizing via URL[edit]

The OrganicDesign wiki now does URL-based image resizing on the fly like WikiMedia as in the following example URL's. You can change the number of pixels to anything and it will return the image at that size.

This process uses the /wiki/thumb.php script which accepts two query-string parameters, f for the name of the image and w for the width of the re-sized image to be returned. Mod-rewrite can then be used to map requests to re-sized thumbnails to the script, eg:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/files/thumb/./../.+?([0-9]+)px-(.+)$
RewriteRule ([0-9]+)px-(.+)$ /wiki/thumb.php?w=$1&f=$2 [L]

25 December 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 24 December 2007 at 19:47
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Merry Christmas[edit]

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.

7 June 2010[edit]

Posted by Nad on 7 June 2010 at 10:48
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Bitcoin: Open Source P2P eCash is here![edit]

Bitcoin is an open source peer-to-peer (a.k.a "p2p") electronic cash system that's completely decentralised, with no central server, trusted authorities or middle men. The availability of bitcoins can't be manipulated by governments or financial institutions. Bitcoin already has a number of exchanges for converting to and from other currencies; BitcoinFX, New Liberty Standard, Bitcoin Exchange and Bitcoin Market.

Bitcoin may last for years and become a popular global currency, or it could be just a flash in the pan, but either way I think this is an important sign of the times to come. This is one of the first truly decentralised currencies and has paved the way for hundreds more to compete together in the new arena of Cipherspace over the coming years. This is one of the key factors in the transition of global society into the post-nation-state economy talked about in The Sovereign Individual.

In a p2p computer network there are no servers, the entire network is composed of users running instances of the application on their computers. Each running instance offers a small amount of processing and storage resource to the network so that it can deliver the services it was designed for such as redundant storage, anonymity or voice-over-IP applications.

In the case of a p2p currency system, some of the services the network is designed to offer are privacy, verification, authentication, currency creation and transfer of ownership. To ensure a reliable and tamper-proof system requires a lot of resource, and that amount is proportional to the amount of coins in the network. The network is able to pay the users for the resource they offer by making the coin-creation process part of the network protocol itself instead of being handled by a central trusted authority. This creates a natural and incorruptible link between the supply of currency in the network and the demand for it.[this bit is factually incorrect, but left in place for historical reasons]

Even aside from the ability to exchange bitcoins for other currencies, it still makes a very useful tool for independent organisations and groups because it allows them to trade and settle accounts amongst themselves independently and privately. It effectively gives them a "bank" that has a trustworthy system of accounts that can't be tampered with and requires no corruptible central authority to operate. See the Bitcoin Whitepaper for more detail about how it works.

To try Bitcoin, download the Bitcoin software, then once it's running, click 'Generate Coins' which will pay you bitcoins in exchange for your computer working to validate bitcoin transactions. Check the exchange rate to calculate how many bitcoins need to be sent. The payer can purchase additional bitcoins if needed. The payer's previously generated bitcoins allow for a lower out of pocket payment. The payer then sends the bitcoins to the receiver using the Bitcoin software. The receiver can then sell their bitcoins for dollars. The receiver's previously generated bitcoins allow a higher dollar payout.

See also

  • WeBank - Report organised by Nesta and OpenBusiness.cc about P2P finance

24 September 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 24 September 2007 at 03:38
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Back to standard mod-rewrite rules[edit]

I've reverted our virtual hosts configuration back to a standard mod-rewrite setup rather than redirecting all requests through our rewrite.pl script. I can't put my finger on the problem, but there seems to have been some strange instability issue involving corrupt content or incorrect files being returned from some requests. When I installed our wikia setup on my local machine the problems became far more noticeable and I was able to isolate the problem to rewrite.pl, so until that problem is sorted out we're back to the old-fashioned rewrite mechanism.

Organic Design uses a single virtual host container to handle all our hosted sites and wikis by rewriting the requested URL to an internal filesystem path which includes the domain name. This means we can add new domains or modify existing domains and the applications they map to dynamically without ever changing our virtual host configuration or restarting the web-server. the virtual-host configuration has been updated to match the features previously defined in rewrite.pl.

14 June 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 14 June 2007 at 06:09
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EmailToWiki extension completed[edit]

The EmailToWiki extension was completed today. The EmailToWiki extension allows emails to be sent to and appended to articles in the wiki using pagename@your-wiki-domain email addresses. See MW:Extension:EmailToWiki for installation and usage details, or check out the code in the local Extension:EmailToWiki article.