News (blog)

From Organic Design wiki

3 September 2008[edit]

Posted by Nad on 3 September 2008 at 08:30
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CategoryWatch extension ready for testing[edit]

The CategoryWatch extension has been completed today and is ready for installation and testing. We now have the new extension installed on OrganicDesign, it currently it requires a MediaWiki of at least version 1.11.

The usual MediaWiki watchlist functionality is that if you watch a category page, you will only be notified when the content of the category page text changes. You won't be notified when pages are added to or removed from that category though which is probably the main information you were wanting when deciding to watch a category page.

CategoryWatch was designed to work in conjunction with the Workflow extension but has been made separately since it may also be useful to others who already have existing workflow solutions in place, but would like the added functionality of being notified when articles are added or removed from categories they're watching. This extension forms part of our wiki workflow and wiki organisation ideas.

30 May 2012[edit]

Posted by Nad on 31 May 2012 at 16:02
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Occupy Bilderberg 2012[edit]

OccupyBilderberg2012.jpg
Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Historically, one of the biggest problems people have had with Occupy is that its aims and demands have been a little, shall we say, "diffuse". Not the case with Occupy Bilderberg. That's the nail getting hit squarely on the head. Occupy Bilderberg is keyhole activism. Picking the exact right spot and sticking the scissors in. (read more)

Statement by Occupy Bilderberg:

We are uniting activists for a PEACEFUL and organized protest as well as extensive media coverage of the Bilderberg meeting at the Westfields Marriott in Chantilly, Virginia from 7 AM on May 31st until 6 PM on June 3rd. Don’t forget – if you cannot attend the protest you can still help defeat the globalists by spreading the word about the Bilderberg Group and their agenda either through social networking websites or by street activism.

See also:

31 May 2012[edit]

Posted by Nad on 1 June 2012 at 23:05
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Iran invites malware into their nuclear facilities[edit]

Flame-Windows.jpg
After Obama and Israel released the Stuxnet worm to attack Irans nuclear facilities in 2010, another virus being called Flame has now been discovered which does even more damage.

Infiltration of the computer systems in a tightly secured nuclear facility would normally be a practically impossible task, but the US and Israel had an amazing stroke of good luck; they discovered that Iran was using Windows operating systems in its nuclear facilities which are renowned for being the most insecure and vulnerable operating systems currently available!

So once this valuable piece of information was known it was a simple matter of applying a few of the well known Windows exploits, such as putting some malicious code into removable media's autorun.inf files or gaining complete control of a machine via flaws in the graphical user interface programming.

It seems almost like Iran was inviting such an attack - why on earth would such insecure software be used for something so security sensitive? why would they carry on using Windows after being infected by Stuxnet? why are they even supporting US companies with their IT budget? It seems to be about as ridiculous as the death star having a self-destruct button in the middle just waiting for a Jedi to fly in and press it!

Updates:

- by Dan Goodin - June 7 2012
- F-Secure's Chief Research Officer: A/V outfits were out of their league

17 October 2008[edit]

Posted by Sven on 26 October 2008 at 09:02
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Tornado in Cambridge[edit]

GarageDoor.jpg

A small tornado hit the Waikato town of Cambridge at 3:00am in the morning. It had the intensity of an EF0 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale.

NeighboursHouse.jpg

The tornado headed through town from the north and bounced through urban housing at times increasing in intensity to an EF1 damaging about 100 homes. I woke up as the tornado passed about two houses away, causing minor damage to our property.

NeighboursHouse2.jpg

The garage door was sucked out and several items in the garden flew around. Three neighbours within 50 metres were not so lucky receiving extensive damage to their roofs. Fortunately in our street power lines were not pulled down, however other streets were not so lucky. Thunder storms caused water damage to properties where roofing had been removed. Ironically emergency services were holding an expo the same day and were kept busy with the cleanup. Weakness in New Zealands economy was evident as trades people such as glaziers went around door to door handing out business cards the next day.

--Sven

25 January 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 25 January 2007 at 03:52
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PDF export added to toolbox[edit]

A user inquired this morning about the old Open Office Export which is not really in a useable state, but it prompted me to have a bit of a look around for current MediaWiki article exporting options. I soon found HTMLDOC which, while not specific to MediaWiki, is able to convert HTML to PDF quite well, and is a well established project.

It was extremely easy to install on Debian using apt-get (I've added it to Debian Post Install), and their documentation is very good too which allowed me to integrate it into our XmlWiki environment in only a few minutes. The transform created to call the htmldoc command is pdf-export.php and is attached to the view event of an article via an XPath query in the URL of the export link in the toolbox.

25 April 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 25 April 2007 at 00:49
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Extension:When[edit]

The #when parser-function is used to add time information to articles. Just add a single parameter which can be arbitrarily formatted time information, for example:

{{#when:2009/4/24}} - best to do dates backwards like this otherwise it tries to use some weird American format
{{#when:24 apr 2009}}
{{#when:24 apr, 4:30pm}} - current year is used here since not specified

The function expands to a set of category links to categorise the article into year, month, day-of-month, full-weekday-name and time (24 hour HH:MM:SS format). Articles exhibiting time can then be matched with a DPL query, for example:

{{#dpl:category=2006|category=April}}

The parser function which adds this is very simple consisting of the following code in the LocalSettings.php file.

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OD2: Beginning New Organic Design Structure[edit]

We've never been able to get the Organic Design wiki into an organised state, but I think the DPL extension can be the solution to this. We now have enough tools within the wiki environment to manage and organise all aspects of a simple organisation including accounts and scheduling - they just need to be glued together into a unified functional system.

Organic Design 2 is about creating a new structure from the ground up which encompasses all the organisational aspects we need, and does so in a re-usable way by creating it as a template-wiki. This article describes the proposed components of this template-wiki and their use, meaning and structure.

30 January 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 30 January 2007 at 01:47
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PDF export improved - create books in the wiki![edit]

The PDF export which was recently added uses HTMLDOC which has been designed to handle not only single files, but also groups of files. When working with many files it renders a table of contents and creates a book rather than a single continuous page. This functionality has now been included in the PDF export by allowing the export of categories. A couple of good example categories to test this feature with are Category:Yi and Category:I am that which are both complete books.

7 October 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 6 October 2007 at 22:57
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Organic Design search fixed[edit]

Our new search (Template:Find) which allows DPL queries has been broken since the 1.10 upgrade a couple of months ago, and has finally been fixed again today. The default search method is initiated by entering a search term and clicking the green "go" icon or by hitting the enter key. This default will be treated as a DPL query if the search term contains an "=" character, for example namespace=Template or titleregexp=php$.

17 November 2013[edit]

Posted by Nad on 17 November 2013 at 12:29
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Bitcoin hit $500 today!!![edit]

Bitcoin hits $500!.png

The Bitcoin cryptocurrency's value hit USD $500 today. Many people believe this outrageous price increase to be a temporary bubble, but there are many reasons for it to be going up like this, the main reason for the continual rise in price is that the coins which have a limited supply acts like a share in the Bitcoin economy which is growing much more rapidly than the availability of the coins. The Bitcoin economy as a whole is at about seven billion dollars, but is expected to eventually reach the trillion dollar scale as it becomes more widely accepted and hits mainstream financial businesses and institutions - this would easily push the coin price into the tens of thousands of dollars.

The picture above is a screenshot from the Bitcoinity chart site. When the price hit $500, Kermit the frog appeared shouting "YAAAAAY!!" :-)

22 May 2012[edit]

Posted by Nad on 22 May 2012 at 19:14
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Anti-war veterans threw their medals into a street outside NATO Summit[edit]

Source: consciouslifenews.com

Dozens of anti-war veterans threw their medals into a street near the site of the NATO Summit 2012 to show their resentment of war and preference for human life.

While the NATO summit was underway, dozens of war veterans and thousands of protesters gathered in Chicago to protest against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The protests were held in order to call to attention the uselessness of war and propagation of peace. The war veterans were generally showing their regret for having fought uncalled for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The protesters called the medals they got for their service as “representations of hate,” “lies” and “cheap tokens,” and then they tossed their medals into the street. Most of the people present there were also making emotional pleas for forgiveness from the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.

A lot of people in the protest were dressed in military attire and chanted through the streets, calling out, “N-A-T-O, NATO has got to go,” and “No NATO, no war, we don’t work for you no more.”

Read more...