News (blog)

From Organic Design wiki

31 December 2011[edit]

Posted by Nad on 31 December 2011 at 16:25
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The 10 Most Anticipated Bitcoin Projects for 2012[edit]

Source: The 10 Most Anticipated Bitcoin Projects for 2012

2011 was a year of growing pains for Bitcoin. It was both loved and hated by the media and subject to a huge bubble that topped out with a market cap of over $200 million. Hackers and miscreants took shots at exchanges and Bitcoin users alike, yet the currency and the community proved their resilience.

Bitcoin is positioned better than ever to prove to the world its significance and utility. These incredible projects only hint at some of what's to come in 2012, which will no doubt be the year that Bitcoin comes of age.

20 October 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 20 October 2007 at 00:44
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Semantic MediaWiki 1.0[edit]

Version 1.0 of the Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) extension has recently been released, and we've upgraded to it here on Organic Design and our other wikia that use it. We haven't started using SMW on this site yet, but we intend to make heavy use of it in our new organisational system which is still in development.

A major change has been made in the new SMW version which is that attributes and relations have been unified into the single concept of properties. In earlier versions of SMW, properties with Type:Page were known as relations and only those used double colons (::) as the separator between property name and link text. All other properties (numbers, strings, etc.) were known as attributes and had to use colon equals (:=) as the separator.

SMW 1.0 unifies relations and attributes, calling them properties, and uses a single namespace "Property:". The default datatype for undeclared properties is Type:Page, but it is strongly recommended that you declare every property's type to clarify its intended use for other editors. SMW still supports := but it is recommended that you use :: for all property annotations. The reason is that the equality symbol contained in := cannot be used properly within MediaWiki template parameters, whereas :: causes no problems in most environments.

4 July 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 4 July 2007 at 00:52
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Semantic Forms Update[edit]

The SemanticForms extension was upgraded today to version 0.3.5. Semantic Forms Semantic MediaWiki also adds many special pages (listed here), which are all starting to get a bit overwhelming. To help with the organisation and learning of all these new pages I've added a new link which shows up under the title of each special page to allow questions, technical notes, related information and discussion etc to be associated with the special page.

12 May 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 12 May 2007 at 01:10
This post has the following tags: News
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InterWiki linking improved[edit]

Interwiki linking is a very useful feature of MediaWiki, but unfortunately it's always been quite a hassle adding or changing the entries as it requires a maintenance script to be run or an SQL database query to be executed. Today a new extension called Extension:InterWiki has been created to allow the InterWiki lists of all the OD/Wikia to be maintained from a single file in extensions/InterWiki/InterWiki.txt.

InterWiki linking is also useful for linking to other sites, and even the default MediaWiki list has some non-wiki links in it, for example Google:foo is a quick way to link to a google search using the keyword foo (or G:foo for short). I've added a few others which may come in handy, which the following examples demonstrate:

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Site upgraded to MediaWiki 1.10.0[edit]

Today the site has been upgraded to MediaWiki version 1.10.0 which became the latest stable release of the software on Wednesday May 9th. The new LaTeX math rendering did not successfully build, but the last version's math appears to be compatible. The new one which won't build is in extensions/math10. The other version 1.9.3 wiki's on the server haven't been upgraded yet as there could be problems with some of the extensions which need ironing out first.

18 January 2012[edit]

Posted by Nad on 18 January 2012 at 17:43
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Wikipedia and many other sites go on strike to protest SOPA[edit]

Wikipedia SOPA blackout sml.jpg

18 March 2013[edit]

Posted by Nad on 19 March 2013 at 00:38
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The first haircut goes to Cyprus![edit]

On Saturday, Cypriot deposit-holders got a nasty surprise when they learned that EU ministers and the IMF agreed to massive bailout plan for Cyprus, which includes a one-time tax of 9.9% on Cypriot bank deposits that exceed 100,000 euros, as well as a tax of 6.75% on smaller deposits.

The unprecedented decision, which appears to punish ordinary citizens for failures in the financial system, has sparked panic and protests as people queued up at ATM machines to rescue their savings. Many cash machines ran out of banknotes because of the panic withdrawals.

It would be hard to over-emphasize how significant the Cyprus situation is. The EU demonstrated under no uncertain circumstances that they will destroy the rule of law to maintain their own power. It was a recognition of tyranny that many of us have always assumed was the case but yesterday became reality.

Bitcoin jumped up a few dollars going over USD $50 shortly after the Cyprus haircut occurred showing that a significant loss of faith in the fiat currencies has likely been caused by the haircut (edit: now two weeks after the haircut, Bitcoin is over $90!). Expect gold to go up shortly too and silver even more as it's unnaturally far below it's usual 1/16th of gold's value.

Central Bank of Cyprus Memo.png

25 July 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 25 July 2007 at 10:43
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Extensions Update[edit]

The Flashlets extension has been updated to allow the embedding of existing SWF files rather than only those directly compiled from actionscript between the <swf> tags.

A new extension called CurrentUsers has been created today which lists the registered users currently using the site and keeps a running total of the number of anonymous guests.

The EmbedVideo extension has also been installed which allows various streaming video formats such as YouTube to be embedded within an article. See YouTube for an example.

    <swf src=http://www.wikiexpert.com/files/5/52/Bounce.swf bgcolor=#4488cc width=200 height=200></swf>

19 May 2012[edit]

Posted by Nad on 19 May 2012 at 15:06
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12yr Old Victoria Explains Banking System[edit]

Source: thestar.com

Victoria Grant is slender and leggy, twirls her hair when she’s nervous, has blue-painted toenails, and would like to be a designer when she grows up. But what started as a speech for her Grade 6 class has become a critique of Canada’s banking system and an Internet sensation.

We’re being robbed, the 12-year-old says.

“Have you ever wondered why bankers are becoming wealthier and the rest of us are not?” Victoria asks, her voice pure and clear, in a talk she’s given in Canada and the U.S. and that her dad posted on YouTube.

The transcript of the interrogation of Mr Graham F Towers, Governor of the Bank of Canada, by former mayor of Vancouver, Mr "Gerry" McGeer, KC, that was mentioned by Victoria, was published in 1939. It may be found in Volume 1 of Human Ecology by Thomas Robertson.

See also:

28 May 2012[edit]

Posted by Nad on 28 May 2012 at 19:28
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Eben Moglen: Innovation Under Austerity[edit]

Eben Moglen (the guy who did the great free software speech that kicked the Diaspora off) talks at the F2C conference about the severe state of the economy and what the free software community can do about it.

20 August 2013[edit]

Posted by Nad on 19 August 2013 at 22:15
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Bitmessage gateway up and running[edit]

Bitmessagelogo.png
Bitmessage is a peer-to-peer communications protocol based on the Bitcoin crypto-currency used to send encrypted messages to another person or to many subscribers. It is decentralized and trustless, meaning that you need-not inherently trust any entities like root certificate authorities. It uses strong authentication which means that the sender of a message cannot be spoofed, and it aims to hide "non-content" data, like the sender and receiver of messages, from passive eavesdroppers like those running warrantless wiretapping programs.

We've now set up a Bitmessage gateway on the Organic Design server which means that existing mail users can now transparently send and receive messages in the Betmessage network. The security of the system is less working in this way since the connection to the Organic Design mail server is a normal SSL connection, but it's still very useful since most users would not be willing to set up a completely new communications application to use Bitmessage, so it helps to get the system more utilised. Users who start working more seriously with it later can take their existing address from the Organic Design gateway and use it in their local Bitmessage client. More detail about the gateway script and usage can be found in our local Bitmessage article.

See also: