The search for a bengal tiger on the loose at the US Army’s Fort Polk in western Louisiana has been halted because no one can find the cat. The tiger has not been seen in a week despite a search that involved 100 soldiers, trackers, trappers and police using military helicopters
Cannabis-based treatments may have longer-term benefits for multiple sclerosis patients. The findings of a short, 15-week trial of MS patients published last year were inconclusive because although patients reported relief in muscle stiffness, rigidity and mobility, the findings could not be confirmed by physiotherapists. But Dr John Zajicek, of the Peninsula Medical School at the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth in southwestern England who headed the study, told a conference there seemed to be further benefits for patients who continued treatment for a year
It eats flies and stinks to high heaven, but if this robot works, it will be an important step towards making robots fully autonomous. To survive without human help — perhaps to rove in dangerous or inhospitable terrain — a robot needs to generate its own energy. Now a robot has been developed that catches flies and digests them in a special reactor cell to generate electricity — but to do so it will most likely have to attract flies by using a stinking lure made from human excrement
A man who tried to shoot seven puppies was shot himself when one of the dogs put its paw on the revolver’s trigger. Jerry Allen Bradford, 37, was charged with felony animal cruelty, the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office said Wednesday. He was being treated at a hospital for a gunshot wound to his wrist. Bradford said he decided to shoot the 3-month-old shepherd-mix dogs in the head because he couldn’t find them a home, according to the sheriff’s office. Unfortunately the fuckwit had already murdered three of the pups before his next intended victim turned the tables
Optus has hit back at claims that its broadband service, OptusNet, has run out of international bandwidth, saying the article printed on technology news web site Whirlpool is greatly exaggerated
A gun safety demonstration went awry and landed Monroe County coroner David Toumey in the hospital after he shot himself in the leg. Toumey said his gun discharged as he was checking to make sure it was unloaded and a bullet struck him in his left leg during the demonstration to a group of people at a Lake Monroe boat ramp
Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital’s chic 16th arrondissement. Officers admit they are at a loss to know who built or used one of Paris’s most intriguing recent discoveries — via Die Puny Humans
A burial site of six Viking men and women, with swords, spears, jewellery, fire-making materials and riding equipment, has been found in England. The site, discovered near Cumwhitton in northwestern England, is believed to date to the early 10th century
GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. GmailFS is a Python application and uses the FUSE userland filesystem infrastructure to help provide the filesystem, and libgmail to communicate with Gmail.
GmailFS supports most file operations such as read, write, open, close, stat, symlink, link, unlink, truncate and rename. This means that you can use all your favourite unix command line tools to operate on files stored on Gmail.
Sydney security firm DataDot is on the verge of sealing $140 million worth of business with Russia thanks to a law that will make an Australian technology compulsory for all new cars by 2006
Anthropologists stepped into a hornets’ nest after revealing research that suggests the original inhabitants of America may in fact have come from what is now known as Australia. The claim will be extremely unwelcome to today’s native Americans who came overland from Siberia and say they were there first
A replica of the Kon-Tiki balsa raft will sail the Pacific in 2005 to study mounting environmental threats to the oceans since Thor Heyerdahl made his daredevil 1947 voyage. One of Heyerdahl’s grandsons will be among the six-strong crew for the trip from Peru aiming to reach Tahiti, about 500km west of the Raroia atoll where the Kon-Tiki ran aground after traveling 8,000km in 101 days
Bruno Bozzetto has a delightful animated short called Olympics, featuring the unfortunate Mr Otto
The Greens have launched their new donations web site, www.democracy4sale.org. At last, you can find out who is making big donations to the main political parties at the press of a button. Follow the money trail of over $100,000,000 of donations made to political parties since 1999, when the Australian Electoral Commission first started recording them electronically
Jason Jepson, the rocket scientist responsible for Star38, a service that fools caller ID systems [BugMeNot], has decided to sell the business. It seems he didn’t reckon on the man in the street find his service less than ideal, but it took harassing e-mail, phone messages and a death threat taped to his front door to convince him of the error of his ways
A poll of almost 43,000 people has shown Britain’s most popular screen scientists to be a pair of Muppets — Dr Bunsen Honeydew and his hapless assistant Beaker. It’s obvious that the polled audience never grew up watching Julius Sumner Miller torture Sydney school boys or Rob and Dean on the Curiosity Show
I’ve had the new version of MovableType for about a month, I’ve just been waiting for a public version of MT-Blacklist to hit the streets before I installed MT. Finally the wait was over.
So MT went in on Wednesday, closely followed by MT-Blacklist. I managed to pull it off with only two spam hits during the install. I’d been beta testing MT 3.1, so had already had the ooh and aah moment over its new interface, but MT-Blacklist was as cool as Jay promised.
There’s still a few bugs there, which I seem to remember were mentioned in his post on the emergency release. But it is a tidy piece of work that does its job well.
I did find that I really missed the joy of hitting a dirty great big despam
button from the old version, but the extra add-on includes that in the main MT interface and when I finally noticed it — a major facepalm moment — I was back to killing the fresh spam, quickly and efficiently.
MT-Blacklist is happily moderating suspect comments, but MT is sending the damn things live. Also found that I’m having rebuild problems. The dodgy comments are killed off, but I’m not getting an index rebuild to remove them from the index page. No idea if this is MT, the Blacklist, my apparently continuing rebuild nightmare from MT 2.6 or some other server weirdness. Annoying and I can deal with it, but I’d love to narrow down the culprit.
Considering that my activity log was nearly all spam attacks, having the Blacklist log as a separate entity makes life easier. The Blacklist stats have provided endless entertainment too, 576 dodgy spam commenting arseholes have been blacked since Wednesday. Woohoo! Perhaps I’m easily amused, but I love that feature so much.
So, happy with the changeover, love the new MT-Blacklist and all is right with the world. Aside from somebody else’s Coldfusion install on my server deciding to eat all available CPU capacity every half hour, but that’s not my problem to sort out.
Thanks to the success of Firefox, Mozilla now appears to have 14.9% of the browser share, double that of 9 months ago. Let this be a lesson in complacency — via Slashdot
The retarded monkey boy‘s network of snitches (concerned citizens) called the Feds on a neighbour informing, them that he had a potentially threatening bumper sticker on his car. The Feds, of course, over reacted and scared the crap out of the guy
A Wal-Mart-owned discount store rising less than a kilometre from the ancient temples of Teotihuacan has touched off a fight by a small coalition that doesn’t want to see the big, boxy outlet from the top of the Pyramid of the Sun
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