Disaster tech

I'll edit this post and add more links over the next few days ......

Here's one to start http://www.frontlinesms.com/what/ (from http://www.janchipchase.com/)

Broadband Global Area Network http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGAN

EUMETCAST (weather data via satellite IP multicast) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eumetcast

Another time

Back in the summer I was recorded by the Antiques Roadshow with the Uniselector Clock. Unfortunately this segment won't now be shown on 25th October. The letter I recently received from the production team states "there are always difficult editorial decisions to make during the editing process to maintain the balance and variety of the programme and sadly, we cannot include every item that is recorded."

Natural disasters and weather

A recent announcement from the World Bank - http://psdblog.worldbank.org/psdblog/2009/10/hackers-and-the-world-bank-unite.html

has me thinking once again about little nudges that could change the world -http://nudges.wordpress.com/

Back when the Wepoco team (anarchists?) were trying to think of ways of getting weather forecasts to people who really could change the world - poor farmers - we deliberately chose to exclude weather warnings from the service. I'm not sure that we ever properly explained why. Well if you work for a government you very soon learn that governments are very protective of their right (responsibility?) to tell citizens when to panic (and how much).

What we hadn't considered is that once the s**t actually hits the f*n, it makes little difference to those affected who is helping them - speed and quality of service is everything.

So perhaps I can make up for not pushing hard enough on the original Wepoco concept by figuring out how best to use technology and weather forecasts to prevent bad situations getting worse.

sudo ifconfig lo up

Before I switch to English here's some more Linux gibberish -

0xb7fc2410: ????* Heartbeat Failure 2 (Step 3)

The above line and many, many others came out of the very useful Helix DNA server when I restarted it yesterday. Why? Because once again I'd forgotten than when I reboot my Ubuntu server it doesn't bring up the loop-back device. Hence the command in the title of this post.

VNC, Google AppEngine Java SDK are a couple of other things I use that fail to work properly without 'lo' up. In some ways what is more remarkable is that the Ubuntu distribution itself is so content to work without this widely used (essential?) virtual network device.