2008 February | John Leach's Blog

UK Earthquake, February 2008, Magnitude 4.7
February 27th, 2008
Just felt what at first I thought was a heavy gust of wind but what then very quickly became an earthquake. We’re in Leeds but quickly got reports from friends over instant messenger, irc and twitter that it’s been felt elsewhere in Leeds, Bradford, Huddersfield and Nottingham.

I’m hearing the collective throat clearing of every geologist in the country in preparation for various TV and radio interviews.

I personally have been expecting the end of days for a few years now and am well prepared in the form of:
- 5 torches
- high capacity Internet link
- several comfortable cushions
- a good stock of tea
- prayer books for all the best gods
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: bradford, earthquake, england, hull, leeds, lincoln, midlands, news, nottingham, quake, seismograph, tremor
Posted in Personal | 42 Comments »
Wikileaks Censored by US Judge
February 19th, 2008

A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US.

BBC News

WikiLeaks and its domain registrar for the wikileaks.org domain name, Dynadot, have been sued by the Swiss Bank Julius Baer, because of leaks claiming illegal activities at the bank’s Cayman Island branch.

The Judge order the DNS registrar to freeze the domain. The main servers are in Sweden though, so the cover names still work (such as the UK one: http://wikileaks.org.uk). There are also mirror sites. This is a good example of why you shouldn’t rely on US domain names (and why we need more diversity of root server control no doubt). Not sure how much better the UK system is though.

The Tor network has hidden services for this kind of thing and though not perfect, helps protect against this kind of attack (the Tor website is censored by my Vodafone ISP btw). A good time as any to volunteer to host a Tor router server.

Cryptome has a Wikileak archive and more information.

Tags: anonymity, Bank Julius Baer, censor, censorship, cryptome, dns, tor, whistle-blowers, wikileak, wikileaks
Posted in Politics, Tech | No Comments »
Valentines poem
February 15th, 2008

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
I tried to buy some for you but an error occurred during a connection to www.valentinesflowers4u.co.uk SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length error code ssl_error_rx_record_too_long.

Tags: error, love, poem, ssl, valentines
Posted in Writing | 1 Comment »
Our dominant system of economics is unstable
February 15th, 2008

The dominant system of economics is unstable, inimical to social justice and lethally damaging to the environmental support systems on which we all depend. A major failure in professional journalism has been the refusal to analyse this; or even to report that real growth rates in the developed world have been declining since the 1970s. Instead, corporate-employed journalists and mainstream analysts frequently extol the alleged spectacular achievements of an ‘unparalleled’ rise in wealth.

Medialens – a UK based media analysis project.

That quote is from one of their latest alerts, “‘CREATIVE DESTRUCTION’ – THE MADNESS OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY”. Find it here: part 1 and part 2. You can buy their book, Guardians of Power, from here.

Tags: capitalism, china, economics, india, journalism, media-anlysis, medialens, neo-liberal, news
Posted in Politics | No Comments »
Beautiful Southport sunset
February 10th, 2008

Louisa took it, but I’m in it.

Tags: beach, pier, southport, sunset
Posted in Photoblog | 1 Comment »
Leeds Ruby Thing, Victoria Hotel 7th Feb 2008.
February 3rd, 2008

Some of the people of the North West Ruby User Group (who usually meet in Manchester) have organised the first little Leeds get together. No real name yet, so it’s the Leeds Ruby Thing for now.

No clear plan yet either, but expect unstructured discussion of Ruby and Ruby on Rails at least.

Thursday 7th February 2008 at 7pm in the Victoria Hotel pub. All welcome!

More details here: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/423116

Tags: beer, coding, leeds, meetup, nwrug, programming, pub, rails, ruby, social
Posted in Ruby on Rails | 1 Comment »

UK Earthquake, February 2008, Magnitude 4.7

Wikileaks Censored by US Judge

Valentines poem

Our dominant system of economics is unstable

Beautiful Southport sunset

Leeds Ruby Thing, Victoria Hotel 7th Feb 2008.

John Leach

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UK Earthquake, February 2008, Magnitude 4.7

Wikileaks Censored by US Judge

Valentines poem

Our dominant system of economics is unstable

Beautiful Southport sunset

Leeds Ruby Thing, Victoria Hotel 7th Feb 2008.

John Leach

Twitter

Author Stuff

Friends

Stuff

Meta

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