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That site is thee BOM
har har, my side...

I'm a sailor and the BOM site saves lives and helps keep people out of trouble. I can see the positives for charging for a weather service, it might let them spend more on improving services etc etc. But there are many negatives:

1. This information is used for saftey reasons. Price on a life anyone....
2. Lots of people use the information and it is of different value to each. How do you set charges on it
3. We've already paid for someone to get the information. Why do we have to pay again to see it?

It's a really really useful tool. I use it at least a couple of times a week - basically anytime the weather seems a bit sus and I need to decide if to do a bolt from the office on my bike before a storm front hits, or to wait until it passes. The last four images thing lets you get a feel for which way the weather is blowing, etc, etc.

On Tuesday nights, when the Sydney Knights do their Tuesday Night Ride (TNR), we're all hitting the bom.gov.au site to see what the weather is looking like. If you ride a motorcycle and live in Sydney, Australia then you need to come on a TNR!.

Now Australia didn't seem to have the problem with the commercial weather services wanting to continue to charge customers for something that they already paid the government for... that's a whole new ball game. Still, I'm all for the gummint opening up public access to weather data in any jurisdiction - it's a really really really good thing. Let the snake oil sellers find a new flavour of snake oil - I've heard that the penis enlargement pill market is a good one.

Evaporative coolers such as units from bonair are excellent in dry, hot climates. They constantly draw in dry hot air from outside, drop it by about 10 degrees C and duct it through your house to escape through open doors and windows.

Where I live at present (Mount Isa, Queensland), just about every house and business has at least a 6000cfm evaporative air conditioner. Humidity can often get below 30%, meaning that they work particularly well. In fact, they can theoretically cool to the dew point, which if you take note of the last 72 hr readings from Mount Isa can pull down to 10 degrees or so when it's dry.

They are of course completely fucking useless for about 3 weeks of the year when it's hot and humid and you get storms in the afternoon at 35 degrees and 90% humidity. You just sweat like a pig then, or retreat to the refrigerative airconditioner you normally keep in reserve in your bedroom.

For those of us in Australia, the Bureau Of Meteorology have an excellent site, with radar, rainfall, river conditions, forecasts and whole lot of useful weather information.

I have six virtual desktops on my current single-monitor setup. I normally have at least four in use, and frequently use all six. If I had to group these on to physical monitors I would need to move to a bigger room, and would probably end up with whiplash.

I have 2 virtual desktops, (one "theory", and one "play"), and each of those is divided into a 6x4 virtual pages. These are usually full of junk, but I have sort of worked out that a particular program always goes on a particular page, (and xemacs takes up 8 different pages at a time, with position in the desktop dependant on which program is in the buffer).

I have used multiple monitor systems before (and have a laptop next to me currently, and linked by using debian's x2x - which is just the r0x0rs), and love them to death. The control computer at ATNF is a 4 headed beast, unfortunately on win NT (that crashes once a week) - the left monitor has a browser, usually open to the BOM weather page, the other 3 have about 5 different control panels and diagnostic plots.

Now, here comes the question. How does one use both a dual headed setup with a pager? I use fvwm2, and would never ever ever get rid of FvwmPager. But can it integrate with a xinerama setup? Is each of the virtual pages twice the normal size, so one virtual page spans across both monitors? Or do you have one pager per monitor?

I read something in the docs that seemed only relevant where you are not running xinerma, and instead have two separate displays - :0.0 and :0.1. I also thought I read somewhere that fvwm2 was actually xinerama aware, or being worked on.

Anyone know?

Of course, this is a moot point, because I have a 19" LCD, and there is no way in heck the department are going to buy me another flat panel, no matter what size it is (and there is not enough room on my desk for a CRT)

The effects of global warming are not uniformly spread around the world. The arctic, both land and sea, are clearly warming. The equatorial areas may not be warming as much. The antarctic shows both warming and cooling: cooling in the the interior and warming.melting at the edges. Being a large, mountainous land mass complicates the climate there.

Here is a link to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's real time weather radar site. The radar image is updated every 10 minues and is designed to show rain, but I have noticed that you can see dense smoke on it too. Keep your eyes on Canberra (and perhaps Sydney) for the next day or two, I think you will nee a lot more fires spreading as the hot weather continues.

Actually, I'm aware of at least one. In 1982 a 747 flew into a cloud of ash from a nearby volcano, and both engines failed. The plane fell 25,000 feet until the pilots were able to restart the engines. Here is a link.

For us geeks down under, we DO have to worry about about 'brutal levels of ultraviolet radiation'. It's not so bad now in winter (see here), but mid summer will see extream UV between 10:00 and 15:00, which will easily toast us pastey geeks on our way to the local store for the latest CPU/GPU/RAM/HDD/etc.

Now the question remains: how much coffee do I need to drink so that I start sweating caffeine?

...and will smearing oneself with Vegemite work as effectively?