Tokyo, Japan — Japanese police have arrested two Greenpeace activists for exposing a whale meat scandal involving the government-sponsored whaling programme. The two activists, Junichi Sato, 31, and Toru Suzuki, 41, are being investigated for allegedly stealing a box of whale meat which they presented as evidence.

The best way to battle disease and bacteria in your garden is always through prevention. Part of prevention is making sure you practice sanitary gardening methods.

These include: always cleaning your tools when you are finished using them, treating or disposing of plants at the first sign of disease and properly clearing and preparing your soil for the next seasons’ crop.

However, even the most sanitary garden can sometimes become infected. Symptoms of bacteria include wilted leaves, brown spots on leaves and fruit, rotten stems and stinky fruit from the plant.

If your plant has a bacterial infection there are a few things you can do to treat it. First try to spray some compost tea on the leaves. That’s right! Compost tea does so much more than just fertilize.

If the compost tea fails to rid your plant of the bacteria, you are going to need to prune the areas that have been infected. Pay really close attention to the plant in question because if the bacteria has spread, which they do very quickly, you may need to dispose of the plant to prevent the bacteria spreading to other residents in your garden.

Unfortunately, bacteria is a problem that many gardeners face. Try to be vigilant and address the problem immediately to prevent the bacteria from spreading.

Good luck and happy gardening

taken from www.gardenmandy.com

On Wednesday evening the Swedish parliament voted yes to a bill that allows FRA, National Defense Radio Agency, to monitor all phone traffic and e-mail traffic in the name of national security. Unlike the police, FRA can listen in on anyone for any purpose without a court order, bringing the level of personal integrity in Sweden to an all-time-low.

The bill was passed after it was debated in parliament, with 143 votes in favor, 138 opposed and 1 representative abstaining. Before the debate the situation was crystal clear. The four party government alliance would win the vote if all party members voted in favor of the bill, but with the seven seat majority the government currently holds, only four representatives had to vote against the party line in order for the bill to fail.

With all the editorials and statements regarding integrity, copyright and online-rights published during the last months by members of these parties, surely there would be four members of the parties that would follow their convictions rather than the party line? In fact, there were four representatives who have been crystal clear in these kinds of issues: Birgitta Ohlsson (Liberal Party), Karl Sigfrid (Moderate Party), Annie Johansson and Fredrick Federley (both Centre Party). They have profiled themselves on these issues and in some cases even campaigned on them. Surely, Fredrick Federley couldn’t let down his everyone of his voters?

Things proved more complex.

Leading up to Tuesday’s debate, the bill had been heavily criticized by journalists, pirates, lawyers, bloggers, all political parties’ youth organizations - as well as the head of the Swedish intelligence agency Säpo. Rick Falkvinge of The Pirate Party was one of the voices that spoke most strongly against the bill. Also, all of the four daily newspapers’ senior political editors were heavily opposed. Rumours had begun circulating that Karl Sigfrid was indeed going to vote against the bill while Fredrick Federley wrote an ambivalent blog post that indicated where this was heading.

The debate was intense with defense minister Sten Tolgfors of the Moderate Party showing his arrogance, ignorance and lack of understanding time and again (if the bill was not passed, he said, parliament would be risking the lives of Swedish UN troops in Afghanistan).

Towards the end of the debate, Fredrick Federley was on the speakers list. He pulled off a tear-filled act (including sentimentalities about his mother) in which he said he had to follow his conviction but at the same time didn’t want to let his party down. He motioned for the bill to be sent back to parliament’s defense committee for expanding the safeguards of individual rights. This was a carefully orchestrated piece of political theater designed to keep the government alliance together while at the same time allow the Centre Party (which until yesterday held high integrity and online rights) not to lose face. At this time, Federley knew that the bill was being reworked on an initiative from the Liberal Party to a new version that had a new authority controlling the controllers.

The original vote was due to be held on Wednesday morning and following an initiative from The Pirate Party, a crowd of hundreds was gathered in front of parliament to protest the bill and try to convince representatives to vote against it. The crowd was a mixture of pirates, the journalists’ union, the political parties’ youth organizations and worried citizens. Following the debate on Tuesday, the morning vote only considered if the bill should be sent back for revision and the vote was in favor.

In a farce of democracy, it was announced that the bill was to be revised in record time and a new vote be taken later in the evening. “I think the law needs to be re-written. It is not enough to create a few checks and balances … It is the law itself there is something wrong with,” Anders Eriksson, former Chief of Swedish intelligence agency Säpo, told Swedish radio before the vote.

By now, Fredrick Federley and Annie Johansson of the Centre Party had put themselves in a position where they could show to their voters that they had “improved” the bill while at the same time they could vote for the revised version to the happiness and joy of their party colleagues. So, what about the other possible nay-sayers?

According to the buzz on the blogs, Karl Sigfrid of the Moderate Party had decided to vote against the bill and was taken into a party meeting where 30 representatives from the Moderate Party along with party leader and Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt were on a speech list, bashing him one after the other until he couldn’t take it anymore.

And the remaining? Birgitta Ohlsson of the Liberal Party was as lame as her Centre Party counterparts: She abstained her vote, according to an interview in Dagens Nyheter “with respect to my liberal consciousness and to my voters but also to my party colleagues”.

When the FRA bill version 1.01 was brought back into the chamber on Wednesday evening, the outcome could only go one way. The Government parties along with PM Fredrik Reinfeldt had decided that this bill should go through and with the internal critics effectively silenced the bill was voted through, plunging Sweden into DDR era lack of privacy. How the bill is compatible with Human Rights (The right to respect privacy, family, home and correspondence) will be decided later in the court of the European Union where a number of opposition representatives will bring it to be tried.

The only liberal voting according to her ideology rather than her party line was Camilla Lindberg of the Liberal Party. In an editorial in today’s Expressen she explains why: “My loyalty is with my voters. And with myself and my conviction. I couldn’t get myself to vote in favour of the bill, regardless of the arguments from my colleagues and the last-minutes improvements. [...] If the surveillance poses a threat for integrity and freedom without having a proved positive effect, I can’t support such a bill.”

TAKEN FROM torrentfreak.com

Low prices make off-brand HDTVs tempting alternatives to top-shelf sets. And in recent years the quality of cut-rate flat screens has improved immensely. But are high-end sets still worth it? To find out, we put a new Samsung 1080p LCD—the followup to our highest-rated TV of last year—against a budget Vizio set with similar specs. To test, we played a variety of HD and non-HD content from cable, Blu-ray and game consoles. Here’s how the TVs compare.

Around Memorial Day, the chances are good that either you or somebody that you are sharing the road with today has been out and about, spending the day with family or just enjoying their time off. There have surely been many hours spent behind the wheel for drivers across the country. Hopefully, drunk driving is kept to a minimum. But, there is another possible problem-driver on the road: the drowsy driver. It’s likely that most of us have had that feeling behind the wheel, where we struggle to keep our eyes open. A new study from the National Road Safety Foundation, which is a non-profit group that produces driver aids, suggests that those drowsy drivers are equally as dangerous as drunk drivers. According to its research, a third of drivers polled admit to falling asleep behind the wheel in the last year alone. Suggestions for combating drowsiness behind the wheel include the obvious: pulling over, drinking a coffee or two and waiting about half an hour for the caffeine to hit your bloodstream. Consider this a friendly reminder to be safe out there.

TAKEN FROM www.autoblog.com

In a bid to counter Google, Facebook is going open-source.

A year after its launched its much-heralded Facebook Platform – a way for third party developers to write programs that work inside the social network – the Palo Alto, Calif., company says it is making a “significant part” of its platform code open-source.

That means developers and companies working in the Facebook ecosystem will be able to see how the code works, manipulate it and give any improvements they make back to the company and other developers.

“The goal of this release is to help you as developers better understand Facebook Platform as a whole and more easily build applications,” the company said in a statement. “We’re also hoping you use Facebook Open Platform in ways we’ve never thought of.”

Though it is posing the announcement as something of an altruistic gift, there’s a bit of a chess strategy behind Facebook’s move. Google launched the competing Open Social initiative last November, a common set of software tools that developers can use to write programs for a variety of social networks, such as MySpace and LinkedIn.

Open Social gives Facebook some formidable competition for the hearts and minds of developers, whose work is seen as integral to making social networks a fun and enduring place for people to spend their time on the Web.

“Developers and users are fickle. They are going to go where barriers to entry are the lowest,” said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester Research. Facebook, he said, “needs to continue to build relationships with these developers or it is just going to be one of many platforms.”

TAKEN FROM /bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Just how bad it is Bell Canada’s P2P traffic filtering? Not bad at all, so long as you’re happy having your 5Mbps DSL link operate at half the speed of a dial-up modem. That’s the assertion of a group of small Canadian ISPs that are asking Canada’s telecoms regulator to intervene and force Bell to call off its deep packet inspection dogs.

Half the speed of dial-up 

The Canadian Association Internet Providers (CAIP) represents smaller firms that generally purchase wholesale capacity from Bell Canada and resell it under their own brand. When Bell applied its filtering system to this wholesale traffic earlier this year, the operators were outraged, especially as several of them explicitly offered “no throttle” guarantees to customers that they now could not keep.

In documents filed late last week with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), CAIP provided evidence showing that the traffic-shaping system used by Bell limits downstream P2P rates to around 30Kbps during peak times. But those “peak times” aren’t just a couple of hours in the evening; they extend from 4:30 PM until 2 AM every day, or 9.5 hours out of each 24.

As CAIP dryly notes, the speed limit ”represents a tiny fraction of the 5Mbps downstream data transfer rate” advertised by Bell.

Image courtesy CAIP

Bell’s system appears to be nothing if not effective, though. A look at the graph above shows what happens to BitTorrent bandwidth at exactly 2 AM. The image comes courtesy of a TDCNet employee who was downloading a legal copy of Fedora during that time and who saw his bandwidth surge immediately to 450Kbps once Bell Canada let up on the throttle.

CAIP concludes, “It is fair to say that, in general, for up to 10 hours a day, every single day, customers using applications or accessing content that are targeted (either intentionally or collaterally) by Bell’s traffic shaping measures are substantially restricted from enjoying the full benefit of the service for which they have contracted.”

The reference to collateral damage is further explained in another filing in which CAIP says that Bell Canada’s DPI system is far too aggressive and often filters non-P2P protocols. According to CAIP’s research, users that start P2P clients are “flagged” for throttling, and once the flag is set, it actually affects everything from SSH to VoIP.

One unnamed CAIP member did an experiment, showing a 500Kbps download speed on SSH transfers and 4.5Mbps downstream using VoIP speed test software. After firing up a P2P client during the peak hours, then shutting it back down, the member found that SSH speed was now reduced to 30Kbps, as was VoIP. The member concluded that this fit with what he had heard, namely that “once a connection has been flagged as a P2P user, all traffic that is not white-listed is throttled.”

Bell: We’re saving hundreds of thousands from congestion

Not surprisingly, Bell Canada insists that its system is highly accurate, only throttles P2P, and that all complaints it has seen can be chalked up to other network problems. Its comments largely focus on the need for a DPI-based throttling solution, and the company claims that a full 700,000 users would experience congestion problems by next year if Bell did not roll out its solution.

To prove the point, Bell filed a chart showing the history of “network cell loss” on its ATM-based DSL network (the company is currently building a fiber-to-the-node DSL network, but most of its customers still use the older, more expensive ATM technology). Packets are broken up into cells for routing on an ATM network, and when capacity limits are reached and buffers are exceeded, cells will start to be dropped. When this happens, the entire packet becomes unusable and has to be retransmitted. Since 2002, as usage has soared, these loss events have also increased dramatically.

Image courtesy Bell Canada

In laying out its plans for dealing with congestion problems, Bell described a three-pronged approach that includes capacity building, usage-based pricing, and traffic shaping in combination to keep the network operational. “The most logical solution to the congestion problem is to invest the money in expanding the capacity of the network,” wrote the company in a CRTC filing. It pointed out that, since 2001, it has spent more than CAN$3 billion in upgrading its infrastructure, and it plans to spend another CAN$500 million in 2008.

But Bell insists that there is no way to build enough capacity to address the issue. Just as highway builders have found that increasing the number of lanes does not translate in the long term into less congestion (because the bigger roads encourage more use), Bell argues that “the nature of the growth of Internet traffic is that as network capacity expands, new user applications invariably also grow to utilize that capacity.”

The company certainly could address the problem through buildouts by creating a network that can handle the peak load being advertised to each customer. No network company builds its systems this way, however, due to the cost and the fact that much of the time, this capacity would simply go unused.

Or, translated into highway analogies once more, Bell’s Mirko Bibic told the CBC, “If you have a two-lane highway and you have congestion at rush hour, you’re not going to build 20 lanes because those 18 other lanes just won’t be needed during non-rush periods. So what do you do? You build a couple of extra lanes for one, you expand infrastructure. As well, you do things like a bus lanes that allow buses, taxis, and cars with more than three passengers to travel on them so that they get faster service ban if you choose to drive your Escalade and you’re alone on the highway.”

Bell claims it is doing the best job it can, though it does admit that it should have given more notification to the ISPs before throttling their users. In bureaucratic speak, this takes the form of saying, “The Company acknowledges the frustration of some of the Applicants’ members and has apologized to its wholesale GAS customers.” In the future, Bell will give notice of such changes “on the day of implementation, at the latest.”

Much of the good stuff, including many specific numbers, was filed confidentially with the CRTC, but at least the regulator now has far more detailed information with which to make a judgment. That judgment, about whether the government should get involved in the entire P2P throttling debate, will likely be made by the end of the summer, but Bell certainly could not have helped its assertion that congestion is a huge problem by opening its own (non-P2P) video download store last week.

TAKEN FROM arstechnica.com

Ajax allows for rich-internet applications that mimic the responsiveness and complex user interfaces typically associated with desktop applications. Moving applications to the web browser opens many possibilities, including the ability to save user data, connecting with other users for collaboration and sharing, and making deployment and using the application easier since web browsers are standard-issue with most computers regardless of operating system.

If you’re interested in expanding your understanding of Ajax techniques and practices, check out these 25 hand-picked Ajax articles and tutorials that outline various methods and concepts involved in the development of Ajax-based applications. Though most are geared for budding and intermediate developers, veterans might find a trick or two they haven’t encountered before.

1. Ajax RSS reader

Build a simple RSS reader that takes remote XML data from RSS feeds using Ajax, PHP, and MySQL. This example allows users to view feed content from multiple sources in one page. At the bottom of the article, you’ll find an animated demonstration of the RSS reader.

2. Ajax Desktop Tutorial

This tutorial is a step-by-step guide on how to create a desktop/homepage similar to Pageflake and Netvibes. The goal of this tutorial is to showcase some common techiques involved in developing web-based applications like manipulating the Document Object Model (DOM), listening to events (i.e. certain mouse movements), and working with remote data.

• Ajax Desktop demo

3. Ajax for Chat

Learn to build a simple web-based chat client using asynchronous JavaScript, XML, and PHP. The tutorial’s example utilizes the Prototype JS framework, MySQL, and PHP.

4. Create your own information space with Ajax and del.icio.us

This article outlines the basic foundations of using Ajax alongside an API service. It uses the del.icio.us API, but the methods and concepts can be adapted to other popular services such as Digg’s or Flickr’s. It’s an essential resource for those contemplating on creating web applications that use remote XML data - a couple of live examples are popurls and SocialBlade, which obtains information from social media sites using available API services. This tutorial requires you to register (for free).

5. Ultra-lightweight Charts For AJAX

See how to create a super-lightweight (1.78 KB) charting component using Flash with Ajax. The example allows you to generate visual graphs using dynamically-loaded data. The solution involves ActionScript-JavaScript communication, and covers the use of the setData and setStyle ActionScript methods for generating and styling the charts.

6. Quick Calendar Using AJAX and PHP

Learn how to create a calendar component using Ajax and PHP. Ajax is used for navigating through the calendar months without refreshing the page.

• Quick Calendar demo

7. How to integrate Google Calendar in your website using AJAX

This tutorial shows you how to create a web page component that calls a publicly available Google calendar. Google Calendar allows you to easily create, share, and manage events and is an excellent feature for community websites.

• AJAX calendar demo

8. Edit In Place with AJAX Using jQuery

In this example, users are given the ability to edit the XHTML of the web page they’re currently viewing. The example is a proof-of-concept – presenting how this functionality can be achieved using jQuery. Normally, you’d want to send the user’s edits to server-side code to perform processes such as validation or saving the changes in a database.

• Edit In Place demo 1
• Edit In Place demo 2

9. Creating an AJAX Rating Widget

Learn the concepts of creating a rating system without prompting the user to click a submit button or refreshing the page. The tutorial showcases how you can do this in a variety of ways by including examples for the following four JavaScript frameworks/libraries: Dojo, jQuery, mootools, and Prototype JS.

10. AJAX file upload tutorial

In this tutorial, you’re shown how to create a file uploader. The tutorial uses JavaScript and PHP.

• AJAX File Uploader demo

TAKEN FROM sixrevisions.com

May 15, 2008 — Right now, as you read this, there are at least 100,000 people in Sony’s fantasy worlds. They’re pretending to be elves, or trolls, or ninjas, or pirates, or cheese makers, or any of a thousand other fantastic things; and they’re all paying a monthly fee for the privilege. So when massively multiplayer fantasy role-playing games go online, they need proper change management, good network architects and customized remotely deployable Linux installs to do it.

That’s where Mark Rizzo, vice president of technology operations at Sony Online Entertainment, comes in. Rizzo has been running the back ends of massively multiplayer games since one of the first such games, Ultima Online, which he worked on at Electronic Arts in the late 1990s. As the first major massively multiplayer online role playing game, Rizzo said that the Ultima Online team was learning and building everything from scratch, resulting in numerous lessons learned by both the creators and players of the game.

A lot has changed in systems management since then. For Rizzo, this parallels the advances in Linux, which has matured to address many of the problems he said faced the Ultima Online team last millennium.

While today most of the problems faced by Rizzo’s team are technical or development related, back in the Ultima Online days, these were compounded by the unpredictable player base. In its day, no one had ever seen the psychological and sociological reactions of players in a massive online world before. Much of the control over societal movements in the game world was given to the players, something very few games have tried to do since. As a result, the player base became phenomenally violent to newcomers, and even the game’s patron saint and lead creator, Richard Garriott, found his in-game avatar constantly assassinated early on in the game’s life. Since Ultima Online, however, a lot has changed.

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is the religious nature of Linux administrators. While customized network installable disk images have made deployment easier, the administrators behind those systems can still get caught up in holy wars around platform choices, said Rizzo. But he has a solution: “An architect who is over all those larger tech decisions. It helps resolve the issues where you may have some individuals who are talented, but maybe not as mature.”

Big Games, Big Systems
Rizzo heads up a team of around 50 systems administrators and troubleshooters. “Our group is responsible for all the live operations of the games, data centers, Internet access, security, and the network operations center,” said Rizzo. “I head that whole group and work to build strategy around quality of service as well as uptime. We also work a lot with the games when it comes to deployment. We have in the range of 6,000 to 7,000 servers.”

With new games coming online, and seven to eight games already hosting thousands of simultaneous users, change management has become a key issue for Rizzo’s team.

“There are so many moving parts. We have thousands of servers in pretty complex networks with a lot of requirements. [There are] lots of port ranges and constant changes of network access controls, as well as constant code updates. We did an April Fools’ prank in one of the games and we had to have some server code updated to pull the prank off. Change management allowed us to know who approved it, and know where it’s from, and where it’s going,” said Rizzo.

To manage that change, Rizzo said that Sony uses BMC Software’s Remedy trouble ticketing system and a mix of its own tools. “We continue to fashion around our processes some of the ITIL principles,” said Rizzo, though he added that his team picks and chooses the pieces of ITIL it finds useful and ignores other parts.

“To make it work for us, the big key component comes down to having good tools to remotely operate and install images,” said Rizzo.

Network Architects
All of this visibility comes thanks to Rizzo’s network architects. These are the folks Rizzo blesses with management duties and the ability to make hardware decisions.

“A good architect is a highly technical person who also understands the team dynamics. He knows who’s good at what, knows who’s not good at what. He has no direct reports, but has senior level responsibility. They also function as technical producers when it comes to products. It helps to be able to say things in a non-confrontational way. They have to be technically competent but fairly even keeled,” said Rizzo.

And most importantly, he said, architects aren’t bought, they’re made. “None of our architects are people we’ve hired in that way; they’ve always grown into that role,” said Rizzo.

Just Like Us
For a market that’s grown from small, single games in the late 1990s to a multitude of variants and sub-genres, online persistent game worlds are now a world unto themselves. Rizzo said that the systems management challenges are varied but not entirely unlike those found elsewhere.

“It’s a difficult analogy to draw to a typical enterprise application, where you have a stack of Web, database and interface. I would say it’s closer to something like a stock transaction system, something where you’re having to process a lot of information,” said Rizzo. “It’s a lot more like you’re running these simulations in a sense; more like what research people do. The client is sort of a terminal into that world.”

Thus, uptime is the most important part of the online gaming plan. With players charged between US$10 and $15 a month for the privilege of access, time offline means thousands of angry customers. Fortunately, staying online is not heavily bandwidth intensive. On patch day, however, Rizzo’s servers can stream out huge amounts of information in multi-gigabyte software updates that need to be sent to all players.

With all those games running all the time, Rizzo felt that remotely installable Linux images were a hugely important asset for his team. When a server in the UK goes down, his team can reinstall a fresh disk image from their headquarters in Southern California.

“There have been systems built and put in place to help manage and image all the thousands of servers in a way that allows you to stand up equipment a lot faster than we used to be. Particularly, in Linux, it was very difficult to run and install on every machine. It took a long time to configure environments. There has been a lot of advancement in rapid deployment,” said Rizzo.

TAKEN FROM /www.sysmannews.com