Modelling Fukushima emissions and fallout

I’ve been reading with great interest a recently released approximation of the quantity and deposition of radionuclides from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant accident earlier this year. Recently published on the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics open discussion forum, the PDF form (entitled “Xenon-133 and caesium-137 releases into the atmosphere from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant: determination of the source term, atmospheric dispersion, and deposition”) is freely available.

The discussion paper raises a number of interesting points, particularly the indications of pre-tsunami reactor containment failure as evidenced by radioxenon releases, the large contribution to overall emissions from the spent fuel pool fire (reactor building #4) and the upward rating on the overall estimated radionuclide emissions. I strongly recommend a read.

Photo credit: TEPCO

Twitter downtime and flailbots

I am rather surprised at the amount of downtime Twitter has had today – the site is up and responsive, but I’ve not been able to access or update my timeline for at least six twelvetwenty eight(!) hours! Twitter is of course famous (especially in the early days) for downtime but this is stretching credibility given the lack of prior notification.

Looks like the flailbot is here to stay, at least for now.

Update – twenty eight hours into the down time I am really shocked at the lack of acknowledgement of the problem on the Twitter status blog. For what is a mature social media network I’d have expected a better response than this, even if it is ‘we have a serious problem and we are trying to fix it’.

Final Update – well clearly whatever the problem was it was rectified. Oddly enough, as many people I spoke to were affected by this as those that weren’t. Odd.

Gasp… an update?

Hello Interwebiverse!

Yes I am still around (as some of you who are following my meanderings on twitter are aware) and am still interested in my blog. Finding free time at the moment is a huge issue for me (just one look at the stack of games in my ‘to-do’ pile speaks to that) but I hope to use my blog as something akin to a more verbatim twitter feed. Twitter has been much easier to post to given the (forced) laconicity of the medium and I have been tweeting fairly regularly for the last few years. Naturally there have been times when I would have wanted to expand what I was tweeting about into a more concise discussion allowing it to coalesce outside of the 160 character limit.

I have formerly made no bones about my aversion to micro blogging (or link blogging for that matter) and this is not where I am leaning. To be honest, I am not entirely sure exactly how this new setup will come together yet, I am looking at the possibility of moving away from a hosted wordpress account to doing something self hosted. Whilst that would give me the opportunity to develop my own (or tweak an existing) CMS system, the problem of maintenance rears its ugly head. Security on the web is paramount the issue of platform is a double-edged sword. Developing a proprietary solution (fun, although likely very time consuming) would prevent off the shelf attacks against known exploits although I do not have enough experience in PHP/MySQL yet to be sufficiently confident in my hardening skills. On the other side of the spectrum, using an off the shelf solution like wordpress would give me the instant bonus of a CMS that I could customise, although I would have to be strict about keeping up with patches and security bulletins for the platform (highlighted by recent history).

So, as you can see, not only am I unsure where / how I am going to take this, I am also unsure of the platform I am going to use. A great start :-).

My interests have evolved and grown a lot in the last couple of years. It goes without saying (as it is my job) but I am very into coding and software development, I regularly write code in C++ and python outside of work now. This presents something else that I need to consider, I would love to write posts about some of this code and make it available for free on here, but I need to figure out how it all fits with the existing content on my blog.

But anyway, before I start rambling, I will be shortly looking into tweaking and starting up writing again. Please bear with me whilst I get everything together. 🙂

Twitterlarity

Hello all! Gosh it has been a little while since I was here, so please bear with me whilst I clean the cobwebs and shoo the feral wildlife out.

The more keen eyed of you will have noticed my twitter feed (on the right of this page) receiving a lot more attention from me than my weblog and the reason for that is fairly simple, it is much easier to microblog and post little snippets than for write full articles. I have never been a fan of just regurgitating content without at least adding commentary or (hopefully) extra insight, hence the reason I have veered so sharply away from doing so on here. But on twitter, by necessity, everything is μ‘d down which is both appealing and restricting. Plus also I can periodically reveal the quirkiness of my personality in 140 characters or less. 😉

Irrespective, I have been tweeting a lot and noticing more and more how popular Twitter has become. Take a look at this snippet from my stats showing just how much the traffic has grown to my post instructing on the embedding of twitter into wordpress.

Twitter is more than a microblogging facility, but there are a number of different ways in which it can be used. I use twitter as an almost light version of facebook despite the fact that I know (or follow) less than an order of magnitude fewer people than on facebook.

Whilst I am on the subject of facebook, I can’t stand the new layout! Now I know facebook has a history of changing things and the public backlash is almost as predictable as the tides, however with the new ‘layout’ I believe is rather more than a stylistic change. It almost feels like there has been a paradigm shift within facebook to try to tap onto the twitter phenomenon and this I find both silly and uncomfortable. Both twitter and facebook serve two completely different purposes no amalgamation of functionality will make me think otherwise…

Speaking of which, I was just browsing through the recent wordpress news and found a new theme which appears to be the result of an extramarital indiscretion between Twitter and WordPress. I mean come on, has the whole world gone insane? Whatever next, Windows Live microblogging??? Oh… Again don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter, I just sneer at the less than subtle attempts by the other ‘major’ players to hump the leg of reinvention.

But enough of my rant. What else have I been upto in the last two months to warrant my silence you ask ? Well, not a huge amount really, my (now no longer that new) job has been keeping me busy both in terms of the work and the learning I am doing around the various subjects. It is both exciting and highly gratifying that the areas I am learning (and working in) are opening up new avenues and have precipitated a greater appreciation for the technologies I so love. Apart from that I have been gaming a lot in whatever spare time I can scrape together between one code block and one uninterrupted quantum of sleep. Recently I have played Mass Effect, Farcry 2, Doom 3, Supreme Commander Forged Alliance as well as a bit of Fallout 3 and I am looking forward to writing about each of these in turn, time permitting. I would also like to start writing about more technical matters (coding paradigms and JS / CSS / C++ code snippets) but given how widely that veers away from the rest of the content in my weblog, I may register a new website and do that there. I have some great ideas for domain names, just a case of figuring out the hosting and (*sigh*) if I have the time to maintain it.

Anyhoo, this has turned a little rambly. Comments / email / @KonradS follows welcome. 🙂

Merry Christmas!

Seasons greetings to everyone! I can’t believe that this blog has existed now for over a year! ! Well, actually it would have been a year back in November, but it has been a busy few weeks and I have not had much chance to update recently! My new job is taking up most of my time at the moment and whilst I am still keeping up with the various things I pay attention to it I have not had enough time to really write good posts about them.

Since the last thing I wanted to do was start microblogging or, worse, posting for the sake of posting; I have been a bit quiet recently. However, that is going to change in the New Year – there are so many exciting things to write about. I have been tinkering with my media center system a lot in the last month and have added a number of really cool bits. I have also played quite a few games including Stalker: Clear Sky (which I briefly mentioned a couple of times), Crysis ( 😀 ) Half Life 2 Episode 2 ( which I need to vindicate due my previous negative post ), DiRT, Rainbow Six Vegas, Mass Effect, World at War, World in Conflict as well as revisiting some classic Gameboy, SNES and n64 games …  the list could go on and on. I have also got a new laptop which works beautifully with Ubuntu almost out of the box which is fantastic.

Ideally I would like to write at least a brief post on each of the things I have just mentioned as well as resume my sporadic commentary on the various topical news stories that crop up, but we shall have to see.

One thing is for sure, it has been a great year and I am looking forward excitedly to 2009. But for now, again, Merry Christmas from me – I hope you get lots of gadgets 😉

LHC Hysteria

I found a beautiful combination of headlines on the BBC news site a moment ago:

Classic..

An Update & Request

Just wanted to write a brief note to let everyone know what is going on. As you have no doubt seen, I have barely posted anything so far this month. The reason is simple, I have recently started a new job which is a lot of fun and challenging, but it is also quite tiring and I am a little short on free time at the moment. So bare with me while I get used to the new workload, those of you who have emailed me in the last couple of weeks – I am sorry it has taken me so long to get to your email, I will try to get on top of everything this week.

Also, on a side note, I am trying to find some good IRC servers, in particular, ones with good communities associated with them. If anyone can suggest anything I am all ears! 🙂