But I struggle to see the merit in broadcasting fairly mundane fire updates across the whole of country South Australia.

Driving home from work in Mount Gambier this afternoon, I was interrupted to hear an emergency broadcast regarding a fire at Cowell on the Eyre Peninsula, about 700km away.

Courtesy of the CFS website, this was the actual announcement:

“THE COWELL FIRE IS BURNING NORTH OF CARPA ROAD NEAR COWELL ON EYRE PENINSULA. SMOKE IS TRAVELLING IN A SOUTHERLY DIRECTION AND MAY REDUCE VISIBILITY ON LINCOLN HIGHWAY SOUTH OF ELBOW HILL.”

That’s illuminating, isn’t it!

The update doesn’t even contain information about whether there’s a threat to property or if people in the surrounding area should evacuate.

It worries me that communication surrounding bushfires hasn’t improved since I personally experienced the 2003 Alpine fires in North East Victoria.

I felt at the time the lack of reliable information was a disturbing factor, and similar reports have followed the devastating bushfires throughout Victoria earlier this year.

In trying to compensate, I sometimes wonder if well-meaning authorities provide too much information too widely and not enough information locally, where it matters.

I really didn’t need to know about the Cowell fire today. But hearing an emergency broadcast stops you in your tracks … the first time. I’ll probably ignore it next time unless I know from other sources to listen.

Ironically, the ABC as an emergency broadcaster, is confined by state borders.

I’d be personally interested to know about a fire that may be burning 40km away in Victoria, but I probably won’t hear emergency updates on SA regional radio unless the CFS is involved and it’s threatening South Australia.

The solution?

Surely the ABC can tailor broadcasts for geographic regions and play music in Mount Gambier (or something) while the Eyre Peninsula hears a fire update. If not, scrap the broadcasts unless lives are likely to be threatened.

The map shows the scale of how far the 700km is from Mount Gambier to Cowell. Worth an emergency broadcast of a scrub fire on local radio in the South East? I think not.

They saved lives in 1939, including my Uncle Jim. My Uncle Michael died in a dugout, but there were exceptional circumstances.

My Aunt Noreen talked about the issues on Radio National with Philip Adams:

[audio:http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2009/02/lnl_20090210_2215.mp3]

Here's the entry I wrote the day after they were born.

Jim and Maggie aren't old enough to understand it's their birthday, but they know it's a special day because of the presents they received and the party we had with friends.

Jim received a fire truck, fireman's hat, fireman bear and a book about machines. Maggie received a Dora the Explorer doll, Dora bag and a book about cats, reflecting their respective interests at this stage.

It uses Suse Linux and provides a limited number of programs with the free service. These include Firefox, Gaim, Evolution, Open Office Writer and Digikam.

There are options to install the virtual computer on a PC or USB memory stick. I’m currently testing it with an installation on my laptop’s hard drive. I’m effectively running a Linux system in parallel with Windows XP and I’m able to switch easily between the two.

It all appears to be very new. I signed up for the free service and received a login code on my mobile phone. There are two web sites, the other being here and seemingly more pitched at a youth audience. Neither has a support forum. I can’t tell if it’s only available in Australia and New Zealand at this stage or not.

Technical details are a little sketchy and the best I could find are here.

The business model appears to involve enticing users to upgrade to commercial accounts with more programs and greater data storage.

The free account has 20MB online storage and 10MB email, which isn’t much compared with Gmail for example.

Linux and Mac versions are said to be under development and there is a web launcher version which I haven’t yet tried.

I have found it to be a nifty and interesting tool. The idea of a secure personal area for online data storage has some appeal as a way to backup documents and photos. The company says it’s secure; just got to hope they don’t collapse like Veridas and take your documents with them.

At this early stage I would say it’s a good alternative to running portable applications on a USB stick. It’s also a good way to introduce newbies to Linux and open source.

There’s nothing uniquely special about it. A couple of extra observations from my previous post:

Gentoo boots more quickly than any other distro I’ve tried; about the same as Windows XP.

Some of the stable packages are out of date. That’s rather irritating when they’re everyday programs like Firefox and Digikam and the procedure for installing “unstable” versions is complicated.

It’s fairly impressive and has some features that are similar to Flock and Firefox. The most obvious improvement on previous versions of IE is the implementation of tabbed browsing.

It takes a while adjusting to the look and feel, which will make the transition a little difficult for typical users when it becomes the real deal.

There is supposedly better security. Anti-phishing is integrated and also feed reading.

I still prefer Flock, but this is a good challenger from Microsoft.

It works with Word Press and seems a nifty tool.

It uses the XFCE window manager and includes my favorite programs like Firefox, Thunderbird, the Gimp and OpenOffice.

I’m unfamiliar with the Slackware package management, but it seems simple enough, although there aren’t many in the net repository. Contributed packages through the Zenwalk web site are easy to download and install.

The total distro is only a 478MB download, which must be one of the smallest around to include the full version of OpenOffice.

I like the look and feel. Zenwalk boots faster than any other Linux system that I’ve used. I’ll stick with it for a while.

Nearly 400 people have been injured in a village in Bangladesh in a series of clashes over controversial umpiring decisions in a cricket match between two rural teams. At least one man is reported to have died while a dozen houses were torched in the scuffle.

Paramilitary Bangladesh Rifles and police fired gun shots and tear gas shells on Thursday to disperse a fighting mob from a village near Brahmanbaria district town, 100 km from Dhaka.

“More than 200 people were admitted to different hospitals with injuries,” a police inspector was quoted as saying in a Reuters report. “The victim succumbed to stab injuries while being shifted to Dhaka for higher treatment.”

The rival villagers used guns, sticks and whatever weapons came to hand in sporadic clashes that began on Tuesday.

Delayed television footage showed hundreds of people carrying sticks and fighting on a newly harvested paddy ground at Sarail. The clashes continued through the day and night before the police and paramilitaries went into action in the village.

“The situation is now under control,” the inspector continued, “but scores of people were injured and huge properties were damaged.”

My comment: It’s a pity the Bangladesh national team doesn’t play with the same passion.

I’ve opened a beer and will fire up the barbie soon. Life goes back to normal.

I’m actually relieved that I didn’t win. That shows, I suppose, I’m not a very good politician!