The level of banking spam has been going through the roof lately and I've recieved everything from St George, to the NAB, Westpac and even the CUA. However given that it's nearing tax time, the ATO is being given a run at the moment.

This morning I recieved an email with the following text:

You have get a Tax Refund on your Visa or MasterCard.
Complete the formular, and get your Tax Refund.

(Your Refund Amount Is 250.50 AUD)

Complete Formular

Classy work isn't it.

So out of curiosity I clicked on "Complete Formular" to see how professional the crackers had made the site look. It was meh. They'd obviously done a screen shot of the ATO site and then overlaid some sort of imagemap. There was a link you had to follow to "claim your refund" so I thought I'd follow that and see what sort of information they were asking for. Here it is in all it's glory.

I'm sorry, but anyone who falls for this is asking for it. The ATO is never, ever going to ask for your ATM PIN. Ever. I can see them asking for Credit Card details, but only in relation to paying of taxes, not giving of refunds.

Sigh.

Okay, as a mental exercise (really because I can't afford to build the thing right now) I have been designing a prototype of the Clean Energy Bio-Fuels plant I mentioned earlier.

To make things simpler I've broken down the design into the component parts:

• Bio-gas Plant
• Bio-Diesel Plant

Now as you may remember, the idea is to create a plant that is as energy self-sufficient as possible while reducing the impact on the environment to the bare minimum, while producing quality fuels, and as I've discovered other products.

This entry will look at building the prototype Bio-Gas plant, the inputs that will be needed, the challanges faced and the outputs I expect to get out of it.

Bio-Gas Plant Prototype

Inputs:

• Bovine Manure
• Agricultural Waste (plant matter only)
• Kitchen Waste (vegetable matter only)
• Glycerol (A by-product of Bio-Diesel generation)
• Water

Outputs:

• Methane
• C02
• Hydrogen Sulphide (Rotten Egg Gas)
• Slurry (source material that has exhausted its ability to generate gas)
• Water (contanimated)
• Electricity
• Heat

Design of Prototype:

Reactor

So, I gave a talk last friday at the Sydney Linux Users Group about the work I've been doing with Plone and Local Government. On one of the last slides I went on about my future plans for what I was working on.

Then I got home and dug into this announcement that Google had made about something called Wave.

Umm, if it works as advertised, wow?

Two things lead me to say wow.

The first is the fact that for something that has the potential to change the way people work online, Google has decided to Open Source it. According to the demo video, they're going to be releasing "the lions share". Not only that but they've already released the first draft of the protocols used in the Google Wave.

This means that Google will not be the only provider of Wave services. If Wave takes off, then there will be a number of Wave tech providers, each able to talk to each other via an Open Protocol.

One of the features of Wave is the ability to create what are called "Robots". That is programmes that act as participants in the conversations being conducted on the Wave. This means that a Wave server can now be the focal integration point for any number of different systems. All of a sudden you can access and use everything from Email through to Plone through to Instant Messaging (Jabber, MSN, AIM and so on) via the one interface. It also means that the tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in older systems don't have to be wasted, they can still actively contribute via the Wave.

I'm not usually one to get all hyped up about a tech, but if this done right, it could be that evolutionary breakthrough that everyone has been looking for.

Just thought I would do a quick update on the vegie garden. The beds have been left alone for a little while now, I would love to say that they've been lovingly tended for the winter growing season, however whats really happened is that I haven't had the inclination to tackle the work to repair the beds until now.

However that being said we're starting to re-populate the beds and today we planted some Romanseco Broccoli Romano, other wise known as Fractal Broccoli.

The next thing I did was move the Sweet Potato. As you may remember, when I first planted the sweet potato, it was in a tyre next to our lemon tree. Well it's reached the point where the tyre is severely restricting the tubor growth so I decided to move it from the tyre into our middle bed.

Last but not least, our pumpkin vine has finally started bearing fruit. The vine has been growing since soon after I built the compost enclosure, and in fact started from composted pumpkin seeds. After meandering all through our back garden it's finally started to produce pumpkins.

If you're going to try and crack a CMS then please at least check to see what CMS it is that you're trying to crack? wp-login does not work on Drupal sites.

Sigh, so hard to get good evil people these days.

Just a quick update because I haven't blogged in a little while.

On the health front, I'm making slow progress on the weight loss issue. I was doing pretty well and had managed to get my weight down to 128kgs however a bout of seasonal flu (not the swine kind) put a crimp in my exercise regime and so I'm back up to 131kgs. Sigh.

On the bio-diesel side of things, I've been quite happy with my previous experiment and am now pricing the materials to make a bigger more permanent reactor. I'm also tentatively investigating what it would take to wire a bio-diesel friendly generator into the house. We had a 20 minute power outage today and I'd like to get to the point where when the power drops out, we're the house with the lights still on ;)

I'm going to be presenting at SLUG by the way at the end of the month. I'll be talking about the work I've been doing with Plone and local governments, the ups, downs and possibilities.

Okay, first up some disclaimers. I am not an engineer. The closest I've come to fuel manufacturing is the internet and a softdrink bottle full of potentially successful bio-diesel. Also the following has not been costed in any way, so may end up being about as viable as cold fusion and as expensive as the QE2.

Now that that's out of the way, let's get into the shiny part.

Now that I've successfully (I think) made bio-diesel, I've been thinking about how to scale up production to say cater for a diesel car/van (the kids are starting to grow out of the car we have at the moment). Me being me, I've also taken it to the nth degree and thought about the best way to scale up to industrial production in the most environmentally friendly manner.

Energy

Any truly environmentally friendly plant needs to take energy production into account at the design stage. The ideal production figure for self energy production would be 120%. This allows for growth in plant production and also allows for a secondary income stream via putting energy back into the grid.

In this thought experiment I've selected a hetrogenous energy production solution, a combination of Solar, Wind and Biomass (Biogas). I've chosen those three based on where I live. The Illawarra is blessed with a high number of sunny days (though as I look outside it's grey and overcast now), coastal winds and is chock full of farms (for the moment, but that's another rant) which could supply biomass in the form of manure and other agri-waste.

Water

Water is a big part of the process of creating bio-diesel. Both in the titration process and after the initial reaction, in the washing process, water is used. An environmentally friendly plant would recycle as much water as possible. This would mean filtering the water after use, removing any contaminants and then feeding the water back into the system.

With thanks to Tilly for this recipe

Okay, I'm going to be putting together this post as I go through the process.

Ingredients:

1 Litre WVO (Waste Vegetable Oil - filtered through coffee filters)

250Ml Methanol

6gm Caustic Soda (this may vary depending on what the titration shows)

Tools:

Rubber Gloves

1 Glass

1 Plastic Softdrink Bottle (1.5l) - Must be dry

1 Teaspoon Measure

1 Mixing Spoon

1 Measuring Container

Step 1: Create Your Methoxide and heat your oil

Before you do anything you need to prepare your methoxide.

• Take one glass container, pour Methanol into container and add Caustic Soda. Mix vigorously with spoon until all of the Caustic Soda has dissolved. This will cause the mixture to heat up so be careful.

• Heat your oil. Nominal temperature is 55 degrees celcius.

Step 2: Mixing The Oil and Methoxide To Start the Reaction

Once you have your oil heated and the methoxide mixed you must combine the two.

• Take your dry softdrink bottle and place a funnel in the top.
• Pour your heated oil into the bottle

I've put it off for long enough, so today I'm going to actually make Bio-Diesel. I'll be using this recipe and once the process is finished I'll be putting up a post with pictures.

Hell I might even video it.

Steve Walsh pointed me at something interesting this morning while I was waiting to see if I was going to crash and burn at Senator Kate Lundys Public Sphere event.

Apparantly a group of "community nagios developers" has banded together and decided that nagios isn't advancing as fast as they would like and so they're going to fork it.

On their "Why A Fork?" page they have this to say:

"In contrast, the core of this system – the Nagios software itself- is maintained by a single developer in the United States and hence is developed at a slower pace. The Nagios community has previously attempted to clear this bottleneck with suggestions to broaden the developer base. Long awaited improvements such as the regular integration of community patches, the connection to databases or the web interface were hoped to be accelerated. Unfortunately, these attempts came to little success and effective community commitment has gradually deflated.

Over the past 6 months, the situation has escalated with Nagios Enterprises LLC requesting several long term community projects to state that they are not officially connected to Nagios. In a few cases the companies were requested to change their open source project names or transfer their domains over. This combination of reduced visible software development and disproportionate actions against long time Nagios supporters has irritated many active community members."

In essence they seem to be saying that the guy behind Nagios IS the development bottleneck and so in order to keep Nagios moving along they have to take it out of his hands.