Mar 27 2012
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Astronomy, Parliament, Space

Square Kilometre Array Telescope mentioned in Parliament

Whilst checking hansard (the official publication of the UK Parliament) for Trainwatch I spotted this set of written answers published yesterday (26 March 2012) about the Square Kilometre Array Telescope:

Roger Williams: To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills what his policy is on implementation of the recommendations of the Square Kilometre Array Site Advisory Committee; and if he will make a statement. [101678]

Mr Willetts: Members of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Organisation will consider the report and recommendation of the SKA Site Advisory Committee, and agree on next steps and actions. The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) represents the UK in the SKA Organisation and it liaises closely with the Department on SKA discussions.

Roger Williams: To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills if he will publish the location recommended by the independent Square Kilometre Array Site Advisory Committee; and if he will make a statement. [101956]

Mr Willetts: The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Site Advisory Committee has undertaken a detailed evaluation of the two candidate sites and has presented its report and recommendation on the preferred site for the SKA to the SKA Board.

All parties involved have agreed that this information should remain confidential while the process for arriving at the SKA site location decision is under way.

Roger Williams: To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills

  1. whether the independent Square Kilometre Site Advisory Committee has completed its evaluation of the cost and infrastructure implications of the African and Australian and New Zealand bids to host the Square Kilometre Array telescope; and if he will make a statement; [101957]
  2. whether the independent Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Advisory Committee has submitted its recommendations regarding the location of the SKA; and if he will make a statement. [101958]


Mr Willetts: The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Site Advisory Committee has undertaken a detailed evaluation of the two candidate sites and has presented its report and recommendation on the preferred site for the SKA to the SKA Board.

© Parliamentary material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO on behalf of Parliament. Licence No: P2011000006

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Mar 09 2012
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humour

Fondly remembering Rubber Chickens

Ah a blast from the past… sorry but if you remember this then you’ll hate me ;-)

Its the time of year
Now that Spring is in the air
When those two wet gits with their girly curly hair
Make another song for moronic holidays
That nauseate-ate-ate
In a million different ways
From the shores of Spain
To the coast of Southern France
No matter where you hide
You just can’t escape this dance

Hold a chicken in the air
Stick a deckchair up your nose
Buy a jumbo jet
And then bury all your clothes
Paint your left knee green
Then extract your wisdom teeth
Form a string quartet
And pretend your name is Keith

Skin yourself alive
Learn to speak Arapahoe
Climb inside a dog
And behead an eskimo
Eat a Renault Four with salami in your ears
Casserole your gran
Disembowel yourself with spears

The disco is vibrating
The sound is loud and grating
Its truly nauseating
Let’s do the dance again

Hold a chicken in the air
Stick a deckchair up your nose
Yes you’ll hear this song in the holiday discos
And there’s no escape in the clubs or in the bars
You would hear this song if you holidayed in Mars

Skin yourself alive
Learn to speak Arapahoe
Climb inside a dog
And behead an eskimo
Now you’ve heard it once
Your brain will spring a leak
And though you hate this song
You’ll be humming it for weeks

Hold a chicken in the air
Stick a deckchair up your nose
Buy a jumbo jet
And then bury all your clothes
La la la la la
La la la la la la la
La la la la la
La la la la la la laaaaaaa

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Feb 18 2012
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Debian, Java, Linux, Ubuntu

How to fix OpenJDK-7 certificates on Ubuntu 11.10 running on Amazon EC2

After a second crash of my EC2 instance which was running Amazon‘s own Linux distribution I had to rebuild so this time I decided to put the latest official Ubuntu AMI on it. Everything ran fine until I fired up an application which takes a feed from Twitter using their stream api.

When I fired that up I got the following stack trace:

17 Feb 2012 21:13:00,790 ERROR [Twitter Stream consumer-1[Waiting for 500 milliseconds]] [in.setra.twitter.TwitterModule] Exception during processing
java.lang.RuntimeException: Unexpected error: java.security.InvalidAlgorithmParameterException: the trustAnchors parameter must be non-emptyRelevant discussions can be on the Internet at:
 http://www.google.co.jp/search?q=b5e7486f or

http://www.google.co.jp/search?q=24943238

TwitterException{exceptionCode=[b5e7486f-24943238 b5e7486f-2494320e b5e7486f-2494320e b5e7486f-2494320e], statusCode=-1, retryAfter=-1, rateLimitStatus=null, featureSpecificRateLimitStatus=null, version=2.2.5-SNAPSHOT}
 at twitter4j.internal.http.HttpClientImpl.request(HttpClientImpl.java:200)
 at twitter4j.internal.http.HttpClientWrapper.request(HttpClientWrapper.java:65)
 at twitter4j.internal.http.HttpClientWrapper.post(HttpClientWrapper.java:102)
 at twitter4j.TwitterStreamImpl.getFilterStream(TwitterStreamImpl.java:290)
 at twitter4j.TwitterStreamImpl$7.getStream(TwitterStreamImpl.java:279)
 at twitter4j.TwitterStreamImpl$7.getStream(TwitterStreamImpl.java:277)
 at twitter4j.TwitterStreamImpl$TwitterStreamConsumer.run(TwitterStreamImpl.java:427)
Caused by: javax.net.ssl.SSLException: java.lang.RuntimeException: Unexpected error: java.security.InvalidAlgorithmParameterException: the trustAnchors parameter must be non-empty
 at sun.security.ssl.Alerts.getSSLException(Alerts.java:208)
 at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.fatal(SSLSocketImpl.java:1697)
 at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.fatal(SSLSocketImpl.java:1660)
 at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.handleException(SSLSocketImpl.java:1643)
:
Caused by: java.security.InvalidAlgorithmParameterException: the trustAnchors parameter must be non-empty
 at java.security.cert.PKIXParameters.setTrustAnchors(PKIXParameters.java:200)
 at java.security.cert.PKIXParameters.<init>(PKIXParameters.java:120)
 at java.security.cert.PKIXBuilderParameters.<init>(PKIXBuilderParameters.java:104)
 at sun.security.validator.PKIXValidator.<init>(PKIXValidator.java:73)
 ... 23 more

After a brief search I found that for some reason when you install OpenJDK-7-jre-headless you don’t get the certificates installed & most people just switched back to the Sun/Oracle jre.

Now this worked for me – the install was a virgin setup so I hadn’t installed the sun JDK before but I found the Java 6 cacerts installed, so the following two lines fixed the problem:

cd /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/security
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-i386/jre/lib/security/cacerts cacerts

This may work elsewhere, it may not – in this instance it worked & I’m now getting a realtime stream in from Twitter.

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