While the death toll of recent Tsunami in Southeast Asia now stands at more than 85,000 dead, scientists in Israel are starting to test a new method to predict earthquakes. To date, nobody has been able to predict earthquakes reliably enough and over short enough time scales to allow the evacuation of threatened cities. Some scientists have entirely lost faith in earthquake prediction. They say that so many factors decide whether a fault will rupture that earthquakes could well be inherently unpredictable in a practical sense.

The new research conducted by Akiva Flaxer, a geologist and geophysics professor at the University of Tel-Aviv, and Dr. Yossi Gutman from the Mekorot Company is based on changes in the water table. So far, in previous earthquakes, it’s been discovered that water start to rise soon before an earthquake. In an earthquake on February 11th water started to rise up to 4½ meters (14 feet) higher than their usual level 45 minutes before the quake hit. The same phenomenon was observed before two other minor quakes in July and August this year.

During this research specialized measuring equipment will be planted in 10 wells along the Jordan Rift Valley, which is part of the Syrian-African fault line, and other parts of Israel. Later researches will wait for the next several quakes in hopes they will all be minor ones to view how water tables change in the various wells. Though no major earthquake hit this area for a long time, the Syrian-African fault line that is the meeting point of the European, Asian and African platelet is prone to earthquakes in catastrophic levels.

Wired just now caught up with Ron Avitzur’s story about secretly sneaking into Apple’s campus and developing the Graphing Calculator for the PowerPC without any authorization.

You can find here a nice JavaScript Markdown. It’s still only a partial implementation and may only work right in Mozilla browsers.

If your scratching your head about Markdown, here’s an explanation.

Bob Wyman, founder of PubSub, wrote an entry about the way MSN Spaces is making searches for the word “blog” useless. Not that it’t going to change anything.

Google published it’s 2004 Year-End Google Zeitgeist.

Most popular search phrase for 2004 is “britney spears”, second is “paris hilton”, than”christina aguilera” and “pamela anderson”. The only thing that comes to mind reading this is “sad”, very sad. Are these really the things people occupy themselves with? Ooh, please don’t answer. If nothing else Google does not lie.

The various categories are not much better. In the “Popular Television Shows” the leading searchs are the simpsons, pokemon, south park, charmed and spongebob. In “Popular Tech Stuff” category: wallpaper, kazaa, mp3, spybot and Linux closing the list at fifth place. With these kind of results I’m just happy it made the list.

I’ve been hearing bad stories about HP laptops for a while now, actually I started hearing them after I bought my very own HP ZD7020 laptop. “Great” I thought to myself, I hope I won’t have to deal with all of that trouble. So far, for a little more than a year, things were ok, the laptop didn’t give me any trouble, I’m fairly happy with it and I didn’t need HP’s support assistance.

However, for another HP customer, who bought two laptops to put under the tree this Christmas things weren’t so great. Read about it at Ed Foster’s GripLog.

WinRar users, take notice, A new vulnerability was discovered in WinRAR, which can be exploited to compromise a user’s system.

The vulnerability is caused due to a boundary error in the handling of filenames when deleting files inside WinRar archives. This can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow by tricking a user into deleting a file in an opened, malicious archive. Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code.

The vulnerability has been confirmed on versions 3.40 and 3.41. Other versions may also be affected.

If you do not know the origin of the archive you are opening, do not delete any file in it, until you have installed a fixed version (as of now, there is non). When available WinRar can be obtained here.

SkyOS, the still tiny but promising Operating System, has announced full ports of Thunderbird and Firefox to their system.

Seems like after this piece of information hit slashdot, their site has slowed to a halt. Be patient.

John Battelle over at Searchblog has new predictions for 2005, he was actually pretty accurate last year. Some of his points are very interesting, some are abvious.

I have no idea why any serious PHP developer will use this but here is a web based PHP Class Builder. If you’re lazy enough, you’ll find use for it.