Charl van Niekerk » Blog: February 2006

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Koeberg: Sabotage!

The Koeberg nuclear power station used to tend to a large percentage of the electrical needs of the Western Cape province of South Africa. I also believe that power was exported to many other provinces.

The last couple of months, it has been experiencing severe technical difficulties, up to the level where it almost exploded recently. (Yes, it's serious.) This is according to a local radio station, KFM.

If you look at the situation all around the world you will find that most nuclear power stations don't last for much longer than 20 years. Many newer ones than Koeberg have already been retired long ago. Koeberg, as far as I know, is a 20-something already.

Anyway, as many of my online friends and readers will already know, the last while we have been experiencing severe and repeated blackouts, which seem to be becoming worse as time goes on.

Please note that we are not solely dependant on Koeberg for power; we should be able to source enough power from other facilities, but if one of your major power production facilities stops producing power, it puts additional strain on all the other facilities. If they are not completely up to scratch either, well, they are likely to break too. Which is exactly what is happening right now.

The biggest problem that we have though is that the electricity monopoly, Eskom, keeps on lying about the situation and keeps making false promises. They are living in unrealistic hope it seems; there are serious problems, everybody knows it, but they refuse to admit it.

The most accurate information seems to be coming from independent newspapers and radio stations.

Eskom is now doing load shedding, which means they cut certain areas during certain times of the day. They give us schedules, but rarely keep to them.

Now there is a new challenge - tomorrow is Municipal Elections day. The ANC (the current ruling party of national government, which also runs for the municipal elections) is trying their best not to loose face. Now they are contributing to the lies being spread. The latest one is that Koeberg has been sabotaged. Ok, it doesn't necessarily have to be a lie, but I believe it is.

Anyway, either way, it's bad. If they managed to sabotage a nuclear power plant, it's really bad. If they didn't, and Koeberg has just had its days, it's also fairly bad, as long as they can't get the other facilities back online to fill in. I think the ANC believes that if they manage to convince the public that sabotage has been the cause, they can put the blame on some external party instead of taking blame for a general lack of maintenance and planning (which is what I personally believe is the problem).

Google Magic

I have been getting a couple of hits under certain search terms, so I decided to investigate.

Do a Google Search for Charlie Jade and I am on the front page! (Well, at least at time of writing.)

Blackouts: Getting Worse

Thank goodness we have UPSs and backup power generators at work. At least now we are online.

Yes, the power outages are getting severe now. Last week we had promises from Eskom that we would be fully operational again this week; now look what happens. Most of the Western Cape province is totally out. UPSs and generators are sold out already in many places.

I really hope "Escum" (new official spelling of Eskom) will get their act together soon, and more importantly, stop lying to the public!

Lonely Finger: Really a hack?

Originally I didn't want to believe it, but now I am hearing this more and more: Has the SABC been hacked?

Somebody seems to have hacked their way into the SABC and placed their own ads on their computers. Now the ads are being broadcast publicly all over the country.

Ok, this is unconfirmed. It still seems like the SABC is completely unaware of the ads. This is very weird for me; doesn't the advertising department watch TV too?

Read some of the comments on WTF is Lonely Finger? for more info. Also see the comments on my previous post.

The guilty one at Koeberg

South Africans might enjoy this one. :)

Now we know! :)

(I don't know who to give credit for this; I only received the image alone in a mail. I hope the original author doesn't mind that I publish it here; if he/she does or if you know who it is please let me know. Thanks.)

KKNK 2006

The KKNK (which translated means "Little Karoo National Arts Festival", where the Little Karoo refers to the semi-desert area in South Africa where it is held) is coming again.

Since it's only about 80 KM drive from George (which in South African terms is not far) I might "make a draai" (literally means "make a turn", actually means "hang around") there a little if time allows.

Gmail at your domain!

This is slightly old news, but hey, I'm catching up. :)

This is seriously cool! Google seems to be running a very limited beta that actually allows you to have Gmail at your own domain! Visit Gmail for your domain on Google's site for more info and to apply. I really hope they'll let me in, but they most likely have thousands of applicants already. :)

CSS Reboot May 2006

The rush to beat the deadline has started again! CSS Reboot Spring 2006 is on its way.

Again, I severely object to the notion of calling it the "Spring 2006" reboot, because in the southern hemisphere it is not spring, it happens to be autumn.

Anyway, looking past that, I will see about releasing a redesign of this blog and maybe even other sites. More details will be on my rebooter page. But I'm very busy at the moment so I can't make any promises. :)

Header with Taglist

I used to have a tagline on this blog; now I have a "taglist". Let me show you how the header of this blog works. :)

Let's look a bit at the header markup:

<h1>Charl van Niekerk's Blog</h1>
<ul>
 <li>Robotics</li>
 <li>Computers</li>
 <li>Electronics</li>
 <li>Technology</li>
</ul>

First of all, we need to style the h1 element. Since it is reasonable to assume that there is only going to be one h1 element on every page in this blog, the selector is trivial. The header needs to look like one big block, so the h1 must be the upper part of the block. Therefore no border at the bottom.

h1 {
 margin: 60px auto 0 auto;
 padding: 20px 20px 0 20px;
 border-top: 3px solid #000;
 border-right: 3px solid #000;
 border-left: 3px solid #000;
 max-width: 700px;
 font: 2em verdana, arial, sans-serif;
 text-align: center;
 color: #fff;
 background: #3372B6;
}

An easier way to set the borders would be this:

border: 3px solid #000;
border-bottom: none;

However, the W3C CSS Validator will issue a warning on this saying that you're styling the bottom border twice. Maybe its algorithms need to be improved a bit, but nothing wrong with either approach though as far as I'm concerned.

Next, we need to style the ul a bit to form the bottom part of the block. Since it directly follows the h1, and since there is only one h1 element in the whole document, we can safely use adjacent sibling selectors.

h1 + ul {
 margin: 0 auto 20px auto;
 padding: 10px 20px 20px 20px;
 border-right: 3px solid #000;
 border-bottom: 3px solid #000;
 border-left: 3px solid #000;
 max-width: 700px;
 font: bold 1.2em verdana, arial, sans-serif;
 text-align: center;
 color: #fff;
 background: #3372B6;
}

Again, a similar principle counts for the borders. You could have done it like this:

border: 3px solid #000;
border-top: none;

Note that the bottom margin for the h1 and the top margin for the ul would naturally both be 0 too so that it looks like one large block. Padding doesn't matter, since the background will be applied in padded space.

Now on to the fun part!

We essentially need to transform an ordered list to look much like the following:

Item #1 :: Item #2 :: Item #3 :: And so forth

The first part is trivial:

h1 + ul > li {
 display: inline;
 margin: 0;
 padding: 0;
 background: none;
}

I'm not sure if we really need to reset the margin and padding properties here, but I rather made sure.

Now to get the :: in. Again trivial, using the ::before pseudo-selector:

h1 + ul > li::before {
 content: " :: ";
}

Now there's only one catch: the first item will also be displayed with a :: before it. first-child to the rescue!

h1 + ul > li:first-child::before {
 content: "";
}

Yep, that's it. If anything is unclear or you wish it explained more, feel free to comment. :)

Power Outages

In South Africa, we are currently experiencing severe blackouts. If I suddenly go offline we're most likely experiencing another blackout; please have patience until those Eskom bastards (South African power company) gets things sorted out instead of shorted out. :)

South African EFnet Server

Again old news, very old news, but something that has completely gone me by. Yesterday I read about the "new" South African EFnet server running at TENET. This is currently the only South African server I know of that belongs to a major international IRC network.

I think this is really good news. I would really like to see servers linked to DALnet and Freenode too. The fact that we don't have more servers like this is the fault of our "beloved" telecommunications monopoly that hasn't progressed out of the apartheid stadium yet.

Of course, this isn't the first South African server that was linked to EFnet. Back in 1993 we already had a server there but that then split away to become ZAnet because of bandwidth limitations.

Atom 0.3 is out the door!

This is probably nothing new but I have been so busy the last while I'm getting behind.

Yesterday, while trying to validate my Blogger Atom feed, I see errors all over the place. I thought, "Wow, can you believe that! Blogger used to be reasonable at keeping their feeds valid..." and then I realised that the validator just dropped support for Atom 0.3. You can read more at feedvalidator.org about it too.

Atom is actually a funny case - it was widely implemented before its time. Using developing technologies is not necessarily a bad idea, but then one has to remember that it's important to upgrade. And this is not happening. Well, not fast enough at least.

Encryption

Encryption, or rather the lack thereof, is a big problem at the moment. As a rule of thumb, if you don't want to see it published on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper, don't send it over any untrusted medium (such as the Internet) with weak or no encryption.

Do I need to explain why electronic eavesdropping is trivial? Probably not. :)

Passwords you do not want on tomorrow's newspaper, so therefore you use strong encryption whenever transmitting one so only the receiving end can decipher it.

Yahoo used to offer two login options: unencrypted and encrypted. There should be no such option as unencrypted. Secondly, that was actually the default! So they have a secure login facility, and prefer to send their clients through the unencrypted one! Those morons! Now luckily the situation has (at last) been rectified.

Blogger still gets it wrong. There's no secure login to start with. Also, since they're owned by Google, when is Blogger's login facility finally going to be integrated with Google Accounts (which does use secure logins already by the way)?

Last gripe. E-mail is private, so it needs to be encrypted. Why does everybody insist on using insecure POP3/IMAP/SMTP servers? Gmail gets this right.

Blogger Love

You gotta love the Valentines spirit at Blogger. :)

Pandion

When I started using Jabber a couple of years back, the first client I used on Windows was Exodus. Exodus is a very advanced native Windows application, but it's not very user friendly. Gaim is a very nice cross-platform, cross-protocol client, but Gaim is actually designed for Gnome and the Windows port feels far from native.

Ironically only now (it's ironic because I'm supposed to be an alpha geek) I found an instant messaging client for Windows I'm actually happy with: Pandion. I now feel a lot more comfortable to recommend Jabber to Windows users since I'm able to present them a truly user friendly as well as graphically pleasing native Windows client.

Way to go to those Belgians!

(Btw, please excuse the grayed out area of the screenshot, can't reveal my contact list. No, I'm not involved with terrorists.)

The Pimp's Mouse

I saw a really funny mouse manufactured by Gigabyte, so I decided to take some photos with my webcam (sorry had no proper camera with me).

Some people like to put all kinds of lights inside their boxes... This I find even more amusing because it's not just totally pointless but also wastes precious electrical resources while at the same time being detrimental to the internal cooling of the computer.

Google Talk & GMail Integration

The much anticipated integration between Google Talk and GMail is now live.

Log into your GMail, and you automatically log into Google Talk through GMail's web interface. See your contacts and speak to them. Set your status. And enable logging in either the web interface or in the desktop app and view/search through your logs in your GMail account.

Also see a whole load of new options when hovering over somebody's name. E-mail and instant messaging have finally been combined.

The future of communication? I don't know, but this is revolutionary to say the least. And Micro$oft is left miles behind... No wonder they hate Google so much!

Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day Firefox! We love you! :)

Many thanks to graphicsguru for this great image!

IE Tab

A truly handy extension for web developers that prefer Firefox but need to do cross-browser testing in IE: IE Tab.

It's a Firefox extension that lets you easily open any page in a tab but using IE's rendering engine (MSHTML) instead of the normal Gecko rendering engine used in Firefox.

Naturally only works on Windows. :)

Short Holiday

Last weekend (the 28th and 29th of January 2006) I went on a short holiday up to Johannesburg (my city of birth). I flew with Nationwide Airlines and stayed at the Courtyard Hotel.

I am actually fairly impressed with Nationwide. We had some troubles initially booking my ticket because some of the people working for Nationwide gave us wrong info regarding the collection of my ticket. However, things turned out easier than I thought (I just had to show them my ID document when I checked in).

Otherwise Nationwide is very cool. Their in-flight service is not too bad at all. My experiences with SAA's in-flight service has also been fairly good, but they're freaking expensive bastards and their online booking system sucks bigtime. Of course Kulula just sucks all-round. You even have to pay for your on-board drinks and food. Oh yes and did I forget to mention their aircraft has the ugliest green interior?

Courtyard Hotel has been a very pleasant stay. They offer very decent suites and a great breakfast. :)

One thing I really like about Johannesburg is the electricity in the air. George, the city I normally stay in, is so dead in comparison it really feels like a graveyard. And they say Cape Town is the sleepy town?

What about the peaceful life? Not for me, thanks! :)

IE 7 Beta 2 Preview

Yes, the latest abomination has just been released by Microsoft. Yes, still only XP SP 2 and no plans for 2k. :)

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