Charl van Niekerk » Blog: January 2007

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Dilbert

Thanks to Claudio Cecchi for mailing this out to the GLUG-chat list. I don't know who is supposed to get credit for this, but please mail me or comment if you know.

jabber.obsidian.co.za back up

The title says it all; I am back on Jabber. Thanks to the guys of Obsidian for getting it sorted. :)

Linuxworld got pwned

Oh, the irony!!!

From Linuxworld leaves SA:

The LinuxWorld Conference and Expo will not be held in South Africa this year after Exhibitions for Africa, which ran the LinuxWorld Expo for the past two years, decided the licensing costs for the show were too high. The company says it is unlikely the show will be staged again in the country.

My favourite Jabber server, jabber.obsidian.co.za must have gotten pwned or something because it has been down for more than a day now. Does anybody know what happened? Will the server be back online?

Yesterday's Slashdot Commentary

Better late than never. :)

From Gentoo On Server Considered Harmful:

I firmly believe in updating server software only when you need to. If you don't need new features, and things are working, why change anything? If you update anything you will undoubtedly need to update configuration files. You will need to fix things that break in the upgrade process... This is hard with Gentoo. Gentoo wants you to change a lot of stuff. It wants to be bleeding edge.

This is a pain I also had to deal with when upgrading my server from Ubuntu Hedgy to Ubuntu Dapper. Indeed, changing configuration files is time-consuming and irritating, especially when the entire format of a configuration file has changed. You need to either have a reliable, automatic configuration upgrade script or give the user the option of postponing the installation.

From Vista Upgrades Require Presence of Old OS:

Ars Technica is reporting that upgrade versions of Windows Vista Home Basic, Premium, and Starter Edition cannot be installed on a PC unless Windows XP or Windows 2000 is already installed. This is a change from previous versions of Windows, which only required a valid license key. This change has the potential to make disaster recovery very tedious. The article says: 'For its part, Microsoft seems to be confident that the Vista repair process should be sufficient to solve any problems with the OS, since otherwise the only option for disaster recovery in the absence of backups would be to wipe a machine, install XP, and then upgrade to Vista. This will certainly make disaster recovery a more irritating experience.

Using Windows is an irritating experience to start with. Microsoft's overconfidence here is typical of them and might eventually cause their downfall if they're not careful. As a matter of fact, I don't just call this overconfident, I call this unrealistic. And what happens if you want to reformat because your Windows partition is simply just getting too slow? (Think about the Windows registry, etc.)

From Gates Proclaims Internet to Revolutionize TV in 5 Years:

With an explosion of online video content on sites like YouTube and Google Video, Bill Gates believes that the Internet will revoloutionize the television within the next 5 years. 'I'm stunned how people aren't seeing that with TV, in five years from now, people will laugh at what we've had,' Gates told business leaders and politicians at the World Economic Forum.

Television, as we know it, sucks. Analogue transmissions are as outdated as longdrops and the image quality is poor. Satellite is too expensive thanks to the equipment, and if you don't have a really good dish, as soon as the clouds move in your signal is kak also. Cable isn't even available in South Africa, although if it was, I'm sure it would have been the best option.

IPTV is the future; you don't need to be Einstein in order to figure that one out. You are not limited and boxed in by your local airwave/satellite/cable provider and then overcharged also. The only problem in South Africa is that Telscum will have to be taken down first in order to get cheap high-speed uncapped Internet access available to the masses.

Thunderbird 2.0 Beta 2

Thunderbird 2.0 Beta 2 is available for download. The roadmap is looking rather interesting, including:

Tools for organizing and managing e-mail

Custom Folder Pane Views such as favorites, unread and recently used.

Message Tagging

Tabbed Messages

Be Informative

New Mail Alert Improvements

Folder Summary Popups

Help Fight Junk Mail

Improve the current bayesian based algorithm

Token Store Pruning / Aging

Looking forward to the release. :)

Cell Pr0n

From slashdot today, Canadian Phone Company Selling Porn:

Telus, Canada's second-largest telecommunications carrier has started selling pornography to its cellular subscribers. The service allows subscribers with mobile browsers to purchase both photographic and video adult-oriented content from Telus, at an average of CD$4 per download.

There's no point trying to compete with the other comments on slashdot, so I'll just post here. :)

In South Africa, there has been television advertisements for pr0n on cellphones for a long time now. Yeah, tell me kids won't be watching James Bond past 22:00 at night during a holiday... Bah!

And that in a country that has a serious rape problem. Not good, in my opinion. Are we being flushed down a moral drain or something?

Telscum Saw It

Oh yes, they did. After the strongly-worded advertisement in the newspaper Telscum indeed responded:

Yesterday Telkom installed my ADSL line. On any other day this would have been unremarkable. Except that in this case it came just two days after the campaign I helped run, the Telecoms Action group (TAG), published an advert in the national Mail & Guardian newspaper complaining about the appalling service offered by the telecoms service provider.

I ordered the ADSL line five months ago. Is it a coincidence that it was installed in the wake of the campaign? Who knows, but the timing does seem remarkable.

In fact, usually Telkom sends out one of its outsourced contractees to install ADSL lines. This time they sent a Telkom employee who said they were only sent out when there was a "problem". What that problem could have been is beyond me because, apart from a phone line that went dead a month or two ago, there was no obvious impedance to installing the ADSL line. Perhaps the problem was me?

Very interesting, yes? Somebody at Telscum was reading the Mail & Guardian on that faithful day, for sure! :)

Casino Tactics

So, I found myself pimping at the casino a bit and I can't believe how gullible some people are.

First of all, to try and get rich at a casino is like playing the lotto. Sure, there is a minute chance (something like one in a couple of billion) that you might walk out a very rich person. But the casinos are there to make money (and loads of it) for themselves, not for other people. In other words, the average person that walks into a casino will end up being a poorer man when he walks out. And the only person that grows (even) richer will be the casino's shareholders.

Naturally, there is nothing wrong with going to a casino and having an evening of good, clean fun. If you can easily afford to loose whatever money you bring into the casino, and you only gamble for entertainment, then what's the harm? That's much better than, for example, going to visit your favourite whore and ending up with HIV.

However, I do have to say that I hate the bullshit.

For example, let's say you're playing at the (now completely computerised) slot machine. Let's say you have 100 credits and you loose 10. The display is updated to immediately show 90 credits. However, let's say you win 10 credits. The display isn't immediately updated to show 110 credits; it slowly counts up (101, 102, 103) with the accompanying sound effects.

Also, take a look at the amount of closed-circuit cameras they have in the average casino. Even Fort Knox doesn't have half the monitoring. Is it only to prevent cheating? Well, how on earth can you cheat a computerised slot machine?

The answer is probably: you can't. However, they can. Who is doing any auditing on these casinos to make sure they don't rig the slot machines? The machines are all networked; it would be trivial for them to change the odds on the floor just as they like. In other words, instead of letting you play, they are playing with you; maybe it's time to stick to good old card games with no computers involved?

Stork Blogging Ad

There is a (really cheesy) television advertisement that has been airing in South Africa over the last couple of months. It features a woman busy baking food using Stork products that "found herself" through blogging. How pathetic. Is anybody else in the country also irritated by this?

South African Coal-to-Liquid Technology

From Strategy for an Energy-Starved World: Go Coal!:

A glimmer of good news recently appeared that many might have missed. China signed an agreement with SASOL, a South African energy and chemicals firm, to build two coal-to-liquid fuel plants in China. These plants, costing $3 billion each, are reported by the Financial Times to jointly produce 60 million tons of liquid fuel (440 million barrels) a year. Since China imported 100 million tons of oil last year, these plants would give China substantial control over its domestic energy situation, though its demand is growing fast. The raw material and capital costs of a barrel of fuel would fall under $10 and other costs would not bring total costs over $15. Earlier coal-to-liquid projects in China were smaller in promised output (rising to 5 million tons a year by 2008) but are said to cost about $10 billion. If these newspaper reports about the SASOL costs and volumes are correct, they would indicate a breakthrough. The SASOL costs are also far less than those of current US technology. One experimental plant in Pennsylvania will cost over $300 million for 250,000 tons a year. This would make its capital costs per ton of oil over ten times those of the SASOL-China plants. (The US Department of Energy has been involved with several “clean coal” projects of high cost and dubious merit, but that is another story.)

Just to sketch some background that some of my international readers might lack:

SASOL, [wikipedia] an acronym for Suid-Afrikaanse Steenkool en Olie (Afrikaans for "South African Coal and Oil") was one of the projects of the Apartheid government. Because they were scared of sanctions on oil imports they were looking for an alternative to make the country self-sustainable in its oil supply. Therefore they specialised in synfuel technology.

The big question would be, if this is such a cheap and realistic option, why aren't we South Africans seeing the benefits of our own technology? Petroleum fuel is very expensive here, to say the least! See the following three resources for more info:

Messenger E-Mail Change

A while ago, Ben Ward blogged about problems with MSN Messenger (now Windows Live Messenger) when changing the e-mail address you use to log in. All your contacts suddenly seem to be offline after the change.

I tried this also a while back and got exactly the same problem. Today I tried again and changed my Microsoft Passport e-mail address from charlvn@gmail.com to charlvn@charlvn.za.net and I got the following message:

If you are a Messenger user, we recommend that you wait at least one hour before signing back in to Messenger as we update your service. Some of your contacts may appear offline until they have signed out of Messenger and signed back in.

Interesting! I guess I'll leave it for the weekend then and see how things go next week Monday.

Open Source Meeting in George

So, the GROSSUG has started up again for the new year and we'll be having our first meeting for 2007 next month. If you think you might find yourself in or around George on the 15th of February 2007 please check out the blog post. As they say, the more the merrier!

Me.dium

Me.dium, a new browser plug-in that enables XMPP-based social browsing and messaging with other users of the World Wide Web, has opened up its private beta to members of the Jabber community.

That says it all. I registered using the username charlvn and the e-mail address charlvn@charlvn.za.net in case anybody wants to add me. I will be using the service over the next couple of days and see what I think of it. To be honest, I would rather have this kind of thing as a separate desktop client application that can integrate with a Firefox extension, but fair enough.

So, if you're still interested, check it out. :)

Yahoo Groups

Yahoo Groups is teh suck.

Today I sent some mails out to a few of the GROSSUG mailing lists and only one mail got delivered so far. Yahoo Groups is extremely slow and unreliable. A few years back when we opened up the mailing lists Yahoo used to be much better but the slowness has been continuing for too long now.

The (obvious) place to move the mailing lists to would be Google Groups. I have to say, the new implementation looks very nice! I am quite happy with their speed so far but the main problem with moving to them is importing the member lists. I really don't want to go and ask everybody on the lists to re-register but that seems to be my only option.

Does anybody know of a good (free) mailing list host that actually allows one to import lists of e-mail addresses? If we could get a good mailman setup it would be great.

I know SourceForge does offer that but they're mostly aimed at software projects. I think there needs to be a service similar to SourceForge but specifically aimed at providing services to Linux / open source user groups. Or should I try SourceForge after all? I know their mailing list services also sucked a while ago (maybe still?) but they're fantastic in comparison to Yahoo anyway. Or maybe I should give FreeLists a try after all.

The ideal would really be if we can get somebody to host a mailman setup for us in South Africa though. If the Internet here didn't suck so much as it does we would have done that already long ago.

After all, from the Recipe for a Successful Linux User Group:

Ditto for mailing list hosting: It's just unbelievably feeble and lame to have Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, Topica, or some other "free" commercial service run your mailing list when GNU Mailman comes already set up and working on major Linux distributions, complete with automatic Web archiving and Web-based administration -- plus you can even add to it mnoGoSearch as an archive search engine, if you wish.

Don't volunteer to look like losers in public: As the saying goes, a LUG needs to "eat its own dog food".

Indeed.

Blood Diamond

Since the movie Blood Diamond was mostly shot in South Africa (and in the movie, pretty-much everything else was shot too - with bullets) I thought I should go and see it.

Leonardo DiCaprio's fake accent was ridiculous. He sounded British, definitely not African. His style was also more American than African.

I actually know somebody in RL that starred in the movie - Braam Wessels (co-pilot of the chopper they flew in). He was wearing a helmet though.

I think this movie is a bit of a wake-up call, even for people in South Africa. We are not used to this kind of violence (even though the crime in some areas might be changing that). People from Zimbabwe might be more used to that kind of living.

Some people from other continents, particularly from Europe and America, might think that this was a bit of a dramatisation. Actually, this is close to how it goes in many of those areas.

I saw an episode of Special Assignment (non-fiction South African television show) where they sent reporters into Liberia to spend some time with the rebel army there. Thank goodness they came back alive! It goes really rough out in some of those areas!

To top it all, in yesterday evening's episode of Special Assignment, they broadcast a bit about Zimbabwe and how things are going there. They needed to go under cover because South African journalists are no longer allowed there. The things they uncovered there are absolutely shocking. Now that's a dictatorship for you.

My favourite quote from the movie is In America, it's bling-bling; in Africa, it's bling-bang! My favourite acronym is TIA. I think I will be using them from now on.

But in general, I give the movie 8 out of 10. I am tempted to say that this movie is a must-see.

Jaiku

A funny name, but a really cool service. Jaiku is one of those online presence thingies combined with syndication and I find it rather interesting. Not massively handy or anything, just interesting.

You can see my page and also see Mark Wubben's post Jaiku: Online Presence and Automating for more info if you like.

I wonder if this is a word-play on Haiku, a form of Japanese poetry.

Googlebot a Floodbot?

On one of my sites I have a mediawiki installation. The "friendly" IRIs are all under /wiki/ but the actual installation is under /w/. I have a robots.txt that disallows /w/ but it got overridden by a server default at some point in time. I only noticed recently that, during the month of December (2006), the Googlebot downloaded over 200 MB from /w/ and it was continuing with this trend this month. This might not sound like much to people in most countries, but in South African terms that is a lot of bandwidth! So, if you're hosting a website inside of South Africa, be careful and make sure your robots.txt is fully accessible by search engines, especially when you run a crappy CMS like mediawiki.

Consumers demand telecoms reform

The promised ad I mentioned yesterday is in the newspapers today. Here is some of the text that was displayed in the ad:

The more of this you read, the more infuriated you'll become.

Last year, Telkom recorded a staggering R9.3 billion in pure profit. At your expense. Read on and find out why South Africans continue to pay some of the highest prices for telephony services in the world. Don't expect the government to step in. They couldn't give a hoot. They've got a 38% shareholding. This in itself is like a ticket to act with impunity. And anyway, it's the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) which acts as the watchdog for the telecommunications industry. Their central role is to regulate telecommunications in the public interest. So how come they're not barking noisily and waking up the country about the fact that South Africans pay five times as much for a local call now than they did in 1996? Or that internet access in South Africa is among the most expensive in the world (in fact, you'll pay less for broadband in Morocco, Egypt, Botswana, and Mozambique)? Or that Telkom is only too happy to pay a R15 million fine for failing to deliver basic services where "it was not economical to do so" (Hold the phone, could that be your area they were talking about?) Worse still, Telkom has laid off over 35 000 staff over the past seven years, ensuring that its profits continue sky-rocketing while the rest of the country continues at a snail's pace, waiting up to six inexcusable months or more, to get connected. To anything. And all this from a company that is supposedly "proudly South African"? Indeed, something is very wrong when the only way the public can get through to Telkom is by running a full page newspaper advertisement. Because clearly, Telkom isn't answering the phone.

Read the full story in Consumers demand telecoms reform over at Tectonic.

Telecoms Action Group Update

According to their website, in tomorrow's edition (2007-01-19) of the Mail and Guardian, the Telecoms Action Group will be publishing a full-page advert against Telscum (this time the link with the dreaded nofollow - I would have preferred to use rel="monopoly terrible overpriced corruption despise" here). For those that don't understand why, please see the following:

What a great day this is going to be for Telscum-haters all over South Africa. :)

The Worst Broadband

South African Telkom, locally often more lovingly referred to as "Telscum", is trying to convince the South African market that it's providing the best broadband. So, let's take a look at their cheapest offering.

According to the advertisement, you get between 256 and 384 Kbps download speed and between 64 and 128 Kbps upload speed. The once-off installation fee is R437,50. The monthly line rental is R99,92 (for residential lines - for business lines it's R132,75) and added to that comes the monthly access fee of R245. Then you have a R199 per month Internet access fee which you can use to transfer a maximum of 2 GB each month over your connection. This includes a free e-mail account and 5 aliases.

This will therefore total R543,92 per month. At current exchange rates, this equals about 75 USD and 58 Euro.

If this is indeed the best broadband that South Africa has to offer, I need to get out of this country ASAP. :)

Google Apps Custom Domains

Google Apps for Your Domain is getting even cooler. Each time I check the domain management panel I am surprised with yet more features.

Today I set up custom domains for my e-mail, calendar and start page (which still needs lots of work).

If they go on like this, one day they'll have a complete e-business solution. :)

Planet

Using Blogger's new feed widget feature, I decided to create my own planet.

Maybe one day it will be running on something proper; who knows. :)

It's Blogger in its new incarnation, though, so better not try to validate the markup or anything like that. :)

Vrotmail

I now have 1 GB of storage space in my old Hotmail account (which I no longer use). Still far from the 2,8 GB that Gmail is offering.

Interestingly enough, Live Domains now lets you add third-level domains also and under any top-level domain instead of just com, net and org. This will increase the uptake in countries like South Africa for sure.

("Vrotmail" would be understood as "Rotten mail" in Afrikaans.)

Custom Domain at Blogger

Blogger added a new feature to their arsenal that is really cool.

You can now host your blog on their servers while using a custom domain name. Using this, I changed the domain of this blog from charlvn.blogspot.com to blog.charlvn.za.net in a matter of minutes. I just needed to add a simple cname record to my domain and voilà! And, best of all, all my old URIs should transparently redirect.

Tire Inflation

It is very important that your car's tires are correctly inflated. In South Africa, it is common practice to let your petrol station attendants check your tires and inflate them to the correct pressure as necessary. However, I have found time and time again that they often stuff this up badly, even at the "good" petrol stations. We recently even had a supervisor that got it terribly wrong (inflated one tire at 2,5 bar instead of 2 bar). Rather don't be lazy and check your tires yourself, especially before long trips.

Windows Automatic Updates

For those poor souls that are still using Windows, be careful of Automatic Updates. It is a real performance hog, especially just after logging in. If it is starting to irritate you too, rather switch it off and do your updates manually, or alternatively switch to a real operating system like Linux, BSD or Mac OS X.

Back in George

I am back in George today after my visit to Cape Town yesterday. The force is indeed very strong in that place; even stronger than in Johannesburg.

Although Cape Town is a very beautiful place, some of the areas do suffer a bit from overpopulation, similar to many of the coastal towns in the Garden Route. But I can see why it's becoming so overpopulated, because it's such a nice place, I'm sure lots and lots and lots of people would like to stay there. Also, it can't just keep expanding and occupying more land like Johannesburg. I think most cities in the world actually have this problem at the moment; Johannesburg might be the exception.

While I was at the Dutch Consulate I took the opportunity to do some reading. It seems like there's lots of very cool technology developing in The Netherlands at the moment, especially in the areas of water management. This makes me want to visit there even more some time.

Open Source Meeting in George (Planning)

We are currently in the planning phase for the next open source meeting in the city of George, South Africa. This time I believe it is important to get early feedback in order to properly plan the meeting and catch people's interest. Therefore, I started a forum thread for the discussion. Please join in and contribute if you can. :)

Also, we are going to have a committee meeting next week. If you are interested to attend, please contact me so that I can provide you with more information. Thanks!

Cape Town

Tomorrow I will be offline as I will be in Cape Town for a day. I need to visit the Dutch Embassy in order to get my European passport sorted out. If all goes well, I should be back the next day (Thursday).

If anybody needs to get a hold of me in the meantime they can reach me on my cell phone. For more detail see my contact page.

For all the people I know in Cape Town, sorry for not being able to organise this better but it is a last-minute thing really.

Geek Dinner in the Garden Route

After posting about forming a geek meeting group, I found out about the South African Geek Dinner project.

So, are there any other geeks in the Garden Route that would be interested in meeting up? :)

Hak.5 Fun

I have been checking out some of Hak.5's Sketches a while back; today I found some of the stuff lying on a hard drive somewhere and had fun again. Some of them are quite good. :)

Hanging in Iraq

On Saturday I was watching CNN. So, Saddam was casually hanging in Iraq - by the neck, that is. And right before 2007. Oh well, I guess he missed the New Year's Party! :P

Déjà Vu

So I went to see the movie Déjà Vu (rather see the wikipedia article, the official site sucks) on Tuesday (that's the day Ster-Kinekor club members only get ripped off badly instead of extremely badly).

Although the movie didn't start that well, by the end I was rather impressed. The way the story came together and the pieces started to fit in place was really interesting.

Movies about time travel rarely make sense though. I think the concept of the different branches of reality is rather confusing. One thing I don't catch, for example, is how some things were insistently perfectly unchanged while other things were changed nevertheless. Not entirely logical.

But all-in-all I rather enjoyed this one. :)

CLUG Park

Only yesterday I realised that I am now being featured on the CLUG Park. I think this is a really good idea and am honoured to have both this blog and Standards.za.net syndicated on it. Many thanks to Stefano Rivera for this.

2007

Ok, so today is the second day of the year 2007. I can't believe I'm still alive.

Christmas sucked a bit because it was very warm, and Christmas is just not supposed to be warm. Otherwise it was great.

New Year's Eve would have been better if I wasn't sick. It anyway felt like I was in the middle of a war. The bangs of the of the fireworks, dogs barking, alarm systems going off, sirens of ambulances and fire trucks, etc... Sheesh, what a way to start 2007.

I don't really know why people bother anyway. Some people place a great significance to a new year coming along. Some people even make new year's resolutions and all that. It's actually only a human culture thing and has absolutely no significance outside of our dating system.

The Earth takes just less than a 365 and a quarter days to complete one revolution around the sun. In other words, every single second we could celebrate that the Earth made one full revolution around the sun in a little more than 365 days. And since the earth is moving all the time, that would be ridiculous. We could have decided that we will start a "new year" somewhere in July. It's all the same to the solar system; it's just our method of dating.

Or am I missing something?

Update: On the positive side, the cultural thing on its own is a lot of fun!!! :)

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