Charl van Niekerk » Blog: March 2007

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Yod'm 3D

For the 3D Desktop wannabees among you that are still using Windows, here is an interesting little tool my colleague showed me today. Yod'm 3D gives you multiple desktops together with that cube effect you've probably seen in various videos on YouTube.

Personally, I find multiple desktops to be indispensable on Linux and struggle to understand why Windows doesn't have that by default. Luckily there are various tools (from both Microsoft and third parties) you can use to get that. The cube effect doesn't bother me a bit personally, though. It would probably irritate me more than anything else, the same as the rest of this eye-candy. (Yep, I'm not a Vista candidate, for sure.)

Update: Also see SphereSite. Very much commercial though, not open source the least bit.

Another update: Check out Modotate.

BumpTop 3D Desktop

This looks rather interesting. I just watched a demo video of the BumpTop 3D Desktop prototype.

It basically makes your computer desktop look like your real desktop. Your files and windows look and behave like pieces of paper that you can throw around, group, stack, fan out, plaster all over the place and do all other kinds of stuff with. You can even fold them and crumble them up.

Personally I find it to be a little chaotic but it might be handy once I'm first used to it.

National Cleavage Day

Today is a great day. No, not only because it's Friday. I bet many of you didn't know 30 March 2007 is National Cleavage Day in South Africa. Who else to thank but Wonderbra. :D

Joining the W3C HTML Working Group

Today I joined the W3C HTML WG as an Invited Expert.

The only thing that worries me is this part in the Good Standing in a Working Group section of the W3C Process Document 6 Working Groups, Interest Groups, and Coordination Groups:

Participation by an individual in a Working Group on an ongoing basis implies a serious commitment to the charter, including all of the following:

attending most meetings of the Working Group.

As I am self-funded, it is highly unlikely that I will be able to attend any meetings. But we'll see when we get there.

If you also need to join the WG, please read the post W3C restarts HTML effort on the (highly recommended) WHATWG Blog.

The Drugs Box

Once again a very neat innovation. The kiosk concept is really taking off. When I was talking about the Freedom Toaster placement in George I got this link: The Drugs Box.

The Drugs Box® is a portable and interactive drugs information kiosk. It is designed so that young people and their communities can access accurate and non-judgemental information about drugs. It is available to public & private sector organisations who are valuing its appeal to young people and exciting research capabilities.

We should put more of this kind of stuff around South Africa. Anti-AIDS campaign, anyone? Thanks to piggy73 for posting the link.

Microformats & Search Engines

I got a link to an article from the Microformats Wikipedia Page that was written more than a year ago titled How microformats affect search engine optimization ( SEO ). Here is a quote:

One day search engine spiders will need to accommodate microformats.

Let’s face it, one day search engines will have no choice but to take microformats into consideration and they will certainly benefit because of doing so. Microformats provide valuable data that people are interested in, just like Technorati pushed elemental microformats to a level of common widespread use (although most don’t realize it), another popular site could just as easily leverage compound microformats causing even more need for engines to begin distinguishing microformats from standard webpage content. It’s a snowball effect that is happening right this moment.

In other words, we are right on the spot with Kupa. :)

Firefox 2.0.0.3 Crashing

After upgrading to 2.0.0.3, although Firefox seems to be significantly more stable, it is still crashing once every few days. It's a real pity that Opera isn't open source, otherwise I would have seriously considered moving over. As much as I love Firefox, I need to be productive, and right now it's really not helping me with that.

Geeky Photos

In my opinion, Jean-Paul must have one of the coolest photo streams from South Africa.

Of course, his photos appeal to my geeky nature. So, what I want to see are some of the following:

Computer cases (your custom mod)
LCD / Plasma TFT displays (that 21 inch lying in the corder will suffice)
Your dual-screen setup
Flickering LEDs and other lights (including your pimped-up case)
Lots of cables and wires (coax, UTP, STP, electrical, telephone, etc)
Antennas, receivers, transmitters (that includes transceivers, naturally)
Servers, server rooms, routers, switches and even hubs. ADSL routers and diginet boxes also welcome.

There are plenty enough photo sharing sites out there, so get posting, geeks!!! And please leave a comment if you know of more geek goodness captured on photo. :)

BitTorrent with Azureus

I absolutely love Azureus. If you ask me, it's the coolest BitTorrent client around. Sure, it's Java, but in my experience it hasn't actually been too slow.

Just check out the screenshots above. One plugin generates a 3-dimensional view of the hosts you're downloading / uploading to; there's lots of other cool plugins too.

So, what's your favourite BitTorrent client? :)

(Oh yes, and in case you were wondering what I was downloading, it's Fedora Core 6. I see 7 is also out now, but still in testing.)

Telkom ADSL SIO: Another Update

Thanks to Aquila's comment on my last post, I found out that you don't have to sign the contract but can merely get the service (along with the free router) on a month-to-month basis.

Initially I phoned a local number in George because apparently I could get faster reply from them. They sent me a fax and asked me to sign some kind of 24-month contract with them. Then I phoned the toll-free number and they sorted it out on a month-to-month basis without me having to fill out anything. Yesterday I phoned, today I already got my free ADSL router. They said they will phone me back in the next 7 days to let me know when ADSL has been activated on my account.

I have to say that the customer service I got from Telkom after phoning the toll-free number isn't too bad so far, especially not for South African standards. It's actually quite impressive. (And that, coming from me, says a lot!)

Let's see how things go from here. Will blog again as soon as I have more news.

Clickatell

I got an interesting comment today on an old post of mine. I'm sure many of you didn't know that Clickatell is actually a South African innovation. And apparently they run VodaZone directly. See Stefano's comment for more info.

Lots of South African IT innovations are starting to see the light, even on an international scale! :)

Buying / Selling Support on SourceForge

Wow, this just in. SourceForge is now adding services to help people buy and sell services relating to open source software. Want to buy software support? Developed some really cool stuff and want to sell your support? SourceForge is becoming your one-stop shop. :)

To stay updated, join the marketplace interest list.

Google Apps

Google Apps is just getting better and better. Not only did the admin panel get an entire makeover making it look really snazzy, but you can now also have "alias" domains on your account. I set up standards.za.net as an alias domain and added the appropriate MX records to the DNS servers. I can now receive e-mail at info@standards.za.net too. Great stuff!

The only problem is that you cannot have per-domain e-mail settings; all your accounts and settings get shared across all your domains. But that's fair enough.

Absa Web Hosting

Ok, this is really funny. We have a dial-up account with Absa which will probably be replaced with ADSL (not from Absa) soon.

Absa actually offers some bundled web hosting for their users. Wow! A full 10 MB! I am so impressed... or not. ;)

If you think Gmail is giving more than 2 GB of free e-mail away, this looks really pathetic in comparison.

Oh well, while I have it, why not use it? ;)

Oh yes and check out the server that it's running on:

Apache/2.0.52 (NETWARE) Server at myweb.absamail.co.za Port 80

Can this be right? No ways, they're running on Novell Netware??? :D

Summer of Code 2007 Update

In my last post about the Google SoC I said I was going to enter something for Joomla, and so I did. :)

Thanks to a public holiday on Wednesday in South Africa (and the fact that I don't take holidays), I was able to spend a large portion of the day researching and working on my application. Sorry for being a little slow with other things the past week, but this took top priority. Now things will be returning back to normal.

I will be releasing more information about my proposal publicly as soon as the deadline for applications have been reached early next week. I am really excited and can't wait for 11 April to see if my application has been accepted!

Telkom ADSL SIO Update

Some interesting info regarding the Telkom SIO I blogged about a few days back.

Firstly, this is only available to residential customers. Why? It is now faster to get yourself online from home than in a premium business area.

Secondly, you have to sign a 24-month contract. If you cancel, you have to pay just under R62,19 multiplied by the amount of months left on your contract. No free lunches, hey. ;)

Ok, so maybe you're paying them back for the "free" router. But if you take the SIO, it seems like you have no guarantee on the router according to the info I received. So even if the router breaks you still have to pay them back for it. Not a fair deal (where's Isabel Jones?) if you ask me.

Any thoughts?

Simple Pingback Hack in PHP

Blogger supports neither the Pingback nor the Trackback specification. It does however have a system called Backlinks which sucks (in my opinion).

Because many blogging CMSs like Wordpress supports Pingbacks out of the box, I decided to create my own little script in order to do pingbacks manually from anywhere.

The only tricky part about doing this in PHP is that you need to use XML-RPC. There are various options for this. You can use the PEAR XML-RPC package or the XMLRPC-EPI system. I decided to settle with the standalone XML-RPC for PHP library, just because it looked the simplest.

Here is the main script. Please note that I didn't spend much time cleaning and perfecting the output. It will just spew you a whole lot of debugging stuff. Since this script is only a quick hack for my personal use I don't want to spend too much time on it. I'm providing this not as a solution; it's only to help save others' time who happen to want to do something similar.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<title>Custom Pingback Form</title>
<?php
 header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8");
 
 if ($_REQUEST["mypost"]) {
  require_once "xmlrpc/lib/xmlrpc.inc";
  
  $m = new xmlrpcmsg("pingback.ping", array(new xmlrpcval($_REQUEST["mypost"], "string"), new xmlrpcval($_REQUEST["theirpost"], "string")));
  $c = new xmlrpc_client($_REQUEST["pingback"]);
  $c->setRequestCompression(null);
  $c->setAcceptedCompression(null);
  $c->setDebug(2);
  $r = $c->send($m);
  
  if (!$r->faultCode()) {
   echo "Pingback to $url succeeded.";
  } else {
   $err = "code " . $r->faultCode() . " message " . $r->faultString();
   echo "Pingback to $url failed with error $err.";
  }
 } else {
?>
<form method="post" action="pingback.php">
 <p>Pingback Uri: <input type="text" name="pingback" size="30"></p>
 <p>My Post: <input type="text" name="mypost" size="30"></p>
 <p>Their Post: <input type="text" name="theirpost" size="30"></p>
 <p><input type="submit" value="Send Pingback"></p>
</form>
<?php } ?>

Please note that you naturally need to have the above-mentioned XMLRPC library in the right location.

Thanks to the Coding your own blog: Pingback in php article for some help.

ClaimID

Stii inspired me with one of his recent posts to register an account at ClaimID. After opening the site, I remembered that I actually already registered an account somewhere last year, but almost completely forgot about it.

The interesting thing is that ClaimID has its own OpenID server. I can even delegate it so that I can use a URI such as http://charlvn.za.net/ to identify myself. Really cool stuff.

Blog Campers

Joe wrote an interesting post The New Campers. Here is an extract:

The camper is the spineless little pencil neck shit that finds himself a corner to hide and waits to shoot somebody in the back. The lowest of the low.

[...]

The new camper is the blogger who regurgitates shallow content. They get the hits, they have ads all over their site like an xmas tree. Here you will find the latest video clip which they did not create or the pictures of the latest blond bimbo celeb's breasts or a series of posts that simply link to other content.

After I stated that campers are simply lamers, joe replied:

I guess the main difference between a "blog camper" and a "lame leech" is that the leech tends not to become popular because the general (clueless) public has enough of a clue to figure out a leech is a leech…

but, for the "blog camper" simple lowest common denominator democracy logic fails.

That's very true. Now I come in for the finale:

Yeah, you’re right. Sheepishness is a common sickness under the general public. But this has been demonstrated long before by the politicians all over the world. I mean, how are they getting away with what they are getting away with (sorry for confusing phrase) and still get enough votes to stay in government?

Any thoughts? :)

Cricket?

Sunday afternoon I wanted to watch the nature show that usually airs at 18:00 (local time) on SABC 3 but could not; the show has been cancelled in favour of cricket.

Monday evening I wanted to watch CSI but could not thanks to, yes, cricket.

Tuesday evening I wanted to watch Special Assignment but could not thanks to, yet again, cricket.

Oh well, I guess if the majority wants to see cricket the rest of us will just have to wait it out. :)

Askimet

After roughly two months using Askimet on Wordpress on Standards.za.net and having it eat literally thousands of spam comments, I finally got my first spam that wasn't filtered out automatically. Although that's a real shame, Askimet has done an exceptional job so far.

Telkom ADSL SIO

Telkom now launched their new SIO ADSL Offering. This basically lets you do your own wiring at home, which is trivial anyway. Why they didn't do this like years ago I don't know, but that's not important. During the month of March, the installation fee is waved and you get a free wifi router with 4 ethernet ports. Apparently you can choose a modem, but why the heck do you want an ADSL modem if you can get a router???

Anyway, so I am getting ADSL installed at my house at last. Since blogging seems to help for some people, I guess I'll give it a try also. Not like many people actually read this blog anyway. :)

Yesterday just after 12:00 (local time) I phoned Telkom. Left a message and am now waiting for them to phone me back. Nothing as yet, but this is only a few hours more than one day. As soon as I get my ADSL sorted I will blog again and see how long it took me since my first phone call. We have to keep in mind that today is a public holiday in South Africa. Their branch at the Garden Route Mall was closed today when I arrived just after 13:00 (local time).

Skype

I am currently using the Skype status indicator image on my contact page. However, even after being online for more than 18 hours, the image still said I am online this morning. Either Skype has been very slow the past 24 hours to update or otherwise my Skype account has been pwned. And now, instead of saying I am offline it says "I'm not telling".

The problem with that image is anyway that it's not accessible. Although the image itself changes (or is supposed to change) according to my status, the alternative text always stays the same.

The security issue with Skype is that you can log in under the same account from as many different computers as you like. The various connections won't even know about each other. And better yet, text messages will be broadcast to all the different connections. In other words, if I know another Skype user's password, I can easily sit and eavesdrop on them without them even knowing.

And if you don't hate Skype by now, just wait until it's transferring others' calls through your Internet connection because it's better than theirs. And wait until you start using it on Linux and your computer keeps freezing up every now and then when somebody sends you a text message.

And the encryption is so heavy, if you use it from an older Celeron your microprocessor can't keep up.

Add to that the fact that it's built on top of proprietary protocols so it's not possible for you and me to create our own software implementations. Well, actually those protocols have been / are being cracked anyway so maybe we could. But still.

Still wanna use Skype or can we start moving to open standards-based solutions such as SIP now? :)

Amatomu

South Africa now has its own equivalent to Technorati called Amatomu. This is an initiative by the Mail & Guardian, a South African newspaper.

The registration process went reasonably smoothly but I did spot quite a few bugs. After I confirmed my e-mail address, I clicked on the log in button on the page and nothing happened. After logging in through the link on the top right, I was searching for the "add your blog" menu item only to find out it changed to "my blogs & statistics".

It is now asking me to add some JavaScript to my blog template which I am reluctant to do, since I'm quite the perfectionist when it comes to markup and minimalistic too. Personally I believe the rankings should anyway not be determined by the amount of visits a blog gets, but by user votes and possibly links from other blogs. I could probably easily write some scripts to beat that system anyway if I was not a white hat.

After adding Standards.za.net, I was asked to add the following code to my template:

 <script src="http://www.amatomu.com/embed.php?blog_id= Notice: Undefined variable: blog_id in /var/www/vhosts/amatomu.com/httpdocs/addblog.php on line 90 "></script> 

It also correctly picked up that my blog is running Wordpress so it gave me an alternate option:

 <img height='1' style='display:none' width='1' src='http://www.amatomu.com/log.php?blog_id= Notice: Undefined variable: blog_id in /var/www/vhosts/amatomu.com/httpdocs/addblog.php on line 99 ' /> 

Obviously there are some issues that still need looking at there also.

There was a temporary problem while I got the code to insert into Standards.za.net but I got a mail from somebody at Anatomu a few minutes after posting this to inform me that the problem has been rectified. Apparently they were making some slight adjustments so I was just the unlucky one. :)

Personally I find the homepage to be slightly overcrowded but in general I do find it to be a little better than Technorati.

On the Top 100 blogs page, there are only 75 blogs listed at time of typing. Therefore, if you have a blog to submit, please do! :)

Some people would really like the tag cloud they can add to their own blogs. Personally I don't see the sense in adding a cloud of tags to a blog if it's not relevant to that particular blog itself, but that's merely my own opinion.

Ok, now I have to apologise for not saying more positive things yet. I hope this post serves as constructive critisism only; I am by no means trying to say this is a bad project. Quite to the contrary, I honestly think this is a brilliant project. I am totally stoked to see this and very, very happy indeed.

Technorati is simply too large for South Africans to make an impact. Amatomu gives us even playing field and allows us to watch what's happening locally. I would certainly like to see this project grow and improve, as I'm sure it will. Hopefully in future we can even integrate some of these great South African services including this, Muti and Kupa.

This is definitely yet another major step in South African web development and I'm sure it will make many headlines in the weeks to come. Kudos to all those involved and many thanks for all your work and coffee-to-code converting.

I hope to meet some of you in person one day so that we can talk about more cool ideas over a nice cold Windhoek. But until then, keep up the good, no, fantastic work! ;)

Update: I knew I had to know somebody that was involved with this project. Yes, Vincent Maher. :)

Another Update: He blogged about it himself this morning.

Charlvn.za.net Site Updates

Ok, so this is long overdue. I finally managed to give my main site some tender love and care. If I'm going to be entering the Google Summer of Code I cannot leave my site looking like it's a job from back in the 90's.

The new site features some useful links on the front page. (Maybe useful.) I also have a new people page with some links to people that I know online, offline, or both. I also have an events page for some of the events I will be attending.

As always, the site is available in both English and Afrikaans thanks to Apache multiviews. Just add .en.html (to force English) or .af.html (to force Afrikaans) to the end of the IRI of an HTML page on my site to get the version you prefer. Otherwise, your browser should do the job for you. :)

And naturally there are Microformats all over the place as well as XFN. The semantic web in action. :)

Firefox 2.0.0.2 Crashing

I don't know what is going on at the moment; I can honestly say that I have never had Firefox crash on me so much even while it was still in its pre-1.0 stages. I am using Firefox 2.0.0.2 now and it's crashing on a daily basis. Some days I have to put up with Firefox crashing 2 or 3 times.

It's really irritating because just when I have a couple of tabs open (and web pages do load so slowly in Africa - the same old boring saga) Firefox decides to crash all over me and I have to start loading them all over again when it restarts. I am becoming thoroughly sick of this now and am seriously considering switching to Opera.

By the way, this is not just my machine or extensions. I use the net from several different machines, some of them on Linux and some on Windows. Even from a completely clean install, I can get Firefox to crash easily but yet with no obvious pattern. This needs to stop; I am getting seriously gatvol with this now. I am feeling like a 10-year-old crash test dummy.

del.icio.us tagging system weirdness

del.icio.us's tagging system is indeed very funny. Even after renaming all the tags in my account with a script, I still have some tags I already renamed left. Sometimes they disappear for a while and then later reappear. The same happens to my links; a while back after deleting some tags three-quarters of my links just disappeared and a day later they were all back.

It seems like del.icio.us does some tag caching / indexing for efficiency (which would be quite logical) but in the meantime this system is still very buggy. And why on earth do we need this system:unfiled tag? I think this just proves the quirkyness of their tagging system.

ipodcast

Ok, so the name might sound a little corny but this is actually a really cool competition. ipodcast - the showdown is now officially open to all South African podcasters. Create and upload your own podcast and win prizes. I'm sure this will really drive podcasting in South Africa; great idea!

In unrelated news, this is my 500th post on this blog. :)

Spam

Wow, the amount of spam I receive has roughly doubled in the last year. Early in 2006 I used to receive between 100 and 150 spam messages a day. At the moment, I seem to be receiving more than 300 a day. I'm so thankful I'm not hosting my own e-mail in South Africa; it would have cost me a packet to pay these bandwidth prices! Luckily my mail is safely on Google's servers overseas and might I add their spam filtering is just plain simple brilliant. Of course I still get the occasional spam message that passes through, but those are minuscule in amount relative to the amount that gets blocked.

Summer of Code 2007

The Google Summer of Code 2007 is now accepting student applications. Yes, South Africans are eligible. Since I have the privilege to be a student I am going to be sure to have my application in this year. Of course, for us in the southern hemisphere it should actually have been Winter of Code but who cares, right? :)

The SoC allows students to develop open source software for some major projects and actually get paid for it. An opportunity not to be missed. The deadline for applications is on the 24th of March so better get cracking. There's nothing to loose; you can even submit up to 20 applications and there's a heck of a lot of potential projects; something for everyone!! :)

I am actually looking into doing something for Joomla. If you need something written please let me know, maybe it could turn out to be a cool project! I will probably blog about my ideas soon. Just need to find some more time; this week is really hectic.

Oh, so you were wondering how much you would get paid if your proposal is accepted? Oh, just around $4 500 U.S. (which would be more than R31 500 at current exchange rates). As I said, an opportunity not to be missed, so get cracking on those applications!!! ;)

Muti!!!

Wow, I can't believe I waited so long to start using Muti. For all those that haven't heard of it yet, it's the South African version of del.icio.us or reddit or digg or whatever.

The fun things about Muti are that you can vote for links, add tags to both your own links and those from others and check out the stats to see who's the top posters. Great stuff. And because it's a local service and most of the links are to local sites you don't get overload like with some of the other services overseas.

Best of all, there's now a race between the top posters for a Muti shirt and some biltong. How good can it get? :)

Of course, nothing is perfect and I have some suggestions on how to make the service even better, however right now I really don't have the time to think them all through and blog about them so this will have to wait for a later date. :)

I am convinced now though that del.icio.us truly sucks and must die. I will probably soon stop using their service altogether. I can't believe that Neville can do such an excellent job by himself and these guys at Yahoo with all their money can't do a better one. Shameful.

New George Meeting Group: myXchange

We now finally have a geek meeting group in George. Actually, I should not say "geek" because the scope for the group is much wider. The meeting group is also for all those that fall into one or more of the following categories, in alphabetical order:

Advertisers
Bloggers
Designers
Geeks
Hackers
ICT Professionals
Marketers
New Media Professionals
Technology Hobbyists

I hope I didn't miss any in that list. Even if you don't strictly fall into one of the above categories but you want to join, you probably should just for reading this. :)

Please note that when I say "hackers" I mean real hackers, not malicious hackers (a.k.a. crackers) and definitely no script kiddies.

The meeting group is called myXchange. The name has been inspired by the vigorous exchanging of ideas that will happen at each meeting. Truly a "think tank", as you might call it. Inspiration for cool people from all over the Garden Route! Thanks to Stii who was obviously the first to be inspired and came up with this brilliant name. :)

Website will follow soon, but for the meantime we already have a wiki up.

The inaugural meeting will be held towards the end of this month:

Time: 18:30 on Wednesday 28 March 2007
Place: Upstairs at Harrys above Spar, York Street, George, South Africa

We will be discussing technology, the web, marketing, advertising, the media, Web 2.0, and any other buzzword you can think of.

If you would like to attend, please add your name to the wiki page or otherwise just mail me or comment on this blog post. We would like to have a rough idea of how many people are coming so that we can book to make sure Harrys will have enough space to accommodate us. Thanks in advance.

If you want to contact me, you are welcome to phone me on my cell number +27 (0)72 405 8378 or mail me at charlvn@charlvn.za.net.

Looking forward to chatting to you at the meeting!!! :)

Transparent Proxy Servers

I have said it a thousand times: transparent HTTP proxy servers irritate me no end. And the worst of all is that, thanks to the bandwidth crisis (yes I call it nothing else), South Africa is full of them. If files are being cached locally, it typically means less international traffic utilisation.

Today when I tried to edit a page on the Wikipedia, I got an error message telling me that my IP is blocked because of vandalism. WTF? When I looked at the IP, it wasn't my IP at all, but the one of an upstream transparent proxy server.

Many web-based voting systems record the source IP address of each vote so that no more than one vote can come from any particular IP address. However, transparent proxy servers often mean that no more than one person on an entire ISP can cast a vote.

This is absolutely terrible and must be looked at urgently.

There are however two workarounds for this problem though. HTTPS usually is not affected so you can use that when the remote server supports it. The other solution is to open up a VPN to a server overseas and access the net through that. The only problem then is that local sites are slower, but otherwise that solution works rather well.

We have also had to deal with clients phoning in. "I just updated my website but when I view it, it still shows me the old pages, even after refreshing several times." However, often a Shift+F5 (in Firefox) or a Ctrl+F5 (in IE) does the trick.

PHP User Groups in South Africa

I know of a huge amount of PHP developers in South Africa. Recently, I received a mail from Ruari Plint of Microsoft South Africa about PHP user groups in the country. However, other than one forum and one mailing list, I found bugger-all. Are there no active groups or am I just not finding them?

Overseas, there are many specialist PHP user groups. However, at the moment most of the PHP-related questions seem to be sent out to the various open source user groups such as the CLUG and GLUG in South Africa.

Taking the popularity of PHP into account it is really strange to me that we don't have a thriving specialist PHP user group going here by now. Not like we necessarily need one, but the quantity of mail on some of the general open source user groups can be quite exhausting at times so I believe more PHP developers would be tempted to join a specialist group than a general one.

Anything happening I missed? Any thoughts?

SourceForge Subversion

I was committing some stuff to the Fidelis subversion repository on SourceForge this morning but could not connect. It seems like SourceForge changed their subversion IRIs similar to their CVS IRIs. In other words, instead of checking out:

http://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/fidelis

You now have to check out:

http://fidelis.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/fidelis

I actually wondered if (when?) they are going to do this and wonder why they just didn't implement this right from the start. A rather big inconvenience I would say. I didn't bother to hack around; I just checked out a new version since the Fidelis code repository isn't very large yet anyway.

This again makes me wonder why I'm still putting up with SourceForge. The only thing is that they provide a lot of flexibility and all-round they are still the best in my opinion. They might not provide a built-in wiki like Google Code Project Hosting but at least they provide mailman mailing lists and a subversion hook to notify the CIA.

Does anybody know of a better alternative for open source project hosting that can compete with SourceForge's features?

Update: Now it seems like I can use the old IRIs again without any problems. Interesting. :S

SA Blog Awards: Time to Vote!

The nominations are in so now the South African Blog Awards 2007 is accepting votes for the people's favourite blogs in each respective category. It's really interesting to see who made it to the top so far. I am really happy to see Stii in the Tech category.

There were also a few surprises though, for example to see The Right Perspective in the podcast category because their content is quite, ahem, controversial. And I am sure that there are many more men reading lesbian blogs than women.

It was also really surprising to see that Stormhoek didn't make it. Biting the hand that pours the wine at Geek Dinners, indeed! And their wine is so great and competitively priced (I should know) that it's ridiculous to think they aren't getting more recognition. This started quite a discussion on blog marketing though.

Most of the South African blogs I would regard as tops are not in any of the categories and most of the blogs there I do not follow. Many of them I never even heard of. For me, a great blog simply has great content. I don't really care how popular the person / people that write the blog are; I just want great stuff to read personally.

I definitely don't like to comment on somebody else's post unless I have something to say, because in that case it just feels to me like I'm wasting others' precious time. When reading comments I also have to deal with a lot of useless information and I don't think the better of any of those comment posters that don't have anything interesting to add to the conversation.

To comment just for getting links back to your own blog is like a form of spam in my opinion. But that seems to be the thing that works for many people irrespectively. I have been blogging since mid-2004 now and my main reader base is still overseas.

But at the end of the day I don't really care; I blog because I want to provide information, not because I want to be famous or impress others. If those were my intentions I would have done things much differently right from the start (for one thing, being less direct about what I think of things). :)

And as far as people nominating themselves go, I just think that's arrogant and rude. I didn't and wouldn't nominate myself; if my blog really deserves to be there others will make it happen.

One thing is for sure though: there are a lot more blogs now than 3 years ago when the Blog Awards started. It's great to see how many South Africans are getting in on the act. Even in the Garden Route we are seeing more and more bloggers jumping up. Congrats to all of those fine people; you rock!!!

Geek Coffee

Last week Wednesday (the 7th of March 2007) we held our first Geek Coffee in George with great success. Many thanks to Stii, Imel and Jaco for being there. The conversation was fantastic; we talked about various interesting topics including Linux, Windows Vista, VoIP with Asterisk and much more.

I used to be a terrible coffee addict; people used to call me a "coffee to code converter" but eventually I gave up drinking coffee from the start of October last year (2006). On Wednesday evening I had 4 cups of coffee at Harrys; although I used to laugh at that amount the caffeine really got to me after being "sober" for so long and I only managed to get to sleep at 05:00 in the morning! And an hour later I already had to get up for work. I felt like a walking zombie, but surprisingly I did not feel too tired. That caffeine is really bad stuff, I tell you. ;)

Anyway, the caffeine seems to have done me some good though because my mind was racing with all kinds of ideas and opportunities. I am therefore full of inspiration now to do a lot of interesting things. I am already busy scheming and planning so watch my blogs in future for updates from the House of Charl. :)

Quality of Service in South Africa

Imel writes in his post Looking beyond 2010:

I am now litterally sick and tired of people going on about how great a money making opportunity the 2010 Soccer world cup will be. When will people realize that 2010 is not about money, but rather about marketing?

2010 wil lbring a new group of toursits to South Africa. These are the sports enthusiasts that do not typically see South Africa as their holiday destination. We have one chance to make a good impression if we are to see them come back. So far it seems all we are planning on doing is making sure they do not come back, through poor service and exhorbitant prices.

We really need to change our thinking on this. Give the visitors a decent experience, great service and reasonable prices, and they will come back again and again, and they will bring others.

Tresblue commented:

I have just returned from Cape Town where I was shocked to see how exhorbitant pricing has become. Tourist venues like Green Point, Waterfront etc really take the tourist to the cleaners. Taxi rates are R11.90 per km. I agree with your sentiments Imel that this is a one time deal to make a good impression and so doing ensure increased tourism for years after the event. I do not however think that we are going to capitilise on the event.Instead we will be dealing with damage limitation rather.

Later Imel writes in his post Technology in a Jar:

We (South Africa) have some of the best trained and most brilliant minds.

[...]

Each unit can be geographically diverse (the more remote the better) so as to benefit those really in the middle of nowhere. Units can be franchised to the locals so empowerment takes place and skills development can really reach those that needs it most.

[...]

We have a truly global competitor consisting (and benefitting) those that are willing to embrace new technology, irrespective of where they are or where they come from.This is all doable, and what is more, it is achievable, today, in South Africa. Like most things, all it takes is willpower.

I couldn't agree more. This indeed sounds very promising. I especially like the part of willpower. Life is what you make of it. You can either suck or be excellent at what you do; it's all in your own hands. Let me share my experience and thoughts.

Almost two years back, my family from the Netherlands came down to South Africa to come and visit us while having a great holiday in the beautiful Garden Route at the same time.

Our neighbours were having an extra room added to their house at that point in time. We thought that the builders were doing an unusually good job. In comparison to what we are used to, they were building really hard and making good progress. They were actively working about 70% of the time during the day which is almost unheard of. Normally we see builders just standing around doing nothing else than smoke marijuana most of the day. If they put in two hours of hard work the entire day we used to be impressed.

Our family from the Netherlands thought quite different of it though. They thought the speed at which the builders were making progress was nothing less than pathetic. My uncle actually made a statement that, if this was the Netherlands, the manager would have come back in the afternoon and fired them all on the spot after not seeing the progress they should have but were obviously not making.

In South Africa, as it is pointed out frequently, we have a massive lack of skill. However, I do not believe this is the main problem. More often than not, the problem is a gross lack in work ethics. When the builders work, they obviously know what to do. When you put enough pressure on them, they sometimes do a decent job. But choosing to not work when you should be and are being paid for working is not acceptable. Neither is not doing a good job even when you are more than able to do so.

A lack of skill is easily fixed. However, how do you fix the issue that people are just plain lazy?

In areas like Europe, because the average is much better, you can easily fire lazy people and employ hard working individuals in their place. However, what do you do in Africa where the average is being lazy? And it's not just the average; it's often extremely difficult to find hard working individuals at all. And those lucky managers that do find them keep them all to themselves and pay them well.

So, how do you build a country on lazy people? How do you motivate the masses to try their best at everything they do? Even if they only try half their best it would be a major improvement.

It's all good to have some of the most brilliant minds in the world, and that indeed we do. However, brilliant ideas are usually not much use when you can't find people to implement those ideas. It all comes down to the simple fact: if we are ever to reach the top we first need to find better labour and that will require "upgrading" (to use computer terminology) the mindset of the masses.

But in the meantime, for the few of us that do believe in good service and quality of work, there will be more opportunities available for us than what we can handle. We will have to help each other, form partnerships and alliances and reach for the stars. However, we will never be able to reach the full potential of South Africa unless we fix these issues, some way or the other.

Personally, I find the problems we have with ethics are not limited just to work ethics. But that's a different post altogether. :)

IEs4Linux

This is really, really nice. Now I can see how broken my websites look in IE right from Linux thanks to the power of Wine and IEs4Linux!

Quanta

Thanks to Stii for pointing me into the direction of Quanta a while back. I have mainly been using jEdit thus far but needed a change.

I just installed the quanta package on Ubuntu and it worked fine, although it's complaining that I need to install some other components for extra features. I'll take a look at that another day.

Quanta is a KDE app so it doesn't look native in Gnome, but that doesn't bother me too much. It's pretty configurable so I can get it to do what I need. It has proper line wrapping but the speed at which it starts up and opens and closes files is not too impressive. All-round, it's pretty good though.

Code Monkey MP3

This is really old, but for those that haven't seen it yet, check out the Code Monkey MP3. For all the developers out there, chained to their desks and forced to write uber-leet (or even really sucking) code for a living. :)

Console

Everybody knows that Windows' built-in DOS-based console is rubbish. Luckily there is an open source app out there that will make your life a lot more fun if you're still using Microsoft's platform. Console gives you all the goodness we Linux users have been spoiled with over the years including tab filename auto-completion and semitransparent backgrounds. You can even open multiple tabs. Much better. :)

Hazer Baba: You Suck

I seem to be allergic to Tartrazine (food additive E102). Actually, lots of people are, and therefore it isn't often used anymore and safer alternatives are preferred.

A quote from ukfoodguide.net: E102 Tartrazine, FD&C yellow No.5:

Tartrazine appears to cause the most allergic and/or intolerance reactions of all the azo dyes, particularly amongst those with an aspirin intolerance and asthmatics. Other reactions can include migraine, blurred vision, itching, rhinitis and purple skin patches, (because of this more use is now being made of Annatto (E160b). In conjunction with Benzoic acid (E210) tartrazine appears to create an over-activity in children.

Not recommended for consumption by children.

The Hyperactive Childrens Support Group belive that a link exists between this additive and hyperactive behavioural disorders in children.

Whilst being a very commonly used colour in the UK its use is banned in Norway and Austria.

Well done to Norway and Austria. Yet, some morons keep using this stuff..

This past weekend, I picked up a box of fig-flavoured Turkish Delight from Hazer Baba. Real shit imported all the way from Turkey.

I ate a piece and only afterwards read the label. I know this was stupid of me, but I don't expect anybody to still use Tartrazine in 2007. Really, really pathetic. Luckily I did not seem to suffer any serious reaction, but I took antihistamine just to be safe.

Next time before I eat anything coming from Turkey I'll check the box twice. There needs to be sanctions against the Turkish government just for allowing this stuff to be exported and protests against the South African government just for allowing the import.

I can't believe food this expensive is so poorly thought out. If you take a look at Hazer's website you'll see that the website sucks just as much as their product (Flash-based with no alternatives).

Update: Something else that's interesting is that the same product contains Indigo Carmine (food additive E132). A quote from the wikipedia:

Indigo carmine is harmful to the respiratory tract if swallowed. It is also an irritant to the skin and eyes. Proper laboratory cautions (Lab coat, gloves, goggles) are advised.

Yep, these Turks are crazy. I would seriously advise against eating anything imported from that country, because obviously there's no control over there.

Back Online

As many of you have seen already today, I am back online after two and a half days of being offline. I suddenly came down with a terrible stomach flu. My throat started to get very soar on Tuesday and Wednesday the real troubles started. I could eat very little because soon after I ate I started to get severe stomach cramps and pains.

I have therefore grown quite weak and tired. I am very happy to be able to report that today my stomach seems to be a lot better and that I'm back in action.

I have to say that being offline like that really made me feel bad on its own. I'm not used to feeling so disconnected.

This morning I first had to deal with tons of Skype, MSN, Jabber and Google Talk windows open trying to catch up. Being a geek is the only way of life for me. :)

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