Charl van Niekerk » Blog: June 2007

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Second Garden Route GeekDinner

I have to second Stii here that I also feel like crap for not blogging earlier. The fact is however that I am about 3 months behind with blogging. I just wish I had more time!

Anyway, the Garden Route GeekDinner July 2007 was held with great success at Duttons Cove in Herolds Bay just outside of George.

Many thanks go out to Stii and Bev for organising this and especially to Graham Knox and Chris Rawlinson of Stormhoek that came out all the way to the Garden Route to sponsor some top-notch wine. Stii actually has some bottles left so contact him, before it's too late!

We had the opportunity to hear the now-famous Stormhoek Story, first-hand from Graham. Absolutely amazing to hear how Stormhoek built up an empire by using the Internet, and more specifically Blogging, as their marketing effort.

The setting at Duttons was beautiful and the atmosphere inside the restaurant equally great. The Shiraz and the (heavily underrated in South Africa) Pinot Grigio were amazing. They call the Shiraz "The Assassin", and for good reason! It's a real killer, just like it says on the back!

Read some more over here:

Also check out all the photos Tresblue took if you like to see. On one picture my mom looked really bored but this was entirely not the case, she was just reading on the back of one of the wine bottles. :)

And just another note of respect to Jayx for all the great logos I'm using on these posts!

Facebook

When it comes to social services such as these, I am always a slow adopter. Like with MySpace for example which I only checked out for the first time less than a year ago. It was my birthday even, I can remember, and almost ruined it. I can't stand such a mess.

However, I finally decided to join Facebook and got a profile page over there.

Although I'm still not entirely sure what the point behind Facebook is, at least it's a lot cleaner than MySpace. Again, I'm more into the distributed model of doing these kinds of things, but fair enough.

Some of the things going on over there are seriously weird though. For example, the If 1000 people join I will post a picture of myself naked. group with over 1 600 members. Yeah, right. The I f***ing hate the animated meerkat from Vodacom. group with over 14 600 members I particularly enjoy though.

Plug-in apps makes the service rather interesting. For example, iLike and Causes.

Skype & MSN

Just a quick note to all that I know: if anybody is wondering why I haven't been on either Skype or MSN much the last week, it's because I'm making use of local-only ADSL to download stuff (much cheaper than full international). I can use MSN on Gaim but then I need to throw it over a socks proxy like with Google Talk to connect to the international server and every time I connect to MSN on Gaim, it crashes. I therefore use Kopete but it does not seem to have the facility to throw the connection over a socks proxy. Skype doesn't have socks proxy support either, it seems. And more than that, my Skype installation is totally buggered. But more about that later.

So if you want to catch me, you are always welcome to add me to Jabber (charlvn@jabber.obsidian.co.za) or Google Talk (charlvn@charlvn.za.net). Especially Jabber is cool because I can connect directly to the South African server jabber.obsidian.co.za while on local-only.

(Btw, I know there are other MSN-compatible clients on Linux but I just really don't have the time right now to stuff around with that. If you know of a good one, please comment, much appreciated!)

Weird Spam / Scam

I received this mail early at 04:27 this morning:

Greetings From Miss Kathy.

It is obvious that this email will come to you as a surprise, this is because we have not met before but i am inspired to sending you this e-mail In my quest for you. With opportunity that will be mutual benefit to two of us, However, I am miss Kathy Jaunther, by name and i am 29 years of age from South Africa. I am lady with a pure heart and i am also born again christian.

I want you to send an email to my email address so i can give you my picture for you to know whom i am, then i hope you will like what you see and write me to my e.mail ?. My aim here is to meet a man that will love me and be my husband then i will do the same thing to him and i will love him with all my heart . I am not here for any game and i am not looking for a player either so please if you are player dont bother to write me back but if you are seriously looking for a serious relationship like i do then lets make it happen . Write me to my email and i will write you back with my beautiful picture attach to it . Thank you and i hope to hear from you as soon as possible.

I believe we can move from here. I am waiting for your mail to my email address above. Miss Kathy Jaunther Remeber the distance or colour does not matter but love matters alot in life. Waiting for your email.

Yours Love Kathy Jaunther.

The mail header proves this wasn't sent only to me, so I don't feel bad about posting the mail here. Now the question is, what is this about? Is it spam? Doesn't look like it. An extremely desperate girl? I doubt it. Some kind of scam? Probably. But what??? :)

Funny shit (apparently) originating from this country these days...

USB Cup Warmer

I have this big problem that when I sit down at my desk with a nice hot cup of Rooibos Tea and start coding, I get so involved with whatever I'm developing that I just totally forget about everything around me, including my tea. Then, two or three hours later (by then virtually starving of thirst), my tea is ice cold. That really sucks, especially in this (unusually - for South Africa) cold weather.

The other day Ben Ward posted something to Twitter about the USB Cup Warmer. At first I actually thought he was kidding, but then it turned out he was very serious.

£3.95 isn't really too expensive; I just hope they export to South Africa. The importing costs would probably be more than the item itself. This does go onto my birthday wish list (or ønskeliste, as they say in Denmark), however. By the way, anybody know where you can buy all this geeky gear in South Africa?

(Just a note to the markup fanatics between you, note the use of the HTML lang attribute in <span lang="af">Rooibos</span> and <span lang="dk">ønskeliste</span>.

Fibre Optic Table Cloth

Thanks to Linoxxis for passing on this link today. This is just absolutely stunning. Fibres woven into a tablecloth. It simply looks magical!

See the product page at LumiGram; via Fiber optic tablecloth: the new candlelit dinner - Engadget.

I am an African

There seems to be a lot of black people in South Africa that believe whites cannot call themselves African. Let me explain.

If you are black with an American nationality, you are American. In addition to that, because your predecessors came from Africa, you are African-American. However, since you are not an African national, you are not African.

If you are an African national, even if you're white, you are therefore African. In addition, if you are white your predecessors (probably) came from Europe, so you are European-African. A person from Indian decent with African nationality can therefore be Indian-African too.

I am both African and European personally, because I am a citizen both of South Africa and of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Therefore I have split nationality (dual citizenship).

Technically speaking, classifying a person according to his/her ancestors is a bit ridiculous to me. Many evolutionists now believe all humans originally came from Africa. According to that, we would all be African, at least in terms of ancestry. A person stating a white person cannot be African has no leg to stand on in my opinion.

Remember: Africa is a continent. Africans are the inhabitants of the continent. "African" does not necessarily refer to an ethnical group; the term is just often misused.

This post was inspired by KMF's post I am an African. From the comments on that post, it seems like the South African government indeed does define "African" as being black. So therefore, for all official purposes, whites are not African. I do not agree with this from a scientific point of view, but fair enough.

Any thoughts?

United States of Africa

From what I understand, one of the major reasons Tony Blair came to South Africa was to check on the progress of the establishment of the United States of Africa. Often I am all for unification, because together we can achieve so much more. However, not this time.

I, for one, would certainly be against this. South Africa is like a first world country in comparison to the rest of Africa. If we have to share our wealth with the other nations, our living standard will certainly drop down considerably and the already limited quantity of great minds left will decrease even further as they flee the resulting increase in poverty.

Maybe this is a bit selfish, but hey, we did this. The other countries deserve help, but only if they are willing to help themselves too. Having wars and terrorist governments such as Robert Mugabe's creation does not help.

KeepVid

This is really good news, especially for bandwidth-deprived South Africans. Ever wished you could download that YouTube video for offline viewing? Now you can, using KeepVid. I managed to download a few flv files from YouTube and play them on Linux using mplayer. However, I also tried to download some stuff from Google Video last week and the downloads kept getting cut off. There also appears to be no resume which sucks.

LinkedIn Intelligent Suggestions

Tonight is the first time in a while I opened LinkedIn again. I tried it out because of the hResume Microformats integration and today I got an invite. While accepting that, it magically gave me a list of people I "might know" - and, wow! Magically a while list of people I do indeed actually know. So yeah, a lot of invitations sent! :)

I really like this kind of intelligence built into web applications; well done to the LinkedIn team! This entices users to do more with what available without having to go out and search themselves (we are all pretty hectically busy these days).

Update: Stupid of me, forgot to give the address of my profile. :)

Skype 1.4.0.74 on Ubuntu Dapper

I downloaded the new version of Skype for Linux (skype-1.4.0.74.deb) and tried to install it on Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper). Yes, I know that's old, but it will still be supported until June 2009 while Feisty will only be until October 2008. But I know I will have to upgrade eventually.

This is what happened though:

charlvn@stargate:~/Desktop$ sudo dpkg -i skype-1.4.0.74.deb
(Reading database ... 147510 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace skype 1.3.0.53-1 (using skype-1.4.0.74.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement skype ...
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of skype:
 skype depends on libasound2 (>> 1.0.12); however:
  Version of libasound2 on system is 1.0.10-2ubuntu4.
 skype depends on libc6 (>= 2.3.6-6); however:
  Version of libc6 on system is 2.3.6-0ubuntu20.4.
 skype depends on libgcc1 (>= 1:4.1.1-12); however:
  Version of libgcc1 on system is 1:4.0.3-1ubuntu5.
 skype depends on libqt4-core (>= 4.2.1); however:
  Version of libqt4-core on system is 4.1.2-1ubuntu1.1.
 skype depends on libqt4-gui (>= 4.2.1); however:
  Version of libqt4-gui on system is 4.1.2-1ubuntu1.1.
 skype depends on libstdc++6 (>= 4.1.1-12); however:
  Version of libstdc++6 on system is 4.0.3-1ubuntu5.
dpkg: error processing skype (--install):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
 skype
charlvn@stargate:~/Desktop$

Cool, eh? So Dapper is indeed becoming stale (just like Debian "stable" often does)? Eish. And I can't even run Beryl or Democracy Player either. Maybe I must give upgrading a higher priority on my list? It seems like Ubuntu will keep supporting Dapper but not the other projects...

Twitter Infrastructure Problems

It indeed seems like the bird is getting pwned.

If you have been following my Twitter messages (I don't call them "tweets" since I am older than 11) you probably saw me complain about Twitter's Jabber bot a lot. Although it's really cool that they have a Jabber bot in the first place, the fact that it seems to be down more often than it's up really sucks.

The last day or two I have actually been using Twitter's web interface, which is rather unusual for me. It seems like even that is giving issues now.

These are the reasons why I believe in the distributed social web. To say that I am a hacker would probably be arrogance, but I do associate with the hacker culture and one of my core beliefs is that the web and everything in it should be as decentralised as possible.

This is also where the South African internet fails. If you are in South Africa, you probably experienced the issues we are all suffering from. How often does your connection fail? Probably frequently. Especially the international lines seem to be suffering. The internet, or at least ARPANET (it's predecessor) has been design specifically with decentralisation in mind. The concept is that the network follows a partially connected mesh topology so that there are many different routes between the source and the destination. However, with the commercialisation of the internet, this often is not the case because big companies only care about reaping in major profits, not about building a reliable network that empowers people.

Drupal Cache Clearing Problems

I have been having a lot of caching issues with Drupal and it's driving me up the wall. I make changes to the templates and they are not being reflected unless the user is logged in. Because I had to test stuff for when the user is not logged in, this was rather irritating.

Executing the following SQL statements on the database seems to clear the cache:

TRUNCATE TABLE `cache`;
TRUNCATE TABLE `cache_filter`;
TRUNCATE TABLE `cache_menu`;
TRUNCATE TABLE `cache_page`;

Seems like the cache_clear_all function could also be handy. I found a post titled A beginner's guide to caching data which could give some insight.

Anybody know of a nice way to clear Drupal's cache on demand without doing custom coding? It obviously does not check the template file dates. Quite a pity. Maybe somebody with a few spare minutes should submit a patch or something.

Can't there just be a way to disable caching entirely temporarily???

The Distributed Social Web

Recently I wrote a blog post titled Distributed Social Services. Today I read a post titled Decentralized and Distributed Photo Sharing on the Web which got me very excited:

Tagging-based communities allowing users to share, organize, and explore resources such as photos and bookmarks have pioneered the combination of social networking and resource sharing. Formerly rather tiresome activities such as annotating information sources have been transformed to ways of connecting and interacting with other people. Resource sharing in a community environment allows contributors to engage in conversation, play, and challenges. However, most resource-sharing communities have architectural and institutional shortcomings due to their usually centralized, restricted, and profit-driven nature. Users do not have control over the community’s policies, functionality, or appearance. The social aspects created between contributors are locked within a community, while it is usually not possible to interact with users from other communities.

In this report, a decentralized approach towards photo sharing is introduced allowing for community and conversation while fostering access to shared photos and empowerment of users. This concept draws insight from a diverse set of disciplines including information retrieval, databases, distributed computing, interaction design, and psychology. A web-based photo repository is conceptualized employing tagging as a classification scheme. Established standards and protocols of the blogosphere are used to provide for decentralized photo sharing in groups.

A prototype photo repository allowing for decentralized photo sharing was implemented. An overview of this software and its functionality is given, and challenges throughout the implementation phase are presented, including considerations regarding presentation, interaction, uploading, syndication, and photo sharing groups. The document ends with a summary and a discussion of the results including an outlook to potential future work.

Man, this is fantastic. Now we're talking. Open sourcing, standardising, and distributing everything. This is what hackers are made for! :P

Safari on Windoze?

Ok so Safari is available for Windows and not for Linux now. That's just stupid because Safari's rendering engine is based on KHTML (used in Konqueror) and works on OS X which is based on BSD. What on earth is going on here?

Toy'd

Ok so Toy'd is rather cool. One major pain for people to migrate over to Linux is that they feel alienated because the desktop looks different. No I am not talking about us leet people but about the noobs, naturally. [tongue in the cheek] :P

Anyway, just imagine you could run the same desktop environment on both Windows and Linux. Now you can make people used to a way of doing things on Windows and then transparently migrate them over to Linux. Well, almost transparently. Obviously all your apps still need to be compatible with Linux too. But you get my point.

You can check out the English Teaser on YouTube if you like.

The 3-dimensional effect demonstrated on another YouTube video is amazing but seems to have a problem. Since Notepad is behind the video, it should be displayed in front of the video when the desktop is turned around, surely?

So although this definitely does not compete with Beryl yet, the cross-platform-ness is flipping hot if you ask me! Which reminds me, there's another video comparing Beryl and Windows Vista on YouTube if you like to check it out. Shame, poor Vista. But hey, if you pay $$$ for software that is made for noobs, that's all you can expect, right? A colleague of mine installed Beryl on his machine though and believe me, it's so much better in real life than on the video. Beryl is teh pwnage! :)

iBurst in Mossel Bay

Tonight I watched the weather report after the evening news. Since the report is now sponsored by iBurst, they showed a map of the iBurst coverage. I noticed Mossel Bay was included. I then Googled and found this page:

“Within the next four months, iBurst will cover Hartebeespoort, Witbank, Vanderbijlpark, Vereeniging, Port Elizabeth, George, Mossel Bay, Paarl, Somerset West, Pietermaritzburg and Polokwane.

- iBurst focused on fixed wireless broadband market.

Unfortunately this page does not seem to have a publishing date so I don't know what four months means but we'll probably see George, etc pop up on the map on television as coverage is added.

Google Summer of Code in Africa

While we're very excited about the global impact of Summer of Code, sadly we only have three students from all of Africa this year, two of whom are studying abroad. We asked for feedback on what we can do to build awareness of the program in Africa, and Wojciech Gryc volunteered to help by letting folks know about SoC during his upcoming trip to Kenya. We had a chance to learn more about Wojciech's work to spread open source in Africa, and we thought you'd enjoy hearing about his efforts there.

- Spreading Open Source in Africa

Oh my goodness. That's all I can say. Am I the only African GSoC student not studying abroad?

Let's spread awareness, people!

Windows Live Messenger Integrated Search

When on Linux, to get the character "ê" I simply press down and hold in the right Alt key and press the "r" key. On Windows, I have to press down and hold an Alt key (either the left or right, doesn't matter) and type "136" on the numeric keypad to the right.

Since I use Linux so much, I quickly get used to it and then I get confused when using Windows. So the other day I was using Windows Live Messenger on Windows XP to chat to my mom. I typed something and then tried to use the "ê" because I was typing in Afrikaans (naturally). However, getting confused, I tried doing it the (much easier) Linux way. Then something weird happened. It sent the message I was typing and did a search on it and displayed the results as part of the conversation. This probably does the same as the "Search" button to the right of the input textbox.

Please see above screenshot of this.

I think that this is a rather handy feature I stumbled upon. The only problem is that it probably uses Live Search. I wonder if there would be a way to configure this to use Google or some other proper search engine with a decent page ranking system. I checked in the options screen but didn't find anything so far. Typically Microsoft - always wants to force you into their own direction.

I would like to see features like this built into Jabber clients though. Quite handy, if you ask me!

Patricia de Lille & MXit on Interface

So I watched Patricia de Lille on Interface this past weekend. I can think of a lot of 4-letter, 5-letter and even 6-letter words to call her, but then she'll probably want to take me to court for defamation or something. So let's just keep this post nice and civilised. :)

It's actually really weird to me that they invited her onto the show. What's the purpose of a debate if one person insists to dominate it and not allow others to speak?

According to Patricia, MXit is suddenly evil because some pedophiles abuse the service. Pedophiles are just sick. I have no time for them whatsoever. However, the fact that they are using MXit does not make MXit evil and MXit, in my opinion, is already doing much more than they need to in order to keep their service safe for children.

If MXit is evil for being a medium, then the entire internet is evil. The internet has empowered so many people all around the world; some people really need a serious reality check.

SMSes, MMSes and picture messaging can be used for similar sinister purposes. MXit is just cheaper making it more accessible and practical. And if you want to use instant messaging from your phone, there are Jabber, MSN and Skype clients available for many platforms anyway.

Don't hate MXit because it's affordable. They are doing fantastic things for the continent. They are enabling people to communicate at affordable rates. They need to be praised.

But one thing that really got on my nerves is Patricia taking on MXit's lawyer stating that he's just there because he is getting paid and therefore his voice does not count. That's just poor in my opinion. Honestly, if I had a debate show I would not invite her. It's fun to debate, not to just throw around poor accusations and getting personal about each other.

I agree that there is a moral problem in South Africa; however, many other countries around the world have similar problems and are even worse. Moral problems need to be changed at home with a good upbringing with values and a good education. Don't blame MXit.

But yeah, that's just my 2c. I would love to hear others' opinions.

Eveready

Ok so this is really, really funny. In South Africa they have a TV advertisement now. It states that Eveready is South Africa's largest and only battery manufacturer.

Wel, duh! If they're the only, then obviously they're the largest! They are also the:

Smallest
Cheapest
Most Expensive
Best
Worst

If you are the only one, then it's trivial logic that you can't compare yourself to anything else. So you are automatically these opposites and many more.

Distributed Social Services

I have been talking about this to a lot of people, and it's time that the structure of the social web changes. I have to say that I am thoroughly fed up with services like Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter, etc. Wait, hold on, hear me out.

Flickr used to be an extremely cool service. But then one day they decided to not allow you to browse past the latest 200 photos in your account unless you pay them. This is ridiculous because many people already have hosting. Why would they pay for yet more hosting on Flickr just to make use of its social services?

Del.icio.us's tagging system sucks. Yeah, I have posted a lot about that previously. As a matter of fact, I find very few services whose tagging does not suck. Muti is one of the exceptions here.

Twitter is really cool; unfortunately it's Jabber bot is down most of the time.

So anyway, what my solution would be is to do the following. Hackers don't believe in centralisation, and for good reason. It just puts too much power in some people's hands. Competition is good for the economy.

Anyway, I want to use my own blog and simply add a linklog to that. Same goes for photos and pretty-much everything else.

How would I like to see the future of the web? Well, simply that each user can have the option to keep everything together nicely on their own hosting anywhere on earth they like. Keeping it all on your own facilities gives you the most flexibility and allows for easy backing up, better integration, etc. I don't want my photos, links and blog posts to be separated. I want them all on my own site. A "portal", so to say. Why pay hundreds of different services if you can just keep it all on your own hosting account which you have anyway.

Of course, open source plays a major role here. Open source software allows anybody to set up their own private services to do with whatever they like and the software can be modified easily also and customised to your heart's content.

But how will all these individual sites be linked? Through search engines and aggregators of course. We're talking about things like Afrigator, Amatomu, Kupa, Technorati, etc. How does "search for all photos in this tag" sound? Let the search go across millions of sites. Don't limit yourself to Flickr, Zooomr, or any other service in a search.

Ok of course for those less technically savvy, there's plenty enough services out there you can use. But for those with some more knowledge, rather do your own stuff.

I am picking up similar vibes on Stii's post Facebook is too isolating.

Garden Route Stormhoek Geek Dinner: 23 June (Hopefully)

During the week I learned that the upcoming Garden Route Stormhoek Geek Dinner's proposed date has once again shifted. However, apparently this date will be the final one. I really hope it will, because otherwise my name will be pretty bad if I keep blogging on like this. :D

The new date is Saturday 23 June 2007 starting at 18:00 (for 18:30) SAST (UTC+02:00). Note that the time also changed an hour into the future. This is so that Stii can watch rugby. Ok, and that is where I shut up. ;)

Just kidding, enjoy it Stii! I will just be coding and hacking something in the meantime as usual. :)

Replication of content on IOL

IOL's way of replicating content is indeed very weird to me. Check this out. Two articles, exactly the same but under different headings:

I accidentally posted the one to Muti even after searching and finding no hits under the same title after the other has already been posted by somebody else. Marked my link as a duplicate.

Also check out the IRI design. I really hope they get me in as a consultant; could certainly help them in some of the "finer" details of web development! :)

Mobstar

I had a hectic month and as you all probably have seen, my blogging has been erratic. Therefore I grew heavily behind, but I received a very interesting e-mail from somebody towards the end of May regarding Mobstar. This is a competition to allow individuals to enter into a competition to shoot video footage from their mobile phones. And there seem to be some pretty fantastic prices up for grabs (like 3 Mac Book Pro's, for example).

It seems like the first competition will run through this month (June 2007). I wish all those who enter the best of luck; some really exciting work in progress. Will indeed watch this closely and keep blogging.

Operator AMA User Scripts

Yesterday I tried out the new Firefox Operator 0.8a extension. Then I took a look at the Operator User Scripts page. I saw the corkd script and thought that it would be trivial to create similar scripts for Afrigator, Amatomu and Muti (in alphabetical order).

So I hacked away and came up with these three. For Afrigator:

var afrigator_search_tags = {
  description: "Find posts on Afrigator",
  shortDescription: "Afrigator",
  icon: "http://afrigator.com/favicon.ico",
  scope: {
    semantic: {
      "tag" : "tag"
    },
    url: "http://afrigator.com"
  },
  doAction: function(semanticObject, semanticObjectType) {
    if (semanticObject.tag) {
      return("http://afrigator.com/tag/" + encodeURIComponent(semanticObject.tag));
    }
  }
};

SemanticActions.add("afrigator_search_tags", afrigator_search_tags);

For Amatomu:

var amatomu_search_tags = {
  description: "Find posts on Amatomu",
  shortDescription: "Amatomu",
  icon: "http://amatomu.com/favicon.ico",
  scope: {
    semantic: {
      "tag" : "tag"
    },
    url: "http://amatomu.com"
  },
  doAction: function(semanticObject, semanticObjectType) {
    if (semanticObject.tag) {
      return("http://amatomu.com/tag.php?tag=" + encodeURIComponent(semanticObject.tag));
    }
  }
};

SemanticActions.add("amatomu_search_tags", amatomu_search_tags);

And finally, for Muti:

var muti_search_tags = {
  description: "Find links on Muti",
  shortDescription: "Muti",
  icon: "http://muti.co.za/images/favicon.ico",
  scope: {
    semantic: {
      "tag" : "tag"
    },
    url: "http://muti.co.za"
  },
  doAction: function(semanticObject, semanticObjectType) {
    if (semanticObject.tag) {
      return("http://muti.co.za/hot?tags=" + encodeURIComponent(semanticObject.tag));
    }
  }
};

SemanticActions.add("muti_search_tags", muti_search_tags);

Now, you probably need some instructions for installation. Took me a while to figure this out myself.

Save any or all of the above code snippets, each to their own file. For example, you can save the Muti script to muti.js anywhere on your computer. You can probably put them all in the same file if you like, haven't tried that myself yet.
Open Operator's options window.
Go to the "User Scripts" tab.
Add each of your scripts by clicking on the "New" button and selecting a script.
Restart Firefox.
Go back to the options window.
Go to the "Actions" tab.
Add each of the services by clicking on "New" and selecting a service from the drop-down list.
You will probably have to do some reordering and/or deleting as well while you're in the "Actions" tab. Click "Ok" when you're done and browse to any web page that uses rel-tag.

Enjoy! If you have any problems or questions, please do not hesitate to contact me or leave a comment. Thanks!

iJol.coza

I checked out iJol.coza yesterday evening. It's a South African event organising site. I really like the clean, simple, minimalist layout. The registration process was fairly straight-forward. I wanted to post our upcoming geek dinner, but got informed that I'm not allowed to post new events. Interesting that they never verified my e-mail account. However, I did get an e-mail message containing my username and password.

It would be really cool though if they supported the hCalendar standard. Should take minimal effort to integrate.

All-in-all pretty interesting project. Who is behind it, however?

Semacode Uses

I honestly don't understand why not more people are actually using Semacode. I mean, it's old technology, and it's got so much potential.

Firstly, it should come standard on business cards. Cellphones are extremely powerful these days. Why type / write over the person's IRI manually? Take a picture of his Semacode and go to his website immediately.

Secondly, posters should include Semacodes. If I see a promotion I'm interested in and would like to know more about, the ideal option would be that I can simply point my phone's camera at it and get more info on my phone. The same goes for flyers, etc.

Thirdly, many restaurants and coffee shops have slow service. Why not use already existing technologies to cheaply speed up the ordering process? I always hate having to put up my hand and call waiters/waitresses.

The shop can run an internal wifi network. You connect up through the wifi from your phone. You get access to the shop's full updated menu on their "intranet" (of sorts). (Really, how many times haven't you been at a place with outdated menus? It's actually quite expensive or even impossible to always keep the menus perfectly updated.) You can order items immediately and always have an accurate, updated subtotal displayed so that you know you're not overspending.

However, now the staff knows your order but not your location in the shop. This can be solved by having a Semacode on each table. Right when you sit down, aim your phone at that. The corresponding IRI you open contains a parameter that specifies your physical location in the shop so that it can be registered on the shop's database. Then you get directed to the menu in your phone's browser, all in one go.

So now the shop staff knows your order and where you are sitting! All with minimal extra hardware expenditure from their side.

Of course, there are issues that need to be sorted out (for example, people moving from one table to another) but those should be trivial issues to solve.

Finally, especially in preparation for 2010, I really hope they will be placing Semacodes up for tourism purposes. Anywhere you can provide instant information about where you are, put signs up. This works well for landmarks. This, combined with GPS, is very powerful and leaves lots of options open that I hope will be exploited fully. The user should simply be able to say "Where the **** am I?" and get instant, detailed information and everything they need at the push of a button. Lots of these technologies are already in place; let's exploit them to their fullest.

One valid concern would be privacy. Thanks Jayx for pointing that out to me. All that happens is that you are visiting a web page through your cell phone. The web page address is decoded from an image, that's all. In other words, there is no greater privacy risk in using Semacodes than in doing any other kind of browsing from your phone. At the worst they can probably figure out which service provider you are using (if you're not going through public wifi) and which model phone you are using.

Of course they could know where you are getting the IRI from (through the Semacode which might only be posted up on a particular location). So they could potentially map your physical location at the time of first visit to the website. Of course, they could combine this with surveillance camera footage on that particular location and then apply facial recognition to find all your personal details and steal your identity. But they could just do that anyway, so I still don't really see the relevancy to Semacodes.

In a restaurant they now know where you are sitting; big deal, they (should and need to) know that anyway. :)

But on the street in a busy city environment with thousands of people and phones (many of the same make and model), any kind of personal tracking would be highly unrealistic if you ask me. And you're not forced to use Semacodes in any way of course. If you don't feel comfortable, just leave them alone. It's not like RFID chips that can do invisible tracking, after all.

Stormhoek in George Update

Just a quick note of apology to everybody (especially Stormhoek). Yesterday I posted about the apparent availability of Stormhoek wine in the George area and it seems like I was sadly misinformed. We checked and this is unfortunately not the case yet.

Many thanks to the Stormhoek guys for letting me know so that I don't send more people on a wild goose chase! The reason I did not validate my facts better before posting is mostly that I have been hearing that Stormhoek will visit the area soon (also for the coming Garden Route Stormhoek Geek Dinner). I therefore made the assumption that they already visited some of the shops in the area after I heard the (false) news.

I have been searching a lot in the George area for Stormhoek wines the last couple of months since the first Stormhoek Geek Dinner over here and I guess my enthusiasm got the better of me! I would actually have realised my mistake myself today out hunting if I didn't turn up with a bad stomach flu this morning. Luckily things are going a little better with me now.

But yeah Stormhoek guys, you are certainly in great demand from this side! We are really looking forward and will be privileged to have you in our area soon! I will post with the validated facts afterwards and even back it up with a picture or two (if the shops will allow me to take photos of their stock). :)

Muti's Jabber Integration

Oh my goodness, this is flipping excellent. Neville, you rock bigtime!!

Indeed, Muti seems to be the first of the South African projects I was aiming this all at to have Jabber integration.

Let's take a look at the support. For some fun, do the following:

Open your muti profile (note that you need to be logged in first obviously).
Click on the generate jabber key link.
Open your Jabber / Google Talk / MXit (or frankly anything else with Jabber integration) client and connect if you haven't already done so.
Add bot@muti.mobi as a contact.
Send the bot a normal instant message in the right format. Say your code is xxx for example. Then you will send the message assoc xxx to the bot.
After your key is excepted by the bot, reload your profile in your browser. You should now see your Jabber ID listed. You can associate more than one Jabber ID if you like.
Now send the bot the message help. You should get sent back some instructions on the commands you can send.
Send the bot the message h10u. This should return the top 10 posts on the hot list along with their respective IRIs.
Send the bot the message n10u. This should return the latest 10 posts along with their respective IRIs.
Change the number to anything between 1 and 10 to get that amount of posts.
You can leave off the u at the end if you don't want to see the IRIs.
After you retrieved a list of posts, you can vote for them too. Type v3 for example to give the third item in the list the thumbs-up. You can type v3d for the thumbs-down. Note that this will be relative to the last list you requested. For example, if you request links from the hot list and afterwards request links from the latest posts and then vote for the 3rd link, the vote will go for the link in the 3rd position in the latest posts list.

Since your Jabber ID is now associated with your usual muti account, your votes through Jabber will be too. Vote for a few items and check the website afterwards to see what I mean. Of course, you don't have to associate your Jabber ID in order to use the system, but that integration is what makes it so cool.

I have been listening to Neville yesterday and he seems to be a man on the roll! Can't wait to see what comes out of his lab in the coming months.

National Accessibility Portal

If this goes any further, I think South Africa will soon become the aggregation capital of the world. :)

I just discovered NAP. I'm not 100% sure what the focus of this project is at the moment but, for a change, the aggregation software they wrote is open source. Currently it is not publicly released such as Henri Sivonen's HTML5 conformance checker though, but let's hope that changes soon. Another major focus of the project is to create accessible and valid output markup. That is indeed a very big step forward for South Africa.

Unfortunately, some really poor syndicated markup is being displayed on the site currently. This invalidates some pages and does not help much, but I'm sure there are plans in the pipeline to literally "cut the crap" on syndicated content.

However, the fact that this is open source is what really gets me going. There is honestly no point in repeating work, and if we can all build towards the same code base we can do fantastic things. If everybody just insist on repeating others' work we will eventually just be a tenth as productive as we should be. Another thing more than just worth pointing out is that the site is localisable into various different languages. Extremely cool!

I will certainly be watching this project closely into the future and be blogging some more.

Sanctuary for All

This is really good stuff. Many thanks to Lachlan Hunt for pointing me into the direction of Sanctuary for All.

This is the first major internet-only science fiction series I know of and apparently the most high-budget direct-to-web production according to Guinness World Records. You can buy the high-resolution versions from the site but the first four episodes should be available online for free at lower resolutions (anyway better for us Africans with the pathetic state of landline connectivity over here). Obviously it's on Youtube but the best-quality versions I found so far are the following:

I could say more, but that would just be a spoiler. Please let me know what you think about the series in the comments; would like to hear your thoughts. :)

The only way this could possibly be improved in my opinion though is if the episodes (sorry, "webisodes") were released under a Creative Commons licence (they don't seem to be already, unless I missed something). Also, where is the Wikipedia page?

Garden Route Stormhoek Geek Dinner June 2007 Update

Ok so I have been really, really busy the last couple of days and did not blog much. However, there's a lot of stuff happening and my to-blog list is growing all the larger.

Firstly, the upcoming Garden Route Stormhoek Geek Dinner has been postponed. We found out that tomorrow would not suit many people and decided to shift the event two weeks into the future. The new date is Saturday 16 June 2007 starting at 17:30 (for 18:00). The venue will still be Duttons Cove and Stormhoek will sponsor the wine. This is an event not to be missed, people; normally us Garden Route folks have to travel to Cape Town for some action, but now it's just a drive out to Herolds Bay!

I hope this will suit many of the Cape Town / Johannesburg guys & girls - please people, we want to see you here! :) Let us know when will suit you best; I think the next Garden Route Geek Dinner should be planned right from the start around those that are coming from other cities. I spoke to vhata and nbm on #clug the other day. Apparently we George bloggers are taking over the Geek Dinner Planet and there definitely seems to be interest, so it's up to us Garden Route Geeks to make things happen. :)

So, if you're interested in attending or need some more information, check out the wiki page. The Geek Dinner wiki required user registrations but I'll gladly add anyone to the list so just leave a comment or send me a mail and I'll sort it. Thanks!

Jayx has also been working on a What is this talk about Geek Dinners all about ? text which we will be spreading around the media soon. Propaganda is the key to a room full of great company. Let's keep it flowing. :)

Garden Route Freedom Toaster Party

Image: View of sunset at wilderness

Image: Freedom Toaster

So finally we are getting around to updating the George Freedom Toaster!!! We will be holding our very first Toaster Party. The gang will be getting together at Imel's crib ("crib" is gangster speak for "house" for those that didn't know) on Saturday 2 June starting 16:00. If you come late, you miss the sunset, after all. Remember, it's winter now in the southern hemisphere! The sun is setting very early! :)

If you want to join us and need some instructions on how to get there, please read and comment on Imel's post to also help him plan. All that you need to bring is yourself, something to braai (the kind that you do on a fire, not on the Toaster), and something to rip. When I mean "rip" I mean bring your CDs, DVDs, Flash Drives, Hard Drives, etc. so that we can copy all your ISOs onto the Toaster's hard drive. There is too much space left that is being wasted and nobody wants only the oldest stuff when they come to visit the Toaster over at JDL Printing.

Hope to see you there!!

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