Charl van Niekerk » Blog: January 2008

Main

Latest

Back in George

Phew this month I have really been travelling like a mofo. First in Gaborone for a week and a half and now in Joburg for a few days. Finally I'm back in George for probably a week or two, then it's off to wherever next I'm going. It's a real pity I missed the Geek Dinner today but travelling to Cape Town literally the next day after I just landed in George from Joburg is a little insane. Mmm, thinking now maybe I should have gone straight to Cape Town, was in such a rush I didn't even have the chance to think properly. But I have so much to do anyway I don't really have the patience for more flying in the next week or so.

My blogging to-do list is growing larger and larger. I seriously need to get around to some personal projects and other shit, but for now I have a couple of emergencies on my hands. Probably going to code until morning again. Oh well, there we go...

27 Dinner Last Night

I really enjoyed the Jozi 27 Dinner last night! There unfortunately weren't any talks (other than one stand up) and there were a lot less people than I hoped but I still got to finally meet Paul Jacobson, ircmaidon and eved in person. All in all was really worth it, although I did hope to see a bit more. Will try to be at the next one, maybe more will be going down then. :)

Unfortunately I'll be missing this month's Geek Dinner, can't make it because of lack of time, but was planning on attending next month's Cape Town 27 Dinner. However, the wiki page has not been updated yet, will that even materialise? If not, I'll just have to wait until March's Geek Dinner. Will see who I can drag with. Can't wait! :)

27 Dinner Today

If all goes according to plan, this evening I will be attending the 27 Dinner in Johannesburg. I was at a 27 Dinner in Cape Town in October last year and it was lots of fun, so am really looking forward to the Johannesburg one, I heard many good things from Stii and Bev that were there I think in November last year.

So tomorrow afternoon I will be catching my flight from George to Joburg. Looking forward to meeting lots of cool people I know online for the first time in person!

Congrats to Joke for now being officially "with it" :)

My mom has been using the net for as long as me (way over 10 years now) but finally she is really "getting with it". She is on Jabber (id kept private, mail me if you want it), she has a Twitter account (and another one for her cellphone as well to receive SMSes) and she even has a really cool South Park avatar now:

Joke's Avatar

Now the next step is to get her a blog sorted, only a matter of time. :)

Apartheid is back with vengeance

From the Wikipedia page on South Africa:

As for racial inequality, Statistics South Africa reported that in 1995 the average white household earned four times as much as the average black household. In 2000 the average white household was earning 6 times the average black household.

From SA's wealth gap widening: survey on IOL:

South Africa's wealth gap is widening and the average black citizen still only earns an eighth of what his white counterpart does nearly 14 years on from the end of apartheid, a new survey found on Thursday.

What will it be in another 8 or so years? 10 times? 20 times? We are in deep shit!

Quoted on Information Week

I wrote a post last year titled Microsoft Windows Power Shell (PoSH). Today, ghost commented telling me that I was quoted on Information Week in an article titled With Latest Server, Microsoft Rides The 64-Bit Range in a section titled The Power's In The Shell on page 3:

We saw an anonymous Unix blog post saying, "I didn't think the day would ever come that I would be saying this, but it seems like Microsoft actually invented a decent shell." Sentiments like these from Unix gurus stem from the fact that this is an object-based, .Net Framework-oriented shell. This differs from standard Unix shell environments that are text and command driven, with the result usually being comparatively less code to execute the same task.

Under normal circumstances I would have thought this is quite cool. However, what on earth is so anonymous about me? My name is displayed in the title bar, in the header image, and at the bottom of each post. One would swear us so-called "unix bloggers" is afraid to put our names to what we say. It does feel good to be called a "unix guru" although I wouldn't nearly qualify myself as that even though I've been using Linux/BSD for almost 8 years now.

Maybe the Americans just thought my South African name is a bit funny - lol!

Not exactly something I would have liked to be quoted on in a major online publication but I guess it's still quite cool. :)

Download Trixbox

I am downloading Trixbox Pro 1.1.3 at the moment apparently published on 2008-01-16 (about 686 MB) with the following MD5 checksum:

6032ad56accd7d3501d073c29e563974

The link is:

http://www.trixbox.com/pro-iso

The product page is Download trixbox Pro.

Just to download this is a mess these days. Not impressed. Trixbox, stop pushing your commercial shit down our throats and fix up your site. KTNXBYE.

Back to XHTML

Blogger started adding the following into my head:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://draft.blogger.com/openid-server.g" />

So now I can use the URI of this blog as an OpenID. Cool. Except that I can do this already with my main site.

Anyway, in order to have the W3C Validator say this site is valid this meant I had to migrate from HTML 4.01 Transitional to XHTML 1.0 Transitional because of the /> which is interpreted as >> in HTML. Because > is considered to be character data, and because character data it is not valid in the head, the head was automatically closed (</head> is optional in HTML). Then it complained about the style element which it now saw as part of the body. Then when I tried to close the head (just for cleanliness) it complained again as its already closed.

Oh well over to XHTML 1.0 now so no more fuss. It sucks though. Now I feel like just another noob serving XHTML as HTML (text/html). :(

Of course lots of my existing pages will not validate because I don't close all the tags according to XHTML standards but that's just too bad. I'm definitely not going to go back and change all of them. At least I had some good years using HTML as it should be used. Now being another noob is the direction apparently. Oh well. At least I can use the validator on the front page again without seeing errors all over the show. That's the point at the end of the day anyway, just to be able to check my latest posts. Pesky to have to distinguish between the right and wrong errors every time.

Revisiting Distributed Social Networking

I blogged about distributed social networking quite a few times in 2007 but definitely not enough. Recently Stii got the ball rolling again with his post Open Social, Facebook. They all suck..

OpenSocial is a very good step forwards, but personally I feel that it is far too basic and does not live up to many's expectations. Yes, I realise it's only the start of the project, but we honestly can't wait forever.

DataPortability.org, yet another disappointment. Dispite having some major players involved, when will they progress further than an outline in their technical spec? The DiSo project, very cool but again we need to progress further than just OpenID and hCard.

I have some basic stuff that I designed a while back but my whole approach has been quite different.

I don't really have much time at the moment so I don't know when I can get all my thoughts down on "paper" so to speak but the sooner the better. I think the time is really ripe for actual implementations right now that actually work! :)

Jabber (again)

A few days ago I posted about using charl@muti.mobi but this now again changed. I actually forgot my password for charlvn@muti.mobi but since managed to find it again so am using that now instead.

Twitter Timeline in Viygo

Although I don't support Flash as a technology in general, it is pretty cool in some cases, even though it's proprietary. I don't like to use it myself but I have seen really awesome stuff built in it. For example, check out Viygo. You can see the global timeline and individual users like my timeline on there as well. Great stuff guys, well done! Some fantastic shit coming out for Twitter once again.

Only criticism so far is that I find the zoom function frustrating (how do you zoom out?) and instead of having that little box with the drop down part of the box and then the radio buttons, why not just have simple buttons on the left or somewhere to select the mouse function?

Jabber

Obsidian's Jabber server, jabber.obsidian.co.za, is really great as its local but the last while it's been down a lot again and therefore I started using muti.mobi instead. My new Jabber id is charl@muti.mobi. Don't delete my old id from your contact list though as I'll probably go back to using Obsidian's server as soon as it's back online but at least now I have a backup. :)

I'll rather pay my duties...

On the way to Gaborone I caught a connecting flight via Johannesburg. After getting my passport checked I got myself basically out of South African soil and could buy in Duty Free shops.

I really like Amarula and I saw a whole pile of boxes so went to take a look. One bottle costs almost 90 ZAR but back in George, even while paying tax, I can buy the same bottle for 50-something ZAR.

So what's the point???

Also, just as an interesting thought. Since you are no longer on South African soil you are not bound by South African law. What happens if you do all kinds of bad things over there? Can you even be prosecuted? Luckily the people that get back there are not your general idiot otherwise it would be life threatening to fly overseas. And I guess there is enough airport safety control as well.

Back in Gabs!

Ok so after my last visit in September I am finally back in Gaborone, Botswana. Phew, but it's hot! Luckily it's actually not so hot at the moment and we even had quite a bit of rain but it's still not cool either. It has been a while since I had to shower 2-3 times a day. :)

Anyway, things are great here so far, have done some Joomla! hacking and various other things the past few days. Working during the night is better than during the day because it's a bit cooler then. I feel like it's a bit of a siesta during the day, need to do that in this hot weather.

It's still somewhat cloudy in Gaborone and am going to take a dip in the pool in about 30 mins, afterwards again a good shower. Getting ready for a hectic week full of exciting stuff.

I am not reachable on my usual South African number (+27 72 405 8378) during my stay here but I am reachable temporarily on +26 7457 5943 until I go back on the 13th.

Update: The cell signal is really crap over here, so I might not be reachable and I will have my phone off naturally during meetings. Online is still the best way to make contact with me, please send me mail or IM.

2008

Ok, so one year has passed. Reflecting back on the past year, I think it's been extremely exciting. There has been lots of great opportunities coming my way. I managed to take part in the Google Summer of Code and successfully completed a project. I am also doing well in terms of work and generally things are looking good. Socially, I also made lots of new friends. I met Stii and Imel at the beginning of the year. Through Stii I met Jayx and lots of other really cool people. I am also privileged to have "met" (electronically) people like Neville Newey and now I'm even doing some work for Dave Duarte and Eric Edelstein.

My feelings about 2008... Well I agree with many others that it's going to be even more exciting than 2007. Lots of interesting things are in the pipeline already and am looking forward to a great year of personal projects and commercial projects as well. I have mixed feelings for some reason. I think that the economy looks really healthy but the politics not in South Africa at the moment. I am not fleeing country yet because we have gone through a lot of tough times over here so it's not smart to get too nervous too quickly. I'm sticking around, but I'm keeping a very close eye on things. Am definitely not going to be one of the last to wake up. I have a strange feeling that I might fly overseas at least once in 2008, but that might also be a short trip for work, not necessarily as part of an evacuation.

Yesterday evening was fairly boring. Last year, there was parties and lights and everything going on all over George. This year I'm sure there were some parties as well but the residential areas looked pretty dead in general. Most people probably trekked into town for that. So yeah quite disappointing. I just came back home and hacked until early morning hours.

At midnight, it sounded like a war again. Sirens, explosions, etc.

Now we have relative peace. I almost finished my holiday bottle of Amarula and am thinking I had enough beer for another month or two as well. So from here onwards it's back to lots of plain Rooibos tea, maybe the occasional green tea or camomile as well.

Ok, well happy 2008 all! Hope the babalas was not too bad this morning, enjoy the rest of the year, signing off from this side! Time to get back into work mode and work like a mofo.

Main

Latest

Archives