How many drafts do you have in your blog software?
I currently have 43 draft entries in my blog software (movable type) that I've not yet published as I have not gotten round to posting some of the posts.
December 22, 2009
March 4, 2009
Twitter Search the posterchild for 500's
One of my pet peeves is currently when Twitter Search is down - there goes being able to zone into conversations on any given topic from bsdisms, following cloud computing, etc.
Tired of seeing:
Status: 500 Internal Server Error Content-Type: text/html 500 Internal Server Error
How difficult is it to fix something that was not broken when it was Summize?
This is what a reply from twitter looks like:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:52:44 GMT Server: hi Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Cache-Control: max-age=300 Expires: Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:57:44 GMT Vary: Accept-Encoding X-Varnish: 1089043412 Age: 0 X-Cache-Svr: searchweb008.twitter.com X-Cache: MISS Via: 1.1 varnish, 1.1 bc1-rba Content-Length: 122 Connection: Keep-Alive Set-Cookie: _search_twitter_sess=*snipped*; path=/Status: 500 Internal Server Error
Content-Type: text/html500 Internal Server Error
UPDATE:
Okay it's up if I go via reverse proxy in the USA - so it's just down for South Africans.
UPDATE:
IS have added some rules to their netcaches and search.twitter.com is working again.
July 22, 2008
Rafiq and Chris popped by
Rafiq Phillips dropped by to drop off a copy of Quirk's book eMarketing written by Rob Stokes and the minds of Quirk.
Anyway it was too good an opportunity to not get a photo taken of Rafiq and Christopher Mills both wearing their WordPress hoodies:
March 14, 2008
SpringLeap into summer
So Eric Edelstein is running a bit of a competition to see who can get better page ranking for the term springleap.
SpringLeap are doing things differently for their t-shirt procurement process. Designers submit designs and apparently on the 1st of April we will be able to vote for the best designs which will be made into t-shirts.
Some strange SEO techniques of building loads of backlinks and is being done with strange content writing pages. Not sure if that is the way to springleap into summer?
November 15, 2007
Naspers are sleeping as usual
What I find really amusing is that Naspers believes that they have started the first south african Digg clone.
Also ITWeb seem to believe that this is fact to according to their writer Paul Vecchiatto:
[ Cape Town | ITWeb, 13 November 2007 ] - Naspers' Internet portal, 24.com, is introducing a news aggregator that should give this country its own version of Digg.com.Called “laaik.it”, the name follows the new trend of naming social networking sites by using the suffix as part of the name, such as US social bookmarks site del.icio.us.
“Laaik” is slang Afrikaans for ‘like' and the “.it” suffix is usually associated as the country domain for Italy. However, the site is operating under the 24.com portal.
MUTI has been around for a long time and is the South African Digg clone! :)
October 31, 2007
Does Enterprise Software Suck?
Why does Enterprise Software suck? Mostly issues around something termed 'usability'. Don't forget to throw in features that you really don't need. Does their developers and project managers listen to user feedback on the product? Most likely a definate no. Anil talks about certain things from a SixApart perspective as well as linking to some interesting blog posts on this topic.
Anil Dash posts more about this:
Every so often, we get some great feedback from our community that's thought-provoking and challenges our assumptions in a good way. And then sometimes, we get blog posts from otherwise-clueful folks who've, well, missed the mark. Fortunately, people with a lot of talent are usually pretty good at taking criticism, and that's certainly true of Khoi Vinh, design director for NYTimes.com and author of the popular Subtraction blog, and Jason Fried, a principal of 37Signals and one of the key voices of their Signal vs. Noise blog.
September 16, 2007
Unwinding after the 1 of 50 Parties
Got back earlier from the 1 of 50 parties with Jimmy Wales and Heather Ford.
It was good catching up with the likes of Dave, Max, Katherine, Neil, Glen, Jason, Pat, Gerado, Ashley, Joe, and various others I've bumbed into at previous 27 Dinners and other places.
Heather Ford announced that they are planning on building the first Free Culture House in Cape Town, South Africa. So far they've raised R50 tonight to go towards building the Free Culture House.
Lightspeed's Ashley Shaw spoke about an end to email and using other means of communicating like using Wiki's.
The Shuttleworth Foundation's Andrew Rens spoke a bit and it was mentioned that he worked on the South African versions of the Creative Commons licenses.
We had one of the ladies from UCT read a poem and promote one of her artists who had never heard of wikis before's art work.
What others had to say about the 1 of 50 parties with Jimmy and Heather:
August 13, 2007
Facebook serves up their source code
One amusing thing from the whole Facebook serving up their own source code fiasco, is that someone forgot to enable php on one of their apache servers:
We just received a tip that the source code for the Facebook main index page has been leaked and published on a blog called Facebook Secrets. There are at least two possible ways that the source code got out - the first is that a Facebook developer has sent it out, or the more likely option that a security hole or other method has been used on either one of the Facebook servers or in their source code repository to reveal the code. The blog that published the code only has a single post on it, so it was created exclusively to publish this code - meaning that whoever is behind this both isn’t taking credit for the hole and doesn’t want to be associated with it. While there is no certain way to verify if the code is actually from Facebook, by taking a quick look through the code and by double-checking some paths that have been referenced, we can say with some certainty that this seems to be both real and also a recent version of the main Facebook page.
April 2, 2007
Amatomu can't count?
I've been wondering why Amatomu cannot count? Their top 100 page shows up 200 entries which includes non-blogs like IOL. Since when is a newspaper website a blog?
Neil has more about this here which he was commenting on a post from Joe.
Bottom line is that Rafiq and Joe are putting something together to ensure that locally hosted content is cheaper.
Update:
To give some perspective to bandwidth pricing, back in the day I ran an ISP and we were paying UUnet (now called Verizon Business) R 0.38/Mb. Apparently its around R 0.14/Mb at the moment with various Verizon clients charging R 0.09c/Mb due to paying for big amounts of gigabytes in advance even if they don't utilise that traffic. Back in those days, we were paying Verizon around R 24000 a month for a half height cabinet (half of the half height cabinet is displayed in the header), close to 200 dial-ups and traffic. Yes you were billed for traffic bi-directionally and guess what. They billed you for traffic within their data centre. So your dial-up user is using a dial-up account you've resold, and you pay for the traffic for that user to send and receive traffic via your cabinet.
March 5, 2007
Cape Town Flash Mob Video
February 28, 2007
More on 27 Dinner
A bit more on 27 Dinner after that comment on Johann's Blog by Quirk's Hungover Sarah Manners, who thinks some comments are utter "vommit":
So us geek's are highjacking our geek dinners back!
I still believe that Dave and Mike from Cerebra should not have highjacked the geek dinners in the first place, and try and turn it into a big marketing platform, but that is a moot point. Yes I agree that there was way too many speakers. Remember that less is more! Or so I keep getting told.
FYI Jacques (I think u may have been asleep or in some kind or geek trance) - no one from Quirk spoke, Mike from Cerebra was damn funny and many people found Angus exceptionally interesting. Dude - your word vomit offends my eyes. Here’s a real easy solution - don’t go next time. Oh and to the team who put last night together - YOU ROCK.
I'm going to avoid turning this into a mud slinging match with Quirk. Towards the end of the evening I was sitting at the back at the real geeks table with Ian, Jaco, Neil, and various other geeks and boy was it boring. And I strongly dislike being bored. Fascinating listening to how the bandwidth situation differs between South Africa and the UK, I don't think we can compare.
And can someone please explain what is up with trying to call 'geeks' 'jeeks' all of a sudden? It definitely does not sound like geeks.
According to the dictionary geek is short for 'computer geek'.
27 Dinner - Cape Town Edition
Just got back from 27 Dinner in Cape Town tonight. Tonights "geek dinner" was more of a dinner for marketing folk than geeks in my opinion. Although I did get to chat to guys like Miquel, Rafiq, Jaco, Neil, Aubrey, Stefano, Sally, Angus, Ian, and various others.
There were close to 60 of us at Relish in New Market street, around the corner from e.tv's Longkloof studios offices.
Pity that the Zoopy did not launch tonight, as they had planned on doing. Instead Mike and Dave launched their site named twac (which translates to rubbish dump in English (the polite version)). There were these mini business card style cd's on the table for people to take home.
Stormhoek apparently were sponsoring wine, of which I did not see any bottles of their "average" wine on the tables where I was sitting. Graeme from Stormhoek mentioned how they sold a couple of thousand cases of their wine before they even launched, and how they went about creating hype for their yet to be produced product. He also mentioned some 40% discount coupon from one of their resellers which was a huge success.
Verity sang a couple of songs and started using the platform as a "mini-sermon" after she discussed how she's sold close to 1000 copies of a cd that has not been produced, and how she's donating a percentage of sales to two organisations.
Mike mentioned about the twac cd's on the tables and how people should contact Cerebra before hand to ensure that if products are going to launch at 27 Dinner, that they can co-ordinate so that a limited number of products launch rather than trying to launch say 40 new products at a 27 dinner.
Guy Lundy's talk I found a bit strange but he ranted about South Africa and the future and his "Declaration of Independence"
Angus from Itouch chatted about the future of the mobile space. Apparently USSD is the next big thing along with WAP (after three premature stumbling blocks along the way). Also Premium Rated IVR (think content delivery for watching video's on your cellphone), and mobile television.
Don't get me wrong but this was supposed to be a geek evening, and I'm not sure where marketing falls into the geekyness factor. Alan Levine (from ZADNS) mentioned that he got quite a low Geek Test score. A basic requirement should perhaps be scoring a minimum of say 15% on a Geek Test before entry. Alan knows a thing or two about DNS as he's on ZADNS (the guys who manage the .za domain and don't see to set any policy).
Updates from around the web about 27dinner:
- Nightswimming GeekDinner (Johann Botha)
- 27 dinner Cape Town off to rocky start (Ian Gilfillan)
- Some of the better things about last night (Tania Melnyczuk)
- 27 - Post Analysis (Aubrey Killian)
January 22, 2007
Version controlled home directory?
Evert mentioned that he is keeping his home directory in subversion.
I tend to have two setups. A full and basic home directory. Version controlled using subversion. Previously I used CVS.
The basic gets checked out at webhosts, etc. which I use. The full gets checked out at work and basically ensures that i have some level of sanity with my shells. I'm using svk to do revision control with subversion.
What's in my version controlled home directory:
- .screenrc
- .zshrc
- .zlogin
- vim settings
The only difference between the two currently is that the work one has a few extra directories setup. I tend to use svk for work.
November 2, 2006
Interesting links from around the web
Some interesting links from around the web:
Are Lines of Code really a measure of either success, productivity or popularity?:
The title PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast and subtitle Despite the buzz around sexy new frameworks like Rails and Django, PHP is more dominant than ever initially commits the same fallacy that others have and that is to compare frameworks (Rails and Django) with programming languages. And then the suggestion becomes that one can interchangeably use Rails and Ruby, Django and Python.
In the fine grained services approach that we use at Amazon, services do not only represent a software structure but also the organizational structure. The services have a strong ownership model, which combined with the small team size is intended to make it very easy to innovate. In some sense you can see these services as small startups within the walls of a bigger company. Each of these services require a strong focus on who their customers are, regardless whether they are externally or internally. To ensure that a service meets the needs of the customer (and not more than that) we use a process called “Working Backwards” in which you start with your customer and work your way backwards until you get to the minimum set of technology requirements to satisfy what you try to achieve. The goal is to drive simplicity through a continuous, explicit customer focus.
October 31, 2006
Why you should keep trying stuff
Via Evan:
Scott Adams (the Dilbert guy) lost his voice to a freaky (and usually permanent) condition for 18 months, and then got it back by rhyming:
Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
Jack jumped over the candlestick.As he said, "Just because no one has ever gotten better from Spasmodic Dysphonia before doesn't mean I can't be the first."
Awesome story.
September 3, 2006
Sun Buys Hewlett and Packard
In a crafty public relations stunt, Sun has acquired a wooden sculpture of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard and decided to send the object on the road to find HP's "sense of humor." A local artist had offered the Hewlett and Packard sculpture, which is part of a larger collection, to HP corporate, but the company passed. So, Sun stepped in with $6,000 and bought the Silicon Valley legends.
May 20, 2006
Werner Vogels of Amazon inverviewed by ACM
An interesting article linked to from James Cox, which brings back memories while working on php3 code for a local .za e-commerce start-up called Pitlane, where I developed code for a car auction site. But enough strolling down memory lane for one day:
In a past job, I worked for a startup e-commerce firm. The architecture was management not customer driven (it was a battle to even get permission to interact with customers and solicit feedback). The structure came from ideas, concepts but not planning: the end result was meaningless and frustrating.
I remember having a conversation with the not-much-older-than-I Managing Director. I had been researching some potential vendor and raised the name with my boss. Yes, he said - "This company are our biggest competitor". I neglected to mention we hadn't sold our product to a proper external client at that time and this competitor was powering some of the country's biggest blue chip names, and instead focused on the company I believed was the bigger and most dangerous competitor: Amazon.
So I responded - "have you considered Amazon?" he dismissed the idea - "don't be silly, amazon just sells dvds and books - it's a web store not an ecommerce platform!" It was about this time that I realized he was a moron.
The thing is - Amazon is the biggest threat to e-commerce developers. It's also their saving grace - they just don't know it yet.
Amazon happens to have innovated and grown a massive distributed service oriented architecture. After they gave up their monolithic 1.0 version back in 2001, they realized that to scale up they had to scale down: distributed architecture is often synonymous with the emergence of insect colonies. In this case Ants - each with their own role to play but without each the whole fails its joint objective.
By taking out core elements of the business - from backend supply chain to front end ratings, rankings and search - and all the others in between and sub divided, Amazon are able to delegate ownership, management and process of these tasks to small efficient crack teams within their organization. This ratifies the belief that small teams develop and ship, big teams discuss and plan: clearly developing and shipping product outweighs the lost efficiency of wrong paths.
It also escapes the need to mass scale intelligence: to try and architect the entire amazon operation from a whole world view is very hard, where as breaking it down to sub units is easier to manage. It breaks away from the bikeshed problem too: developers don't need to find something small enough to argue over - the parts are bite size and the teams are scaled to cope.
So technically they have it right, even if they are struggling to figure out how to test - a problem I totally understand: trying to figure out how to simulate a customer with a specific problem I hadn't even encountered yet was quite hard - instead I focused on making error reporting more robust and iterate faster.
I see the biggest problems that Amazon face are two fold: it's hard to see the usage requirements of a whole if everything is in pieces - it's important to keep a hold on all of them. Calling 100 applications on the front gateway page may be OK - but what impact does that have on the user? Especially if the user is a mobile device, a heads up display or a refrigerator.
The second problem is in interface. Amazon (in my opinion) need to go through the process of scaling back the architecture and direction. I often look at www.amazon.com and struggle to decide what the purpose is. (hint: making money by customers buying or consuming?)
Amazon are having that teenage crisis about their identity - are they really just a technology company who sells partner product, or are they really just a big shop with an amazing technology department?
It's hard being both, and if not managed the needs of one conflict and fight with the other.
Personally, I'd like to see amazon the retailer distance itself from amazon the technology company. (perhaps A9 will become the technology face of amazon?) I'd like to see that technology company focus on e-commerce, and not get into being a Microsoft competitor: we don't need another social networking site, search engine or similar web2.0 contribution - we do need better, simpler and more encompassing shopping user experience.
To find out more about Werner's work - read his weblog.
April 12, 2006
Automattic gets funding
Matt Mullenweg, of WordPress fame, has mentioned on his blog that Automattic has gotten funding by selling a minority stake in Automattic.
The best thing that can ever happen to a web service is to have passionate users. Users that notice and email you the second there’s a database problem, users that really push the limits of what you can provide, and users that are phenomally successful and bring thousands of others to your doors.
As a service provider, you have a strong responsibility to these folks. They’re putting their life online with you, they deserve nothing less than 100% uptime. They tell all their friends to try you out, they deserve for the experience of the hundred thousandth user to be as great as the tenth. WordPress.com is serving 4.2 million hits a day on a handful of boxes. Akismet has gotten to the point where it’s blocking so many spams every second that any fraction of downtime is very noticable to users. (Like we had this morning.)
At Automattic we’ve always taken this very seriously, and from the bootstrap beginning I planned for it to be sustainable and frugal in the long term. Of course since I moved to San Francisco I’ve talked to dozens of really high-quality investors who were interested in what we were doing, but the bubble model of giant valuations and ultra-rapid growth never really appealed to me.
The growth of WordPress.com and Akismet has outpaced anyone’s expectations. Recently, I made the decision to sell a minority stake in the company to a few select partners who I think are going to bring a lot of value to the business far beyond mere dollars. This isn’t going to change how the business is run, or the people involved with it, but it will allow us to take better advantage of the opportunities before us and also for us to keep our promise to every one of you to maintain a fast, stable, and innovative platform in the long term.
Automattic isn’t going to get fancy SoMA offices, throw huge parties at SxSW, or “get big fast.” We took a small amount of capital to put things that were already growing fast in a stable position, so from month to month you’re not robbing Peter to pay Paul. We’re going to use the money to pre-emptively address scaling issues before they happen, and continue to share everything we can back to the community, like all of the code behind WP.com in WordPress MU, the spellchecking feature we sponsored, free Akismet for 99.9% of users, and a few other goodies we still have up our sleeve. In terms of hiring, we’re still going to grow very deliberately in line with our revenues and focus on the very best and brightest (and BBQ-loving), like Podz.
We’re going to publish more technical details about everything later, and this is already longer than I hoped — I’m sure you folks have some questions. I’m going to do something a little different and turn the comment section here into a FAQ. If you have a question, please post it below. If you want to say “congrats!” or “that sucks!” do it on this entry instead to keep the question and answer flow clean. If a question warrants a long enough answer I might turn it into a separate blog post.
More PHP Blogs that are not on Planet PHP
Something funky is up with the Shiftlett's regex which does some weird things to comments there so here I'm adding a list of South African PHP Blogs which are not on Planet PHP continuing from here.
Here in South Africa, we have various people who blog about PHP on their blogs:
- Colin Alston
- Ian Gilfillan (ex-Technical Manager of IOL)
- Neil Blakey-Milner (also ex-IOL stock)
Chris has a couple of blogs listed which I also read including:
April 2, 2006
The Sun doesn't shine on me
Anyway SUN have this 60-day free trial but you can't get this in South Africa. Would be interesting to see this boxlet in action.
This Web-based, limited-quantity, limited-time offer is only available in the following countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom (Great Britain), United States of America. Offers are available only while supplies last and are subject to cancellation without notice. Web qualification not valid in countries not listed above. Country list may be changed without notice. For securing a trial system in countries other than listed please contact your Sun sales office.
March 17, 2006
Blogger Buzz: With Apologies to Mike Judge...
I just love the pictures of what happened to one of Google's switches when it started failing and the blogger guys decided to punish it.
There once was a router so crappy
That it made all the Bloggers unhappy
It caused pagers to be beep
And kept us from sleepSo we smashed it on the ground with golf clubs and threw paving stones at it and kicked it and someone filmed part of it but that’s not up yet and then we dropped it off a dumpster and kicked it again and gathered up the parts and sent them to be recycled quite snappy
February 14, 2006
Oracle buys Sleepycat Software
Heard via Jeremy, Oracle has purchase Sleepycat Software, the makers of the Berkley Database:
Wow, the rumors were true. Oracle is snapping up Open Source Database companies now. First it was Innobase (see Oracle buys Innobase. MySQL between rock and hard place?) and now it's Sleepycat Software.
The purchase of Sleepycat, which has been rumored for weeks, gives Oracle another open-source product to complement its proprietary database offerings. At an investor conference last week, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison reiterated the company's strategy to generate revenue from a combination of open-source and proprietary software.They produce and support the famed Berkeley DB embedded database engine and have radically improved it's features since the version 1.x days. Nowadays you get a small, fast, transactional database engine with industrial grade reliability and replication.
It's interesting to note that MySQL's first transactional storage engine (BDB) was created on top of Berkeley DB. Their more popular transactional storage engine (InnoDB) is built on top of technology produced by Innobase, which Oracle bought last year.
This leads to the obvious question: What is Oracle up to? Are they trying to do to Open Source Databases what Yahoo appears to be doing to Web 2.0 companies?
There's been speculation of a master plan at Oracle that involves buying up various bits of the Open Source infrastructure used in building applications. Is JBoss next, as some have suggested?
We'll see.
Oracle is betting that they can make more money from the embedded database if you read their press statement:
REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., 14-FEB-2006 Oracle today announced that it has added Berkeley DB to its embedded database product line which includes Oracle Lite for mobile devices and Oracle TimesTen for high performance in-memory database applications.
"Sleepycat's products enhance Oracle's market-leading database product family by offering enterprise-class support to customers who need to embed a fast, reliable database at a lower cost," said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president, Oracle Database Server Technologies.
"We're very excited to join the world's largest enterprise software company and the industry's leading database company," said Mike Olson, CEO of Sleepycat Software. "Sleepycat's products, customer base and proven business model, combined with Oracle's tremendous expertise, complementary technology and resources, will allow us to better serve the needs of our customers and the open source community."
According to Carl Olofson of IDC's research, "The embedded database market was projected last year to be just over $2 billion in 2005 and forecasted to grow to over $3.2 billion by the year 2009. This market is very diverse, and the technologies tend to be quite specialized. Sleepycat's Berkeley DB complements Oracle TimesTen and Oracle Lite, allowing Oracle to address a broad range of segments within the embedded DBMS market."
Sleepycat Software's Berkeley DB is the most widely used open source database in the world with deployments estimated at more than 200 million. Berkeley DB is distributed under a dual license model, i.e. available under a public license and also available under a commercial license. Well-known open source projects such as the Linux and BSD UNIX operating systems, Apache web server, OpenLDAP directory, OpenOffice productivity software, and many others embed Berkeley DB technology.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Now we can wait and see if the Zend rumour is also true as apparenlty either Andi Gutmans is a Oracle employee or Oracle have also aquired Zend.
February 8, 2006
QOTD
"The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competition, the best way to put distance between yourself and the crowd, is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose."
--William H. Gates III, chairman, Microsoft
January 21, 2006
LiveJournal XSS Issues
Heard about the LiveJournal XSS security compromise earlier this evening via Matt:
I’ve been following the Livejournal hack closely because as someone who runs many services that allow user submitted content, any new developments in XSS are very important to stay on top of. So far the only official technical explanation I’ve seen is here on lj_dev. Since we don’t allow template editing or embedded JS or styles on WP.com I can’t think of any vectors for attack, but you never know with these things. More on moz-binding
In the process of their fixes for the XSS cookie capturing issue, they've now enabled users to have username.livejournal.com for all users. Previously free users had to make do with www.livejournal.com/~username/ and www.livejournal.com/users/username/ for their LiveJournal blogs.
January 19, 2006
Microsoft’s real competition: Stormhoek
Interesting to see that Stormhoek are competing against Microsoft.
Oh, you gotta read Hugh Macleod’s blog to get this one. But, there’s a lot of truth to this. Let’s say you have $400 burning a hole in your pocket. You have a lot of choices where to spend that money. It could go to an Xbox 360. But it could go to a case of wine too.
Hey, if you decide Stormhoek is a better investment than an Xbox 360, at least invite me over to drink some! ;-)
Quite interesting to hear the story of hour they shipped out 100 bottles of their wines to bloggers in Europe, in order to create a buzz around their product.
Does writing this - my part in the first UK blog wine promo - make me a Buzz Agent? Gaping Void via Hugh Macleod, sent out a batch of pre-release samples of South African producer Stormhoek's wines in an attempt to utilise blogs as a marketing 'word of mouth tool'. Personally I think it is a little early; Blogs in the UK are under-developed when compared to America. The British either dont know exactly what they are or deride them; but then word of mouth is word of mouth and website link is a website link.
Even Scobleizer gets in on the action
If you don’t know, my friend Hugh Macleod draws these cute little cartoons on the backs of business cards. He’s gotten a bit of attention from the bloggers (I used his drawings in my PowerPoints when I give presentations).
Anyway, he’s been raving and ranting about Stormhoek. Anyway, they sponsored the geek dinner on Saturday so I got to try a bit of their product (some might say a bit too much, but we’ll keep that among friends). Heheh.
I also got to meet the folks from Stormhoek and found them to be a friendly bunch but we ended up talking about wines we’ve had and wineries we remember. The number, for most folks, are very small. Funny enough the name Bonny Doon came up a great deal. This is a small winery near Santa Cruz, CA (not connected with Stormhoek in any way). But what Bonny Doon does well is give people lots of stories to remember and talk about. Have you ever had “Big House Red?” Why is it called “Big House?” Because the grapes were grown near San Quentin, the famous California prison. Their site says “wine should be as much fun as government regulations allow.” Humor. It goes a long way.
November 20, 2005
Marco asks is Copyright Dead?
Marco Tabini, a publisher from Canada posted the following article on his weblog regarding "is copyright dead?"
I’d like to submit a simple idea: that copyright law has become essentially unenforceable where it matters.
Let me explain. The real problem with copyright is the fact that it is an artificial law that has no root in man’s history. Until the 1600’s, the right over intellectual property was, at best, a matter of personal pride—indeed, in the far past imitating another person’s work was considered a matter of flattery, as opposed to one of crime.
The reason why I say this (from a layman’s perspective, of course—I am no lawyer) is that intellectual property cannot be measured, weighed or quantified. Where physical property, like a car or a house, has an intrinsic value that is somewhat dictated by the difficulty connected with its replication, copying intellectual property requires no effort whatsoever: you can’t build a house without bricks and mortar, but IP is intangible can be safely stored in your brain. Of course, IP is (at least in my opinion) much more important than a house—but that’s a different discussion.
Whether we like it or not, the concept of IP protection is one of balance and counterbalance, just like every application of the law. In other words, if you choose to break the law, the punishment should be commensurate to the amount of damage that you have made: you break a window, you repair the window.
The problem here is that IP right violations are no longer controllable. I’d venture as far as to say that copyright law was never enforceable: who doesn’t copy music tapes? Or photocopy pages off of a book (especially at University?). Despite widespread violations, the whole system would still work because the damage caused by the former could be recuperated by controlling pricing. If five illegal copies of a book I publish are made for every single one I sell, I’ll just multiply its price by five and get my money that way (if you think I’m oversimplifying things, I’ve been working in the publishing world for a while and I’ve seen this very calculation done a fair number of times).
Today, however, a single IP violation has consequences so catastrophic that can no longer be undone. If I copy one song and place it on a file-sharing network, it’s gone forever—and there will be no way to get it off of there; essentially, the act of one individual has caused irreparable damage to the intellectual property—so much so that it will be basically impossible for the copyright holder to make its money back through a legal action. It might be possible to stop the individual, but his or her actions have already caused the complete devaluation of the intellectual property by placing it completely outside of the holder’s control.
It seems to me that copyright holders can react to this in two ways: they can either bury their heads in the sand and ignore reality, or run with it.
The entertainment industry has obviously chosen to bury their heads in the sand. It’s clear to anyone but the most naïve of observers that suing people because they share files is impractical under the best of circumstances (not to mention the PR nightmare that it causes); first of all, the average person does not have enough resources to satisfy the costs of legal proceedings (and, in my opinion, no judge in his or her right mind is going to take away someone’s home because they shared songs on the Internet). Additionally, suing people is not going to solve the fundamental problem that the intellectual property is effectively lost. Finally, this approach doesn’t work as a deterrent, both because the public-at-large does not perceive IP theft as a “real” crime with “real” victims and because technology is always a step ahead of the brilliant legal minds that inhabit the high-rises downtown with their $5,000 suits and $350-an-hour fees.
Running with it is actually a lot simpler than might seem—there are several industries that have already successfully done so for years, and their model has worked well on the Internet, too. Most mainstream magazines, for example, have long stopped selling content. They sell advertising, as I never seem to stop telling everyone who wants to listen. From their perspective, the inadequacy of copyright laws at the single-user level is next to meaningless, and protection from competing business is more than enough: if Regular Joe copies an article off of an advertising-supported magazine, it’s good publicity. If ACME Inc. reproduces my articles, I can go after them legally and enjoy the law’s protection. Similarly, you can think of Google as the largest intellectual property theft ever perpetrated against humanity: they “index” your content, and essentially use your work to sell advertising. (I am, of course, using Google as a mere example, since pretty much every search engine does the same thing—which, incidentally, is also a damn useful service).
For niche publications, the problem is indeed much more significant. Where a market is not large enough to support advertising, but large enough to attract people who do not appreciate the value of professionally-developed content and choose to pirate it instead of paying for it, the fact that copyright has lost its meaning is becoming a real problem, as more and more companies are finding out. This doesn’t mean, however, that content itself has become meaningless—just that it cannot be used as a primary source of revenue any longer. The trick becomes using content to promote and market services that cannot easily be stolen in an orgy of peer-to-peer sharing, focusing on content to deliver the message where it can make its highest impact… something similar to “self-advertising.”
This, too, is nothing new. Most software companies will gladly give you all the content you want in the hope of luring you to their products. The interesting thing is that, whereas only a large company used to be able to afford doing this, today it’s possible to achieve a similar goal with a much smaller budget and resource pool.
November 10, 2005
The Venture Capital Squeeze
Every now and again Paul Graham posts a gem about business onto his site. In The Venture Capital Squeeze, he discusses how VC funds and some issues relating to them in the USA.
In the next few years, venture capital funds will find themselves squeezed from four directions. They're already stuck with a seller's market, because of the huge amounts they raised at the end of the Bubble and still haven't invested. This by itself is not the end of the world. In fact, it's just a more extreme version of the norm in the VC business: too much money chasing too few deals.
Unfortunately, those few deals now want less and less money, because it's getting so cheap to start a startup. The four causes: open source, which makes software free; Moore's law, which makes hardware geometrically closer to free; the Web, which makes promotion free if you're good; and better languages, which make development a lot cheaper.
November 2, 2005
That's the way the cookie crumbles
An interesting blog post from Limoncelli, which reminds me of a previous job from hell a few years ago, where the server room was so small you could not really work in it at all and you would have to drag a monitor and keyboard and a table to sit outside the door and try and debug issues with hardware that was on it's way to the computer dumpyard.
Some days you are master of a huge data center. Other days you're just sittin' on the floor outside the "computer closet" trying to figure out why the new server won't boot.
That's just how it works.
October 29, 2005
Software Patents are Like Smoking
Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB has written an article for Groklaw titled Software Patents are Like Smoking. Fortunately here in South Africa, we don't have software patents like the USA. In Europe, they various politiicans are trying to implement Software Patents.
Society crossed an invisible but decisive border when it started to allow patents not only on tangible inventions but also on computer software. It must have felt good at the time, but today it is becoming increasingly obvious that software patents do no good. In that regard software patents are like smoking – it started with an experiment to improve health. It tasted quite good and it soon became a fashion statement. But today smoking kills not only those who smoke but also those who breathe nearby. And yet it is very difficult to completely eradicate smoking. Those who smoke stubbornly defend their right to do so. Perhaps there is even an argument to be made where smoking is good in some circumstances. But overall it is a habit that would deserve to be stopped. The same applies to software patents.
The rights of an inventor or author need to be properly protected. Otherwise we will soon have no inventions or new creations. But when it comes to software, copyright is quite sufficient protection. In my mind software should be treated like architecture, music, literature, and journalism and not like mechanics, electronics or biochemistry or other traditional industries. Here is my logic.
First of all, in traditional industries producers produce and users only consume. But with software, users produce even more than dedicated producers. The Citibanks and Coca-Colas of the world collectively write more software than the Microsofts and IBMs. Similarly, music and literature is produced both by professional producers and by private consumers. When production is so heavily tilted towards users, patents make no sense. Or are you saying that a 15-year old who develops a great software algorithm at home should do a patent search (among tens of thousands of patents) to verify that he/she is not infringing?
The second argument has to do with determinism. For a system of patents to be functional, there needs to be an easy way for inventors to verify that their inventions do not infringe on other patents. Either the number of patents has to be very limited, or the terminology needs to be so well defined that you can search by keyword. Neither of this is true for software patents. As a result, it is absolutely prohibitive to make a reasonable patent search to verify non-infringement. The consequence is that nobody can be safe. With copyright you will always know if you infringe on someone else’s right because you can do so only by actually copying code. But with patents you cannot know. The system is not practically deterministic.
The third argument has to do with the parameters of the software industry. A patent can take long to get approved, and it may be in force for 20 years. But technology cycles in the software industry are much much shorter. In traditional industries, you may have a very limited number of patents for each product you produce. But a software product may extend over areas that are covered by hundreds if not thousands of patents. In other industries, patenting and patent defense is a small fraction of overall R&D costs. But in the case of software, patents take up a much bigger portion of the R&D budget. As a result, patenting and patent protection becomes prohibitively expensive in the software industry. The only ones who gain are the patent lawyers.
Many companies apply for software patents for defensive reasons, thinking that if someone challenges them with a patent, they can retaliate with their own patent portfolio. But today the software industry is seeing a new breed of companies - so called patent trolls – that have no other business than acquiring patents and then extracting royalties from other businesses. No patent portfolio will help against a troll, because they have no production or sales of their own that you could threaten.
This leads to the “3 Gazillion Peril”. A gazillion in this context is a unit for patent cost in a company. In a small company it can be a million; in a large one it can be hundreds of millions. The first gazillion gets spent on defensive patenting, because you don’t want to be any worse off than anyone else. When that’s done, you will have shareholders requiring you to make the best possible use of your assets (and probably they have heard that IBM makes a billion a year on patents). So you approach your competitors and tell them they have to pay a gazillion in patent royalties to you. But of course they have built their own patent portfolios, so you end up cross-licensing your patents with no money changing hands. In essence, you have now lost your second gazillion. Then a patent troll appears on the scene and demands patent royalties from you. You try to defend yourself with your own portfolio, but to no avail. In the end you pay the troll a gazillion in royalties. By this time you have spent 3 gazillion of your valuable currency, and you have achieved absolutely nothing.
This is why I believe that software patents are bad for anyone developing software, whether user or producer, large or small, closed source or open source. Open source companies and organisations have been the first to smell the danger, but everyone will be hurt. Fortunately we have seen a good debate on the topic lately, and we scored an important victory when the European Parliament rejected the software patent directive in July this year. For more information on this critically important campaign, please visit www.nosoftwarepatents.com which is sponsored by MySQL AB and other companies.
October 20, 2005
Sue Companies, Not Coders
Interesting article on Wired News by Bruce Schneier where he is discussing Sue Companies, Not Coders in response to an arguement of Howard Schmidt comments.
At a security conference last week, Howard Schmidt, the former White House cybersecurity adviser, took the bold step of arguing that software developers should be held personally accountable for the security of the code they write.
He's on the right track, but he's made a dangerous mistake. It's the software manufacturers that should be held liable, not the individual programmers. Getting this one right will result in more-secure software for everyone; getting it wrong will simply result in a lot of messy lawsuits.
To understand the difference, it's necessary to understand the basic economic incentives of companies, and how businesses are affected by liabilities. In a capitalist society, businesses are profit-making ventures, and they make decisions based on both short- and long-term profitability. They try to balance the costs of more-secure software -- extra developers, fewer features, longer time to market -- against the costs of insecure software: expense to patch, occasional bad press, potential loss of sales.
The result is what you see all around you: lousy software. Companies find that it's cheaper to weather the occasional press storm, spend money on PR campaigns touting good security, and fix public problems after the fact than to design security right from the beginning.
October 12, 2005
Set your priorities
Joel from Joel on Software has an interesting piece on his blog called Set Your Priorities.
“Custom development is that murky world where a customer tells you what to build, and you say, ‘are you sure?’ and they say yes, and you make an absolutely beautiful spec, and say, ‘is this what you want?’ and they say yes, and you make them sign the spec in indelible ink, nay, blood, and they do, and then you build that thing they signed off on, promptly, precisely and exactly, and they see it and they are horrified and shocked, and you spend the rest of the week reading up on whether your E&O insurance is going to cover the legal fees for the lawsuit you've gotten yourself into or merely the settlement cost. Or, if you're really lucky, the customer will smile wanly and put your code in a drawer and never use it again and never call you back.”
October 11, 2005
Stumbleupon is a new way of finding websites
I've been using Stumbleupon since November last year when I was introduced to the concept of stumbling upon interesting websites, by Mark Leonard from Point45 Entertainment.
For example one can click a 'I like it!' for websites which you like and if you are the first person to click 'I like it!' you get to add the first review and your name shows up as the person who first provided the website to Stumbleupon. Also your reviews get displayed on your reviews page and you can also be reviewed by other Stumbleupon users.
October 2, 2005
Another court case looming for MicroSoft?
Tectonic is reporting on the XML software patent opposition heading for court. For those of you don't know, MicroSoft somehow managed to file a software patent in South Africa when our patent system does not cover software patents.
Microsoft refused to voluntarily surrender the patent late last month and said they would respond to the case made against them during revocation proceedings. Now anti-patent advocates are preparing to file a revocation order with South Africa's patent authorities.
"They turned down our very generous offer for them to voluntarily surrender their patents," says University of South Africa senior lecturer, Bob Jolliffe, who has lead the challenge against the patent. "They are now waiting to see what happens."
Jolliffe is currently preparing a submission that he says will be ready to file within two to three weeks.
September 30, 2005
Ché gets a blog
Ché has now entered the world of blogging.
September 20, 2005
Opera is free
The Opera webbrowser is now free.
No more banner ads for users who use their 'adware' version. It's great to see a company offering their software for free to the general public. This might mean that Firefox has more competition. Also Opera claim that they have the 'fastest browser', but from my initial testing, Firefox is way faster.
August 19, 2005
The satisfaction one gets from Hacking
Ben mentions on his blog and the Six Apart website about the joy of hacking and some of the things they've achieved for a release of Typepad by just holding a hackathon.
Joe Kraus, FeedBurner, and others have done a good job of demonstrating the effectiveness of periodic hackathons on inspiring creativity. As a fast-growing company with multiple products and international offices, though, one of the biggest barriers we've faced has not been lack of creativity in and of itself--what we've been missing, in part, is channeling that creativity into features that get released in our products.
Over on Six Apart News I posted about the Scratchathon that we held, which work formed the basis for our most recent TypePad release.
This is an amazing release, because it combines work from all of the engineers working on TypePad, and includes features that we & our customers have wanted for a long time. In fact, Mena writes about her favorite new feature on Mena's Corner:
Believe me, not having the ability to choose specific photo albums has bugged me since day one of TypePad.
We'll continue to post more information about the new features over the next couple of days, including the feature I worked on during the Scratchathon.
Taking time out from one's normal schedule to fix small annoyances can be useful, as you get to scratch at code you normally are not prodding as part of your day to day coding activities as well as making adding new features to your codebase.
Allowing employees to take ownership for a project of their own choosing for a product is a great way of getting employees to think differently about the product and be creative and think outside of the box.
More reading:
July 25, 2005
AJAX Developer Site
ajaxdeveloper.org has started for those interested in everything ajax.
Our hope is that we can provide news, software release information, code examples, etc for the Ajax community and, in the process, provide a good place for all of them to share their problems, cool hacks, and even lists of other resources for the rest of the Ajax commmunity.
Bear with us as we work on things around here - we're still in the startup phase. But, if you'd like to get involved with the site, no matter what kind of role you'd like to take, shoot us an email and let us know.
You'll also notice some references to our sister site, PHPDeveloper.org, around until we get things a bit more polished up. We're using their backed to run the site, so things will look and feel a bit similar between the two...
July 22, 2005
Going South
Ben Saunders popped me an email earlier today announcing his next challenge which he and Tony are embarking on a expedition called "South", where they are planning on completing Scott's epic 1912 journey. Ben is back after his Serco TransArctic Expedition.
January 1912. Dying inch by inch, Robert Falcon Scott and his team crawled back from the South Pole through the most hostile conditions on earth. Eleven miles from their depot they finally perished. In the 93 years since, no one has ever walked to the South Pole and back. Many experts still consider it impossible.
In October 2006, we will attempt to prove them wrong. Setting out from Scott's wooden hut on the edge of Antarctica, we will manhaul 400lb sledges across 1,800 miles of the most hostile terrain on earth, to the Pole and back.
From the Serco TransArctic Expedition site:
On 5 March, Ben Saunders set out to ski solo more than 1,200 miles across the Arctic from the Russian edge of the arctic ice pack to Canada via the North Geographic Pole.
In the weeks that followed Ben experienced what NASA called 'the worst conditions on record'. Of the four solo expeditions that started out that year, one died and two were rescued suffering from frostbite and injuries. Ben was the only solo expedition to make it to the North Pole and in doing so set a world record; he is by far the youngest person to reach the North Pole solo.
Ben continued on towards Canada, but conditions worsened and he was told by his expedition team that he would have to be picked up. Despite not being able to reach Canada, Ben set another British record for the longest solo arctic trek, skiing more than 1,000km in treacherous conditions.
Ben is asking users to pay for the 1800 miles that he and tony are travelling.
July 20, 2005
10 essential development practices
Picked up via Jim Winstead:
damian conway’s “ten essential development practices” article (via daring fireball) may appear on perl.com, but the basics are applicable to any software project.
i would put “use a revision control system” way at the top of the list, and i would also add “use a bug-tracking system.”
Amazon.com opens software development centre in Cape Town, South Africa
Picked up from Coda.
Online retailer Amazon.com has opened a software development centre in Cape Town, a statement issued by the company said on Tuesday.
The centre will create innovative web services and help software developers build innovative applications using Amazon technology.
It is the third centre of its kind in the world, with the other two in Scotland and India.
Chris Pinkham, managing director of the centre, co-founded South Africa's first internet service provider, UUNET, in 1993. In 2000 he joined Amazon.com in Seattle as director for the network engineering group and later as vice president responsible for worldwide IT systems infrastructure.
The launch of the Amazon centre in Cape Town is "testament to the calibre of the highly-skilled talent pool in South Africa", according to Pinkham.
The centre will deal with idea generation and technical design and will expand Amazon.com's global web services offering, allowing software developers around the world to develop and launch their own services built around the company's infrastructure and product data.
"We want to build a team of the most talented individuals that South Africa has to offer," Pinkham said in the statement. The centre is looking for computer scientists and software engineers with entrepreneurial spirit to join the start-up team. - I-Net Bridge
Actually Colin founded what was known as the Internet Africa which also went by the name of TICSA (The Internetworking Company of South Africa). They were based in the Compustat house in Newlands, round the corner from the South African Brewries Newlands plant. One can read how TISCA became UUnet South Africa (Pty) Ltd.
July 6, 2005
Europe says NO to software patents
I'm sure programmers in Europe are celerbrating the fact that the European Parliment REJECTED the passing of making software patents in Europe by voting against it in a huge margin of 648 votes against to 14 for the directive and 18 abstenstions.
Via Derick Rethans:
So, it seems that the European Parliament did the only correct thing today. They voted massively against the proposed directive "Patentability of Computer Implemented Inventions Directive". 648 voted against, 14 for and there where 18 abstenstions. Now the European Commision has to restart the whole process, if they are going to do this at all.
Local organisations challenge Microsoft XML patent here in South Africa.
June 28, 2005
Make Poverty History
Every single day, 30,000 children die, needlessly, of extreme poverty.
On July 6th, we finally have the opportunity to stop that shameful statistic.
8 world leaders, gathered in Scotland for the G8 summit, will be presented with a workable plan to double aid, drop the debt and make the trade laws fair. If these 8 men agree, then we will become the generation that made poverty history.
But they'll only do it if enough people tell them to.
We don't want your money - we want you!
Visit these sites to find out more:
June 25, 2005
Ask Ask Bjørn Hansen
Ask Bjørn Hansen located a useful resource of world cities from Maxmind which looks interesting as it provides generic co-ordinates for cities and suburbs across the globe which is used for the Geourl site.
June 15, 2005
Yahoo! aquires blo.gs
Jim has sold blo.gs to Yahoo!.
the sale of blo.gs has been completed, and i'm proud to announce that yahoo! has acquired the service. as of right now, give or take a few minutes, yahoo! is running blo.gs.
this is the sort of good home that i was looking for — yahoo! obviously has the resources to run and improve blo.gs in pace with the incredible growth of blogs (and syndication in general), and in talking with them it was also clear that we had some of the same vision for the future of the service and the ping/notification infrastructure.
Congrats to Jim on the sale. It's great that blo.gs is part of Yahoo!.
What are our plans for the service? Simple. Keep it running, make it scale, and make it even better (a lot like the Flickr plans).
June 7, 2005
BitMover Announced their BitKeeper to CVS Converter
May 29, 2005
Laugh It Off
Congratulations to Justin Nurse from Laugh It Off on winning your Constitutional Court case against SAB Miller.
T-shirt maker Laugh It Off has won its fight against South African Breweries (SAB) over its right to mock the Carling Black Label brand.
May 18, 2005
Dive into Greasemonkey
Dive into Greasemonkey is a all about teaching the old web new tricks.
Dive Into Greasemonkey is a book about programming with Greasemonkey, a Firefox extension for customizing web pages. Read it online for free.
May 17, 2005
Distributed Identity: Yadis
Brad Fitzpatrick has implemented yadis.
There is also a mailing list setup for yadis.
UPDATE:
Yadis is now called OpenID.
May 13, 2005
Brads blog gets comment flooded over fsync()
Brad seems to like causing a slashdot effect minus the site not being up response that normally occurs with the slashdot effect regarding
diskchecker.pl and fsync().
mod_rewrite cheatsheet
The mod_rewrite cheatsheet is available from the I love Jack Daniels blog.
The mod_rewrite cheat sheet is designed to act as a reminder and reference sheet, listing useful information about mod_rewrite. It includes a list of flags for the RewriteRule and RewriteCond directives, list of server variables, a regular expression guide and several examples of common rules.
April 29, 2005
Code readability
Jim Winstead, Jr. brings up a point which deals with the subject of bad code readability which Neil has brought up previously.
It's the simple things like taking the time to make your programming easier. For example Jim shows us the following example:
$query = "SELECT id,name,url,rss,md5sum,method,updated AS up,"
. " UNIX_TIMESTAMP(lastchecked) AS lastchecked,"
. " UNIX_TIMESTAMP(updated) AS updated"
. " FROM blogs "
. " WHERE updated > NOW() - INTERVAL 10 MINUTE AND method = 0"
. " ORDER BY up DESC"
. " LIMIT 10";
Which he goes onto mention that he is now doing it like:
$query= "SELECT id,name,url,rss,md5sum,method,updated AS up,
UNIX_TIMESTAMP(lastchecked) AS lastchecked,
UNIX_TIMESTAMP(updated) AS updated
FROM blogs
WHERE updated > NOW() - INTERVAL 10 MINUTE AND method = 0
ORDER BY up DESC
LIMIT 10
";
Which makes it easier to copy and paste into the mysql command line utility. I'm known for having extremely long lines of code for SQL queries when I was programming in PHP back in the day. Also in certain ways it can make it worse when you have long long lines which you are trying to debug and are unable to figure out quickly what your 900+ character SQL query is doing!
A line like:
$categories = $dbh->getall ("SELECT directory_company_category_map.company_id, directory_categories.id AS category_id, directory_sub_categories.id AS sub_category_id, directory_categories.category, directory_sub_categories.sub_category_name FROM directory_categories LEFT JOIN directory_sub_categories ON directory_sub_categories.category_id=directory_categories.id LEFT JOIN directory_company_category_map ON directory_company_category_map.category_id=directory_categories.id LEFT JOIN directory_companies ON directory_companies.id=directory_company_category_map.company_id WHERE directory_company_category_map.category_id=directory_categories.id AND directory_sub_categories.category_id=directory_categories.id AND directory_company_category_map.sub_category_id=directory_sub_categories.id AND directory_company_category_map.company_id='" . $listings[$i]['id'] . "'");
is quite a bit to process ;) It looks way better like:
<?php
$categories = $dbh->getall ("
SELECT
directory_company_category_map.company_id,
directory_categories.id AS category_id,
directory_sub_categories.id AS sub_category_id,
directory_categories.category,
directory_sub_categories.sub_category_name
FROM directory_categories
LEFT JOIN directory_sub_categories
ON directory_sub_categories.category_id=directory_categories.id
LEFT JOIN directory_company_category_map
ON directory_company_category_map.category_id=directory_categories.id
LEFT JOIN directory_companies
ON directory_companies.id=directory_company_category_map.company_id
WHERE
directory_company_category_map.category_id=directory_categories.id AND
directory_sub_categories.category_id=directory_categories.id AND
directory_company_category_map.sub_category_id=directory_sub_categories.id AND
directory_company_category_map.company_id='" . $listings[$i]['id'] . "'
");
?>
April 28, 2005
Mena makes some noise ;)
Mena responds to a post by Jason Kotte about a whole new internet.
Janice was the first to get the ball rolling per say.
From the way things look down here in South Africa, the picture is that we are normally months off and having to play "catch up" and what not.
Web annotation comes in quite useful. Imagine if you could send google search results to friends like you would do with a send a stumble to a friend on stumbleupon.
April 7, 2005
BitMover - Biting the hand that feeds it
It's rather disappointing that BitMover has announced that they are no longer going to provide a free version of their BitKeeper software, which is sort of biting the hand that feeds it.
In their marketing material they mention how they improved the Linux kernel development as their main sales push.
It's disappointing that BitMover has decided to take that path. I've got the hang of subversion and trac which works well for various open source projects esp. when using the FSFS file system and not bdb. Which replaced CVS as my version control application of choice. I was using bitkeeper a year or so ago to when I attempted to do some patches for MySQL on FreeBSD at the time.
April 4, 2005
The reality of working hard and not getting your dues
Davey has a couple of interesting blog posts on his blog about how he and his friends got duped by a Jason Macer.
March 31, 2005
Random Python Notes
Coming from a PHP and Perl background sometimes using python can be a bit of a challenge when remembering what sort of array to use as python calls these dictionaries, tuples, or lists.
I've started compiling a random python notes and am planning on comparing various perl and perlism's with their equivalent python version.
March 25, 2005
Why Switch?
The Scobleizer found the following which I picked up via John:
FellowshipChurch.com has decided to switch from ASP.NET to PHP. Brian Bailey blogs about their switch:
- As we began evaluating our options, one of our developers moved to another department so we began to search for his replacement. As I evaluated the resumes we were receiving, I began to have the sense that we were continuing down the wrong path [in using .NET]. Here are the top ten factors that influenced the decision to change direction.
Jason Fried once upon a time said:
"It's all a matter of trust. If you don't trust your developer to choose the right environment, then how can you trust him to build the best application?"
March 17, 2005
Let's do lunch
Our friends at Media Toolbox seem to have been noticing as well when people have stuffed up and they noticed. This time it was Woman & Home's turn into the spotlight.
If you buy the Sunday Times you would have received a glossy pull-out on the launch of Caxton's new Woman & Home magazine. The four pager contains a URL (www.womanandhomemagazine.co.za) for readers wanting more information on the magazine.
Intrigued media.toolbox surfed over to the new website on Monday evening. Guess at our surprise when we found a site dedicated to Caxton's newspaper classifieds. Off we go to www.womanandhome.co.za only to find it home to a blog titled "The sad life of a Penguin Pools owner."
This seems to clearly remind me of the good old days when there was that show on M-Net called Idols. Yeah remember that embarassment of M-Net's where they forgot to register the domain before their show? Remember when you had to go to the main M-Net website just to go and get your fix of M-Net branded content from Glen and friends there? Meanwhile back at the ranch there were interesting bits and pieces up on the Idols Fanclub website.
Off to the UniForum registry to see what's what with the domains names. It seems an online marketing firm called Catching Mercury caught Caxton napping and registered the domain name www.womanandhome.co.za on 2004-10-23.
But what about the Caxton's classified site accessed from www.womanandhomemagazine.co.za? Seems Caxton only registered this domain on 2005-03-14. That is a day after the campaign ran in the Sunday Times.
We know Caxton has a bad reputation when it comes to investing in online media but this is just ridiculous. They finally got it right by this morning (2005-03-15) – the new site dedicated to the magazine is finally up and running.
So as our friends over in Catching Mercury land have a habbit of saying Let's do lunch!.
The devil's in the detail
Okay, so Samantha Bowman has gone back to her M-Web dial-up account, which utilises infrastructure from the Internet Solution. So hopefully I can get her cut off once again from having the ability to SPAM users who registered on Mr Deliveries website, seeing that I used a unique email address when registering on that site, apart from that fact that she also seems to SPAM email addresses which appears on DNS registrations.
If anyone can think of how to explain to someone that they've either been hacked, sold their user database or a staff member sold it I'd love to know how to approach the Mr Delivery guys.
Return-path: <salesits@mweb.co.za> Envelope-to: *snip*-mrdelivery-com@*snip* Delivery-date: Sat, 12 Mar 2005 09:57:26 +0200 Received: from c2-483-1.rdg.dial.mweb.co.za ([196.23.227.229] helo=itsales.co.za) by *snip* with smtp (Exim *snip*; *snip*) id 1DA1Ua-000Bek-9S for *snip*-mrdelivery-com@*snip*; Sat, 12 Mar 2005 09:57:26 +0200 From: "Callum-Lee IT Solutions" <salesits@mweb.co.za> Subject: Web Hosting & Domain Registration To: "Jacques" <jacques-mrdelivery-com@boxlet.za.net> Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="_Boundary_2mlksmuasadvnqk5prcsiwy" MIME-Version: 1.0 Sender: Callum-Lee IT Solutions <salesits@mweb.co.za> Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2005 08:37:36 +0200 X-Mailer: MailList King 5.0.4.82
If you are also getting mail from Samantha Bowman, why not give her a call on (082) 773-8512 and tell her she's a SPAMmer, and she thinks she's not for some odd reason. Maybe if someone were to give her Aunty Ivy's email address they'd be closed down in a few years time?
March 14, 2005
Laugh It Off
Last night, while watching Carte Blanche, they did an insert on Laugh It Off, whom used to have offices in one of the buildings where I previously worked, who were talking about being brand atheists.
The also showed the First National Bank "How may weed help you" t-shirt, which parodied FNB, whom saw the fun in it and purchased 500 t-shirts for their staff, with a dagga leaf replacing the normal tree in their logo.
Brands always talk about something called "goodwill" and that someone is harming their goodwill, but from my understanding goodwill is a make believe entity, if some lawyer can post a comment on this, I'll appreciate it.
If there is something called "goodwill" isn't SAB doing damage to their own "goodwill"?
Reading the following on a forum:
i have to say, i've lost alot of respect for SAB from their response to that. after all, research has shown that once people choose a firm favourite, not much will make them change their mind. plus, they haven't had a significant drop in profits due to the feared "decrease in sales", so they can't claim it's affecting them financially either.
the only thing that could be a problem is trademark and intellectual property - but then again, the black labour white guilt is satire, which last i heard, is ok - otherwise Hellkom would be belly up by now.
No, the only thing SAB has done is show themselves to be overly sensitive - me thinks the company doth protest too much.
March 6, 2005
Bioplus Longest Day Challenge
I see that old Tiger Brands are prob going to target me for my domain name. They are advertising something about winning a powertrip on their Bioplus bottles. I might scan in the competition goodie shortly.
March 3, 2005
More issues with brands websites
Yesterday I posted about issues with one of my favourite brands website and mailers and today another one of my favourite brands have similar issues.
One of the local IT Law firms Buys, Inc. have a IT Law blog which I read every now and again, but when I went to their website today and clicked on the link for "IT Law Blog" I definately did not find what I was expecting!
I got a holding page of the ISP where they host coming up and clicking on the links on the holding page just brings up 404 errors, oh lovely!
Using the contact form on the site bounces due to SPF issues, so Reinhardt did not get my mail and it bounced! Mimecast correctly bounced the message because titan.cybersmart.co.za is not allowed to send mail from my personal domain, which is correct. The guys who developed the site for Buys, Inc. should have rather generated the mail from a @buys.co.za email address instead of forging the from email address when submitting the form.
In the past when doing website contact forms I always send it from an email address like noreply@domain.name in question rather than forging the email address.
February 9, 2005
Blogging gets a Googler Fired
Blogging is can get you into trouble. It turns out that Mark Jen got fired from Google for blogging about the companies adsense financials and global strategy from what I can gather.
Jeremy Zawodny and wrote about employee blogging previously, which one should look at.
Like Jeremy Cole was saying on employee blogging that one needs to factor into the equation the following:
- Is it about anything sensitive in any way?
- Is it disrespectful to either your employer or any coworkers?
- Would you flinch in the slightest if your boss, his boss, all the way up to the CEO and the board of directors read it?
I suppose this brings up the question about Google's motto "do no evil" which I'm using as one of my motto's these days.
Interestingly enough Blogger has a faq on how not to get fired for blogging which I think he should have read prior to starting to blogging.
Who owns your webbrowser homepage
A couple of bloggers are blogging about what they are using for their webbrowser's homepage. What about you?
Personally I've mainly been using the default Google search page currently as I found that I do more searching and it's pointless loading up my personal website when opening a new browser window. Previously I was using about:blank before that when I was on a slow link to the .net via UUnet South Africa. I tend to find at one job I had a customised homepage with links which I was going to often which was useful at that stage when I was into hardcore PHP programming.
Thinking about it I also used to use my intranet as my homepage back in the day at Ataris Technologies when I had offices with a permanent online connection.
January 17, 2005
billieg gets caught posing in 1983
Bill Gates Strikes a Pose for Teen Beat Photospread, 1983.
A laugh and a half :)
January 16, 2005
Live Journal semi online
LiveJournal are currently working hard at restoring their service. How many people do you know who would not verify data before taking their service live again?
Wind writes "According to any journal hosted off of LiveJournal.com, the LiveJournal data center Internap has suffered a critical power failure, leaving all of LiveJournal and its content temporarily offline and requiring the revival of 100+ servers. Perhaps Six Apart wasn't quite prepared for the responsibilities of a website of this size? Updated information is posted here."
It sort of reminds me of the run for the hills comments after Six Apart purchased Live Journal. It seems strange that Internap had a power failure and that both power systems (including the backup redundant power supply died at the same time).
Locally in South Africa, I've experienced some dodge places for hosting servers and one of the things I discovered when using a globally operated ISP here in South Africa called UUnet, that they have redundant UPS's for backup power, diesel generators, have access to the building generators, etc. as well as having redundant eskom power sources from two different sub stations entering from two seperate points in the building and the power cables runs for about 10 metres together into the UPS room. Also they have redundant telkom fibre, etc. which other local concerns don't have. It pays to pay money for the redundancy which you don't have to build yourself.
Something which we don't have here is the datacenter which no ISP owns but ISP's and webhosting companies purchase rackspace and pay for their telco related stuff seperately.
I suppose that LiveJournal and Sixapart would be moving their equipment away from the two Internap locations to a place like above.net or maybe even MCI?
I suppose we shall be hearing more about this saga over the next couple of days as Brad and the gang post some updates to the LiveJournal website.
UPDATE:
LiveJournal is still having issues from site load and it looks like login sessions are not working 100% as you tend to be logged out while using the site.
Hopefully things will get back to normal soon.
January 7, 2005
LJ sells out to Six Apart
Brad Fitzpatrick has sold his baby to Six Apart.
Congratulations Brad! I've recently been looking at various things relating to software developed by Brad and his team, namely Perlbal, Memcache and MogileFS.
I've also noticed that they have numerous members of the LJ community bringing up things from the MT3 licensing issue, to various others.
December 29, 2004
The Graphing Calculator
Taking a read through The Graphing Calculator Story it sounds quite interesting how a piece of software which was never going to be completed due to the project being scraped, how the one developer continued to work on the project until it was ready to launch.
I have in the past finished various projects which I was not paid for where it's more about completing the project than leaving loose ends around and getting closure knowing that you can do the necessary coding into someones API for getting data and displaying the said data, and learning more as time goes on.
December 8, 2004
Much weirdness
Fast Company has an article in its December 2004 issue titled The 6 Myths of Creativity, in which a Harvard Business School professor who studied "creativity in the wild" (that is, in business) says that there are "six cherished myths about creativity" to which businesses cling:
- Creativity comes from creative types
- Money is creativity motivator
- Time pressure fuels creativity
- Fear forces breakthroughs
- Competition beats collaboration
- A streamlined organization is a creative organization
November 27, 2004
CEO's are Chickens... apparently
Saw the following on my Planet PHP RSS feed this evening while at work which was an interesting read considering I'm told that sales people are five different kinds of dogs according to the book entitled Sales Dogs.
The following analogy comes from Scrum. In fact I am going to quote Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle’s “Agile Software Development with Scrum"…
A chicken and a pig are together when the chicken says, “Let’s start a restaurant!” The pig thinks it over and says “What would we call this restaurant?” The chicken says “Ham n’ Eggs!” The pig says, “No thanks. I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved!”
The Scrum meeting rule says that pigs, committed project members, are allowed to talk. Chickens, people who’s career would be unscarred by project failure, can only listen. Opinions from pigs will have the needs of the project at the top of their concerns. They cannot afford to put self interest first, leading to balanced and rational compromise. So in a small web based firm, besides the web developers, who are the pigs?
The sales managers are usually piggies. They have sales targets, so usability, customer profiling and conversion rates are vital to them. Missing those targets is financially limiting, and possibly career limiting too.
Marketing are also in the pig pen. They will need a constant stream of information from the developers, usually in the form of processed log files. They also need to post process content for search engine optimisation and usually have link building programs in play. If the developers cannot supply these services then the marketing plan can be severely disrupted. Even if marketing’s jobs are safe, someone’s head will eventually roll.
Another porker is the content manager. An unpublished author has achieved nothing and will complain loudly. There may have been expensive copyright negotiations beforehand that won’t repay themselves until publication. Also content ages. A delayed appearance on the web site could invalidate it. If the content manager has a problem, the development team will hear about it in about the time it takes to walk down the corridoor.
The support staff slopping around in the mud are utterly dependent on IT. They can have a miserable job, so let’s not make it worse for them.
By contrast the CEO can take project scale action. That action could be as drastic to fire everyone responsible and outsource the whole project to India, and they might do it anyway if it’s perceived to be in the interest of the company. More usually intervention comes in the form of long term strategy changes that affect the other stakeholders. The mission statement of the project will shift accordingly, or the project may fragment or be allowed fewer resources. The original plans can be changed to the point of mutilation by them. The CEO is committed to the company, not the project.
If you are using iterative development than you have supplied your CEO with options other than cancellation or expensive change requests. The CEO already has sufficient influence over the warring parties that there is no need for them to write stories or micromanage priorities.
So, can you keep them from interfering in iteration meetings? Good cluck…
November 18, 2004
Bushisms?
Look at the left before reading the text below George. Movable Type makes weird thumbnails, so you want to click on the picture to view it.
October 8, 2004
George is Soliciting Opinions
George is busy soliciting opinions for building a new blogging tool.
Maybe it's time to discuss various options and get feedback via a wider group of php.net people and contribute to a new tool. I've spent some time learning to do tableless CSS which I still have a lot to learn.
I can't remember the URL to an article someone wrote a while ago which goes into detail about building the best blogging platform.
UPDATE
I found the link I was refering to earlier.
October 7, 2004
Six Apart finds a honey pot full of VC Dollars
September 27, 2004
Have you been rasmussed?
Via Derick .
Some people who where speaking at the conference where "rasmussed". This new verb means that some presentation speaker drew all the audience away from other presentations being given at the same time. This effect usually occurs when Rasmus Lerdorf is having a presentation at the same time as another speaker has, though this is not necessary that the person who rasmusses you is Rasmus itself.
Dan Scott - Monday, 27th of September, 2004; 02:06:31
Yeah, I was totally rasmussed at php|works -- and it was by Chris's session security talk. I started with one audience member (Josh--the Trek guy), then it grew to two (thanks Marcus!), then a couple of other people (Wez, Damien) took pity on me and hung out for the last fifteen minutes or so. Some day people will care about DB2 :) Ah well, quid pro quo--I was one of the few people who went to Marcus' CEP talk while Rasmus was giving his best practices speech.
Adam Trachtenberg - Saturday, 25th of September, 2004; 01:18:05
I was totally Rasmused at php|con East back in 2003. I had 6 people in my talk. At least it was actually Rasmus speaking. I don't think I could stand being Rasmused by someone else. :)
September 17, 2004
Easier way to read blogs
There is an easier way to read blogs using Bloglines to subscribe to the feeds from a blog. Nifty and easier than typing in each of the blogs URL's in the URL bar in a webbrowser.
Patrick's got a blog
Patrick has a blog. Got blog?
September 7, 2004
SCO are Litigious Bastards!
I wonder what would happen if people did a Google bomb on Telkom along the lines of the SCO one?
SCO are litigious bastards. Or, just bastards.
See http://www.litigiousbastards.com/
for more.
August 31, 2004
Fired for blogging
Picked the following up on Jeremy Zawodny's Blog that the evil people at Friendster who have no policies in place regarding to blogging, has fired one of their employees Joyce Park. Since when is it company policy to dictate what staff members may or may not say? I don't discuss what happened to me for 11 months at a dubious outfit and why I left, which is another story.
People have something called freedom of expression even in South Africa, and I would have expected a company like Friendster to encourage their staff members to express their opinions, etc. After all their company revolves around information, which we make available be it via Journals, Blogs, etc. etc. and how people connect together via what they call Friend Networks.
And Jeremy if Yahoo! did decide to fire you, there would be an huge uproar in the blogging community, which they most likely would want to avoid, if you ask me.
No, not me. (But would it surprise you?)
It seems that Friendster, who had no policy at all on employee blogging, has fired Joyce Park. You may remember her from such debates as Java vs. PHP. Or maybe her book. Or maybe mod_pubsub (blog).
Take a minute. Go read her blog. See what you can find that's so offensive to the company that they had to fire her.
I'm really resisting the urge to say what I really think about Friendster's current and past management. I think it speaks for itself.
Do you think they'll add a "bloggers need not apply" banner on their jobs page? I'm guessing not. Why? Because "you can work on social networking, but you cannot blog" just doesn't sound right, does it?
Now, pardon me while I got figure out how to cancel my Friendster account. I suggest you do the same.
Wow, that was easy! The image at the right (larger version) is what it looks like to cancel your friendster account because they fired an employee for blogging.
Just in case you wondered.
Related Coverage:
- Friendster Fires Troutgirl for Blogging?! (the social software weblog)
- Cancel your Friendster (randomthoughts and planet python)
- Friendster sucks (kasia in a nutshell)
- Screw Friendster (Derek's Rantings and Musings)
- Clueless newbie award: Scott Sassa of Friendster (Timboy)
- Fired From Friendster for Blogging (Ross Mayfield on Many 2 Many)
- Now Here Is A Company That Really Gets Online Community (Jeffrey McManus' Grind)
- Cancel Your Friendster Account (Gen Kani)
- Fired For Blogging! (lee's weblog)
- Friendster No So Friendly (Lockergnome)
- Goodbye Friendster (Chasing Coffee)
Update
As I've been pointed out, Friendster has a long way to progress as it is still BETA and does not connect users in various ways as I have been thinking.
August 30, 2004
www.buys.co.za down *sigh*
Amazing what happens just after you send your your newsletter. Also the ISP where they host their website with's site is also down but I'm not going to upload that picture as well.
August 29, 2004
Wez Furlong's blog's back
Noticed today that Wez Furlong's webblog is back online after it's disappearance from the blogscape. Welcome back Wez!
Designing Scalable Infrastructure
I think it is time someone spends some time writing a book about designing scalable infrastructure to help those who are currentlty having to go through the learning curve to learn how to design a scalable infrastructure for their application.
Thinking about who could qualify for writing this book I would imagine someone from Live Journal or Omniti could easily write this book. I have from a certain degree not had to scale a perl application in ages, but I tend to have to scale PHP ones which I've designed.
The problem with sites gaining in popularity is that they get increased traffic and they require more CPU time. So throwing in more hardware all the time to make the site scale to many may look like the solution to their problem.
Profiling your code can also help. Then you can optimise your SQL queries, cache content, etc.
August 28, 2004
Webblog Tool Evolution
Over the past couple of weeks I've been thinking about designing a Personal Webblogging Service which would be more powerful and easier to use than various blogging software I've been testing to enable more features on my personal website. Part of the thing is that the blogging interfaces do not intergrate into the CMS which prompted me to start coding bits and pieces which could form my own Personal Webblogging Service of sorts to fix the issues which I have experienced.
Various things need to be taken into consideration to enable things like permalinks, feeds, etc. to still work the same after migrating over the the new software which integrates various features which Movable Type does not offer. One of the main things I think is because my experimental software is written in PHP it offers me more flexibility when coming to how I want to layout various articles, whether it is in Wiki format, HTML, plain text, I can plug in differnt text renders which I think is cool as sometimes I don't feel like writing HTML other times I do, but Smarty's nl2br is sometimes problematic, hence adding an option to not convert line breaks and various other text filters.
I wrote a guestbook module a few years ago for the Heinz Winckler Fan Club, which I'm thinking of fixing up to also use the TypeKey comment registration system. I suppose I could always go and write my own TypeKey type of service if I really wanted to, but having more usernames and passwords for users to remember tends to irritate users, so a common interface would most likely need to be developed.
One plugin for Movable Type which I like is the MT Blacklist from Jay Allen which enables one to block these trackback spammers from sending trackback entries to your blog which in turn links to porn sites, which is highly annoying on Movable Type 3.0D which does not allow one to keep trackbacks somewhere prior to accepting them.
Live Journal allows users to have threaded topics under a journal entry, which I think is quite useful.
Also their view of your friends recent journal entries is also quite cool, as one no longer has to go type in the URL to your friends journal to go and view their journal, their journal entries appears on your friends page.
I think looking at the various blogging / journal software there is no perfect solution to each users requirements, but one can find certain features you need in each of them, but they don't give you the ability to totally customise them to your needs.
Movable Type and Typepad makes it easy as pie to modify your the sytle and layout, while Word Press makes it as hard as possible.
August 27, 2004
Fixed </ul> issues
Yeah I figured out why Internet Explorer users kept seeing some weird things in the webblogs which I link to. It turns out that the other day when I was fixing my template for the main index for the blog, I was using </ul> instead of </li>.
One of the things I dislike about being sleep deprived and editing templates, you always make some silly mistake.
Testing Live Journal
I have setup a journal on Live Journal which I've started playing with to figure out how I want to evolve my blog. One of the features which I like about Live Journal is the fact that you can view your friends journal entries from a page which is sort of part of your journal.
August 23, 2004
Jay Allen has released MT Blacklist v2.0e
Jay Allen has released version 2.0e of MT Blacklist which I'm currently testing on my installation of Movable Type prior to installing it on friends blogs.
August 11, 2004
Only in .za
One would have thought that freedom of expression would be allowed in a country like South Africa, unfortunately corporates like Telkom and SAB Miller are known for supressing freedom of expression. Now Telkom's lawyers have decided to go after Gregg.
Hopefully this will not be like the case against Justin Nurses's company when SAB Miller went after them. It might be the time to link to Telkom's website for the term supressor of freedom of expression or something like that.
Well it looks like the dawn of a new era - an era in which freedom of expression is no longer allowed... One small step back for the Constitution, one giant leap back for Democracy.
August 9, 2004
August 2, 2004
Busy tweaking 'netevil'.
Been busy looking over at Wez's netevil codebase. Looks quite interesting, and I'm thinking that it might replace my blog with netevil at some stage. In the meantime I've started to contribute patches to Wez for inclusion in netevil.
July 15, 2004
Six Apart Expands now will they fix typekey.com mail?
Congratulations Six Apart on your acquisition of Ublog.
I'm sure Ben and Mena are thrilled at aquiring one of thier partners.
Now the question is can someone at Six Apart add DNS entries for MX records so that my incoming mail servers can accept mail from your @typekey.com mail addresses and that I can stop receiving mail like:
root@maquis:~# exigrep typekey@typekey.com /var/log/exim/mainlog
2004-07-03 14:41:31 H=(corp1.sixapart.com) [66.151.149.25] sender verify defer for : could not connect to typekey.com [66.151.149.12]: Operation timed out
2004-07-03 14:41:31 H=(corp1.sixapart.com) [66.151.149.25] F=
2004-07-03 15:28:53 H=(corp1.sixapart.com) [66.151.149.25] sender verify defer for
2004-07-03 15:28:53 H=(corp1.sixapart.com) [66.151.149.25] F=
...
2004-07-13 16:55:38 H=(corp1.sje.sixapart.com) [66.151.149.25] sender verify defer for
2004-07-13 16:55:38 H=(corp1.sje.sixapart.com) [66.151.149.25] F=
2004-07-13 16:56:28 H=(corp1.sje.sixapart.com) [66.151.149.25] sender verify defer for
2004-07-13 16:56:28 H=(corp1.sje.sixapart.com) [66.151.149.25] F=
2004-07-13 17:49:31 H=(corp1.sje.sixapart.com) [66.151.149.25] sender verify defer for
It would be appreciated as Six Apart are known for their web standards usage, now why can technical people do the right thing and adhere to the normal standards. Also you guys might want to add SPF records while you are at it as well.
July 9, 2004
New version of Movable Type Installed
I was hoping that Hetzner would have my files but they've deleted the contents of the HDD and I don't have my blog files, various other files relating to a few sites that were hosted on that particular drive, backup files for some software I've written, tarballs, etc. etc.
Anyway the blog is backup minus all my content. Hetzner you okes suck. :/ It's always nice to know that you guys don't do backups either.
I'll be remaking the tarball for SMS_Clickatell version 0.4 when I have time.
[Update:]
Disclaimer: I hereby give notice that I am merely exercising my right to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, that the above is my opinion and that I am protected by the constitution from any legal action that may occur as a direct or indirect result of my opinion. This constitutes an opinion on the current status quo and not an attack on a person/s or company.
Also I've found a tarball of SMS_Clickatell 0.3 which is online.
June 10, 2004
sun.com has a blogging portal
Sun Microsystems look like they have enabled their staff to have employee blogs. Which I think is quite cool. I would love it if people at work would be open minded about the possibility of having a work blog where all the guys and gals could post interesting snipbits etc. online, as the bulk of the stuff we are doing is web based, it would be nice to get user feedback and stuff.
Also on a side note I think it's cool that Sun's open sourcing the solaris source code. Good on you sun!
June 7, 2004
Silly Comment SPAMmers
My page about Comment SPAM seems to have more spammers trying to sell body part enlargement and point to out sites. Also one thing I can't figure out is why do the comment spammers always say silly thing like I like this site, Good post, etc. when they don't have anything relevant to say on the topic.
It really confuses me.
April 4, 2004
Colin Viebrock has a blog
Colin Viebrock, one of the co-founders of easyDNS Technologies in Canada now has a webblog.
Colin is infamous for designing the PHP.net website, writing the musical "Top Gun - the Musical".
Colin has also designed logos for well known open source projects such as PHP.net, the Horde Project, and Zend to name a few.
March 29, 2004
How late is it?
Noticed that the timestamps on my blog posts looks odd, is it daylight savings in Europe again?
March 13, 2004
One man. 1,240 miles. Alone in the Arctic.
Taking a look over at Damien's website I noticed that he's the one who designed the website for the Serco TransArctic Expedetion.
Also the website was featured on the Web Standards Awards website for winning a Web Standards Award.
Continue reading "One man. 1,240 miles. Alone in the Arctic." »
January 16, 2004
Comment SPAM on the increase
I've started noticing an increase of comment SPAM on webblogs. As a matter of fact 2004 seems to bring out the comment SPAM people who add 3 comment SPAM messages to the same article and hope that you do not notice.
January 15, 2004
Backstage
Was busy tweaking 'backstage' a bit this afternoon, and managed to add a couple of features of from a code fork of backstage which has become a profile editor for another project I'm working on.
November 16, 2003
When Your Mom Finds Your Blog
Was busy visiting Jim's website and I noticed that he was blogging about the following:
this help item from blogger.com is funny: “what to do if your mom discovers your blog...” i like the idea of going multi-lingual. (the blogger item was inspired by this story at the onion.)
November 15, 2003
Six Apart Typepad
Started testing the TypePad service from Six Apart, Ltd the makers of the Movable Type weblog software that powers my weblog.
October 5, 2003
Updated a few settings
I've updated a couple of settings with Movable Type so that trackback pings should be working now as well as the Google API has been enabled as well.
May 15, 2003
Blog Installation Service
I've been thinking about offering a webblog software installation service as well as a "dedicated blogger" web hosting plan, which would allow users that do not know what they are doing to setup their own blog without even downloading the software themselves, but by running a simple php script that I've written that makes it easy as 1-2-3 to setup software like movable type without knowing how to use tar, gzip, etc. etc. or even requiring shell or ftp access.
more blog$hares...
Well good old James Cox seems to have had a fieldday purchasing the bulk of the available shares in my blog :P
Anyways lets see how the linkage stuff works to improve my blog's valuation.
Ken Coar's Burrow of sorts :P, the bare naked ladies (well the URL looked interesting :P) We have a band here called "Springbok Nude Girls" who are all guys who just happen to be clothed.
May 14, 2003
more blog$hares
Blog$hares
I seem to have been listed on Blog$hares and James Cox from the php.net project pointed this out to me over IRC.
March 16, 2003
PHP.net search semi fixed
I was busy fixing a PHP.net website bug yesterday morning regarding searching on PHP.net where you are starting a new search within search results would not give you the results linking back to your prefered mirror you came from like the initial first round of results.
