Technians?

I can understand that you get break in transmission when your people can't even spell technician. Small things tell a huge amount about incompetence.

For people whose internet connections are not on ubuntu itself

http://apt.alturl.com/ rules. Put in what you need (library), and use downthemall with a filter on *.deb, to get all the files. Set the downthemall to skip the existing files, and you can get your own little offline repository going.

Mshini Wami - For new anthem and Bok emblem

I quickly made this from the current logo and the wikipedia AK47 article.

It comes from my lunch discussion I had about the bok emblem, and how we should really have Mshini Wami being sung, rather than our anthem, because the "Stem" part is embracing the old afrikaner regime.

Anyway, my personal take on it is, we should keep the Bok emblem, because IT DOES NOT represent the negative stuff of the past. I'd remove the anthem, and sing Shosalosa.

Wordpress vs Blogger

I was recently invited to co-post at the tenletter games blog, which is hosted on Wordpress.

For me, the way blogger lays things out's user interface is cleaner than Wordpress's.

In the above screenshot, you *might* notice the publish button to the right of the editor. In user interfaces... that should really be at the bottom of it.

However, the features at wordpress is really cool, from pingbacks to statistics and other cool things make it really good.

So, my recommendation (if you don't already have a gazillion blogs) - blogger is "simpler, better, faster". Wordpress is more features, more complex.

My Daily Web Experience

This will take you through my typical day of being on the web...

1. I log onto gmail.

There I check if I have any new personal emails (not tons a day, often none, sometimes a bit more). I try to reply to them ASAP, though obviously work goes first.

I also check for any progress in my Diplomacy game. I'll respond to them ASAP too if I deem it appropriate for my tactics/strategy.

I am subscribed to several lists and blogs, so some of them automatically goes to it's label, and leaves the inbox (typically high traffic lists), or some lie in my inbox for my perusal. The most important lists are:
1. Lazarus mailing list.
2. Slashdot
3. Facebook junk
4. The straight dope
5. My church's mails
6. Seth Godin's Blog
7. Lots of other randoms, like ToME or Open Office's newsletter or KDE's newsletter and so forth.

2. I look at my iGoogle rss feeds
Then I am taken to my iGoogle feeds... I have some blogs on there, and some webtoons. I've got more on there than I actually read, so maybe I should reduce it? Anyway, those that I still read regularly is:
1. xkcd
2. Basic Instructions
3. Happysad
Those that I have, but don't follow,
4. Dilbert
5. Cyanide and Happiness
6. Calvin and Hobbs

I have some news feeds on there too, news24, and BBC (i think).

Blogs on there
1. Tenletter
2. De Naakte Priester
3. Ker!ching retail
4. Some cricket blogs
5. Keo

3. Random searches and browsing
Other than that... well, not much. I'll browse wikipedia from time to time, and I'll join the freenode server on Mibbit (an IRC webclient).

If you think there is something absolutely essential I'm missing... let me know!

I also run a very cool wiki for myself (which sports a decent TODO list, but also other useful information).

Popular Mechanics

I don't generally read their magazine. But the South Africa edition, for the month of October 2008, had a long article about how google make us think differently. Quite interesting, and quite ironic, as they say that we generally struggle to read more than one page at a time now, because of the way the internet is structured now... and then the article is about 4 pages.

Anyway, their graphic designer made a mistake... hopefully not (maybe it was intentional?), but they wrote htpp, instead of http.




Whoa... that's a bad error to go past everyone...

SVN frustrations

Again... I don't want this to be a techie blog (probably because I'm in the land of the blind, and I have one eye... and I've seen the land of the sighted...)

Anyway, my searches on google failed to help me here, so I am hoping this will help people out. (THIS IS DONE AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!)

My SVN kept dying (during checkout - and afterwards during update). And leaving me with a state where neither svn up, or svn cleanup would work. Giving me this error:
svn: Error processing command 'modify-wcprop' in

The advice other people gave, was to remove the directory and start over... this works ok, but the trouble is when it's in the root of the 50mb svn... then remove the directory (and it's subdirectories) won't work.

Here's what I did, and again... NO WARRANTY.

I deleted the .svn/lock file. Then I just did svn up, and it completed it!

Anyone reading this, that know and understand why this is a bad thing please comment. Also if you did it and it worked, also please comment.