Freedom!

In the software community, (especially the free software community) there has been great amounts of talk about what is free software. GNU and Richard Stallman has a definition, and so has our "common sense"... what is free? Well, it costs nothing, but according to GNU it doesn't *have to be without cost*. For them the true freedom is to be able to do what you want, and add and edit what you want with the software (for this case I'll add knowledge to it).

I never quite understood it. Why would anyone ever stand in the way of this type of freedom? I still don't know why people would stand in the way... but what I do understand now, is why Richard Stallman is so fanatical about being given the freedom.

I've been trying to push a freedom of knowledge base... and some people (who are responsible for documenting systems etc.) cannot seem to fathom that wiki-based knowledge is
1) empowering for those who use it (they can teach themselves stuff they never had access to),
2) grows at exponential rates
3) self regulating
4) for the good of all
5) multiplayer notepad. (I love that)... though it was first cliched for IRC.

They think that the knowledge won't be audited, and that people will start to follow the wrong principals. But if the wiki is active enough, and they (who are people who can authorize is) are active on it, the knowledge will continue to be passed on, and on and on.

And if someone inhibits those awesome features of a wiki, then I feel the need to passionately fight for the right of freedom too.

Open Street Maps

This is the wikipedia for maps, which I think is a kind of a ubuntu way of life for the world. Everyone with a GPS should log their travels and upload the roads into the Open Street Maps!

I wish I had a GPS so I could easily add to this wonderful project!

Open Office 3.0 Calc vs Excel

This post might be edited later, or further posts will follow.

Excel (and Access) is the benchmark no doubt when it comes to the two Office packages. If Open Office can do what excel can do, and DO IT THE SAME, then there's no reason to pay for MS Office...

Anyway, here is something that Open Office Calc does differently, and I think it's cool, MS Excel does this differently (it grows the selection to the width of the merged cells).

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.

Sunset

Another one. Taken a while back, but even that day I walked a bit to find this shot. I doubt it's great, but hopefully you'll have an idea how breathtakingly beautiful it was for me.

Alarm Bleeps...

I recently had to change my alarm on my car... I don't know if I *had* to, but the auto-mechanic said that the alarm was giving trouble, and well, my feeling is, that if I take it back to him every time, I can have what he's used to in the car. It wasn't cheap, but hopefully it will add to reliability.

The interesting thing about this alarm though, is that the "On/Off" bleeps are inverted from how the old one was. My old one was :
1 Bleep : On
2 Bleeps : Off

Our house was always set up like that, and I recall the installers saying "the amount of letters after the O is what it means".

So my current alarm is:
1 Bleep : Off
2 Bleeps : On

How do I get used to this? Well what I did was I decided that when it goes Bleep, it's my car saying "Hi!", and when it goes Bleep-Bleep, it's my car saying "Bye-Bye!".

So now, when the card says Hi, I say Hi back, and when it says Bye-bye, I say bye-bye back. This will hopefully get me used to it.

Face book - Application privacy

Well... I know I won't be using the "Send Secret Thoughts" application anytime soon.

Rain in the cape

Yesterday we had rain so highveldlike which we don't often see here. Hail, thunder and lightning, and high volumes of rain in a short time. This picture is after the rain has been gone for at least half an hour, showing how the drain pipes can't handle the sheer volume of water. Fascinating and scary.

Kulula EMERGENCY Poolboy

I'm no amateur,
this is not toy.
I'm an expert in my field,
I'm emergency pool boy!
I'm a jet setter,
I'm a jet setter.

When H2O needs fixing,
Kulula is my ride,
if swimming pool is greener,
on the other side
I'm a jet setter.

I provide a personal service,
more personal than you think,
satisfaction is guaranteed,
nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Jet setter!

Love the advert, reminds me of Desperate Housewives.

Beinjing Pollution? -- Cape Town

So Beijing has a lot of pollution... I believe it's pretty bad... but Cape Town's is pretty bad too if there is no wind blowing it all around.


That part there you can almost see... that is Table Mountain. There is a whole lot of mountain that you cannot see in the picture.

If you look carefully at this picture, you can see a mountain range (Stellenbosch's surroundings) on the right of the image... There is also, if you zoom about 300% onto the middle of the image, you'll be able to see a hint of it still there... but to the left of it it's totally obscured.

Cape Town is set to host quite a lot of games of the 2010 Fifa World Cup here, and if the Olympic committees had issues there, similar issues could be raised here.

We in Cape Town also need to get our act together in terms of pollution.

Card shark

My cousin tossed this card about 5m across the room (missing his target by about 50cm) only to have it peg into the banana. Pretty sweetly too. I found it a little bit frightning and visions of bullseye in daredevil came to mind, but cool enough to share.
Yes... We ate the banana afterwards.

Animals

When I drove to work this morning, I was driving behind a guy with a bakkie, with 2 dogs in the back. They were loving it. I know that Gary Larson in his Farside comics often thinks about what it would be like in our world had dogs (or cows, or flies, or other animals) been just like us --- almost.

Anyway, what fascinated me was (as dogs always do) how they wanted to keep their faces in the "wind". I suspect it has something to do with the wind otherwise bothering them in their ears, but maybe it just gives them a sense of freedom.

Another thing that fascinated me, is the fact that dogs, even though they do not really invent new technologies like cars, understand quite in real terms, the implications of these technologies. They know not to run in front of the car, or not to jump off the car while it's moving.

The last thing that fascinated me, is the interspecies relationships. Dogs and cats interact. Birds and hippo's have sybiotic relationships. But is there really times in the wild where species interact to such a way that we can really call it friendships? Interspecie relationships thus far is extremely rare... So two thumbs up for everyone of us with an interspecie relationship! :-)

What linux *must* change

I don't want this to be a tech blog, and it will never be... Anyway...

I've been an advanced computer user (programming, modifying, etc) for more than 20 years now. I've worked on Apple II, DOS (from 3.0-the end), several Windowses (95,98,2000,NT,XP,Vista), and several linux distros (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Red Hat, Gentoo). And there is this part on it that totally gets me confused and not wanting to explore...

THE ROOT DIRECTORY:
/bin
/boot
/cdrom
/dev
/etc
/home
/initrd
/lib
/lost+found
/media
/mnt
/opt
/proc
/root
/sbin
/srv
/sys
/tmp
/usr
/var


Hello? Can't we use a "little" more descriptive names?

/bin Ok, so by now I know this is binaries... but which binaries? I'll tell you one thing... ALL the binaries are not there. (Also please note... not a recycle bin - shouldn't be "emptied".)
/boot is good. Like it keep it.
/cdrom... well, it's good enough on it's own... almost like D:\
/dev devices maybe? This isn't perhaps the development libraries? (I'm trying to convey a point...)
/etc well, this is where it all started. What is /etc? What's the difference between that and /usr... and /usr and /home? I've tried to explore it, but it's got about 2 gizillion "files" in it... Windows has "Program files" where the space messed everything up for the first 2 or three years... but one thing I can say is that it's descriptive.
/home I know now. It's good, and can stay. But what is /usr then?
/initrd I have no idea. Something with initialization. But it's not part of /boot.
/lib This I know is libraries. Thinking of it as a literal library may make it easier to accept the total levels of chaos in there... (sorted chaos, but to the untrained eye, it is chaos) *phew* and don't get me started with the cryptic library names.
/lost+found Well, at least it's descriptive. I have no idea how to use it... or what even goes in there. But it's descriptive.
/media This makes sense, and wasn't there years ago. It's a good addition. And in a way makes /cdrom unneccasary.
/mnt GRRRR... I know now (ok for about 12years now) what is a "mounted" device. But we have media now thank you... /mnt or /media... why both?
/opt I dunno... I think it's new from the old days, and I assume it's options. Why doesn't it then go into /home?
/proc Again... No idea. Procedures? Processes? No idea, never visited there.
/root Okay... I know what / is... /root? I assume it's root's /home folder?
/sbin ... Uhmmm /bin is binaries... sbin? No idea.
/srv This one is new to Hardy. I assume it's server stuff. Dunno, don't care.
/sys *sigh* what is in here? Must be "system" stuff... but what isn't covered in /dev /opt /proc /boot /initrd?
/tmp Now here's one I can identify and understand. We don't even need an "e" because the data is so temporary we don't have time for the "e". So /tmp can stay, I'll be forever grateful.
/usr Well... see the comments on /home and /etc
/var No idea... Variables?


A fresh windows (vista, XP, etc... /etc?) install has about 5-8 "folders" in the root. It "hides" all the stuff that I don't want to know about. And it all looks clean and understandable.

Please Mr. Shuttleworth or Mr. Torvalds, please, please can we make this part a bit easier?

Cuil

Well... they've got a decent concept. BUT I don't believe them that they don't use my private data. Because, I search for word vine (a really cool game) on CUIL, and it found (on an image)... Vine Trellis... a Magic: the gathering creature... Now I ask you, how did a search engine that doesn't poke around in my private data, know that I have an interest in Magic the gethering?

Another issue that bothers me... is the navy blue on black background. I like navy blue, and I especially like black as a background... but no... they don't go together well. I cannot read the "preferences" (If you select it with you mouse you can read it) link.