Archive for July, 2007
Are we training enough Open Source competent people in SA?
Jul 25th
Working on the “dark side” of development, ie, the Open Source side has many distinct advantages, but it is becoming more and more apparent that there is a major skills shortage in South Africa. In all the businesses I have worked with, one of the recurring problems is finding good open source versed developers and unix skilled system administrators.
The problem as I see it is many of the Universities, Technikons and private learning institutions are still focused on teaching ASP, Visual Basic, Windows Servers, and so on, and the market is becoming more and more saturated with these skills. Where as on the other side of the spectrum there are gaping holes for competent staff.
With that said, if you are one of the few highly skilled PHP/MySQL (don’t be modest now!) developers, please get in touch with me, with your CV and/or some code you have written, so I can point you to some companies who desperately need your skills and are willing to pay for them! Specifically in Cape Town, South Africa!
Technorati Tags: PHP, MySQL, LAMP, Open Source, Developers
A Springbok supporter deep down.
Jul 20th
It doesn’t often happen when you get to take a snap of a die hard All Black supporter, wearing a Springbok jersey. Nevermind the circumstances or reasons, I just thought I’d share with the planet, John Ingram our conference facilitator, wearing, proudly I might add, the Springbok rugby jersey. If you happen to know John Ingram or any of his friends, please spread this around.
Sorry, John 
Technorati Tags: Springboks, All Blacks, John Ingram
SalesForce or SalesFunk?
Jul 12th
And by Funk I mean, as in Funky smelling, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw this.
USB Humping dog
Jul 11th
I think I just found the ultimate gadget for my computer, the USB Humping dog.
Whoever came up with this gem needs to be rewarded!
How to measure website success? Page views or time?
Jul 10th
I just thought I’d share an interesting article with the rest of you, because it made me think about how I analyze my readers, whether they are just visitors who have no real interest in my content, or if they actually stick around and read what I have to say.
So in future I’ll try post some items worth reading :]
How to measure website success? Page views or time?
Technorati Tags: The Register, Analytics
What is this crap?
Jul 10th
On my way to work this morning my ear drums were raped by what is probably the worst jingle I have heard since the 80s, for a website called RapidInfo.
Well it did its job by annoying me so much that I had to actually check it out, and well, the site look and feel matches the jingle. Where did this crap come from? Who actually paid good money for this and is willing to blow more on radio advertising? Please please PLEASE whoever you are call me to arrange an appointment so I can slap you.
Go check it out and have a laugh, www.rapidinfo.co.za and yes, I am not linking to it because I don’t want to help their SEO.
Oi vei.
Technorati Tags: Total Crap, Money Wasting
Are we giving Google etc, too much power?
Jul 8th
I have been sick the past few days and my mind has had the time to idle away, well, just thinking. Browsing around the internet many of you may see, as I do, the many sites that are using the ‘Google Analytics’ tool by none other than Google to track the statistics of their websites. This in itself is pretty harmless generally speaking, but using the analytics tools Google would have the ability to track your visitor’s from site to site, browsing patterns and what not. I’m not familiar with their privacy policies and I don’t think its in Google’s interests to sabotage their clients, but it is just scary knowing the power they have. Even more scary is the fact that its completely free, and at any given moment it could be switched off, leaving businesses without the necessary marketing tools they have been enjoying up to this point. 
Then I thought about GMail, but more specifically the ‘Google Apps’ offering, which I now host the mail for my own domain (ddj.co.za) as well as phpusers.co.za, also free services, with no guarantees from Google, just leaves me feeling slightly insecure. I would almost feel more comfortable paying, if I wasn’t such a cheap skate :]
The thing that really bothers me about this is, not really the reliance on the servers as much, but just the information that these companies have about me. Google has all my mail, highly personal information (banking statements etc) and Facebook knows everything about me, and all the people I know, and all the people they know. Am I being watched, maybe if I was someone more important :] 
All I know is, if I meet people that work for Google or Facebook I will surely be nice to them, or my mail, money and god knows what else will be at their mercy :]
Technorati Tags: Facebook, Google, Big Brother
Mac OS X on a PC Update + Ubuntu 7
Jul 3rd
Some of you may have read my initial, extremely short and uninformative post about installing Mac OS X on my PC. Well I got a little bit ahead of myself after installing that, soon realizing that I couldn’t actually do much with the PC as I was having a lot of incompatibility problems, drivers, and so on. Enjoying the challenge, I decided to keep looking around and I eventually found another, considerably better ISO image for Mac OS X (x86), running a later version (10.4.8) and patched for SSE2 and SSE3 CPU’s.
So, if you’re up for it google for ‘mac jas 10.4.8 sse2 sse3′ and download the image from your favourite torrent site. Burn the image and at the boot screen push F8 and the enter ‘-v’ to get verbose output during the install so you can see if something goes screwy. Make sure to uncheck printer drivers and only install what you need, also use the disk utility from the Utilities menu and make a Mac partition for yourself. I decided to leave some free space and not use the entire partition as I was going to try and run a dual boot configuration, but a bit more on that later.
Once installed I was faced with the driverless config of old, this time I was not installing it on my PC but on my older notebook, which is a HP Compaq NX7000 (Pentium M 1.5GHz [SSE2], 1.25 GB RAM, Bluetooth, ATI Mobility Radeon 9200, Built in 802.11b, etc) I managed to source some drivers for the Radeon 9200 which worked pretty well and allowed me to change the resolution to the native 1680×1050 offered by my laptop. I installed Microsoft Office Mac 2004 successfully, firefox and some other apps with no problem. Having such a crummy graphics card in the laptop does limit the performance some what because it does not offer something called “Quartz Extreme” or QE so the GUI is not as quick as a native mac or SSE3 machine, but it is still very useable, just don’t try and watch any videos in full screen or use OpenGL applications.
Once I had my laptop working pretty well I decided I would try the install on my more suited PC which I described in my last post (Pentium 4, SSE3, Geforce 6600). This time it was much more successful as I managed to find some drivers by the name of ‘Titan’ I suggest you check these out if you have an Nvidia card, otherwise, visit this site to check your hardware compatibility and possible driver links for what you need. The Osx86 Project has some awesome resources so browse around their site, you are almost certain to find what you need. After all my pain my PC runs Mac OS X extremely well with full video acceleration, and I have had no compatibility problems as yet so I think I have a winner there, but its just not as convenient as a laptop :]
OK, Jumping around a bit here, but after installing Mac OS X on my laptop, using the ‘free space’ I had allocated during the install, I tried to go ahead and install Ubuntu 7 on that partition, at first it wiped my boot loader for Mac, but after reading some guides I found that editing /boot/grub/menu.lst and adding in my Mac partition to the boot list, this problem was solved, and, I was seriously impressed with Ubuntu, it still boggles my mind that such great software is available for free. I think I have found my new home development environment, I installed all my development tools (Eclipse / XAMPP), hardware and personal items with such ease, the Ubuntu developers are definately on to something good hopefully they’ll get the community support they need (or enough of shuttleworth’s $$$) ;]
If anyone has any questions about my configuration of these operating systems don’t hesitate to ask, I will see what I can do to assist you, although I know very little on the subject :]
Good luck!
