come on down to clug park and meet some geeks online

Week of upgrades and becoming a Mac Kiddie again..

• Monday, carwash, gym, photo processing, Clifton walk, veggie dinner at Henk’s.
• Ingi moved out, Kris moved in. Ingi is now living with BB.
• February is the best month in Cape Town, nice weather, less tourists.
• Tuesday, admin, pool cleaning, home PC upgrade (extra 1TB and nvidia card), walked from Vredehoek to Andy’s lookout spot along the cable car contour road with Georg, very good lentil moussaka at Sidewalk Cafe, Waiting Room with Henk, Elodie and Karen, dinks at Julep.
• Henk has this theory that there is an over-supply of woman in Cape Town, that’s why so many nice girls tolerate losers.
• Wednesday, TF brand strategy workshop at Aiden’s with Jonathan, Posticino pizza at Posticino, nap, run to Bantry Bay.
• Thursday, tea with Jaco at Neo, installed the new MacBook Pro, big backup day, TF meeting, nice Thai yellow beef curry at Carlyle’s with Georg.
• I do a big off-site backup every 3 months. It’s about 100GB now (not counting any audio/video). A terabyte seemed like a lot of space a while ago.. not so much now, but it still takes forever to move around.. you can tell I’ve been creating RAID sets?
• I’m a Mac kiddie again. Actually not much has changed since the v10.3 days. I now have a MacBook Pro 13″ with 8GB memory, a Magic Mouse, Apple keyboard, 26″ LCD and Griffin elevator stand… all working very nicely together. Oh, and a groovy exo-skeleton-like Crumpler Gentleman Farmer bag.
• Lesson of the week.. don’t be afraid to pay for expert skills, it’s quicker than doing it yourself and you learn a lot in the process.
• One more lesson.. stand for something. Some people will love you and some will hate you, which is way better than not even being noticed.
• I’ve been pondering two things this week.. that point where you act on strong instinct.. and, the question you ask yourself after you created something.. is it beautiful?
• Friday, breakfast with Jonathan at Crush, gym, business plan workshop at the Barn, fetched Mia, Orms visit, sunset Beta Beach walk to play with the new circular polariser.
• I had a chat with a friend recently.. I asked something like “how is fatherhood treating you?”.. he commented that it’s a bit strenuous on the relationship between him and his wife.. and mentioned that it’s hard without a support network of grandparents who live nearby. Statistically, many relationships end in the 1st year of having children. You can probably guess why this is interesting to me. Even more interesting is unsupportive grandparents who do live nearby.
• I think I’m an excellent ex (-;
• Saturday, uber juice, gym, swim, lunch at Depasco with Keith and Georg.. try the balsamic chicken sandwich on yellow corn bread, photo safari around Cape Town CBD with Keith, snacks at the Eastern Food Bazaar.
• Sunday, uber juice, stuffed ourselves with watermelon, gym, swim, picnic at Kirstenbosch.. watched aKING with Debby, Georg, Gerjo etc.. seems Mia was not so impressed, more watermelon, awesome sunset, great light.
• Selecting good photos is turning out to be harder than taking them.. it involves discipline and routine.
• I think I need to change the way I answer my phone.
• Tune of the week: Why Do I Keep Counting?, Sam’s Town, The Killers.
• Mia seems to like The Killers.

• “Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors.” — R. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

• I’m thinking of making Mia a compilation of all the music from her 3rd year. She’s turning 4 at the end of March.. “Full of stuff she likes. Full of stuff that make her happy.”

Have a fun week kids.

It hit my mailbox today – the decision to put the entire letter in a jpg file probably got it past gmail’s spam filters… but sheez, this is absolutely terrible… terribly perfect as a rip-off that is…

Get this:
1) Firstly the spelling and grammar is actually almost acceptably good !
2) It puts a whole new spin on the usual “God bless you for your help” and other religious crud in the “help me collect my dead husbands fortunes” 419s by pretending to be from a Christian in Saudi who had converted (along with the dead hubby) from Islam
3) It then goes on to state that the purpose of the money for her is to use it for charity ! To build things like cancer research centers !
4) The “I have cancer” bit is a nice (if rather fucked up) twist…

Sheez… I can just see a million fundamentalists falling for this one… Here is the letter as I receive it.
Please if you get this – IT IS NOT REAL. These scammers have in the past committed fraud, theft, kidnapping and even more violent crimes than that against people who respond. Do not fall for it.

Oh, and whichever scammer came up with this one… you know, “Sister Mary Jones” is really not a very believable name for a lady who was born to a Muslim family in Saudi Arabia !

419 Scam

I used to work for OLPC, whose mission is to distribute low cost laptops for education, without necessarily the connectivity with the outside world. Now at Praekelt we’re focusing on using connectivity as the power – harnessing the deployed base of mobile phones in Africa without requiring them to be smartphones or computing devices. As part of this Praekelt Foundation and Vodacom are hosting the Betavine Social Exchange Cape Town Developer Day 2010.

I’ve asked Steve Wolak to tell us more about Betavine and the event.

Who is Steve Wolak?

Stephen Wolak, Founder and Head of Betavine, has worked in mobile technology and software since graduating from Imperial College, London. Stephen joined Vodafone Group R&D in 2000 and in 2006 put forward the idea of an open platform for engaging the wider technology community with R&D activities.  The rest, as they say, is history.

MC: I first became aware of Betavine when looking for 3G drivers for Linux, but I’m sure there is more to it than that. What is Betavine and how did it start?

SW: Betavine was launched in January 2007 and has been evolving ever since, with new features being added in response to new requirements and feedback from the user base.  One area of success has been the linux software for the Vodafone Mobile Connect (VMC) card which has been downloaded over 750,000 times and has created a lively community around it.

We have also run a number of successful competitions on the website and created a lively Widget Zone. The website continues to evolve and we try out new things.

MC: What is the Betavine Social Exchange?

SW: This is our latest idea.. creating “social and sustainable” mobile solutions.  The Betavine Social Exchange seeks to bring together 3 communities; the mobile community, the social sector and the entrepreuners.  Together these communities can create mobile solutions for the social sector.  Community organisations create challenges on the website and mobile developers / social entrepreneurs create solutions. The website then supports the deployment of these solutions on the ground.

MC: The BSX’s success certainly depends on connecting the right people: those with needs – the NGOs and community organisations – and the developers. How do you publicise the BSX to reach them?

SW: We are running our pilot in South Africa and so we are working with Sangonet to help us get in touch with South African NGOs.  We are running a developer day in Cape Town to help us engage with the local developer community.

MC: What do the resulting solutions include – are they apps for mobile phones, mobi websites, SMS solutions or all of the above?

SW: All of the above.  It is important that the solution is appropriate for the challenge and the local community that will ultimately use the solution.

MC: What can developers expect from participating in the BSX?

SW: They can find real world challenges that people are seeking solutions to.  They can meet other developers and find useful resources to help them create a business.  The full resources section is coming soon.

MC: Which leads us on to the Developer Day being hosted in Cape Town next month. What’s going to be happening at the event, and how does it tie in with the BSX?

SW: We are keen to encourage mobile developers based in South Africa to engage with the real challenges that have been posted on the Betavine Social Exchange.  The developer day will include presentations on mobile technology and some exciting mobile solutions plus a developer competition and lots of creative energy and networking.

MC: You’re going to be speaking at the event. Who would you like to see there?

SW: I would like to see mobile developers plus those with design skills and a passion for using mobile technology for social change.

MC: We’re having a developer competition on the day. Can you tell us anything about the prizes/incentives you’re planning to bring?

SW: Well, the developer day is free and includes lots of food and drink plus some beer at the end of the day … :-)  We also intend to offer a few prizes for the competition winners .. But we have not decided exactly what yet.  You will have to come along and see but tickets are going fast!

Developer Day details

Date: Wednesday, March 10, 2010 from 9:30 AM – 7:00 PM

Location: The Lightbox Daylight Studio, Green Point, Cape Town

More information and free tickets are available at eventbrite. Due to the demand, the event has been expanded to 70 people.

"System Design, is one that as a profession we talk about less than I believe we should. It is, in many ways, the most important and most difficult thing that we engineers attempt to do. I believe that we avoid talking about it because it is hard, and seems somehow “unscientific.” There are clearly some designs that are good and others that are not. But the judgment of how good a design is often seems subjective or based on aesthetic principles rather than on the cold hard facts that we are engineers who pride ourselves on forming the basis for all that we do. I hope that this essay convinces some readers that the dichotomy between science and art or engineering and aesthetics is not clear, required, or even desirable. What we do must be grounded in fact, but it also needs to be grounded in taste. We should revel in that rather than trying to cover it up. It makes what we do more difficult, but also much more interesting."

It’s not often I do two posts on the same day, let alone with radically different content, one a humorous parody of a band – and now a genuine serious
article on a matter of great importance to me. I suppose it’s just the way my mind works.

As the outcry over the President’s affair and subsequent fathering a child continous, I have lost whatever tiny smidgen of respect I once had for
Hellen Zille. Unlike most people who may make such a claim – I don’t support Zuma as a politician either however. I don’t think he should be the
president and I don’t think he should be re-elected. Unlike Zille however, my statements to this effect is based on critique of (many of) his policies
(and recognition of the correctness of others), his performance at the implementation of those policies and – most importantly – the fact that he
used weasel techniques and legal technicalities to avoid prosecution for the fraud charges he faced – instead of standing in a proper court. As the
accused he had the benefit of the doubt. He didn’t even have to prove his innocense, he’d walk away a free man with no controversy if they couldn’t prove
his guilt… when you have that kind of odds… and his kind of money… it’s pretty suspicious if you dodge the trial.

But none of this removes his rights as a citizen of the country. Privacy is not a negotiable matter. It’s a basic human right. Like free speech, free labour,
free thought, free association… but then I have never really believed that Zille believes in any of these things. Let’s be clear about this, the DA’s
policies are about as liberal as Rush Limbaugh painted pink… purely skin-deep and even that facade is filled with cracks.
They do not, because most of their voters do not, really believe in these human rights. Like all concervatives they think “I have these rights, and you
can have them too – just as long as you only use them to do and say what I agree with.”
The difference can be summed up like this: concervatives and liberals both claim to believe in freedom of religion. But a liberal means “let anybody have
the right to believe what they want”, a concervative means “let me have the right to force my particular brand of religion on all of society without
restriction”.

Now wrap all that up in a politician and you get Zille’s opportunistic grab at the news headline that Zuma had a child out of wedlock. Zuma rightfully
points out that his sex life is a private matter (and what, in this world is more private than that ?)… and she claims he doesn’t have a right to privacy
about his sex life because other people look to him for examples.
Sorry – reporting his sex life in the newspapers should not be tolerated. Free press does not mean the right to privacy goes away. It means they can
report in the public interest without restriction. Who any particular person fucks is never in the public interest to know… sorry, I can’t think of a
single example where an individuals right to privacy would not outweigh this need. If he was caught with an underaged girl that would be another matter
because now the legality of his private actions are at stake. But sex between consenting adults is a private matter… end of story – there can be
no debate about this – if you start making exceptions on things like this… very soon – none of us will have any privacy.

Think it can’t happen ? We lived in that world not long ago. Remember the puritans ? The victorians ? The latter is barely a century ago –
in what was already a liberal nation! Just 25 years ago, here in South Africa, the government decided that sex with somebody of a different race was
immoral, and forbade mariages between them as a little bonus. Technically it was sex-out-of-wedlock that was illegal, but it would only apply if that
sex happened where wedlock was prohibited. Their morality (which I’m sure Zille would publicly claim not to agree with) came to be a law that caused some of
the greatest hardships in this country.
My fathers generation saw four brothers who all grew up supporting appartheid all become opposed to it during their lifetimes via various routes. For one
of my uncles – the heart of that opposition came about when he was a young prosecutor working in a magistrates court and watching case after case of
people’s lives being destroyed for falling in love with somebody they weren’t allowed to.

Because the people in power had decided that their personal morality should have the force of law.

Fundamental to the democracy we built after 1994 is the basic premise that individual human rights are sacrosanct. That personal choice is a right and
we do not have to conform with every idea of society – even the popular ones. Whether I agree with Zuma’s behavior or not is irellevent. The fact that
I know about it without his deciding to tell me himself is however a basic violation of his rights. This attempt to attack him based on his personal
moral and cultural values and for how they do not comply with those of the conservatives who vote for the DA is nothing but outrageous.

None of the excuses bandied about for why his behaviour should be decried hold any water. We’re told we should violate his privacy and complain because
he is an example to the youth who follow his lead. Nevermind that actual research shows this just isn’t true (at least off sexual behaviour)… the fact is
if his rights had not been violated in the first place- the youth would never have known what his behaviour actually was !
Saying he is a role model who should live by a higher standard is one thing – demanding that to be YOUR higher standard is quite another. Zuma is acting
as a perfect role model for the values he believes in. You may question those values, this is our constitutional right, but you may not force him to accept
yours. That’s the law.

This is a secular nation now – with good reason. Because we felt in severe suffering the results of letting morality and religion have the force of law very
recently. Believe what you will, express your beliefs but do not enforce them on others. You may not like Zuma having four wives and an affair – but nobody
is forcing you to do the same, and you can’t force him not to.
Whatever else it may be, it’s not a political issue by any means. You aren’t supposed to pick a politician who agrees with your morals, you’re supposed to
pick a politician just liked you’d hire a staff member. Based on his fitness for the job at hand. We don’t get to ask potential staff members their sexual
preference – the law has seen fit to protect people’s privacy in that regard – why should we get to ask a politician if he believes in polygamy or not ?

It’s probably discriminatory that polygamy is only legal if you ethnically belong to one of the cultures where it has always been tradition, it should be
allowed or banned across the board – but then I don’t believe in giving cultures special treatment – that is what discrimination means. The fact is though,
Zuma has not – in this instance, broken any of the laws of this country. His actions are perfectly within his rights as a citizen of this nation.
That fact that his job is public doesn’t mean his life is. By that logic so is the lives of every other public servant as well. Do you think we have
the right to know if a postal worker is gay or not ? Nor do we have the right to know the sexual activities and preferences of politicians unless they
choose too tell us.
I don’t believe in censorship – but preventing a newspaper (also known as a corporate entity – e.g. NOT a human being anyway) from profiting
from the violation of human rights is not censorship – it’s PROTECTING free speech. Court decisions here and abroad has consistently found that the
sex lives of celebrities are not news in the public interest. A politician is nothing but a celebrity postal worker and should enjoy the same protection of
his rights.
The fact that Zille is jumping up and down screaming “adultering polygamist” while people in her province are starving to death is the very peak of
self-righteous political hipocricy that has caused the terrible state that the world is in today.
It’s one thing for Hayibo to joke about her Botox treatments, it would be quite another for them to steal her medical records to prove their jokes.

Now I know I’m fokken famous but I was still kina surprized when my phone rang and Yo-Landi asked me out cos she’s way more fokken famous than I is. At least now that MaxNormal ditched the three-piece suits and reinvented themselves as Die Antwoord.
I’m not even all that used to girls asking me out, throwing me undies with their number on is a more usual approach but I guess she’s a bit fokken old-fashioned in that regard. So I spent some time thinking what a chick like her would actually, you know like, dig and shit, and came up with this perfect date plan.

Hired the perfect car (a 1988 Toyota Hilux bakkie met fucked suspension), and picked her up from her posh pozzie in *censored* where her bra’s DJ HiTek and Max Waddy first read me the fokken leviete about taking good care of her and not fokken playing with their little friend and having her home before fokken dawn…
So off we go to her favorite fokken restaurant (a wimpy drive through) and then to go watch the the city lights from some fokken naais romantiek hilltop somewhere. Next fokken thing I know… she’s like: “bru… jy’s fokken tasty, pomp my.”.. and one thing jumped on another en toe creak daai fokken hilux se springs harder as HiTek se fokken next-level beats.

I had to stick my finger in her mouth to suck on – but mostly to make her stop trying to fokken dirty talk cos that’s just not on … at least, not the fokken way she does it… what can I fokken say ? I mean she may be a fokken zef rapper but I don’t think rapping the lyrics of rich-bitch during orgasm is all that fokken appealing, besides she can’t rap as fast as fokken Max so she wasn’t keeping up with the rythm of the fokken springs and I wasn’t gonna slow that down. Fok daai kak.

Anyways, about five seconds later she’s complaining cos I’m taking too long and she’s getting fokken tired, so we finish off and I drop her off…

She’s fokken awesome.

DISCLAIMER: This post is a parody review of the band. I did not in fact go on an actual date with Yo-Landi in a Hilux (or any other vehicle) and I did
not in fact sleep with her, or in fact ever even meet her (so if there’s ever a paternity claim I know it aint mine)…
I just wanted to get into the spirit of the thing. I dig the irony of the band, and I hope they’ll dig the irony of my chosen review style.

1. Electrolite – R.E.M.
2. Corduroy – Pearl Jam
3. Rain King – Counting Crows
4. Dig For Fire – Pixies
5. 3:45 No Sleep – The Cardigans

..oh, most of the stuff from the Wes Anderson movies and obviously Disintegration by The Cure.

Jacob Zuma has made no meaningful stamp on the history of South Africa.

I have blogged about Jacob Zuma's rise to power in the ANC before.

I am reminded of Winnie Mandela's response when asked for comment about Thabo Mbeki's re-election bid in 1999 - she said he "deserved another chance". I am sorry - "deserve" is a strange modern word like "it's not fair!" - creation of a concept that did not exist 100 years ago. When running for election the more important concept is what the electorate "deserves", not the incumbent running for re-election.

I have tried hard to justify Zuma's election to the highest office in South Africa - his struggle credentials, his common touch (in contrast to his predecessor), his stance regarding Robert Mugabe to the north. Even his proud Zulu ancestry.

I have also blogged before about the Zulu culture of polygamy - Zuma is now dubbed "Africa's most famous polygamist". But his latest child, the result of an affair with the daughter of a good friend Irvin Khoza (six years his junior) means that I have lost the faith.

Where do we start ? I pick his notoriety as a father - I see nothing else of substance that he has done as president. During the ANC succession debates, Thabo Mbeki warned against the cult of personality - and reminded his comrades how hard the ANC as an organisation had tried to avoid that. Zuma has become that personality.

Let us count the children. On his official site, www.thepresidency.gov.za he is listed as having 19 children. That page was written before the latest revelations, so I will up that to 20. By all accounts, he has no children by his first wife, four by his second, five by his third, two by his fourth, two by his fifth, and two now by other women. We are still short by five.

As Nomboniso Gasa writes in the Sowetan, we expect someone who holds public office, whose salary we pay, whose children are educated at state expense, to be held to a higher standard than the common man.

He admitted to another extra-marital affair, unprotected sex, in December 2005, also with the daughter of a struggle comrade - AIDS-positive to boot. He was cleared of rape charges, with the encounter deemed consensual. Much was made in the media of a shower he took afterwards, supposedly to minimise his AIDS risk.

After that trial he admitted that he had erred by not using a condom with an HIV-positive partner. Just four years later, we note that again he did not use a condom in an extra-marital affair. In December 2009 on World AIDS day he exhorted "But that does not mean that we should be irresponsible in our sexual practices. It does not mean that people do not have to practice safer sex. It does not mean that people should not use condoms consistently and correctly during every sexual encounter." This two months after his latest child was born to Sonono Khoza.

As Patricia de Lille said, Zuma is asking people "to do as I say and not as I do".

In the course of my work with computers in South Africa, I get to see many different township schools. There are excellent schools, and others less so. The common denominator I have found is the principal - the fount of discipline at the school. A clean, tidy, motivated school environment invariably indicates the same of the principal.

South Africans need a president to be proud of, a president to emulate. They "deserve" better than Jacob Zuma.

CUPOOTINO, California. Steven Jobless, CEO of Crapple Corp, announced his company’s long awaited tablet form-factor machine last Wednesday. Whilst sequestered in the backwoods of Tennessee last year, Mr Jobless spent a lot of time waiting for medical test results and considering the meaning of life. Whereupon he had what he described as a “number 1 experience”. It hit him – the perfect Captive Market. The new product, marketed as the iPoo is of the ideal form factor for use whilst positioned on the lavatory. Unlike the early tablet products produced by their competitors, the iPoo is not a fully fledged compooter, but follows the Jeff Raskin school of thought on what constitutes a suitable “Intuitive Interface” for the average user.

Marketing of the new product is intended to involve heavy use of anti-social media – each geek on the planet is forced into deciding whether they would buy the device or not. Since most of them think it’ll be shit, it’ll count as a ringing endorsement for the non-tech savvy public. It seems that the geek public is waiting for the next shitteration of the device.

Taking full advantage of the DRM the product provides, it comes in two models. The slightly more expensive option, “Comes with Porn” (seemingly aimed at competitor Noklue) unlocks DRM for porn on the device, and also uses a new technology known only as “3D-multitouch” (details not yet provided at time of going to press).

We spent some time after the media announcement assessing the mood amongst the company faithful, and by and large that mood was one of “Relief”. Reaction amongst the Linux community was less positive, with comments ranging from “We invented Brown” (Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth), “We invented shit-casting” (Communitization manager, Jono Bacon) to “It’s Crap” (Fabian Scherschel, from the Linuxoutlaws).

After a year and and a bit as a software developer at the Remote Sensing Research Unit of the CSIR’s Meraka Institute, I’ve now transferred to a new team (still inside Meraka), where I’ll be working on SANReN’s design and roll out, thus moving the focus of my day job back to networks.

SANReN will no doubt lead me to interesting discoveries that I hope to publish here¹ so please keep reading :-)

1. None of it will be confidential information. Also, none of the views expressed here represent any official position of my employers.

No idea what intro to use for this week’s post..

• Monday, tea, Toy Story, gym, swim, smoothie, aquarium, Naulene fetched Mia, bought 3 electric toothbrushes.. 2 for Mia’s 2*N redundant lifestyle, walked from Vredehoek to the Kings Blockhouse with Georg, beer and supper at Sidewalk Cafe.. nice pot of mussels.. nice spot to watch the sun set behind Lions Head.
• I always figured electric toothbrushes were a gimmick, not so, my dentist suggested I get one, I agree, just feels cleaner.
• Tuesday, sold my shares in Frogfoot, photo processing, a run to Clifton 1 and a beach walk, cocktail at Kyoto Garden Sushi, dinner at Sidewalk Cafe with Keith, Georg and Parri.. very good calamari and awesome cheesecake.
• It’s funny when you are in a beautiful environment without a camera it somehow forces you to be a bit more conscious of the moment.
• Wednesday, gym, dentist round 3, GeekDinner at the Wild Fig.
• I think facebook is more like TV than we’d like to admit. I read a study that claimed about 70% of facebook users have a read-only experience. I think it’s probably worse than that. Just because people have the ability to publish and interact does not change they way they consume. So instead of having 200 TV channels they may now have 500. So much for the read-write culture idea.
• Thursday, lots of admin, lunch at Gourmet Burger with Abz, ordered a Macbook Pro (with 8GB memory), TF meeting, a late veggie dinner.
• Friday, gym, breakfast at Crush with Jonathan, haircut at B’s, Orms visit to shop for a polariser, Canon S90 seems pretty cool, hardware shopping, Cavendish to buy a few shirts, burger at Royale with Georg.. try the Jack Daniels and peanut butter milkshake, Neighbourhood.. try the Mojito Okinawa, Mint Julep at Julep, La Vie with Aiden and Cams.

• “Manners are a great thing.” — Aiden

• “Drive it like it’s stolen.” — Mark at Julep

• Saturday, Origin with Georg, watched The GODS first gig at the Hidden Celler.. very good, Akker.
• Loads of fun walking around Origin at dusk with the 85mm.
• Thank god for that Paul van Dyk CD.

• “The deafening sound of fuckall.” — Andrew, about Origin starting at 13:00

• Sunday, woke up in Stellenbosch, fetched Mia, breakfast at the Blue Orange with Cath and Parri, Andrew’s birthday braai, dropped Mia off.
• I figure this is a good week to stop drinking. For a long time.

Lots of photos to go process now..

Someone did a Google search for “how to price ip transit costs south africa”, and ended in my apache logs when they followed the search result to this site.

Having never worked in the ISP industry, I’m not really qualified to answer, but here goes anyway:

If you have this much bandwidth:

ZA can has traffic?

…then do this:

1. Randomly choose a price thats so expensive that it’s economically infeasible for your customers, then dial it back until you have ~100 reluctant customers.
2. Bill for transit by traffic volume in giga-bytes, call this a “quota”.
3. Hard-cap the “quota” so that the customer would exhaust it on the first day of month.
4. Expire (steal) the customer’s unused quota at the end of the month.
5. Oversubscribe like a lunatic, and then be vague about this to your customers.
6. Redefine “Internet access” to exclude certain popular protocols, and then buy a router that forwards those specific packets slower, or not at all.

If, on the other hand, you have this kind of bandwidth:

MOAR please.

…then do this:

1. Bill customers monthly for a 5-minute average traffic rate (Mbps).
2. Offer a variable per-Mbps discount if they commit to a minimum rate, and allow them to set the rate (to zero, if they like).
3. Don’t fine them for traffic spikes, instead, discard the top 5% or 10% of the 5-minute averages each month.

Here is the thing though, aren’t the graphs symptoms, and not causes of the pricing strategy?

For the past few months I’ve been working on the LTSP-Cluster team at Revolution Linux. Today we’re releasing the website so that we can tell the world what we’ve been doing!

LTSP-Cluster is a set of tools and plugins for LTSP that allows you to extend LTSP so that it can scale up to hundreds of servers and thousands of LTSP clients. It has a nice web interface for your LTSP configuration, does load balancing between your servers and more. It can even connect your LTSP thin client to a cluster of Windows terminal servers or NX servers, if you’re into that sort of thing. If you’re deploying LTSP soon, you’d probably want to investigate LTSP-Cluster, and I’m not just saying it because I’m involved in the project

It’s licensed under the GPLv3 license and supported by the LTSP community, you can also get commercial support *wink* *wink* from Revolution Linux where plenty of very skilled people are ready for your LTSP related needs.

Like any internet routable IP address, I am being blasted with the usual kinds of wide range port scans. However, yesterday afternoon I noticed something strange while checking my firewall logs. I was getting a huge amount of incoming UDP packets on port 18919. It was coming from all kinds of different IP addresses across various subnets and it almost resembled some type of DDoS attack.

Does anybody else know anything about this, or am I the only one to notice these?

[Currently sitting on desk in study.]

[Given to Anna and Ollie at their wedding.]

My mom gave me a sand art kit for my birthday. Result 1/3.

[Given to confluence on the occasion of her 28th birthday.]

As Scott posted before, the Edubuntu Bug day went quite well last week. This coming Thursday (21 January) we’re doing a Wiki Hug Day to to focus our efforts on fixing things in the Edubuntu wiki namespace, it includes:

• Fixing broken links
• Removing horribly obsolete or broken pages
• Moving pages which are in the wrong place
• Prettifying pages
• Mark pages that may need to be on the Edubuntu website instead
• Any other improvements we can think of

We’ll officially be starting the wiki hug day from around 12:00 UTC to accommodate the time-zones of our current contributors. It will be co-ordinated in #edubuntu on the freenode network. If you’re familiar with Edubuntu and know a thing or two about wikis, feel free to join in and get involved!

O M G! This is the most delicious champagne!

More: continued here

Yesterday I looked at very simple theming in Pylons, and mentioned that I'd prefer loading the current theme from the database rather than the configuration file. So this evening I decided to see if I could achieve that.

Looking in environment.py, I noticed that SQLAlchemy and the models were being configured and initialised last in the load_environment method. I moved those two lines up to the top of that method, and changed "config" to "app_conf". Then I simply did a normal Session.query() to fetch my theme name out of the "variables" table in my database.

Now that I had my theme name, I constructed my theme directory using the path to the themes directory from my configuration file and the name of the theme from the database. Then I set up my static files and tempaltes directories using the new theme directory.

Lastly, I wanted to do something that Drupal, the CMS that powers this blog, does with it's theming system. Drupal has a set of fall-back templates so that if you don't provide (whether by mistake or by choice) all the templates a theme needs, the default Drupal templates are used. This was very easy to set up, because Mako's TemplateLookup class accepts a list of template paths. So all I did was add the normal Pylons template path to the list as well.

So now my file looks like this:

def load_environment(global_conf, app_conf):
    """
    Configure the Pylons environment via the ``pylons.config`` object
    """
    # Setup the SQLAlchemy database engine
    engine = engine_from_config(app_conf, 'sqlalchemy.')
    init_model(engine)
 
    # Pull out theme variable
    theme = Session.query(Variable).get(u'theme')
    if not theme:
        theme_name = u'default'
    else:
        theme_name = theme.value
 
    # Pylons paths
    root = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)))
    theme_dir = os.path.join(app_conf[u'themes.directory'], theme_name)
    paths = dict(root=root,
                 controllers=os.path.join(root, 'controllers'),
                 static_files=os.path.join(theme_dir, 'public'),
                 templates=[os.path.join(theme_dir, 'templates'),
                            os.path.join(root, 'templates')])

As usual, any comments or suggestions are welcome

For a while I've been thinking about how to achieve themes in some of my Pylons applications, and just today I was looking around in my environment.py file, and saw the configuration of the templates and public directories. That gave me an idea, can I load a theme directory from the configuration file and use it in there?

I had a bit of a false start initially, I thought that I could just use the config object as I do elsewhere in my application, but that didn't want to work. Eventually I found the solution: the app_conf object.

This is how my code now looks:

    ...
    theme_dir = os.path.join(app_conf['themes.directory'], app_conf['themes.current'])
    paths = dict(root=root,
                 controllers=os.path.join(root, 'controllers'),
                 static_files=os.path.join(theme_dir, 'public'),
                 templates=[os.path.join(theme_dir, 'templates')]
    )
    ...

And the relevant lines in my config.ini file:

themes.directory = %(here)s/themes
themes.current = default

Each theme is simply a directory with two subdirectories, "public" where my images, styles and scripts live, and "templates" where my template files live.

I'm still looking into how I can pull the current theme from the database at this early stage of the application, but this is a start in the right direction.

Hopefully, this will help someone else. If you have any suggestions for a better or more elegant solution, I'd be keen to hear about it.

Happy 2010 everyone!

I’m not sure how I’ll ever top the 2000’s, it was quite an action packed decade for me, it’s sometimes hard to believe that in 2000 I was still in school

I haven’t made any big goals or plans for 2010 yet, I guess I’m happy with the direction things are going at the moment,  in short I plan to:

• Stay in Canada for a few months (probably over 2 visits)
• Get my motorbike license (appointment is for 1 March)
• Up my Ubuntu involvement more. Revolution Linux gives me at least a full workday a week for Ubuntu related stuff so this shouldn’t be hard
• Continue getting fitter- been doing great at the gym recently and I’ve been going 3-4 times a week for the last 2 months

I feel very good about this year, hope it turns out great for everyone!

Cape Town boasts a wide variety of Jazz, with the calendar centred around the Cape Town Jazz Festival, on the 3rd and 4th April this year.

My introduction was via Monday Night Jam sessions at Swingers, which I found in late 2006. (Others have blogged about Swingers as well). Swingers can be found at 1 Wetwyn Road, Ottery - such a short road that you cannot miss it. GPS location :- 34.000936S,18.503765E as it seems I cannot add Swingers to Google Maps. In 2006 it was a cramped but busy venue, the brainchild of Kevin Harris, that had been running since about 1985. He expanded 2007, to vastly larger premises at the same address, and it even has a facebook group where you can find even more photos than the links above. My pictures are from the old location.

On Monday nights entrance is free for the Jam session. There is a large kitchen there too, and if you book ahead (recommended) they will reserve you a table. The House band kicks off about 9:30PM, but the real action starts later - I tell visitors that you will miss the best of the Jazz if you leave before midnight. So - stay late!

Another (more accessible) jazz venue is Pilano's, in Kalk Bay. GPS 34.129493S, 18.448582E. This is a stunning venue with big picture windows looking over the sea at Kalk Bay harbour. On Sunday they have a Jazz night, also with no cover charge. A friend Buddy Wells usually plays here, a noted Jazz saxophonist who studied under Winston Mankunku and I have also seen him play at Swingers. He also plays tonight with Tutu - below.

Swingers hots up considerably in the weeks surrounding the Cape Town Jazz festival, as visiting performers make their pilgrimage to Kevin's venue.

I went to a tribute performance for Winston Mankunku just before he passed away in 2009, and I went to his memorial in Gugulethu after his death. This week I went to see Tutu Puoane - another South African Jazz singer now living in Belgium - perform at Oude Libertas -just another beautiful Amphitheatre in Stellenbosch - tonight she performs at the Cape Town International Convention Centre.

While trying to install a fresh copy of Ubuntu Karmic on my home server while on local-only ADSL, I was surprised to find that the installer took some serious time over configuring my package management. After some investigation, it turns out that za.archive.ubuntu.com is now pointing overseas.

$ tcptraceroute za.archive.ubuntu.com
Selected device eth0, address 10.0.0.2, port 40677 for outgoing packets
Tracing the path to za.archive.ubuntu.com (91.189.88.31) on TCP port 80 (www), 30 hops max
 1  10.0.0.1  0.822 ms  0.536 ms  0.525 ms
 2  * * *
 3  cdsl2-rba-vl2563.ip.isnet.net (196.38.73.213)  66.394 ms  66.815 ms  67.348 ms
 4  cdsl1-rba-vl11.ip.isnet.net (196.38.73.37)  69.400 ms  66.765 ms  66.147 ms
 5  196.38.73.86  67.547 ms  145.898 ms  71.422 ms
 6  cdsl1-rba-vl58.ip.isnet.net (196.38.73.81)  67.501 ms  65.758 ms  66.198 ms
 7  core2b-rba-te2-0-1.ip.isnet.net (168.209.1.182)  67.346 ms  122.184 ms  67.403 ms
 8  mi-za-rba-p6-gi2-0-0-302.ip.isnet.net (168.209.164.173)  368.621 ms  365.957 ms  367.828 ms
 9  mi-us-25b-p2-po2-1.ip.isnet.net (168.209.160.213)  366.350 ms  367.134 ms  365.615 ms
10  core2a-ny-gi1-0-19-302.ip.isnet.net (168.209.164.124)  407.520 ms  608.075 ms  845.757 ms
11  168.209.244.21  559.901 ms  898.657 ms  348.690 ms
12  12.86.158.25  349.102 ms  342.504 ms  340.242 ms
13  cr2.n54ny.ip.att.net (12.122.130.134)  369.922 ms  369.597 ms  369.422 ms
14  ggr2.n54ny.ip.att.net (12.122.130.5)  341.299 ms  342.279 ms  340.849 ms
15  192.205.33.94  363.115 ms  364.654 ms  364.087 ms
16  vlan79.csw2.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.68.16.126)  351.098 ms  349.668 ms  343.381 ms
17  ae-71-71.ebr1.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.134.69)  363.079 ms  365.153 ms  363.173 ms
18  ae-44-44.ebr2.London1.Level3.net (4.69.137.77)  339.174 ms  339.574 ms  348.962 ms
19  ae-100-100.ebr1.London1.Level3.net (4.69.141.165)  334.342 ms  335.395 ms  334.459 ms
20  ae-3-3.ebr2.London2.Level3.net (4.69.141.190)  338.931 ms  342.750 ms  343.615 ms
21  ae-26-52.car2.London2.Level3.net (4.68.117.48)  337.617 ms  335.361 ms  337.871 ms
22  gi1-0-1.oxygen.canonical.com (195.50.121.2)  342.183 ms  339.843 ms  342.108 ms
23  leningradskaya.canonical.com (91.189.88.31) [open]  334.685 ms * 335.591 ms

This is a monkey solution (at best) but worked for the time being:

$ sudo sed -i "s/za\.archive\.ubuntu\.com\/ubuntu/ubuntu\.mirror\.ac\.za\/ubuntu-archive/g" /etc/apt/sources.list
$ sudo sed -i "s/security\.ubuntu\.com\/ubuntu/ubuntu\.mirror\.ac\.za\/ubuntu-archive/g" /etc/apt/sources.list

I neglected to post this earlier, but the slideshow I set up for my lecture at Wits last month is uploaded here:

What is it called when:
Despite having visited the same fridge or cupboard less than 2 minutes previously, and having previously also not found something appropriate, you still obsessively open that same fridge or cupboard looking for something.