Which features would you like to see in the new MXit app?

Or, which new features would make you use MXit?

I’m guessing most of the people who read my blog don’t currently use MXit, but I bump into MXit people fairly often and I have some ideas for features. I’m not looking for a long detailed list – I’m more looking for things that are cool and exciting and fun and useful – big impact ideas. Mini disclaimer: I don’t work for MXit, but TrustFabric is part of the same group of companies.

A bit more context: I’m thinking iPhone or Android app here. I guess I’m trying to get the perspective of other geeks like me more than the current MXit user. The following are a few of my ideas – some of them may not be that realistic. Please let me know if you like these ideas and if you would add something to the list.

The Basics
All the things you would expect from a smart phone app: A convenient replacement for SMS. Easy install. Easy way to get started and find your friends. Push notifications, so you can leave the app active in the background. Nice view of past conversations. The only new thing I’d add to this list is end to end encrypted (client-to-client) messages.

Money
A wallet and a payment system in the real world. Read: be able to buy a coffee or movie ticket. Easy payment based on my location would be cool – just a name and a swipe, no reading six digit codes to the person at the till.

Inner Circle
I’d like the app to know which of my contacts are close friends (strong ties) – people I would invite to a braai. It might figure this out from my call and SMS log to start – I’ll tweak it, but I don’t want to work hard at maintaining my inner circle list.

Events
When I arrive at a big event/party, I want the app to be able to show me which of my close friends are there, which of my connections are there and maybe how many of my connection’s connections. It should also help me plan a small event, like an ad-hoc after work drink or a Saturday afternoon braai.

Again, maybe not all of this is useful, but if I had this I might start using MXit, get my friends to use it and even get an iPhone (I like my Nokia E5).

Ideas?

Midgets dancing on the bar..

• Number of nights I slept at home this week: 2.
• Monday, raw green smoothie, dropped Mia off at school, visit to Will’s house to stitch a panoramic image, took a walk around Stellenbosch, watched The Other Guys.. brilliant.

• “I was so drunk, I thought a tube of toothpaste was astronaut food.” — Will Ferrell, The Other Guys

• 500 Twitter followers and 400 LinkedIn connections this week.
• Tuesday, morning walk to Lazerac, lunch with Theo, Mia visit.
• Wednesday, took Mia to school, nurse visit.. Discovery Vitality thing, vitB shot, got a USB3 compact flash reader.. my 2nd USB3 device, 180deg dental xray, fresh chilli juice with Max at Wembley Square, gym, a beer at Carlyle’s with Georg, early supper at Sidewalk Cafe, Wakami, a Guinness at Twankey Bar.
• Thursday, woke up in Cape Town, ScaleConf at Kirstenbosch, Hout Bay beach walk, sushi at Tukami (old Kink).. very good, watched Sherlock Holmes 2 at the Labia – very good.

• “Broken gets fixed, but shitty lasts forever.” — from ScaleConf

• Friday, Scaleconf, a walk around Stellenbosch, Beluga, Dom Perignon Luminous Experience at The Reserve with Georg, Aiden, Rob and LKB.. The Reserve is a bit over the top (the midgets dancing on the bar for example), but I think Dr. Ernst would love it.

• “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist.” – Oscar Wilde, via Dave

• Saturady, woke up in Cape Town, Mia visit and swimming, fish and chips at Trawlers in Gordons bay, photo processing.
• Only 2500 unprocessed photos to go.
• Mia can swim the length of her gran’s pool underwater now.
• Sunday, family day, Johnn’s 3rd birthday party.
• January was a busy month, I think February should have more routine.
• Just a tiny bit sad I missed Origin.

Have a fun week, crazy kids.

Holy Shatner

I was casually browsing Google+ statistics this morning when I came across William Shatner‘s profile and noticed a nice little public spat between him (who played the original captain Kirk in the original Star Trek series) and Carrie Fisher (who played princess Leia in Star Wars).

I like both Star Trek and Star Wars personally, and never quite understood why people would fight about it since they are two completely different things that happen to have the word “Star” in it.

William Shatner is a weird an interesting character. I admire him for still being so active being over 80 now. He even released an album recently, here’s him doing Bohemian Rhapsody:

Anyway, on to the spat

Here’s Carrie Fisher encouraging people to go troll William Shatner along with some other trolly things. In general it sounds kind of ignorant but some of it is pretty good:

And here’s William Shatner’s response, I love his Darth Vader interpretation. I once worked in a retail computer store and a client started yelling at me in a high screechy voice because the printer he bought didn’t work. I couldn’t help laughing at him and felt bad about it afterwards, this kind of reminded me of that, I think he would’ve been a great Darth Vader:

Not at all sure how much of this is faked, but it’s a bit of nice morning entertainment regardless

Dad and daughter weekend..

• Monday, morning walk around Stellenbosch, walked past the places I lived in 1996, 1997, 1998-2000, haircut – with clippers – which were connected to a wall socket – I guess I’m just a short-back-and-sides kinda guy, tea with Izak, chili juice with Cath at Wembley Square, swim, Lions Head walk with Andrew and Camila – carried up a tripod and took a series of photos for a panoramic photo project, nerd gathering at Hudsons in Green Point with Cath, a glass of wine at Georg’s house and fetched the last of the stuff I left there in September.
• I think I’m getting used to living in Pleasantville.
• Tuesday, omelette with Naulene in Stellenbosch, rock shandy with Alex, made a panoramic of Table Mountain, a walk around Stellenbosch, cooked my first meal at home – couscous salad, photo processing.
• Looking at some photos – 2008-2011 was a pretty fun ride – going to have to work to keep up the pace.
• Wednesday, office, got home and had no electricity, Mia visit.
• I think this heat is affecting my sleeping patterns.
• Thursday, woke up in Somerset West, took Mia to school, car service day, visited Will, sunset bubbly on Paul’s lawn, pizza at Morituri Stellenbosch with Paul and Victoria.
• I’ve managed to process all my pre-2011 photos and archive the masters – saved a fair bit of space.
• Friday, late lunch at Cuvee – Simonsig with the family, Kanonkop, De Oewer, a walk along the river in Mostertsdrif.
• Saturday, watched Stardust with Mia, lunch at Delicat – Tokara with Mia, Nikki and Andrew.. very nice ice cream, dress shopping for Mia, wine farm tour – Dornier, Hidden Valley, Uva Mira, Rust en Vrede, went to go kick a rugby ball on the Coetzenburg rugby fields.

• “No, seriously, don’t mention it. Reputations, you know – a lifetime to build, seconds to destroy.” — Captain Shakespeare, Stardust

• Sunday, raw green smoothie, we built Lego while listening to Hootie and the Blowfish, Dan Patlansky at Kirstenbosch with Mia, Paul, Claus, Jani and Philippa, pretty awesome bottle of Danie De Wet 2006 Reserve Chardonnay.
• Paul tells me Danie De Wet smuggled the first Chardonnay vine cuttings into SA.
• There is a special kind of happiness from finding Mia’s hat which I was pretty sure had been forgotten at Kirstenbosch the previous day.
• You know Mia has been visiting when there are little bits of blue feathers all over the place, from playing with her feather boa.
• Tune of the week: Die Illusie Van Veiligheid – FPK

Have a fun week, crazy kids.

Giving Unity Another Go

Yesterday I installed Unity5.0 and I was pleasantly surprised by some of its new features:

• I can set the panel background colour. By default, the Unity panel adapts itself to match the wallpaper colour. This doesn’t always work out, and with certain background colours it looks really horrible with the icons on it. I set mine to a none-harsh, dark grey and can now see my icons without any desire to fork out my eyes.
• I can set the launcher panel to be ever present. I have plenty of horizontal screen space and I find it annoying not having a window list present on my display. When I have to hover my mouse to the left edge and wait a few hundred milliseconds before I even see the list of open apps and where they are positioned, it just annoys me. Having them always on-screen is just so much easier.
• It’s fast and more stable. Unity 5.0 is noticeably more snappy than it’s predecessors. It also feels less buggy. What drove me away from Unity on Oneiric was that the window placement snapping got horribly confused now and again and the only way out of it was to kill Compiz or otherwise restart Unity. My session is 24 hours old already and still going strong

Some Areas that could do with Improvement

Update: I thought it’s worth mentioning that removing the Gwibber lens removed close to *500MB* of that extra 1GB RAM that was used. There also seems to be an issue where gdbus and dconf worker are way more busy than they should be (at least on my machine). I’m figuring it out and will file bugs if I can confirm them. When they behave better then memory usage in Unity and Gnome Fallback shouldn’t be that far apart.

• Global menus still get confused about running apps. Sometimes I’d get a Thunderbird title in the menu space and Thunderbird has already been closed. This is kind of weird when you’re not aware of the bug.
• Memory usage is high. I’m currently using around 1GB more memory than I typically would when using the Gnome 3 Fallback session with the same software running. I’m hoping that it stays there and that it won’t continue to rise due to memory leaks and other memory issues. This is a deal breaker on application servers.
• The Dash isn’t very pretty or user friendly. I guess the dash didn’t get much work or research done due to the focus on getting bugs fixed, so it’s probably not all that bad. At least you can right-click on the Ubuntu icon now and get a list of installed Unity lenses. The Dash home should really be customisable, and I’m not sure how users are supposed to do some rudimentary tasks like connect to a network share.

Overall Thoughts

Unity has improved a lot recently. I feel that I can continue using it if it’s memory consumption stays under control. I’m testing it on Ubuntu 12.04 which is currently in an early pre-release state. Unity crashed twice while writing this blog entry so I hope it’s just some underlying bugs that will be solved by the time Ubuntu 12.04 hits release.

As for deploying it at client sites, I don’t think I could recommend that until it’s memory issues are resolved. Losing 1GB of RAM is a lot. Simple day to day tasks should be more intuitive (finding recent docs, accessing menus, accessing what used to be known as ‘Places’, etc), and it would help a lot if the Dash home were customisable (I couldn’t find a way to do it from within Unity or anything about it in the documentation). The Gnome 3 Fallback session is very solid and very familiar and I think I’ll continue to recommend it for the typical user desktop. At the rate that Unity is improving though, that might soon change.

This year I just want to get more stuff done.

Motto for 2012:

Two friends of mine recently purchased iPads - Vernon asked me, as a computer fundi, to help him out on the installation. I always think it is useful to document first-time experiences - one adapts and forgets so easily.

Old timer

I have used Linux pretty much exclusively for the last 20 years. I have a pragmatic approach to my friends who use Windows - I have followed Microsoft's offerings from Windows98 through XP - I have an XP user's understanding of the later versions of Windows.

Apple I have pretty much never used. I have never owned one, I taught people how to use the original MacDraw, but pretty much have never used it since. So, when Vernon took advantage of First National Bank's interest-free loan to buy one, and asked my to check it out, I dashed over.

Fresh out of the box at his workplace in Cape Town, battery charged.

Internet

First hurdle - registration. There are a couple of Welcome.. screens, Name, country, etc. Pretty soon, it wants to get online to talk to Apple. Well, we had no wifi in his workplace, and the GSM SIM card was a "micro" variety, so I couldn't pull one out of my Nokia and get past that.

Failure.

Strike #1 - I can't even use this thing without Internet ? Ten years ago, this country only had dialup, and that was expensive. Requiring Internet before doing even the most basic things like taking a picture, writing a note, experiment with the touch screen ?

Vernon knew what to do - buy a SIM card, load with 100Mb data (costs R50, about $8). Weekend comes around - Andy, stop over. Some trouble getting cellular data to work through Vodacom. I had internet from my netbook tethered through my phone - google, ask on forums - ah, I need to enter "Internet" as the APN for the service provider. Would Vernon have figured that out on his own ? I don't think so.

As a side note - Ubuntu Linux knows all the main cellphone carriers in South Africa, and if I choose Vodacom on Ubuntu, it knows to put "Internet" as the APN (thanks, tumbleweed).

We walk through registration, no problems. Vernon had taken advantage of a free 1 hour course at the Apple store, and came away with "iCloud". So, we must hook that up.

An iPad manual

Back up a little - let's RTFM. Where is the iPad manual ? Nothing in the box - no paper, no CD (haha - no CD player on the ultra-thin iPad). A tap on Safari, a quick google - there is the manual, as a PDF on Apple's website. Old-Skool says:- "Save the pdf on the desktop". Safari has no options for that - wtf? Seems I am indeed old-school - the iPad has no desktop. Wait a minute - the out-of-the-box iPad comes with no manual, and there is no way to save a copy locally ?? More googling - oh - I must download the iBook application, and then get the (free !) iPad user manual. Sigh - consider it done.

Strike #2 - I need internet, some savvy, a new app, and a download just to read about how this thing works.

iCitizenship

Back to iCloud - Vernon had been told at the course that he needed a "United States" designation for his iCloud registration. Seems the only iCitizenship worth having is a US one - otherwise no music downloads and app restrictions, or something. I trust the Apple store man - how to do this? More googling - you need to attempt to get a free app from the Apple store, choose "None" as a method of payment, lie about your address, lie about a US phone number.

Strike #3 - to get the full benefits of this new iPad, one has to pretend to be a US citizen. South African simply doesn't cut it. You can buy it here, but there are heavy restrictions on its use.

GSM standards

OK - nearly there with the iCloud registration. Oops - I have no data left. Yep - I have burned through 100Meg of data just to get this far. A trip to the corner store - buy R110 pre-paid airtime, pull the micro-SIM out of the iPad, delicately put it in my phone (which takes a normal size) and walk through the USSD menus to load the airtime, and convert R100 of it to data bundles. R10 left behind as voice - whoopsie. Chalk that up to Vodacom ineptitude.

Strike #4 - the iPad comes with no SMS/USSD interface to the GSM network that would allow you to recharge a pre-paid SIM for data. You must take the SIM out and do it on a phone - that may not take the same size SIM.

Apple is using GSM - iOS (the operating system) is common with the iPhone - yet Apple stripped the GSM bits out of the codebase for the iPad.

OK - now we are sorted. I am unwilling to experiment much with iCloud - I have a feeling it could gobble up all my data again if I accidentally tap "backup" or something.

Games - nope - just a Games portal - go buy one. What, not even tetris or mines ? Oh well, was not really interested anyway.

Browsing is slick and fast, some study of the manual and gestures are easy and intuitive. Some struggle with outdated concepts like stopping running applications - I was pointed to this article by my Linux User Group.

Bluetooth

OK next - will it see my Nokia phone over Bluetooth ? My phone sees the iPad - tries to pair with it - nope. The iPad never sees my phone.

Strike #5 - Apple uses standards like Bluetooth for things like external keyboards, but does not bother to implement the standards properly.

Its like they think they are so big they don't have to bother. Receive a business card from my phone via bluetooth ? Pah - you must talk via Internet please. No matter that others value interoperability, here at Apple we have our own way of doing things.

I have paired my old Nokia phone with my newish netbook via bluetooth. I can easily move photos back and forth, and without even taking my phone out of my pocket the netbook will use it as a gateway onto the net. I can see that this brand new Apple iPad will not allow me to do that - either acting as a gateway, or being able to use my phone as a gateway for the iPad (which would have got over Strike #1 if I could have reached the settings menu, which I could not).

USB

And, last but by no means least - I cannot plug a USB stick into the iPad.

Strike #6 - there is not even a physical interface for a USB stick (or drive).

• Floppy disks were good in their day - but they got too small and unreliable. Snif - floppies are gone.
• CD were fantastic in their day - ubiquitous for two decades, they were the workhorse of transferable media. Now they seem bulky, small, and a tad unreliable. Snif - CDROM drives are fading from the landscape.
• USB disks are small, everywhere, fit on your keyring, and absolutely rule for data transfer. Even virus-writers target them, they are that convenient. The sun has by no means set on the USB thumb drive, but Apple, in their wisdom, choose not to provide an interface.

Now, that is just nasty. That was deliberate. I saw what you did there. And I am calling you on it.

And, just because of Strike #6, I am reviewing your motivations for Strikes 1 thru 5. I could have given you the benefit of the doubt over SMS, Bluetooth and Internet, but I see now this is deliberate.

Summary

The iPad lives up to its reputation as a beautiful piece of hardware. The Multitouch screen is a true Apple innovation, and is a pleasure to use. The few apps I tried seemed nice. Read about that elsewhere - it is all true. But the level of control that Apple assert over the products they sell brings the ugly out in me.

Apple - I will not be buying your products any time soon.

A few weeks ago I started receiving calls from this number on my cellphone. At first I got several a day. Then they slowed down to a trickle — one every one or two days, at random and inopportune times. If I answered, I heard complete silence until the call terminated. When I called back, I discovered that the number was invalid. When I searched for the number on the internet, I found similar reports about nuisance calls from other people, some of them overseas. This didn’t look like a deliberate crank caller — more like a misconfigured call centre. The calls were getting really annoying, though, and I wanted them to stop. So what were my options?

1. Software

If you have the right kind of smart phone, you can install software that will block specific numbers. I have a Nokia 6822, so I very much doubt that I can (if I’m wrong, please let me know in the comments).

2. My cellular provider

Surely MTN can block specific nuisance callers from making calls to your number? MTN Afghanistan can do it. How hard can it be? Impossible, apparently. According to MTN, all they can do is block all incoming calls to my number, which is not very helpful. The MTN representative suggested that I call the police to have the number investigated.

3. The police

Um… no. I’m not going to call the police to complain about a misconfigured call centre. I’m pretty sure they have actual work to do.

4. Telkom

Telkom issued this landline to someone, so they should be able to do something if they’re misusing it, right? I searched the Telkom page for an appropriate avenue for this kind of complaint. I couldn’t find anything specific, but they do have a crime hotline for reporting “criminal and unethical behaviour affecting Telkom”. I guess being negligent when configuring automated phone systems is “unethical behaviour”, so I gave it a shot yesterday, after receiving yet another call.

The crime hotline operator said that they had no ability to investigate issues of this nature, and instructed me to call Telkom directly (apparently the Telkom crime hotline isn’t Telkom). So I called the normal Telkom helpline, and after a lot of waiting and ignoring automated options I was redirected to an actual human. After hearing my story, he said, “Ooh, we have a department for just this kind of thing,” and dictated the number of the crime hotline.

After explaining that the crime hotline had just redirected me back to Telkom, I eventually persuaded him to look the landline number up. So he did. And then he said, “but that’s our call centre number!”

There you go, people googling this who are trying to find out who keeps robo-calling them. It’s Telkom! Mystery solved.

Telkom Guy said that he would escalate the issue to his supervisor, who would call me back (I hope after investigating why one of Telkom’s own call centres was randomly spamming people with silent calls).

About half an hour ago, I got another call from the call centre. I picked up, thinking that perhaps it was the promised return call from Telkom Guy’s supervisor. It wasn’t. It was a Telkom call centre operator trying to sell me an ADSL line. I explained that I already have a Telkom ADSL line, briefly summarised the problem, and asked to be removed from their call list. Did it work? I guess I will find out tomorrow.

Get your priorities straight
There is nothing more important than enjoying your life. Making sure that other people are enjoying their lives comes in at a close second. You are not a useful human being if you are not enjoying your own life.

Don’t sweat the small stuff
Gary Player famously said that the more he practiced the luckier he got. You can reprogram the way your brain reacts to truly stressful situations by practicing positive, stress-free, reactions to the little things that go wrong every day.

Get some perspective
Most of the stuff you worry about is simply not important. Your family and friends are what matter. They are irreplaceable. Your car getting stolen, your house burning down, losing your job, while all sad and frustrating, should not result in emotional trauma.

Emotional trauma is scar tissue
Years ago I broke my big toe by kicking a wall. It was stupid and every now and then my toe hurts for no reason. If you repeatedly kick a wall your toe is going to hurt all the time and you are not going to be able to enjoy your life.

It’s not over until you’re dead
Your health is important, but not more important than enjoying your life. I’m not suggesting you start a small heroin habit, but worrying about your health is futile unless you’re doing it while calling a doctor.

Put on your big girl panties when dealing with family
There are situations in life where you just need to make hay, even if you’re allergic and the sun isn’t shining. The normal rules of engagement do not apply for family. “Not talking” to some branch of your family is an incredibly sad outcome that should be avoided at all costs. No one is asking you to paint each other’s nails while watching Thelma and Louise on VHS, but for everyone’s mental health, including your own, sometimes you just need to just get out there in the rain and start throwing around some hay.

Appreciate what you have
Be thankful for the things you have, not because one day they might be gone or because others don’t have them, but simply because you do have them.

Stretch
This is not a computer game. When you die your life is over. Try and be incredible or die trying.

Yourself is the best you you can be
Countless Facebook posts will encourage you to sing like no one is listening. That is rubbish. Being yourself is the only way to be happy. This is not rocket science. If you want to sing, sing. If you want to spend your weekend reading a book to your cat, do that.

Stop
Close the door, put away your phone, sit down and spend some time thinking. Call it whatever you want but just do it, daily if possible.

This news is a few weeks old but I kept on meeting people who hadn’t heard so I figured a blog post was in order.

I have officially left TrustFabric and have joined Praekelt. Leaving TrustFabric was a hard decision. If Joe can pull of what he’s got planned, and I think he can, he will change the way we manage and share information online. I want that to be a reality.

My first few weeks at Praekelt have been great. I am now in a pure strategy role. Travelling back and forth between JHB and CPT, meeting amazing, talented people, having my mind expanded and learning constantly. My diverse background (travel, banking, advertising, telecoms, ISPs, online dating etc etc) is proving to be useful in ways that I never thought possible.

I’ll keep you posted.

A few days ago I needed to get into my parent’s house while they were on holiday. I was driving to my house to fetch their spare keys and fretting about having forgotten their alarm code. As I opened my front door the alarm keypad began beeping. I instinctively started punching in a code. As I was pressing the keys I became aware that the pin I was entering was not the pin for my house but a totally different pin.

When I pressed the last number I realised that he pin I had just entered was the pin for my parents house. A pin that I could not remember a few seconds ago.

Mind blown.

I didn’t blog about this when I first did it, because I didn’t know if it was going to work. Today I was relieved to discover that the water puddle in my kitchen was caused by an over-watered plant standing above the washing machine, and not the violent death of yet another y-shaped splitter, so I guess my solution is holding up nicely. But first, a description of the problem.

My flat, which was built sometime in the forties or fifties, has a single cold water inlet cemented into the kitchen wall. Since I have both a washing machine and a dishwasher, I need to split this inlet in two. The vast array of plumbing possibilities available for purchase in hardware stores near me comprises exactly one suitable part, which is a rigid white plastic y-shaped splitter.

The water inlet is a pipe which protrudes quite far out of the wall. When the rigid splitter is attached to it, and the ends of two inlet hoses are attached to the splitter, the resulting structure protrudes very, very far out of the wall. When people stand around in the kitchen chatting, and lean back on the appliances, as they are wont to do, they push the dishwasher further towards the wall. Subsequently, when the dishwasher is operated, its strong vibrations exert considerable force on the rigid assembly of pipes.

The dishwasher is made of metal, and the inlet pipe is made of metal, so the element which bears the brunt of the assault is the unfortunate y-shaped splitter, which is made of plastic. A fracture forms in the crotch area, water squirts through it at an alarming rate, and I soon have a small pond in one corner of my kitchen.

I lost two splitters like this. I really wanted to extend the inlet pipe with another hose before attaching the splitter, to give the whole assembly more space to flex, but I couldn’t find a female-to-male hose anywhere. It’s possible that they don’t exist. My inlet is male, all appliance hoses appear to be female-to-female, the nozzles on the appliances are male, and the splitter is one-female-to-two-male.

When I noticed that the inlet nozzle on my dishwasher is in a deeply recessed area, I tried an alternative plan: I attached the splitter to the dishwasher, one leg of the splitter to the inlet (using the dishwasher hose, with the convenient 90° kink next to the wall), and the other leg to the washing machine hose. This moves the entire width of the splitter and hose ends into the recess.

This might work for you if you have a similar problem but no recessed nozzle — having the splitter protrude at a different height to the inlet pipe is probably still an improvement over having them right on top of one another.

I switched from a desktop feed reader (Liferea) to Google Reader about a year ago, because my bandwidth is now sufficient for it not to be laggy, and because keeping Liferea synced on two machines was a huge daily waste of time.¹

I was annoyed that you couldn’t filter feeds unless you installed a somewhat obsolete user script and heavily modified it (and kept your filters synced by hand), but the feed and read item syncing was a major bonus. I can serve arbitrarily modified feeds from my own webserver if I really want to, but I recently unsubscribed from most of my noisiest feeds anyway.

Then Google redesigned Reader’s layout. By now, the wavefront of caps lock rage has circled the Earth several times. A lot of people are leaving Reader, and a lot of people are continuing to use it while complaining a lot. These are not your only two options — thanks to the wonder of user scripts and user styles, you don’t have to suffer other people’s poor layout decisions.

User styles

A lot can be accomplished with a static custom stylesheet — a large collection is available at userstyles.org. To install these styles on Firefox you need the Stylish extension. Chrome apparently has some limited support for styles now, but there is also a Stylish for Chrome. I hear it’s a bit crashy. Stylish lets you toggle stylesheets on and off easily. The order in which stylesheets are applied is random, which can cause some weirdness.

I currently use this redesign with my own special sauce tweaks. I also like switching to two columns when reading long text feeds on a wide screen, but that doesn’t work so well for image-heavy posts — I’m thinking of writing a feed-specific script for this.

User scripts

Changes which require manipulation of page elements need Javascript. You can find a wide variety of scripts at userscripts.org. To use them on Firefox you need Greasemonkey or Scriptish, and Chrome has native support.

I use a script which adds favicons to the entry list — useful when you’re viewing multiple feeds in a folder. The script also allows you to specify custom favicons, but I think this functionality is broken in the new design.

1. Yes, I know Liferea can sync with Reader. It gives you a huge flat list of all your Reader feeds, which you can’t re-order, arrange in sub-folders or filter. This is completely useless.

'the idea of immediate compilation and "unit tests" appeals to me only rarely, when I’m feeling my way in a totally unknown environment and need feedback about what works and what doesn’t. Otherwise, lots of time is wasted on activities that I simply never need to perform or even think about. Nothing needs to be "mocked up."'

Donald Knuth 25 April 2008

(Okay, so I'm slow to the party. As always.)

I went to the Whisky Live Festival in Cape Town last Friday evening - the last day of the Festival - definitely a good choice.

International Convention Centre

Emma, a visitor from Scotland, persuaded a group of us to go, and we made our way to the International Convention Centre. We got a group rate, and 12 redeemable coupons for tasting. We decided that we would specialise on the single malts - a whisky made from the product of a single distillery rather than a blend between distilleries.

The first surprise we got was that many of the stands asked for two coupons per taste, rather than the one we had been expecting. However, this did not turn out to be a problem - by the end of the evening nobody bothered asking for coupons as it was the last day.

The booth babes were gorgeous, and most seemed knowledgeable on their products.

A good early stop was made at the stand for the Whisky magazine, who issued awards for the whiskys. The gentleman on the stand said that the overall winner that year had been a Japanese whisky - but it appeared that there were no Japanese whiskys available for tasting in Cape Town, either on his stand (stocked with also-rans from the competition) or on other stands. He recommended the Independent bottlers stand as worth a visit.

I had an early taste of a Dalwhinnie - from a very impressive stand giving tastings. I learned from Emma about Speyside - one of the centres of the Scottish single malt industry.

Glen Grant

Another stand that stood out for me was the Glen Grant stand, where the very knowledgeable South African Marketing manager gave us a rundown of their products. They also had a whisky workshop, where they had three sessions explaining the process of making whisky.

I managed to get a seat in the workshop, where the white-haired gentleman explained the process - which starts very similar to beer. Malted barley is cooked and rinsed to extract the sugar - maltose, created by enzymes from the starch in the barley grain when it germinates.

The yeasts they use are different, however - the distiller's yeast can stand much higher concentrations of alcohol. The yeast is allowed to do its work, and the first distillation step produces Low wine - with alcohol concentrations up to 60%. Another distillation step is performed - being careful to skip the initial distillation products and the end distillation products, and keeping the 'heart' of the whisky.

The end result of this is a clear liquor - of quite high alcohol concentration, ready to be aged. Second hand barrels from the sherry industry are very popular, as well as Madiera wine barrels. It is this step that gives the whisky its colour and much of its taste. Scottish whiskys must be aged a minimum of three years, but can be kept as long as 21 years.

We got to taste in the workshop the Low wine (rough, strong), the 3 year, 10 year, and 12 year Glen Grant products.

Jack Daniels

I bumped into friends Ashley and Barbs there, and also made my way to the Jack Daniels stand, where I learned the differences between Bourbon Whiskey and scotch. American whiskeys all contain at least 51% of another grain, either corn, Rye, or wheat, though they also have a 51% barley product, Malt whiskey. The Glen Grant man had no nice things to say about any grain other than barley.

We tasted some nice Welsh whisky, and Ireland were also well represented. The coupon system was out of the window by the end, so most of the stands were offering free tastings.

A very pleasant evening.

My home network has a somewhat complicated setup where I have multiple PPPoE sessions across my ADSL connection, with various different ISPs. This allows me to take advantage of varying ISP properties such as cost and latency, by routing different traffic over different connections. Naturally, each of these connections only affords me a single IPv4 address, so I make use of NAT to allow the rest of my network access to the Internet. A potential problem arises, however, when connections go down and come back up. In the simple case, with only one connection, MASQUERADE takes care of all the details; when the interface goes down, all of the NAT entries associated with the connection are removed, so when it comes back up, it’s not a problem that your IP address has changed, because all of the NAT entries associated with the old address are gone. This works just as well in the multiple connections scenario; if an interface goes down resulting in traffic being routed over another interface, all of the old NAT entries have been dropped, so new ones will be established associated with the interface they are now travelling over. The problem arises when the interface that went down comes back up; traffic will now be routed over the first interface again, while still being rewritten to the second interface’s address, and this traffic is almost guaranteed to be dropped by either your ISP, or their upstream provider.

What’s the solution? Well, if you absolutely definitely want to start routing traffic over the first interface as soon as it comes back up, you’re going to need to flush the associated conntrack NAT entries as soon as it comes up, and let all your users reconnect (since their connections will be interrupted); I’m not entirely sure how to do this. In my case, however, I’m more concerned with maintaining existing connections without interruption, even if that means continuing to route them over the “wrong” interface. This also applies to incoming connections; ordinarily if somebody tries to establish a connection to the public IP address of one of your connections, they will need to connect to the same interface that outbound traffic to them would be routed over, which can be somewhat inconvenient.

My solution is something I’m going to call “connection pinning”. The idea is that once an outbound interface has been selected for a particular connection (by the Linux routing table), we “pin” the connection to that interface, so that traffic associated with that connection always travels over that interface even if the routing table changes. In order to achieve this, we can use a combination of Linux policy routing (ip rule), as well as firewall / conntrack packet marking. When a connection is first established, we set a connmark, which is a value stored in the conntrack table entry for that connection. In the case of an incoming connection, we set the mark based on the interface the packet arrived on; in the case of an outgoing connection, we set the mark in POSTROUTING based on the outbound interface already selected by the routing table. Then, for future outgoing traffic associated with that connection (as determined by conntrack), we set an fwmark based on the connmark, and bypass the normal routing table using policy rules for traffic marked thusly.

This is implemented in three parts. Firewall rules added using iptables, for the netfilter/conntrack bits; an ip-up script for establishing policy rules and routes when a PPP connection is established; and an ip-down script for flushing them again when the PPP connection is terminated.

First, the firewall rules (using the excellent ferm tool):

@def $DEV_PRIVATE = eth0;
@def $NET_PRIVATE_V4 = 10.0.0.0/24;

domain ip table mangle {
    # Only match new connections; established connections should
    # already have a connmark, which should not be overwritten.
    chain (INPUT FORWARD) {
        # Unfortunately the set-mark rules need to be duplicated for
        # each ppp interface we have.
        mod conntrack ctstate NEW {
            interface ppp0 CONNMARK set-mark 1;
            interface ppp1 CONNMARK set-mark 2;
            interface ppp2 CONNMARK set-mark 3;
            interface ppp3 CONNMARK set-mark 4;
            interface ppp4 CONNMARK set-mark 5;
        }
    }
    chain POSTROUTING {
        mod conntrack ctstate NEW {
            outerface ppp0 CONNMARK set-mark 1;
            outerface ppp1 CONNMARK set-mark 2;
            outerface ppp2 CONNMARK set-mark 3;
            outerface ppp3 CONNMARK set-mark 4;
            outerface ppp4 CONNMARK set-mark 5;
        }
    }
    chain PREROUTING {
        # Copy the connmark to the fwmark in order to activate the
        # policy rules for connection pinning. Only do this for
        # traffic originating from the local network; other traffic
        # (such as traffic going *to* the local network) should be
        # left unmodified, to allow return traffic to be routed over
        # the correct interface.

        interface $DEV_PRIVATE daddr ! $NET_PRIVATE_V4 CONNMARK restore-mark;
    }
    chain OUTPUT {
        # Same as above, but for locally originating traffic.

        daddr ! $NET_PRIVATE_V4 CONNMARK restore-mark;
    }
}

# I am assuming you already have something like this:
domain ip table nat {
    chain POSTROUTING outerface (ppp0 ppp1 ppp2 ppp3 ppp4) MASQUERADE;
}

If you’re not using ferm, here’s what the raw iptables commands would be (these are exactly what ferm will install given the above, so this is just more verbose):

iptables -t mangle -A FORWARD --match conntrack --ctstate NEW --in-interface ppp0 --jump CONNMARK --set-mark 1
iptables -t mangle -A FORWARD --match conntrack --ctstate NEW --in-interface ppp1 --jump CONNMARK --set-mark 2
iptables -t mangle -A FORWARD --match conntrack --ctstate NEW --in-interface ppp2 --jump CONNMARK --set-mark 3
iptables -t mangle -A FORWARD --match conntrack --ctstate NEW --in-interface ppp3 --jump CONNMARK --set-mark 4
iptables -t mangle -A FORWARD --match conntrack --ctstate NEW --in-interface ppp4 --jump CONNMARK --set-mark 5
iptables -t mangle -A INPUT --match conntrack --ctstate NEW --in-interface ppp0 --jump CONNMARK --set-mark 1
iptables -t mangle -A INPUT --match conntrack --ctstate NEW --in-interface ppp1 --jump CONNMARK --set-mark 2
iptables -t mangle -A INPUT --match conntrack --ctstate NEW --in-interface ppp2 --jump CONNMARK --set-mark 3
iptables -t mangle -A INPUT --match conntrack --ctstate NEW --in-interface ppp3 --jump CONNMARK --set-mark 4
iptables -t mangle -A INPUT --match conntrack --ctstate NEW --in-interface ppp4 --jump CONNMARK --set-mark 5
iptables -t mangle -A POSTROUTING --match conntrack --ctstate NEW --out-interface ppp0 --jump CONNMARK --set-mark 1
iptables -t mangle -A POSTROUTING --match conntrack --ctstate NEW --out-interface ppp1 --jump CONNMARK --set-mark 2
iptables -t mangle -A POSTROUTING --match conntrack --ctstate NEW --out-interface ppp2 --jump CONNMARK --set-mark 3
iptables -t mangle -A POSTROUTING --match conntrack --ctstate NEW --out-interface ppp3 --jump CONNMARK --set-mark 4
iptables -t mangle -A POSTROUTING --match conntrack --ctstate NEW --out-interface ppp4 --jump CONNMARK --set-mark 5
iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING --in-interface eth0 ! --destination 10.0.0.0/24 --jump CONNMARK --restore-mark
iptables -t mangle -A OUTPUT ! --destination 10.0.0.0/24 --jump CONNMARK --restore-mark

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING --out-interface ppp0 --jump MASQUERADE
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING --out-interface ppp1 --jump MASQUERADE
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING --out-interface ppp2 --jump MASQUERADE
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING --out-interface ppp3 --jump MASQUERADE
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING --out-interface ppp4 --jump MASQUERADE

Next, the ip-up script (to be placed in /etc/ppp/ip-up.d/ and made executable):

#!/bin/sh
TABLE="$PPP_IFACE"
MARK=$((${PPP_IFACE##ppp} + 1))
ip rule del lookup "$TABLE"
ip route flush table "$TABLE"
ip route add default dev "$PPP_IFACE" table "$TABLE"
ip rule add fwmark "$MARK" table "$TABLE"

Finally, the ip-down script (to be placed in /etc/ppp/ip-down.d/ and made executable):

#!/bin/sh
TABLE="$PPP_IFACE"
ip rule del lookup "$TABLE"
ip route flush table "$TABLE"

There are a couple of changes you will need to make to adapt these for your own network. In particular, you’ll need to duplicate the pppN iptables rules for each of the PPP interfaces you want to apply this to. Also, if you are already doing packet marking for some other reason, you’ll need to change the fwmark values I’ve used to ones that don’t interfere with your existing marks. I suspect there’s a better way to only mark outbound traffic than what I do above, but I wasn’t able to figure it out. If you have any improvements to suggest, feel free to mention them in the comments; I will try to keep this post updated with any improvements I make (either on my own, or based on other people’s suggestions).

I took a look at the data from the Who in the World is reddit survey to see what it says about South African redditors. Only 83 survey entries listed their country of residence as South Africa, compared to 409 subscribers to /r/southafrica, so this data might not provide a complete picture.

To start off, it will surprise no-one to learn that most SA redditors are men in their twenties and thirties.

Despite the “forever alone” stereotype, just about half are in a relationship.

We’re a pretty well-educated lot, with almost two-thirds having some type of degree. I’m a little curious about the one associate’s degree, since I don’t think such a thing exists in South Africa. Could be an American expat, I suppose.

Income has quite a varied distribution. The original income ranges are given in multiples of US$20 000 — for the sake of having relatively round numbers, I used an exchange rate of seven rand to the dollar.

(And yes, I know this is a bad histogram, but it seems to be impossible to get Libreoffice Calc to draw a better one.)

I didn’t draw a chart of the answers to the “favourite subreddit” question, because the answers were widely varying. The top seven were:

Finally, there are the two really serious questions. It turns out that South African redditors are mostly dog people:

But we are a divided nation when it comes to the issue of cheese:

We had quite a successful Ubuntu Global Jam on Saturday. Thanks Yola for hosting us. It was only 5 of us, and I was the only one with any uploads under my belt, but the nice small team meant I had time to help everyone fix some build failures. We had intended to focus on Scientific packages, but it was easier to just pick arbitrary build failures from the most recent archive rebuild.

Maia visited us briefly at lunch time and took some photos, thanks :) Sorry you couldn’t stay longer.

Some stats from the jam

Examples that we fixed together:

• sync libmatio to fix FTBFS
• fix FTBFS in pidgin-twitter

Kyle Williams:

• sync kcollectd to fix FTBFS
• sync k9copy to fix FTBFS
• fix kx11grab FTBFS
• fix kon2 FTBFS

Marco Gallotta:

• fix pysatellites FTBFS
• fix ratpoison FTBFS

Michiel Baird:

• Sync camlimages to fix advi FTBFS
• Sync libsdl-sound1.2 to fix asc FTBFS

I think that’s pretty good for a day’s work :P

In other news

Eep, haven’t blogged an ages. Since I last blogged, I’ve become a Debian Developer, made an Ibid point release, been to (my first) UDS and a Debconf (which were both fantastic, and very different), spent a week sailing in Croatia with my brother, and been pulled into the Ubuntu release team. All this has meant little progress in my MSc, though :/

RFC 3749 defines a mechanism for compressing a TLS connection using the DEFLATE compression mechanism. When used in conjunction with https, this fills a similar role to that of Content-Encoding: gzip, except that headers benefit from compression too (as the whole connection is compressed), and I suspect there is less chance of weird proxy / caching bugs. I decided to do some quick tests to see which browsers actually support this, as I found approximately zero information on the subject on the internet; the results, unfortunately, are rather dismal and depressing:

• Chrome: supported (apparently since Chrome 9, but I only tested Chrome 15 on the dev channel)
• Firefox: not supported (tested 8.0 Aurora)
• Safari: not supported
• Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7: not supported
• Android 2.3 default browser: not supported

I’ve been contacting people at Isett Seta for the last two years (Yes, 2 years), simply to get a reprint of a certificate. The contact person I’ve have been dealing with for the last year, no longer works there according to the out of office reply. Thinking this may be a step forward I proceeded to contact the person referred to in the Out of office reply and to my surprise it was quite a step back. Here is what I wrote:

Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2011 10:39:02 +0200
Delivered-To: xxxxxxxxx@gmail.com
Message-ID: <CAECkFp1Q1HPgBuLnXxoRQZxUnX8cB7zQN2cQyaMuWcrPiVpEgQ@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: National Certificate in Systems Support Engineering NQF Level 5
From: Me <XXXXXXXXXX@gmail.com>
To: XXXXXXXXXXX@isettseta.org.za
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Hi PersonX,

Would you kindly assist me or point me in the right direction of
whom to speak to regarding a reprint of one of my certificates.
The certificate number is CN: XXXXXX

Many Thanks.

Here is the reponse I got from the Provider Accreditation Administrator of the ETQA department:

From: PersonX <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX@isettseta.org.za>
To: Me <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2011 10:52:39 +0200
Subject: RE: National Certificate in Systems Support Engineering NQF Level 5
Thread-Topic: National Certificate in Systems Support Engineering NQF Level 5
Thread-Index: AcxXOPjuBpsK80sDSA26nv38iHoo6QAAeA6g
Message-ID: <03C8AE8F61B78F4A8F1334AE8D6ED9BE129E181253@HMC-MBX07.he.businessgateway.co.za>
References: <CAECkFp1Q1HPgBuLnXxoRQZxUnX8cB7zQN2cQyaMuWcrPiVpEgQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAECkFp1Q1HPgBuLnXxoRQZxUnX8cB7zQN2cQyaMuWcrPiVpEgQ@mail.gmail.com>
Accept-Language: en-US
Content-Language: en-US
X-MS-Has-Attach:
X-MS-TNEF-Correlator:
acceptlanguage: en-US
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
MIME-Version: 1.0
Return-Path: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX@isettseta.org.za

Eish

-----Original Message-----

Is it really that hard to reprint a certificate? The LP.I. was kind enough to reprint and repost my LPI certificates and I received within 7 days. I guess all I can say is… “Eish”.

This injunction includes decoupling from your own APIs where those are non-core to the subsystem under design.

Introduction

In case you missed the news, Google Maps Navigation (Beta) for Mobile is now available in South Africa. I tried it out briefly, and thought I’d offer some thoughts on how it compares to the primary navigation software I use, Waze. Note that as an Android user (HTC Desire HD), this review will be fairly Android-specific. If you’re using an iPhone, please write your own review and let me know; if you’re using something else, please join the rest of us in the 21st century.

Integration

Navigation is part of the Google Maps application; as one of the core Google apps that virtually every Android phone ships with, it’s well integrated with the rest of the system, and in particular, with Maps / Places / People. Waze isn’t quite as well integrated; for example, there’s no easy way to grab a location out of  Places and have Waze navigate to it.

Voice prompts

These are generated entirely via TTS, using the system-configured speech engine. This is great for road names, not so great for actually being able to comprehend the prompts; I wish they had taken the Garmin approach, and only used TTS for the road names and such, not everything. By comparison, Waze only uses pre-recorded voice prompts, although they are currently testing out TTS functionality as well (I don’t have access to that, so I don’t yet know how it compares). As far as the actual prompting goes, they seem to be about equal in terms of usefulness.

Map data

This is a bit harder to quantify, as the quality and coverage of map data for both Waze and Google Maps varies drastically depending on where exactly you are in the country. In general, Google Maps has much more complete data; on the other hand, it tends to be several years or more out of date. In areas with active Area Managers on Waze, coverage is likely to be far more accurate, even going so far as to include temporary road detours during construction and so on. As such, your mileage may (and very likely will) vary.

Routing

Waze definitely wins this one, assuming you’re navigating in an area where the map is actually sufficiently complete to allow for sensible routing. Waze tracks the average travel time along each road segment and uses this as part of its routing calculations. In addition, if there is sufficient data, it seems that this will even be broken down by day of week / time of day, so Waze knows that what might be a crawling disaster at 4pm is actually smooth sailing at lunchtime. In addition, speed data is also handled in real-time; so if there’s a traffic jam right now, and some Waze users are stuck in it, it’ll detect that the average speed *right now* is much lower than it usually is, and route you around the problematic road segments if appropriate. Google Maps, by comparison, has a real-time traffic layer which can be used for routing decisions, but there currently seems to be no traffic data for South Africa, and I’m not sure if this information is used at all for long-term routing decisions. Even if it is, it’ll take a while for them to catch up with the existing data that has already been built up by Waze, so I guess we’ll have to see how that works out.

Display / UI

Google Maps wins this one. While driving, you can have the satellite layer displayed for the map, not just the road layer, which makes it a lot easier to match the map to what you’re seeing out of your windscreen, assuming the map isn’t horribly out of date. In addition, once you’re making your final approach to the destination, it will show you a Street View image of the destination, making it much easier to find the exact place you’re looking for, instead of trying to estimate distances on a map. By comparison, Waze offers only the usual abstract road map; this works, of course, but could be better.

Crowdsourcing

In addition to using average speed data collected from users for routing decisions, Waze also does things like adjusting road segment positions, and toggling road directions (1-way to 2-way and vice-versa) automatically, based on collected driving data. Occasionally this results in errors, but it mostly saves a lot of work on the part of map editors who would otherwise have to manually fix the map up. There’s also the ability to report accidents, traffic cameras, potholes, speed traps, roadblocks, and so on, which other users will be able to see and avoid. Google Maps doesn’t really have anything similar, other than the real-time traffic info.

Conclusion

I’ll be sticking with Waze, for now; the real-time and routing functionality, as well as the ability to fix up the map myself, easily makes up for any of the other disadvantages. If Google Maps grows to encompass the functionality and userbase of Waze, this would definitely tip the scales in its favour, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen any time soon.