Neverness

Athlone towers coming down

August 22nd, 2010 in Water (Personal) · 1 Comment

The Athlone Towers came down today.

For those watching, it was mostly a disappointment. The towers were blown up 4 minutes early, catching most unawares, backs turned, or video cameras still bagged. eTV’s footage consisted of a surprised presenter and a hurried jump to a disappearing cloud of smoke. The Zoopy servers failed under the strain, and I was racing to a viewing point, and missed the whole thing.

I grew up under the Athlone Towers, in Pinelands, when they were still functioning as a coal power station. When the wind blew a certain direction, there were coal flecks on the window sills, and our washing was stained black if we were unlucky enough to have chosen the wrong day. Pinelands also suffered, and probably still does, from the “Pinelands Pong”, when the joyous smell of the sewage works drifted our way. In typical apartheid planning though, the wind mostly blew the other direction, and Athlone suffered the worst of it.

The area was believed to suffer higher rates of asthma and other breathing difficulties, and it was a happy day when the power station was decommissioned, firstly kept operational for emergency use, and finally taken offline completely.

A childhood landmark has gone – let’s hope the land gets put to better use now.

With the poor timing by the demolishers, there’s not much good video video footage available, but here are the best two I could find:

UPDATE:
Here’s a great video of the demolition:

Athlone Cooling Towers Demolition from Phillip Gibb on Vimeo.

Northern Sotho Wikipedia needs help

Northern Sotho is the only official South African language without an active Wikipedia. The project sits in the incubator, where it interestingly has far more articles than all other SA languages bar English and Afrikaans (540 vs Swati on 187).

Mohau Monaledi has been driving the project, and has contributed 1310 edits, more than everyone else put together, and was one of the original proposers in 2007. It’s unfortunately quite difficult to get a project out of incubator these days, and the project needs some help to become an official Wikipedia.

The proposal is struggling to meet the following criterion: “develop an active test project; it must remain active until approval. It is generally considered active if the analysis lists at least three active, not-grayed-out editors listed in the sections for the previous few months.”

Mohau needs more support!

This would be a great project for the fledgling Wikimedia South Africa chapter to drive, and it would be a significant milestone to have all official South African languages represented with their own Wikipedia. Northern Sotho has over 4 million speakers, and is the 4th most spoken language in South Africa. If you speak Northern Sotho, please help out! And if not, try recruit some Northern Sotho speakers. I will try to focus some work with my template translation tool on Northern Sotho as well.

To help:

go to the Northern Sotho site on the incubator and create an account.
start editing some articles!
add your name to the list of people interested in forming an editing community.

A key tracker is at http://toolserver.org/~pathoschild/catanalysis/?cat=0&title=wp/nso&wiki=incubatorwiki_p
There needs to be at least 3 active (not grayed out) editors contributing for 3 consecutive months. There was in late 2009, but not recently.

Once this has been done, and it’s probably the most significant remaining hurdle, we can start on the next stage of the approval process.

Wikimedia South Africa workshop

August 9th, 2010 in Earth (Literature) and Fire (Social) · 3 Comments

This weekend a number of us held a workshop at Wits University to discuss forming a South African chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation – the non-profit foundation supporting projects such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary. For those interested in the details, the Wikimedia South Africa meta page has more, and you can also join the mailing list.

It was a good start. Many of us active on the various Wikimedia projects met each other for the first time, and a number of new people attended as well.

We finished with a concrete timeline – approximately 7 months to registration, as well as two core teams – one working on the administrative aspects of registration, and the other on activity planning.

There was also much discussion towards a draft vision, draft purposes, draft challenges and possible initiatives. I had hoped to make further progess on these, but time was very limited. Another half-day might have seen these tightened up and agreed by everyone at the workshop, while I suspect doing this on the mailing list is going to drag on a lot longer. But, it’s a good start, and many good ideas have been thrown into the mix. It’s everyone responsibility to keep the momentum going while we’re not in the room together.

Thanks to everyone who made the effort to attend the conference, and contribute in some way, taking photos, updating the wiki, and in particular Delphine Ménard and Bence Damakos from the Wikimedia Foundation Chapter Committee, who flew in for all of two days just for the workshop, the African Commons Project, for whom Kerryn McKay and Daniela Faris White attended, for hosting and co-ordinating the wokshop, Achal Prabhala for sparking it into action and Nhlanhla Mabaso for helping to network and reach many of the people who hadn’t been active on Wikimedia projects before.

There was another concrete outcome, perhaps more in line with the anarchic way things tend to happen. After the workshop, I went to the Jozi book fair with Mbulu. We met an old friend of his, who happened to have translated into English the very first Venda novel, written by his father. He showed interest in the chapter, and gave me a copy of the book. I read it at the airport and on the way home, and now there’s one more Wikipedia article towards filling the gap in African literature!

Cruel to be kind?

August 4th, 2010 in Fire (Social) and Wood (Spiritual) · 2 Comments

A Facebook friend shared an animation from RSA Comment entitled First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. Go watch it first.

By Slavoj Zizek, the renowned critical theorist, the critique was interesting and largely accurate. How we buy a Starbucks coffee as redemption in the consumerist act, for example.

However, I was struck by a comment from “Nathan”. I suggest reading it in full too.

Much disagreement occurs because the arguments are about different things. “Foolish critical-theoretical nonsense.” says Nathan. No it isn’t, says someone else, and off the argument goes, completely missing each other’s points, arguing from a position of ego, not humility towads understanding the other’s position.

So let’s be specific. Zizek says “the worst slaveholders were kind to their slaves”. Why? If slaveowners were all cruel to their slaves, raping and beating them, the moral position would be clear. One the one side, the good guys, against slavery. On the other, the bad guys, the rapists and the beaters. Nice, neat, utopian, but completely ungrounded in reality. Taking his argument further, he is then claiming that beating a slave is better than not, as it helps bring down the immoral system more quickly.

How comforting for the slave. How disconnected from human reality. It’s this thinking in abstractions, far from the human realm, that Nathan seems to criticise, validly. Zizek says that “the real aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible”. Absolutely. As Krishnamurti said “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” It’s a wonderful vision, and alerts us to the trap of acting with compassion, but misguidedly, in a way that strengthens the current immoral systems. But to attempt to do so, disconnected from human compassion is a trap many have fallen into.

Systems don’t change on their own, or solely because of the leverings of a few elite thinkers. They change because people change – their humanity shaped and fertilised by their experiences. By a slave who, perhaps through playing with the owner’s child, realising that her owner is not a being far above, rather a person, like her, which encourages and empowers her to stand up against the injustice.

By a slaveowner, again perhaps through playing with a slave as a child, realising that their slave is human, like them, and changing their actions. For some, the actions will be partial. A bigger pen to sleep in. An adjustment from one-eighth to one-quarter the master’s food helping.

But for others the action may go further – releasing their slaves, working towards breaking down the slave system entirely.

Trying to create a black and white “Lord of the Rings” style utopia isn’t helpful if that’s the only level we work on. Change does not only come out of a preconceived abstraction, but out of human compassion, human experience, and human consciousness.

There can be no perfect systems with flawed human consciousness. The level to work on is that of human consciousness. It’s a two-way dance, the system, the individual, breaking down the boundaries between both. As we do that, we develop our compassion, and change our actions towards others. We develop our awareness, and see the machinations of the existing systems. We realise we are not the property of anyone else, that we are not just workers to be used as puppets by global capital. And step towards our full human potential.

Wolof reaches 1000 Wikipedia articles

May 30th, 2010 in Earth (Literature) and Fire (Social) · 5 Comments

A sixth African-language Wikipedia has reached the 1000 article milestone, with Wolof now sitting at 1068 articles.

Two other African languages, Somali and Kabye, are also closing in on the milestone, both having moved quite quickly into the 800′s, passing the relatively stagnant Igbo and Kikongo.

African Language Wikipedias

Language	1/1/2007	3/8/2009	30/5/2010
Swahili	2980	12631	17998
Afrikaans	6149	12568	15259
Yoruba	517	6261	8858
Amharic	742	3333	3810
Lingala	292	1148	1255
Wolof			1068

Swahili remains the largest African-language Wikipedia, and is moving rapidly ahead. Having passed Afrikaans in August 2009, it’s now almost 3000 articles ahead, while Afrikaans remains on a steady trajectory.

Swahili also benefited from a Google project to create more Swahili content, focusing on the Swahili Wikipedia. Google initially targetted 7 East African universities, and sponsored prizes. Contributers had between November and January to write new articles, and the contest resulted in a 30% increase (by words) in the size of the Swahili Wikipedia for that period. New articles were up to 35 a day (up from 9 in October), but it appears this was a temporary boost, as rates have dropped off to 5 or 6 new articles a day since, below the Afrikaans average of about 9.

So, the African language Wikipedias show steady progress, what about Wiktionary?

African Language Wiktionaries

Language	3/8/2009	30/5/2010
Afrikaans	14128	14669
Swahili	12956	13000
Malagasy	142	4253
Wolof	2675	2689
Sotho	1387	1389
Swati	31	371
Tsonga	358	359
Amharic	311	319
Rwandi	306	306
Oromo	186	218

Many of the languages have stagnated, with the possible exception of Malagasy, which at first glance appears to have taken off and is now the 3rd-largest African language Wiktionary. In March though, the Malagasy Wikipedia stood at 6119 articles, so it appears a large number were not article quality, or were spam, and have been deleted. Article count is not a good indicator of quality, as it’s quite easy to create large number of low quality stubs, which isn’t indicative of a vibrant project.

On to the South African languages in particular:

South African Language Wikipedias

Language	1/10/2007	3/8/2009	30/5/2010
Afrikaans	8374	12568	15260*
Zulu	107	187	195
Tsonga	10	169	174
Swati	56	157	173
Venda	43	124	162
Xhosa	66	112	115
Tswana	40	103	105
Sotho	43	79	69
Northern Sotho**	0	311	540
Ndebele	0	0	0

* – yes, one article has been created since I started writing this.

** – The Northern Sotho Wikipedia is going great guns in the incubator, but it appears no closer to becoming an actual project, even though it would easily be second to Afrikaans. The missing criteria is “having an active community”, a criterion most of projects still in the main space would fail.

Besides Northern Sotho, and of course Afrikaans, there’s been some minor activity in Venda and Swati, but otherwise the other South African language Wikipedias have all failed to come to life yet, with Sotho even reducing in size as spam articles are cleaned out.

And how about the Wiktionaries?

South African Language Wiktionaries

Language	9/12/2007	3/8/2009	30/5/2010
Afrikaans	9312	14128	14669
Sotho	1381	1387	1389
Swati	31	46	371
Tsonga	166	358	359
Zulu	102	127	131
Tswana	0	22	23
Xhosa	11	Closed	Closed

Again, outside of Afrikaans, and a notable spurt from Swati that seems mainly to have been contributed by one person, nothing but the most superficial of progress.

Overall, only two languages, Swahili and Afrikaans, could be called success stories, but there’s some progress overall with some of the larger African languages.

From Helkom to Telkom to Arushka

April 7th, 2010 in Water (Personal) and Wood (Spiritual) · 1 Comment

Relationships are a mirror of our selves, a gift to reveal a little more deeply what’s going on. While happy relationships are more fun, unpleasant relationship can reveal more.

Today began with an encounter with the object of my most bitter and unpleasant relationship. Telkom. At the very mention of the name, my face creases into a scowl and my fingers knot and gnarl like a Dickensian rogue.

Most relationships can be ended if they become too destructive. With Telkom, I have been forced to face the mirror for longer than I’d like. I don’t enjoy feeling trapped, but Telkom has kept me smothered in its huge arms no matter how much I wriggled.

I’ve dabbled in mobile, in Iburst, but the long arms of Telkom have always hunted me down.

Like any relationship, Telkom and I have a history. A long history. A long, bitter, unpleasant history. I have sworn (literally) never to go back, never to give them a cent again. Tail between my legs, I’ve headed back each time, thinking surely, this time, they’d have changed.

But expecting the other party in a relationship to change without changing yourself never works, does it?

We’ve been waiting for a year for a phone line and ADSL at our offices in Philippi. So when we were told our alternative arrangements, piggy-backing off someone else, were coming to an end, it was time to face the mirror again.

A year ago, I closed an account with Telkom. They failed to close it properly, so I’ve had to close the account numerous times, on the phone, going into a branch, each time re-informing them that we’d left the premises a year ago, that no calls had been made since then, that I’d ordered the account closed.

The last time was about 4 months ago, and this time I thought they’d got it right. So when, driving to work, I got an SMS from Telkom kindly informing me to contact an attorney to pay my outstanding bill, I got so cross, I missed the turnoff to Phillippi and ended up in Blue Downs.

A simple SMS, innocently sent by a well-meaning employee, got me flying into a rage ready to ram any Telkom truck unfortunate enough to be near me on the road.

What was the mirror showing me?

Not trusting myself to deal with Telkom, I got someone to help get our long-awaited ADSL installed. She phoned them. Impossible, Telkom have no infrastructure in Philippi. She phoned the next day, again, calm and polite. Impossible – they could install a phone line, but ADSL would not be possible, they’d put us on a waiting list.

If it was me, I’d have been raging, ready to bite the operator’s head off.

She phoned again. Were Telkom aware that a nearby organisation that applied long after us had recently got an ADSL installed? No they weren’t, they’d investigate.

She phoned again. Yes, the neighbouring organisation did have ADSL, Telkom said, but they’d had a phone line installed already, so pre-dated us. No, this wasn’t the case. I can imagine myself, if I’d even got that far – “You lying *$@#&@*#&@*s”, slamming the phone down raging at their incompetence. She phoned again, still calm, polite and insistent.

And lo and behold, she happened to get hold of a helpful, competent assistant, who couldn’t believe the nonsense he saw on the account’s history. Of course there was infrastructure. Of course it could be arranged. And an appointment was booked for that week.

They phoned the day before to confirm. They arrived on time, installed the phone line and ADSL, waited for it to be tested to my satisfaction before they left. We had a phone line and ADSL. After a year, a few insistent, polite phone calls got the desired result.

Telkom has been my clearest mirror. Watching this process unfold was quite a revelation for me, and reminded me again of the stupidity of getting angry, especially at an entity!

So, when I woke today after five and a half hours sleep to face a summons from Telkom for the above-mentioned account, it was a chance to practise my new-found approach.

It wasn’t perfect. As I picked up the phone to dial I was ready to rage. But, but the time I got through to Arushka, I’d morphed her from a representative of an evil entity to a person. And, not surprisingly, when one treats a person with respect and patience, they respond much better.

So, has the summons gone away and the account been closed? No, not yet. Perhaps I need a few more opportunities to fine-tune my technique.

Talking Heads

February 18th, 2010 in Fire (Social) and Water (Personal) · 0 Comments

I attended Talking Heads this evening, part of the Infecting the City Festival, courtesy of 2 Couchsurfers who were staying with me, and were part of the festival. Billed as speed dating for the brain, the format sees you sit at a table for 20 minutes each with 4 different, hopefully interesting, people, from all walks of life. The brief: “this information could change your life”.

None of the Talking Heads managed to change my life in any kind of dramatic way, but the event was interesting, getting better for me as it went along.

First up was Ronald Suresh Roberts. I was a little disappointed to find out that it wasn’t just me at the table, that I’d be joined by another person at each. Suresh started talking about legal rights and legal rites, the subject of a new book he is writing.

The talk didn’t work for the format too well, and rambled a bit back and forth, and before it had really got started it was over. Given another chance, I’d leap straight in to questioning him about his (in)famous book, Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki, and his generally fractuous dealings with the press.

Next up was Reinette Steyn, a clinical psychologist, who gave a brief introduction, then handed over to the two of us for questions. Much of the time was spent discussing the other participants son, and the time was up quickly.

By half time, I was a bit disappointed. Partly to blame was my interaction style. I remember having the same feeling at a recent radio interview. The presenter was filling space, talking, and I was letting him talk, but the format calls for more forceful interaction, since there’s limited time.

After the break was someone from the Bicycling Empowerment Network (I think his name was Andrew), an NGO which promotes cycling, as a means of poverty alleviation, and a generally healthy, green activity.

But the best was reserved for last. Jonathan Shapiro, Zapiro himself. He talked about crossing lines, and, peppered with his cartoons, the conversation went from the Muhammed cartoons, to some of Zapiros edgier creations, the backlash he’s faced from various communities, as well as his not always smooth interactions with newspaper editors.

Being the last, we could carry on well over the allotted 20 minutes, and gathered a crowd from the other tables, all enjoying Zapiro’s cartoons and the stories behind them.

Overall an enjoyable event. It’s held three times a year, so look out for the next one.

The Windows treadmill

February 4th, 2010 in Metal (Technical) · 4 Comments

I own a laptop that came bundled with Windows Vista. I installed Linux as fast as possible, but left Windows as a dual-boot option mainly to check that things behave nicely in Internet Explorer.

And a good thing too, because they usually don’t.

I also keep it because I own some junk hardware that also doesn’t play nicely with Linux.

I boot into it about once a month – the last time was mid-December. I always enter with trepidation, knowing I’m about to install countless Gigs of security and anti-virus updates.

This evening I booted into Windows at 22h02, and immediately kicked off the Windows, Windows Defender and AVG updates. The updates finished around 00h30, and I’ve probably blown February’s bandwidth.

Shortly after finishing, I was alerted to another update. It seems they arrive faster than I can download them.

About an hour into downloading the patch for the latest gaping hole, a dialer popped up, so a hole was probably exploited in the interim.

I’m now scanning the entire system – who knows how long that will take. Perhaps I was a bit ambitious in hoping to get back to what I was doing by, say, 22h05.

For the average user, who perhaps doesn’t appreciate Freedom, or ever run into the frustrations of not having complete control of their system, there are still two huge advantages to running Linux.

One is having access to tonnes of fantastic software in one place – the default repositories. No need to trawl the internet for dodgy freeware, or head off to Incredibly Expensive software shop to buy something that’s freely available.

The other, of course, is that the obligatory anti-virus software takes up a rather large proportion of the system’s resources, and uses up a nice chunk of your bandwidth too.

And unless you use the machine regularly (and therefore update regularly), the chances of exploitation, even if you immediately install the updates when you do log on, are high.

The scan’s still running. Perhaps I should get this blog post up before my Windows partition is formatted…

We are Stars

January 19th, 2010 in Metal (Technical) · 1 Comment

The 3rd in Don Kurtz’s excellent series of lectures moved outwards, towards the edge of the universe. While the first was a brief romp through the history of astronomy, and the second focused on the wonders of our nearest star, the 3rd looked outward towards the stars and beyond.

There’s $600 million spent on each space shuttle launch, and a recent mission focused on the Hubble telescope. A relatively small telescope in size, but, situated in space, it has a clear view out into the universe, unhindered by our ever-smoggier atmosphere. Our eyes are relatively limited in the range of light we can see – there’s infra-red (heat) on one side, and ultra-violet on the other. The Hubble telescope can detect infra-red light, and there are some amazing pictures being sent back.

It’s currently thought that when the universe formed, only Hydrogen and Helium elements existed. Other elements are cooked up in nuclear reactions in stars, and flung out across the universe. So, in a very real sense, we are star-born, and couldn’t exist otherwise. Certain, very rare, elements, are only created when a star goes supernova – platinum and gold.

The Hubble telescope is returning the most phenomenal pictures – galaxies lit up as a star goes nova, emitting light, and, year by year, as the light travels a light year further out, the galaxy lights up revealing more of its secrets. Stars that are revealed to be entire galaxies, and again stars in these that appear to be galaxies, as we look deeper and deeper in space.

The latest telescope can see galaxies 13 billion light years away, believed to be close to the very edge of the universe. The next generation will see beyond this, and, if galaxies are seen even further out, the model of the universe’s expansion as currently understood will have to be rewritten.

At the same time, Kurtz is part of a team looking for earth-like planets. He said that he couldn’t reveal anything yet as he has signed a non-disclosure agreement, but, in a future year will return with the findings. The method is simple, but wasn’t possible without the latest high-powered telescopes. Look for a star similar to the sun. Look for planets crossing its face, and see when they return again. An earth year later, and about the same size, and you’ve got an earth-like planet.

Looking into space is looking into the past – what we see is what existed at various points in the past. Galaxies could have collided, stars could have gone supernova – we wouldn’t see it until its light gets here. When we look at the nearest star besides the sun, we’re looking 4 and half years into the past. When we look into deep space, we’re looking 13 billion years into the past. Space-time indeed.

To end off the series, here are some videos.

Images from Hubble

Images from Hubble 2

Hubble Deep Space

Neverness

Athlone towers coming down

From Helkom to Telkom to Arushka

The Windows treadmill

We are Stars

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