November 2004 – Neverness

IOL Vacancies – sysadmin and developer

An exciting day today with two resignations in the technical department. Blogging helped Russel Beattie get a job at Yahoo (at least according to this post by Jeremy Zawodny, where he claims the appointment as further proof that blogging can help smart people get jobs). Jeremy also regularly advertises Yahoo vacancies on his blog, so… Continue reading IOL Vacancies – sysadmin and developer

Go_Open begins

I was impressed with the first episode of Go_Open. The presenter, John Vlismas if I remember the name, is, ‘funny’ according to the 18 year old sister of my partner. A relief after I feared a boring voice droning on to an already converted audience. Of course, competing with the rugby and Survivor didn’t help,… Continue reading Go_Open begins

M&G blogs, $1 DVD’s and pushing hands

I’ve been following the Mail and Guardian’s entry into blogdom quite closely, and so far been quite disappointed. The functionality seems limited, anonymous readers can’t post, and, most importantly, there aren’t many contributions. One of the few contributors I enjoy (and one of the few active contributors) is Ian Fraser. A friend of mine is… Continue reading M&G blogs, $1 DVD’s and pushing hands

History is the home address

I’ve been getting a surprising amount of referals looking for Sarah Johnson’s Personae. Of course, being far, far from an A-list blog, my hits are so low it could just be one person (or perhaps the author herself 🙂 ) looking for information. Unfortunately I haven’t read the work yet, but I plan to soon.… Continue reading History is the home address

Arrogance, slashing Slashdot (and MySQL) and the end of America

Doing some research for an upcoming Tectonic article, I came across some writings by Fabian Pascal and Christopher J. Date. They are both well-known in the relational database world, and have been particularly harsh on MySQL, calling it ‘one of the worst SQL options‘. Written before MySQL even supported transactions, and while the developers were… Continue reading Arrogance, slashing Slashdot (and MySQL) and the end of America

Firefox usage growing quickly amongst South Africa readers

With Firefox 1 being released, there’s been a rush of sites displaying their browser statistics. However, none of the big South African sites to my knowledge have done this. I’m hoping to get these stats on the IOL site itself quite soon, but I couldn’t wait. Here’s what IOL readers are using (which is probably… Continue reading Firefox usage growing quickly amongst South Africa readers

DOS attack by Impi fans

Spotted an amusing snippet on Distrowatch. It appears South African Impi Linux fans were attempting to up their distro’s profile by calling their page on Distrowatch (which ranks distros by the number of times their page has been called) up to 10 times a second. Read the full commentary here. As Madonna said, no publicity… Continue reading DOS attack by Impi fans

The next peg?

I always think of the peg when considering inventions I wish I’d thought of, but probably would never have, even though they are obvious now. I used to ponder inventions much more as a child, or at least in the days when I didn’t have 3000 emails in my inbox demanding immediate attention. Now there’s… Continue reading The next peg?

US Election – the aftermath

Everybody on earth knowing that beauty is beautiful makes ugliness Everybody knowing that goodness is good makes wickedness … That’s why the wise soul does without doing teaches without talking The things of this world exist, they are; you can’t refuse them … The above is from Ursula Le Guin’s version of the Tao Te… Continue reading US Election – the aftermath