The pet food underworld

For the last few months I’ve been buying a cat food called Petite Anges. It’s made locally, is as good for the cats as the most expensive brands (and better than a lot of others – I checked the ingredients quite carefully), and is a lot cheaper.

Until recently that is…



b2evolution upgrades and antispam

Hopefully most of my gazillion readers have noticed the new look, but I’ve also been upgrading the blog’s backend…



Music, aging and 101 reasons for a Black Celebration

I have many CD’s. If I had to listen to them all, one after the other, it’d probably take me months to listen to any of them twice…



Holes

I’m having fun tightening up my holy-as-a-sieve server…



Dysfunctional site of the day

I still have plans to start a hall of shame (I’ll think of a better name) of dysfunctional websites in South Africa, not to humiliate the perpetrators, but to encourage them to make their sites more usable…



Pictures of my new home

I’m finally settling into my new home. It has the most stunning views over the city, harbour and mountains behind. The pictures of course don’t do it justice…



20Twenty negotiations continue

Another update about 20Twenty. Its fate apparently rests upon the whims of a like-minded financial services provider, with whom negotiations have progressed well.

Below is the full body of the mail they sent me…



A day without power

I’ve been experiencing lots of synchronicity. So perhaps I shouldn’t have been too surprised when, shortly after a conversation on the end of oil, the cities, mass deaths from the coming bird flu etc…



Oracle’s purchase of InnoDB and the effects on MySQL

As a change from my usual beginner level tutorials, I decided to explore the effects of Oracle’s purchase of InnoDB in this month’s Database Journal column, entitled Oracle’s purchase of InnoDB, their release of Oracle Express, and the effect on MySQL



The woes of GM and Ford

Reading yet another article on the woes of the American car manufacturers, I was struck by how their own short-sightedness and reliance on gas-guzzlers has come back to bite them…