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. It seems they’ve been… Continue reading The pet food underworld
Month: November 2005
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. It now runs off b2evolution’s new(ish) Dawn release, which brings noticeably faster performance, and huge antispam improvements. With a couple of backend hacks as well, I’m down to deleting about one spam entry a day (I… Continue reading b2evolution upgrades and antispam
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. I can see why some old people get stuck in their musical ways – they just have so much of their own familiar music to listen to… Continue reading Music, aging and 101 reasons for a Black Celebration
Holes
I’m having fun tightening up my holy-as-a-sieve server. Being a clueless systems administrator, and the fact that the server is shared with one or two others, makes this quite challenging, but I’m enjoying bumbling around. A post on FreeBSD Server Administration entitled Contact form abused through BCC field triggered something in my memory, and I… Continue reading Holes
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. Reasons for being dysfunctional include the all-too-common only working in Internet Explorer, broken links and general poor navigation.… Continue reading Dysfunctional site of the day
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. And Cape Town in the summer has that energy to it, the city gets full, and the mountains call… Being within walking distance of Table Mountain is… Continue reading Pictures of my new home
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. There’s an image at the bottom of the mail which may or may not have been a disclaimer against doing this… Continue reading 20Twenty negotiations continue
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. with a friend of a rather more apocalyptic bent than me, the power in Cape Town gets cut (it turns out… Continue reading A day without power
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. My conclusion for those too lazy to read? Oracle has a number of strategies… Continue reading Oracle’s purchase of InnoDB and the effects 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. The generalisation is that the European manufacturers have concentrated on improving fuel efficiency by focusing on diesel, the Asian manufacturers by focusing on petrol, with… Continue reading The woes of GM and Ford