Month: July 2007

July 2007 GeekDinner

Thursday’s GeekDinner was enjoyable, and as always, some of the best conversation happened outside of the official talks. It was also great to see quite a few new faces, and a growing (although this may just have been the subset I encountered) Ruby presence. Some of the more regular event bloggers weren’t there (Neil and… Continue reading July 2007 GeekDinner

Defeat

After a Monday morning facing overwhelming odds, I have admitted defeat. 2900 mails arrived in my mailbox this morning, and that’s just what got through the mail server’s spam filters. So, I’ve had to wave the white flag and reduce civil liberties (apologies for the mixed martial metaphors, but it suits the moment). No more… Continue reading Defeat

Technology and the environment

Laurence of Commentary has written two quite interesting pieces on environmentalism and technology (Let’s do the time warp and What’s wrong with technological solutions). Both pieces are worth responding to. Unfortunately, they’ve also attracted the usual utterly idiotic comments. For example, in response to the earlier piece, Colin Pretorius writes I have no time for… Continue reading Technology and the environment

Dear Standard Bank staff

I enjoyed this piece a friend of mine submitted to Standard Bank… Further to my earlier email, when your MasterCard SecureCode failed to recognize my identity number, and I couldn’t make an online purchase, because either your computers are a total mess or you’ve somehow got the wrong ID number for me, you will be… Continue reading Dear Standard Bank staff

When will Paypal be able to transfer money to SA accounts?

Paypal became available a few years ago now to South Africans. Unfortunately, it remains a one-way vacuum cleaner, happily taking money out of the South Africa, while South African entrepreneurs and businesses remain hobbled and unable to earn anything back. After years of seeing the stock PayPal continues to research how best to expand its… Continue reading When will Paypal be able to transfer money to SA accounts?

Spambank at it again

I always use a unique email address when I subscribe to anything, so that I can trash it if it gets used for spam, and a number of others who own their own domains do this to. Normally it’s the dodgy forums that use the mail for spam, but I was a little surprised when… Continue reading Spambank at it again

Bloggers for positive change

Thanks Urban Sprout for tagging me with a Bloggers for Positive Global Change award. The award meme was initiated by Climate of Our Future, and the rules are simple – basically, when tagged yourself, tag up to 5 other blogs that you believe fulfill the criteria of trying to change the world in a positive… Continue reading Bloggers for positive change

eNaTIS hack attack: DoT denying the undeniable

There is no doubt that the eNaTIS website was hacked (in the common usage of the word) yesterday, twice. The attackers, possibly making use of a simple exploit in an outdated, unpatched version of Joomla, a commonly-used open source content management system, first struck with a polite warning in the ‘How do I’ section. When… Continue reading eNaTIS hack attack: DoT denying the undeniable

Zend framework released

Version 1.0.0 of the Zend framework was released today. It’s a PHP MVC framework, similar to Ruby on Rails, Django, TurboGears, Pylons, or CakePHP. CakePHP lags behind the more mature Python or Ruby frameworks, but with IBM and Zend both solidy behind the new PHP framework, it’ll be interesting to see how whether this, together… Continue reading Zend framework released