Category: Earth (Arts and Literature)

There are now two local blog competitions. There’s the SA Blog Awards, and now News24’s Great South African Blog-off. Unfortunately both are hardly stellar examples of technical competence. SA Blog Awards permalink, comments and trackback links all break, so it hardly qualifies as a blog itself. Subscribing to the blogs feed is not worth it,… Continue reading Broken blog competitions

I see that Johnnic is launching what could be described as a blogging site, reporter.co.za. It’s being given a different spin to the other local alternative, the Mail and Guardian’s Blogmark (recently rebranded from Blogspot). Instead of aiming to be a blog, with all the attendant low-quality noise associated with the term, it’s aiming at… Continue reading Johnnic launches reporter.co.za

The fire is still raging out of control, but looks like the Cable Station, with a little help from the wind, will make it. I didn’t get a good view of the Higgovale situation, but those houses must be close. There’s also another fire, what looks like towards Rhodes Memorial, so the arsonists have probably… Continue reading Table Mountain Fire Pics

I came across two recent criticisms of the Wikimedia projects. Both unfortunately show a lack of understanding about the projects. One picks up on an old, dated criticism, and the other gets caught up in the edit war phenomenon, resorting to insults when they don’t get their way. The first, on New Median, entitled Wikipedia,… Continue reading Recent criticisms of Wikimedia

It’s been a long time since I saw a movie that’s left such an indelible mark on me, or caused such a strong emotional response . Living out in the sticks of Cape Town, where the nearest cinema is at the Long Beach mall, where the average film seems to be aimed at someone with… Continue reading An unforgettable movie

Just for the record, I have nothing to do with SSWUG (the SQL Server Worldwide Users Group). While googling I found they were offering an article written by myself, available to paid subscribers only. What they actually do, after taking your money, is then redirect you to the freely available original article. Highly unethical if… Continue reading Dissociating myself from SSWUG

I’ve been having fun today on the Afrikaans Wikipedia. Although my Afrikaans is bad enough so that everything is quite slow going, and I sit with a dictionary by my side, its quite fun working on something that’s still so incomplete. The English Wikipedia is huge now, over 600 000 articles, so the tiny Afrikaans… Continue reading Templates on the Afrikaans Wikipedia, and a translating tool

Knowing too much can be a curse. In this case it’s the knowledge of good and evil. Of course I’m told there is no good and evil really, and sometimes I even think I manage to grasp it, but buying into my judgemental partitioning of the world for now, I sometimes hark back for the… Continue reading The curse of knowledge

Unfortunately I missed the FLOSS conference in Pretoria, but there’ve already been two writeups about it that I’m aware of. A Tectonic article, Wiki-ing into Africa, and a Wikimedia conference report. The conference sounded great, particularly the discussions around distributing Wikipedia, legal terminology and Wiktionary (to assist the courts in dealing with translating the 11… Continue reading Wikimedia and the FLOSS conference in Pretoria

Walton recommended a rare treat of a book, and I’ve managed to steal enough time, and let Dorje get up to just enough havoc in order to finish it. The treat in question was After the Eclipse by Tom Rymour (published by Discobolus). The author’s name (real name Tom Learmont) is apparently derived from Thomas… Continue reading After the Eclipse, by Tom Rymour