Category: Metal (Technical)

I enjoy reading the weekly newsletter by my old IOL colleague Philip Devine, the editor of Business Report online. Today’s was entitled Computing the cost of doing business (the full text is available at getopenlab.com, not sure about the legalities of them posting the whole thing online, but that’s another story). Phil has some nice… Continue reading The installation challenge – Windows vs Open Source operating systems

I don’t know too many people who’ve tried 3G, but I’d heard nothing good – everyone claims the line dropped frequently. Now I’ve seen it in ‘action’ (Vodacom’s offering that is). Both in Observatory, Cape Town, and Forest Town/Rosebank, Jhb, it seems 3G is a major disappointment. Lost connections 100 times a day is no… Continue reading 3G unusable

I’m experiencing a highly annoying PHP sessions bug (PHP bug 32330). By simply trying to start a session with session_start(), at seemingly random times I get a session_start(): Failed to initialize storage module: error. The PHP bug 32897, is actually more accurate in my case, but that one’s been closed as a duplicate. The bug… Continue reading Highly annoying PHP Session bug

After the excitement of seeing that South Africans have the privilege of paying money through Paypal, but not receiving money (and who says global capitalism is not one big sucking sound from the have nots to the haves), I’ve recently actually tried to use it. I’ve tried a few times, at different times of the… Continue reading Trying to make a payment in Paypal

I read some stats today that indicated Telkom have doubled their ADSL user base from 50 000 in Feb 2005, to 100 000 now, with a 20 000 waiting list. With both Vodacom and Telkom offering ‘free’ computers and broadband access for an affordable monthly fee (I purposely avoid the term ‘reasonable’), it looks like… Continue reading Broadband Boom in SA

I missed the earlier announcements, if there were any, but I’m glad to hear that Paypal is finally available (partially) for South Africans. We can now open accounts and make payments via Paypal, but not accept payments. One friend has already been buying up a storm on eBay.

The domain impi.co.za points to my server. It’s a coming-soon project, but in the meantime it seems Impi Linux have stuffed up and posted ads all over Distrowatch punting Impi Linux (yes that’s org.za), and pointing anyone who clicks the banner to impi.co.za. One of the more successful marketing campaigns? 🙂

I’ve been attempting to read password-protected PDF’s on my new(ish) Linux laptop. I mentioned this a while ago, while still on my previous laptop, but yet again it’s the cause of fun and games. KGhostview is as hopeless as ever with password-protection, but things have moved along, so I tried KPDF again. Wonder of wonders,… Continue reading Password protected PDF’s on Linux – part II

I missed the news originally, but I’m quite pleased to see that HP are supporting Ubuntu Linux on some of their laptops. When buying a laptop here, HP and Toshiba were the only two that offered any Linux support (they offered to install it and promised it would work). What’s good about the new HP… Continue reading Ubuntu Linux on HP laptops

A long long time ago I was an addict of a game called Football Manager, written for the ZX Spectrum by the immortal Kevin Toms. The doddery graphics, the thrill of recognising a pattern of stick figures that usually resulted in a goal, the anguish of a star 5 Star player you loyally refused to… Continue reading Heaven is… Football Manager