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Archive for March, 2007
Heroes are coming to SABC 3
I cannot remember the last time I sat down in front of a television set to watch anything. Maybe a few minutes of the news, but nothing more than that. A recent announcement on TVSA caught my attention, though. The highly acclaimed series Heroes will be shown on SABC 3 from the 1st of May.
With superheroes and some intrigue, this is right up my street. I’ve seen snippets and have read a bit about the series and it does promise to be quite entertaining. Some plot devices that will undoubtedly be used seem evident just by reading about the characters abilities: Claire Bennet has a healing factor and Hiro Nakamura has the ability to manipulate the space-time continuum.
In any event, I hope these heroes don’t wear their underpants over their trousers!
Bandwidth price trend: discounts!
5 years ago
by manfred
in Life in South Africa
Discounts are always welcome. Getting more bandwidth for the same monthly cost is great, as is the lowering of prices per MB.
I have a 3GB iBurst connection that is quite reliable and the only real alternative I have for broadband access where we live. At the beginning of March, iBurst launched Data Carry-Over as well as a Data Bonus. The Data Bonus means I get an extra 500MB of bandwidth per month without an increase in price. That’s not to be sniffed at! With carry-over, I’ll be able to skip sucking down one or two torrents just to make sure I use my monthly cap 
For mobile access, I use a Vodacom 3G/HSDPA card which has great reception and country-wide coverage. Vodacom has also lowered its bandwidth charges – instead of providing more bandwidth for the same price, the bundle cost per month is being reduced. For the 500MB cap that I presently shell out ZAR 350 for, the cost will decrease to ZAR 249.
These changes apply to existing and new subscribers. iBurst’s claim that iBurst contract customers have the lowest in-bundle per Megabyte data rates in the country may no longer be valid… Let’s see whether there’ll be another reduction soon.
ZA gets into Podcasting
Apple continues their drive to market their products. Hot on the heels of the Phofilmusigner event, the Apple IMC is preparing for a competition that will test voices and creativity. ipodcast – The Showdown challenges entrants to submit a video or audio podcast of three minutes or less. The best entries will be selected based on public opinion. Apple is providing a fair number of prizes to those making it to the finals.
As someone who has been listening to a variety of podcasts for more than two years, the generation of some localized content is certainly a welcome trend. Even if it falls under the auspices of a marketing campaign for Apple.
Where is that microphone?
IBM SOA Architect summit
I continue with an overview of the remainder of the IBM SOA Architect summit.
Modeling and methodologies are all good and well. But there is a time and a place for everything. In the talk on SOA in an enterprise architecture, there was a fair bit of real-world experience provided. Practical advice including the fact that standards are useful only if they actually make a difference. A good example of this is the attempt to include a certain standard or development technique into a SOA development only to find out that the requisite skills are not available or that the development technique goes beyond what is ordinarily done in the organization. The most salient point made in the presentation is probably the most important question anyone embarking on the SOA voyage should think about: what is a service?. It’s a lot trickier than one initially thinks…
Open Tuesday
5 years ago
by manfred
in Linux/Unix
Ok, it’s Wednesday. Tuesday was yesterday. So, let’s pretend it’s late Open Tuesday and I’ll tell you about the inaugural event
Open Tuesday is an event that originated in Finland and is aimed at bringing together friends of open source software. A small, diverse collection of us got together at the first such event in South Africa. Future meetings are planned, and these should take place on each second Tuesday of every month. I had a bit of a time getting there: the initial location was given as the Sandton Convention Centre, but had been changed to the Kelsey grill in the Katherine Street Holiday Inn. A rather long walk, and we were there. The voucher for a free beer was certainly welcome!
A VC from Finland gave a short introduction, then the floor was open for discussion. There is a huge amount of talent in ZA – if you are into open source development, seeking venture capital for a startup or just want to share ideas with like-minded individuals, Open Tuesday may be for you. Get to the website and register. I’ll meet you there next month…on Tuesday.
IBM SOA Architect Summit
Yesterday was certainly a busy day! With both the IBM SOA Architect Summit and the inaugural Open Tuesday event, there was no opportunity to provide feedback during the day.
Here are some notes from the IBM event, which was well attended and provided input and information from some senior IBM’ers. The high attendance figures are a good indicator for the amount of attention SOA is presently receiving.
IBM’s take on SOA is similar, yet subtly different from SAP’s view. That makes sense, as IBM has the ability to provide a SOA architecture without having to worry too much about an existing, functionally rich application suite. Whereas SAP is focusing on select services and components, IBM offers a much broader scope that extends all the way from its On Demand hardware and solution provision, to modeling and development.
Open Tuesday
5 years ago
by manfred
in Moblogging
Open Tuesday
Originally uploaded by MHertenberger.
Something lighter after a day of SOA. FOSS at Open Tuesday.
JPod by Douglas Coupland
I don’t know what it is with Coupland’s books. Maybe, it’s the cutesy Lego art gracing the covers of his books. Maybe, it’s the fact that he is a contributor to Wired magazine. Whatever it is that drew me to them, his books suck!
My foray into Coup-land began with an order for two of his books: Microserfs and JPod. Completing the first one was a tedious affair. Actually, a waste of time. I wrote about that a while ago.
Drupal experiences
Learning and using Drupal is proving to be interesting, if not frustrating at times. Maybe WordPress has made me soft. There’s the obvious difference in that Drupal is a CMS and caters for more than just pure blogging. Plug-ins are available to make WordPress do a number of things above and beyond what it was initially designed for. Drupal simply has the necessary CMS features built-in from the start. Overall, it works. There are certain things in Drupal that stand out as being quite innovative. Then there are strange behavioural quirks and links and codes you may need that take ages to find. The creation of a menu structure took me a fair bit of time, for example.
WordPress is a polished product, with an excellent resource of documentation. The WordPress documentation is highly detailed and accessible at the same time. Drupal’s handbooks are certainly useful, but I find them slightly incoherent at times and often lacking the detailed information I needed to find. Maybe it’s just that I’m new to the platform, but the handbooks don’t really help that much. Switching to forum searches is often a better means of finding a solution to an issue, as is the ever-popular Google search. I installed a new version of Drupal. A lot of the content and development is still focused on the older 4.7 release. Finding resources for version 5 is not all that easy, or one is never sure how well older components will interact with the new version. A similar situation with WordPress, I guess.
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