Life is grand

…while I was in Africa last week.

I will wager that a Brazilian says “I am from Brazil” rather than “I am from South America.” and then clarifies with “Brazil.” Yet I will often allude to Africa, that vast, dark, dangerous continent, rather than simply say I am from South Africa.

That there are less Africans around here than other foreigners, Asians, Americans, Australians etc., adds to the allure of Africa. When you hear Africa you see the starving millions against the backdrop of the Serengeti or towering Kilimanjaro. You hear the chanting voices around a fire and the screams of a dying continent. It is dark and dangerous. And I come from there.

The TSSG has an internet monitor called Websense and I run into it a good couple times a day. A few blogs I regularly read are labelled as adult and more than one photo site I like to visit is banned.

The best though is urbandictionary.com which Websense has blocked and labelled as “Tasteless.” Thanks Websense, I knew that, that is why I was going there.

Imagine for a moment that magazines and newspapers titled their stories like companies name their products. A New York Times story on Cheney’s hunting accident* would be titled “NYT DC HA 001″ while Jacko’s court case might be “Wacko Special CC1xT Supreme.”

What the hell am I talking about?

I just got back from 9 days away from my feed aggregator and on opening the PC Magazine New Product Reviews feed I was presented with the most unintelligble list of product names this side of 1970’s USSR military resources.

Saitek A-250, Plus V-339, Podzinger, Konica Minolta PagePro 1400W, Lenovo ThinkVision L201p, Cingular 2125, Vizio L32, Westinghouse LTV-32w1, Proview RX-326, Velocity Micro Vision GX and Nokia 6102/6101.

Did I just stumble across a list of produce codes rather than marketable, understandable product names? No. Those are the names. I only know the last two products are mobile-phones because that is what Nokia makes. Otherwise they could have been Swedish massagers for all I know.

Why can’t the Westinghouse LTV-32w1 (say that three times fast) be named the Westinghouse 32″ HiDef TV 2006. Keep the LTV-32w1 bit for when it breaks and I need to phone Westinghouse support, but keep it in the manual or on the back of the telly. Don’t make me sound stupid when I go to a store and ask for the Westinghouse el, tee, vee, dash, thirty two, double-u, one.

* Why is the second-in-charge of the free world hunting anyway?

I need to titivate. Look it up.

Just a quick shout out to say I am still alive. Haven’t had a net connection for over a week now down here in South Africa. My uncle’s funeral/memorial went very well in Gabarone. I’ll be back in Ireland on Sunday and back up and running on Monday.

See you all then my friends.

The Infinitim team just gave the rest of the TSSG a demo of their SIP IM client. It integrates with a BEA server and allows text, audio and video calls all initiated using SIP.

At one point a voice call was made from a Windows desktop client to a WiFi SIP phone. That was quite impressive. Eventually you’ll be able to roam with the phone and it will automatically switch between the best available network (e.g. WiFi, GSM etc.) Another concept carried over from the Impruve team is that of IM “bots” which allow automated systems to integrate with your IM client. The one they had was a location bot that showed you your location on a map when asked.

The team will be at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona at the BEA stand. If you are there give them a shout.

Handy travel trip thanks to Brian.

At first I was going to fly Ryanair Dublin to London Stansted and then catch a connecting bus to London Heathrow to catch a flight out of there. The Ryanair flight would have cost €59 and the bus €29. But Brian mentioned that Aer Lingus fly Dublin to London Heathrow and on checking the flight, in total, costs €90. So if I pay €2 extra I cut out that awful 2 hour airport bus connection and don’t run the risk of missing my later flight thanks to London traffic.

thanks Brian.

Airlines are insane. Look at the above price selector. Two different flights, both from Johannesburg, South Africa to London. Both on the same day. Both at economy level. The cheaper one leaves 5 minutes later and arrives 10 minutes earlier. It is cheaper by £50. Why on earth would anyone choose the first one?

Even more insane is €2333 for a return flight from Dublin to Johannesburg when a return flight from London to Johannesburg is just €1100. I can get a return Ryanair flight from Dublin to London for €100, saving me about €800 even factoring in the hassle and bus trip from Stansted Airport in London to Heathrow.

It is going to be a bit of a mad trip though.

I’ll have to catch a bus from Waterford to Dublin on Friday evening. 21:30 arriving 23:30. I’ll then stay overnight in Dublin Airport to catch a flight to London Stansted, 06:30 to 07:45. I then need to catch a bus to London Heathrow, 08:40 to 10:05. I then depart London Heathrow at 17:50 on Saturday and arrive in Johannesburg at 06:45 on Sunday. I’ll have a breather till Tuesday when we drive from Johannesburg to Gabarone, Botswana. About a 6 hour trip. Funeral is then on Wednesday. Drive back to Johannesburg on Thursday. Another breather till I depart Johannesburg at 21:20 on Saturday the 18th and arrive in London Heathrow at 06:20 on Sunday the 19th. I then catch a bus to London Stansted to catch a flight to Dublin where I will need to find a bus back to Waterford.

It will all work out as things always have.

If you are using SwitchTower to deploy your apps and your subversion repository needs a different user and password to your deployment boxes then use the following snippet in your deploy.rb:

set :repository, "--username usr --password pass http://repourl/"

It isn’t ideal as your password is in deploy.rb but you could use a read-only user. I am hoping I can figure out how to send an environment variable when using rake deploy so that I can set the password then.

I found this little trick on SwitchTower progress.

Marc Clifton asked “What is a computer program?” Toxcct answered with this brilliant reply:

do
    write randomly 0 or 1
while (not enough)