Life is grand

The change from Mandela to Mbeki was, at the time, slightly worrying as we weren’t sure who this humorless, London and Soviet bred man was. He proved to be good for South Africa though, a steady hand on the economic wheel. We might have done better as a cultural nation under a few more years of Mandela but Mbeki was no bad thing (though his AIDS policies have been bizarre.)

Mbeki to Zuma on the other hand is more than slightly worrying. Zuma may have been acquitted of rape charges but this is a man who was relieved of his vice-presidency and will possibly be facing corruption charges. He has said “I would knock him out” should a homosexual stand in front of him. Great presidential material there. He also thinks a shower after unsafe sex would reduce the risk of HIV.

Tutu doesn’t like him much either.

This was an apparent reference to the woman Mr Zuma was acquitted of raping. She was a family friend less than half his age with whom he had unprotected sex while being aware she was HIV-positive.

Rapist, homophobic, corrupt and delusional about the threat of HIV to South Africa. Our next president?

I am glad to read that Internet Explorer 8 is currently passing the Acid2 test. Acid2 is a bit thin on the practical side of web development but it indicates a strong commitment from Microsoft and the Internet Explorer team to getting web standards right. It also shows that the guys have been working hard on the next version of Internet Explorer and that the hoohah from the blogosphere last week was a bit OTT (this Acid2 announcement has come at a good time for them.)

Also the news that IE8 will be available in beta format after MIX08, first half of 2008.

As Tom says, 2008 could be a good year for web developers and web users.

Marty Mcfly has some words of wisdom for those of us mainlining widgets:

I’m not in the widget business anymore. I have no widgets to sell.

(Via Kottke.)

Doc Searls’ word is not catchy* but phrowser definitely coins what I do with my iPhone most. Before it I never used the “mobile” web but now I often reach for the iPhone on the coffee table rather than the MacBook Pro when I want to look up Spider Pig or a sports score. And it applies to the iTouch too. A friend’s wife got one last week and over the weekend this most un-geek of a man was sitting on his couch checking his fantasy soccer league scores on the iTouch.

It is a gem of a web enabled device.

BTW if you have an iPhone or iTouch and find the browser frustrating then you might not know about the double-tap feature. Double-tap on a section of the site to zoom in, double-tap to zoom out. It generally figures out the rectangle of content you want to zoom in to. The pinch-to-zoom feature is cute but the double-tap feature is just plain useful.

* Not that “catchiness” always matters. Google was a maths geek term before Google the company. Facebook is unwieldy but just got added to the dictionary. etc.

If I understand DevPay right it allows me to create, for instance, a photo application that uses S3 and then charge the S3 usage through DevPay to the user. Before DevPay I’d have to manage it all with my one, personal S3 account and figure out how to charge my users. It takes some risk out of it for developers, allows users to regulate their usage and

Amazon has gone and made their web services even more practical and useful.

SPIDER PIG
SPIDER PIG
Does whatever a SPIDER PIG does
Can he swing
From a web
No he cant
He’s a pig
LOOK OOOUUUTTT!!!!
He is a SPIDER PIG!!

Oh man. The Simpsons movie could have been 87 minutes of disappointment but boy was it ever funny. Everything The Simpsons are and more.

Well done Matt Groening, James L. Brooks and the rest, you somehow managed to pull that one off. Genius!

Amazon’s SimpleDB is a really interesting piece of technology. It isn’t MySQL/SQL Server in the cloud but as many are commenting most of us don’t need a full-blown RMDBS for our web-apps. We need data persistence and querying; a scalable data hash with a decent query system. SimpleDB seems to be that.

Inside Out has a good initial write-up on it including a bit on the schema-less nature of SimpleDB. It is more like an XML document store than a relational database.

I am looking forward to some Ruby on Rails adapters for this.

I had forgotten how truly terrible the Windows command line is in comparison to any Unix-style command-line.

Then again, I’ve never had a hard-drive fail on me, in 16 years of computing, till yesterday when my MacBook Pro HD died (it is an Hitachi drive.) Mac OS X started locking up and Disk Utility reported errors all over. I booted into single user mode, ran fcsk and it reported the errors had been fixed. But the problems persisted and a few hours after the initial warning signs the system became unbootable. A reinstall doesn’t work, it gets 10 minutes into the process and then reports that the HD is not responding.

Thankfully everything, the entire drive, is backed up to a network share via the brilliant Time Machine.

I have ordered a replacement drive but that will only be delivered on Monday. So it is back to Windows on my old Compaq laptop for the next few days.

It is an odd experience having to find drivers for Windows XP after this last year or so of “it just works” on Mac OS X.

I am disappointed in the MacBook Pro. An HD really shouldn’t fail after just one year.

There seems to be a good number of APML producers but are there any APML consumers? In other words; what can I do with APML?

Yahoo! EasyListener is exactly that. Point this Flash app. at a URL that has MP3s and it will list them and start playing them. Simple and useful.

(The music above is from a friend, CubikMusik.)