the corner office

Interesting article, at allAfrica.com, about the local accounting package TurboCASH going open-source and global:

In the eight months since TurboCASH moved into the open source licensing model, over 12 000 new users have registered. Registrations have come from over 60 different countries. Translations are under way in more than nine languages.

Whodathought.

Having built my own accounting system (and being rather proud of how I did it), I'm keen to take a look at TurboCASH, and see what it's like under the hood.

Coincidentally, it's the only shrinkwrap accounting package I've ever really worked with: back in 1991, as a student, I did some part-time bookkeeping for a small TV production company, and I got to play with and set up TurboCASH. DOS-based and butt-ugly. I'm sure it's come a long way since then :-)

Tupac's not the most maternal of dogs. As her puppies start sprouting teeth, she ends up spending more time with us. I wonder why...

Her old favourite napping spot used to be under my desk, which was great because she made an excellent foot warmer. These days, her favourite spot is behind or underneath my office chair. Not a good thing. First, I find it a bit hard to relax knowing that I daren't roll my chair back and forth in case I do grievous doggily harm. Second, it's almost impossible to get this mutt to move once she's comfortable. Speaking, shaking, clapping, nudging, shoving, and menacing half-attempts to move the chair get met with a blank stare or resentful 'how-could-you' indignance. I end up a prisoner at my own desk, unable to move.

I've discovered the secret though. I have some plastic wrapping from a packet of biscuits, and I've discovered that the gentlest ruffling of this plastic is enough to remove the dog from deep-sleep inertia, and have her up and bouncing around at my side with a cute 'can-I-have-some-too?' look.

A bit cruel of me, but problem solved :-)

I've always known that AMD were the underdog, but I was rather amazed to read that their annual sales are still less than 10% of Intel's.

Just switched off the telly. In the news are two things: the assassination of the wheel-chair-bound, half-blind 'spiritual leader' of a terrorist group who apart from encouraging suicide bombings also builds up its groundswell support by funding schools, hospitals and other social projects. At the same time the spin machine for both sides hypes up and down the allegations that George W Bush was so focused on finding a way to implicate Iraq that he allegedly barely cared about the real perpetrators of 9/11.

I tried to look up the word 'terrorism' in the dictionary and it basically describes every use of force humankind has ever resorted to: violence to achieve a goal. Yet we have a War on Terror, nebulous as it sounds, and we must win. Us versus terrorists, and they must go.

I'm ambivalent, and here's why: our current government used to be a terrorist organisation. I wouldn't vote for the ANC but I do support their right to rule our country. That's what democracy is about.

There was a time, though, when they tried to kill people like me, for things I had little control over. Our much-loved ex-president Nelson Mandela was responsible for forming Umkhonto We Sizwe, the ANC's military arm. MK, as they were known, were the reason that almost every classroom in white South African schools had posters up, teaching us how to identify limpet mines and the like. Terrorist attacks happened. The ANC killed innocent civilians to achieve their goals. The Magoo Bar bombing is a particularly infamous terrorist attack from the 80s. The mastermind of that is now a Police Chief.

(Unsurprisingly, in the entire BBC article, the word 'terror' doesn't appear once. Yet the Magoo Bombing was pure terrorism, as pure as 9/11 or the Madrid bombing or the suicide attacks in any downtown Jerusalem restaurant).

Perception and semantics. One day a terrorist attack, another day a 'bombing'. One day terrorists, the next day, your government. It can be hard to reconcile these things. Perhaps it's impossible, and there's a lesson in that.

Firmly fixed in my world view is the old truism: one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Very firmly, I abhor violence. I hate the idea of killing. Yet when it comes to the concept of 'terrorism', our own history tells me it's not as cut and dried as we'd like it to be.

I often ask myself: what would have to happen to my life, my status quo, my freedoms, before I was willing to do what so-called terrorists do? Can I honestly say never? Could you?

It seems to me that a working definition of terrorists is simply 'those who commit acts of war without the benefit of a flag to give it legitimacy'. As westernised people, we were always very comfortable with the notion of 'collateral damage' (can you spell Hiroshima?) as a necessity to defend ourselves or enforce our notion of what's right and wrong on the world. Ironic then, how we react when others want to engage us on similar terms.

I dunno. I'm not standing up for terrorists and the awful things they do. I just don't think that established, sovereign states are necessarily very different to, or better than The Terrorists. I don't believe that the issues are as simple as our politicians (and our fears) would have us accept.

Grand Prix this morning, I didn't watch since I've decided that with Ferrari whupping everyone's butt this year, it's officially Boring and my girlfriend's enthusiasm for the sport is not enough to get me up at 8h30 on a Sunday morning to watch. L had crashed on the couch last night and he & Ronwen watched it this morning. I woke up in time for breakfast. A little hungover I might add, but not of the 'dear-lord-let-me-die-now' varieties. More the 'yay-why-don't-I-do-that-more-often' types.

L's chosen DVD for today was Undercover Brother. What a hoot. I spent the rest of the day mindlessly surfing the web, mostly NMA sites. That devolved into bouncing from blogroll to blogroll and devouring a host of blogs of people I've never heard of before. At 11h15 I came to the conclusion that having done exactly zip constructive today, I owed it to myself to try and spend at least some time doing something useful. Since I can't decide what to do, I figured I'd blog a bit more instead. Sad or what?

Tomorrow's a public holiday for us. Cool.

Charles Miller's Rules of Argument:

Rule one is scarily simple. You will never change anyone’s mind on a matter of opinion. Someone going into an argument believing one thing, and coming out the other side not believing it is a freak occurrence ranking somewhere alongside virgin birth and victorious English sporting teams.

So true. Gay marriages, US/Iraq issues, coding styles, the lot. All conspire to chew up precious minutes and hours. It's not like one is ever going to stop wanting to say one's say, or stop enjoying a good set-to, but Charles hits the nail on the head: understand what you're going to accomplish and know when to leave well enough alone.

Last night was the New Model Army concert. Their first visit to South Africa. God bless the Alter Ego crowd (mind the sound clips). What a magical experience.

The gig was at the Newtown Music Warehouse. P's oversees, so L joined R & I. The venue was hot, busy but not too packed, and an excellent atmosphere. The crowd was a mix of youngsters, 30-somethings and even older. Barney Simon was the MC (he'll be 95 and they'll still wheel him out to announce any remotely alternative band, but he reminisced about the old Shadow Show and he hauled out his old NMA 7 singles for effect so I spose he does have some cred). The opening band were a local act called the Parlotones (?), first I'd heard of 'em. Not bad, but not what we'd come for.

After a long wait of setting up and soundchecking by their roadie, on came NMA. Brilliant. I can't begin to remember the full set list, but many, many classics. In the main set, two songs stood out as really blowing me away: the acoustic A Liberal Education, and the rocker Here Comes the War had the crowd going ballistic.

The set ended and the band did an exit left, the crowd kept screaming, and they eventually came on for an encore. I can't even remember what they played but they did another 3 songs or so. Off they went again, and the crowd started chanting 'Vagabonds!'. On came Justin Sullivan. "You'll have noticed we don't have a violinist" says he, and offered to do the song if the crowd sang the violin riff. Which we did, with Justin singing and playing guitar. The band made their way back onto stage, and joined in for the last verse. They ended off with I love the world. What an end.

Couple of other songs off the top of my head were 51st State, Purity, Green and Grey, Stupid Questions, No Rest, Poison Street, and Get Me Out.

It took over 20 years for NMA to make it to South Africa. It's a little sad that we get so worked up over something that many people in Europe could go out and do every other month - but at the same time, I think it added to the mood because for everyone, this was special. The atmosphere was brilliant, and least of all because the band seemed to feed off of the excitement and got into it as much as we did. They were professional, loud and passionate, and their music was even more powerful and beautiful live, than recorded. An incredible night.

The X-files pisses me off. There've been some really cool story lines in the past, but the overriding thing that keeps me from being a fan is that at least halfway into any given episode I want to shake everyone and scream out "just fscking talk to each other!"

For how many years have the principal characters gone from episode to episode talking in bloody riddles and acting all cryptic and refusing to hear what the other person says? Yeah, that's the human condition, but it's a ridiculous charicature of reality. These people are in a profession where weird shit happens. Over and again. You think they'd have learned to be a little more open to each other's hunches and intuitions and know that when one of 'em has weird experiences with a fruitloop, it's happened for a reason. Instead, it's the same tired bob and weave every damned episode:

"I have a goofed out theory that explains this, but I won't tell you about it because we have another 20 minutes to get through excluding ad breaks." "No, you're talking out your arse, and I don't know what you're on about anyway." "That's fine, in this episode it's my turn to be all mysterious" "When will you get over this mystery thing. There is a rational explanation for this. I was wrong the last 6 seasons, but this time it's different." "Accept the truth. I am your father."

Pffff.

Thanks to the BBC, I was reminded that yesterday (the 18th) was the 12th anniversary of the Referendum which saw white South Africa agree to share the goodies with everyone else.

A bit of history follows.

I was 19, and it was the first time I'd had an opportunity to vote. We were at varsity and myself and my friend M went to a local school in Parktown to vote. I can't remember much about the ballot but it basically had a huge long-winded paragraph which you could paraphrase into "End Apartheid? Yes | No". You made your cross in one of two big blocks. Silly, but I remember that making that cross was as nerve-wracking as writing out a cheque is. Not fundamentally difficult: you know exactly what you want to write but part of your mind is saying "What if I fsck up and make a cross in the wrong box?", and experience (and many cancelled cheques) has proven to me that as soon as you start thinking about fscking up there's a good chance you will. Thankfully I proof-read my cross a few times, and was reasonably satisfied that I'd done my bit for humanity and not voted for the wrong side. Walking out of the school hall, I think, was one of the first times I really felt like a grown-up.

I remember that the referendum was a really big thing - in many ways more than the elections which followed two years later. There was a lot of controversy because it was after all a whites-only referendum. Us whiteys got to decide whether to dismantle apartheid, as if it was really up to us to be magnanimous or not. Back in my home town I knew enough people who voted No. At the time, a common way to describe a racist white person was to use the forceful phrase "Ek Stem Nee!" (I vote No).

There was a lot of heated discussion - back then, many people believed that voting Yes would be inviting decay and mayhem a la Zimbabwe and our other neighbours. On the flipside, many people suspected that if the Yes vote didn't win, and the negotiations that were happening at the Codesa talks et al were halted, we would almost certainly descend into civil war.

In the end, the Yes vote won 2:1, which was a fairly decisive considering that nobody was really sure how it would go. Regardless of its legitimacy as a 'democratic' referendum, I think that the psychological effect of proving that the majority of white folks were open to change and didn't want the status quo to continue, defused a lot of tension, gave people faith that things could turn out positively, and prepared everybody for what was to come.

12 years ago. Fsck, I'm getting old...

Two certainties in life. Got home from the lunch run, and there's a strange hissing sound coming from under the kitchen sink. Open up the cupboard under the sink, and I'm met with a steam bath. Quick call to the plumbers (one of whom used to live next door, which is always a bonus), and a corroded, leaking hot water pipe which runs the length of the kitchen, behind the cupboards, is the culprit. Thankfully they managed to remove some of the cupboard backing and get to the pipe to clamp it, but the real repair at some point in the future is going to mean ripping apart the entire kitchen, removing stoves, fitted cupboards, the lot, to replace the pipe. Seems we're not the first flat in the complex to have this problem.

At times like this I'm bloody glad I'm renting. We'll have the inconvenience of not having a kitchen for a day or few, but at least the expense (and heartache of seeing one's recently-refurbished kitchen being taken apart) won't be ours. Having gotten off the phone with her a few minutes ago, I think our poor landlady's sitting down and having a stiff whiskey round about now.

And with that, my afternoon has evaporated. Back to Recons code I go...