the corner office

The majority of the weekend was spent playing with Gentoo. An emerge world saw a heap of updates to KDE and Gnome come down the line... many many many hours of compiling. Then I decided to try rolling my own Thunderbird. Not a good idea... that chugged away for hours. Then Eclipse... couple more hours, and finally OpenOffice which took nearly 13 hours to compile. The novelty of compiling my own stuff is wearing off. On the up side, apart from a looong list of things to tweak and sort out, I have a semi-usable system, and apart from minor details like mail and Notes access, I'm spending less and less time in Windows.

Very few other distractions over the weekend - we rented a DVD on Saturday (Big Fish - very good), and met P and L and A at the Manhattan Grill on Sunday night. Speaking of Manhattan, P's leaving soon on her company's annual ra-ra. This year they're going to Cancun and New York. Bah.

It also turns out I missed a chance to meet up with Mr Blakey-Milner who was up to present at the Open Source Software Africa conference. It's only been, oh, 7 years since we last met up? :)

Thanks to Mr Vaughan, I have me a gmail account. Thanks Jonvon! :-)

Ronwen and I were off to Cresta for lunch, and decided to catch a movie while we were there. It's been months since we last went to movies (always too busy or lazy). We ended up watching Around The World In 80 Days. Some less than stellar bits but overall good clean fun. The fight scenes with JackieChan! are always good fun. A good few cameos... Arnie didn't do it for me, but Rob Schneider's part had us in stitches.

I ate too much though. Came home and spent the evening feeling sorry for myself on the couch and mooching around with Gentoo. R & I watched 'Coming To America' on SABC3. Still a damned funny movie - especially the various Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall characters. It's always a hoot to revisit or even rediscover the source of old gags and lines that are nowadays part of our common culture, 16 years later. As I said to Ronwen, it's painful to look back at the clothes and hair styles and music and think we grew up with that, but then again, if you're willing to re-embrace that 80s cheese, you can hook back into a lot of good memories.

On Thursday night I finished reading Game Architecture and Design: A New Edition by Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris. No, I have no pretensions of getting into game development, but let's be honest, it's the coolest part of the IT industry, and I bought the book for a bit of armchair tourism, if you will. The fact that it took me months to finish is perhaps indicative that I found it pretty slow going. If I hadn't coughed up so much for it, I'd probably have given up.

It's a fairly comprehensive treatment of games development - not much nitty-gritty technical stuff, but instead a detailed treatment of various aspects of the games making process - from the earliest design phases to the final goal of shipping a game. It is interesting and valuable in that it applies good old software development best practices and principles to the context of game development, and that obviously is still applicable to the boring work the rest of us do. Some of the principles almost seem heretical and counter to our images of what ubergeek game developers do - but that's the point the authors repeatedly make - games are BIG these days, and need a different set of rules now: the anarchic culture is actually holding the games industry back.

The book is well written and I kept coming across truisms and examples and observations that had me thinking 'hmm, I should make a note of this' - but in the end I just didn't find myself excited about reading it. I can't say why - some sections just seemed to go on forever, and in general, I guess what I should call the "resonance to noise ratio" just wasn't that high for me. There's some really decent, insightful and useful content, but not enough for me to say I enjoyed the book.

I remember this being on the telly weeks back. An old man dies, a so-called prophet says he will rise again, and so the family refuse to bury the body and wait for a magical day that keeps getting postponed. Now the cops have said enough is enough:

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South African authorities will bury a 77-year-old man who has been dead seven weeks despite his family saying a "prophet" had promised them he would be resurrected, police said on Tuesday.

Paul Meintjes's body was returned to his family late last week after the local mortuary refused to store it any longer. The body was kept in his widow's bedroom at their Free State home for three days before officials said it was a health risk and ordered it taken to the state morgue.

"The body is OK -- it is still recognizable," police spokesman Sam Makhele told Reuters by telephone from Bloemfontein. "But after a few days out of the fridge the smell was not OK."

At the time I had one of my "bah religion" tirades which usually end with the missus saying "Colin. Shut up already." I just can't help but wonder what the family would have done if the fuzz hadn't stepped in. At what point do one's nostrils override one's faith?

(via Gauteng Blog)

Ouch...

A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between "not specified," "male" or "bitch," because of an unfortunate error in translation.

This and other balls-ups at CNET: How eight pixels cost Microsoft millions

(via Ian Murdock)

In 2019, I finally fixed a typo in the link to cnet.com - the article was still there. I also removed the link to Ian Murdock's site, which is now an advertising domain.

Stepped outside this morning, and got my first dose of Johannesburg spring air. I could never put my finger (or nose) on it, but there's always a certain something when the season turns. Swell!

I'm trawling through more interesting links over at Gauteng Blog. Apparently the small Gauteng province is running out of space, and more high-rise buildings are expected to be built over time. It will be interesting to see that play out, methinks. The ever-growing horizontal sprawl of housing complexes upon housing complexes growing out into the countryside around the city speaks to the Joburg mindset - after the formerly popular high-rise suburbs of Hillbrow and Berea quickly decayed and turned into a slumlands in the late 80s and 90s, your average Joburger is not going to rush off and buy property in an area with lots of high-rise buildings. Pity.

Another interesting part of the problem is that a large part of Gauteng sits on top of dolomitic (limestone) rock, which isn't suitable for building houses. Why? 'Cause they can get swallowed up in sinkholes, basically. I grew up in the mining town of Carletonville which was particularly badly hit by this in the 60s. The mining in the area resulted in lots of water being pumped away, and large underground cavities being left behind as the water table dropped. These caused all sorts of unpleasantness. Throughout Carletonville, there were suburbs where one house on a block, or sometimes entire blocks were open land with nothing more than the original foundations of houses, because ground movement and settling had caused the houses to collapse or be destroyed to avoid the sinkhole threats. The bottom of this page (also linked to by GP) has a picture of a huge sinkhole in Kaolin street, Carletonville. We lived two streets up, and that area had plenty of empty lots. Freaky stuff. Those open lots with their uneven ground always had an eerie feel to them. By the 70s and 80s most areas were considered 'safe', but I remember that in one area a new housing complex quickly had to ban the construction of swimming pools, because all that extra water increased the sinkhole risk if pools leaked. Didn't do much for their property values, as I recall.

Another side effect of all the mining was the amount of seismic activity and tremors we were exposed to all the time, so much so that you eventually didn't even notice them. I remember coming back to one of the Carletonville mines as an auditor. An auditing team of Joburg city slickers nearly soiled themselves and were almost diving for cover under tables when a tremor hit, while the locals, including myself, carried on doing our thing, completely oblivious to the seismic wibble. Some wibbles were worse than others, though, and we were always near the epicentre, so even we got frights now and then. I will admit that I resolved at a young age that California was probably one part of the world I'd probably not want to live in.

A question posed by Gauteng blog:

I have noticed that when I go down to the coast, my half-used shampoo bottle (I use Johnson's Baby Shampoo) is crushed. When I open the lid, it pops back into shape. Presumably, this has something to do with altitude and air pressure differences between the coast and Gauteng. It could also have to do with my poor packing technique, but I doubt it. Do manufacturers have to take this into account when transporting goods?

Since Joburg is over 1.7km above sea level, it's very definitely due to the changes in air pressure. I've always maintained that Durbanites, between the coastal air pressure and oppressive humidity, are exposing their brains to a form of slow pressure-cooking that definitely can't be healthy for them. It probably explains a lot about Durban, come to think of it.

To answer GP's question: it is a transport issue. My aunt's sister and her hubby did a stint a few years ago as truck drivers in the USA. Transporting packets of potato chips (crisps) from California to elsewhere can be a problem: if trucks take the mountain passes to get inland, the packets explode at high altitude, due to the much lower atmospheric air pressure. If I remember their story correctly, potato chips have to be transported around some of the mountain ranges, so's to keep the chip packets intact.

Supporting a good cause: Hellkom is in hot water because parastatal monopolist Telkom doesn't like people saying bad things about them.

Telkom will probably manage to squish the Hellkom site eventually, but the more negative publicity Telkom gets in the meantime, the better.

Edit: As of 2019, hellkom.co.za seems to be selling mobiles and just linking to articles elsewhere, so I've removed the link