the corner office

The Iraqi elections seem to have far exceeded anyone's expectations and it raises hope that Iraq's future as a stable democracy isn't just a pipe dream. It's a lesson for the world and a moment of pride for Iraqis that they ignored the threats of terrorists and thugs, and braved attacks which killed over 33 people, to participate in their new democracy.

At the same time, the comments have been made that neoconservatives will take this as validation of Bush's policies and what has happened in Iraq over the past 2 years. Yes, it'll happen, but I think it's BS. The issue shouldn't be whether elections were held or not, but to ask honestly whether these same elections could have happened with less bloodshed, less violence, and less destruction to Iraq, its infrastructure and its society. Also, the elections don't change the fact that the country is in effect embroiled in a civil war and that there are a lot of violent people who aren't just going to pack away the guns and explosives because the masses have spoken. And if Bush takes this as his cue to hightail the US military out of the country (possibly to gear up for spreading "freedom" in Iran), then Iraq could still go up in flames, even more so than now.

But I think the elections promise hope for that country and will prove to ordinary Iraqis that they and the majority of their countrymen and women do want to exercise peaceful control over their destinies, and that's the most positive news to have come from Iraq in a long time.

Many many many years ago a phenomenon shook the Net: Afrosquad. I still have all their movies. Then, one day, *poof*, the domain disappeared and they were no more.

I got to thinking about them a few minutes ago, and pointed Firefox at www.afrosquad.com, 'cause you know, maybe they'd come back one day. Lo! In a serendipitous twist, the site came back online a few days ago. Not much there yet, but one of the founders has been bloggin' for a while, too.

(The reason I was thinking of Afrosquad, actually, was watching this similarly-lo-fi-styled home-made music video of a Deadbolt ditty aptly named "Patches". Deadbolt rocks. Patches the evil clown rocks, too.)

Ronwen and I have been together for nearly 5 years. Before we started going out, she was renowned for her demon baking skillz, and especially her Chocolate Eclairs. Somehow over the last 5 years, the eclairs haven't been that forthcoming. She did whip up a batch, about 3 years ago, but I was rationed to about two of them, and the rest were parcelled off to work. Piffle to that. I still bear the scars.

Thankfully, this weekend has seen the Return of the Eclair, and this time around, they were ALL for me. It's about time... I hope I don't have to wait another 3 years. They're FAR TOO DELICIOUS for that!

(This is a shameless attempt at positive reinforcement.)

I occasionally use lynx, especially when I've hit my 3 gig ADSL cap and I've got next to no bandwidth to play with. But oh! the havoc that innocent little browser can wreak:

A Londonder made a tsunami-relief donation using lynx -- a text-based browser used by the blind, Unix-users and others -- on Sun's Solaris operating system. The site-operator decided that this "unusual" event in the system log indicated a hack-attempt, and the police broke down the donor's door and arrested him.

(Boing Boing, via Miguel de Icaza)

Carrying on with the studies topic, I got the official letters from UNISA, and my degree is being awarded with distinction. Yay!

Now the graduation looms and I have to decide whether to go or not. I must admit I'm not a big pomp and ceremony person, and I've never been to any of my graduations. I've had three 'graduations' from 3 universities in the past: my BCom from Wits, my Honours from UNISA, and my HDip Tax from RAU. I skipped all of them. I've just never seen the point in sitting in a hall full of people I don't know and twiddling my thumbs through a drawn-out ceremony for the privilege of getting to walk across the stage and bow down to some dude who doesn't know me from a bar of soap and posing for overpriced photographs while wearing robes I just rented for the occasion.

I know I'm a negative git, and it probably sounds very glib, but getting the degree in the post is a lot less effort. On the other hand, this holds a lot more personal significance for me than the things I studied before. So perhaps I should go? Or am I just feeling guilty about being a stick in the mud? Maybe I can just drape a black curtain around myself and get Ronwen to take some pics? The grandkids will never know... ;-)

Oh man. This year some of my varsity subjects reference a number of academic articles. In the past, anything of that sort was pre-printed and posted to us along with the rest of our study guides. This time around, because we're all grown up, we have to source the articles ourselves. I wasn't keen on having to send in periodical request cards to the university library and wait for photocopies to get posted to me, so I thought I'd take the wired approach instead. I spent over an hour trawling the Net trying to track down some rather obscure-looking articles... only semi-successfully, because geezers like the IEEE charge for access to their electronic archives. Only after I'd missioned through two subjects' worth of reading lists, did I finally hit a tutorial letter which said "get photocopies from the library or download the .pdfs from the library's website." Aaargh!

As it turns out, the library keeps pdf copies of tons of articles, and it's as simple as creating a login to get access to them, and to the library's complete catalogues and library management system. To be honest, I didn't think UNISA would be that jacked up. I'm impressed.

The best part of getting new books in the post is... bubble wrap!

Neat. On 25 February I'll be writing LPI certification exams, along with a few hundred other Linux geeks.

AfriBiz, a Linux training/solutions company, are arranging a mass certification event - and the exams can be written for a fraction of the normal cost (R200, instead of the R1k or more these exams usually go for). The original goal was to get 200 people to write the exam(s) at once. They reached and passed that goal, so they upped the number to 250. Now they've passed that limit and might decide to register even more people.

Nothing ventured nothing gained and all that, so I decided to give it a bash (no pun intended), and signed up a night or two back. I just got confirmation that I've been registered for the two Level 1 exams. It's going to be a busy busy month.

As if I wasn't feeling etchy enough after the talk of the recent spate of burglaries just north of us, another car has been stolen from our complex; this time our neighbour's.

When Ronwen's car was stolen a few months ago, they lifted the complex's electric gate off its hinges, and pushed it open. The gate frame was then reinforced to prevent anyone from doing that, so this time around, the bastards hopped over the wall, cracked open the gate motor's casing (with padlocked harness) and cut the wires, and simply rolled the gate open.

A stolen car isn't the same as a violent break-in, but I have no doubt that these people are also scoping out our flats while they're galavanting around our complex. Really heartwarming.

Google has unveiled a new scheme intended to discourage comment spammers. All you do is insert a rel="nofollow" attribute to all visitor-provided links on your site, and Google will ignore the link in determining page rankings. The idea is that spammers will stop bombarding sites if they don't gain search engine prominence by doing so.

I'm curious to see what comes of it. How ubiquitous will this solution have to be, before spammers go "ok, you got us" and move on? I'm sceptical.

There must be like eleventy billion blogs out there, and even if the majority of blogs implement the nofollow changes, it will take a long time to reach the critical point where spammers don't gain any benefit from comment spam. If ever. Most attentive bloggers delete comment spam diligently, but the comments keep coming back. Spammers' bots will continue bombarding sites in the hope of scoring a hit or two. In a clamped-down atmosphere, the value of each page-ranked "hit" will increase. Will it encourage comment spammers to be even more aggressive?

What's more, even if their pagerank isn't improved, the plain visibility of their spam messages has value, much like spam email. Again, simple visibility becomes more valuable if page ranking becomes less valuable.

So the way I see it, it isn't a panacea. Every bit helps though, I guess.

I can also imagine there will be interesting social implications. All of a sudden you can categorise links - links "worthy" of Google page ranking, and links which aren't. How would you react if someone links to your site/blog but inserts a "nofollow" attribute? Would you feel snubbed? What message are you sending if you do that? Richard Schwartz has more thoughts on this, including what will probably become one of the most common nofollow uses: sending small "fsck you"s to the upper echelons of blogdom :-)