the corner office

Freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

On the upside, the Constitutional Court said that it's OK for Laugh It Off to flog their "Black Labour, White Guilt" parody t-shirts, and that South African Breweries can go suck eggs. I don't know that SAB did themselves any favours by pushing this issue for so long. Ironically, Laugh It Off have won the case, and will call it a day after auctioning off the remainder of their stock and giving the proceeds to charity.

On the downside, the Mail & Guardian were gagged today, because of an article on an ANC-related funding scandal. This is juicy stuff - the same oil company that crawled up Saddam's bum and had hissy fits about the Iraq invasion a while back were also donating taxpayer's money, basically, to the ANC. Oilgate, it's being called. Will anything come of it? Probably not, but respek to the M&G for making this an issue.

It's funny. The M&G's parent newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail, was famous in the early 80s for being banned and censored silly by South Africa's apartheid government. So much so they eventually shut down for a number of years. Two decades later, the paper's still getting censored by the government (or its lackeys, at least). Some things change, but others seem to stay the same.

(via Commentary and Joblog).

Even though reviews are mixed, we'll have to go watch Revenge of the Shite because well, it's just something one has to do. Ronwen wanted to re-watch the first two episodes, so on Friday night we rented the Phantom Menace. It's really not that good, and every time I re-watch it it becomes even less appealing. I fell asleep halfway through (admittedly, as much from a hectic week as anything else), and Ronwen eventually gave up after scratches on the DVD caused the movie to keep dying. I don't recall ever having to take a rented video back because it was so badly damaged, but with a halfway finicky DVD player, renting becomes more of a hit-and-miss affair.

Yesterday started off splendidly, with a vsit to the post office to collect the latest addition to my CD collection: The Spectres' debut album, Rubber Room Rock. This baby went out of print a year and a half ago, and new, sealed copies go as "collectibles" on Amazon for $130. The only other second-hand copies I've seen were hovering around $90, so when I saw a copy for $36 or so, I snapped it up. That probably makes it the most expensive CD I've ever bought, but dang, it's worth it. Classic psycho-rockabilly, brilliantly off the wall songs, top-notch stuff.

Spent a quiet night at home last night watching telly (Return to Me, and Married To The Mob), and mooching aimlessly around the Net. I woke up this morning with a bee in my bonnet. We have a number of old pine bookshelves which have never been painted or varnished, and desperately needed prettifying. We had started staining and varnishing some of them a while ago, and they were turning out quite nicely. I wanted to get going and finish off the rest of them, but finding the right colour varnishes turned out to be a huge schlep. We headed out west, sitting in traffic (on a Sunday, sheesh) and missioning up and down Hendrik Potgieter Drive trying to find someone stocking the right Plascon stuff. Eventually we admitted defeat, headed back to Cresta for lunch, where, go figure, the local small hardware shop had exactly what we needed. Got home, and my enthusiasm was well dampered. I finally got going, and started on one of the bookshelves. I have to admit that Ronwen did most of the painting last time around, so kippie here is still a bit of a newb with this whole painting/varnishing gig. I'm as stained as the wood is, and by the end of the week the skin'll be falling off my hands from washing them in turps all the time. I'm really not a DIY kinda dude.

Needless to say, we're buzzing on the turpentine fumes. Quick extrapolation of the stain-wait-stain-wait-stain-wait-varnish routine across the remaining bookshelves and we're in for another month of this. By then we'll be eating with spoons and drooling uncontrollably. Psssssssssh.

After a bit of a hiatus I got back into the CD ripping. I've been making my way through the Rs, and currently on rotation is a compilation Ronwen bought a while ago called Rocking Against The System. It's a collection of South African music from the 80s, and it really is a trip listening to some of these old songs again. It's not that I was nuts about all of these songs when I was growing up, but a lot of these really were part of the theme music of the 80s in ZA, as it were, for better or worse. The passage of two decades and evocation of fond memories makes some of even the tiredest of these songs sound a whole lot better.

Of course, some of these tracks are Damned Fine Tunes, nostalgia notwithstanding. Most notably for me, the Psycho Reptiles' 'Monster From The Bog,' because, well, if you were a kid in the 80s in South Africa, then that ska-esque tune is well and truly imprinted in your psyche, and being schoolboys and all, the line 'There's a monster... in the bog' took on a whole meaning of its own. No Friends of Harry's 'Competition Rules' is a close second, because, well, NFOH rocked and I thought they were cool long before I knew what 'goth rock' was. I don't remember The Dynamics, but 'Thugs' is just plain groovy. Celtic Rumours weren't bad (and as a youngster it just seemed so wrong and too close to home when vocalist Kevin Van Staden died in a car accident), and listening now, stuff like Via Afrika's 'Hey Boy' just says '80s' in all its eccentricity, and songs like Falling Mirror's 'Johnny Calls the Chemist' just stand as plain well-crafted pieces of music.

The saddest thing is that given the limited market this music had, a lot of these albums are out of print (although Fresh Music is reissuing some of them), and there's very little to be learned about these bands. Ditto for anything as exotic as their music videos (a number of which, I realised, I can still clearly remember). Googling for the Reptiles comes back with around 200 hits, and the majority of them are for the handful of compilations their songs have been added to.

Anyway, I figured I'd do my bit for history, and see what sorts of cool things Google can do with this ;-)

Moon is hiding behind the clouds
The swamp is full of eerie howls
The monster from the bog
He's gonna come out all covered in slime
He's gonna make sure that he gets you this time

A few miles away there is a laboratory
Mixing up the chemicals and pumping them in the sea
All the toxic waste goes to the bed
And that's where the monster was born and bred

Only female flesh can satisfy his need
It's got to be alive and it's got to bleed
The monster from the bog
Yeah he's real ugly and he's slimy and mean
and when he rips your head off you're bound to scream

A few miles away there a laboratory...

The monster from the bog
Be careful what you throw down your kitchen sink
Cause it's not quite as harmless as you might think

Weeell, his hands are calloused and his teeth are green
The elephant hide man it's so obscene
The monster from the bog
When he knocks you on the head and drags you to his cave
It's not quite certain you'll be seen again

There's a monster... in the bog

I get to do some simple command line stuff on a Solaris box at work. At first I was rather stoked, since I've only ever played with Linux before. The honeymoon didn't last long. As the saying goes, Unix *is* user-friendly, it's just choosy about who its friends are. So it is with Solaris. It's just a case of clambering up the learning curve, but jeez, the GNU tools are a delight in comparison.

Trying to do a grep on Linux, including subdirectories:

grep -R PATTERN ./*

The equivalent using Sun's grep? I had to google for it, and found this:

/usr/bin/find . | /usr/bin/xargs /usr/bin/grep PATTERN

Or even better:

/usr/bin/find . -exec /usr/bin/grep PATTERN {} /dev/null \;

When you're blindly hitting keys on the keyboard trying to figure out how to navigate a man page, because the up and down arrow keys don't work, then you know you're in unfamiliar territory. At least I can now add 'know how to do a recursive grep on Solaris' to my CV.

Vaz has an interesting observation:

As both Microsoft and Sony have revealed their next generation gaming consoles, namely XBox 360 and Playstation 3 respectively. Nintendo is going to reveal with its "Revolution" console.

What is so striking is that all three console share same CPU supplier, IBM. This new generation console wars, Only IBM is the winner.

Hmmm.

Software is a little easier to fix than hardware. Apparently there are security problems with Intel's Hyperthreading technology. Hard to exploit, but not entirely insignificant either.

This is why controversial tattoos are never a good idea. Some newly-studied manuscripts suggest that the number of the beast might be 616, not 666.

I did a quick Google, and it seems this is a rather legit discovery, if not yet proven. The Wikipedia entry on The Number Of The Beast has some more details and background, and rather interesting sections on the number and its effects on pop culture, psychology, conspiracy theories, and the like.

(via Bob Congdon)

Never a dull moment in the IBM world. Not happy with service revenue from WebSphere consulting? Pick up some work looking after open-source J2EE app servers.

One could take a slightly more cynical view, too. Maybe it's just me, but I don't see Geronimo going too many places with some of its primary developers on IBM's payroll.

There's been some heated discussion over the past week about the state of the Notes/Domino market (eg. in response to blog entries from Carl Tyler, Volker Weber and Ed Brill, and a follow-up from Rocky Oliver, and others), and that has also segued into other discussions around the merits and demerits of Lotus Workplace (more at vowe.net and viz also Greyhawk68's experiences).

I don't really have an opinion about the Notes market - it seems fairly flat, but not dead, locally. If lots of people are saying business is great and lots of other people are saying it's grim, then the truth is probably somewhere in between. More thoughts on that another time maybe. The discussion around Workplace is fairly intriguing though. I haven't played with it, so I can't say how cool it is or isn't. It certainly sounds incredibly promising, particularly when it comes to the possibilities of the Eclipse RCP and what that will mean for next-gen rich client apps - within or outside a Notes paradigm.

Apart from residual uncertainty and unhappiness from the original Notes vs Workplace confusion, the major gripe still seems to be that Workplace is a monster. To install... getting better, but still not there. Tangentially, there's something people allude to and what I think is the real problem: you can't bang it onto an old PIII or whatever in your home office and play around with it. You can do that with Domino, and with Tomcat, and MySQL, and PostgreSQL, and Apache, and PHP and ditto for lots of MS stuff. The software is essentially free, and accessible, and you can get stuck in on a Sunday afternoon and grok what those platforms and environments do and what they can offer you. And in this modern day and age, this is why there are strong developer communities and ecosystems around all these cheap and accessible chunks of software. They have fsck-aroundability.

But when you need machines with heaps of gigs of RAM and multiple CPUs just to get a slow proof-of-concept environment going, you're talking about big-ass enterprise software, and that's another baby entirely. Nobody runs SAP at home, not many people have AS/400's running in their basements. People don't do pet projects on Websphere servers and blogs aren't persisted into DB2 backends. That's not a good or bad thing per se, that's just the nature of the beast; these systems have different things to offer (although a lack of fsck-aroundability is a disadvantage). I just think some of the disillusionment happens because people are expecting Workplace to be as lean and accessible as something like Domino, and it's not, and maybe never will be.

A side issue is just why a platform needs that much memory and CPU power when other platforms get you 80% or 90% or even 100% of the way there for a tenth of the resource requirements, but that's another story.

Merrily skipping through the meadows; I've escaped from Castle Lots-of-Assignments-To-Do. Phew. Traditionally I've been a bit of a late starter when it came to assignments and stuff, but some silly new law meant that every subject needed an assignment submitted by the 10th. With everything that's happened the past 2 months, it took a while to get into the swing of things, but all done and handed in with one day to spare.

Now to catch up on email, personal admin, housekeeping (yes, dear!), and everything else.