Scattered Mind

Since I can remember, the Silver Falcons has been the awe of many South African boys. I personally saw my first real live show on 2 October 1993, when I was 11 years old.  Unfortunately on my first airshow, one of the planes(Capt Charlie Rudnick) broke out of the group for a maneuver and tragically died in front of the crowd in a big black smoke.  Devastating experience.

The Silver Falcons Aerobatic Team is the official display team of the South African Air Force. Their aim is to inspire the youth, promote aviation and showcase the skill of SAAF pilots to the general public. The team flies the Pilatus PC-7 Mk II ‘Astra’ in a 5-ship formation aerobatic display.

Today I ran into an awesome channel with footage of some of their flights with great sound tracks. The Falcons’ channel can be found here .

Coming from the guys that brought you the awesome Banelings, their latest, Void Rays  a parady based on Rebecca Black-Friday.

If you live in South Africa and have not read or heard about RICA. Well, the deadline for all mobile phone users in South Africa to be RICA’d is coming up, which is 30 June 2011.

The first question on everybody’s mind is : “Why RICA ?”

Basically it is intended  :

• to control cellular phone usage.
• curb organised crime
• to allow the law enforcement agents to intercept cellular phone communications if there is reasonable suspicion of crime.
• require cellular operators to keep detailed information of all their clients, as well as cellphones and SIM cards.

Here is the press release from the Department of Communication of South Africa(13 June 2011):

The Department of Communications appeals to all South African citizens to register their SIM cards whether they are cellular, data or other SIM cards used for mobile devices.

The Regulation of Interception of Communications Act (RICA) provides for the lawful interception of communications, such as voice and data conversations between persons including phone calls, emails and postal services. This Act is in the interest of the individual’s right to privacy and can only be done after authorisation by a judge who is specially designated to carry out this role or function. RICA is applicable to both prepaid and contract subscribers and it is obligatory for all cell phone and other data users to comply.

The Department of Communications calls for all SIM card users to go to their mobile service providers with their proof of residence and Identity Documents (IDs) before or on 30 June 2011 for registration.

“Failure to comply with the deadline will result in SIMs being locked. Those who have not registered will not be able to make or receive calls and will not be able to send SMSes or use data,” states the Deputy Minister of Communications, Mr Obed Bapela.

So if you are not RICA’d yet, do so by visiting your nearest cellular outlet and providing them with your ID document and proof of residence.

Thanks for Hendrik de Bruin, motorcycle enthusiast and racer, I just cracked myself for this one.

8ta, the newest mobile network operator in South Africa today announced that they will be bringing their “go big” data package to the market, with ridiculously low prices, or rather for the mobile space, and even can whip some ass on ADSL packages.

They will be offering two products :

1. 10GB per month for R199, and
2. 10GB + 10GB to use between midnight and 05h00 for R299 per month.

For these deals you must sign a 24 month contract, and excludes the 3G modem. 8ta does however have the 7.2Mbps modems available for R349 and the 21Mbps for R699.

Now my question is now. Obviously 8ta has an advantage over most other networks with the fact that it has the landline giant Telkoms‘ infrastructure to back these offerings, and also will allow them to take a wealth of new subscribers on, without having to worry about load on their systems.

Pricing might also now become an issue between the networks, as it would be quite easy for 8ta to provide products at these rates, because they can provide it to the consumer at a high profit, where the competition, when providing their packages at similar rates, will have very low profits margins. Do you think this might end up in the competition commission court ?

Today, with the large amount of open source BPM tool out there, it is quite hard to select the right one for one’s environment.  Yes, you can get out a consultancy company out to make the decision for you, but I strongly believe in evaluating the products one selve if the resources and time is available, as the people inside your company knows what it wants and know what type of things it can handle.

Here are a couple of open source solutions you can start your investigation with.

1. Intalio ( http://www.intalio.com/ )

Probably the most supported and the one with the most testimonials behind it. Other advantages is the fact that there is a company behind it that can support it(at a fee of course). Other really cool tools and applications in their suites.

2. Active EndPoints ( http://www.activevos.com/learn/open-source )

I found this one, but have never really heard about the performance and the background behind it, first impressions though reading through their website indicates that they definitely have a winning product here.

3. ProcessMaker ( http://www.processmaker.com/ )

Very promising tool, with vendors like Toyota and Lenovo also using their technology, definitely something to not look at.

4. uEngine ( http://www.uengine.org/web/uengineen/test )

Has been registered on Sourceforge in 2003 and has since then just grown, think it might be too much Java focused at some points though.

5. Joget ( http://www.joget.org/ )

Best for last, Joget, simple and quick to use, think this might become a nice lightweight contender in the future.

So this is my list, please comment below if you have any other exciting BPM tools that you’ve run into that might be worth mentioning.

Found the coolest auction on BidOrBuy today, a ticket to the Ark in Tibet, for when the world comes to an end in 2012.

The price is a bit steep though, but with bidding starting at R19.95 how can you not try to bid on this item for the fun of it.

At work I’ve been taking over a very content intensive website the last few months. Today we found some links that were invalid whereby the destination URL was non-existent and we had to correct the links.

For this I found LinkChecker, and open source utility for checking broken links in websites.

Some of the main features of this quick download is :

• recursive and multithreaded checking
• HTTP/1.1, HTTPS, FTP, mailto:, news:, nntp:, Telnet and local file links support
• proxy support
• username/password authorization for HTTP and FTP and Telnet
• honors robots.txt exclusion protocol
• Cookie support
• Different interfaces: command line, GUI and web interface

What is quite nice about this utility is the command line interface, which can be used to automate regular checking of different sites, which is quite useful when you manage large collections of websites.

As social buying is getting big these days, it is hard to keep track of all the excellent offers and deals that are available online.  BidOrBuy has also been having a section on their website called “Deal of the Week” which sometimes have some excellent deals at very good prices.

Just one such an example was last week when you could buy a Samsung Galaxy Tab for under R5000.

Today whilst browsing their “Deal of the Week” I found one of their latest offerings, a Canon EOS 7D kit(EF-s 18-135mm IS) which include a 3 year warranty for only R15 995 , which is truely a steal.

The Canon EOS 7D is a digital SLR built on the needs of photographers – in fact, in the design process Canon consulted over 5,000 photographers to ask them what they needed most from their camera. Featuring 18 megapixels and a 19-point cross-type AF sensor, the Canon EOS 7D digital SLR combines great accuracy with even greater flexibility. AF settings can be customised, enabling both photographer and camera to quickly adapt to the scene. A new metering system, the Focus Colour Luminance (iFCL) intelligently measures focus, colour and luminance across 63 zones. There is also a dual layer sensor which gathers information from each distinct zone to produce an accurate, consistent exposure. In addition, the Canon EOS 7D digital SLR offers an Integrated Speedlite Transmitter, allowing photographers to control external speedlites with no additional accessories and Full HD 1080 movie shooting.