Author: Arné Klopper

Last week Thursday evening me and the wife went for a quick visit to Durban, had a few things to do there.

Our plans was to fly from Johannesburg to Durban on the Thursday night and return on Saturday evening.

We decided to go with the newly found subsidiary(think this is correct) of SAA , Mango Airlines.
On our first flight the flight was delayed by almost 2 hours due to a heavy thunderstorm and the airports’ computer system going down as well. Out of boredome, and stuck in the plane for almost an hour on ground I took a picture of myself 😉

Anyways, understandable as a result of the thunderstorm we had a relatively good experience.

On our way back everything went smoothly on Durban International, no problems whatsoever. Landed in about 45 minutes at Johannesburg International(I”m not using OR Tambo name …) . Then the paw-paw(mango maybe) hit the fan. First they had trouble getting the airlock staircase connected to the plane. After about 30 minutes they got a staircase at the backdoor of the plane and only let 5 people at a time out to the back as to balance the plane. After 45 minutes in the plane we got out of the front door airlock …

BUT – thats not the end of it. Now we are in the tube that goes to the terminal building … when we got to the terminal building the door was locked … and everybody walked back to the plane.

At the end of the day a flight that is in the air for between 30-45 minutes took us almost 2- 2 1/2 hours .

Here is a pic of the CEO of Mango Airlines, Nico Bezuidenhout and the plane they operate.

Just stumbled upon a very nice resource for nice javascripts that work(and very good at that), and also very nice AJAX toolsets etc.

DHTMLGoodies

Took some photos of the new house – going to use this as a “before” photo set. When the house registration comes through we’ll start putting up some new walls and paint the house abit…

Link to gallery

Yes – Yes, I’m now addicted to YouTube .

This one cheers me up everytime .

Don’t get me wrong, I love some Microsoft products, and also love alot of Open Source Products, but when a giant like Microsoft makes a mistake, it is always way fun.

Check out this video of the guys at Microsoft giving a demonstration of the new Vista Voice Recognition software…

Last night I attended a webinar at Zend.com about Web Services and PHP. (had more than 500 people worldwide attending)

Although nothing new was learnt through the attending it was quite nice to see someone work in Zend Studio and see how this program works. Really looks impressive. I’ve been using a mix of PHPeclipse and SVN(for versioning) to develop my applications but Zend Studio combined with Zend Platform really looks impressive.

So actually the webinar was more of a promotional stunt than anything else.

Also something that was mentioned was coding standards, which in many PHP applications is non existent. The guy that presented the presentation showed some real examples of code etc, which was some really nice interface of classes etc. For example PHP5 ‘s very nice XML and atom classes etc.

PHP is maturning slowly but steadily.

Another EXCELLENT open source project…

This week I went on a expedition for a Microsoft Project alternative to manage project schedules and resources.

After Googling, Yahoo-ing abit I found the URL to this project from a member of SystemShock Forums.

Open Workbench

I downloaded it and quickly went through a 10 minutes into tutorial that I also downloaded from the site. It took me like another 10 minutes to draw up a 2 month project plan almost. Very nice features and very extensible and agile.

THe program works on a view-based system where you custom design your views with the varialbes of the project etc. Obviously the standard views are already there for you like Gantt charts etc.

Open Workbench is an open source desktop application that provides robust project scheduling and management functionality. Already the scheduling standard for more than 100,000 project managers worldwide, Open Workbench is a free and powerful alternative to Microsoft Project.

Released in December 2005, Open Workbench 1.1.4 provides significant new enhancements and bug fixes. For more information on version 1.1.4, please review the Open Workbench 1.1.4 Release Notes. The source code for Open Workbench 1.1.4 is also available on SourceForge.

Open Workbench provides all the functionality and benefits that project managers expect in a world-class scheduling application:

* Open Workbench can be used and distributed free of charge throughout an enterprise.
* Open Workbench is a stand-alone desktop application that provides robust project scheduling functionality.
* Open Workbench provides the unique ability to generate project schedules based on resource constraints.
* Open source developers will find a ready-made community of business users interested in their enhancements and extensions. The source code and other developer information are available on SourceForge.
* The open source distribution and community development model will now bring quality, innovation and cost advantages to the project management world.
* Open Workbench can also be used in a fully integrated fashion with CA’s Clarity solution. Please visit www.niku.com/go/owb for more details.

Open Workbench

Thats the way I feel about BlogMad .

I’ve been using BlogMad for the last couple of months since they started back in the day(actually a few months ago).

I was one of their first initial Beta Testers.

I’ve also posted about them here .

After a hickup here and there they are now full in swing and taking over the Blog Scene piece-by-piece.

For the few months they’ve been online and going they already have something like 2700 blogs registered on their site and more than 5400 users registered.

One advantage about BlogMad is that they have 1:1 ratio when browsing Blogs. So for every blog you visit, you get one visit back – fair deal – no strings attached.

They also hold special double point days or timeframes where if one browses blogs you get double credits etc.

I can’t wait for them to accept payments to buy credits etc..

If you guys wanna join BlogMad, please use this link so I can get some credits.

Gr8 stuff!!!

As I realized yesterday there is much more to Google search then meets the eye.

Usually I just type in what I wanna search and voila, I get it, but there are much more feature to Google Search then the standard search, like the Calculator function etc.

Here are a few examples:

Finding Pages:

Calculator:
For this type in any arithmic calculation and see it calculate the answer for you.

Look at these examples:
12 + 34 – 56 * 7 / 8
45% of 39

Some nice conversion tools too
120 lbs in kg ,
300 Euros in USD

There is alot of features like stock price index etc. thats built into Google Search, but head on over to the help section to find out even MORE .

Google Search Help

Again, another innovation out of Googles’ camp,

Google Checkout

Google Checkout gives you the power to only have one login for all the shops where you shop(thats if they support Google Checkout). You can track orders from multiple shops in one interface. This brings everything together.

This is really a cool innovative idea. I just wish they would start supporting South Africa. Currently Google Checkout only supports US peeps. Paypal also does not support South African merchants.

Whats wrong with us(South Africa) !!!!!?
South Africa does have a stable economy, and one of the best investment oppurtunities in Africa, can’t these “giants” see that.