Author: Arné Klopper

When you drive towards Krugersdorp form a northern direction on the R28/N14 into town, you’ll see this advertisement board overhanging the road.

From a far it looks quite standard, but lets have a closer look and see what our friends at the ANC are doing.

According to standard municipal bylaws you need permission from the council to advertise your boards on street poles etc. to reduce pollution, and sometime your poster even need stamps on.

Well, the ANC don’t care about that !

They decided … why don’t we just stick our campaign posters on poles and power boxes all over town, much easier to spend money on cardboard posters.

Like their leader, they will probably get away with it anyway.

Can’t they look at the opposition parties and learn from them, their posters are neat and correctly placed according to law.

(look just behind the lamp pole… ha there he is one the power box as well)

There is only one truely South African word for this … eish !

UPDATE: Apparently the council has a system where you pay them a certain amount for each poster you put up, and when your period you’ve paid for is up, you go back take off the posters and recycle etc. and you then receive a large amount back from the council when you have disposed of the poster correctly, iow not leaving it on the lamp poles.  This to me is a very good system for handling this, but again we have a problem with governance.

Today marks the Birthday of Dr Seuss and Google also celebrated.

I work for a company called DVT, which is short for Dynamic Visual Technologies, we are part of the DTH group which is listed on the AltX.

This afternoon I received my weekly iWeek, and quickly scanned through the articles and came apon an advertorial by DVT….

Our company has purchased almost a three page advertorial for this episode.  One of the drives at our company is getting new talent as we are embarking on a wide variety of new projects and we need some skills!  So if you reckon you’ve got the dynamic edge, comment on this post and I’ll send you details.

The drive involved all of us in Gauteng having our pictures placed in a matrix of pictures with some gaps for YOU the prospective employee to fit in.  You can see my mug on the second row, fourth from the right.  I couldn’t supply a high quality image of myself in due time and they took pictures of me, whilst being busy a few hours into a large implementation, so I totally do not look too well, but at least I’m in iWeek!

Here is a bit closer view of my mug.

So if your looking for a new exciting challenging oppurtunity please comment and I’ll send your detials through.

At last, after three days of trying to get my new VPS setup correctly with Apache, PHP, MySQL and Subversion, at last it is completed.

On the second day of my “migration” I experienced problems with Apache where it ran out of memory, as a result of a memory leak.  I’ve never spend so much time Googling for answers to a problem I have.

So I’ve moved over all my websites and this blog, and the new server is just running beutifully!  Clean, and running like ‘n well oiled beach babe!

During this week I’ve catched up all my Linux skills again, and feel almost 133t agai. 😉

Earth Hour 2009 is a global initiative by the World Wide Fund for Nature which acts as a worlwide call to action to every individual, business and community to take a stand against Climate Change. To show your support, sign up now and commit to switching off your lights for one hour on Saturday, March 28th at 8:30pm. Originating in Sydney, Australia in 2007, the Earth Hour initiative proved more than worthwhile when it witnessed 2 million people coming together to switch off their lights for one hour for this vital cause.

Following on from this success, 2008 saw an estimated 50 million people taking part. Global landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Rome’s Colosseum and the Coca Cola billboard in Times Square, all stood in darkness, as symbols of hope for a cause that grows more urgent by the hour.

More info on Earth Hour SA site

Some nice tips given by the Gmail Team:

A couple weeks back we launched Multiple Inboxes, an experimental feature in Gmail Labs that you can use to customize the different “inboxes” you see in one view when you log into Gmail.

If you forward all your work or school email to Gmail, you can use Multiple Inboxes to see your two accounts separately within the same browser window. Here’s how:

1. Turn on Multiple Inboxes from the Labs tab under Settings.
2. Set up a filter to auto-archive all mail sent to your work or school address.
3. Customize one of your multiple inboxes to show mail sent to your other address. To do this, go to the Multiple Inboxes tab under Settings and set up one of the panes to search for mail sent to your other address.

4. (Optional) Use a “custom from” address so that replies will be sent from Gmail but as if they’re from your other account. This way, your coworkers or classmates won’t know the difference.

I use Multiple Inboxes to keep track of email sent to my college alumni address which I forward to Gmail. I used to filter, label, and auto-archive all these messages (my alumni frisbee team listserve gets tons of mail), but found that I rarely looked at the relevant labels. Now with a separate “inbox” I can see them easily without cluttering my primary inbox

Read this interesting post/article on InfoWorld last night about virtualization and it’s role in the enterprise, and if it would be an advantage to your company.

Though perhaps overhyped in some circles as a cure-all, virtualization is worth exploring to free up datacenter space, reduce costs, and maybe even keep your company up and running
Virtualization has been hailed by many as the cure to all our woes. Wouldn’t that be nice? Alas, it has its limitations — though it may do a whole lot more than you imagined it could.

Before we can really center on the benefits, we need to resolve some of the misconceptions. For example, perhaps you think of server virtualization as a great way to create savings by reducing the amount of hardware you need.

[ For the latest virtualization news and views, please check out David Marshall’s Virtualization Report. ]

Now, before you nod your head in agreement, keep in mind that that last statement may not be accurate. Imagine reducing 10 servers down to one. You might think that this results in obvious savings. But placing 10 virtualized systems onto one machine comes with a hefty price tag all its own. To calculate true ROI (return on investment), you have to first consider the cost for that solitary server, which has to be maxed out with processor/RAM/disk features. It should have a solid set of storage virtualization (mirrored drives, RAID, and so forth) and, in true business continuity form, should be replicated with data protection and disaster recovery in mind.

Read more here

My father-in-law is Koos Hailey, who drives alcohol funny cars as a hobby.  In 2006 he had a slight crash when he raced against Michael van Rensburg(son of the owner of Tarlton International Raceway).

Today I finally managed to convert the dvd to upload onto YouTube.  Here’s the video of the accident.  Apparently the tires got cold as they waited too long before actually jumping from the line.

Pair Programming ? What is it ?

Pair programming is a software development technique in which two programmers work together at one keyboard. One types in code while the other reviews each line of code as it’s typed in. The person typing is called the driver. The person reviewing the code is called the observer^[1] or navigator. The two programmers switch roles frequently (possibly every 30 minutes).

While reviewing, the observer also considers the strategic direction of the work, coming up with ideas for improvements and likely future problems to address. This frees the driver to focus all of his or her attention on the “tactical” aspects of completing the current task, using the observer as a safety net and guid

Wikipedia Source

Last week I have truely done my first session of Pair Programming. Yes, previously I’ve done Pair Programming, but in a more casual sense where we find a problem and sit together for a little while and afterwards each developer goes back to his desk.

This time it was different.  We were about a week away from deployment when the Pair Programming was allocated for.  Basically it comes down to going through your current bug/snag list and handling each bug, and squashing it there and then on the spot.  In my situation I sat with our business analyst working on the project and she helped raise some issues on the business rules side which was not that obvious.

We spent almost 4 hours in this session(8 hours together) and the productivity gained from only this one session was astronomical.

Have anyone every work in such a situation of peer review, peer criticism or pair programming ?

Wow, this came to a shock to me!

I should say I was relatively jacked with my knowledge about HTML, Javascript and associated technologies, but you cannot know everything.

So you reckon you want to build your website to strict XHTML standard, and you reckon you know everything, I’ve got news for you, sometimes accept that you were wrong and continue with what you’ve learned.

The past week I persisted to one of my colleagues that the target=”_blank” property for HTML <a>(link) tags is the way to do it, but was terribly wrong, and by a long shot as well, and out by about 6 years!

Basically after some research after my outburst with my colleague I found that target=”_blank” is not compatible with some browsers and could cause incompatibility issues with your sites.

At the end of my research I could derive that if you want to keep your website XHTML compliant, just don’t open up new windows. Let all activity happen inside the window your in.  If you really need the functionality of opening a window the next best bet would be to use a Javascript function to open up a new window.
What have you guys experienced regarding XHTML standard and simple things like the target=”_blank” (deprecated)features
?