About 6 years ago I started installing advertisement monitoring systems in Africa for a small media company. A media company of course has good relationships with their customers i.e. television and radio stations.
The first installations I did was in East Africa, Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and Kampala. My first trip was kind of hectic, the logistics was screwed up totally and we had a lot to learn.
Our first mistake was thinking that renting a car and self driving is a good idea. The roads in these cities are atrocious, and the drivers worse. And the irony is that for the same money you can get a full time driver with a car of the same quality. Anyway on this first trip I was driving around in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi dodging potholes and Kamikazes in cars.
Continue reading ‘Africa from the rooftops - East Africa Trip 1′
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About two weeks ago I googled for info on “Saturday Voices” (Saterdagstemme) at “Die Boekehuis” in Johannesburg. “Saturday Voices” is a regular event at “Die Boekehuis” where well known (and not so well known) authors, poets, critics or academics launch and discuss their work. more....
I get lots of e-mail, about 300 messages a day (excluding spam). Ok admittedly I don’t really have to deal with all of it immediately but if you let it go you very soon have thousand of e-mails waiting in you INBOX. more....
I guess everyone that has an interest in matters internet related already know that there is a new kid on the block in the search engine market. Go have a look at http://www.cuil.com if you haven’t done it yet. more....
Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day
You may ask “What is a System Administrator?”
The answers you will find at http://www.sysadminday.com/ are as good as any. Being a System Administrator is a somewhat stressful job and turns you into a cynic very quickly (see http://www.sysadminday.com/time.html ) and you start hanging out in places like the scary devil monastery. Your (l)users also stop talking to you mainly out of fear of hearing the truth because the last time they complained about not getting e-mail you answered “Well, maybe nobody likes you anymore”
Continue reading ‘If you can read this, thank your sysadmin’
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Yesterday Andrew McGill posted the message below on the Gauteng Linux User Group mailing list. Because he is not blogging I’m doing it for him. What he is describing is one of the biggest frustrations people have with so called new and improved software. more....
If you have a look at the page “Where I’ve been” you will see that I have traveled in most of Sub Saharan Africa. I travel in Africa for work, which is installing advertisement monitoring systems for one of my customers. more....
Anyone that runs a mail server very quickly learns how to fight spam if he wants to do his job properly. It is also one of the favourite pastimes of the clueless to think up stupid ways to fight spam. Today I saw a brilliant answer to one of these ideas on the postfix mail list. more....
While we are talking about Jacob Zuma and company down here in SA, the Germans are debating the use of biometric data for identification. One of my favourite groups the Chaos Computer Club of Berlin has pretty much proven that using biometric data like fingerprints, retina scans or facial features are not such a good idea by lifting their minister of interior Wolfgang Schäuble’s fingerprints and then showing how easy it is to fool these sytems. more....
