They are probably right and most new cars will be fitted with one and the battery should last 3 to 5 years. If you have an older car things are not that simple. If your older car was fitted with a “hybrid” or plain lead acid battery originally, you will find that a silver calcium battery will probably not give you the life expected from it.

Today my expensive silver calcium battery gave up the ghost completely at least six months before its time after about two weeks of nursing and nightly additional charging.

Being a techie I did not sit idle during the two weeks and did a bit of extra research about car batteries. Most people that have dealt with car batteries know that your car’s lead acid battery is not really 12 volt but 12.6 volt and you need about 14.2 to 14.4 volt to properly charge it. If you use too low a voltage to charge the battery it will never get a full charge and too high a voltage will cause the battery to gas and lose electrolyte (water). A too low charge will also cause something called acid stratification as well as sulphation in the battery causing it to fail sooner than expected.

Unlike normal lead acid batteries, silver calcium batteries need 14.8 volt to properly charge. This means if your car wasn’t fitted originally with one its charging system will never fully charge a silver calcium battery because the charging system is set to 14.4 volt not 14.8 volt. Guess what happens? Yes your’e right, the silver calcium battery dies a premature death due to sulphation and acid stratification.

Battery Centre will happily sell you an expensive silver calcium battery and even tell you it is not really a problem because the battery will simply run in your car with a slightly lower charge. (http://www.batterycentre.co.za/SilverCalciumBattery.htm) They happily neglect to tell you that sulphation and acid stratification is a problem when you operate a battery continuously in a state of low charge. To be fair it does get a mention elsewhere on their site but not where they are punting the silver calcium batteries.

Dodgy marketing practices on their website is probably par for the course but Battery Centre’s staff really should think long and hard about dismissing a customer as ignorant when he tells them he doesn’t want a silver calcium battery because it is not the correct battery for his car. Anyway the proper battery was R200 cheaper at Midas accross the road.

Read all you ever wanted to know about batteries at http://www.batteryuniversity.com

When you set up an internet connection for a customer you do everything you can to protect them, you set up a restrictive firewall, you have a proxy that enforces policy for web surfing as far as possible. You also use all possible means to block spam and viruses in e-mail before they reach the lusers that still believe Bill Gates will give them free Nokia cellphones.

After you did all the technical stuff, you tell everyone (you know it falls on deaf ears, but you have to try) that they must not visit those porn sites, that they must copy links in e-mail and paste them into their browser rather than simply clicking on them etc. So what happens when one of the lusers that actually listened goes to a legitimate website and still have his windows computer exploited? Or if they are lucky the lusers get a warning from their anti-virus software and the site gets blocked.

The sad part is that even very competent IT professionals have extreme difficulty to prevent all exploits on the internet even when they do all the right things. You can read a fascinating account in the Gauteng Linux Users Group mail list archives of such a case where someone’s web site got exploited by quite a nasty man in the middle attack.

In short, a windows server (every one says, we are not surprised) was compromised in a data centre and intercepted traffic from other servers on the same local network. By doing this it managed to redirect innocent visitors of well managed websites to malicious websites that attempted to compromise the visitors’ machines. You can read the gory details at http://www.linux.org.za/Lists-Archives/glug-tech-0905/msg00009.html and more detail at http://www.linux.org.za/Lists-Archives/glug-tech-0905/msg00026.html. Links to the whole thread is at http://www.linux.org.za/Lists-Archives/glug-tech-0905/threads.html

The real scary part is that you cannot do much about something like this because even if you do have a secure local net and the web server you visit has a secure local net, this type of attack can be done anywhere in the path between you and the web server you are visiting.

Be careful out there.

It is of course quite easy to stay relatively anonymous on the internet and services like Pirate Bay are already offering ways to work around these new laws.

There are however people that figured out how to make use of the new technologies to distribute media and still make decent money. Jamendo is one of these companies. All music on Jamendo is free to download and licensed through one of several Creative Commons licenses or the Free Art License, making it legal to copy and share, as well as to modify and make commercial use of for some, depending on the license. Jamendo allows streaming of all of its thousands of albums in either Ogg Vorbis or MP3 format, and downloads through the BitTorrent and eDonkey networks. Jamendo also helps musicians to commercialise their music via their Jamendo Pro services.

On 23 March Jamendo published an ironic statement against the “Three strikes” laws. It is called “Three strikes vs. three thanks”. In a nutshell - they will reward people for downloading music, instead of punishing them showing “…that there are plenty of talented artists who know how to profit from the opportunities offered by the internet and embrace innovative monetization models…” Hopefully many more artists will join them.

BTW if you are in Johannesburg and want to hear a really great band that publish all their music under a creative commons license, NUL are playing at the Bohemian tonight 4/4/2009.

Those of you that use gmail will find sup’s way of  organising your e-mail familiar because sup uses the same ideas to do this. Instead of sorting mail into folders like you do in conventional mail clients you tag e-mails with labels enabling you to quickly find mails. Actually the idea is more to tag mail threads rather than single mails. There is also a powerful search function to search your mail that does not have specific labels. As in mutt you get through reading and sorting your mail really quickly.

I tried out sup and found that it worked very well although it takes a bit of getting used to. It reads mbox,  maildir and IMAP mailboxes.

Sup does have its drawbacks, the major one being that it does not syncronise with your IMAP server which means that if you read a mail using sup it does not get marked as read on the IMAP server and vice versa. In fact if you did read mail on your IMAP server using another mail client you have to re-sync sup’s indexes before you can read your mail with it again.

I also found sup’s mail source configuration a bit painful because it does not read all the folders on an IMAP server automagically, you have to type them in one by one. This is somewhat of a chore if you have lots of folders and want to switch. This is however only a once of task.

Sup also does not download any messages from a mail source which can be a show stopper if you are on a slow connection as I often am.

I think sup has great potential and if you like the way gmail organises mail it is definitely  for you. I am seriously considering switching to sup but the non-syncronisation with IMAP is holding me back because I often have to read my mail that is stored on an IMAP server from someone else’s computer using a web based mail client.

O yes, sup is written in Ruby and therefore should run on any platform that Ruby runs on. I tried it on Mac OS X because OS X Leopard conveniently has Ruby pre-installed.

If you go to the link you will notice that it was the Chaos Computer Club that published the vulnerability. I have written about them before and think they do great work to raise awareness about the risks in computers and other electronics. Some may think that they are irresponsible, but are the large companies that release equipment with these kinds of vulnerabilities not way more irresponsible?

I also have a feeling that our cell phone providers are probably not providing the filters suggested in the article, and even if Nokia does release fixed software for their phones chances are high that most people will be clueless about it and won’t know how to install the fixes.

PS. I love the final question in the CCC FAQ (translated from German):
Q: I don’t realy know the exact question but can you answer it anyway?
A: Tricky. But not impossible. The answer is: 42

During the years I kept my iLife up to date and even did a website or two with iWeb. IWeb had one drawback in that it really was geared towards publishing websites on .Mac or MobileMe its new name.

Apple released iLife9 in the beginning of this year and last week I finally spent the money to upgrade. It definitely does not disappoint. iPhoto has two great new features, faces and places. Faces uses facial recognition to search for people in your photographs. With a bit of training it actually works great and it took me about an hour to tag the recognized faces in my photos with names.

Places is a bit more mundane and allows you to tag your photos with GPS co-ordinates. It helps of course if you have a camera or phone with built in GPS but you can tag you photos with places without owning a GPS. iPhoto will show you a map with pins stuck into it indicating places you (or your GPS) has marked. If you click on a pin iPhoto will show you the photographs taken in that place.

iWeb now also has the possibility to directly publish to a site using ftp. For me this is quite useful because I don’t own a MobileMe account and for simple websites iWeb works really well. It is also a lot easier to add your own code to a website.

Garageband is a music creation program that comes with iLife. Not being a musician I always played around with it a bit and used it for simple mixing tasks but not much more. It now comes with a Learn to play feature. You get a set of free lessons (that you have to download) to learn playing the piano or guitar. I tried out the first two piano lessons and found them very easy to follow. I’m sure that someone that wants to learn to play seriously will find these lessons very useful. After you did the free course there is the possibility to download lessons created by successful artists teaching you their music.

All things considered I think iLife09 is worth the money.

Kampala

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.

We assumed that TV and radio stations would be good at technology and decided to install our computers at the broadcasters premises. I’m sure you know about assumptions and what they do to you and me. Well to say the least these guys may know something about broadcasting but there was very little understanding of computers, the systems we installed seemed like black magic and mentioning the word linux caused blank looks from all concerned.

The other mistake was thinking that communications systems are similar to that in South Africa and that because we only need to upload a few kilobytes a day to the server back home that dial up internet will be OK. It is up to the point you want to do maintenance and have to dial into the system from South Africa.

Dar es Salaam is actually quite a nice city especially the older part of town where I found some very nice places to eat. Unfortunately DTV where I had to install the computer were a bit surprised, they expected me much later.

Street in front of DTV - Dar es Salaam

The computer installation was quite simple except that it was mostly a hurry up and wait situation and I did not get to the roof, DTV had an antenna that worked well.

Next Stop Nairobi: And I find out the computers are stuck in customs with no hope of getting them out in the next two days. This caused some hectic rebooking of flights causing me to catch the last flight out of Nairobi to Entebi and booking into the Kampala Sheraton at about 1 am.

The next day I meet up with Alex from TV Africa who was quite helpful and surprisingly he had an ISP lined up in the same building as TVA, we got a full internet connection with public IP address from them. TVA had quite a weird array of antennas on their balcony all pointing at a nearby hill with a massive transmission mast on it. There was also quite a nice view of Uganda’s parliament.

Kampala Antennas

The Kampala installation went quite smoothly with only one snag. The only flight I could get back to Nairobi was the very early 5 am flight. This meant leaving Kampala at 2 am to get to the airport in time. This meant about 5 hours sleep in 48 hours, which is no fun at all. I also had one of the most bizarre moments at Entebbe airport. Going through emigration the guy checking passports asks me “Are you a businessman?”, I answer “Yes” and he asks “When are you going to the moon?” My half asleep brain really struggled with this line of interrogation until I realised he was referring to Mark Shuttleworth’s space trip. The guy was just being friendly.

Fairview Hotel Garden

Back in Nairobi I was actually quite happy to hear that the computers haven’t cleared customs yet. I had time to book into the lovely, very colonial Fairview Hotel and go to bed. The only damper on the proceedings were the gunshots going of just after I checked in and the hotel staff all saying “Gunshots Sir? No we didn’t hear any shots”. OF course the next morning when I walk out the front gate I find that the Israeli embassy is opposite the hotel. Half the Kenyan army were standing around looking menacing. With no one saying anything I assumed someone tried to attack the embassy the previous day and probably failed miserably. The Kenian army then showed up with a token presence to look as if they cared. Anyway there were no other incidents during the two days I was there.

Nairobi

I go to GTV who were just down the road to do the installation, again the radio and TV part is well sorted at the TV station but computers are a black art. An additional complication is that they don’t have any means of dialing out directly except for their fax line which, of course, they don’t want to give up. I manage to convince them eventually that the computer will actually dial four o’clock in the morning so it won’t interfere with their fax line. In the process I found out that 4 hour power failures are quite normal in Kenya. (At that time power failures did not happen in South Africa, of course it is very different now). Luckily, because they broadcast from the top of the building GTV had a decent generator set to keep them going, I guess they had big diesel tanks.

We were lucky to be able to swop flights easily when we could not get the computers out of customs in Kenya. If not it, I probably would have wasted a great deal of time and would have needed to fly there again. I was really happy to be back in South Africa after this very hectic trip.

To my surprise I found lots of info on past events but very little about upcoming events and no Boekehuis website. Why the surprise? Well “Die Boekehuis” is a very successful bookshop specialising in South African and World Literature. In 2006 they got listed by the International Booksellers Federation’s list of 50 unique bookshops in the world. Everyone in Johannesburg that I know, who has a real interest in books knows about them so they are successful.

I visited “Die Boekehuis” last week and asked: “Why don’t you have a web presence?” The answer was simple: “We don’t really have the time to properly maintain it.” They did however offer to put me on the announcement e-mail list for “Saturday Voices”. You can ask nicely for the same by mailing boekehuis@boekehuis.co.za.

This made me think and ask the question: “Does a small, maybe niche business really need a presence on the world wide web to be successful?” Taking “Die Boekehuis” and my own small buisiness as examples, no, not really. I was also simply too busy to maintain anything but a single homepage for my business. My work came via “word of mouth” advertising from mostly happy customers. “Word of mouth” seems to work even better for “Die Boekehuis”.

When I started out as a small consulting business everyone told me, I must get onto the web. Being someone that actually sells and maintains computer systems I believed them. As I said above all this turned out to be wrong. In fact in 8 years I got one serious enquiry via the website, unfortunately the person was in the USA so I couldn’t help him.

No you don’t need the web to sell 4000 year old technology. It seems that you don’t even need the web to sell brand new technology.

Amazon.com probably disagrees.

For years I used a mail client called Mutt. This was mostly because I spend my time using terminals, but also because it was the best available at the time. Mutt does not have a pretty face and definitely does not have any pretty pictures unless you ask it to show them to you. I then bought a Mac and started to use the Mac mail client.

Mail on the Mac actually performs its job quite well. It manages to sort mail according to thread (an essential feature if you subscribe to busy mail lists) pretty well. Mail also has a reasonable filter to move emails into folders and recognise junk mail. It certainly performs way better that the two offerings from Microsoft that still after many incarnations cannot sort messages properly.

Lately I noticed that my backlog of mail became larger and larger. I decided to bite the bullit and download the mutt sourcecode to compile it on the Mac. This was quite painless and pretty quickly I was able to dig up my old muttrc (configuration file) and with a few tweaks I was running mutt on the Mac.

What a pleasure! I halved the daily time I spend on e-mail and I also get through the busy lists like the postfix mail list in reasonable time.

To learn more about mutt see The Mutt E-Mail Client and My first mutt

Oh yes before I forget, if you still suffer using windows do not despair, mutt is available for Windows.

Cuil claims to be the world’s biggest internet index. I don’t really care as long as I can get relevant results from them. Unfortunately the few searches I did, did not come close to giving me relevant (enough) results. There was also a problem that the same search would give different results on different occasions or even worse it would give results with say six pages and one of the pages would suddenly say We didn’t find any results for “foo" but all the other pages would have some results. Hopefully they will sort out these issues.

I do like the presentation of results and they have some nice features to drill down e.g. if you search for a word you get tabs at the top of the page with other word combinations that appear often with the word you searched for. Try searching for "retief" to see what I mean. On the whole I don’t think they are up there with google yet. Searching for "grumpy old techie" on google gives you this blog in the first ten hits. At cuil I couldn’t find a thing about this blog or the other grumpy old techie at http://www.internetevolution.com

I will probably give cuil another try in a week or two but for now google still rules the search engine market.