Category: Metal (Technical)

A while ago I got addicted to the Africa Geography Game, a silly addictive Flash game that tests one’s knowledge of African geography. At the back of my mind I’ve been considering writing a proper application that does something similar, but is much more flexible, testing capitals, flags, etc. Luckily anyone interested in the idea… Continue reading KGeography

I’ve decided to do some more work on the Wikipedia translation tool I started in 2005. Amazing what having another deadline will do to you. I started it originally for helping me with translating Wikipedia country templates from English to Afrikaans, and it’s easily to extend to other languages as well (not only FROM English… Continue reading Wikipedia translation tool

About a month ago I first installed Kubuntu Dapper Drake (6.06) on one of my home office machines. I really liked it. Last week, I decided to ditch the old version of Mandriva I’ve been running for about 18 months on my primary machine, a Toshiba laptop, and give Kubuntu a try there too. This… Continue reading Running Kubuntu 6.10 on my laptop

A while back I wrote a piece entitled Greed and need, or why I’m excited about Wengophone, the ‘open Skype’. That piece goes into more detail about why I’d like to see an alternative to Skype, and mentioned Wengophone, a Free, open standards competitor to Skype. There seem to be four main alternatives to Skype… Continue reading Ekiga – the free, open, Skype alternative?

I know blogging can be a fairly narcissistic activity, but the lack of comments in the past few weeks on my posts was starting to puzzle me. Not enough to investigate further though – I just assumed I’d been relegated from the E list to the F list of bloggers. It’s only when I tried… Continue reading An exercise in narcissism

I installed Kubuntu 6.06.1 LTS (Dapper) on an old 2001 PC today. The machine used to be my primary desktop, running Windows 98, became a spare about 2 years ago after I got a laptop, running Mandriva LE 2005. It gave up the ghost from a combination of losing a power supply in the Cape… Continue reading A short and sweet (whisper it) review of Kubuntu 6.06.1

There’s a bane infesting the internet. OK, there’re many. But the bane I’m considering here is one that I find highly irritating. It’s number 9 on Jakob Nielsen’s all-time Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design. Born of the need to control, a vain attempt to keep readers on a site when they actually want to… Continue reading IE7: The demise of a bane?

I’ve upgraded my blog software to b2evolution 1.8.2 (Serenity), from 0.9.1 (Dawn). Featurewise it looks a reasonable improvement so far, as you’d expect with the version jump. The whole project looks quite healthy, with the documentation now in much better shape than before, two new releases in quite quick succession, and a much better plugin… Continue reading Upgrade to b2evolution 1.8.2

Rory McKinley has written a useful Gregarius plugin, Feed Filter Regular Expression. Gregarius is a great little PHP application, simple to use, well-documented, and with a helpful, active community. It’s an RSS/RDF/ATOM feed aggregator. I use it to aggregate and export feeds, as well as create a page for myself containing all the feeds I’m… Continue reading Gregarius plugin: Feed Filter Regular Expression

The P in LAMP can stand for PHP, Python or Perl, and it’s good to know that this week sees the launch of a PHP user group, as well as a Python user group in Cape Town. The acronym CTPUG is already in dispute! The PHP meeting is Thursday 7 September, at 18h30 (more info),… Continue reading The P in LAMP is booming in Cape Town