One down, two to go

I finished reading Executive Orders, and it turned out to be a painful experience. The book is long, as noted in my previous post.

I can't give an objective assessment of the book, as I raced through it, but I felt a sense of relief after finishing.

The plot is made up of different threads, and, as each one developed, I found my curiosity turn into frustration and finally to relief, as each denouement signaled that the end of the book was approaching, and that I would be liberated from Clancy's acronym-laden and turgid prose.

Maybe I'll enjoy the Dan Brown novels more, especially since I don't think I'll feel the need to rush through them.

Jumping on the bandwagon

One of my teenaged cousins recommended Dan Brown's novel Angels and Demons to me. I did some research and found that Brown also wrote The Da Vinci Code, a book which I noticed being discussed on a few blogs.

So, I went to Exclusive Books, and finding that they were sold out, ordered the books from Amazon, along with Tom Clancy's Executive Orders.

The Clancy book is long and, like his other books, probably filled with insider-technobabble, but I feel compelled to read it because it follows on Debt of Honor, which ended with a plane crashing into the US Capitol while the president gave his State of the Union Address.

My package arrived today, and after powering through Clancy's book I'll see whether Brown's offerings live up to the hype. I am hopeful, however, given the strength of the recommendation by my cousin.

Who won the Iraq elections?

A lot of people are making a fuss about the Iraq elections, but they are oddly silent about the (very tardily released) results. As predicted moderate, pro-western liberals seem to be winning.

The return of sneakernet

One of the first things one learns about when studying computer networks is the bad old days of sneakernet, where people would physically transfer data by using removable media. LANs were supposed to solve all that.

But in the real world, I often find colleagues and friends sharing data by using USB flash drives. These are not computer neophytes, but engineers and software developers. They find it a lot easier to plug in and plug out, than it is to mess with domains and set permissions, or to email an executable (it's blocked by the mailserver, so it has to be zipped first, or have its extension changed).

Someone already wrote an article on this in 2002.

Faster, please *

Iran: the invasion preview. [via]

^{* Apologies to Michael Ledeen}

Wikipedia articles that need editing

I've been busy for the last two weeks.

Here are some Wikipedia articles on local topics that you can contribute to:

Tshwane
Magaliesberg
Kempton Park
Centurion
See the article on Gauteng for more links that need attention.

There is also a shortage of information on South African universities.

Mbeki attacks sacred cow

He had some controversial things to say about Winston Churchill. [via]

User interface design II

The end-user experience is something that is often neglected in the rush to produce slick-looking interfaces.

As I said in a previous post, kulula.com has one of the best user interfaces on the web. Gmail and FNB's online banking site also score highly, because they make navigation simple and hide the complexity of their underlying logic. SAA's website has improved since my last post on the topic.

On the other hand, there are many programs and websites that have look slick at first glance, but suffer from awful performance and have ugly, cluttered, headache-inducing interfaces, that, if tested with actual users (as opposed to managers who won't really be using the system), would be rejected.

Durban robots - semi-inane rant

Something I noticed around Durban (the central and Berea areas especially) is that many of the traffic lights are not fully functional- many have burned-out lightbulbs (or LED's?).

In one case, at the intersection of Sydenham Road and (I think) Centenary Road outside the Greyville racecourse, heading towards town, all the green lights were burned out.

If you are a Durbanite, it might be a good idea to find out why the municipality is neglecting the traffic lights.

Two other drivers who I spoke to also commented about the problem with the robots.

Happy new year

My usual holiday haunt, Durban, was hot, humid, stuffy - and a lot of fun.

Happy new year.