Gautrain: a white elephant?

With the increasing costs of the Gautrain project, questions are being asked about its viability.

A Rich Man's Highway?

The Sunday Times Metro section has an article on the proposed PWV9 highway between Pretoria and Johannesburg. According to the somewhat breathless piece, the route has been revised to run further west than originally planned, between Sandton and Hartebeespoort, rather than parallel to the Ben Schoeman Highway.

I don't have enough information about the route to make a definite comment, but I do hope that this new highway doesn't become a road for the elites to zip between their golf estates and workplaces, leaving the poorer western parts of Pretoria and Centurion without a good transport link to the province's economic hub.

More powerful searching

Imagine if a search engine could infer meaning from the text it crawls. So a search for "negative review of MOVIE XYZ" would come up with negative reviews, even if the reviews themselves didn't contain the actual words "negative review". It's probably not a new idea.

Update 8 November 2005:
Google seems to have launched a movie review site. [Via Scripting News]. See this example.

Trucks on the R21 and minimum speed enforcement

The R21 is an important highway between Pretoria and the East Rand. It provides the only practical link between Johannesburg International Airport and the the Tshwane Metropolitan Area (Pretoria and Centurion), and is one of the only highways in Gauteng that remains relatively uncongested, even at rush hour.

There are minimum speed limit signs on many stretches that indicate that vehicles must travel faster than 60 km/h. There are also lane-use restriction signs that prohibit the use of the right-hand lane during rush hours by trucks (although when these signs are demolished in accidents, they don't seem to be replaced by the authorities).

However the minimum speed limits seem to be seldom enforced. Many trucks crawl along, sometimes at under the minimum speed limit. Today, a couple of Zimbabwe registered trucks (lots of trucks from that country use the highway for some reason) caused an enormous backup (and lots of hard braking) because they were traveling extremely slowly in the left-lane. There wasn't a traffic officer in sight.

The problems caused by trucks on the R21 need to be addressed by the authorities.

Greasemonkey - Change web pages to make them more user friendly

After reading about it over the last few months, I took the plunge and started using a clever extension for Mozilla Firefox called Greasemonkey, that can be downloaded from http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/.

After installing it on Firefox, one can download or write user scripts to add features to web pages, making them more usable.

I am using scripts I downloaded that make Gmail more user-friendly by adding "delete" and "mark read" buttons (instead of having to use a dropdown).

I also have a script that allows a form submit by pressing CTRL+ENTER in a textbox, and one that shows Amazon prices in Rand, in addition to Dollars. Another script converts URL text into hyperlinks automatically .

There are apparently also similar similar options for other browsers, but for now, I will stick to Greasemonkey. I have switched between IE and Mozilla/Firefox for the past few years as my default browser, but I finally have a reason to stick with Firefox.

Web developers are going to complain about users being able to mess with their site designs - with good reason - you could make some sites stop working if you install the wrong script - but uninstalling is easy. I would recommend Greasemonkey to experienced web surfers, who are looking for a way to improve their online experience.

Misc.

• Driving home today on a major highway on Monday, I found myself in an area of almost zero visibility, caused by fine debris being blown about by the wind. Scary stuff. Also lots of power failures, but despite much thunder and lightning I haven't seen a major downpour yet.


• A popular financial services company is discussing its employees' personal lives, specifically their hobbies, in its advertising campaign. I don't see the relevance of their personal lives to whether they are capable of doing their jobs.
  
  Besides, I was at a weekend sporting match earlier this year, and a large group of people wearing clothing items branded with the company's name (I, and others, assumed they were employees) got drunk and one assaulted a female spectator. The police confronted them. Not a good advertisement for the company if it believes that I should base my assessment of its products on the after-hours conduct of its employees.


• An interesting analysis of South Africa's floor crossing sham. [Via Fodder]
  

Odds and ends

I just fixed my modem (I had to rely on a laptop with power problems to connect, so I could rarely stay online for more than a few minutes).

Hopefully I will be able to stay connected long enough to be able to post some stuff.

I'm currently checking out Ruby on Rails for web application development, and working with VMware Workstation.

While my experiences with VMware Workstation, a program that lets one run multiple virtual machines on your computer, have been overwhelmingly positive, I haven't been able to get Rails to install yet because of the Internet connectivity problems I have been experiencing.

I'm mainly testing Rails because I want to see what the hype is about, but VMware has already proved to be enormously useful for maintaining multiple development environment configurations.

South Asian immigration to South Africa in the context of the recent London bombings

I wrote last year about immigrants from South Asia. Although ostensibly here legally, I have heard that their immigration status is often secured by bribery.

In the wake of the recent mayhem in London, I have to wonder whether immigration by South Asians, especially Pakistanis, to South Africa, needs to be monitored more closely. While many of them are hardworking people, are we willing to run the risk that they, or -perhaps more likely- their children, will become disaffected at some time in the future, and turn to radical Islam?

By the way, while Muslim leaders in Britain have condemned the bombings, their South African counterparts are still seemingly equivocal in their responses to terrorism.

Update - 07/08/2005
The Sunday Times had a feature article on the topic of South Asian immigration today, with a focus on Bangladeshi immigrants.

Looking for web content authors

This blog hasn't gone dormant - I had the flu and couldn't connect to the internet.

If anyone knows of professional web content authors in South Africa, please email me. (I don't need a web site, I need someone to write copy for a corporate website.)

Gauteng from space

Check out the amazing satellite images of Gauteng from Google Maps, linked to by Commentary.