Hyperlinking bans

Looked at the "terms and conditions" section on a South African corporate website recently?

I noticed that at least two of the big four banks, a large listed IT company, and another top listed holding company have notices that require written permission for incoming hyperlinks to those sites. (I'd link to them, but, if their websites are to be believed, I could get sued).

I seriously doubt that search engines like Google ask for permission before indexing and linking to pages on those sites.

The draconian (and absurd) warnings on these websites, that prohibit even linking to their home pages without written permission, are a sign that a lot of South African companies remain absolutely clueless about the nature of the web.

[Take 2...Blogger wiped the first version of this post]

Hope

Once there was a busy road, full of vehicles. Although the road was wide, traffic moved very slowly along the road.

On this road there was a red taxi. The taxi was brave, and worked hard to end the traffic jam, along with some other taxis.

Eventually the traffic jam unblocked, and the traffic started flowing freely. The taxi was rewarded by being given its own lane, along with other taxis who had helped end the traffic jam.

But some of the red taxi's friends realized that, as an older model, the taxi, along with its friends would end up jamming up the traffic again because they didn't understand the reality of driving in modern traffic. They conspired to get the old vehicle off the road, using the taxi's own naivete against it.

Humiliated and broken, it looked like the taxi was destined for the scrapyard. But, suddenly, to everyone's surprise the taxi was released back onto the highway.

Now, for some time before the taxi's return to the road, there were rumours that it had a slow puncture. These rumours had started when it emerged that the taxi had driven over an area with sharp nails without a care in the world (at a time that vehicles driving over nails without caring was a major problem on the road). Did the taxi, they speculated, already have a slow puncture? ¹

Panic ensued, as the sleek new cars on the freeway thought they would, once again, be caught in a traffic jam. The taxi trundled along in the emergency lane, building up speed, when suddenly, a tyre exploded and it rolled off the road into a ditch, never to return to the road.

Did you know?

A number of American universities (including MIT) require students to pass a swimming test before they are allowed to graduate.

Here we go again

The pope quoted some offensive statements about Islam, and Muslims may yet react in a similar way that they reacted to the Danish cartoon crisis.

If they do react in the same way, it will be a confirmation of the pitiful state of the Muslim world, which, it seems, cannot learn from its mistakes.

This is the kind of controversy that made me support this pope. Good old fire and brimstone - if I was a Muslim, and really confident in my religion, I'd say "bring it on". Enough of the wishy-washy kumbaya bullshit - it's refreshing to have someone speak their mind. I'd personally rather have a dozen enemies that I knew about, than one that I didn't.

Muslims: the pope is your spiritual enemy. Get over it.

Updates:

• Abu Aardvark thinks that the sort of rhetoric employed by the pope strengthens Al-Qaeda's hand..
• An in-depth look at the pope and church from earlier this year.
• No huge riots yet, and now that the pope has clarified his statements, I wait for the usual suspects to start bleating about how his "capitulation" is a symbol of "dhimmitude" in "Eurabia".

It's for your own safety

The Star had some tips for people traveling overseas after the clampdown on hand luggage.

Mostly useful information, but the following statement stood out:

Baby foods are being tested at the security gates. Again, it seems absurd, but it is for your own safety. [emphasis mine]

Except sheeple, it appears that the entire threat was grossly exaggerated. The idiotic security measures don't seem absurd they are absurd.

The circumstances around the liquid terror scare intrigued me from the start, and, although terrorists will continue killing innocents, it now appears that there are other players who are actively exploiting the specter of global terrorism to advance their own agendas.

Ubuntu upgrade Blues

I'm trying to upgrade my Ubuntu Linux distribution, and it involves a bit more pain that I had expected for something that is aimed at the "human being" segment of the population- what with files being locked and piped commands required to unlock things.

Although I'll probably figure it out because I'm a techie, I seriously doubt that someone without much computer knowledge would cope. My Ubuntu install experience is not as bad as my experience getting a graphics card to work on SUSE a few years ago, but I think Ubuntu has a long way to go yet...

Update: I am using a VMWare virtual machine and I don't have any critical data on the machine, so I just did a new install, and wiped out everything. I tried entering some arcane commands I found on the internet to do the update, but I kept getting the same errors over and over again. Also, there is surprisingly little information about how to upgrade, despite the update manager referring one to the Ubuntu website.

I did find this, but it was too late, so I don't know if it would have worked or led me back the same way.

Busting Nigerian email scammers

Puts our own crime problem in perspective...

The complexity cult in "software engineering"

I've written before about the affliction of some programming "gurus" that leads them to believe that design complexity is a sign of "cleverness", when, in reality, it leads to maintainability problems.

There are certainly programmers ¹ who develop brilliant frameworks that seriously reduce the burdens of application developers. But I get the feeling that they are far rarer than the wannabes who create complexity because it's part of their job descriptions, at the behest of clueless cargo-cultist buzzword-oriented managers, or because their inflated egos deny them the ability to realise their own limitations. A few years of experience and knowing some design patterns does not a "software architect" make.

Most developers that produce business systems would probably do better if they came to terms with their mediocrity, and focused all their efforts on adding value to their customers using ready-made tools and frameworks produced by others wherever possible ².

Footnotes

^1. You could call them "software architects", if you like pretentious and fairly inaccurate metaphorical titles
^2. ie almost all of the time. This doesn't mean that design should be thrown out, merely that re-inventing the wheel for the sake of intellectual masturbation should be shunned.

Classical music

In recent months I obtained some classical music mp3 collections, and I have started appreciating the genre.

It's interesting how deeply embedded some of the tunes are in popular culture. From the absurd "bananana" advertising adaptation by now defunct the Banana Board in the late 1980s (I think - I was still quite young at the time), based on Beethoven's 5th Symphony, to the movies, these songs have always been in the background.

It's nice to be able to put names to the tunes.

Analyze this

Would you work for a company that relied on handwriting analysis to vet potential candidates? I wouldn't¹.

^{1 unless I was desperate for a job}