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.

Software essay list I

I have been busy for the last few weeks, hence the lack of blogging.

Joel Spolsky of the Joel on Software website has a compiled some essays on software development into a book. Based on the books he chose for his book list, I expect that his choice of essays will be as good as his choice of books.

I would recommend that you buy the book, if possible, but, if like me you don't have the cash for the book, you can read the essays online.

Here are links to the first few essays from the book:

• Style Is Substance
  
• Award for the Silliest User Interface: Windows Search
  
• Excel as a database
  
• ISCOC04 Talk
• Autistic Social Software
  
• Why not just block the apps that rely on undocumented behavior?

More to follow...

Good clean fun

I watched Noot vir Noot, the Afrikaans TV music quiz show, last night. It has been going for years, and, although the music is not the type of stuff I would normally listen to -I only decided to watch because one of the contestants was quite pretty- it is nice to see that there are still television shows that can be enjoyed by the whole family.

Don't believe everything that you read in the papers

There was a fairly big news story today, and I happen to know some of the people involved. Because of this, I know that the coverage, particularly from the newspapers has been ludicrously inaccurate.

The amount of bullshit produced by the mass media is astounding.

Ooh shiny!

I attended a wedding ceremony the other day, and the chap officiating described the event as a "sanctimonious occasion". No one else seemed to have noticed the malapropism, and most were probably impressed that he used a difficult word in his speech.

Big words impress people. Jargon intimidates the feeble minded. Fancy graphics can mask crappy functionality.

Too many people value style over substance and pay the price in the long run.

Blindingly obvious observations about corporate website content (that some people still don't know about)

• I surf the net looking for information that is useful or interesting to me. I use web applications to get things done. I expect that most people do the same. I am not awed by eye-candy, but I appreciate an aesthetically pleasing website as much as the next person.
  
• Presentation is important, but if your corporate website doesn't have useful content the it will probably be a white elephant.
• If your website's navigation scheme makes it difficult for search engines to follow your links you will lose business.
• If you use obscure jargon to describe your business, instead of saying what you do in simple English, you will probably lose search engine hits
  
• If you have spelling and grammatical errors on your site, your company will look unprofessional, and even the best site design won't compensate for that
  

Monopoly

I played Monopoly with some friends today. We used the newish version of the game, which has updated property names. The best part was that no-one cheated- making this the first time I ever participated in a clean game.

The only thing I dislike about the new version is that it takes time to get used to all the additional zeroes on the banknotes, and there were a few mix-ups during the game, as 50000 notes were confused with 5000 notes. I don't get why the values were inflated- they are still unrealistically low, and they just make the game more difficult to play

Poor traffic enforcement

Minibus taxi drivers seem to be able to get away with dangerous driving without much being done to stop them.

Taxi drivers are not the only inconsiderate and reckless road users; the following dangerous habits also need to be cracked down on:

• People who, seeing a line of cars in the right-lane of a two-lane highway, passing a truck, decide to use the left-lane to overtake these cars. They then try to force their way back into the right-lane when they reach the truck, causing the other vehicles in the right lane to have to brake suddenly.
• Truck drivers who violate lane restrictions and minimum speed rules.
  
• Morons who don't treat broken robots as four-way stops (from what I've seen, Durbanites, in particular, ignore this rule)
  
• Idiots who do u-turns on highways by crossing the median island
  
• Pedestrians who run across highways.
  
• People who drive in the emergency lane.