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.

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