Okay so my timing sucks with Wordcamp being on this Saturday. Like that’s news! I’m temporarily suspending my blogging on this domain and wordpress blog, while I’m going to be doing so on my .co.za domain. Sorry to do this to you all, but I simply don’t have the time or energy to migrate this database over to my newly created Django powered blog. I’ll rather keep this one dormant over here while I blog and continuously developing the other.
Powerful and moving. www.dayswithmyfather.com is a moving annotated photo essay by Phillip Toledano. The photos are moving and beautiful and the stories sad at times. Being a dad myself, it grips me around the heart. Its an incredible thing Phillip did for his dad… pity his dad probably don’t even realise it. Do yourself the favor and go check it out.
With Twitter forcing us all to use everything but IM, it is a good idea to look into Twhirl. Not only does Twhirl update Twitter, but you can set it so that it updates Pownce and Jaiku at the same time (See : Impressive Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce application). Now, you can get FriendFeed updates as well. The UI is just so sleek! It is simple to leave a comment. Simple to post something to FriendFeed. I’m loving it.
I’m not sure if this was available in Twhirl version 0.8.1. I first saw this in version 0.8.2, so it might be a good idea to upgrade to the latest version. I was going to make a screencast to demonstrate how to enable and use it, but fortunately Maria Reyes-McDavis did me the favour of doing so already! It is still very awkward for me to do screen casts :). Check out the video if you’d like to see it in action.
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A lot of my friends have said lately that they’re all burnt out on Social Networking. How tired they are of every new service, blah blah blah. These past couple of weeks I’ve been down and out with the obligatory winter bug that corrupts our systems every so often when this dreary season start and it was exceptionally tough to debug this round.
Nevertheless, I seem to have swatted the buggers, but in the process I was feeling pretty much anti-social in the online sense of the word. I abandoned plurk, avoided Facebook and did not have much to write about other than how shit I feel, so I didn’t blog here, nor on Tech Leader. Twitter still isn’t much of a problem as they’re doing an outstanding job themselves in limiting my Twitter consumption.
It sucks. Although I had more than regular contact with my flesh and blood buddies, I missed all the geek-speak and babbling we normally do online. You’d think that with all those other things not distracting you, you’d be 10 times as productive. Sorry, WRONG! I’ve grown very used to be distracted by all the other things so I’m constantly searching for something… Its like “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” all the time. Okay, to be fair, it could have been the bugs that had me down… Seriously though, why would I want to work without all the distractions? Its not that much fun anyway!
Over the past couple of years, my attention span has become, uhm, flexible. I get tired after reading the first 140 characters of a book. Therefore, I read 3 or more books at once, 140 characters at a time. Works like a charm!
Anyways, guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m debugged and stable and have a backlog to catch up with!
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Next thing on the list is the content. If you look at the home page, the news page, the blogs page and the podcasts page, you will see various tabs. It is the various ways we decided to organize content.
On the front page, for example we have 4 tabs. You already know what the custom tab is about (if not, click here!), so I’m skipping that one. The other 3 tabs are:
1. Recent Posts - these are the most recent posts fetched by our feed reader. Whoohoo! Awesome! Well, at least the blogs on there makes it awesome… the feature, well doesn’t have any surprises installed.
2. Most clicked posts - Okay, now it start getting interesting… a little at least! It is as the name suggest, the most clicked posts! It is the most clicked posts within the past 4 hours, that is.
3. Popular blogger’s posts - These are the most recent posts written by the top 100 bloggers based on our ranking algorithm.
On the usability front is the Expand / Collapse link at the top of each section (can be seen in the image below underneath the tabs). If you’d like to see a short excerpt of all the posts but don’t want to click on each of the posts’ title individually, you can simply hit that button and it would expand all the posts in that content section.
Another feature is the +previous | +next pager below each section. This allows you to browse to earlier posts in that section. It uses AJAX to speed things up significantly as it does not reload the entire page, only that section of the page.
The other content section is not new, but I think not a lot of people are fully aware of it. On the blogs page there are a menu at the top with buttons. These are categories. We try to sort new blog posts in those categories as we read them with our feeder. Sometimes it is not 100% accurate as it is experimental still. We did not want to categorise blogs, but rather individual posts. If you at my blog, I write about everything from Python to Arrowhead Flatworms.
So go check it out! Even if you don’t blog or don’t have an African blog, go register and enjoy it! Please let us know what you think and if it spits out weird looking code, notify us at bugs@afrigator.com, please!!!
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This music video by the band called “Straatligkinders” (Afrikaans for Street Light Children) is one of the best videos I’ve seen in a long, long time. What makes it even more special is the fact that it is by a South African band and producers. Even if you do not know Afrikaans, the video is well worth the watch. The song is also not bad at all! The song is called “Avontuur van ‘n hartbreek” (English: Adventure of a heartbreak). It sounds heavily influenced by Killswitch Engage. I saw on the Facebook page that Killswitch Engage is listed as one of their influences, which explains everything! Great song. Great video!
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How fitting! With my morning coffee and cigarette, I saw this most odd looking worm. It has a fan shaped head, so I took a quick couple of pics and Googled for some answers. Lo-and-behold! Its an Arrowhead Flatworm according to the bug expert. A weird looking bugger, but a totally harmless garden worm. They do get quite big. This one is about 15cm long, but on whatsthatbug.com there are some big ones! Funny, but nowhere I found record of them in South Africa. Its the first time I’ve seen one of these myself!
Here is some of the photos I took:
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This weekend I read in the paper how a proudly South African said that instead of bitching and moaning, we should help combat crime, etc… Well, this guy sure did something. He built a safe around his pedals. The safe is made of 4mm steel and fitted to the body with 6 x 10mm bolts. As an extra measure the guy also welded the safe to the body, just in case, according to the person who took the photos.
Look, I don’t think its foolproof, but it will sure as hell make a thief’s job harder!
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With the use of computers, Pi has been calculated to over 1 trillion digits past the decimal. Pi is an irrational number meaning it will continue infinitely without repeating. The symbol for pi was first used in 1706 by William Jones, but was popular after it was adopted by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1737.
Amazing, isn’t it?!
I’m a bit late, but I’m ordering me a cool π shirt for next year!
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Pink Floyd is beyond doubt one of my favorite bands. Their philosophical lyrics, psychedelic/progressive sound and David Gilmour’s guitar(s) crunching and weeping.
When I first bought the DVD “David Gilmour - Remember that night - Live at The Royal Albert Hall” I was a bit doubtful. He left out some serious favorites from The Wall like Mother, Goodbye blue sky, Another brick in the wall, Run like hell and from the album A momentary lapse of reason, On the turning away, which I though was a bit disappointing. David Bowie also did Comfortably Numb, which coincidently is one of my favorites and the first one I looked at and immediately thought “Argh no, Bowie, your messing it up, man!”. Needless to say it grew on me. It is different as Bowie sings it as Bowie and when Gilmour takes over at the chorus, it is Pink all the way! A beautiful collaboration.
It is a fantastic show. As elaborate and spectacular as you would expect from an ex Pink member. After watching it, I watched it again. I suddenly realised that I’m not even missing those classics anymore. I still have to watch the second DVD with the bonus tracks and documentary, but for the moment I’m stuck on the music, so it will have to wait.
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It is the most clicked posts within the past 4 hours, that is.
Its that magical constant number’s special day today again. 
