Street Magic

This movie is David Blaine at his best making fans freak out and pass out of shock.

Thanks to the Jinja Ninja!

Filed in: Funnies by: Stii

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Belinda’s “disastrous” exam…

When Belinda started her blog it was when she had to study and write her UNISA exams.

I quote:

“After my somewhat disastrous exam yesterday morning, I really needed something to comfort the soul.”

I’m a proud hubby to let all and sundry know that this “disastrous” exam turned to be a pass with distinction. 93%!!!!! Now if that is disastrous I’d love to see what a good exam looks like! Well friggin’ done lovey!

Filed in: General and sometimes Rants by: Stii

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27dinner - A room full of greatness and good times…

The Jozi 27dinner was simply friggin’ amazing! Me and Feisty Bev got on the big bird and migrated north for one evening of great fun. Although badly powered by Eskom, it was a huge success! It was also the very first time the four Afriguys (credit: Nic) were together in one room all to announce the new beta release of Afrigator.

Mike, Justin, me and Mark. It was great seeing you all and specially meeting Mark for the first time! The Afrigator ride is probably one of the best.

It was simply awesome to have met all my online heroes finally. Vincent Maher, Nic Haralambous, Charl Norman, Simone Puterman, Eve D, Craig Nichols, Gregor Rohrig, Carly Ritz, Paul Jacobson, Tyler Reed, Armand du Plessis, Wezzo, Roger Saner, Carl Spies, Darren Gorton, to name but a few! You guys are all giants and a truly amazing bunch of individuals. It was a great privilege to share some of Stormhoek’s finest wine with all of you!

Funny thing was when Vincent was trying to poke out his mind’s eye after looking into some serious crack… Groogle did us all the favor to capture the moment and forever cementing it into our minds.

Special thanx to Nic for picking up my dinner bill! I really appreciate it and next time its on me! Once again, thank you Stormhoek for the talk lube. Must say, I love this social networking, Web2.0 style, offline. I’ll be there again!

Filed in: Afrigator, GeekDinner!, Social Web by: Stii

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Marvel Comics goes digital!

I used to be a comic book collector in my younger years. I absolutely loved comics and used to spend a big chunk of my monthly salary on buying comics to grow my collection. I mostly had DC Comics and Marvel Comics. Marvel just scored BIG brownie points by releasing thousands of their print comics online. And not even some digitalized remake of the original, but the quality is damn near the original state.

I think it is kind of sad that today’s kids don’t have much of the comic magic that we used to have. It simply became too expensive to buy new comics @ approx. R40.00 per new comic here in Africa. Nobody really stock them either, so finding comics these days are very hard. When you do find the occasional stack of comic books, you can forget about building up a nice series as there are no constant stream of running issues.

For only $5 per month, you can have access to thousands of comics and titles. Much more affordable! A great, GREAT move. Now we only hope that DC Comics follow suit and do the same. Comic heaven on earth! They released 250 free samples, so go check it out!

Filed in: Kick-ass Tools, Web 2.0 by: Stii

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Mambo nr 5 and Cake PHP

I feel like I’ve been in the stone age the latter part of this year, but saw tonight that the new release of Mambo (version 5) is going to be powered by CakePHP. Wow! Interesting move. If you do not know this, Joomla! used to be Mambo and a lot of the Joomla! version 1.0.x code is still like mosMainBody or mosLoadModule. mos as in Mambo Open Source. That was until there was some serious disagreement about corporate influence by the company who funded and founded Mambo, Miro International. You can read more about that saga here. Ever since the fork between Mambo and Joomla! it has been Joomla! pretty much all the way for me.

What is kind of strategic interesting is that Mambo nr 5 will be powered by a great (Open Source) PHP MVC framework called CakePHP. I’m undoubtedly a Code Igniter fan, but Cake, although more complex/heavyweight, is a pretty good MVC framework! So I think this is a very clever/sensible move on Mambo’s side. Joomla! 1.5 reinvented the MVC wheel by developing their own MVC framework for developing plug-ins. This means that although you have been developing Joomla! components up to now, you will have to learn the MVC side of 1.5 from scratch if you want to use it.

Mambo users, both old and new can start playing with CakePHP and get a feel for how it would work in Nr 5. They might even win a couple of new supporters with this move to CakePHP. I’m dead sure the old supporters would not mind either as the API was starting to feel a bit outdated anyway.

I know this goes without saying, but it is less obvious given the nature of how Cake works, and that is whether existing Mambo components would be completely backward compatible. I suppose that would depend on how deep the Cake integration is going to go. It would be suicide to throw away all the existing component code! Thats a no-no. Then again, as I said, it goes without saying! Joomla! 1.5 has its own new MVC built in with funky ways to do new components, but they made damn sure they cater for existing ones to some extent. Lets see how Mambo handles it.

What would be interesting to see is whether Mambo would be powered by Cake or whether Mambo would become a CMS built for Cake…

Filed in: PHP, Software Development, web development by: Stii

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Hey, where is the time?

Normally by this time of the year I would be starting to get the silly season feeling. The weather is awesome, the wine is stocked up and fires should be burning. It is not. There is a kind of year end rush and time is simply not on my side it seems.

I’ve been dedicating every spare minute I could steal looking into Ruby on Rails as next year I might have 2 big projects that needs to be done in RoR, but I feel I’m getting nowhere as a minute here and a minute there is getting less and less, while it should be the exact opposite! Well, historically for me at least. Last year this time, I was churning blog posts at a constant rate, now I hardly get the time to write anything.

GIVE ME BACK MY TIME, dammit…

Filed in: General and sometimes Rants by: Stii

4 comments

2007 Blog Awards

This morning I browsed through the nominations for the 2007 weblog awards and it made me think back to earlier this year… I loved this piece of sheer brilliance by Shane from Ideate:

Never the less, there are some awesome blogs over there so go check it out and vote for Yblog ZA who is the only South African blog in the category for Best Middle East or Africa blog.

Another interesting thing is that in the Technology department, it is the Gadget sites Engadget and Gizmodo that are by far the front runners and Fark! is by far the most popular online community.

Filed in: Blogging, Social Web by: Stii

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Want to learn Rails?

Apart from the free Sitepoint book (which expires soon! So hurry up and get it) and the book “Agile Web Development with Rails” you have to bookmark Railscasts. Railscasts is an extremely useful resource with screencasts of how to get some pretty awesome things done in Rails. There is currently 78 casts on various specific topics and every single one is more useful than the next. I really enjoy it and I honestly love the idea of watching how to get things done while at the same time it is explained in detail. Check it out:

Filed in: Ruby (on Rails), Tutorials by: Stii

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Ruby (not on Rails)

Tonight we got the latest addition to our home made zoo. When I was away this weekend our little fox terrier ran away due to a heavy thunder storm. She gets extremely frightened when the thunder rolls and tends to simply break out and take to the streets. Our eldest son was heartbroken. Naturally, the only way we could thought of was to say “well, we’ll have to get puppy to take Krummels proud place.” Needless to say that fortunately, the next day someone phone the SPCA and heard that we were looking for our beloved Krummel and the woman phoned us and we went to pick her up. Thank you, woman-who-took-care-of-her! She bathed and fed poor old Krummel and we are thankful for that!

Thing is, the idea of a new puppy just sounded so attractive to Ian! He decided not to let that one slide and started making promises of all kinds like forever doing his homework without us telling him to do it, etc. just for us to get him a little Border Collie. Needless to say, that idea did not sound half bad to myself

So, today we went and fetch Ruby, who is an 9 week old cutie! We’re absolutely stoked to have you in our extended family, Ruby!

Initially she was extremely shy, but now she’s already accustomed to her new environment and playing in and around the house!

Here is the feisty runaway Krummel.

Filed in: General and sometimes Rants by: Stii

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TEDTalk: Schools kill creativity

While in Cape Town Dave showed me this video. (Thanks Dave!) I’ve now watched it over and over. It is simply brilliant. If there is one video you should watch (specially if you have or are going to have kids) it is this one!

It is a scary thought how way behind our school curriculum still is and at what pace our world is changing at the moment. I agree with Ken that conventional schools should seriously learn to adapt.

Another statement I simply LOVE is “If you’re not prepared to be wrong you’ll never come up with anything original.” So often we are guilty by pressuring our kids not to fail. Whether in sport or academic, we live in a society where failure and mistakes bare a very low tolerance , which is so wrong! Even ourselves. We’re too scared to do something new as we’re scared we would fail. It is sad actually!

Its a long video (almost 20 minutes), but well worth watching.

Filed in: Business, ideas 2.0 by: Stii

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