Category: Aggregate This

10 things I want to do by 30

I celebrated a birthday recently, my twenty seventh, and although I generally don’t fret about birthdays and new years, I’ve been pondering my life and all that I have and haven’t achieved in 27 years.

Firstly I’m pretty happy. I’ve got a great job with people I really like working with. I’m learning constantly. I have a good group of friends who support me when needed and berate me when needed. I’ve aquired a fair amount of “stuff” that makes me happy and I’ve got my health.

So why make a list? Well I haven’t achieved *everything* I wanted to achieve by 27 and mostly because I, like most people on this planet, find it very easy to procrastinate and/or get bogged down with the little things. I’m a big fan of lists for the little things in life so why not apply that same principle to the big things.

10 things I want to do by 30 (3 years)

  1. Stop paying someone elses bond
  2. Get fitter than I am now
  3. Do the penisula hike I’ve been planning for years
  4. Stop paying someone else to do my taxes
  5. Learn Python
  6. Travel in Africa
  7. Read Cryptonomicon
  8. Write one of the many stories bouncing around in my head
  9. Take more photographs and get better at doing it.
  10. …

So there you go, I open it up to the floor.

What should my number 10 be?

ath.

You lose Computicket, YOU LOSE!

Never before have I been so floored by the absolute uselessness of an online process as I was 2 weeks ago when I tried to use Nu Metro’s online booking process powered by Computicket.

compu0.pngThe Computicket site requires Java to run. I run Linux, so even though I’m able to install Java I chose not to for security reasons. So, I load up my virtual machine and browse the site using Internet Explorer 7 under windows. Off to a bad start.

Lets have a look at the site. First of all, the color scheme is terrible. It looks like something put together by a color blind person in 1994. I love the way they have taken advantage of the Internet Explorer’s customizable scroll bars, because, like, red and yellow are classy.

Next up we have the interface. At first it looks ok. Then you start using your brain. The blue box is the cinema. Check. The white dot is the cursor. You wonder, where are the seats? Are they all available? Am I losing my mind.

You assume simply that maybe the entire cinema is empty. On the right you click the up arrow twice to select that you want 2 tickets. Then you click somewhere. hoping to find an open seat.

(If you’re seeing this in an aggregated form, the rest of this story is on my site)

Continue reading “You lose Computicket, YOU LOSE!” →

Does bad luck really come in threes?

Permit me to dive right in

Bad Luck #1: The Warning…

My battery light has been on for a few days… I thought it had to do with the fact that I’d left the interior light on overnight and since the car was starting perfectly I resolved to sorting it out on Tuesday. Bad Idea. Today on the way to class after work my car beeps and suddenly the power steering disappears accompanied by another light on my dash. It’s the power steering light. I pull over hoping that it just needs to be rebooted. Car wont start. Eish. I wait 30 seconds and try again. It *just* manages to start up. Obviously the battery is borked. I decide to get it to a garage still hoping stupidly that this might just need battery water. I drive, without power steering, down the road only to be greeted by another light and some more friendly PINGs. ABS is dead. Ping, break light is on. PING some other not so friendly light. PING… PING… The doors start locking and unlocking themselves (I shit you not). PING, lock, unlock. (Does the car want me to get out before it explodes?)

I get to the Engen Garage on Main Rd in Newlands and carefully pull in and have them look at the battery. Alfred, his name badge read, was wearing a hard-hat but seemed to know more about cars then most pump attendants. “What’s wrong? he asked… “I dunno, the batteries dead and my power steering is dead”. I say vainly hoping that a dab of battery water will fix it. Alfred informs me that I have a No-maintainence battery… ie. They don’t refill the water. “What’s wrong again?” he asks. “ABS, Power Steerings gone, everything” I reply.

“Ah” he says pointing into my engine, “You don’t have a fan belt”. I. feel. like. an. idiot.

Momentum insurance was awesome, flat bed truck, plenty of confirmation SMSs and numerous phone calls from the great consultant, Colin, checking and rechecking that everything was ok. My car is sleeping at Barons in Claremont tonight, where hopefully in the morning it will receive a new fan belt and a charge.

Bad Luck #2: The long way down…

As nice as the flat bed truck people are, their vehicles are a bit beaten up. Climing backwards out of the passenger seat outside my flat (in the dark) I asked the driver how far down it was. This was a retarded question since I had climbed into the vehicle and therefore should know approximately how far down it was to the ground. His reply “A long way down” could not have been more apt. I commited to “stepping” out backwards. It was one of those situations where you can’t see behind you so guess where the ground is. I guessed relatively well, but i didn’t guess I would end up on the edge of the pavement and subsequently collapse like a rag doll onto my ankle. Awe.so.moe. Twisted ankle, looking like a fool. Strike 2.

Bad Luck #3: The dark floor…

I get home to a very sympathetic girlfriend who I recall the story for while making myself a sandwich. Then I notice it. The floor around the sink is dark… We have this “acid stained concrete” in our kitchen. It looks cool, but when it gets wet for a long time it goes dark. Ah crap. SOMETHING is leaking. I open up the cupboard under the sink, which contains a small but very effective geyser.  Yup, the floor is wet. The geyser, or one of it’s affiliated pipes, is leaking. Luckily this is Pam Golding’s problem, but I still need to make sure I’m around to see some plumbers crack.

I thought it came in threes?

Bad Luck #4: What were *you* doing in Jan 2004?

In December 2003 I decided I had had enough of the corporate world and wanted a break. I took 6 months off. I arbed around and generally bummed off my savings. It was a good thing. I learnt a lot of good life lessons in that time; like how to make 2 minute noodles interesting 4 days in a row.  SARS however doesn’t like the idea that I went from being a regular salaried employee to unemployed for 6 months and then back to employed. This isn’t such a big deal since all I have to do is fill in a form and send it to them, but it makes me stress over whether or not they’ll believe me or hassle me for more proof that I did nothing; which as you can imagine, is hard to prove.

There is actually something else, but I’ve decided to leave it out. It has to do with the reason why my fan belt is probably missing and, in the letter that I am writing to a particular company whose fault I believe it is, I have said I will not mention their name anywhere if they take swift action. I don’t even expect them to pay for the fan belt.  If however they decide to not heed my call I will come down upon them with a vengeance that… well, it wont be nice.

lovely.

j.

GeekDinner – Carnivorous Cantaloupe

Another successful GeekDinner is in the bag…

Last night around 70 of Cape Town’s coolest geeks converged on Krugmann’s in the V&A Waterfront and ate, drank and discussed geeky things like wireless meshes and selling wine on the interwebs. I’ll leave it up to more neutral people to say whether or not it was a success but I certainly enjoyed myself.

David Carman spoke about building a wireless mesh in Scarborough… his talk was excellent… I’m very interested in the technical elements of wireless communications but the thing that “got” me the most was the fact that they are providing internet access to kids in the township. I don’t care what authority you’re from and what laws you want to twist to “get your way”, but if you want to take Wikipedia away from underprivileged kids you’re going to have to do so after ripping the CAT5 cable out of my cold, dead hands.

Next up was Ian Gilfillan who essentially told us that, even though he is now an International MySQL superstar, he didn’t get rich doing so.

Alan Levin talked about peering… Alan is a great speaker who did his best to ignore Wizzy’s heckling. It’s comforting to know that we should soon have cheaper international bandwidth in this country, and morally reprehensible (what’s new?) that the government and Telkom have set it up in a way that it’ll still cost an arm and a leg because some irrelevant middle man has the “rights” to sell it at some archaic price as previously defined by Telkom. BMW X5 much? (Alan, did I get the corruption chain right?)

Johann Wegner of GetWine.co.za (our fabulous wine sponsor) was up next and talked about the challenges of selling wine online. His sidekick (what was his name), Sam Paddock, gave a more in depth technical discussion about how they actually do it. Very interesting…

Finally we had Aslam Khan telling us how wonderful PHP and Pretoria are. Actually, he talked about Behaviour Driven Development… a talk which for some reason the two non-technical people I brought along seemed to enjoy the most… perhaps because he used the dog.getBody().getTail().wag() vs dog.expressHappiness() analogy. Aparently non-techies like dog analogies.

I’d like to personally thank:

  • You guys for rocking up!
  • Antoine for hooking us up with sound and a projector.
  • SimplyAV, an excellent AV company that I would seriously recommend you contact if you need AV – (021) 782-5100.
  • GetWine for providing the Wine.
  • Krugmann’s for hosting us.
  • The other GeekDinner organisers.

Finally, just a little punt. These things don’t organise themselves and we’ve got it to the point that it’s actually quite easy to put together. PLEASE, if you have any inclination for helping us organise a future GeekDinner, sign up to the GeekDinner Planning list. We don’t mind if you lurk.

There’s also the announce list which everyone should join so that you know when these things happen. The list traffic is extremely low, about 1 email a month. Finally, for those of you who have succumbed, there is a Facebook group.

Cheers, see you at the next GeekDinner.

ATH,

J.

ps. The photos and the very bad recording (something went wrong) will be available some time over the weekend.

One projector, free alcohol and a spammer

Hi there

It’s me, Jonathan. We haven’t talked in a while. Sorry ’bout that, been a bit busy you know. Yah, me too.

GeekDinner time is drawing near and the registrations are slowing growing.  We still have some space, so please blog about it and invite your friends and your mom.

We’re also in need of a projector and screen, so please if you can organise one please let me know.

ok, the free alcohol story. The other day we went to the bottle store to buy some wine for dinner. As we walked in we were greeted by a promo girl holding two empty Stella beer glasses. Before I could avoid her she said “Hi, we’ve got a promotion on, if you buy this case of beer we give you two free beer glasses!”.

I’m not a big beer fan… I was not taken. Then I noticed there was a promo-boy(18 year-old PFY) standing to my left with a couple of Jack Daniels bottles. I asked “What’s your promotion”. “Oh, I’m just giving away free alcohol” he said with the wryest smile an 18 year old can pull off.

ORLY? Awesome… It struck me then and there (not some other time and place because that would be a delayed reaction and I am sharp as a marble) that this kid represented the entire body of marketing knowledge known to man. People like a good deal. Free Jack is a good deal.

I didn’t partake though since it was probably 10am and really, who drinks *in* a bottle store?. BUT, I did buy a bottle of Jack to replace the unopened one that my friend Jan is meant to come collect for services rendered.

Oh, and the spammer. Steinser Training and some guy called Billy Snyman: If I receive repeated emails from you and am unable to unsubscribe then you are a spammer… Telling me that my email address is not in your database of “addresses out of the yellow pages” is not a valid answer. I await Billy’s feeble excuse and I will keep you posted.

lots of live, peach and shabbiness

j.

GeekDinner on the way…

The 3rd of the new series of GeekDinners is being held at a really great restaurant called Krugmann’s Grill in the waterfront. We still have some space available so sign up on the wiki to book your place.

There have been a number of people who’ve asked me various questions about the geekdinners, so here is my FAQ:

  • No, it doesn’t cost anything… you only pay for the food you eat. (there is often free wine).
  • No, you don’t have to know linux to come.
  • Yes, you can bring your boyfriend/girlfriend.
  • No, It’s not a boys club.
  • No, you don’t *have* to speak.
  • No, it is not boring.

http://wiki.geekdinner.org.za/wiki/Cape_Town_July_2007

Also, if you want to keep up to date with the GeekDinner happenings, why not sign up to the GeekDinner Announce mailing list

J.

Nerds Rule!

Nerd, Geek, Hacker; The lines are definitely blurred and there are definitely people out there whose mind’s think differently.The older I get the more in-touch with my inner-nerd I become, and the more happiness that part of my self brings me.

What did you do last night. It was a typical saturday night, The revellers were revelling, the rabblers were rabbling.

And the geeks? Well, we were hacking. Firstly an attempt to fix a broken ICD (In circuit debugger) and then a lengthy conversation over dinner about the complexities of tracking supersonic aircraft with combination radars (one of the geeks works for an unnamed company that develops military radars.

Then the conversation moved to using solar flares to map a 3d model of the earth’s density, and then later still, a conversation about how to hack a pic into a remote controlled car and make it drive a set path. Next logical progression? A discussion about building control better control circuits and the maximum possible data transfer rate over FM, farm wide wireless sensor system for use on farms and why you don’t want to stand in front of one of the biggest radars in the world. The answer? Obviously because, as it spins quite fast, it is likely to know up side the head and leave you unconscious. Oh, and high powered lasers and an unfortunate incident inside a dam wall.

The point I’m trying to make is this is where I feel most at home. In the presence of other hackers. Kindred spirits. I love to learn constantly, I crave the knowledge and the outside-the-box, anything-is-possible philosophy that comes with it. Perhaps this is why I am so happy being a frog… you never know what’s going to be your next challenge and you know that there are bright people around to help you come up with a solution.

Anyways, back to last night. While somewhere else in cape town another group of 20-somethings were likely drinking themselves into oblivion and using their best pick up lines on other, just as alcoholicly-oblivious, females, we were plotting our next hack.

Someone said “Let’s distil the pineapple juice stuff”, or something to that effect. The pineapple juice stuff was something that my best friend’s house mate had “concocted” a while back. I think it is just pineapple mash, some yeast and some water. It definitely tasted like there was some alcohol in there.

Now, first I must be clear on something. We all drink. Occasionally we even drink to much. I have nothing against those who choose to drink themselves into oblivion. I’m sure they think our geek-hacker-nerd evening was just as much a waste of time as we think theirs was. To each his own.

Ok, so checklist: Digital probe thermometer, check. Boiling container, check. Tubing, check. Ice, container for ice, check. You get the idea.

So we set rig it all up in the most liebig condenser looking fashion possible (this is at about midnight) and do some test runs to make sure we can keep the temperature of a liquid at a stable 80ish.

I must point out that, at this point in time, the chemical engineer in the group is lying on a mattress in the lounge shouting the occasional instruction at us. She is not too concerned about the process, but rather that we don’t kill ourselves. In true geek form, her book is far more entertaining than a group of electronic engineers and programmer trying to make alcohol.

The kitchen at this point looks like a meth lab.

Moving on. Get the temperature up to 80ish, notice the tiny bubbles, see the viscous looking liquid condensing in the tube and running down all the way into the clean black cat peanut butter jar. Yup, the pinky finger test confirms, it kicks like meths (apparently someone knows what meths tastes like).

Now, in true geek form, after about an hour of distilling, and probably a little over 30ml of alcohol we all take the tiniest of sips and decide that the only logical next step is to pour the rest of what we have into a saucer, turn off the lights, and set fire to it. Awwww, pretty.

GEEK PRIDE!

ath.

Benford's Law

The other day I was part of a discussion regarding how to detect fraud in large datasets and I was reminded of Benford’s Law… it really is quite amazing.

Essentially the law states that in a large enough collection of naturally occurring statistics the frequency of the first digit will tend towards “1”. This holds true for things as diverse as house numbers and stock prices.

If a large set of numbers is generated by a psudo number generator to say, fake atmospheric pollution data, the resulting set of numbers will not adhere to Benford’s Law and therefore can be assumed to be fake. It is obviously a trivial exercise to analyse a large set of data and modify it to adhere to Benford’s Law.

The table from the wikipedia article shows the logarithmic nature of these numbers.

Leading digit Probability
1 30.1%
2 17.6%
3 12.5%
4 9.7%
5 7.9%
6 6.7%
7 5.8%
8 5.1%
9 4.6%

What does facinate me even further is the question: Would a large set of randomly generated numbers generated by atmospheric noise random number generators adhere to Benford’s Law, and if not, Why?. Surely if pollution data does adhere to the law then atmospheric noise, which is much like pollution, should too.

I think I might generate a large set of random numbers generated by atmospheric noise and have a look at it while I’m disconnected at the river this weekend.

I hope this puzzles you as much as it does me…

j.

The Anti-Rant

I think I’ve been ranting a bit too much recently so I’m going to write a completely positive blog entry.

Firstly, while I’m writing this I’m listening to my flippen awesome old friend’s band, civil twilight, off myspace. I can’t believe how far these guys have come from a garage in Hout Bay.

For many reasons that will be clear if you read my posts regularly, Rian, my girlfriend, decided to return her HP laptop for a full refund. Being the instant gratification junkie that she is, she decided she needed another laptop ASAP. She’s also been harbouring a rather latent mac fetish for a few years now. I had a bad experience with a powerbook a while back but admittedly it was in the midst of a bad life experience so maybe I was just confused.

We ended up getting a really good price and awesome service from Project3 near Cavendish. They knew their products and their price for the 2gHz core 2 duo, gig-o-ram flavour macbook was 1 mili-bar less than everyone else.

What is perhaps more surprising is how nice the little baby is. Her name is Joy because until her we just weren’t getting any joy.  She’s really bright, fast and light (13.3″)… and, yes, I’m liking OSX… so all my OSX fan friends (bje, tuna) can start to hope again.

Jumping madly to food I want to rattle off the names of a few restaurants that I like.

Greens (in Park Rd, off Kloof)

Greens is pretty much where all the pretty people who drink at Vida E around the corner go to eat, however, it is actually a really nice restaurant. Their portions are larger than you’d expect and the overall quality and environment is worth the few extra rand you’ll be spending.

Jimmy’s Killer Prawns (also on Kloof)

The company and amount of alcohol previously consumed at Relish probably had something to do with it, but the few times I’ve been there (yes, all after friday night drinks at Relish) have all been wonderful. Do yourself a favour and get some of the Jimmy’s Killer Prawns, they’re awesome. I think they may also still be doing their Tuesday night all you can eat sushi.

The Ocean Basket (heh, also Kloof but the one in the waterfront also seems good.)

While the Ocean Basket probably fights against the family restaurant stereotypes in the hopes of not becoming the “spur” for seafood, what they do offer is repeatability. Their prices are good, the food is good and the service, generally good. If you’re looking for seafood give them a visit. (The one in Canal Walk is not quite at the same level as the two I’ve mentioned here)

Krugmans (V&A Waterfront)

This one is a gem. Tucked behind the Kauia, below the cinemas, this suprisingly large restaurant is probably one of those places you avoided because they look like you’ll walk out sorry with an empty wallet. Luckily Krugmans seems to only look that way.  Sure, they’d gladly sell you a R1400 bottle of wine but they also have amazingly good value for money burgers for under R50 and all kinds of steaks under R90.  On the topic of wine. They don’t have House Wine, so be careful when the waiter rattles off a list of their 26 cab savs that you don’t pick the R38 per glass option,  a few times…

Ok, enough about food… I’m getting hungry.

Just one final prop to Momentum Short Term insurance. Having recently bought a car (I take delivery in a few hours) I now know the pain of purchasing a vehicle privately. However, getting it insured proved rather simple. I currently have my household and all risks stuff (laptops etc) insured through momentum. I realise that the fact that they had me on their “books” made this slightly easier. I dialed the number, waited less than 30 seconds, spoke to a knowledgeable consultant called Yolandi who gave me the quote in less than 2 minutes and gave me her *direct* number so that when I wanted to give the green light it would be simple. The next day I called the number, she answered and remembered my name, called my policy up, initiated the insurance, told me what me new total premiums would be and sent a confirmation fax to the vehicle finance people and an email to me. All in less than 3 minutes. I’ve subsequently got various quotes via *my* bank and none have come close.

This concludes my anti-rant.

ath

j.