Visualising the Interest Rate

I though it might be interesting to try and graph the Reserve Bank’s prime rate data… It goes back a long way. I used Python to scrape and collate the data and PyCha to generate the graph.

UPDATE: I’ve replaced my graphs with new versions made by Russell who corrected my original code by interpolating the data correctly over the y axis.

This is the narrow version.

And this is the wide version (click to download the actual 10000px wide png)

Interestingly enough, todays rate cut *was* on that page earlier today, but now I see it’s gone… so I inserted it manually 😉

Odd murmurings about diet.

I’ve been on a pretty strict diet since last Monday and although the goal of the diet is simply to lose some weight I’ve noticed a few very interesting things during the week.

  • Mindset is King. I don’t know what flipped the switch in my head, but I feel ready to diet now. I think this is very much to the “can’t quit until you really want to quit” argument for drug addicts etc.
  • It’s not that hard. I’m not hungry. When I notice myself getting hungry it’s usually less than an hour away from lunch time etc so I just push through till then.
  • I feel better. It’s not that I used to feel bad, but I just generally feel better, less lethargic. I didn’t expect this.
  • Eating smaller portions is a habit you can get addicted to. I used to eat really big meals, now I’m trying to see how little I can eat while staying healthy.
  • It doesn’t take long for your body to adjust… by Thursday I was already feeling stuffed after eating a relatively small dinner.
  • It can be hard to make healthy food interesting but it also gives you the freedom to experiment a lot since you’re going to be having a chicken breast 3 times a week etc. My chef is doing a really good job of trying to keep dinners interesting.
  • I get cravings for massively unhealthy food (think deepfried everything). This is probably the result of my body not knowing what the hell is going on and trying to get me to eat some “normal” food. This will obviously pass.
  • At this point I’m very aware of the diet still, I’m sure that as I carry on it will become “normal” and I’ll stop thinking about it.
  • Saturdays are dietary “off days” and I had a chicken mushroom pie. My lord did it taste good 😉
  • Fruit is pretty good stuff.
  • I’m aiming at a loss of 1kg per week. I lost 2.5kg in the first week. I don’t expect that trend to necessarily carry on into the subsequent weeks, but who knows? I’ll keep you posted.

GeekDinner Stellenbosch

Last night was the first Stellenbosch GeekDinner and I thoroughly enjoyed it, mostly because of the venue.

Lovane Boutique Wine Estate was gorgeous and perfect. It’s on the Cape Town side of Stellenbosch so you can get out of the city after work and be sipping wine on the balcony overlooking the vineyards while the sun is still out.

Best of all was the food. A sirloin steak buffet with a mushroom sauce and tons of veggies and a green salad. Dessert was homemade ice cream with chocolate sauce. It was delectable in its simplicity. Something that the GeekDinners have been missing out on since we were at Mell’s Kitchen. The meal was perfectly paired with the bottle of wine had been generously placed on our table by Perdeberg.

Which brings me to a point about food. My partner is a chef. Her life is food and she’s incredibly fussy about getting food perfect… As a result I have eaten some pretty amazing meals ranging from the utterly sublime to french toast.

Perfection turns out to be very hard, even for the simple things. How do you fry a perfect egg? How is the perfect roast chicken prepared?

What any chef who truly knows their craft will tell you, if they’re being honest, is something that any good drummer will also tell you. To really impress, perfect the basics, keep it simple and introduce your own subtle flare to hook the person eating (or listening).

Complicated rhythms that mix 3 time signatures and require super human levels of coordination only impress drumming nerds. Also, making food too complicated before you’ve perfect the basics is like taking part in the 100m sprint before you’ve learnt to walk and too much complexity will just taste like noise to most people, even the “experts”.

Lovane got it right. They got the basics right and they had their own subtle touches which finished it all off nicely. The price was perfect, the venue was perfect. I just need to return to see if their wines are perfect!

If you’ve got a function and need a venue for around 55 people I can thouroughly reccommend Lovane.

There is no cure for stupidity.

A while ago I blogged about a weird comment I had received on one of my blog posts.

In summary, there is an SEO company called SEO Results (aka BizSearch, aka NetAge) that gets its staff to trawl blogs and write comments with the Author URL set to the url of one of their SEO clients.

Author : PMM (IP: 165.146.34.239 , dsl-146-34-239.telkomadsl.co.za)
E-mail : kim@bizsearch.co.za
URL : http://www.pmmproperties.co.za
Comment:
Wow what a difference it looks fantastic, great job done

One would think that after the first run in I had with these spammers they would have avoided my blog?

Anyway, to make sure it’s clear: SEO Results are spammers and black hat SEO idiots… Using them is likely to get you bad mouthed on the internet (like this) and perhaps worse, blacklisted on google.

An online hiatus

For a little over a month now I’ve been compulsively avoiding the time sapping parts of the internets. This isn’t the result of a new years resolution but rather the collective result of being incredibly busy. Admittedly I’ve been on the internet the whole time, but mostly for work or some form of hacking.

My google reader is overflowing, Digg.com could have been down for months, the only blogs I have read are things that someone has specifically asked me to read or randoms that I hit upon while plumbing the depths of python knowledge. Boing Boing, Engadget, DamnInteresting, FailBlog, Icanhas*, XKCD and all-those-things-my-friends-thought-were-mindblowingly-interesting have been ignored… and suprisingly, not missed.

Sure I yearn to know what the fastest SSD in the world is *right now*, or how big the Panasonic engineers have managed to push high contrast LCDs… and about that video of the cop hitting the kid (this happens every few months and causes a flap)… BUT, I’ve realised that it just doesn’t matter… or maybe it does, but not to me… not at this stage of my life.

Perhaps I’m just getting old, but the thing is, this month has passed and I feel better for it. I didn’t plan it this way, but now that it’s happened I get the impression that my little (or perhaps big) addiction to all-things-intertubes was wasting a crap load of my time. I feel good about not knowing. I feel good about the stuff I’ve learnt rather than the drivel I could have absorbed.

In the old days it was still possible to follow the internet… I had more time and the inernet was producing new stuff as a slower rate… but we’ve reached the point where every tom dick and sally has a blog and a phone cam… and is meticulously documenting their lives for the rest of us to pretend to care about. I don’t.

So I urge you. Stop reading my blog. If it’s ever relevant to something you care about you’ll no doubt find it via google… in the mean time I’m just going to upload pictures of my garden and rants about bad web developers.

Over and Out.

Have you seen this video of my cat?

Eye Witness News (ewn.co.za) has a few issues.

First let me say that I like the idea of a new, fresh news site… EWN could quickly become a serious player in the news arena, but before they do so they’re going to need to fix a few issues.

I sent an email listing some of these issues to the Primedia team. I know it got there because people who know people said there was some flapping and urgent updating that happened as a result of the email… However, I’m yet to get any form of reply whatsoever… which I think is just rude.

(update: A few things (like the comments about Mandela) have been fixed, but the overwhelming majority is still as it was when I wrote this list a few days ago. The site however seems to be suffering from lots and lots of timeouts now.)

This list is by no means exhaustive…

1. You need to add a DNS record for ewn.co.za (so that http://ewn.co.za actually works)

2. You need to add RSS, preferably ATOM, with a number of sub feeds, geographic locality etc.

3. You need to remove your stupid comments from your html source… not only is it dumb, but people WILL take offence.

<!–<li><a href=”#”>Mandela Gives Birth to a Gorilla </a><span class=”timeadded”>2&nbsp;days&nbsp;ago </span> </li><li><a href=”#”>Prengant Child attacks Mandela</a><span class=”timeadded”>3&nbsp;days&nbsp;ago </span></li><li><a href=”#”>Tourists Can’t Give Enough Birth </a><span class=”timeadded”>1&nbsp;day&nbsp;ago&nbsp;</span></li>–>

etc

4. You need to make sure all your templates actually work… for instance this one is a little too concise —
http://www.ewn.co.za/story.aspx?id=4013

5. You need to protect yourself from SQL injection and handle any attempts gracefully.
ie. http://www.ewn.co.za/articleprog.aspx?id=40%2709

6. You should probably consider looking into better urls for your articles, specifically for SEO purposes.

7. You should also probably add meta descriptions (and possibly tags) to your article pages. This will help display relevant content in search engine results.

8. Your pages do not even come close to validating XHTML transitional.

9. You need a mobile version! This is easy to implement!

10. That logo… It’s very 90’s.

11. Bonus Tip: One of my biggest gripes with the other news sites is how they never allow you to view larger versions of their images. Implementing Lightbox2 over you existing site will be easy and help
differentiate yourselves from the other players.

12. Your site search is broken in Firefox and Safari and is unstable in IE6 and 7.

13. Your server errors (timeouts etc) need to be handled more gracefully. At the moment your site displays the default .NET error pages, which is something that only the developers should be seeing.

14. Your comment form gives no indication that it hasn’t submitted due to invalid data. This will confuse users.

15. Besides the SQL Injection issues, users who search for any string that contains an apostrophe will be greeted by a rather ugly error page. Try search for o’grady.

16. You need to remove all your test data from your database. http://www.ewn.co.z/articleprog.aspx?id=183 etc

17. You should add a clearfix after your pull-out-quote on your article pages. This will ensure that articles that start with single character words like “A” don’t end up displaying the first character to the right of the pull-out with the rest of the article below the pull-out. See http://www.ewn.co.za/articleprog.aspx?id=4021

18. Your logo should be a link to your landing page. This has become a web standard and a lot of users will expect it to do so.

19. You should sanitise your article source before your editors submit it so that you don’t end up with styling imported from MS Word which can break your layout. ie. 

<p class=”MsoNormal” style=”MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 12pt; tab-stops: 18.0pt 91.6pt 137.4pt 183.2pt 229.0pt 274.8pt 320.6pt 366.4pt 412.2pt 458.0pt 503.8pt 549.6pt 595.4pt 641.2pt 687.0pt 732.8pt”>

Not only is it ugly but it will repeatedly break your validation.

eg. on http://www.ewn.co.za/articleprog.aspx?id=4033

20. While it’s debatable whether this is a true bug, there is a fair amount of functionality on your site that is broken when the user disables javascript.

21. As I’m browsing the site I am hitting a lot of timeouts. This indicates that your server is probably struggling. Most likely due to bad coding and/or a database that isn’t tuned properly.

22. Your cache control is not good. You should probably add far future expire headers to all your static resources. This will speed up the site for regular users. Also, combine and gzip your js. This will also decrease load on your site and help with all the timeouts.

Girls and XHTML Validation

If you’re ever debating whether or not something is sexist, change the gender statement into a racial one and see how it fares…

ie. (taken from the intertubes)

Lucy
We don’t know a whole lot about Lucy, except that she’s one of the few females on the planet who can hold a conversation about search engine algorithm changes and validating XHTML pages.

Changes to:

Sipho
We don’t know a whole lot about Sipho, except that he’s one of the few black people on the planet who can hold a conversation about search engine algorithm changes and validating XHTML pages.