unsigned long geek = random();

… are greatly exaggerated. I’ve been rather quiet of late due to a lot of work pressure and working far too many late nights and weekends. I haven’t had much time to hack on things lately but am now starting to get back into the swings of things.

Some recent news:

• I finally upgraded to Wordpress 2.0. The upgrade went very smoothly, even with my heavily modified 1.5 theme.
• I switched themes, to Shaded Grey. At some point I’ll develop my own theme to make this site and my homepage look the same, but that’ll have to wait for a little while.
• I finally launched a new version of my home page, now accessible as mjturner.net. I’ve finally moved out of the 90s and into the era of XHTML and CSS

After deleting 309 comment spam posts, I’ve decided to solve the problem once and for all by installing the AuthImage plugin. It requires those posting comments to type in random letters from an image, so it should stop most spambots.

*sigh* I fondly remember the days before the Green Card Lottery of 1994…

Some of you may have noticed a few hiccups during today – it was an unscheduled move to a new host (which required a database backup and restore and a little Apache-fu). Hopefully things will be faster and the change will somehow motivate me to post more often

A lot is said about the poor state of South African home Internet access – the high cost and therefore limited penetration of broadband, etc. Sadly, the situation is not much better in most in workplaces…

As a consultant, I’ve worked in a number of large organizations in South Africa and most have Internet access that can best be described as pitiful. My current client is a large multinational mining company, a world leader in their field. Today I tried to do some Internet banking but gave up after waiting for five minutes for the ABSA Direct logon page to appear. The Internet connection is unstable and never seems to be up for more than an hour without interruption. When it’s up, the speeds are atrocious. Sadly, this is similar to the experience I’ve had at most clients I’ve worked at.

In contrast, I’ve also experienced first world Internet access. When I was at our campus at St Leon-Rot in Germany in May I downloaded at speeds of 800-1100K/s (that’s kilobytes per second). We have several thousand employees in Walldorf and St Leon-Rot, so it wasn’t like I was sitting on my own in the office at the end of a fat pipe. I ran out of Linux distributions and *BSD releases to download and had to resort to sucking down bootlegs from The Internet Archive to try and fill up my USB drive

I’m not sure if the sad state of affairs in South Africa is because of the high cost of Internet access or because employers don’t perceive access for their employees to be adding business value? The real reason probably lies somewhere between…

Niki and I spent Saturday night having a great dinner at Moyo at Spier, just outside Stellenbosch. Even though it’s the middle of winter and Moyo is an outdoor restaurant, they do their best to keep everyone warm (marquee over the dining area, gas heaters, blankets, etc.). With my great luck we were, of course, seated next to an opening in the marquee, so I was subjected to an icy wind for most of the evening.

The food was great, although with outdoor buffet dining in such weather there is always the risk that your food will be rather lukewarm before you’re finished eating (which happened with us, although that didn’t detract majorly from the great food). They seem to have pretty much everything on the menu, from fish to filet to game to potjies along with a good mix of veggies and it seemed uniformly excellent. Unfortunately, I forgot the digicam in the room, otherwise I would’ve posted some piccies.

We left the restaurant at around 11:00pm (the first to leave) and spent Saturday night at the hotel at Spier. The whole experience was great and is highly recommended.

My employer kindly paid for the excursion – it was our mid-year office dinner.

My mom looked after the children while we were away – thanks for babysitting Ma. hehehehe.

Hmm… Just testing my new blog…