unsigned long geek = random();

I’ve been quiet for the past few months, but I’m still very much alive and well. One of the major reasons for being so quiet is that a month ago my family and I traded the sun and sea of Cape Town for the bright lights of London. We’re still getting settled (everything seems to take sooo long!), but things have been going very well so far. More on the move in future posts.

For those in the area, we’re now living in Horley, Surrey (near Gatwick).

The past few days haven’t been great for us Capetonians. With the recent power problems we’ve been having, Eskom, the local power company (well, we don’t have any choice in the matter – the joys of monopolies), has had to resort to rolling power cuts in order to avoid having to cut the power to the entire city.

On Sunday morning at around 2:30am we had a city-wide cut. When I woke up in the morning, I wanted to check the status of the blackout, so tried to access IOL, one of the better local news providers. Of course, my laptop had been powered up and on AC power when the power was cut, so the battery was dead by Sunday morning, leaving my mobile phone’s browser as the only choice for accessing the Internet.

When I visited the IOL site, I got an error message stating that it could only be accessed by MWEB Namibia subscribers and that if I wanted to view the contents I’d have to subscribe to MWEB (a local ISP). What the heck? This is me, sitting in Cape Town, using my Vodacom mobile phone and trying to access a local site and being blocked by MWEB (who I’m guessing are somehow involved in IOL’s hosting). Gee, thanks MWEB. I had to resort to visiting News24.com for news on the power failure. Even more annoying, I have no problem accessing the IOL site using a Citrix server and proxy sitting in Germany (which I often do from work), but can’t access it using my mobile phone. Argh!

This past week was one of the more hectic I can remember:

• The main $WORK project I’m involved in needs to be completed by the end of the month (when the customer starts integration testing), so I’m working at a hectic pace to try and get it finished.
• I’m involved at another customer for one day a week, but on that day I need to try and squeeze in about 3 days work. At least it’s both challenging and fun
• On Thursday I had to present to the new purchasing manager and a number of the business analysts at one of our customers – the joys of trying to quantify savings in purchasing to justify expenditure on new software.
• I had to get an affidavit signed to make some changes to our medical aid policy.
• A pipe in our house sprung a leak and our plumber was a bit slack in getting back to us, so every time we needed to use the water I’d rush outside and turn it on and then off again. The leak was under our yard, which is paved with bricks, so I was pretty stressed about it having to be dug up. Fortunately our plumber ended up fixing it with only a small number of bricks broken.
• My mom’s car was broken into, but luckily it wasn’t damaged and nothing was stolen.

It’s only February, but I need another holiday already!

It’s always interesting to Google the names of people one has studied with to see what they’re up to know. Heck, sometimes their names appear out the blue, as in this case.

Just spotted this interesting titbit on Kiyotito Leverette’s WebLog – Michael van Dijken is now Marketing Manager of Microsoft Hosted Solutions. Here’s an interview with him. Mike and I studied together at UCT but I haven’t been in contact with him since around 1999.

It’s with sadness that I report the passing of phantom.eri.uct.ac.za, the first net-connected Linux system that I had an account on The department that used phantom as its mail server decided to move over to the main UCT mail server, resulting in phantom being decomissioned.

From what I’ve been told, phantom began life sometime in 1994 or early 1995 as a small Linux server in the Energy Research Instititute at UCT (now part of the Energy Research Centre). Thanks to Stephen Tjasink, I got an account in mid-1995, if memory serves me correctly. I started using the machine (then a 486/50 with 8M RAM and a 250M disk) for my mail and to host my home page. After a while, I got root and began assisting with the sysadmin tasks (Travers Waker was the official admin in those days). I remember the heady days of converting from aout to ELF, installing perl 5 and rebuilding the NCSA httpd At around this time, phantom slowly started becoming more important, hosting POP accounts for staff in addition to the department website.

In late 1997, some time after Travers left and had been replaced by Edward van Kuik, phantom got a hardware upgrade and became a Pentium MMX 187 (overclocked!) with 128M and 2.5G disk. It was also migrated from Slackware 2.2 to Redhat 4.0.

Edward later left and was replaced by Geoffrey Crowe. I continued to assist with sysadmin tasks and by then the department was using phantom for all its mail. In 1999, Geoffrey’s replacement, Darren Ravens, managed to find money for an additional disk and phantom gained an additional 8.4G and was migrated to Debian.

By 2003, phantom had been upgraded to a 1.7Ghz Celeron with 256M RAM and the following year gained two 80G drives running in a RAID1 array. It also started doing virus scanning of emails and had some pretty good anti-spam measures in place. Sadly, the writing was on the wall when Darren left in late 2004, and phantom was finally decomissioned this week.

With phantom’s demise, so dies my oldest active email address: mj@phantom.eri.uct.ac.za.