By public demand (one person IS a member of the public !), I have resurrected my [tag]webcomic[/tag] scartoonz. A few small changes:
1) The new ones have a slightly more advanced CMS so I can spend less time hacking to do it.
2) The jokes are even worse.
3) I deserve to be strangled even harder.
Have fun (or something)
And what an amazing time we had. We saw the full [tag]big five[/tag], [tag]leopards[/tag] no less than three times and even got to see [tag]lions[/tag] [tag]mating[/tag] (hur hur, I said ‘mating’ :p )
I took loads of pictures (even some of a baboon “[tag]playing with his thingy[/tag]” to use my wife’s delightful description) which I will post as soon as I can get them from my brother.
Now that I’m back, it’s right back into the old bump and grind with a lot of work ahead of me and several projects that require attention. There is also some fairly big business changes in progress which will ultimately make life easier (after first needing some birthpains of course). More on this later.
Anyway, I am back home and life goes on – with it, this blog.
Tomorrow morning I am heading out to Pretoria with the wife After a small stint doing some work for a customer up there, we’ll link up with my family and head out to the Kruger National Park, a longtime dream of hers which is finally coming true. I have always loved the park myself, it being one of my all-time favorite childhood holiday destinations so I am very much looking forward to seeing it again.
This does mean that over the next 14 days or so, I won’t be blogging much though, but when I am back, I’ll make up for it.
Hi everyone.
I had this massive fotoblog of the [tag]ampli5[/tag] festival planned with reviews of each band and lots more. Except I am paste, it was a kickass party, the most ass-kickage partying I have had in a long time, my neck still hurts, and it’s 2am the next night, I’m tired and I’m sleepy and I’m just not going to do it :p
But I did upload all the pix. Some of them are not great because the light wasn’t great, but the ones that made it in here are the best I got. Shows my best shots of [tag]Love Jones[/tag] (Devil in miss Jones :p ) who rocked, the [tag]violent femmes[/tag] who rocked in the most transcendental return-to-roots way ever, [tag] maxnormal.tv[/tag] a sort of zen hiphop band that is without being (don’t ask, it’s impossible to explain, but it kicks ass) and of course the stars of the day [tag]fokofpolisiekar[/tag] and [tag]Jimmy Eat World[/tag].
The photos are up in the events gallery lemme know what you all think, right now, I’m going to try to sleep. I’m still pumped !
UPDATE: Ok, so I wanted to do a bit more per-band “how did it make me feel” thing. So I went and stuck a mini-review of what was happening in each picture into the pic descriptions so check out the gallery again for a genuine foto-tour of ampli5 Bellville.
For the first time in nearly a decade (9 years to be exact), my [tag]hair[/tag] is not hanging below my shoulders. In fact, though still long by typical South African male standards, they are shorter than they have been in a long time. Cut into layers with an easy natural style. I like it. After all these years, it was time for a change. Just in case anybody wonders though – this change does not mean that my love for [tag]hairmetal[/tag] is in any reduced, that is impossible.
These pix were taken shortly after the actual cut while I was braaing a chicken for dinner.
This Saturday, me and the silentwife… erm… make that wifecoder… erm…that don’t work either me…erm… and my beloved will be heading out to see [tag]ampli5[/tag] at the [tag]Velodrome[/tag].
Ampli5 is a concert promoted by 5FM, an all day event starting 12 noon with some excellent bands – both local and international. Among the local talent are new-on-the-scenes like [tag]love jones[/tag] and well established kick-ass bands like [tag]fokofpolisiekar[/tag], the international line-up includes bands as varied [tag]groove armada[/tag] (which beloved loves) and [tag]Jimmy eat world[/tag] (which I love).
We’ll be kicking ass in the golden circle aka the moshpit and rocking out to some of the best bands on the scene today. A really good day if you ask me. I will report on how it was after the show.
In other news, tomorrow is [tag]woman’s day[/tag] in South Africa, a national holiday. The other 364 must apparently then be men’s days though we don’t get to have our days off work (nor apparently do we get in any way revered on them).
Still, all seriousness aside, may equality come where-ever it isn’t. True equality, for all.
.
It was 3am on November 28 2001. I was sitting in Abuja, Nigeria. I had, had a very real problem that day. I needed a [tag]cybercafe[/tag] management suite for [tag]Linux[/tag], which would coincidentally work well with the (then still very new) LTSP project. No suitable candidate had been found – so I wrote one. It was simple, but it did the job.
With my usual flair for naming things I called it ¨AJ´s [tag]internet cafe[/tag] management toolkit for LTSP¨, and with my usual love for all things free, and the realization that I had done it way past normal work hours, I released it to the world under the GPL.
It was included on the CoverDVD of LinuxFormat the following month. Which was the point where I think I first began to realize just how badly the Linux world was in need of such a program. It didn´t have the glamor of a bash-shell but it was needed – and I was the only one who had actually done anything about that need.
That first suite was made up of about 10 small commandline programs, hard to setup, and limitted to run only on LTSP systems – but it would grow.
Not long afterward it received a much nicer name – direqcafe. It would continue to be developed under that name for 5 years. It had a steady following of users over 3 major versions (with a whole bunch of small minor version in between) and I think was generally a very, very successful free software project, at least for a niche market.
In September of 2006 however, things began to change. New horizons in my life meant that I now had more and more reason to explore new horizons for my little pet project.
I began with a grounds up redesign -the purpose of which was to rid myself of the limitations of the earlier project. The design was all encompassing, it would be multiplatform, backed by an SQL server with every database action completely abstracted inside a library and it´s own user-database completely independent of the underlying operating system. It would be highly extensible and it would be so damn cool.
The new project was dubbed ¨[tag]zybacafe[/tag]¨ and had one alpha and one beta release. This however was also a time when my personal life changed. As December neared, I quit my job and began a new career as an entrepeneur.
ZybaCafe was forgotten. For a long time, nobody worked on it, users were begging for features and nobody was answering their pleas. But I had made one big mistake with ZybaCafe, I had let a third party have the copyright. Sure the main thing was [tag]GPL[/tag]´d but the addons were not.
I realise that there was only one of two futures. Either somebody would fork zybacafe, or it would be doomed, ultimately replaced by something (hopefully), and since everything else out there was badly maintained, slow-moving and generally as basic as my program had started out to be (without the five year evolution in the meantime)… this seemed tragic.
So I decided to fork it myself. Take the GPL´d part and restart the project anew, replace the proprietary bits from scratch, add the features I wanted and refuse the ones that don´t belong.
The result was [tag]OutKafe[/tag]. Now most of this history is (at least partially) known to most of you, though I don´t think I´ve ever given it all in one clear chronological timeline like this. Which must make you wonder why I felt the need to post it all today.
The reason is that today marks the release of version 5.2.0 of OutKafe – and I have a sense today of my project´s maturity that I have been aiming for, for a long time.
The newest features are all focussed on letting the users adapt it to their environments, themability and translateability making up the core of this.
It has become stable, fast and easy to use with a growing userbase and several other developers actively helping me grow it.
It has also (through paid development of specific features or grandscale customizations) become my largest source of income. My baby has grown up I guess.
Of course, it´s far from over. This version is nice, but no doubt there will be bugs discovered, people will look at these features and help me see where the next obvious gaps are. It will keep growing, evolving – and more and more cybercafe owners will start to see Linux as a viable solution in their business, ultimately a goal which I for one think has perhaps just a tiny bit of nobility to it.