I noticed this yesterday, but Russell has the full story of what seems to be News24 being duped into pointing to a web site to gather credit card numbers. Seems quite possible with the generally impressionable and attention-seeking South African media. Of course, it could be scarier - maybe they just happen to be the only people to know of eBay being hacked (um, no?), and maybe the police really are running an unsecured Internet site with no obvious affiliation to the SAPS that asks people to enter their credit card details...

You'd think that multiple emails about SARS' electronic filing system not supporting anything but Internet Explorer on Windows, I'd at least get a reply saying they just don't care about their users. Well, I'm not the only one complaining, but at least they replied, even with ancient figures and bad reasoning. Let's see how well _this_ email works.

Apparently, I've been doing this (ephemeral link, I'm afraid) for the past year and a bit. You could be doing this stuff! (In response to the people who asked me whether there was an advert.)

This year South Africa will also be participating in the new and more comprehensive Software Freedom Day, which is a public Open Source and Free Software advocacy campaign. Our local efforts will be organised through the Software Freedom Day - South Africa site. So far, the Schools' Linux Users' Group is planning another installfest at the MTN Sciencentre, and the East Rand Linux Users' Group is planning something big at the East Rand Mall. I'll be speaking at 2nd Open Source Software Africa Conference, so I'll be in the Johannesburg area - I'll try to report back from whatever happens there.

After finding the '-c bilinear' option to produce nicely-scaled graphics (way better than the original 320x200), I've got to say that The Ur-Quan Masters, a port of the 3DO port of the DOS version of what I knew as Star Control 2 is easily as enjoyable to play as the original. Yes, that's what I wasted the majority of the weekend playing. I'm about 60% through the campaign portion now.

On Friday, besides signing for my new abode, I also accepted a job offer at Jam Warehouse and resigned from Independent Online.

Sometimes time accelerates. Friday morning Jeremy suggests we check up on the other apartment going in our complex. That afternoon I took off some time from work, saw the place, and then signed the rent agreement. On Saturday morning it was processed, and we're moving in on 1st August.

Moving from a Pentium 233 to an Athlon 2400+ does wonders for the usability of your web site, your email, and your web server log analysis. As part of a secret plan, if you're seeing this, it is being served by a machine I'm hosting at Layered Technologies. No complaints, and delivered quickly. This whole hundreds of kilobytes per second thing is quite disturbing to a poor South African, though.

Brand-newly-installed Windows XP (with latest service packs, all care of Windows sysadmin at work) machine. Try open second disk with Explorer with Folders sidebar enabled (default when you click the Explorer button in the task bar application launcher). Freeze. Do the same without Folders sidebar, it works. Repeat for four other disks. Also, is the quality of software just poorer in Windows? The work I'm doing is running into various system limits (dealing with millions of multiple-megabyte print-quality images), and I'm not getting the nice error messages (or even _any_ error messages sometimes) I'd get in FreeBSD or Linux...

I was in a conversation this weekend where I needed to give the names of a few programming patterns. I barely managed to remember Singleton. About two minutes later, the names of others started arriving, much too late for that topic in the conversation. Yet, if I'd been asked what a certain pattern did, my memory would've brought them up immediately. I suppose trying to find a list of things that fit a group term is sometimes like using a non-indexed column in a query. (What really astounds me is when it takes me fifteen seconds to find the necessary words to explain I want the TV remote which is hiding behind a mug on the kitchen counter next to the coffee machine. Those should be indexed!)