The South African Court of Appeal has declared that under the Constitution the common law concept of marriage was to be developed to embrace same-sex partners. This overturned an earlier decision against the couple heading the appeal, who were seeking that their intended marriage be recognised.
Asia Source
29 Nov
Earlier in the month I noticed that the excellent guys at Tactical Technology Collective had announced Asia Source, a conference similar to Africa Source (which I attended in February) in all but geography - Asia Source will be just outside Bangalore in India. I popped a note to one of the friends I made at Africa Source who is involved with Asia Source to see if I could help out and attend. Heard back on Friday that they'd like me to come, but they'd have to see whether I'd upset any budget/attendee balances. So I've applied, and am way too excitedly waiting to hear how things go.
Walk in Newlands Forest
29 Nov
Jeremy invited a colleague to go for a walk in the forest, and my other plans falling through, I tagged along. Her dog, Liesl, and Dante seemed to enjoy themselves - Liesl not having to play guide dog and Dante being trusted off-lead. He didn't let us down, wandering around but staying within sight and coming when called.
After last week's being a socialisation class of one, this week our socialisation class teacher wasn't available. So Dante and a new 5 month old doberman joined the big dogs for a training class. Of course, Dante is well capable of sitting already, but we took the opportunity to see if he's take commands with all the other dogs around, which he seemed to do well enough on his lead. More pictures from Dante's socialisation classes.
KnowledgeTree modernising
27 Nov
We've been quite happy at Jam for a few contracts to improve KnowledgeTree. These not only improve KnowledgeTree for everyone in the specific area of the contract, but in the process we're given the opportunity to look at surrounding code, and think about improvements. Such is the latest of our contracts, which involves some wide-spread changes that I'm having to prepare for by improving various things about KnowledgeTree - mostly getting rid of legacy decisions and methods. Here's the start of that work.
AIMS Open Source orientation
25 Nov
The guys at The Shuttleworth Foundation gave an Open Source and Tuxlabs orientation class to the Maths postgrads at African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, and I attended expecting some hardware refurbishment needing to be done, and to watch the pilot of Go_Open. I took some pictures of the event, especially Jason's hound, Frank.
Go_Open begins
22 Nov
As Brad relates, the Go_Open TV show went out for the first time on Saturday, on SABC2, at 17:30. I was watching at The Shuttleworth Foundation (more on why later), and while it was a bit cheesy for my tastes, but I guess I'm not the target demographic (am I ever?). I like what they've done for their web site too.
I spoke too early
22 Nov
I said a few days ago that KnowledgeTree was at its highest point in the project in 14th place in activity. Since then, it fumbled about the 20s, and not it's been at 7th place for the past three days.
Go-Open marketing starts
19 Nov
On the Gauteng LUG a billboard saying
Given a choice, Pick 'n Pay chooses Open Source softwarewas discovered. On another list, news of a TV advert for the Go-Open TV show was mentioned. And last night, the Freedom League was announced, whereby those members with the most verified conversions and installs will be rewarded with goodies from HP South Africa.
KnowledgeTree stats
16 Nov
Every once in a while I check the activity stats of the KnowledgeTree project. It's a nice summary of how your project is doing based on views, downloads, and the tracker (although the CVS tracking is broken), and also gives you your rank on the SourceForge ladder. On the 10th November, KnowledgeTree was 14th, it's highest ever position. Not even in the top 100 for downloads - need seven times the number of downloads for that!