It would seem so - i walked up to the fall out boy entrance, sign in hand, "ticket to buy please." i had asked and no one had seen anyone selling. I asked the guard at the gate. "yoh! This guy over here!" the guy looked at me, leaned over and said, "here, present." amen. (this post from my mobile)
UPDATE: BTW, concert was cool, but this was the worst sound I have ever heard at a concert. This includes concerts at the Good Hope Centre in Cape Town, notorius for its bad sound, and Bon Jovi at Green Point where they blew their mid range amps. On the latter occassion, the sound engineer managed to compensate. Last night, to say the sound was "muddy" would be an understatement - at times you couldn't hear the lead vocalist.
The Fall Out Boy website Joe Trohman's blog with today's post about their African trip - to Uganda and SA - including pictures and commentary about the gig at the Dome and their game drive
Ok, help. It took a while to find someone to go to Fall Out Boy with. Hey, not everyone has good taste.
By the time I convinced a girl who had an invite to shaparone a 14 year old with a complimentary ticket to take up the offer, the show had been sold out. So now I'm in the dog box.
If you know of anyone selling a main floor standing ticket to this Friday's show, please comment on this post.
My life has been a technology hell this past month and a bit. I appear to have become one of those people who causes technology to explode when I walk past.
First one of my server hard drives went. The RAID saved my butt and it was then a matter of ordering replacements from the States via eBay. They finally arrived, but to do the capacity expansion (I ordered bigger hard drives) I had to back up all the data, replace the drives and then retsore the data - not a trivial task for a few hundred Gigs of data. This was made more difficult because my DLT drive is still busted (it will cost thousands to fix). However, although time consuming, the drives are in. They are reconditioned drives and two failed on start up - which is where I got lucky because I ordered two extra.
The new laptop I bought to replace the stolen one arrived with Windows Vista for Business. I resized the partition to install a dual boot of Debian Linux, and disaster. Vista would no longer boot. So I've been working exclusively in Linux for the last month while I've tried to sort out the Vista problem. This has allowed me to develop an appreciation of key migration issues. The biggest? For me, tables in Powerpoint. Almost all my consulting documentation ends up in Powerpoint (roll on the consulting jokes). Tables are critical for formatting data on a slide. And Impress (the OpenOffice.org equivilent) doesn't do them. No. Kidding.
Solving the Vista problem has been a ball-ache of note. The recovery disk will not boot if you have resized the orginal install partitiion and IBM suggested I buy a copy of Vista - at a few thousand rand - to replace the OEM version on my machine. This after much efforty including a trip to the East Rand to the Laptop distribution and support warehouse.
I finally found documentation on the issue here after arriving at a similar conclusion.
The key is being able to run "chkdsk" on the affected Vista partition. You can either boot with a NTFS-capable start disk and run it from there, or you can run ntfsfix from Linux and then boot your Vista partition which will launch "chkdsk".
This a pretty huge issue - most Linux installations now make use of partition resizing in order to turn a Windows machine into a dual-booting machine. This issue results in a broken Windows installation. Sabotage?
As if the above pains were not enough, I dropped my cell phone into some water. With my old laptop stolen, I was contactless! I have a backup on my LDAP server, but with the transition to a new eGroupware this had also got broken. Yup, I certainly have become Karma's bitch (taking over from Devil).
Anyway, much more about all of the above incidents, workarounds and fixes on my technical blog.
After a week of drying out, I tried my phone yesterday - et voila! It works. Together with the Vista fix, the arrival of my new wireless router (after six months of fighting with Digital Planet) and my new UPS, does this mark a change in my techinical fortunes. Please God let it be so.
Dog decapitated with chain saw 19/06/2007 15:55 - (SA)
Johannesburg - A Delmas magistrate has refused the offers of two men who wanted to pay admission of guilt fines after admitting to using a chain saw to decapitate a live husky dog.
The SPCA said both Phillip Matthysen and Alec Sirate pleaded guilty to a charge of animal cruelty.
But last night he came back again and tried to rob my neighbours. Oh yes.
The bugger is so bold, he didn't waste any sleep this time. At 22h00, my neighbour's wife walked into the bedroom and was confronted by the sight of a dread locked man standing in her garden. Of course she screamed. This either did not bother the burglar - or he froze before bolting.
I was in the shower when my phone rang. I am the body corporate trustee in charge of security. "Sorry to bother you so late IITQ, but would this be a convenient time to talk?"
My neighbour must be the most polite person on earth. "(L) spotted a guy in our garden and we've let the guards know and called the police. Should I be doing anything else?"
So I called our suburb's security and once again we had ex-soldiers (ex-recces, the SA equivalent of the SAS/Marines) with assault rifles running through the complex.
Naturally our gardening staff are a little concerned - they are after all having polygraph tests today. So post us having not found the terrorist again, one of the gardeners volunteered to take the security guys to the homeless vagrants up the road to quiz them. Shortly later I had two scared looking vagrants on my doorstep, one munching hungrily on some bread. Odd. But I didn't question that - other things were more odd and more pressing.
My gardener, "These guys know the guy who owns the bag we found with the torch from your house. He has dreadlocks and his name is Terence."
Alrighty. Turns out Terence is a Zimbabwean who smash and grabs from cars in Sandton, sells dagga to the builders in the area and has the nickname Rasta. It seems the man's talents are expanding.
Talents which, by the way, include getting over electric fences, past guards and up 2,5m walls.
By now, half the world's private security and the police are in my complex. I take the homeless to the police and they repeat the story. The police and the suburb security resolve to catch the man the next day. For his sake, I hope the police get him first. The security have offered to bring him to me.
Meanwhile, my home is becoming a massive worksite and interrogation room. The polygrapher is in my study quizzing the frightened gardeners. The alarm people are rewiring and adding everywhere. By coincidence the pond guy arrived to fix something. The carpenter arrived to fix my damaged door and lock. The complex security management are on their way. My client deliverables are way behind. And I write a maths exam next week. And I need sleep.
Oh, turns out one of the ex-recces bought the vagrant the bread as a tongue loosener. Apparently it worked.
After sleeping through my Monday night robbery, I was awake for its reprise last night.
I'd worked until 03h00 and was settling in for my sleep when I heard a noise. Armed with a piece of steel rebar that has been beside my bed since Monday, I inched down the dark passage. Never turn the lights on they say - you become a better target for a bullet.
I rounded the corner to see the shape of a crouching burglar on my patio. My shout as I chased towards him was the weird roar, "You fucking bastard!"
The dark shape turned and ran. He slipped as he tried to cross my koi pond. In a flash he was up again. He raced across the garden an vaulted the garden wall into the complex gardens.
I raced back to my room, called the police, suburb security and armed response.
I spent the next hour scouring the complex with first the suburb security, ex-recces with assault rifles, then the police and then the armed response.
Nothing. Either this guy knows a good way over our boundary wall and electric fence or he's coming from the inside.
There have to be thousands and thousands of stolen laptops and cell phones in South Africa. Where do they all go?
It bugs the shit out of me that people buy stolen goods. Without the market there would be no theft.
I'm thinking about it because I've just had to run out and buy a new laptop. And I will have to buy a new DVR and DVDs tomorrow. After the brazen fuckers broke into my house and stole them while I slept last night. Of course I'm lucky. I could have woken up, etc, etc.
But I've been thinking a lot today about the arsehole who's going to buy my old laptop for a few hundred bucks.
Meanwhile: new laptop + Office 2007 = R20000. DVR = R3000. DVDs = R2000. The stuff that's missing that I have not figured out yet? All the work from the three weeks since my last back up?
On Friday night one of my server's hard drives went to hard drive heaven. This resulted in many pretty messages printed on the screen and many pretty words pouring out my mouth.
It reminded me how dependent on technology each of us is. That server has a ton of my life on it.
Not only that, but after my tape drive failed a year ago, my effort to procure a new drive from a bloke in Beijing through eBay were frustrated by the fact that he was a thief. $750 US down the drain. So my backups are way out of date.
Luckily, I invested in RAID. The miracle of technology means that I merely have to put in a new drive and it will be rebuilt. I don't even have to switch the machine off when replacing the drive.
So pray that my new eBay drive order goes according to plan. If another drive in the RAID fails during the interim, I'm toast.
I installed Compiz on my PC yesterday. Oh my goodness. Eye candy deluxe.
I have a dual-booting laptop with Debian Linux on one partition and Windows XP on another. I installed Compiz on my Linux partition. "Compiz is a compositing window manager that uses 3D graphics acceleration via OpenGL. It provides various new graphical effects and features on any desktop environment, including Gnome and KDE."
To those of you that imagine Linux / UNIX to be a green screen terminal-style command prompt, now's the time to take a closer look. Hell, if you're a Linux/UNIX guru, now's the time to take a closer look!
You know all the eye candy special effects on Mac OS X and Windows Vista? Take a look (a pretty good look at a whole lot of effects very quickly on a high-end 64bit machine) at Linux (Beryl is a downstream fork of Compiz that has now be remerged with the original project):
http://youtube.com/watch?v=QLuOlgu5dsA
The cube effect draws on the Linux/Unix "multiple desktop" metaphor. Even in the days of terminals, you could hotkey between visually and logically seperate command lines. The same capability is present in window managers (like KDE), where you can hotkey between seperate GUI desktops. I find this easier than Alt-tabbing between windows or minimising everything to try and sort through hat I have open. It also allows me to group tasks together (such as development on one desktop, mail and producitivity tools on another, and office stuff on another).
This demo shows (with a cool ambient garage beat) a feature-by-feature breakdown - part 1. Part 2.
This demo shows a dual head (two monitors joined into one desktop) setup with Compiz(now all the traders are going to want fancy GUIs on their trading floors - take a look at the crazy trader pics here).
Crazy trader desktops!
Here's the Novell presentation about Compiz/XGL/Linux (SUSE distro) features.
Here's a narrated demo of a guy running at 2560X1600 - it will give you an idea of how efficient XGL and Compiz are. The guy also shows CPU usage using Compiz.
Obviously it's not really realistic to watch this on Youtube resolution, but it gives you an idea of the effects. You can have a look at some screenshots here which will give you an idea of the higher res effect.
For those of you wondering if this is lifted from Vista - one of those patents you've heard about - if you look at the dates on these Youtube videos, you'll see these features predate Vista.
Is this just eye-candy or is it useful? I've believed for a long time that our computing experience is limited by the screen desktop paradigm. Is your physical desktop really 15-, 17- or even 20 inches? I think these types of efforts to make the desktop more three dimensional help us escape from that trap. I often think about those classic scenes from "The Lawnmower Man" and "Disclosure" where the characters don goggles and conduct their computing experience in a 3D visual world. The 3D library so brilliantly portrayed in Disclosure as a metaphor for filing really works for me.
The virtual reality machine in Disclosure
If you've seen Minority Report, you've already seen a desktop very similar to the Linux one in these demos - it's just been moved to a large transparent flat panel (that technology is also close to being available).
The "desktop" in Minority Report
In fact, compiz with a touchscreen LCD monitor gives a Minority Report like effect. See this Youtube video.
Most of the underlying technology for this stuff exists in pockets. Second Life is a virtual world we use as a community environment. I've got excited about that before. But it is also used to create a 3D commercial experience for businesses. Might businesses also use it for virtual meeting places for multi-national staff? Or as a virtual environment to store data in a visual way a la the library in Disclosure?
I have no doubt that one day visual stuff will be trasmitted to our brain and overlaid on our the view from our retina the way it is in the Terminator. The technology is already available! Be it through an implanted chip, electrodes we wear, or some new wireless technology.
Already, wearable displays allow gamers to see overlays of computer data on their real environment.
While I wait for the world to catch up, I might just buy one of those giant LCD display for my desk and hook it up to Linux....
I'm difficult to put in a box: I am passionate about my career and work hard at it - but I'm mad about sport - and theatre and art.
I travel a lot. I've been lucky enough to work in New York, London, Stockholm, Paris and Jakarta amongst other places. But I'm largely Jo'burg based at the moment.
Visitors since 1 April 2005