Google maps, Soweto uprisings and Iranian TV

August 21, 2007 • Blog

World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Fourways » Shingara Sands

Google today upgraded Google Maps. It’s now bloody easy to include a map on your site.


View Larger Map

Above, you’re looking at geotagged artworks in Delft. The datafeed comes from Beeldenstad.net.

That took me less than one minute. True, as a user using this new technique (embedded maps) you’re more restricted than doing everything yourself (like I do on several of my sites), but your development time also goes down to near zero. It just ain’t fair.

Soweto uprisings . com on MSNBC

Yah, we’re cool. You might know I’ve done some nice work, together with Ismail Farouk on Soweto uprisings . com, an online mapping application, documenting the June 16, 1976 uprisings in Soweto. Recently, the site was mentioned in an article on MSNBC.
The article is decent enough, but also generalizes too much, something journalists writing on ‘Africa’ often end up doing. The article also isn’t 100% accurate, as it says that “… by the end of the day (June 16), scores of children were shot dead.” In fact, at the end of the first day (that is, June 16), it is generally accepted 23 people had died, including 3 whites. I don’t think the other 20 all were children.

Anyway, the site’s getting coverage on, according to Alexa, the second most popular website in the world.

Iranian TV

I was asked to plug an online Iranian TV station aimed at the 18-35 age group. It’s rather entertaining, if you have an interest in Iran. They’re still ironing out some glitches on the website.

http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/823324966

A review of realtravel

August 19, 2007 • Blog

World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Fourways » Shingara Sands

As you might know, I run a travel website called Travelhog.net and have been doing so since the year 2000. At some point, the website was more popular than most local newspaper’s websites. Not doing too bad now, it lists travelogues from all over the world.
At some point, I had the idea of also offering the possibility of users running travel blogs through Travelhog.net, but I never got round to it. Partially, because it felt daunting to compete with the likes of Blogger and whatnot.

I recently stumbled upon a travel website, however, that just does that. Over at realtravel anyone can keep a travel blog. Certainly, good stuff.
What I wonder, however, is why prospective users would choose this website over the more obvious choices such as Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal or any of the many local (that is, national) blogging services which have crept up over the years. Sure, this one does look good (just look at the realtravel homepage), but so do many of the other available blogging services.

That said, it does come close to offering functionality I also had in mind for Travelhog.net. Realtravel allows for selecting a country and checking out the blog entries users made for those destinations; take a look at the Thailand page for example. Then again, taking that Thailand page as an example, the website also shows it’s rather commercial in nature:

+ The page URL includes the word ‘hotels’.
+ There is no easy access to ‘all travelogues’ for said destination.
+ There’s a prominent ‘compare prices’ halfway down the page. Amazingly, comparing hotel prices doesn’t work, however (at least, not for Thailand).

When you do stumble down to the bottom of the page, you can find a list of reviews, I assume by regular users, of typical destinations in the location in question. I checked out Chiang Mai (where I’ll be stationed later this year) and found, indeed, a lot of hotel reviews, blogs, restaurants and whatnot. Unfortunately, the restaurant section turned out to be structurally spammed with invalid entries. Still, the right functionality is there.

Now, what’s missing? Another thing I had in mind for doing with Travelhog.net was to index offsite travelogues and keyword match them on travel destinations or activities. A bit like how Technorati orders indexed blogs. I think I could like realtravel, but I wouldn’t want my blogging platform to move from my own site to theirs. However, I would like to contribute from my own website and then somehow be indexed by them. That, currently, doesn’t seem to be possible.

An emotional dream and a spent movie script

August 18, 2007 • Blog

World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Fourways » Shingara Sands

I had the weirdest dream the other day. It involved time travel, humanoid robots and a medieval setting. And if I would be able to make it into a more coherent story, I’m sure it could make a good movie.

As is typical, I don’t remember too much about the dream, except for one or two essential and emotional moments. I think the tale started of with me being close friends with some immensely advanced humanoid robot (I’m sure triggered by my recent viewing of Transformers). I think the robot resembled, in retrospect, Archie, a character from an ancient comic book.
Somehow, the robot and I were separated. I had to travel a lot and was only able to return and find/see the robot some 500 years later, when I returned to a medieval castle that, again in retrospect, resembled a 3D version of a generic castle from, say, the video game Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins. The place was deserted and my feeling was that science and people had degenerated over time, had lost their previous level of development.

I searched around the castle, in search for a sign of life, and my robot friend, when the first emotional moment happened. I found relics of our (that is, the robot and mine) visit 500 years earlier. They were artifacts cast in gold and included a cape and two statues, which might have been of the robot and of me. I fell on the floor, crying and beating with my fist on the ground.
Shortly after, I pole vaulted (as you do in dreams) over a castle wall and landed on a platform, but nearly missed it, I’m sure because of bad sprite detection, where a small door led to a small open enclosure. The door opened and inside the enclosure was my robot friend, walking around in circles and opening and closing his jaw, seemingly not seeing anything and not aware of his surroundings. In order to dumb down, in parallel with the society he had stayed behind in, he had, slowly slowly, replaced his metal frame/skeleton with a wooden one, losing practically all his abilities.
That was emotional moment number two.

Script

Which brings me to something not wholly unrelated.
Years ago, I had an idea for a movie script which I never sketched out in detail but have always been planning to. As the subject matter is slowly making headlines in international publications, I better throw it out now, before the story line becomes totally irrelevant and common knowledge by default.

The idea was to have a group of kids stumble upon a series of irregularities in reality, like glitches in the matrix. Over time, the glitches become bigger and bigger but it’s only the kids who actually notice them. They build theories around why these occurrences are happening and go out in search for them, until they come very close to the actual reason for their existence.
Then, I did already visualize the final scene, one of the kids is in his street, on the sidewalk, on a bike. He looks up, the camera zooms out and a computer crashes or the game is over. The kid sitting behind his PC is called to lunch or dinner by his mom.

If you didn’t get it, some kid is playing a simulation, think Civilization, but his PC is corrupt or virus infested, hence the glitches in the matrix.

The reason I mention this now is because it has been shown (a while ago, but the article in which it appeared wasn’t widely read) that, chances are, we ourselves are living in a simulation. And, this week, the NYT had an article about it. So I figured it made sense to throw out my idea now (which I came up with before I read the original article), before everyone thinks it trivial.

Charities and houses

August 16, 2007 • Blog

1 / 1
World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Fourways » Shingara Sands

This post is sponsored by Navtej Kohli (1, 2, 3, 4). He’s an Indian, presumably quite well off and founder of the Navtej Kholi foundation. And his Linked In profile contains a glaring spelling mistake, plus he has no connections there. Odd.
Also, surprisingly for a philanthropist, Google News returns exactly three hits when searching for his name, with the oldest being from 1997, where one of them talks about him being charged with conspiracy and mail fraud. A news search for Tej Kohli returns two hits about some setup called Pop-Up Shop. An interesting concept in itself as a pop-up shop seemingly is “like a regular American Apparel store, only temporary – up in 5 days, and gone in 45”.
It gets more confusing as a profile for Navtej Kohli on seomoz.org shows that that profile is for the guy sponsoring this article, while he himself admits there’s another “famous Kohli” guy out there. With a name like that, you’d think there’d be only one Navtej Kohli, but no. Imagine how pissed I’d be if I’d find someone else called Babak Fakhamzadeh. I’d kill the bastard! Well, maybe not.

Anyway, a Navtej Kohli is sponsoring me to talk about my favorite charity. Easy, I thought, because I surely was going to chat about Geekcorps. However, the one requirement for this post was to talk about a charity listed on Charity Navigator. And Geekcorps isn’t on it. My obvious second choice was HDN, but that one, too, wasn’t available. And by then I had already committed to talking about my favorite charity. And, obviously, Khazimula (website currently not yet online), was not going to be a possibility either, just being way too small and unknown.

Which brings my to my fourth choice, Habitat for Humanity, which actually has 50 organizations listed on Charity Navigator. Some of you might recall I actually organized a ‘building trip’ with Habitat in the summer of 2000 for Veto, my fraternity, bringing us to Beius, Romania, where we built a house.
I still get regular mail from Habitat, asking me to fund some new or old project they’re working on. Although I don’t really appreciate those requests for money (I can perfectly well decide myself who I want to support or not), I do appreciate their work. Habitat basically builds houses for the poor.

Our trip to Beius was quite typical for Habitat’s modus operandi. We sponsored their project in Beius, with money, but also went there ourselves to help build a house. On top of that, typically, the beneficiaries are also required to help build their own house. Because, often, these houses are built in disadvantaged social environments, many of these beneficiaries either don’t have a job or have a very insecure job and regularly, building these houses also is a form of job creation. This, even long term, as Habitat builds series of houses, not individual units.
Additionally, the houses aren’t given away for free, but at an advantageous, to the future owner, lease.

Habitat has been building houses since 1976, starting in what was then Zaire, and in 2004, the 30.000th house was put up in the Africa and Middle East region. The organization’s most well known spokesman is former president and peanut farmer Jimmy Carter. And, indeed, to quite a few that is not a recommendation in itself. You’re wrong in thinking Habitat typically works in Africa and the Middle East as the total count of houses built through the help of Habitat has surpassed 220000, including houses in all of the United States.

Surprisingly, the website of Habitat seems to put an emphasis on supporting the organization financially, where I found that supporting them by actually physically helping the building of a house is extremely rewarding. More so than just transferring a few euros into their bank accounts.

Many other opportunities

It’s February 2023. Here’s a nice broad list of volunteer opportunities.

Comparing hosting providers

August 15, 2007 • Blog

World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Fourways » Shingara Sands

It’s always a struggle to find a good and affordable webhost. I’ve been needing webhosters since 1998 or 1999 and I’ve gone through a few, partially because it’s always hard to get non-biased information and reviews on the hosting companies out there. However, I recently stumbled upon one review site which compares web site hosting from multiple vendors, which might just be the right place to start looking.

Why you need a good host

After a few small hosters, years ago, I went with ReadyHosting.com where, at some point, I had about 20 websites hosted. Not too bad, they weren’t too great either, but they were affordable and had reasonable service. Then, however, they were acquired by some other hoster and the whole process of moving from old to new servers was handled so badly, with so little and unclear communication, it was obvious, I had to find a new provider. I’m still hosting two websites there and it hasn’t been the same as before the takeover. I track the uptime for one of those two website and for several months late last year, uptime was as little as 95%. In webhosting terms, that’s abysmal.
To be fair, it does seem that now, finally, they’ve cleaned up their act.

So I had to move to a new hosting provider. But how do you find one that’s actually reliable and of good quality? Websites aplenty that claim to review the hosting providers out there. However, it’s been pointed out that it’s easy for a hoster to game those website and garner attention and good reviews, with the right marketing budget and a few paid reviews.
Anyway, I ended up with MidPhase, where I currently host more than 30 websites. Pricing is good, I have no real practical limits and their customer service isn’t too bad. However, the quality of their hosting very much leaves to be desired. Only two weeks ago, I found that all my sites were offline at a time extremely inconvenient to me. Their online customer service was offline, I didn’t get an immediate response from their email support and I couldn’t get through to them on the phone.
When I finally did get a response, by email, it turned out they were migrating several servers. And how should I have known? Some blog they run which I’d never heard of, mentions the planned outage. The blog claimed the outage would not last more than six hours and probably much less. My websites were offline for some 10 hours. Extremely unacceptable.
And that’s just one incident. Although it’s one of the worse ones, my websites are offline way too often. At some level, MidPhase’s price level, I suppose, reflects their service quality, but, really, do something well, or don’t do it at all. And on top of that, whenever I find my sites offline, their website is still up and running. So apparently they can’t do for their customers what they can do for themselves.

To choose a web host

So I’m in the market again for a decent and decently priced hosting provider. But how to find one? Switching always carries a risk. And, better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.
As I said, I stumbled upon said website offering web site hosting Information. I’m a bit reluctant to except websites like these as the real deal, not sponsored by the services they are trying to promote, but there are a number of things that suggest this one is genuine:

+ The site is not flashy, but clean, simple, easy to read. Typically, sites pushing web hosting services are annoying as hell and hard to navigate with all the ads and whatnot. (True, I use the excellent Adblock, but even when turning it of, I found only one banner per page and some non-intrusive Google ads.)
+ The currently highlighted review (on OnTheSpotHosting) only describes the service and is not too interesting, but the open reviews and comments currently show only one vote of 1 out of 10. If OnTheSpotHosting was really being pushed here, the website would make sure no customer review of 1/10 would show up here, at any time.
+ The RSS feeds are seriously useful and split out in several areas of differentiated interest. Not only do they review hosting providers, they also provide information on the types of hosting services.
+ There’s a weekly podcast. Although I never listen to podcasts, I appreciate someone who takes the time to prepare one. And judging from the subjects covered in the podcasts, they appear to be truly informational, again, not pushing a particular service.
+ They claim to offer hosting dispute resolution. Although I can’t vouch for the quality of that service, it’s innovative and a potential crowd puller, and only interesting and relevant if they’re not on some hoster’s paylist.

That said, there are still a few areas open for improvement:

– Although the search is functional, the amount of filtering available is too limiting. A search for medium priced plans with medium sized storage on a UNIX box with a good rating returns some 50 providers. That’s just too much. I would like to be able to drill down on that list. Also, although the resulting list shows each hoster’s rating on this website, it doesn’t show how many people voted to get to that rating. For hosters rated 10/10, it’s nice to know how many people actually thought so.
– The resources categorization is practical. However, when listing articles with resources on a particular category, the list only shows titles for those articles. I’d like to see the date they were written and a short extract as well, to get a sense of their content.

So what will be my next hosting provider?

Pooh. I don’t know yet. The list of providers returned for my search criteria (under $25 per month, 50 – 250GB, a rating of 9 or higher), on the above website, is really too long to use as a basis for a quick decision. However, there’s a few names in the list I recognize, so I probably will check them out first.

And that brings me to another thought: moving from one webhost to the next is extremely cumbersome, particularly if you’re hosting multiple websites. Are there actually hosters out there that automate the process of moving from one host to the next? Theoretically, not much is required, just FTP everything from the old host to the new one, copying directory permissions in the process.
Hmmmm. A service waiting to be offered. Anyone actually offering such a service would surely get my vote.

Data has arrived in South Africa

August 09, 2007 • Blog

1 / 1
World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Lion Park

For the initiated, Data is the nickname of a friend of mine. Don't get your hopes up, no, we haven't finally gotten a friend to visit us, he's here on business. However, he is on business in Johannesburg, so we've been seeing him quite a bit lately.

August 9 is National Women's day, which commemorates 9 August 1956 when women participating in a national march petitioned against pass laws (legislation that required African persons to carry a document on them to "prove" that they were allowed to enter a "white area"). Those passes were generally known as 'dompas' and quite similar to a, say Soviet, internal passport. Dompas is an Afrikaans word and literally means 'stupid pass', because, supposedly them blacks were mighty stupid.
Well let me tell you.

Anyway, as Betsy's working for a Dutch call center, she doesn't get the day off on South African public holidays. Still, she took one and we went to the Lion Park.
Yes, we've been there a few times, but it's hard to get enough of the cute little lions and hand feeding the giraffes and ostriches.

DDR Chocolate

August 03, 2007 • Blog

World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Fourways » Shingara Sands

I’m not in the habit of posting stuff twice, as I believe in keeping original content in one place, but this bit of internet coolness I couldn’t just post to DDR ZA . com. And I’m quite sure that most of you reading this blog don’t keep track of DDR ZA . com.

http://www.youtube.com/v/7qatrJl4Pmk

As bandwidth and internet connectivity is quite crappy and very expensive here in South Africa, I’ve pretty much stayed away from online video ever since I arrived here early last year. In fact, I believe this lack of connectivity has hampered me quite a bit in staying on top of things during this period. It’s strangely prohibitive, realising you’re paying through the nose for every megabyte that arrives at your computer.
Still, I follow, like, 40 news sources (through the excellent Google reader), so I couldn’t help but be aware of YouTube recently putting songs by some guy called Tay Zonday all over the place. Particularly his song Chocolate Rain was a favorite and it quickly became, if it wasn’t already, a proper internet meme. To illustrate, currently, the song, on YouTube, has an impressive 45000 comments. This does not necessarily mean it’s a good song. It is, however, too good to be missed.

Now, someone created DDR steps to the song. Well, that is, technically, it’s an In The Groove stepchart because it has bombs, although that is debatable as late last year Konami bought In The Groove. For the uninitiated, ‘bombs’ are the complete opposite of arrows, you are not allowed to stand on the arrow the bomb represents when it arrives at the top of your screen.

If you haven’t yet, I really urge you to take a look at the video of the original song. It’s quite hilarious: “History quickly crashing through your veins, CHOCOLATE RAIN, Using you to fall back down again, CHOCOLATE RAIN” and so on. The man, really, is a machine.

http://www.youtube.com/v/EwTZ2xpQwpA

The DDR version is at i-am-bored.com, here, which unfortunately can’t be shared like YouTube videos. Still, someone did upload it to YouTube.

To me, the stepchart looks like a nine or ten footer and seems to be made with Stepmania and, I suspect, played on a keyboard. It looks doable, except, perhaps, the last bit where there are so many bombs scrolling up, it becomes hard to discern the arrows.

Update: According to Urban Dictionary, Chocolate Rain is a euphemism for racism. Makes sense.
True true, Urban Dictionary also has a few other very interesting definitions for the same meme.

PayPerPost: Try to make money with your blog

July 31, 2007 • Blog

World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Fourways » Shingara Sands

Months ago, I signed up for payperpost (PPP). It’s a service aimed at bloggers and advertisers where bloggers get paid to write posts, on their own blogs, about the advertisers. There are plenty of opportunities available on the PPP site; currently close to 80 campaigns are on offer, but for some reason, my blog, that is, the one you’re reading now, has never gotten the opportunity to take advantage of all these possibilities.
While there are some 80 campaigns on offer, I can only choose from four and this post is the result of one of those, writing about PPP itself. The other three are “Review OldCookbooks.com”, “US State & City Mortgages” and “How to start a business”. Already implied in the names of these three opportunities and quite obvious when you visit the PPP website, is that the whole service, like PPP’s competitors, is very much America-focused. This is, in a way, understandable as that’s where most of the dotcom money is, but also a bit annoying for all those bloggers outside of the US of A, of which, there are probably more anyway.

That said, what I do like about this service is that, although the homepage, the ‘dashboard’, feels like the horrible lovechild of a series of neon signs and bad designers, the opportunities overview is clean and easy to understand. If only I would get more opportunities to write about!

If you can believe the lists on the PPP dashboard page, the top earners make more than one thousand dollars per month. Those are decent amounts with which, if you live in a place like South Africa or Thailand (my current and future locations), you can maintain a decent living standard. But at an average payout of, say, 20 dollars, that would mean having to write more than 50 reviews per month to reach those numbers, say two a day. And although the currently highest paying opportunity will give you a cool 235 dollar, there are now only 10 opportunities paying more than 20 bucks.

Doing the time warp, again!

July 29, 2007 • Blog

1 / 1
World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Fourways » Shingara Sands

It’s winter, here in Jo’burg. Which means it’s bloody damn cold. So to alleviate this struggle against the cold, Betsy threw a Rocky Horror Party.

All dressed up, we jumped to the left and then took a step to the right. The house was a mess afterwards, with confetti, rice and all sorts of leftovers.

Before the show, we posed for a few pictures. Ain’t Christo a natural, as Frank-N-Furter?

Some interesting shit

July 28, 2007 • Blog

World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Johannesburg art gallery

A few weeks ago, Betsy and I managed to grab the tail-end of what probably is South Africa’s most important art-related event: The ABSA L’Atelier Art Awards. Ismail‘s partner, Rat Western had managed to get a work in and stood a change to win one of a series of impressive prizes.
The food at the event was extremely good but, possibly even more surprising, so were the works on display. I found almost every single work impressive in some way, much better than I expected. I was happy to see so much good stuff was actually coming out of this country.

Then, today, I had a second very pleasant surprise. Currently at JAG (imagine that, probably South Africa’s most important gallery and they don’t have a website), the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Africa Remix is on show. Art from some 45 artists from around 25 African countries. The show’s already been on in several European and Japanese cities but now, here in Jo’burg, has arrived on the African continent for the first time. This show, too, is of very high quality and if you’re in Jo’burg before the end of September, I really urge you to see it.
One series of of photographs I had already seen before, a few years ago in Leeuwarden. Another work, a naked Osama Bin Laden on the American Flag, made me wonder why Al Qaida hadn’t yet bombed every venue the exhibition has already been shown at.

In relation to the exhibition, Africalia was hosting a full day seminar or discussion programme, at JAG, on African art, and I was sort of lucky to enjoy the first half. Ismail had a piece on his work, including five minutes of infoporn on SowetoUprisings.com.
Ismail was on a panel with a few other South African artists, one of them being Aryan Kaganoff, whom is ‘known’ for shooting a film with a cellphone. Kaganoff tried to be the enfant terrible of the panel and succeeded in coming across as extremely arrogant.
Also on the panel was a Stacy Hardy who liked to talk about bringing digital social networks to the people and although she said all the right words, I couldn’t deduce whether she was actually any good as far as understanding the technical aspects of digital social networks go.
But the worst addition to the panel, albeit temporarily, was Danielle Roney. Although pleasant to listen to and well spoken, her presentation and idea of putting up a series of internet kiosks which she herself designed (gasp!) to bring into contact people from as far away as Johannesburg and Beijing felt ten years overdue. She even dared to show a video, recorded a week earlier, a picture-in-picture video, of someone in Johannesburg, talking (“about anything”) with someone from Atlanta.
Next, she was going to build on the synergy of the Beijing olympics and take this wonderful technology to China, I’m sure to bring people across the globe closer together.
Seriously, what crap is this? Someone is actually paying her to do this shit? Get a kiosk; install an operating system; install any one of a host of instant messaging or video conferencing tools; put one kiosk in Jo’burg and the other in Atlanta (or Beijing or, wait a minute, both!) and, voila, you’re done.

Gauteng’s dictatorship?

Generally speaking, the quality of South African media is mediocre, at best. Investigative journalism isn’t up to international, well, ‘western’, standards. Newspapers, typically, publish sensationalist crap and report and expand on the infighting in, often but not only, the ANC.
Thank god, or whomever you prefer thanking, for The Mail & Guardian, probably the only decent newspaper in this country. It only comes out once a week and actually holds the middle between a regular newspaper and a weekly, with current events but also more in depth articles. Typically, it takes me a few days to get through the whole paper.

Often, the M&G comes with extra supplements. Sometimes on education, Africa’s development or whatnot. And sometimes it comes with “Gauteng News’, ‘Newsletter of the Gauteng Provincial Government’ (each province in South Africa has its own government). Because the M&G is a high quality paper, you’d expect the supplements to be of the same standard as well. Luckily, this typically is the case.

But not so with last week’s ‘Gauteng News’. At 8 pages, one of which was taken up by ads, the supplement had 20 articles. Twelve were accompanied by a photograph. Out of those twelve, four, all on the first three pages, included a picture of the Gauteng premier Mbhazima Shilowa (who, of course, is ANC). Out of the 20 articles, no less than 9 prominently referred to the premier, every single one in a positive manner. These numbers are more appropriate for a Zimbabwe or Libya and don’t fit well with a, supposedly, democratically run country or, in this case, province.
Then again, if you would ask the DA in the Western Cape, I’m sure they’d argue the ANC is not a very democratically operating organization.

A dollar a day

Also in last week’s M&G, the business supplement had a positive article on Ghana’s participation in Agoa, the African Growth and Opportunity Act. Bill Clinton, in 2000, signed the act into law in the US and it allows for duty-free trade of certain products (from, in this case, Ghana), in exchange for US-directed economic reforms.
Although the article mentions not everyone is that impressed by the agreement, but the article also doesn’t divulge on the why and, instead, quotes a USAid executive as saying that Agoa is an opportunity not to be missed and goes on to say that, with the expected introduction of a similar scheme by the EU later in the year, the opportunities and possibilities will significantly increase.

All very good and whatnot, but what I don’t get is that the article mentions that in the uniform and workwear factory, which is positively highlighted in the text, the employees make ‘little more than $1 a day’. Surprising, as this is less than the generally accepted poverty level of 2 dollars per day. These people are, in effect, working for the US on a US-government sanctioned project for less than 2 dollars per day? How can this be condoned by a country and an NGO which claim to want to alleviate poverty?

According to a list available on Wikipedia, some 80% of Ghanaians live with under 2 dollars per day. As the workers in this factory have to support a family, it’s not unlikely these people live with significantly less than 1 dollar per day.

Three leopards are one

July 25, 2007 • Blog

World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Johannesburg art gallery

On the Mac, I’m currently working with Autopano Pro to create panoramas. It has a nifty detection mechanism for finding pictures that are supposed to make up a panorama. However, it sometimes gets it wrong. Or, in this case, strangely right.

The three images that make up the above panorama are of the very same object from three different angles. The panorama is nearly seamless and qutie cool, if I say so myself.

In the Continuum

July 23, 2007 • Blog

World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Market theater

You’d think that after doing a show for two years, having everything fit together perfectly would be mere routine.
Almost, perhaps, but not completely. Not that it’s disturbing too much, I just noticed.

The show -is- actually quite good, even though it’s a bit too long or, rather, as a too long middle bit, a strong opening and a very strong if not saddening ending.

Two actresses, Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter, also both authors of the play, are a middle-class wife and mother in Zimbabwe, the other what I suspect is a teenager, African American, in Los Angeles, whose lives get messed up after discovering they’ve been infected with HIV.

What makes the play interesting is that you’re actually treated to two very decent one-man shows which alternate but sometimes occur simultaneously on stage, with strong parallels and sometimes interactions.
Both actors play a range of characters, within their own story line, which Danai Gurira, the Zimbabwean, pulls of a bit better.

The parallel between the two stories is that the two women, although living in two very different cultures, with vastly different economic and social climates, both struggle with the same central issue of how to move ahead while their whole life has been turned upside down, their opportunities and future chances tied to getting hold of, or hanging on to, a male provider, in both cases the man who infected them.

Apparently, in some US shows, the program to the show came with a glossary of Zimbabwean, Shona, words used onstage.

This show was sponsored by the culture department of the American consulate here in Johannesburg. After the show, the American consul said a few words and then invited, what I assumed was, the director of the theater. Clearly reluctant to speak at first, the man delivered a story about how important the show was in terms of our understanding the disease and the social stigma attached to it. Etcetera etcetera. He talked for over five minutes, maybe even ten, and didn’t once mention either ‘HIV’ or ‘AIDS’.

Public art in Jo’burg and Pownce

July 21, 2007 • Blog

1 / 1
World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Fourways » Shingara Sands

It’s been a busy few weeks since I came back from Thailand. I’ve resumed my residency at The Bag Factory, while I have to work on a series of other projects as well. For my residency, this time, I’m not creating art, I’m documenting it, through Beeldenstad.net. Currently, already over 30 public artworks are listed on the Johannesburg page on Beeldenstad.net and, because I’m getting support from the Jo’burg municipality, many of those with extensive information.

An interesting extra is that I’ve added KML and GeoRSS feeds, with which you can, say, have artworks plotted inside Google Earth.

Pownce

The guy behind everyone’s favorite social news site, Digg, recently started a Twitter-like service, Pownce. Pownce has more functionality and is getting rave reviews. I received an invite today and have six left to give away. So, if you know me, you can grab one.

However, I don’t understand the popularity of Twitter. It lets you tell the world what you’re up to, like IM (Instant Messaging) to the masses. It’s very popular in the States which, I suppose, isn’t too surprising as Americans are the hallmark of exhibitionism. But telling the world what you’re doing is one thing, actually taking the time to see what others are doing is something else. Why would I be interested if I’m not an insecure 12 year old looking for attention?

Anyway, Pownce is a bit more useful: It not only lets you tell the world what you’re doing, it also lets you send files to friends, share links and share events. Like a simple shared productivity tool. So I suppose that you don’t have to be an insecure 12 year old to use Pownce, but possibly an overconfident late teen, looking to impress your friends.
But, still, if it’s productivity and usefulness you’re looking for, there’s plenty of good tools out there (the Google suite being the most obvious, but by no means the only one).

Artsy panoramas, by chance

July 19, 2007 • Blog

1 / 1
World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Fourways » Shingara Sands

After moving from Windows to Mac, I need to get acquainted with the right Mac-based applications for stuff I’m used to on Windows. Mostly, that’s not too much of a hassle as, generally, the same or better applications exist on Mac. However, oddly enough, the area that I find most lacking is specialist photo manipulation tools. Three in particular which I used on Windows, I can’t get on Mac and I haven’t found the right equivalent for yet. You can read up on my current list of Mac applications.

One of the tools I have a hard time replacing is Panavue. Panavue is, in my experience, the easiest to use panorama building applications with the best results. Panavue’s main advantage is twofold: It’s easy to use and it’s very tolerant of imprecise source images. Typically, if you’re going to build a panorama, convention says you have to use a tripod and shoot in manual mode. However, Panavue is very tolerant, meaning I practically always shoot by hand and often in semi-automatic or even fully automatic mode, without any negative results in the resulting panorama.

So, as the Mac is supposed to be a machine for photographers and designers, I figured that finding a decent application to replace this bit of functionality wouldn’t be too hard.
Well, so far I’ve tried over 10 panorama building applications, and only two have turned out to be reasonable. The first is PTGui, which seems to create good panoramas but is counter intuitive to use. The second is Autopano Pro, which is a breeze to use but also seems less accurate.
One cool functionality of Autopano is that it can recognize source images for panoramas when you pass it a collection of photos. To try that out, I threw in all 400 or so pictures I took on Monday, of public art in Johannesburg, for Beeldenstad.net. It recognized all intended panoramas (less then 10), but also created oddities from sometimes related pictures (over 60). Here are the best ones.

The normal stuff

A regular panorama. Nothing wrong here.

Intended to be a panorama, I’m not too impressed however. The colors are flat and the buildings look a bit skewed.

Not a very good panorama, but also not intended to be a panorama. I was hoping to shoot some images of a mural on the grounds of a church, but the gates were locked. I was able to look in, and saw this mosaic. Shot some crappy images and left.
But Autopano thought it had to be a panorama.

Although not intended as a panorama, this mix of images of the same subject worked out really well. It’s almost pretty good.

The weird stuff

So not intended to be a panorama and you have to look closely to actually see why it is one. This panorama consists of two images. One large one, the main image, and one small one, a close up of some of the wheels in the back. Autopano impressively realised it was looking at a detail of another picture and stitched them together.

I shot more closeups of the wheels in the hope I would land a masterpiece. I didn’t, but Autopano thought I had something going and stitched my disjointed images together.

There’s a park in Newtown, Johannesburg, where there’s a series of artworks. One of them commemorates municipal workers and that’s the one you see below, sort of. Autopano took a few images that were taken in the same location and recognized the skyline was similar so that, therefore, they had to be stitched.

I shot two pictures of a white wall with the text “republicofthemic.com” on it, twice. Neither of the images contained a piece of pavement, yet here it is.

The mashup below is of an artwork called Obelisk, not far from Sandton in Johannesburg. The artwork is on a traffic island. I wanted to take a few pictures of it for the website Beeldenstad.net, but there was no where near to park, so I made it into a drive by shooting, sitting behind the wheel of my car while having one arm, with camera, out of the window.

Autopano obviously was able to match the related photos, even though they do not make up a panorama; their photos of the same object at different distances. Still, Autopano thought differently and tried some warping and adjusting to bring them together.

This is one weird cookie. Autopano took a whole lot of pictures, some of which were related, some of which weren’t. Then it created a monster.

But I like this monster.

Beeldenstad: Johannesburg

July 16, 2007 • Photography

1 / 1
World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Braamfontein center

Beeldenstad.net was a collaborative, social, mapping platform for documenting art in the public space.

What Mac OS X applications do I use?

July 09, 2007 • Blog

World » South Africa » Johannesburg » The Bag Factory

While in Thailand, I bought myself a MacBook. The (Windows based) laptop I brought violently crashed, yet again, so I figured it was now, really, time to splurge and get something more robust, even though, in gadget-happy Thailand, this meant forking out an amount of cash that could have gotten me two and half Windows machines.

So far, it’s been a bit of a struggle, here and there, on getting the machine to do exactly what I want it to do. For one, it took time to find the right applications to do the job. So far, this is what I’m using.

FTP and File management

Mac OS X comes with a very decent filemanager, Finder. Except, it doesn’t have multiple panes, like the ancient Norton commander. It means that Finder is not always good enough. As a paned filemanager replacement for the Mac, I use muCommander.
MuCommander is also an FTP client and works very well for up- and downloading from one pane to the next. However, I couldn’t get it to work together well with the HTML editor I also use (see below). Therefore, I also use another FTP client, which is single paned, but works very well too. This one is Cyberduck.

For enjoying all the P2P Bittorrent goodness, I use Transmission.

HTML and code editing

Every time I set up a new machine, I try to find a free or cheap replacement for the excellent Dreamweaver. On Mac, I was hoping for some cool Mac only tool, but it was a struggle. I tried Nvu again, which is a promising application and certainly has the feel of Dreamweaver, but for some reason I never get it to open PHP and ASP files. It needs plug ins for this, but they don’t work as they should.
Nvu hasn’t changed at all over the last 18 months or so and a project that addresses that lack of updates is KompoZer. However, there, I had the very same problem, not being able to open PHP or ASP files.

Two alternatives that would be good are Quanta and Bluefish, but both have to be compiled before they can be run, which is not too user friendly.

So I searched around a bit and found a reasonable and small package, Smultron, which works, up to a certain extent. But in the end, I started using Dreamweaver 8, which isn’t free, but does work better than the other applications I tried.

Media player

iTunes and Quicktime are nice, but can VLC be beaten? It gives you all the codecs you can dream off straight away.

Still, I installed Flip4Mac and Perian to extend the number of file types Quicktime supports.

Instant messaging

Although I was one of the first to IM, back in the day when ICQ was hot, I’m not too prolific an instant messenger. On Windows, I used Trillian to get all my IM clients in one interface. On Mac, Adium does it even better.

Then, there’s also Skype, of course.
I also like Google Talk, but they don’t have a client for Mac, yet.

The Mac came pre-installed with iChat, which seems to be a decent application.

Photo editing

I’m used to Fireworks and, to a lesser extent, Photoshop. I like the idea behind Gimp, but I find the interface annoying, so I’ll probably end up reverting to either of two aforementioned products. Meanwhile, I moved to Gimpshop, which aims to bring a more Photoshop-like interface to Gimp.
Also, like OpenOffice.org, Gimp requires the X11 window manager to be installed, which makes the interface act differently from ‘native’ Mac applications. Not great.

I’ve started using Fireworks again, which doesn’t seem to work that well under Mac OS X, and Photoshop CS, which lacks the photographic tools I’d like to use from CS2 and CS3. But the cost of Photoshop is on the bad side of funny.
Then again, so is the price of the (formerly Macromedia) Studio CS3, which includes Fireworks and Dreamweaver.

For managing my digital photography collection, I used a wonderful Windows application called FastStone image viewer. It’s very similar to ACDsee, but not as bloated, more functional and, the best part, free.
I’ve searched for a similar application for Mac but haven’t found something reasonable yet. The closest I came was GraphicConverter, but that misses functionality compared to FastStone, is less intuitive and not free. Petra, in her comment below, mentions the application QPict, which indeed seems to be useful, in a Picasa kind of way.
A tiny application that at least solves the problem of browsing images through the Finder is Finder Browser.

A different approach to managing your digital photo collection while having access to a series of basic photo manipulation tools is exemplified by Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom. Both aren’t free, in fact, rather expensive at just under 300 dollars, but I’m starting to like Lightroom.

I occasionally use a program to create mosaics. On windows, Mazaika is very functional but a bit clunky to use. On the Mac, I found MacOSaiX, which is very user friendly but doesn’t have the same amount of knobs and levers Mazaika has. One big advantage of MacOSaiX is that it natively can search through Flickr, Google and Yahoo! streams. With Mazaika, I had to write scripts to achieve that and then build my own libraries for each keyword I wanted to use.

For building panoramas, I used the extremely excellent Panavue on Windows. On Mac, an extensive search has now left me with two alternatives. PTgui, which I find rather hard to use, and Autopano Pro, which is a breeze to use, but doesn’t seem to be as accurate as PTgui.

And for getting your photos on Flickr, there’s no better tool than jUploadr.

Browser

Both Opera and the pre-installed Safari are decent, and the upcoming Safari 3 is interesting, but nothing beats Firefox.

Office

I’ve been an extensive user of OpenOffice.org for years, although over the last year I’ve moved towards Google docs more and more. Still, Google doesn’t have a presentation package, yet.
One disadvantage with OpenOffice.org on the Mac is that it requires the X11 window manager to be installed, which gives the application a non-native feel, which is slightly annoying.

Running Windows applications and file systems

One of the main, if not the main reason, why it took me so long to switch to a Mac, was the inability to run particular applications on a Mac. Most particularly the threesome Panavue, DCE and Photomatix, all three being image editing applications.

So, now that Macs run Windows through Bootcamp, I figured that was how I was going to do it. But then I stumbled upon a schweet little tool called Parallels desktop, which allows you to run a Windows XP installation inside a window on your Mac OS X desktop. What’s more, it also allows for accessing that external NTFS hard disk you might want to use without converting to OS X’s file system.
Parallels works very smoothly, if you stay inside the Windows window and don’t move between Mac and Windows applications. It even seems the windowed Windows is faster than my old laptop.

For accessing my external (NTFS) hard disk, I experimented with MacFuse, a tool developed by a Google employee. Together with ntfs-3g, it’s possible to access NTFS file systems. In the end, I did manage to get it working, but it was a long road.

Update (November 2007): After a physical hard disk crash, a repair and a reinstall of everything, getting my external NTFS hard disk up and running was a breeze. A few minutes to install macfuse and another few to install ntfs-3g. That’s all it took to access my external NTFS hard disk.

Also, I discovered Darwine, a Wine port for OSX. With Darwine, you can run ies4osx, multiple internet explorer versions.

And the rest

Three enjoyable pieces of software are coconutBattery to keep track of the quality of your battery, coconutWiFi, to track all the wireless networks in your neighborhood and the widget iStat nano, which keeps track of all sorts of hardware related info.
There’s also smcFanControl, which lets you juggle with the speed of the MacBook fan. Whole tribes swear by this application, and with the occasional stories of MacBooks overheating, this might indeed be a useful application.

Then there’s Google Earth and Quicksilver, a replacement for Spotlight.

A nice little video application is Gawker, which lets you create stop motion videos with your built in iSight.
There’s also Paparazzi!, which easily lets you make full sized screenshots of web pages. This is useful if your webpages fall of the screen and you don’t want to stitch successive screenshots together.

Mac OS X has a built in burner but when I tried to burn a DVD with just over 1GB of JPGs, it refused to cooperate. So I’m now trying my luck with Toast Titanium.

There’s also a built in unzipper, but it doesn’t handle .rar files. The Unarchiver does.

The Lion King

July 01, 2007 • Blog

World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Fourways » Montecasino

Right in our backyard, they’ve spent the last 10 months or so expanding one of the weirdest malls you’ll ever see, Montecasino, adding an Italian piazza and one of the biggest theaters in the world.
The theater was specifically built for the South African production of The Lion King which, if all goes well, is supposed to bring in several hundreds of millions of euros in turnover during the first few months alone.

The theater is surprisingly small, which is mostly due to the audience having very small arm and leg room, and so is the stage. The advantage being, of course, that where ever you are, you still can easily see what’s going on, on stage.

The show was quite amazing, but I’m sure that, amongst others, ten years on Broadway, no one still needs to be convinced. They’re just copying a tried and tested formula.
A few scenes are spectacular: the opening scene with all the animals on stage and Simba’s conversation with his deceased father.

The acting could be a bit better, although some of the roles are done extremely well, Timon being one of them. Particularly young Simba, the son of producer Lebo M, sings very well, but could be a better actor.

Gone west

June 30, 2007 • Blog

World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Fourways » Shingara Sands

It all happened so fast! Already I’m back in South Africa, struggling with a less than mediocre internet connection. Then again, I also was reunited with Betsy. Aaaah.

On my last day in Chiang Mai, I bought a personal media player (including video) from the very well known brand Dhoom (hear the sarcasm?). It wasn’t the cheapest, at 45 euro with 2GB on board, but the only cheaper one came with no warranty, whereas this one has a one year warranty. And the quality is actually quite good.

(No) vindication

June 26, 2007 • Blog

World » Thailand » Chiang Mai » The Olde Bell

There’s a pub quiz on Thursdays in the ‘UN Irish pub’, here in Chiang Mai. So far, we’ve tried in twice and on both occasions didn’t do too badly. Then again, our asses were kicked on both occasions by teams who did much, much better. So we figured we’d try out the Tuesday quiz at ‘The Olde Bell’. Certainly more mellow, we were unpleasantly surprised when three of the stronger teams from the Thursday also turned out to participate here.
Again we didn’t do too bad. But we came in last.

And I’ve been vindicated a tiny little bit. The local newspaper Delft op Zondag, in which, incidentally, I’ve by now been mentioned several times, most recently in relation to my trip to Afghanistan, ran a small article mentioning that the planned online database with public art in the Dutch city of Delft had already been ‘done’ on my website Beeldenstad.net.

In the words of Cuba Gooding Jr.: “Show me the money!”

Google docs overhaul

I’m an avid user of Google docs, to the point where I practically never use a desktop office suite anymore. Already years ago I moved from MS Office to OpenOffice.org, but for the last year or so, I ‘ve been all over Google’s office suite.

Last night, I was working on a document in Google docs. Just now, I was going to continue and found the Google docs interface completely changed. It’s smokin’!
But still no presentations (like Powerpoint).

A busy weekend with an apple to round it off

June 24, 2007 • Blog

1 / 1
World » Thailand » Chiang Mai » Central Airport Plaza

A busy weekend. I'm returning in October, but that's not for another three months, so this was going to be my last weekend in Chiang Mai for quite a while.

Most of this weekend was 'dry': no alcohol was for sale from 6pm on Saturday, until 12am on Monday. The reason? Elections. Over the past few weeks, from shortly before my arrival, election banners have crept up all over town. I've asked a few locals what the election is about and it -seems- to be for something not dissimilar to the position of mayor. Chiang Mai city is inside a moat, a square canal around the inner city. The best banners were put up by candidate number 5: all around the moat, a distance of a few kilometers, he had put up banners with alternating red and white '5's. '5', in Thai, is 'ha'. So reading his banners meant laughing all the way.
And why no alcohol? I assume in some distant past, candidates would ply their voter base by handing out drinks on election day. In fact, there's still a rule in the UK, and I'm sure in many other countries as well, that at election rallies, candidates are not allowed to hand out food.

So it meant that on Saturday night, four of us were drinking at Felicia and Todd's new house. After a day of scouting out unchartered territory in town, on foot, that was a very welcome way of spending the evening. It's bloody hot at the moment, think over 30 degrees centigrade, which, with the humidity, is a struggle.
On the Sunday, Elyse and I shared the rent of a scooter and, together with Todd and Felicia, visited a few of the more further out wats, temples. Again, bloody hot, and no cool beer to quench our collective thirst.

I also visited the airport plaza and the Carrefour centre, two huge shopping malls, but not the only ones. The Carrefour centre is, you've guessed it, centred around a huge Carrefour store, a huge supermarket. The airport plaza is a more regular mall, with four levels of shopping madness. And since Thai love to eat out, much of the madness is focused on food. Good food, and a few fried bugs.
Both malls had a video arcade but, sadly, no DDR.

On Sunday, we also visited the walking market which happens all over downtown Chiang Mai. Every gimmick you can think of is sold here, and most are hand made, many of which by individuals from the surrounding villages. Prices are good, and it's hard not to walk away with every single cute thing you can think of.
But besides the gimmicks and gifts, you can also find hordes of blind and often 'special' individuals making music for petty cash. You get several different groups of musicians and sometimes solo artists, tucked away in many corners of the outstretched market. It made me wonder how these groups get formed. Do the individuals each choose an instrument and have a musical preferences and, through that, find like minded blind, struggling musicians? Or, as most appear to be coming from a care center, are instruments and groups assigned to them? What if they don't like to make music? What if they get assigned the guitar but want the drums instead? How do they actually get to the market? You will always find the same groups in the same places. Are their places reserved?
So many questions.

The work at HDN is going quite well. It's taking up a bit more time than I expected, but in the end the resulting systems will only be better. I'm now working on significantly upgrading HDNet.org, after which will follow the upgrade of AIDScarewatch.org and, what will be most of the work, a social news aggregator which will replace the current websites TheCorrespondent.org and healthdev.org. The latter is the interesting one of the two; a listserv-run communication platform with no less than 20.000 subscribers. Imagine being able to bring all those users onto a dynamic, socially driven, only news platform.
So, as said, that will see me return in October.

Oh, and I bought a MacBook today.

What's for dinner in Thailand? Part 14

A McDonalds happy meal!

×