To anyone not familiar with ecological art of the kind that one encounters in nature, the very notion may seem incongruous. Isn’t art what one finds at art galleries and museums? And even if one grants that art found in galleries may also be in the broadest sense of the concept ‘ecological art’ in so […]
2008
A country without future?
I had a long conversation with a small group of unemployed youths a few days ago. Young people in their early 20s, who are supposed to have a long, bright future ahead of them. At least theoretically. These guys were not so sure about that though. They were actually quite angry. Jaded already before they […]
On broken dreams and broken teeth
When I was growing up my mother’s greatest fear was that I would break my front teeth. I grew up. I broke my front teeth. The point of this intro is not to lament over hours of dental work or to illustrate the backlash of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is to emphasise, with some embarrassment, […]
The flip side of the freedom of not having a car
Walking. Walking, and waiting. I do a lot of both now. Tonight, in the autumn cold, I sit on a bench on wharf 5. It rocks almost imperceptibly on the inky waters of Sydney Cove. The next ferry is forty minutes away; I fed my ticket into the turnstile just in time to see the […]
Chisimba by AVOIR our African Open Source web apps
Content Management systems are all the rave at the moment with so many people publishing online. We all have our preferences and it’s no secret where my allegiance is. I recently worked on some interface design work for Free Software Unit at UWC (University of the Western Cape) and was introduced to Chisimba, a rapid […]
Major SA websites hacked by China – nobody cares about your Web 2.0
Over the last few weeks, we have seen a set of incredibly uncomplicated and simple attacks effectively compromise several hundred South African web pages, and several million internationally. Many of the South African sites compromised were important; including major media organisations, several government institutions, large mining houses and even one information security company, who still […]
Zimbabwe: Home of the brave and land of the free
Robert Mugabe’s appearance at the World Food Summit in Rome has been described as “obscene” by observers mindful of the human rights disaster that is Zimbabwe, and the atrocities being carried on prior to the run-off presidential election — more so now that opposition MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai was detained and then released from a […]
The xenophobia files: Part one
First of all, I apologise to all foreign nationals both directly and indirectly affected by the recent xenophobic attacks. I am not a perpetrator and I do not support the perpetrators, but, as a South African, these stupid attacks were done in my name against our fellows from across the border, and for that I […]
The Sharks Super 14 in review: Still nothing in the trophy case
So South Africa´s most valuable franchise has gone yet another year without anything to put into an already quite empty trophy case. So let’s have a review of the season shall we, and see what went wrong this time. At the beginning of the season, it was easy for Sharks fans to feel a bit […]
XBRL: mash-ups for accountants
I’m grateful for search engines, but I still find it hard to accept living with Dead Text. Letters and figures on a screen. Not able to be mined, found, unlocked, extrapolated into meaning. What irks me in particular is tables of figures, especially financial information, that you would have to re-key into excel or some […]
Rugby beats football any day of the week
Growing up in and going to school in Highlands North, Johannesburg, meant playing rugby and football seven days a week. Rugby practices were straight after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays with matches being played either Wednesday afternoon or Saturday mornings. Football practices were also held on a Tuesday and Thursday but in the late afternoons. […]
Boost the economy from your desk: Pay a small business on time
Do you earn a salary? Salaries are like love and hot water. You only miss them when they’re missing. This is a little shout-out to all you salaried folk, especially those who have anything, anything at all to do with making payments to small businesses and freelancers: pay up on time. I don’t mean write […]