General

I foresee an influx of job-hunting Brazilians raiding our shores in the not so distant future. This would be one incoming swarm, which even our self-styled special tactics division in Alexandra could never stop. A precedent has been set. The likelihood that a Brazilian job-hunter could be valued at no less than R1 million is […]

If there’s one think in this life that you can guarantee, it’s that a Yank or a Brit, cast to play the role of a South African in a movie, will duff the accent so badly that not one person from the Rainbow Nation will be able to guess which country he’s supposed to be […]

One of the primary goals of any serious journalist is to take whatever they are writing about, and cover it in plain, simple English so that anyone, regardless of prior knowledge, can understand the story. Journalists are, after all, communicators, and if we write long, unwieldy sentences full of big words and waffle, we’re not […]

After all the noise and excitement which came with the dawn of Social Media, we are now seeing signs of the Web 2.0 slowing and becoming a part of everyday life. Similar to what happened with email, it was a big launch and now it’s everywhere. Nielsen Online, the online buzz monitor, showed an approximately […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]