In Christ Alone

In April I went to the Rez Conference 2013 in Midrand. It was held in Christ Church, in Midrand.

The experience was fantastic, though the one thing I noticed was that I struggled to keep up with most of the songs/hymns. They’re a more ‘traditional’ church in the sense of their worship songs. It was fun learning new song :)
Anyways, since that day I’ve come across some of the hymns that were sung, and wow!

One of them has been covered by Kristian Stanfill in the Passion 2013 album. In Christ Alone.

8ta Modifies the 10GB Offer

Internet Hero

8ta ran probably the best internet promo in a while, with the 10GB for R199 offer. The promotion expired at the end of March 2013, but I see there’s a slightly better one. 8ta [Telkom Mobile] is now offering a 20GB offer for R299 (essentially the same as the previous offer, but the other 10GB is not optional any more). The one thing I appreciate is that the NightSurfer data now starts from 11PM as opposed to 12AM. This makes a huge difference for me because I normally sleep just before midnight, so I hardly get to use the data for non-scheduled downloads (you know what :) ).

So Kudos 8ta, you are the Internet Hero for today

You can check the offer out here: [http://www.8ta.com/plans/postpaid-data/10gbpromo/]

Google is Down, Bing is Still Terrible

General,

Google Search has been down for a few hours now. I’m not certain if the problem’s just with me, or whether other people are noticing it.
I probably search Google 200 times in an average day, so today’s not going well for me. I’ve had to use Bing a few times, and each time I use it I am reminded of why I think it’s a horrible joke gone wrong.

Bing

Half of the time when I decide to use Bing to look for something, I get useless nothing. Yesterday I had an error on the app that I’m writing, when I Googled Binged the error I found nothing of relevance, an hour later Google Search was working again, so I searched again, and found what I was looking for.

How does Microsoft with their Bing gimmick expect me to take them seriously when searching for myself won’t even return my own blog? Here’s the specimen

I really think people who keep saying that Bing is better than Google Search are like those people who didn’t wanna complain about Apple Maps the first week it was released. Some of them were even going:

“It’s been perfect so far, except for the melting bridge that I avoided“

Today I’m off to a Men’s Conference at church :) Look ma, I’m doing stuff that men do, does it mean that I’m finally growing up?

8ta 10GB Promo Renewal Window

General

One of the best things to happen to the interwebs in South Africa during 2012 was 8ta announcing a 10GB data deal for R199 (~ US $21) per month. There was an add-on option of 10GB extra for R100,
It’s been quite a liberating experience having the data promo. I’ve saved literally thousands of Rand in data costs.
Anyways, the offer was announced in the first week of June 2011 IIRC. Running over 24 months means that early birds’ contracts expire at the end of May at least. The problem’s that rumour has it that the promotion is ending with this month. So there’s 7 days to upgrade …

I received a call today from a lady at the 8ta call center, who notified me that I’m due for upgrade. That made me smile cos I can still get the data deal again for another 24 months before it expires.
I tried to confirm that the data promo is being canned at the end of March, she went and found out but got no detail on it. She also suggested that there might likely be similar deals (with Telkom introducing Telkom Mobile). I doubt that I’d get a better deal than what I am currently getting, so I think I’m just going to renew mine, if something better comes, I wouldn’t have lost out.

One other thing to consider though is that 8ta’s LTE launch is “imminent” (as the site puts it), and with the fresh offers that they’ve recently brought, it’d be likely that their LTE offering will be affordable too. I might have to flip a coin for this one :(

Forking a Repo to my Dongle

Opinions & Letters

So some character was offended by two guys at a tech conference, and instead of telling them that their ‘offensive penis jokes’ are offensive penis jokes, she went on the interweb and ruined their names and probably rest of careers. The Verge has covered the story, which is what I first read before I went digging around to get more info on what happened.

The story is covered everywhere, and my side of it is that this character should have rather approached the guys. the TL;DR version of it is that this Andria Richards character felt offended by two guys who were talking about forking a repo (which means: making a copy of someone’s project in order to use/contribute to) and references to a “big dongle” (you know, USB dongle, Bluetooth dongle … ). She then tweeted about it, and got the guys kicked out of the conference. Later both guys were fired.

 this Adria (had spelt her as Andria, apologies) Richards character felt offended by two guys who were talking about forking a repo

It’s a sad thing because she’s prolly taken back the whole “women in programming” bit backwards, as is evident from some of the hate mail spreading around the net and IRC. The anonymously infamous Anonymous even took a stand against SendGrid, Andria’s employer, who later fired her citing the DDoS as a reason.

I find some sense of humour cos the interwebs bring justice, even when you decide to use your power and ruin guys’ lives over something that could have been handled in a more civil manner.

iTunes music playing

iTunes Music for Android User

Music, ,

I’m an Android fan (‘fandroid’), and for the most part, bashing Apple is my pastime. Of course I’m referring to iOS, Apple make great products (hardware). I have also lately taken to watching Apple’s share price plummet, it’s like I have this evil mantra towards Apple.

I do however admit that besides for iOS and the slow innovation in their mobile products of late, they still execute a lot of things brilliantly. One of them is iTunes. I’ve had iTunes for a while now, and I mainly use it to access iTunesU podcasts. Since we can buy music now in South Africa, I’ve been contemplating making the switch from buying CDs to buying music online. Continue reading →

Jacob Zuma on Bafana Bafana Winning AFCON

Tweets

This was just too funny, worth more than just a retweet. For those that don’t know, the AFCON is an African football cup challenge. So when the president says that an African team will win, he’s just implying that he knows nothing of what’s going on. Perhaps just a media stunt to go see aBafana?

 

phone-design-hero-584x340[1]

Welcome Ubuntu Phone OS

General, ,

Today Mark Shuttleworth announced the Ubuntu Phone OS. Quite interesting as I saw it as the first true ‘gesture phone’, which is something Google is moving towards (at least with their apps, like Maps for iOS). The most interesting thing for me was the home screen, Looked very visually appealing, we’ll probably see it in the Play Store in a few weeks.

If you found my blog cos you were searching for the Ubuntu Phone OS, this is the wrong place to read up on it :) I was just commenting about the phone/OS. Word (Press Release) has it that the phone will be available in early 2014, but since Mark was holding an Android device, and he mentioned that Ubuntu can run on Android devices, we might see it sooner (if the source code is released).

Remember that the difference with Android is really the layer on top of the Linux kernel. Both Ubuntu and Android will use the same kernel, though versions are expected to differ, as with all things Linux.

Congratulations Canonical. “Oh my gosh, take my money!!!”

Let’s hope Apple doesn’t try sue you too in a few years!

Gautrain Combinations: Did you know?

General

I’m spending most of my December break stuck behind a PC, about 16 hours a day (4-5 hours’ sleep is enough). I’m working on a public transit project, which at most is a lot of frustration, and some of those ‘wow’ moments.

Today I was working on permutations and combinations, specifically on the Gautrain.

Did you know that among the ten stations, there are combinations of 64 possible routes?

Of course a lot of them aren’t routes I’d expect one to take (e.g. a few km trip from Rhodesfield into the OR Tambo International is about R105.00. I’d rather walk, right?) The interesting thing for me that the combination of n=10;r=2 is supposed to be 45 (think: 9 + 8 + 7 + 6 + 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1) [This is only possible because r=2]. This is not the case with the Gautrain, because there are three nodes connecting to each other (as opposed to a single node above).

When I calculated the combination, it was a bit tricky so I got my neighbor to help me out (he’s got a Masters in Actuarial Sciences and Math Stats). I normally do it manually when it’s not a series on a single node, which is normally a mess on paper :) .
Anyways, I was surprised that he didn’t dismiss me at the door when I came to ask him. He showed me something quite interesting on how to calculate the combination, I can’t yet explain it because I’m still going to try simulate it and try derive a formula to calculate the probabilities on multiple nodes, but I found the numbers interesting.

Of course there’s already a way of doing it (which is what my neighbor showed me), but I am interested in representing it in either a single formula, or by programming a heuristic algorithm that calculates the combinations by just assessing the number of nodes and the lengths of the points on each of the nodes.

This will come in handy when I take a look at the Rea Vaya bus network, as it’s much more complex than the Gautrain one. Hopefully I’ll be able to generate the combinations on the route network automagically (it’s relatively easy to calculate the combinations, but not to generate them). I once crashed my PC trying to generate the 13’983’816 different combinations in the lottery, not an easy one to do.

Anyways, this was the ‘most’ exciting thing for me today :)

In my will I am going to stipulate that my blog should remain running for at least 200 years after I pass on. My grandchildren and their grandchildren will come and update the blog after each 100 years :)

Pity though that people thought something would happen … Sometimes I wonder why humans were the dumb ones out of all the animals created lol

Thank You 8.ta

General

Dear 8.ta

Thank you for the wonderful and affordable internet connection that you have given me. I was frustrated during the week when you had connection issues, and I am glad they seem to be sorted now.

8.ta speed test

Kind Regards
A paying customer

Sign that I should go to bed :(

RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded

I made a lot of progress tonight with my Node.js app, but then I got stuck here. Hopefully I dream up a solution, it’s happened before :)

Where’d Commute Nav Go?

Incorporator

I’ve seen some interest on my LinkedIn and other public profiles linking people to commutenav.co.za and my blog. Currently when you go to commutenav.co.za / commutenav.com / rwt.to / rwtto.co / rwtto.com / rwtto.co.za (I know, the domains left me broke), you’ll find some page about being down for maintenance.
I was writing my board exams, so I couldn’t afford to fool around, it’s easier for me to wanna work on programming instead of studying, so I shut down my production PC and took everything off the web.

Well, now I have resumed working on the project, it’s not yet live because for some silly reason I decided to rebuild it from scratch using just Javascript. It’s going to be my December project, and so far it is coming along well.

So, hopefully in 3 – 10 weeks I’ll have another prototype running :)