Geek Dinner was fun
The Cape Town Stormhoek Geek dinner, another first in South Africa, was a ton of fun!
Thanks to Graham and the crew from Stormhoek, and to Dave for getting it going.
I particularly made sure to gobble up some prize winning Pinotage!
Herewith my very amateur wine review of the 2 wines I had:
I started of with the Pinot Grigio and found it pleasantly bubbly and quite fruity, not too dry, but not sweet. I think it will make a great accompaniment to seafood or a wine to pop open on a lazy summers afternoon with friends.
The Pinotage was fabulous, I have had some pretty awful pinotages that often sport a very unpleasant burnt and overly smokey taste (I hope that comes across right) , thankfully this is a very civilized taste, it felt rounded and smooth and was a very pleasant experience as a whole. I'll be looking out for this one in the shops!
Thanks again guys!
Netlife reviews IS 1mbit (DSL-over-fibre)
There is an interesting review of the IS 1024 kbps DSL over fibre solution (as opposed to satelite) over on Netlife.
I quote:
Pros:
1) Uncapped & Unshapped
2) Reliable
3) Great service desk
4) Far cheaper than Diginet based solutionsCons:
1) Cost, its far from affordable for end users
2) IS retains ownership of the router.
3) Telkom is still in the loop for the last mile
4) Only 1mbitIn conclusion; this is what a DSL experience should be like, at a 10th of the price.
Bill Gates talks Wireless
Bill Gates,during today's Cape Town presentation, says that Microsoft are moving at introducing wireless technologies into Africa "so that internet can be delivered cheaply". Hey, I am all for that, but it is the article on Reuters that is dissappointing, seems that MS is teaming up with MTN (Africas biggest mobile carrier) to provide a bandwidth solution packaged with a low-end PC running a stripped down version of Windows. Why am I disappointent? Well if cost is the problem, where are the solutions using exciting initiatives like Ubuntu and Edubuntu? Where is the South African version of the Municator? Africa does not need a strip downed low-end PC, we need an appliance that can operate with minimal support.
Investors, take note! Why should we have an international company come and set down its proprietary fortress in our back yard now that their stock prices are crashing in back yard. I don't know about you, but I am tired of this continent becoming the dumping ground for the rest of the worlds old news!
At least Gates is right about one thing, Wireless is the only forward for us in this country.
Broadband to become essential. Just like water and power.
We are living in exciting times, I sometimes forget the incredible advances that we have made in the last 50 years, its scary to think that the BMW M5 has multiple times the processing power of all the computers involved in putting the Eagle on the moon.
Where will technology take us within the next 5,10,20 years? What amazing things will we have available to improve our quality of life?
The large-scale deployment of IPv6 will see a world where every imaginable (and sometimes unimaginable device) will be IP ready and jacked into the grid, self-restocking fridges will be commonplace, digital cameras will auto-upload to online storage, our TV's will receive media off the net and VoIP will be king.
For content providers this means the end of dictated content - `user interactive` and `on-demand` become the norm and `broadcasting` becomes old news, the user will control his own usage, the independent content producer will be able to get his content to a much wider audience now and we will really see the effect of the long tail. Yeah, this all sure sounds a lot like podcasting (which is very "now"), except it will go through a series of changes before ultimately becoming mainstream, podcasting is still very edgy today and it stands out from other forms of user-generated media only because of the time-shifting aspect, i.e. download while you sleep.
I expect that the rapid adoption of municipal WiFi/WiMax/Mesh type technology will accelerate and soon entire cities will be blanketed with always-in internet, this will become an essential service and not a luxury. Blanket WiFi will change the face of technologies like podcasting and devices like the iPod, why have a hard drive if you can just download what you are watching on the fly and it costs next to nothing? Do you even need a hard drive on that device? Already services like Last.fm are hugely popular as they are so well tailored to your taste and it helps you find good content all for the price for a bit of bandwidth.
Another thorn in the side of local storage applications, especially video ones, will be the rapid consumption of disk space, imagine having to cache anything approaching a healthy collection of HD-DVD/TV content on your local machine. Now all of you are going to shout at me and say that disk storage is cheap but history has told us that while the amount of storage on the "standard" drive of the day keeps multiplying (Moore's Law), the fact is that the number of disk hungry applications also follow that trend and it has really never gotten much cheaper to physically buy that standard hard disk. Example: My 512Mb , 2 Gig, 20 Gig, 40 Gig, 80 Gig etc. drive purchases over the last few years have always been roughly as expensive as the one before it (twice the storage at the same price) and if I need to buy a few of them it still hurts my wallet 
No, off-site/remote hosting is key.
Our digital persona's will be irrevocably intertwined with our real lives, already we have seen the rise of the so-called MySpace generation, the next gens, they will demand unlimited access to blogging and social networking sites and to them being disconnected for any amount of time will be like hell.
Most of our personal computing will move onto the grid, take Gmail for example, I already can't operate without it and to that reason network connectivity will need to become much more reliable with more fail safes and alternates in case something does go wrong.
We will track the movements of our loved ones with RFID and even the traffic department will use RFID to bill you for using a toll-road. Don't make a mistake, big brother will be able to track you!
All-in-all I look forward to huge changes in everyday of life via new technologies, but I do find myself fearing that in South Africa we will be left behind due to the slow movement of the broadband glacier in this country due to socio-economic complications and plain old greed on behalf of the powers that be.
Luckily there are some people out there with vision! Just this evening I met someone attempting to start up a new WiMax based operator, he really seems to "get" broadband and realises that you cant retain customers by contract but rather by good service.
Lets back our local innovators, lets make our voices heard. Lets liberate our broadband. Recently heard someone mentioning the `Bandwidth Liberation Front` in jest, but seriously, has it become time for the "Broadband Liberation Front"? I already see developed countries like the USA grumbling that they are getting left behind in the high-stake game of Ultra-broadband, jeepers.
Vodafone using SA as a testing ground?
I see over on The Register that Vodafone UK are only now starting to publicly over the HSDPA data cards offered over here via Vodacom partnership for a couple months already.
Interesting, does this mean that SA could be seen as a valuable testing ground for such new technologies by the international telecoms players?
CNN Money Link-love!
BarCamp Cape Town got some link love from CNN Money recently, thanks to Chris Messina for pointing it out.
Once again, the point of it all:
"We figured there was much more expertise in the audience than there possibly could be onstage," says BarCamp co-founder Ryan King. Unconferences break the barrier between the two. Attendees write topics they're interested in on boards, consolidate the topics, and then break into discussion groups. At traditional conferences, the most productive moments often occur in the corridor between meetings; at unconferences, attendees like to say, it's all corridor.
If you where still reserving your decision on attending, does this get your attention now? Any brave companies out there that would like to chime in?
See you there 
Bead4Need
I don't normally like to plug efforts by big corporates like SABMiller, but this one dropped into my mailbox by Mike Stopforth seems to be a worthy enough cause.
Beed4Need are racing against time to raise $10,000 before 16 June 2006 for charity.
From the site:
The Bead4Need Race against Time has one simple objective, “To raise $10,000 before 16 June 2006”. Every last cent of this money will be channelled into The CIDA City Campus that aspires to making a sustainable difference in the lives of the disenfranchised people in Southern Africa.
The are selling bead work on EBay as the main fundraising drive.
Links to the works can be found on their blog.
If you are a corporate with some cash to spend, please take a look and do your bit to further the peoples of our great country.
Buddy Dave says he is going to be using Bead4Need as a case-study in his Marketing 2.0 talk at BarCamp, interesting.
Technorati Tags: Bead4Need
About me
Web Engineer, lover of technology, tearer down of walls.
Recent Tweets
- Looks like I am on accidental Helkom uncapped this month - lolz
- It was awfully dark this morning when I got up *groan*
- Not sure if Morgan Freeman was expecting the tough questions from Lee-Ann on Morning live this morning, but he didn't do to badly imho.
- @mikestopforth Ok if its something that person truly believes it. If he's a glorified version of a glomail salesperson, not so much.
- I favorited a YouTube video -- Ableton LIve - Preparing your set for the APC40 / Launchpad http://youtu.be/76WvQNJB1bk?a
- Just rewrote threw out and rewrite some code in 2 hours that originally took a day to write. go figure.
- Working on Joomla! Need some advice, am doing CCK type stuff, is K2 considered "the one"?
- @rafiq I used to but recently mine has stopped downloading movies, so I don't use it anymore, only has series reruns one there now.
- 5 min breaks are really short ...
- also started my first joomla project, hold the phone on judgement.