My view of the world and anything that might interest me.
I have not said anything about the said deal yet. I have just read an InfoWorld article by Neil McAllister and must say that I agree with him. This deal would be good for IBM and so more for us that work in the Application Development area within IBM.
Technorati Tags: sun, deal, ibm, linux, java, mysql, solaris
The current economic market is more bad than worse that is forcing not only small organizations but also the giant organizations to cut out the work force. IBM, one of the leading groups, is about to cut 5000 jobs in USA.
The job cuts will account for over 4 percent of IBM’s U.S. workforce, which totaled around 115,000 at the end of 2008. An International Business Machines Corp spokesman declined to comment. The company, which had a total workforce of 398,455 as of end 2008, has not disclosed how many jobs it has cut so far this year, but has said it was making “structural changes†to reduce spending and improve productivity.
IBM, which now earns around two-thirds of its revenue from outside the United States, has been expanding its workforce in emerging markets like India and China.At the end of 2008, employment in the BRIC countries that includes Brazil, Russia, India and China with a total of around 113,000.
I hope this does not split over to South Africa. It is unlikely since IBM seen SA as a Growth Market and is investing lots on money into this region.
Technorati Tags: layoffs, ibm, growth market, financial crisis
Ever wanted to learn something new but have not got the time or money or whatever to attend University. Well, how about doing it all within the confines of your four walls? This is what Academic Earth is. It gives you video recording or lectures from a couple of universities like Harward, MIT, Yale and others. You can either stream the video or download them for later viewing.
I always wanted to do some course in Astronomy and found one on Academic Earth. It is called Introduction to Astrophysics and I have watched the first couple of lectures and have learned more about Astronomy in those lectures than anywhere else. Cannot wait for the rest of the lectures.
Technorati Tags: academic earth, university, astronomy, education, learn
This is the mist and clouds that came rolling over the hill this morning. Are this the end of Cape Summer and start of Winter.
These photos were taken with my new Canon PowerShot SX10 IS with no editing at all. All that I did was to re-size the images.
Technorati Tags: winter, canon, sx10, powershot
On 28 March 2009 it is EarthHour day and on that day we are trying to get as much people as possible to switch off their lights for 1 hour. The target is to get 1 billion people around the world involved. I have signed up .. why not you also … go here and sign up.
Technorati Tags: earthhour, south africa
Yesterday I officially moved to our new IBM Offices at Century City. This is the Sunrise that greeted me at the new office. What is view .. I can get used to this. And it cuts my driving distance to work in half and driving time by even more.
Technorati Tags: office, view, century city, ibm
Cape Town is one of the host cities for World Cup 2010 and a new stadium is busy being build. Here, the half (or maybe three quarter) build stadium is covered with mist. Hope that it is not an indication that this stadium will become a ghost stadium
Yesterday, myself and a friend (thanks Marita) spend the afternoon in Houtbay enjoying some fish and chips. The wind was howling as can be seen from the white on the water and it was really unpleasant but it was nice none the less. 
Houtbay without fishing boats is not Houtbay and being so unpleasant and windy all the boats were in the harbor as can be seen here.
Currently it is very hot in Cape Town and there is fires burning in the Stellenbosch/Somerset West mountains and the sky is covered with smoke. On my way, taking my son to varsity in Stellenbosch, I took this photo of the sun behind the smoke.
This photo does not do it justice since the sun was bright red, not pink like in the photo.
Technorati Tags: houtbay, fire, world cup, 2010, cape town, sun
Around September last year I got a new work laptop – Lenovo T60. IBM, for whom I work, gives one the choice of what OS to run on the desktop ie Windows or some Linux flavor. Oh and some people actually do run Macs also. The Linux is either Red Hat, Fedora, OpenSuse or Ubuntu. My choice was Ubuntu.
Getting Ubuntu installed and running with all I need to get my job done within IBM took about 40 minutes. Inside IBM we have our own APT repositories with various layer packages that install the appropriate packages and applications to get everything up and going.
Now about 5 months later I have no regrets. Having a working machine in about 30 seconds after boot is just great. No more BSOD’s, viruses and/or trojans to really worry about and just a more stable and productive envirionment.
At home I also had Windows XP on some very old hardware that ran very slow. Since my laptop experience was so good, I decided, what the hell, lets totally get rid of Windows. Now my machine at home is also running Ubuntu and it is doing it so much faster than before. In the mean time I got another desktop and this is runing Kubuntu.
To be honest, I have not gotten used to Kubuntu so I do not know how long my second machine is going to run Kubuntu. I just prefer Ubuntu and finding my way around it, is just so much easier. And the fact that Dropbox does not work on Kubuntu is a real pain. Oh and not being able to share my floders on Kubuntu with my Ubuntu machine is not great either. To be honest I did not really try to find a solution for this yet so it is probaly only something stupid I did or did not do.
Technorati Tags: ibm, lenovo, t60, linux, ubuntu, kubuntu, dropbox
According to National Geographic News, a nonhuman species has shown “widespread success” with subtraction—equaling college students in a series of experiments.
Technorati Tags: monkeys, subtraction
