Category Archives: Software

Geekdinner, 28 March

Posted on by — 7 Comments ↓

Yesterday evening (28 March) I attended the Geekdinner that was held at Barbarellas in Constantia Village and my overall opinion is that is was a great success and everybody had a great time.

It was good to meet some virtual acquaintances like Tania and Neil face to face and also to catch up with old friends like Ian and Joe.  Have also met a lot of other people but names is not one of my strong points.

The talks was good and interesting .. not too long and in all likelyhood the right kind of talks for the people that attended.  I particurly liked that Ubuntu was promoted and people were asked to get involved. Neil’s talk on OpenID gave me the idea to implement OpenID on this blog.

There is one thing that I find strange — were is all the geek girls?  Out of a group of about 50 I only counted 5.  BTW, what does one call a female geek?

Thanks again Joe for arranging .. was a job well done.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

IBM Software Live!

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Spend the whole of yesterday at an IBM Software Live! day presented by 2 of my American coleagues – Doug Spencer and Jeff Reynolds (Kelly, you probably know Jeff since he also originated from Rational)

As fairly new to IBM it was good to see the range of IBM software products and wow what a range .. Covered from Tivoli on the monitoring side, Lotus on the people side, Websphere on the middleware side, Rational on the development side and then Information Management on content/data side.

Also good to see IBM’s direction with Web 2.0 and products like Connections and Quickr.  And then the support for open standards and open source.

The venue was great (Mount Nelson hotel in Cape Town) and the food was great.  Oh and a customer of mine walked away with an Apple iPod Nano in a lucky draw. Good for you Simon. Yes, us IBMers were not allowed to throw our business cards into the bowl 🙂

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

This realy shows my age … the world of IBM mainframes

Posted on by — 5 Comments ↓

I just read an entry by Mark Cathcart called Looking back, Unix System Services, Linux et al.

I started my computing life on VM systems way way back, and the fact that I actually know all the acronyms and terms that Mark was using, say’s a lot. This trip down memory lane gave a very good insight into how IBM looked at Unix and then in the later years Linux on their big systems.  I still do not know whether I totally agree or like with the i, x, p and z Series names for IBM’s hardware.  I so much more liked it when it was called 360 Systems, 390’s, 9375’s etc and OS/390 or MVS, VM etc.

Every year I hear somebody say that the mainframe is dying but it just goes from strength to strength.  When it comes to reliability, scalability and pure cost/performance then nothing beats it … even if you throw a multi CPU clustered Intel or AMD machine at it.

When looking at how IBM implement and innovate around Linux, I am confident that in years to come Linux will play an integral role in helping business in optimizing their computing requirements. As an Open Source and Linux supporter, I will use these solutions more and more in my dealings with my customers and clients.

Lastly, I am so glad that the WIN32 API was never implemented and used in the IBM software stack.  Just imagine the situation IBM might have been in today …

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Collaboration: New from IBM

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓

A lot has been written and said about Notes 8, Lotus Connections and Quickr since announcement at Lotusphere 2007.  I like particularly what Bill Buchan wrote and I quote:

Notes – my long term partner – well. She’s been tucked, trimmed, lipo’d, exfoliated. A complete makeover. But she’s still the rather interesting person behind this new facade. Some new tricks, of course. But the old ones still work. The in-laws – IBM – well, they cant get enough of her. The twin sisters – Quickr, and Connections. No talk of the ugly cousin -Workplace -anymore.

and then Bill gets a stab into MS also — love it

Let me tell you – Quickr just makes Sharepoint look like an ugly sister. Ouch.

I have run the latest beta build of Notes 8 and must say I like what I see. Much more slicker and responsive and that for a beta build.  Cannot wait to get my hands on Connections and Quickr.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

IBM vs Microsoft on Open Standards

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I wanted to comment on the spat that is going on between IBM and Microsoft and Open Standards.  Actually it is not really a spat since all IBM is saying, support a ratified open standard like ODF rather than getting another quasi standard like openXML from Microsoft.  Now Microsoft is blaming IBM for taking sides.  Glyn Moody summed it up well in his post titled “Microsoft’s Fruedian Slips”.  I quote

What Microsoft glides over, of course, is that the choice is within the standard. There are now a number of programs supporting ODF, with more coming through. That’s choice. I doubt whether there will ever be a non-Microsoft program that supports fully its own XML format: there will be no choice, just lock-in under a different name.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

So it was D-day for MS Vista

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Yesterday Microsoft officialy released Vista to the wider public. So why would one upgrade?

From the little bit I seen about Vista and read about it, I can find no reason to upgrade. Firstly you would probably need a new faster CPU, more memory and a much more powerfull graphics card with lots of memory. And what do you get for this .. juts more bling. You will still write the same documents, fill the same spreadsheets, play most of the same games and all this will probably be slower than on your existing Windows XP.

Rather than upgrade to Vista, why not switch totally to some Linux distribution. No hardware to spend money on, no OS to spend money on and your machine will in all likelyhood be faster so you will be more productive in the end. And you would have access to thousands of software applications for FREE — let me say that again FREE — it is going to cost you nothing.

So what is the ultimate goal why Microsoft want you to upgrade to Vista — make more money. You as the consumer will not get much value for that hard earned money you going to give Microsoft. So use the money rather to enjoy life and change to something thats not going to cost you any money and give you freedom of choice, ie Switch to Linux.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Building Second Life on Linux (Ubuntu)

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓

This one is for for Andy who is looking for a stable Linux version.  Now that the SecondLife client code is released as Open Source, he can do it himself. 

Allison Randal has build it on both Mac OS X and Ubuntu. Seems that the Mac build was a bit easier than the Linux one … Linux one build successfully but crashes when trying to log into the live SecondLife world.  Well I am sure you coding geeks will get it working, I will just wait till a good working Linux build for Ubuntu is available before I go down that road.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

SPAM and what to do …

Posted on by — 3 Comments ↓

I have a couple of email accounts (that does not include my work [IBM] address) which I have to monitor on a daily basis.  Over the years these accounts have landed up in the clutches of Spammers which meant that I receive close to 500 SPAM emails each and every day.

I use Thunderbird as my mail client which work well in catching all this Spam but it means that I have to download all the email from my email servers.

Since a couple of weeks ago I started using MailWasher Pro from FireTrust.  What a difference this has made .. basically you can setup as many email accounts in it and then it will download only the headers and first couple of lines of the email.  It will then apply all its build-in SPAM rules and any other rules that you might have defined to mark the mails as either SPAM or Legitimate.  It support Whitelists, Blacklist, Blacklist Servers and Friendslists. When it is done marking all the email you just process it and MailWasher Pro goes and delete all the unwanted Spam and Junk from your email server. So when you use your email client (Thunderbird in my case) to download you email, all that is left over to download is Legitimate emails.

Here is some stats from my use of it:
mwsummary - 2007-01-04

And how the SPAM was classified:
mwspam - 2007-01-04

The Pro version is a Shareware version and if I do not find anything else with the same capabilities over the next week or so I will register this.  I prefer to use Open Source software but have not come accross anything with the same features as MailWasher Pro.  If anybody know of a Open Source/Free product with this features then please let me know so that I can have a look at it.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,