I love a good game of internet pile-on as much as the next guy, but god damn this is hilarious.
The brilliant designer Coda, based in Cape Town, regularly gets his site design jacked by punks all over the world and most of the time he just laughs it off. Then the other day someone pointed him to the new Optimal Energy site done by Clickthinking, a Cape Town based (ie. They must know who Coda is) “web company”. You can read Coda’s opinion here.
Right now I guess Clickthinking are busy digging the hole they plan to live in for the next few weeks until this quietens down, but damn, Optimal Energy should be pissed… They got fleeced and are probably feeling pretty damn uncomfortable about their *brand new website* right about now.
ps. No link-love for Clickthinking… just google them.
So after chatting to some people who love their hacked iPhones, and seeing a terminal running on one, I have to admit that they’re very pretty and possibly very powerful. However all that power is being locked up inside the shiny little box, and Apple seems convinced that that is the way forward for their platform. They’ve even resorted to telling some app developers that their apps are too similar to the existing Apple apps, and therefore won’t be allowed onto the marketplace.
But before I turn this into an anti-iphone blog, the reason I’m again saying that Android is going to eventually reign supreme is because Motorola (whose cell phones I’m not a huge fan of) are planning to employ 300 developers to work on Android internally. While this might just mean that Motorola ends up producing more crappy cell phones, it also might mean that they are having a bit of a mind shift… (possibly caused by the iPhone’s success?) and want to build something that competes for that power user rather than the 16 year old school girl they’ve apparently been developing phones for for the past few years. And physically motorola build solid devices. They have a rich history of building miliatary grade equipment and comsumer trendoid crap like the Razr (Is that how you spell it?)
Regardless of what Motorola end up doing, the real winner is going to be the Android software stack that they’ll no doubt push code back into. I’m not sure how their licensing is going to work, and they might chose to close source all their android applications, but they’ll no doubt have a positive effect on the Android operating system/software stack, and that’s all that matters.
ps. Thanks to Jonathan Carter for pointing me to the news story.
Lynnae, as you may know, is a food nerd. She teaches me stuff about how broccoli is from the Brassica family and therefore not suitable for stocks if you want a clear stock and that toast smells nice because of the Maillard reaction. So she’s a nerd, but she’s definitely not a computer nerd and it’s kinda funny when she’s trying to understand what I do all day or tell me about some or other computer problem she has at work. She has a windows box and a mac… no prizes for guessing which one “flashes on the one window and then the other one goes orange and starts flashing too and then you click on the tab for the first one and it starts flashing too so I had to work the whole day while the screen flashed at me“.
The real gems seem to pop out of nowhere:
Who pays for the network waves?
- Asked while I was trying to explain the concept of a wug.
Maybe it’s a glitch.
- Pretty much anything that goes wrong is “possibly a glitch”.
Something with a megabyte.
- When asked what size the SD card in her phone was.
What’s an aggregator, is it an angry alligator?
- Ok, admittedly she’s trying to be funny.
But she’s learning… We have a shopping list wiki, which she thinks is arbiwikiwiki.com (or something) but she runs firefox and is starting to understand why open source is better… that, and she’s the most awesome friend I’ve ever had, so I’ll tolerate her noobness.
So here we go. I will be officially launching a private beta of Half Price Tuesdays on the 29th of September at the September Geekdinner, final details of which will be available shortly.
Unfortunately, if you’re not already on the list for the event you won’t be because it’s full, but I will open the beta to others shortly thereafter.
If you are coming to the dinner, please don’t expect fireworks or rocket-science; hpt was meant to be coded over a weekend, but I got carried away in the design phase.
If you run a decent OS (linux) you should be able to:
sudo apt-get install fcrackzip
Then read the man page but know that there is one little gotcha. fcrackzip’s default brute force starting length is 5 characters and by default it will run up to 6 characters. The gotcha of course is that if your password is 4 characters long you will never find it. So always run it with the -l flag and start at 1.
Richard Feynman is one of my core inspirations. This seemingly simple man was not only a Nobel winning quantum physicist, but also a man who claimed that anyone who said they understood quantum physics was a liar. He also played the bongo drums, picked locks and worked with Einstein on the atomic bomb.
Feyman says:
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing… I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.
I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose… which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.
I’ve always wondered what these things were actually called and now I know… Meet the Belling-Lee (IEC 169-2) connector… also know as the “TV Aerial Plug”
As much as I hate to drag you into this ugly mess I feel it is necessary to let you know that Vodacom (a cellular phone operator here in South Africa and a subsidiary of Vodafone) is messing with your copyright. I’m not a fan of copyright at the best of times but I think it is important to send a very stern message to any ISP who feels it is okay to inject html on web pages their customers are trying to view.
The offending bit of HTML which is served whenever anyone requests your website is a link to their own “Vodafone Live” service which in many ways is a competitor to Facebook. Below you can see a screenshot of your page (which is copyright 2008) and just below it, the injected link. This is an unauthorised derivative of your original copyright work.
And here you can see some of the content on the page which they link to:
If you let them do this they might be overwriting your advertisements next.
Plus a link to an article that explains how to turn a hard drive into a speaker. http://www.hodcroft.net/?s=4&p=speaker
Lourens, I know you have hard drives lying around.
