Tania.co.za

IT Project Management: Deadline extended for course applications

The deadline for applications for the Certificate Programme in IT Project Management from 25–29 May 2009 in Johannesburg has been extended. (I had a chat to Briggita today -- thanks, Briggita!) Applications will be accepted until 19 May.

University Programme in IT Project Management: Johannesburg 25-29 May 2009

Getting a course like this going has been my personal passion since I first studied Project Management back in the previous millenium, when I found that what apparently worked fine in construction and events management did not work well for me at all when I attempted to apply it to software development! I finally persuaded a number of people that we needed a university course like this which is specific to IT, after I ran into my long-lost hero, Martin Butler, in a corridor one afternoon shortly before a trip to Botswana to do training for the Office of the President there along with Dr. John Morrison.

The objective of the programme is to equip project managers and owners with the knowledge required to complete IT-intrinsic projects successfully. A generic approach is followed and whilst reference is made to methodologies such as Agile, PRINCE2 and others, no specific project management approach is promoted. And Martin is the lecturer. (Yay!)

We did a trial-run of this course for an IT company a couple of weeks before the delivery of the first public course, which was held in Cape Town earlier this year. They came from Bloemfontein, Durban, Johannesbug, PE and Cape Town -- 20 of them, including line managers and senior programmers -- and it absolutely transformed the organisation. Their training manager (herself an experienced programmer, who has done other training in Project Managament before), said it was the best course of any sort which she had attended in her life. I take that as a compliment coming from a training manager!

Find out more about the course here and and get an application form ASAP. (You snooze, you lose.)

Thank-you, Microsoft!

So I install Microsoft Project 2007 Trial, but naturally I don't uninstall my working, registered 2002 version, in case I choose not to upgrade.
Ah, I notice save is disabled in the Trial version. Pity. Because I need to save my model answer to distribute it to my students when daylight comes.
Never mind, I will just use the 2002 version then, unfortunately without the benefit of the Cost Items feature.
What's this? Now I can't save using my registered installation either?!
OK, let's uninstall the trial and restart the computer.
Tried that. Great. 2007 version gone from my computer, and 2002 version rendered absolutely unusable. Will have to get to the office before dawn now to reinstall.
And I remember now that this same thing happened to me on Michaelo's computer about a year ago...

Funny thing is, I have never met anyone else who trains students on Microsoft Project and feels all warm and fuzzy about this stuff. And it's not like some of these are little bugs either. You should see what happens with Project Standard 2003 via a Citrix client (not a rare installation, FWIW, seen it in two huge organisations). And you should see the what happens with the Calendar in the 2007 version, just arbitrarily on numerous computers. Yes, you can climb the Alps with only one leg and one arm. Yes, you can use Microsoft Project to plan and control your projects. I just think that any course in the hands-on use of Microsoft Project should actually be called How to use workarounds to manage a project using software from Microsoft. It's not like there aren't other scheduling tools in the world, you know.

Aaargh!

Grrr! It appears that the connectivitability configuration for the transmission synchronisation for the user-base access of my wi-fi service provider has been monodirectionallly discombobulated!  To be precise (as Prof. Cuthbert Calculus would say), I cannot see any Web sites other than those hosted in South Africa. It feels like being hemmed in behind a solid concrete firewall. The reason why I believe the problem to be with my ISP only is that I received an automated notification telling me that this guy has started following me on Twitter, and to the best of my knowledge he's still in South Africa. So I've concluded that the rest of South Africa is not experiencing the same problem, and that I am still perfectly visible to everyone on the World Wide Web, in spite of the fact that the worldwide part of the Web is not visible to me. Therefore, bearing in mind that although I can receive your Facebook messages (since they get automatically e-mailed to me), I cannot respond unless you send me your e-mail address. (My e-mail is not hosted by the same ISP that is not giving me proper access, so there's still a way of sneaking out messages from behind this wall.)

Speaking of being walled in, yesterday at lunch my uncle Chris told this joke which dates back to the 1970s:
"And now for the international sports news. East Germany's former national pole-vaulting champion is now the number one West German pole-vaulting champion..."

Sold out for 2008! Book now for 2009!

With the exception of the Programme in Microsoft Project on NQF 6 which has two or three places left, our Project Management courses are all sold out till the end of the year. We were constantly scheduling extra NQF 7 courses throughout 2008 to handle the overflow from that which had been planned, in Durban, Johannesburg, Windhoek, Cape Town, Pretoria and other cities. Next year we're adding the specialist programmes in IT Project Management and in Project Management for Local Government, but enquiries and bookings for the generic and in-house courses, as well as for our new part-time course to be held in Cape Town from March to April, are also still coming in daily. I'm flying to Johannesburg next week to teach a custom course for staff at Wits, and then another along with MC Botha at Krones the following week. If you want to get into a course before May 2009, it looks like you might have to send us your details before the end of November 2008!

IT Project Management course (NQF 7) in Johannesburg in 2009!

We managed to get two courses scheduled for Cape Town for 2009, and, as can be expected, we kept getting the "Why not Gauteng?" question. Martin returned to South Africa recently and I just found a memo from him in my inbox which I missed somehow, confirming that he could indeed present the course there from 1 to 5 June 2009. I really hope we can get Bytes as the venue -- they have an excellent high-tech conference facility -- and they're holding the dates for me. I'm also trying to see if I can get an accommodation package arranged, including airport and to-the-class transfers, which would be suitable for students who have to travel from faraway places like Mpumalanga, Mozambique, etc. to come for the training.

NQF 7 (for those who don't know how the National Qualifications Framework works) is "post-graduate". In this case, you can actually get credits towards an MBA by doing this university-accredited course.

The fee per student will be R9,900 (that includes courseware, assessment, teas, lunch, etc.).

I've got the preliminary course outlines ready, so if you're interested, send us your details.

Murphy's Law of Software Development

Well, it's not really Murphy's Law, it's mine, since I am the one who formulated it, but I need to credit Murphy with the groundwork, so this is perhaps this should be called Tania's Corollary to Murphy's Law, but then there would be two iso-corollaries (or something like that) and that would be complicated.

Herewith the Law which I discovered in around 1998, and which has consistently manifested itself to my empirical observations over the past 10 years. (Boy, am I convolutedly verbose today!)

Breaking your addiction

I was born in 1965, so for me, breaking a digital addiction simply means going back to find the way I lost, and that requires no faith. But you were born in 1985 and cell phones and the Internet are your cultural heritage, so for you it would mean going forward. Are you ready to embrace the future?

Hippy hoppy happy birthday to me!

I came back late from the Geek Dinner last night (wine sponsored by Perdeberg).

The venue was a very good choice, IMO -- a place on Greenmarket Square called Da Capo, which actually has big screens as a standard feature. I would hereby like to publically hint to all my comrades to urge for a Bladerunner Party at this venue, and to suggest the first commercial release of the movie as the version to be screened*. In fact, since I had a really horrible birthday this year, I think the world owes me a Bladerunner Party.

* I recommend this version for newbies, because the presence of the narrator helps to guide you through the plot. We can always have a movie analyst explaining the issue around the Director's Cut for those who don't know the history, to contextualise the ending. I noticed that there is now also something at Amazon called the Final Cut, which I guess may be a combination of the two -- would someone who has seen  all three like to offer an opinion here?

The Geek Dinner talks were entertaining. Kerry-Anne spoke about CapeTownDailyPhoto.com, the site she and husband Paul run as a hobby, proving herself to be as comfortable and witty in public speaking as she is in her writing.

There was also a talk by one Donna Metzlar which finally gave me a glimpse of understanding into (not sure that's the right preposition) why one might want to belong to a gender-specific professional association -- something which usually turns me off like anchovy-scented deodorant.

But my keenest ears were reserved for Andy's experiences in Nigeria, because now that I have managed to persuade my associates to schedule a Project Management course in Abuja, we have to actually pull it off!

Jerith, Graham, two of the Jonathans, etc. at the Geek Dinner.

This morning, still tired from the late night and from having been unable to remain asleep for the two hours before alarm time, I worked at an ineffectve pace on my preparations for the course for Sandvik, due to begin tomorrow. I'd already made peace with the fact that my work there meant I would have to miss the workshops and dance battle at the African Hip-Hop Indaba.

And then at the eleventh hour, a most opportune misfortune befell my client, and they requested a postponement of the course. My neighbour (the drummer to whom I referred at the Geek Dinner last night in the context of calculating interest on barter loans) was here loafing about whilst musing through his plans for the first anniversary of his dating relationship, while I gaily sang songs from old musicals in the shower in exuberance over my fortune. It was with pure delight that I waited in the queue at Computicket, chattering away to some young woman who was far more keen to spend three times the amount on a ticket for the Wine Festival, and thereafter went off to visit my former flatmate, sharing my joy over a cup of tea and a game of Crazy Eights. God is kind.

Whitelist me, please!

Would all the e-mail administrators in local, regional and national government departments throughout South Africa kindly whitelist my e-mail address?! The reason why you are getting so much mail from me sent to your servers is because so many of your colleagues are requesting Project Management training from ProjectManagement.co.za, and when I take all the trouble to write them carefully worded, contextual, individual responses to their specific questions, I would appreciate it if you didn't treat me like some bulkmail robot!

Programme in IT Project Management: Course overview

OK, I have some more info about this course from Martin now:

The objective of the programme is to equip project managers, owners and key resources on IT projects with the knowledge required to successfully complete IT-intrinsic projects. The programme first covers basic project management principles, processes and techniques before presenting the application of these to the IT domain. All aspects of IT systems development and implementation are covered, including bespoke software development and the roll-out of major enterprise systems (e.g. ERP, CRM or SCM). The programme does not present a specific methodology (e.g. PRINCE2, Agile or Scrum), but covers all the important subject areas of IT project management.

Click here for course dates or send us your details if you want to receive more info when we have it available.

University-certified course in IT Project Management

It's official! Well, no, not quite, but almost: we had the meeting yesterday, and unless some evil authority thinks up something to put a spanner in the works, our first university-certified Programme in IT Project Management on NQF level 7 will be held in Cape Town early in the second quarter of 2009. The course will be presented by Martin Butler (senior MBA lecturer and an experienced IT Project Manager), whom I regard as an awe-inspiring systems thinker and an extremely good presenter. You can't imagine how chuffed I am about this. We should be ready to start taking booking enquiries via the ProjectManagement.co.za Web site by mid-July, but if you like, you can fill in an enquiry in the meanwhile if you want to be notified as soon as more information becomes available.

Putting a SPIN on things

Too nerdy and too niche, said Joe in response to my request for a talk explaining and comparing the different IT Project Management methodologies at the Geek Dinner in May, and suggested that I go to a SPIN meeting, which I finally managed to do last night. Never mind nearly running out of petrol, getting caught in the rain and being a little dull from a lack of sleep, because I was completely refreshed by the conversations I had about Agile, Blackadder, PSNext, Goldratt, Bladerunner, Scrum, the importance of melody in musical experience, The Goal, Red Dwarf, RUP, managing risk in IT projects in the DRC, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, processes versus tools, and the unimportance of PMI certification in the pursuit of happiness as an IT Project Manager. I left the Cape Town Yacht Club (which is where I ended up after the meeting with Gerhard and Emile, two experienced systems thinkers) sometime before midnight. Memorable phrases of the evening include, "Abuja is like Bloemfontein. You have to experience Lagos!" and "Friends don't let friends use Microsoft Project." I can't wait for the next meeting. So I won't. We're going to make a plan to get together sooner. In the meanwhile, I am getting ready for an important meeting between ProjectManagement.co.za and the university this afternoon to develop a certification course in IT Project Management.

StarCamp

StarCamp was very nice. (Sorry, I'm all out of intellectual-sounding adjectives.) The venue was perfect, the company was perfect, and some of the talks, like those by Phil Barrett, Ian and others were actually quite good too. To be honest, I didn't care all that much if one or two of them dragged on a bit on topics which were of no interest to me whatsoever, because the nice thing about an unconference is that you can fiddle around on your laptop, fall asleep (like Paul!), get some tea or go smack someone in a Wii boxing game next door without feeling like you've committed some violation of protocol. Of course, there are some basic rules of etiquette that do apply, but they are not vastly different from those you should adhere to when some friends come over for pizza.

I went out with Dennis, Simon, Adrianna, David (well, one of the Davids) and Neil (the other Neil) after the first day, and with a much bigger crowd at the end of the second day. Jonathan (the main Jonathan) found the discovery of my longstanding desire to own a Captain Janeway uniform perfectly entertaining, and made all sorts of psychological deductions from it. We all argued about when Descartes had lived and were all proven wrong.

Simon, Neil, Jeremy. (Graham's fingers in the background.)

I don't think one should have StarCamp too often, though. About once every second or third weekend would be often enough.

How much does it cost to go to StarCamp?

Dennis just asked me the price, so in case there is anyone else who is confused: This is not a conference. It's an unconference. You don't have to pay; effectively, you actually you get paid: free lunch, free t-shirt, free talks by free open source people!

StarCamp this weekend

I'm still recovering after a busy couple of weeks teaching Project Management courses at the Southern Africa Trust in Johannesburg, at Parliament, at the RSSC in Swaziland and for the company of wine people back here in the Cape, and I have two more days of private tuition for from mining employees from Sierra Leone before the "training season" is over, with plenty of loose ends to tie up, like reassessments, certificates, feedback reports, invoices and disbursement claims. I undertook to give an overview of Project Management software at StarCamp in Muizenberg (which everyone seems to want to call Muizenbuuuuurg), and I am going to have to prepare that sometime between now and Saturday morning! (StarCamp is free, by the way; sign up ASAP if you want to come.) I have decided that I don't want to "do Baden Powell" more often than I need to, so I have booked myself a place in the local backpackers for the night, since it's a two-day event. (All these decades of living near the sea, and I have hardly ever been to the beach. Funny how geek events can change your life.)

BarCamp, StarCamp, PodCamp, Geek Dinners and 27 Dinners: A brief political history for Capetonians

BarCamp

In 2006 on a very cold weekend, a bunch of geeks (plus a couple of people who felt that by hanging around geeks, they could make money) met in a dark and uninspiring school hall in Kuils River, where they were very inspired. Based on similar events held elsewhere in the world (if you're really interested, you could probably get someone to explain how FooCamp spawned the BarCamp revolution), the Cape Town event was largely driven by Conrad Strydom, but nobody seems to know what has become of him since.

Many of the guys who were at the Cape Town event have now become quite famous as a result of the BarCamp catalysis.

Dave Duarte, Rafiq Philips, Adrian Rossouw and
Miguel dos Santos at BarCamp in June 2006.

Geek Dinners and 27 Dinners

One of them, Dave Duarte (a then colleague of Conrad Strydom) co-presented case study on blog marketing featuring Stormhoek, a small wine company which managed to make a name for itself on a shoestring budget by effectively harnessing the power of the Internet and social media. Graham Knox, Stormhoek's owner, spoke of how they sponsored so called "geek dinners" — parties held by computer guys who had blogs — in America and other countries, in exchange for having these guys say something about their wine on the Internet. These could be costume parties or formal dinner parties — any kind of party where wine is consumed.

As part of Stormhoek's South African launch, Dave and Graham started organising dinners in Cape Town. Here, a "geek dinner" took the specific form of a sit-down dinner in a restaurant with talks by volunteer speakers, and sometimes also with live entertainment.

The Mike-Stopforth-comes-to-town get-together at Yindees that led to
more formalised 27 Dinners and Geek Dinners in Cape Town.
In the foreground are Conrad Strydom and Miguel dos Santos.

Soon, however, some of the people who attended the parties began to feel that they had been cheated: they had expected a get-together of computer enthusiasts, but instead, they had to listen to yuppie marketing pitches and to pay a lot of money for very little food (a hallmark of nouvelle cuisine). As a result, a breakaway movement called the Original Geek Dinner was formed with the wine sponsor varying from event to event, while Dave (teaming up with Mike Stopforth, with whom he later went into business) continued with a series of events which became known as the 27 Dinners, being held on the 27th of every second month. (The latter movement soon spread to Johannesburg, Durban and elsewhere). In spite of the split, many people such Ian Gilfillan and I continued to attend both events on alternating months.

Jonthan Endersby, Joe aka Swimgeek (and other names, including his real name) and
Jaco Engelbrecht at one of the early events organised by Dave and sponsored by Stormhoek.
After this one in February 2007, Geek Dinners and 27 Dinners became two separate events.

Rather than being opposing "camps", the two groups may be considered branches (or perhaps clusters) which focus on different aspects of Information Technology. Both have a leaning towards Open Source, but the 27 Dinner movement focuses on the outward, glitzy side of new media, with a lot of emphasis on marketing, while the Geek Dinner also includes the guts and the engine room.

Through a curious set of coincidences involving Jaco Engelbrecht and Die Mystic Boer, I got to know Jonathan Hitchcock. In spite of having missed both BarCamp and all the 27 Dinners, Jonathan soon became one of the most diligent organisers of the Geek Dinners.

Rudi van Niekerk, Graham Poulter and Wessel Venter at the September 2007 Geek Dinner.

Related events, such as visits to South Africa by Wikipedia's founder, and the Open Coffee Club (run by Eric Edelstein and focusing on business networking amongst entrepreneurs) attracted members of the same crowd, and so the movement grew. (Ian Gilfillan is leading Cape Town's bid to hold the next Wikimania conference. Results are due any day now.)

Glen Verran interviews Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia at the Creative Commons event in Observatory.
In the background is Zalta, Stefano Sessa's girlfriend.

PodCamp

Being into "broadcasting IT", one of the original guys from BarCamp, Glen Verran (host of the ZA Show podcast), stuck with the 27 Dinner branch and began organising an event focused on new media. The first Cape Town PodCamp will be held on 20 October. (ProjectManagement.co.za is sponsoring a prize draw for a copy of James P. Lewis' Fundamentals of Project Management.)

*Camp (StarCamp)

With Conrad Strydom being AWOL and thus no plan for another BarCamp for 2007, another original BarCamper, Neil Blakey-Milner (a Geek Dinner affiliate who also frequents 27 Dinners) began organising *Camp — a kind of "bigger, better BarCamp".

I was a (very nervous) speaker at the original BarCamp 2006. I chose to do a short presentation on Lotus Notes/Domino as an development platform, showing some of the applications which I have developed for the Web and for the Notes client, including the templates which run content-managed Web sites such as ProjectManagement.co.za and Pavatile.co.za. (Thank goodness Adrian Rossouw told me he found it interesting, because without that reassurance I would probably would have gone and hidden myself in a cupboard afterwards.) As a keen social chessplayer, I put my name down to speak about the social aspects of chess at a Geek Dinner in mid-2007, but later chickened out. However, Bryn Divey came and sat down next to me at the Creative Commons event at the Armchair Theatre in Observatory, and talked me into doing a short presentation for the following Geek Dinner after all. I switched my subject to Project Management in Five Minutes Flat, but actually delivered it in ten minutes. Since this was quite well received, I thought it might be a good idea to do a longer presentation at *Camp, focusing specifically on Project Management software, with plenty of demos, particularly of scheduling software. I had initially wanted to present a workshop for newbies on the technical steps involved in setting up a formal personal Web presence (from domain registration through DNS setup and mail forwarding to building and uploading a Web site), but I can't feasibly do both. I have also been promising a talk on graphic design for non-designers, which I intend to deliver in abridged form at the next Geek Dinner.

*Camp is scheduled for 8–9 December 2007.

Geek stuff

I am quite tired after last night's Geek Dinner — had to be at the office at 07:30 this morning to prepare for an important meeting. I'd been on the organisers' mailing list but being so busy and flustered during the past month, I wasn't able to commit myself to a meaningful contribution. I had been given a solemn promise by a very serious and businesslike guy from the Zandberg wine estate that they would sponsor an event, but he evaporated, and nobody responded to the enquiry which I filled in at at the Zandberg Web site in an effort to re-establish contact. GetWine, who have previously been happy to sponsor a Geek Dinner, rose to the occasion, and I asked whether I might be the one to thank them for their sponsorship and promote their special offer. Jonathan was a little amused, since I do not actually drink wine myself (in spite of the fact that my father raised me properly). Wessel, who drove there and back with me, informed me that the wine was very good.

Rudi, Graham and Wessel at the Geek Dinner. At the end of the table (looking like a ghost of Jean-Luc Picard — sorry, low lighting) is Andy.

One of the talks last night was about what it takes to become an issuer of digital certificates, delivered by Stefano Rivera. I was a little distracted during the talk by other things which were happening in the room, but I thought, never mind, I know enough about certificates to do what I need to do with them once in a blue moon. Now at this point in my narrative, imagine an ominous change to a minor key in the background music, with nervous cello's and some rumbling timpani. Since I will be out of town next week and my Notes certificate was due to expire during that week, I had to recertify my Notes id this morning. A while back, I had changed my organisation name and moved my mail file to another server, since we are no longer running two Notes domains, but only one. So I reckoned I should recertify myself with the new organistion's cert.id. Logical, perhaps, but also unfortunately wrong: Just before the Big Meeting at 10:00, I locked myself out of my own mail file and all the other applications which I had developed and to which I had Manager access! Fortunately, my mail file was still open on another computer with a locally stored id file, and I could rectify my mistake by resending the request to the Administrator's mail file and then using the old organisation's cert.id to certify the copy of my id. I then replaced the messed up id on the server with the decent one. Perhaps I will have to cross-certify my id again at some stage, but perhaps I should not exacerbate a potentially shaky situation by acting preemptively. What I (re-)learned from this temporary disaster was that what appears behind the slash is not an indication of the domain to which you belong. Evidently, I am still a citizen of a country which no longer exists, and as long as it issues me a passport, I can travel. Bullet number two of the conclusion: I should probably listen more attentively to Stefano Rivera.

One of the most exciting talks last night was by Neil Blakey-Milner. An event called StarCamp is being planned for December, and the format is exactly what I would have wanted in a geektech event. More about this later. I still wanted to say something about the conversations that Dennis, Wessel, Graham, Arno, Christèl and I had at the table too, but I've got to go and do my to-do list now. Apologies to those to whom I have not created hyperlinks yet. Will try to rectify this faux pas when I get back from my trip.

Getting to know your friends through Facebook applications

I have very few 'Facebook friends' — people I met on Facebook. Most of the friends I have there are people I got to know in some other way, who also happen to have Facebook profiles. Having said that, it is still interesting to find out how little some of us know about each other, and in that way, Facebook is helping us to get to know each other better.

Naturally, one sees one's friends adding pictures or signing up for events relating to things you didn't know interested them. But what is also insightful is what the Facebook applications they want you to add say about the relationship. Here are a couple of exmples: Numerous friends have asked to 'compare movie taste' with me, not realising that I hardly ever watch movies nowadays. Others have generously sent me drinks using the 'Booze' application, not realising that I don't drink booze (of course, this is 'virtual booze', but nevertheless something to which I can't relate). Yet others suggested that I add the 'Are You Interested?' application, unaware of the fact that I am most decidedly unavailable for any kind of hanky panky. And the furthest from the mark of all, perhaps, is the request to add the 'Astrology' application from people who do not realise that I am entirely allergic to astrologers. Granted, most of the people who have sent these requests have not spent very much time with me in the 'real world' either; we may have met through a networking event, at Mystic, or through some other group situation, and chatted only briefly on subsequent occasions.

There was a tag-game amongst bloggers a while ago in which you had to tell five things that people don't know about you. Maybe I should write something along those lines, making a list of all my everyday eccentricities which would have been quite obvious if the circumstances to which they apply had occurred somewhere during previous social encounters.

Geek question

Here's a question for anyone who knows something about databases. I have two spreadsheets (or databases, if you wish, but I will be receiving the data in spreadsheet format) and I wish to find the common records. There may be some field differences, but essentially there will be two or three fields which can be used for mapping purposes (representing name, surname and organisation). I want to have a small application which can run a query to identify the common records. It must be easy for me to feed in the data, e.g. I want to be able to provide the two source files as comma-delimited text files or simply as spreadsheets, and then push a "Compare" button, and get a report. If anyone wants to take this on as a little project, or simply to give me advice about a suitable approach, please contact me. The volume of records won't be huge (a couple of hundred at a time), and there are one or two nice-to-haves which I guess I could raise (e.g. the ability to run a comparison based on either a specific field's values or on the values in a combination of fields), but let's keep the scope simple for now. This is only for a single user — me — so please do not start thinking of buffer pool size or anything beyond this simple request...

Project Management seminar

I recently went to Sun City as one of the speakers at a seminar on Project Management. It was the first time I'd ever visited the place, and I was glad that I got paid for being there because I cannot imagine wanting to go there for fun, although people who like golf, or who have a horde of children to be entertained, could justifiably have a different perspective on the place — and the food, and even the coffee, was excellent. But I prefer real rocks, and plants that choose where they want to grow. Disneyland is more honest. It doesn't pretend to be real life.

People

My topic was An Introduction to Project Scoping and Planning, and I also assisted Celeste Venter in facilitating a workshop on the third day. I met a number of interesting people, including a PMP who works for Siemens and who appeared to be the very embodiment of what you'll learn a good Project Manager should be — a man of uncommon emotional maturity and humility. I also met the Issue Manager for the Gautrain project and arranged to interview some of her colleagues later (got something up my sleeve, don't want to reveal all now).

Microsoft Project and PSNext

I will be going back to Johannesburg at the end of the month to present a course for a team of researchers at Wits university, and will then complete the advanced training which is necessary for me to offer training in PSNext in Cape Town. At the Sun City seminar, I also met one of the guys from the project office of a major retail bank, and I arranged to go and take a look at their Microsoft Project setup. They have both PSNext and Microsoft Project, and following my own initial evaluation of the one versus the other, it was very handy to get his perspective on which one is better for what. Since I will be continuing to present both a Microsoft Project course and now also a course in PSNext (contact me via ProjectManagement.co.za if you want details), I found his insights invaluable. He also provide best practices for Microsoft Project. Some of these were things I'd figured out for myself already, and some were new. For example, I use a "noun plus verb" approach for naming lowest-level tasks; what I will now also adopt is a "verb plus noun" approach (i.e. the reverse) for the naming of milestones. Things like this seem like pedantry to first-time users, but if you have seen some of the vague and ambiguous project plans which have come out of major organisations prior to training, you will understand why tips of this sort are important tools to producing good plans.

Groupwork on the final day of the seminar.

Seminar dynamics

Inter alia, I also learned some valuable lessons on how social events can assist in building a learning environment, as I saw the effect on the collaboration between participants in the groupwork session which followed a visit to the shebeen the night before. (It wasn't really a shebeen, it was a pub, but the Sun City people seem to like to call it a shebeen so that you will think you are getting a township experience even though you are surrounded by security and opulence.)

Supper at the shebeen which was not a shebeen.

My role in this industry

I was chuffed to discover that I am indeed fulfilling a valuable niche role in this industry (hmmm, 'niche role' seems too much of a mixed metaphor, but I can't think of anything more fitting right now). In spite of increasingly good feedback from participants on both my software courses at the university and the in-house customised training which I present, I have struggled with self-confidence because I am not as good at this or that aspect of Project Management as so-and-so is. After this seminar, I feel much more confident amongst my peers, knowing that what I do, I do well, and that this adds value. Not everybody can simplify the complexities of Project Management like I can for a novice audience. Not everyone has the same insights. Not every Project Manager — no matter how good he is — is a good course presenter. Being an outsider — a consultant if you will, although I tend to balk at this over-used epithet — allows me to be objective in a way in which even senior insiders sometimes cannot afford to be, given the pressures of company politics. And objectivity coming from someone like me, who cares very little about business glamour, can be useful in getting companies to address the fundamentals of effective Project Management, while my attention to detail can make a big difference when using tools for effective Time and Cost Management, or in producing documentation.

And now I really need to go and plan the project of tidying my desk...

Need advice on the choice of a cell phone

We have two cell phone routers at work, and because of this arrangement, we can get two new cell phones. One of them will be mine. This leaves me with the task of choosing a model. Years ago when I was faced with this choice I gave my requirements list to a colleague who was into electronic gadgetry and asked him to make the choice on my behalf. Since then he has left the company, so I hereby request the advice of anyone who has an opinion on the subject. My requirements are as follows:

Presentation software

Dear Bill, I am sorry I so stubbornly refused to use PowerPoint before just because it was from Microsoft. After Freelance Graphics' very basic functions and Open Office's truck-like handling, I now finally have a vehicle which drives smoothly, gets around the bends safely and reaches the intended destination fast, without requiring detours. The custom animation features alone are worth the money. My presentation at Sun City is going to be very smart. You are allowed to say, "I told you so."

Communication

My mother phones me.
"Have you read the most recent article about Facebook in Die Burger?" she asks.
"No, I haven't. Why?"
"This time it's really serious. They are saying that Facebook is very bad, and dangerous, and they have all the evidence. I thought that I should warn you."
"Oh. OK. So why do they say that it is bad?"
"I don't know, I haven't read the article yet, but I will keep it for you."

A few days later she phones me again.
"Can you tell me what MXit is?" she asks.
"Yes, it's a program that you can install on a cell phone to make SMSing cheaper," I reply, trying to keep my answer simple — and neutral.
"How much do you know about it?"
"Not a lot, but you can ask me questions and I will see whether I can answer them." I am expecting something similar to the conversation about Facebook, so I add, "I don't have MXit, because my model of phone is too old to be able to take it."
"Oh, I just wanted to know how much you knew about it. It's a really fantastic thing, and I am going to install it. Maybe you can get another phone."

My desirable domain — the story goes on

Afrihost sends me another note, this time in reply to mine: "Hi Tania, We have received a request to transfer the domain. We have come to realize that the person who requested the domain does not own the domain. We will inform them. Thanks."

Then 'Bjorn' mails Afrihost (and copies me, and my client): "I have not requested this!"

Teehee. Someone's in trouble. Not sure who yet.

Uh, excuse me, dude... that's actually MY domain!

I'm the tech and admin contact for more SLDs than I can remember. Today I get a ticket reply request from UniForum to tell me that Afrihost is trying to change the DNS settings on one of my domains (nogal one that cost my client several thousand bucks after we had to negotiate with the sniper who beat me to registering it a couple of years ago). I have no business relationship with Afrihost (the Web site is hosted on our own server, and I am using my own DNS provider), so I send them a little note asking them what they are trying to do, and why. (Needless to say, perhaps, I also send the magic cookie back with a "Deny" in the subject line.) I get a friendly little e-mail message from Afrihost (not in reply to mine — they haven't read mine yet) to tell me that their client, Bjorn, from such-and-such a paving company, has asked them to take over the hosting of this domain, and could I please do this and that within 24 hours. If I knew how to raise one eyebrow independently from the other, I would do that at this point, although no-one is watching. I reply via e-mail, "Your client does not own this domain and the move is therefore denied." Did Afrihost perhaps neglect to tell their client Bjorn that he needs to register his own domain in order to have it hosted?

A brief comparison between Microsoft Project and PSNext

So, I am back from Johannesburg. Several friends SMSed regularly asking when I would at last be coming back from "Sodom" (sic), at what precise time I would be home, and so on. And they didn't want to borrow money, so I felt cottonfluffily happy at being so wanted. My cup runneth over. (And I was only gone for three days!)

Well, the purpose of the visit was largely fulfilled: I learned enough of what I need to know about PSNext to get going as a trainer on this enterprise Project Management software, and I negotiated the basic terms with the distributor. I have Tomcat running on my laptop and the training database installed, plus all the Java components, so I am almost ready to roll. I do still want to evaluate some of the free Open Source Project Management offerings out there so that I can see where they fit into the landscape (I downloaded OpenProject a long time ago and never got round to installing it), and I also need to to update ProjectManagement.co.za with details about the various options.

I haven't read the distributor's feature comparison yet, but if I had to provide my own summary of Microsoft Project versus PSNext, I would say that there are two major differences:

Firstly, Microsoft Project appears to be designed "bottom-up", while PSNext is designed "top-down". What I mean is that Microsoft Project is a desktop scheduling tool with complex add-ons to enable you to do enterprise-level collaboration and reporting. It is feature-rich, but then all the users have to pay for all the features instead of just paying for those they use. PSNext, on the other hand, is designed for use by a Project Office or Programme/Portfolio Manager and then also for everyone higher up in the organisation and lower down in the Project Management hierarchy. As such, it allows for many user-defined fields and roles, and licencing is based on a per-feature basis. (Contact me if you want me to show you what I am talking about.) So if a certain user only needs to use timesheets and to view his own assignments, there are licence tokens used only for that and nothing more. A Project Manager would typically also use the planning components and the resources, so additional licence tokens would be used in his case.

Secondly, Microsoft's application architecture is (no surprise) "Microsoft-based". It integrates quite well with other Microsoft Office products and with Outlook. (For the last three years or so, Microsoft Project has been marketed as an extension of the Microsoft Office suite. In fact, I think they are now calling it Microsoft Office Project.) PSNext, on the other hand, can run with any regular database as a back-end: DB2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server (if you insist), and I think even MySQL. Being Java-based, there are connectors for many things (I think via XML, but I can't remember if I was told this or whether I just assumed it). I still want to get the reading matter on how to create the dynamic links with SAP systems and the like, but my impression is that it's not nearly as cludgy or expensive to set up as sewing together a Microsoft Project collaboration portal with enterprise integration.

I certainly do not intend "throwing out" Microsoft Project -- it has its place, and I will continue to train users on it -- but there are simply situations where PSNext is the better option, with a vast number of features which Microsoft Project simply can't offer as part of a normal, native installation.

Number one in South Africa for paving

Whew, at least Pavatile is back on top again too now. It had slipped to number two (to my horror) and I reckoned I knew why, so I made the necessary change last week, and it appears to have worked.

Number one in South Africa for Project Management

That's interesting. We have been at number two for over a year, and although the course schedule is up to date, I haven't had the time to flesh out the content regarding IT Project Management and several other areas of detail. In spite of this, we've made it to the top.

U het opgedateer tot die nuutste weergawe van Firefox

Rêrig, is dit wat ek gedoen het? Sjoe, né. Ek weet nie hoe ek dit sou gesê het nie, maar in elk geval nie só nie. Miskien deur dit in die lydende vorm te sê, sonder die "u". Dankie anyway vir die effort wat wie-ookal ingesit het om 'n Afrikaanse Webblaaier wat wérk, daar te stel. Die uwe sal probeer stilsit en waarderingsvol soetwees.

Klik gerus op die vriendelike hiperskakel wat deur die hierbogeplaaste skermafbeeldinkie verskans word indien u belangstel om u genotlikheid verder uit te brei deur derglike Afrikaanslike snertlikhede.

Terloops, indien u dit nog nie gedoen het nie, gaan leer Anglisaans. U mag dit dalk nuttig vind indien u in die toekoms verdere vertaalde "toepassings" gaan gebruik.

Die uwe gaan nou poog om 'n diep ordentlike Afrikaanse Webwervaring te geniet.

Haai, ek besef nou net: Ek was 'n "jy" toe ek die "toepassing" begin installeer het, en 'n "u" teen die tyd wat ek klaar was. Dit wys jou net, jy kry sommer 'n heavy "opdatering" van jou sosiale status ook wanneer jy die Vuurjakkals gebruik.

Yeeeeha!

Yay! I am supposed to put multiple Domino search options into a single "page" in a Domino Web application. You can't seem to get multiple Query fields into a $$SearchTemplate, so the only options I could think of were using iframes to "embed" other search pages, or to plak JavaScript onto a page, form or document. I could get the cut-and-paste JavaScript to work in a plain HTML document, but not in Domino, so I tried the iframe, but when the query ws submitted, it wasn't putting the results into the top target, in spite of the fact that this principle works in other contexts if you ensure that both the frame containing the page, and the framed page have the base target correctly specified. The results themselves, on click, did the right thing, but that isn't so surprising, since I have other results pages at the site which work on that principle already.

I discovered then that the reason I couldn't get the simple Javascript drop-down searchboxes to work was because the Domino pages, documents and forms were automatically generating their own <FORM> tags, and my own form code was being sandwiched in between, rendering it impotent. And then... I thought of simply closing Domino's automatically generated tag using Passthru-HTML, and it worked! By then opening another <FORM> tag after my own code, I can get the Domino form to work in addition to my own, so I now have complete JavaScript and Domino functionality!

This mystery has been baffling me for years and it is now apparently solved. What is pretty cool is that I can now have JavaScript in the site's layout template, and for this application, I don't even need any JavaScript in the page header. Well, I think it should work in all sections of the site, but I have only tested it in a form, not in docs and pages yet. Nevertheless, I am so glad I didn't give up today, as I had been tempted to do...

Snippets

Ag, jong, ek het al weer te min tyd vir skryf... Net 'n paar brokkies...

Are you curious about who is to blame for eNaTIS, the new National Traffic Information System that has frustrated citizens so imensely and causes such a loss of productivity in all sectors of industry? These are the culprits... (If you're an employee of Tasima, don't tell your friends. Say you're doing under cover work for the police, and you won't be lying.)


Dirk Winterbach en sy krygsvroue nou die aand. (Ons het dié aand saamgeëet. Die vroue het nie geëet nie, hulle het net gestort; dit het ingereën.)

And here's another example of how not to do it

This is a continuation of my Big Moan about the inappropriate use of the word technology.

This piece of screenshot is from Facebook.

Internet & Technology is a hybrid classification. It combines two different levels of granularity and is semantically befuddled anyway. Technology should be a higher-level category; Information Technology should come below that, and Internet, or  Internet and Cyberculture below that. (See Information Architecture For the World Wide Web for further clarification of what I mean by hybridization and granularity).

More about the Geek Dinner

I didn't really have the time to write a comprehensive report of the last (or was it actually the first?) Geek Dinner, and I don't really have the time now, so I will just do this in snippets.

Talks
The talk I enjoyed most was actually the one of which I didn't have any high expectations. Jonathan Endersby wants to start a collaborative project to develop a restaurant review site, for the love of it and then if money happens, well, cool. He gave a good explanation of how he anticipated it should work from the user side, and also why; and then the conversation really got interesting when someone at Andy's table said, but why not develop the application in such a way that it could work for other types of reviews too, e.g. cars, books, hotels or whatever? (I am quite a fan of multi-purpose applications, so my ears stood up at that point.) Jonathan explained that such work was already being done by the developers of microformats (I think I first heard about microformats from Rafiq at BarCamp), but that it had become evident that subject experts would be required to identify the fields relevant to the specific industry or item applications of such a system. When it became obvious that one size would not fit all, and the system would have to be huge to accommodate every possible permutation of an item or event or service or whatever might be reviewed, there was a bit of a disappointment in the air -- until someone came up with the suggestion that instead of dumbing down the entire application/platform to an amorphous agglomeration of non-specific fields which were supposed to meet every need in order to suit the potential integration requirements of standardised formats, the dumbing down could instead be done by XML where required. I thought that was pretty cool way of thinking.

Some meta-comments
I read a number of other report-backs on the Geek Dinner, and I agreed with most of the finer points made in the blogs -- inter alia, that it would have been nice to have had more of an opportunity to chat with people besides those at one's own table. Some of the talks, I agree, exceeded their allocated time by far; and although the content was fine enough, we would rather have spent the time getting to know one another better.

Other ideas for geek events
I think that other types of geek events -- not just dinners with talks -- would also be nice, and I realise that not all people have the same taste in entertainment, but a big games day would be one thing which I think could work. I have a vision of this taking place in some huge house during winter, with a big pot of soup, pizza which gets delivered (or maybe Arno can cook?), and all sorts of games, including LAN games, board games, card games, insane debates, chess, trivia, invent-your-own games and possibly even some more physically strenuous outdoor activities, like a Viking-style battle using home-made polystyrene weapons.

The usual Monday admin blues

It's been weeks now. Weeks of network DNS, proxy, router, cache bla bla bla workarounds and I am still having intermittent problems as a result of whatever it is that Telkom did. I managed to solve Gabriel's problem with his mail notifications because I remembered that I could search the Notes/Domino 4 & 5 forum without actually having to login, and luckily I remembered that there was something there explaining that if you deleted some value in the notes.ini file, the notifications would be revived. Fine. At least I could VNC into his machine and fix the problem. But in the meanwhile my access to https sites is just dead. Hopefully it will come right again when I restart my computer with this gazillionth toggle between the one proxy setting and the other, but why should I have to spend so many valuable man-hours -- no, polymath-hours, which are decidedly more dear -- to fiddle with workarounds? (OK, don't jump on me now. I can call myself a polymath in spite of the fact that I know virtually nothing about network admin, as well as virtually nothing about anything else compared to God, Brendan Coulson and my history of art lecturer, Mr. Koperski.) I installed Firefox for Alex this afternoon and used Stii's workaround (which wasn't working in old-fashioned Mozilla), so Alex was able to access Absa again. So far so good. But what is next? Doesn't someone at the Geek Dinner please want to talk about Telkom and the recent DNS problems, and systematically and logically explain the features and benefits of the various vigilante groups? Thank-you. I have a headache now.

Indexing

It takes me no more than 48 hours to get indexed by Google. Is this, like, normal, or am I unusually privileged?

How to get a Web 2.0 life (the short version)

Dear Grace

As requested, here is a reply to your question about a permanent e-mail address, and also to the questions which you did not ask but would have asked if you knew to ask them. For now, I am going to give you the very short summary version.

Register your own domain using a domain registration service such as MyDomain. I use several such companies, and I can't really say which I prefer. There's also GoDaddy and RegistryDomains, to mention just two out of a thousand. The Americans are the most competitive and they tend to throw in a lot of free and useful services. One of these services which you will definitely need (all of the registrars I mentioned provide it) is e-mail forwarding. Some of them also provide POP mail. With forwarded e-mail, you can choose to have an e-mail account with your local village service provider (e.g. MWeb or the Apple Creek County Internet Company or the XYZ ISP) and have all of your e-mail to you@yourfancydomain.com directed to there. In your outgoing mail settings on your own computer, you specify you@yourfancydomain.com as the address which people will see, whereas actually your real e-mail account address is grace785@applecreekcompany.com. So nobody will ever know that you are actually getting your mail via some local yokels. Once you have had a big a fight with the Apple Creek Company about their rates and services, or you move to Zimbabwe or whatever, and thus decide to move your account to the Banana Republic Internet Company, you will just change the settings with the registrar to now send your mail to gracecat@bananacompany.zw, but your friends will still see you@yourfancydomain.com, and your e-mail will still come into the same e-mail box on your computer or on the Web (wherever you care to keep it). There are other ways of doing this, but I am talking quick and dirty here.

To keep in touch with what friends and family worldwide are doing, encourage everyone you care to know to sign up at Facebook, which is the most intuitive, full-featured social networking site I have ever come accross. In addition to Facebook, you may want to use Flickr to share pictures with the big wide world. (These services are free -- up to a point.)

Thirdly, to tell people what's new and how Julia is getting along after falling out of a tree, start a blog, preferably using WordPress -- I think it's at WordPress.com (I prefer a different platform, but there are reasons why it wouldn't be practical for you to use that). Friends and strangers will be able to post comments about what you write, if you choose to enable this feature. I recommend WordPress because it can be ported later, and as you mentioned, you don't want to be stuck with a specific service provider. The address of your blog will be http://whateveryouwant.wordpress.com -- however, you will later want to move it to a proper professional hosting service (such as ANHosting, which has an import tool for WordPress sites), so that you can have it at http://www.yourfancydomain.com -- but I wouldn't do that right in the beginning, because you'll be paying for hosting while you struggle to get your head around the technicalities of blogging in the first place. If you have a fight with your host later, you can port your whole site to another hosting service, but everyone who is used to visiting your site will see the same URL (address on the Internet).

As I said, this is the quick and dirty answer. The path is, in fact, frought with potential hitches, but short of paying someone to do it all for you, you will just have to go through the pain of getting Web-fit if you want to live this life! If you're lucky, you will make a couple of friends along the way who can guide you through some of the steps in exchange for home cooking. Ironically, it is always best to have real, tangible friends to help you lay down roots in the virtual world, so don't be overly hesitant to get to know the people you meet online in person.

All the best

Tania

The usual admin moan

Ag jong... It's been nearly a week and this Telkom thing is still not resolved. I have been switching back and forth between Telkom vanilla and Stii's workaround, and still I don't get uninterrupted constant access to all the places I need to go on the Internet. I need to solve a user's problem with mail notifications; I know exactly where and how to find the solution at the Notes forum, and I just can't get there...

RoseBlood site

The Wizard of Oz and I put in a good number of hours yesterday and managed to migrate Roelof's blog from the free WordPress space to a hosted area where we could fiddle with the CSS and get in our own graphics. (If it weren't for the Wizard I would have suffered immensely, and certainly wouldn't have got this far by the end of 2007, hehehe...) It's not all done — I stilll need to put in the interviews I did with the band members, provide a link to Dirk the Sculptor's page (and I still need to create his page!), edit and caption some pics, fix some bad punctuation, make a proper splash page, and a whole lot of other stuff; and at the moment it is hanging in there by threads with a cloaked redirect. But at least it is up! Go and take a look.

Conspiracy theory

Ek het net gewonder... is Google, Firefox en Linux nie miskien Raka nie?

The funny Googles that bring people to my blog

Other bloggers have reported the same strange phenomenon — you wonder why you get picked as an authority on that subject. It's like the improbability drive in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: They could have gone anywhere, but they ended up on your site. Here you have it, thanks to my built-in Google tracker — Some of the people who have searched Google during the past two weeks have ended up at my blog by using the following search terms:

There's a good reason why I have decided to put this into image files. As you can imagine, I don't want to become an overly popular destination for some of these terms!

Baldy rides again

Laurence's blog is back online.

My pretty app

My colleague Andrew recently complimented me on the Courier application which I made for Pavatile. The nice thing about the compliment was that I had forgotten about the application. After I demo'd it to all the users they simply went off and started using it the next day, and I didn't hear anything more about it, which meant that there wasn't anything which irked them. (It's quite a simple Notes database; no agents, no LotusScript, just @Formula language; one hidden view and a profile document for lookups; it sends mail notifications with doclinks to the trip requestor or trips co-ordinator; you can specify a preceding trip, and that's about it.) I was quite chuffed to find that they had been using it every day since I gave it to them.

I think Google loves me

I have been watching the Google referrers to my blog... and in the process I noticed that Google indexes me rather frequently. Then one fine morning I woke up and I was on top for a whole bunch of search terms I wasn't even trying to capture. I haven't even been using keywords in my blog till now, and I use the world's least popular blogging platform. I reckon I should start charging money for revealing my secret, hehehe...

Telkom smelkom

Telkom has recently imposed an apalling new fault reporting system on its clientele and longsuffering support staff. It is like something straight out of Catch-22. In the past, they used to be able to tell you when a technician would attend to your line which is down, and you could plan around that; and the techies themselves tended to get in contact with you regularly, even if the fixes were not that quick. Now they can't tell you when, and they also don't let you know afterwards when it has been fixed — you just have to keep checking the boxes in your server room yourself to see if this is your lucky day. They can tell you "a technician has been assigned" — no more. You can often be on hold waiting for them to take your call for over an hour. On two occasions since this system came into operation, our leased line has been down for nearly a week. It is so counterproductive having to spend the whole day using workarounds just to facilitate the normal operations of the business instead of getting down to my own work. The entire company's mail had to be channeled through an Outlook Express account on an old ThinkPad running Windows 98. How embarassingly primitive! Not to mention the fact that when it comes to mail, we normally "don't do Microsoft".

This occasion was the first time in my entire life that I actually felt a touch of disillusionment about making a living in South Africa.

Hacking

This page was edited on 2007.01.12

My blog tracks referrers (in other words, it is able to tell what site referred people to my site). If it was Google, it is also able to tell what people searched for that brought them here.

To those of you who are still visiting this site because you think I might know how to hack *M*X*i*t, you are in the wrong place! I have never even used *M*X*i*t. My cell phone is too old for me to be able to install it. Go away. And FWIW, if I knew know how to hack *M*X*i*t, I would tell its makers so that they can plug the hole. I certainly wouldn't document the step-by-step instructions on my Web site!

Most of my successful "hacks" (if you can even call them that) have simply been the result of been the result of going in through unlocked "back doors" of Domino Web sites, but there has actually also been an occasion when I got into a place where they stored the financial statements on the LAN of a large Cape Town engineering company (not a Domino thing). I don't believe in destroying people's stuff. When I find a vulnerability, I contact the site owners to tell them how to lock the door. I also tell them exactly what I have seen. (Once I got to a whole lot of credit card numbers of a Cape Town IT company's customers. I was not impressed by the lack of speed in their response.) And I expect the people who find vulnerabilities in my stuff to tell me and help me. It is not OK to use someone's ignorance as an excuse to make them suffer. How does that make you better than them? Rather teach them. Help them. Cure their ignorance. Give them a reason to admire you.  

Meta blog entry

Op die een of ander stadium skryf seker elke volgehoue blogger 'n metabloginskrywing, oftewel 'n blog oor blogging. OK, hier is myne...

VLOEK: Baie mense dink vloek is nog steeds in die mode. Wake up and smell the banana smoothie: vloek is al lankal uit die mode, net soos wenkbroue wat gepluk word totdat dit soos "cut here" stippellyntjies lyk. Vloek is glad nie so cool soos mense dink dit is nie. In fact, dit is so un-cool dat mense nou al besluit het om nie meer die KKNK by te woon nie omdat elke wannabe-musikant blykbaar deesdae dink hy moet vloek al het hy niks om oor te vloek nie. En as jy gereeld vloek, verloor vloek heeltemal sy nut.

FAVOURITE: Bloute.co.za is (ten spyte van die occasional drieletterwoord) my favourite blog.

GOOGLES: Some of the weirdest and most interesting Google search terms that have ended up in visits to my blog include (sic):

Why we need data cleansing

We are number one!

Flee feer to ed it my bog etnry

I recently saw this personal description at a dating Web site: "I am a man of charactor. I life by strong moral values and enjoy life and the challenge that it brings me. im a leader and always seek the purpose God created me for. Im humble and have alot of self convidence." (Sic.) He also described himself as "very attractive", and included a picture which proved the latter claim to be false; which also makes me wonder how humble he really is, and which, by inference, creates doubt about everything else which he said in his profile (except for the "self convidence")... But I digress. Inter alia, he mentioned that he had a post-graduate degree. Surely, then, he would at some time have had his writing edited by someone who knows how to spell (or how to use a word processor's spelling correction facility, for that matter). Why not invite nice ladies with spelling skills to edit his profile? This would be a perfect opportunity to prove the humility which he so "self convidently" asserts. After all, people who suffer from dyslexia and other learning difficulties need "self convident" representatives to create awareness of the challenges they face. I have three close family members and two colleagues who spell badly, and they all make a good deal of effort to have their public writing edited, and to improve their writing skills. But too many people just don't have enough respect for their readers to bother with improvement.

How bad does speillng hvae to get bfoere poeple sotp undretsadning cmopeltely? Pettry b ad, it smees, aoriccdng t o a Cbmridge U vinersity sutdy; bu t taht asume's taht y ou hav kompitunt rdeaers i n th e fsirt palce, w ho hav e arleaedy matsrered t he art of uncsramlbing t he mddile of t he wrod at a gnlace &switcihng 2 finettick reckognicion fr om tyme2tyme whyle ingoring shoddey pnuctuaton&grammer and sin tax. So the next question is: To how much bad spelling must a kid (or an adult) be exposed before his rate of learning to read becomes significantly impaired? There's already a furore in the education world around tween text slang — gr8, oic, ppl, etc. — teachers say it's messing up kids' ability to spell "properly". I'm not really in a position to make an informed comment, so my knee-jerk reaction is one of agreement. But let's try to be open-minded now: Isn't it just a matter of language evolving? Perhaps business letters twenty years from now will be stipped of the "Dear Sir" and "Yours faithfully" and the paragraphs in between, and replaced by a three-liner in M*X*i*t style which just gets to the point as quickly as possible (e-mail, with its simplified conventions, has already largely replaced the old fashioned business letter — until the parties get cross with each other and revert to faxed or hand-delivered printed formality). "Correct" English spelling is, after all, horribly inconsistent and difficult for people to learn unless they are blessed with superior mnemonic abilities and some exposure to the study of etymology. There's even a little-known movement aimed at changing the spelling rules of English completely to make them phonetical and consistent. In fact, I would have supported this movement if I had believed it to have a fighting chance against the traditionalists.

But I digress again. Let's at least just stick with the notion of consistency. Here's the real questoin wh ich I intneded gtteing to orgidnially, bfefore I g ot dis tracted by all the ot her isues sirounding speling: Jst h ow fzzy wil dtabase srch tools hav to ge t 4 th devolved ppl of th e fture to find th sutff they r lokoing 4? And at this point, I will stop playing devil's advocate and ask one final rhetorical question: Instead of producing idiot-compliant software, why don't we simply stop producing idiots?

Online dating

Since I know the Web better than he does and I have done this before, a friend asked me to assist him in getting signed up at an online dating service. Having got him sorted out, I decided that I would make a profile for myself so that I could login and see who's new around town and looking for friends — although I must say from past experience that finding friends via a dating site is not easy, so I wasn't all that hopeful. (Most people who sign up there are looking for a mate, and once you meet, they quickly forget that your profile said that you're not available for any hanky-panky.) I created my usual go-away-unless-you-wanna-be-friends-type-profile and the third person who clicked on me was one of Dave Duarte's friends! How's that for a small world! (I don't think he'd got to know me well enough to have recognised me without a picture, though.)

You'd be surprised how many of these people you actually run into in the world out there. I once met a guy at a party whom I recognised from such a Web encounter. I knew all about him, but he knew nothing about me, since he had never seen me, and I don't know if I had ever given him my real name. When he finally figured out where we had 'met', he wanted to know why we hadn't got together in the 'real world' before.
"You didn't like me," I reminded him.
"That can't be!" he said. "Why wouldn't I have liked you?"
"Because I told you that I didn't like you flirting," I replied.
We got on OK after that, though. It turned out he had met the hostess of the party (also via Internet dating), my old school friend, and had had a brief "thing" with her some months before, which accounted for his presence on the guest list that night.

Do you sometimes get the impression that the convolutions of Charles Dickens' plots were not so far-fetched after all?

Addictive Web site

In my mail this morning from my brother Anton:

I found this web site and ever since I've found myself going back to check what's evolving. It started 5 days ago with an ad in the Economist, where an Irish company, Steorn, challenged the scientific community to test their free energy machine.  Regardless of whether this is a hoax or if it really works, what's interesting is the discussions in the forums and the amount of press it's creating. Its a real-time mystery being played out on the Internet.
http://www.steorn.net

Good news for Domino bloggers

Hmmm, nice to see that my restored DNS settings have propagated! I deliberately messed them up a couple of days ago after I had at first tried to hack one of my sites remotely via a browser in an effort to redirect an errant URL. Not easy to over-ride some things, considering I had deliberately closed some typical Domino hacker doors to this domain a long time ago; I just managed to delete pages, but not to edit the template and obviously not to change the "$$" defaults. (Now please don't think that it's an invitation to hack my site just for the challenge of it -- I only do this stuff part-time and I really don't want the pain of having to become a security expert. If you do happen to stumble into a hole, just be nice to me and tell me what needs plugging.)

Now the good news! Adeleida told me that a blog template will be included with the next release of Domino -- beta available already, developed by the guy behind DominoBlog.com! Obviously a version 7 database isn't going to run with full functionality on a version 5 server, so I have decided to take up Franco's offer of hosting my future blog for experimental purposes. We're still back in the Domino Middle Ages over here, with users on Domino 5. I don't have the time to go through the hassle of upgrading everyone now, though -- I am the one who would have to answer all the questions. Instead, I will start blogging with a Domino 7 client once it's ready, and try out the Designer client too (if I get the time -- I thought I would have got the time to try out version 6, but no such luck). We've ordered a ThinkPad Lenovo, though (they're on special at the moment), and if I have my way, it's going to come home with me at night and be used at the office as a workstation during the day. Then I will have more time to play.

Techie job

Our ISP is short-staffed at the moment, and I am blogging about it, because the sooner they can get staff, the better it will be for us, their customers. Please visit their Web site for details. Their alpha geek attended BarCamp; speak to him first if you want to find out if this is for you.

Fiddling and twiddling with software

OK, let's be bold here. I am going to attempt to get this comments business up and running on this blog. The only problem is, to read them it appears that it uses a built-in dingetjie to launch the Notes Client (instead of a browser). And until I have a computer I can take home and configure the way I want it, I am not going to have the time to tweak this code.

Oh ja, and I take back what I said about Microsoft Project substitutes: I tried out the desktop version (Plan for Windows) of that project scheduling thingy from Twiddlebit. It does have equivalents for Microsoft's task types (in fact, it is quite nice and explanatory about the implication of the choices); however, I did not find an equivalent of effort-driven scheduling, which is a bit of a problem if you are, for example, assigning ten guys to share a workload, working under a supervisor and/or using one piece of rented equipment or rented premises. Mind you, I possibly didn't spend enough time looking for what I needed. I will report back when I can conclusively confirm things one way or the other...

OK, I have this Google thing figured out

How it works is this: If you search from Google.co.za, you have the option of either searching the Web or searching pages from South Africa. Even if you choose "the Web", you will not get the same set of results as if you searched from, say, Google.com or Google.co.uk. (Also, the .com will redirect you to the .co.za site if you're not careful at the start of the search.) So, the bottom line currently is: Pavatile ranks at number 5 if you search "the Web" from the .co.za site, and at number 16 if you search from the .com. We're nowhere significant in the .co.uk search, and I couldn't be bothered to search from Google Finland, Google Borneo or Google Antarctica, since those areas do not currently represent our primary target markets anyway...

What the... ?!

My blog tracks referers and stores the details in the blog database. Now, pray tell me if you know, how the dickens it happened that the search highlighted below led someone to my blog?!

Who needs Microsoft?

Mikhailo got himself an i-Mate, a kind of telephone with a built in camera, running the Pocket PC OS. So, last night when all I wanted to do was go home, he decided that he wanted to take a Microsoft Project file along with him to a meeting the next morning, and it was upt to me to "make that happen". In fact, exporting to Excel and viewing it on the mobile spreadsheet just wasn't gonna do it for him; he wanted to actually do the whole tutti of project scheduling and costing on that small gadget. Well, I teach a Microsoft Project course, so I am quite adept at making excuses for why you don't have multiple undo levels and all that, because I have been led to believe that the complex thinking which the program has to do requires enormous processing power and RAM...

Well, basically, I discovered, that's just a lot of twaddle; and we don't need twaddle in our lives. What we actually need is twiddle: I discovered Pocket Plan. For a Microsoft Project user, it's really intuitive. And there's a desktop version too (see screenshot above).

Cool, fine, multiple projects and all that are probably not going to be managed to the same degree of complexity, and you certainly don't have a multiplicity of view options, so don't imagine that as a Project Manager for the 2010 World Cup you're going carry every subproject in your pocket; but for the average Microsoft Project user, for whom the program is simply an ad hoc planning tool, Pocket Plan and its big brother, Plan for Windows, is a cool option.

Mikhailo left for his meeting this morning, with Hannes Pretorius' plan in his pocket.

Another step up!

Well, um, ja! I haven't even had time to put up photies of the weekend, or to tell you about my sneaky campaign to get Adrian to retain his beard, but I just have to announce that Pavatile has moved up another step in Google since last week: It's now at number FIVE in Google for the search term paving, and has risen to near the top for cobble and cobbles.

Who said Google doesn't care about meta tags?

These are meta descriptions, my friend! (And check out who is number one in South Africa for this search term!)

SEO success!

Pavatile is currently number six in Google for the search term paving!

Drat this inscrutible template!

I eventually thought I figured out what was overriding my rich text, and just when I thought I had control, I saw that my table text still wasn't the same as the body. OK, I will spend one fine evening taking a look at this CSS again...

BarCamp

On Friday, Laurence mailed me a notification of a two-day event for geeks. I was sort of surprised, because I didn't really think he regarded me as worthy — because I am blonde and female, but because I rather think I actually act blonde and female too, and the most complicated code which I have write rarely amounts to more than...

Lookup := @DbLookup("":"NoCache";"":"";"(lkpDocTypeCategories)"; docType; 2);
FancyValue:= @If(Lookup = "1"; "Document based on the product classification system"; Lookup = "2"; "Other product document"; "General document");
@If(@IsError(FancyValue); ""; @IsDocBeingRecalculated | @IsDocBeingSaved ; FancyValue; "")

...although I do think the computed HTML which Brendan taught me to use in Notes column headings is rather clever, and I did manage doing an Implode/Explode all in one expression recently without any help.

And although Lotus Notes can run on Linux and can integrate with MySQL (not to mention that IBM has thrown a lot into the OpenSource community in recent years), it isn't really all open. But the spirit of BarCamp turned out to be one of openness, so I was welcomed, and I met a couple of delightful fellows and a small number of women too, although most of the latter evaporated after the first day. It was actually quite touching to see that guys like Edrich and Ralph had come all the way from Durban, braving horrible modes of transport just to be there. And it goes to prove that geeks are not really abnormal reclusive mutants who like to live in troglodyte isolation; they crave company as much as other editions of homo sapiens do, it's just that normal mortals do not provide an appropriate interface for connectivity, which is why BarCamp is so welcome.

I missed Derrick, particularly as there were some presentations specifically about Python, and I saw something about raytracing on somebody's laptop as I walked by. I actually wanted to open my presentation with a reference to Derrick (because if it hadn't been for him, I would not have been there), but I decided to keep things as short as possible, being insecure about the fact that my presentation was about a commercial software platform.

Unfortunately I missed some of the first day's presentations, but I was present for Dave's well-prepared presentation about blogging as a marketing tool, which convinced me that Marius was right when he said I should create a blog for Pavatile's people to use. From Rafiq and others I learned why some of the code I had wanted to fiddle with in my own Neil Turner blog template should be treated with respect (in fact, I will now have to check whether I did not unwisely delete some of the more useful tags!). Rafiq is also campaigning to have TYFYC (thank-you for your comment) recognised as a ligit Internet acronym. (Meanwhile, I am still trying to figure out überhaupt how to make comments show up in this blog!)


Dave, Rafiq, Adrian and Miguel.

An unexpected thing happened after I left. The BarCamp had been held in a cold and grim school hall, so you would have thought that I would be happy to go home. I had become quite cosy in my chosen lifestyle of white linen, no more TV, and no internet connection at home. I had been quite proud of having given up my computer addiction for so long, with no regrets. But when I left the BarCamp, I didn't feel like going home at all. I went straight to an Internet café...

Introduction to my blog

Old picture of me (end of 2004) holding a blue-tongued skink.

For some years now I have been wanting a Domino-based blog. (The main reason was because I wanted the control of being able to edit offline, anywhere.) I certainly didn't want to have to reinvent the wheel by developing my own database, but what was available back in ancient times — BlogSphere — was buggy at the time. Finally in 2006 I found this template (which, I understand, is probably already quite old, because I am a couple of Domino versions behind the rest of the civilised world), but I got the thing up and running without having to read too many instructions, so I am well on the way to being quite pleased.