Today is the day that I officially begin writing up my thesis.
Cheap phone calls, yay!
Usually, it costs us 62.24 euro cents per minute to call home to ZA. With the “voordeelnummers” discount of KPN, it costs 43.57 euro cents per minute. Obviously we’ve activated this for the numbers we call often.
This weekend I decided to have a look see at the alternative long distance carriers again. We’d had a bad experience with Tele 2, but that was some time ago. After a bit of googling, I came across bel1601: we now call ZA at 7 (yes SEVEN) euro cents per minute and 5 cents startup per call. Tonight I had the privilege of paying EUR 1.90 for 27 minutes of chatting.
Bad, interface, bad!
Why do the clever people at Microsoft persist in labelling their buttons with “Ok” and “Cancel”, even when these words have almost nothing to do with the actions that will be performed when such a button is clicked? Take this dialogue for instance (I got to look at it many times as I was debugging an ITK memory allocation error with 700MB of data in memory):
It would be fantastic if one of the brightsparks up at Redmond suggested: “Hey boys, why don’t we rather label those buttons ‘Terminate’ and ‘Debug’?!” But they probably won’t, as labelling buttons with descriptive verbs is Apple territory.
My ADSL gets another upgrade
It seems that (finally) my ADSL will also be upgraded at the beginning of April. The monthly fee stays the same, but my unlimited 1.5Mbit/s down and 256 Kbit/s up will be changed to an unlimited 2Mbit/s down and 1 Mbit/s up connection. I was quite happy with my download bandwidth, but the upload was getting a bit restrictive.
Now I’ll be able to upload home-made porn much faster to the pay-per-view porn site that I run.
Prisoners are allowed to vote, I’m not
South Africa is a great country, but sometimes things can be completely crazy. It turns out that even prisoners can vote in the upcoming general election (it’s their constitutional right, apparently), but that I can’t, as I am working in a foreign country. Why are my constitutional rights considered less important? Is it because I don’t steal and pillage in my own country but earn a salary elsewhere?
I’m just wondering.
Python new-style object method resolution order
Caveat emptor! Due to the diamond-like inheritance structures frequently seen with new-style Python objects (i.e. all objects are derived from the “object” class), the Python method resolution order (MRO) has been slightly adapted.
It used to be left-to-right, depth first. With old-style objects, this almost never caused problems. With new-style, because of the common “object” ancestor, this could cause redundant occurrences (obviously due to the diamond structure). Typically Python, this has been solved in a simple yet effective manner.
Die, filthy comment spammers!
Spammers represent the lowest form of life, as we’ve established. They also seem to think it a good idea to paste meaningless comments on one’s weblog in order to promote some other website. This weekend, I deleted about 800 of these comments from my weblog. I wish these spammers all die from some extremely painful but slow-acting disease and that they also realise exactly why this is happening to them.
Converting VCARD to LDIF
So, you want to export all your addresses from evolution (which I use at work) and to import those addresses into your Mozilla Mail (or Thunderbird) at home. Once again, the software really bites. Evolution is too damn retarded to export anything else than VCARD (VCF) files. Mozilla Mail can import CSV (comma-delimited) or LDIF files.
Fortunately, there’s vcf2ldif. It’s far from perfect, but it’s miles better than nothing. Oh, BTW, this will probably segfault on your evolution VCARD file. I bashed its head in with my trusty gdb (a “debugger” to the less refined readers) and this patch is the result.
Andrew October threatens me with legal action!
Dear friends,
In December 14 of 2003, I read an on-line article that made me quite angry. In short, the article told the story of the time-honoured tradition where kids are encouraged to write letters to Father Christmas (or Santa Claus). The Post Office in South Africa had made an address available to which children could send their christmas lists. Andrew October, a South African journalist, lodged a formal complaint and claimed that this could “break the fragile spirits” of South African children.