Well my vote has been cast in the South African elections for the first time since I registered in 1999 and I’m feeling mighty proud about it. If you’re wondering why I never voted before then let me tell you it was mainly due to disillusionment with the political landscape in South Africa. Other than the ANC there has never been any other party capable of mustering a large enough following to make a viable bid to win the presidency in this country. The DA under Tony Leon always seemed to only be able to play on scaremongering white voters into voting for them by saying how terrible the ANC would be, while all the other parties were either too conservative or too fragmented to be able to make any serious impact in the government. This was until a few years back when the DA made a shift with Tony Leon resigning and Helen Zille taking over the party’s reins and winning the Cape government. Since then I’ve been fortunate to see some good action on her part locally here in Cape Town and with her as mayor the city really has managed to take a few steps forward. Add to that the ANC splinter party, COPE, that’s also managed to make a name for itself in the short time its existed and the political climate in SA seems a whole lot brighter. Hopefully these two parties will be able to give the ANC some serious competition and force them out of the sort of slump they’ve hit since the managed to take SA into its new democratic era under Nelson Mandela. Hopefully many other young people such as myself have also seen that this is the perfect opportunity to make our voices heard and make a stand here and now to let our leaders know that we’re serious about making this wonderful country into a shining light for all the other African nations and to make it a country to be proud of on the international stage. To think we’ve managed to come so far since the bad old days of apartheid is still amazing and its probably more important now more than ever to make sure that we realise how fortunate we are to live in one of the most beautiful and splendid countries in the world. So if you haven’t voted already then grab your ID book and go stand in the queue and become part of something great. Happy election day to all my fellow South Africans!
Monthly Archive for April, 2009
I stumbled on the following video from a Joystiq post the other day and found it incredibly amazing. Its 3 minutes of a guy running around doing parkour tricks while filming it from his perspective using a camera in his hand. For those of you who’ve played Mirror’s Edge this will seem even more amazing 
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTrf5anN4k8
Welcome to the slightly new and improved Counting Beans website. Now if you’ve been here before you’ll be wondering just what has changed so let me give you the breakdown:
- I’ve added blog badges for Ubuntu 9.04 and OpenOffice.org for those of you who want to try an OS and office suite that isn’t costly
- I’ve finally gotten around to adding Adgator and Google AdSense to the front page and post pages to once again try and get a tiny amount of cash for my ramblings.
- I’ve drawn up a list of all the game reviews I’ve done over the past few years and which I’ll update with any new reviews as they come out.
- I’ve added a bit more to my About Me page in case you have any interest at all in knowing a bit more about me.
- I’ve managed to get rid of the annoying bullet list images that were plaguing my last.fm plugin on the sidebar after fiddling around with the CSS.
Have fun exploring!
The Linux Foundation recently recently ran a competition to come up with an ad campaign to match that of Microsoft and Apple and the winner was recently announced. Check out the winning entry “What does it mean to be free” below:
As an advocate of open source software I’ve always used the fact that many governments around the world have made the switch to open source software as a cost cutting measure (such as the French police service) so I’ve been very interested in my own government’s move towards open source. Unfortunately it would seem that while the South African government is indeed looking at moving towards a FOSS implementation they are moving slower than a glacier when it comes to actually putting ideas into action. A recent article on MyBroadband.co.za has a quote from Arno Webb who is head of the State IT Agency’s FOSS programme:
…the move to open source software has not been as fast as we would have liked, but we are now entering a new era. In the past, open source deployments were mostly spontaneous and ad-hoc. We now have a more systematic approach.
It seems like one of the major stumbling blocks is that it usually takes the intervention of an open source advocate within departments to get them to look at its implementation and as soon as they move on to other departments or projects any progress is halted. Its a very apathetic attitude towards moving to a FOSS backend it would seem. The one department that seems to have made some inroads to moving to an open source system is the South African Revenue Service (SARS). While they have not yet fully migrated over to Linux there is a large portion of their staff and call centre operators that now use Suse Linux and they are currently also looking at implementing a thin-client Linux strategy.
In these times of recession its a very good ideas for alrge corporations and government organisations to look towards moving onto freer platforms. A lot of the times the cost savings far outweigh the hassle of moving from proprietary systems onto a more open system.
It came as no surprise to me that Microsoft has recently announced the decision to end production and sales of the Encarta reference software after 16 years worth of releases. I say that mainly because in those intervening 16 years there has been a huge shift in the way that computer users gather information. Encarta is really just a digitised encyclopedia, an electronic Encyclopedia Britannica if you will. Nowadays most people will turn to sites such as Wikipedia to find something out or they’ll use search engines such as Google to check up on a fact. The days of people using disc based reference material are long gone and Microsoft has finally realised that their resources will be better spent elsewhere. They tried valiantly to fight off the inevitable though by adding in features such as user editing and the use of a chatbot for instant answers on topics. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough and so when 31 October 2009 dawns we will no longer be able to make use of Encarta’s online functionality or sites. I don’t think many people will mourn its passing, heck I don’t think I ever used it in the first place, Grolier being the only electronic encyclopedia I ever used as it came free with my first PC (which also ended production in 2003). Its an interesting example of how the internet is slowly changing our habits and how we are disseminating the vast amounts of information presented to us every day.
I was fortunate enough to get a chance to play Ninja Blade on the Xbox before its local release today, so if you’re looking for some advice whether or not to go for it then hop on over to my review and give it a read. Hopefully it helps. Let me know what you think as usual
My latest gaming addiction of late has been Resident Evil 5 co op with Newlande almost on a daily basis and its been a great ride! I’m already through my second playthrough and still loving it. I’ve written up my thoughts on the game over at Xboxgaming once again. So pop on through to my review and give it a read and let me know what you think.
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