September 2008 - Posts
So news has just broke here ... "The Scorpions' decision to prosecute ANC leader Jacob Zuma on fraud and corruption charges was not legal, the Pietermaritzburg High Court has found. "
Showerhead has won his appeal to have the charges against him declared unlawful!?!?! huh? I mean when have you ever heard of something this ridiculous? Remember this is all AFTER the fact that his longterm friend and comrade, Shabir Shaik, was convicted and sentenced because of the corrupt relationship he had with showerhead himself.
Long live African justice is all I can say.
How can we say that prosecuting a person suspected of a number of crimes is not in the interest of the country when that very person is in all likelihood going to be our next leader.
We have a president to-be who is clearly a corrupt criminal, we have in a police chief who is currently suspended with full pay on charges of corruption and aiding criminals, we have a justice system that buckles under political pressure, we have a youth league that threatens to return to militant ways should they not get every desire, we have countless trade unions that down tools and cripple an entire country day after day when, like children, they don't get exactly what they want.
This is exactly the kind of message South Africa did not what to send out to the rest of the world in troubled times like these; the message we just sent out to international investors and the rest of the world is a clear one .... "Here in South Africa we condone, support and in fact encourage corruption!" Do what you like, kill who you like, rape who you wish and as long as you have enough political clout you'll get off scotfree!
What happened to the dream that Madiba started 14 years ago?
Excuse me whilst I go mourn pitifully for our beloved country!
UPDATE:
Yes, I know this trial has nothing to do with whether or not showerhead is innocent or guilty; it only has to do with whether or not the NPA followed correct procedures when charging him. This judgement therefore does not mean Zuma gets off, but what it does show (IMHO) is that our justice system buckles when enough pressure is applied. What's the chance that the NPA will recharge Zuma? What's the chance that should they do this Zuma and his lawyers won't just unleash another barrage of appeals and stalling tactics to build up enough political pressure through his henchmen to force the courts to once again buckle under threats.
The ANC says they respect the decision of the courts, of course they would! its an easy one for them to accept. Whether or not I accept the ruling, well ... what choice do we have?
Ever since "Oslo" was announced the industry has been in a flat spin trying to figure out what this is ... Will it replace BizTalk? Will it be a solution to world peace? Who knew ... and for months and months a variety of posts from a variety of sources have claimed it to be different things. Microsoft has promised the first REAL look at "Oslo" at the upcoming PDC (which I can't wait to attend 
) and as we draw closer to the event we're starting to see the first real indications of what the technology holds in wait emerging from Redmond itself.
With the announcement of "BizTalk Server 2009", Microsoft also release a roadmap of where the product will be going in the next 2+ years ...
http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/roadmap.aspx
This extract from the BizTalk roadmap announcement also starts clearing the mud, for me at least, in terms of where the CSD team see "Oslo" going, in the short term at least.
BizTalk Server and "Oslo" and .NET
"Oslo" is the codename for Microsoft’s forthcoming modeling platform. Modeling is used across a wide range of domains and allows more people to participate in application design and allows developers to write applications at a much higher level of abstraction. "Oslo" delivers a new integrated platform for connecting across modeling domains, including a new "Oslo" modeling tool, an "Oslo" modeling language, and an "Oslo" repository. As we gathered feedback from BizTalk customers, they indicated they would prefer to take a disciplined, evolutionary path to adopting some of these newer platform technologies. We have thousands of customers that have deployed mission-critical applications on top of our BizTalk Server architecture; they want to decide for themselves when to move to newer versions of the platform.
Therefore, it’s an important guiding principle to our planning efforts that we preserve our customers existing investments in their BizTalk Server infrastructure. In fact, you won’t need to upgrade BizTalk Server to take advantage of "Oslo" – current BizTalk Server 2006 R2 or BizTalk Server 2009 customers can benefit from "Oslo" by being able to leverage and compose existing services into new composite applications. BizTalk Server today provides the ability to service enable LOB systems or trading partners as web services (using WCF supported protocols), which can be composed with the "Oslo" modeling technologies.
This principle applies to advances in the .NET Framework as well, such as Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). In response to customer feedback, we are committed to continued support for BizTalk Server’s XLANG orchestration technology - the existing BizTalk orchestration engine. Additional support for WF will be prioritized for the coming releases based upon customer demand and scenarios.
I am happy to see that the team from Redmond remain committed to BizTalk as a product!
Long live BizTalk Server!
So by now i am sure you've all seen the Zpiro comic and you have your own thoughts on it.
He then proceeded to update it this morning with this one ...
My thoughts .... well good for him! It is not racist. It is not sexist. It is simply portraying the situation in South Africa as many of us who are not blinded by the mob mentality see it to be!
Glad to see that somebody in this country still has the balls to tell it like it is. To hell with political-correctness, to hell with hiding behind your political party.
Long live freedom of speech the last true tenet of democracy!
When the first beta for IE8 was announced I rushed out, downloaded it and installed it eager to see what the IE team had been up to ... Well let's just say that the beta lasted about 5 days on my machine before it was removed. The best thing about beta 1 was the uninstaller that actually removed all traces of the beta properly.
So when beta 2 of IE8 was announced last week it was with some skepticism that I hit the download link, and with even more doubt that I installed it.
My initial thoughts aren't bad, but they aren't great either! Whilst (so far) it seems more stable than the first beta there are still some things that are pesky and annoying at best, and others that simply make the product unusable and are coercing me to try and see if the uninstaller for the second beta is as good as the first was.
Firstly, it's VERY aggressive use of resources drives me bonkers! I like tabbed browsers as I can fire up tabs in the background and let them load peacefully and read them when i get around to it. Well, lemme rephrase that, I like tabbed browsing when using firefox, opera, or safari, but NOT when using IE. (and yes I am running them all to compare 1 browser to another, comparing apples with apples if you like). The reason being is the IE8 just kills my machine when opening more than 1 tab. I know sometimes I can get carried away having as many as 20+ tabs open, but firefox (my current browser of choice) handles this just fine. IE8 beta 2 doesn't! In fact any more than 3 tabs and you're starting to ask for trouble.
This shows a screenshot from this morning; with a mere 11 tabs open
321 Meg being consumed by iexplore!?!?! That's a little extreme guys ... i mean come on! That's more than 30 meg per tab! Does IE simply fire up a new "instance" of itself per tab?
Here's a comparison between IE and Firefox with the exact same tabs open, notice the difference ...
Firefox here is using only 80Meg vs IE's massive 225! That's a difference of close to 300%. Ridiculous if you ask me.
Aside from the annoying aggressive use of my system resources some other quirky things bug me about IE; like the silly green color of the tabs. What's this about? At first i thought it was an attempt to indicate unread vs read tabs like Firefox does via a few nice addins, but alas no. There appears to be no way to remove the pesky green color.
Compare this again to the stock standard Firefox way ...
the inactive tabs appear in a darker grey and the active tab appears with a lighter background color as well as the close button highlighting nicely so at a glance you can see which is the active tab. This is the stock standard firefox behavior, adding some nice tab add-ins can get you a much more custom experience.
So thus far my feelings on IE8 aren't great!
I'd love to hear what others out there think of the browser.
Next time I will focus more on the features of the product from a developers point of view and will touch on things like standards compliance etc. So watch this space.