Author: Shaun

I don’t check Stormhoek’s website that often (note to self: add feed to new feed reader), but I was wonderfully surprised when I read on gapingvoid about a few new “hacks” being implemented at Stormhoek.

Here’s the new intro on the site:
‘new zealand has the best tech for making white wine. but south africa has better grapes. so obviously the “hacker” thing to do was to move the tech over to south africa and see what happens. voila! stormhoek. “freshness matters.” available in the u.k. at asda, threshers, waitrose, majestic, sainsbury’s and oddbins. hope you like.’

There are also plans afoot to funk up the Stormhoek bottle’s design.

Rock on Stormhoek.

On a side note, for reasons to complex to explain I kinda lost access to my review of my Stormhoek freebie, but with any luck I’ll be able to post it next week.

Technorati Tags: stormhoek, wine, marketing, hacking, blogging, bottle, design

The Fedora Project have just released version 1.0 of Fedora Directory Server. It is interesting that this announcement comes at a similar time as Sun announcing the open sourcing of Sun Java System Directory Server.

If you take a look at the screenshots, you will realize that these products – iPlanet Directory, Netscape Directory Server, Sun ONE Directory, Fedora Directory and Sun Java Directory Server – are all almost the exact same thing!! Who are we trying to kid here? Inbreeders! The history explains it in a succint manner.

This is a typical example of the (really bad) forking that takes place when it comes to proprietary software. If you think forking and branching of code bases only happens in Open Source Software, you’re horribly wrong.

Basically all this means is that millions of dollars have been spent competing on development of the same code base in order to put the same or similar features into the competing products. At the end of the day Open Source Software became the winner, but at what cost to the corporate entities involved? If only someone realised this, we would not have a fragmented product, but one robust product that everyone has equal control over the development of.

Novell and Microsoft must have been laughing all the way to the bank.

So how aligned am I with the company I work for?

Here’s a comment from Jonathan Schwartz about the release of most of the Sun enterprise software stack for free (sans support and warranty):

From a fading star, Schwartz said, Sun will become the software industry’s “rock star.”

Welcome to my point of view, Jonathan.

Just one question: If Sun is the “Rock Star”, won’t they need more “Rock Star Hackers”, not fewer?

Living in the land of hot summers and mediocre winters, we don’t get to play much in the arena of winter sports, which makes this snowboard simulator just that much more desirable.

I joined the madness at Computicket on Friday evening to wait in queue for a chance to get my hands on some Robbie Williams tickets on Saturday morning. Fortunately luck was with me and I was not one of the many disappointed fans who missed out on tickets when they sold out at about midday. Yes, it apparently took all of three hours to sell every ticket that was going for the Pretoria and Cape Town shows.

Of course the call centre was unavailable and their website – predictably – went down (they want to run Dell hardware, what do they expect?). I covered every angle with a spot in the queue, an internet connection and a cellphone call to the ticket booking centre. I’m actually lucky I decided to stay in the queue and not simply try over the net, as that would have been disastrous. In the end the queue paid off.

Despite the sellout I do suspect that there will still be tickets available as time passes – most people in the queue bought the full quota of 6 tickets, probably with a view to get rid of them later at a premium. I even have a couple of spare tickets myself – what with the concert being about six months away, you never know what could happen in the interim. Hell, in six months I could probably convert someone into a Robbie Williams fan and then sell them a spare ticket!!!

So if you’re reading this and you want a ticket, contact me. I promise nothing, and you’re gonna need a good reason for not being with me in that queue, but you never know, you may catch me in a generous mood.

Tags: music, pop, robbie williams, world tour, tickets