Author: Shaun

Sun this week released their new X86 64bit servers – a set of machines that blast the competition out of the water. Check out the benchmarks for the Sun Fire tm X2100,X4100, and X4200 64 bit X86 servers – they destroy the competition and set a whole bunch of new world records. Awesome stuff.

Bundled with the new servers is a kickass marketing campaign to remind everyone who Sun actually is. Of course a few of the ads proved a bit too hot for conservative conventional press, and they’ll never fly in South Africa, so I’m linking to the details here.

My favourite? – 100% more bitchin’ than Dell. Quite frankly though, in my technical opinion, Dell should never have come close to being competition for Sun. I’ve always viewed them as inferior, and it is surprising that they are credited through this as being real competition.

Great servers, edgy, risque marketing, now that’s good reason to work for Sun.

Good news is that local domestic airline Kulula.com has taken up the task of campaigning government to introduce daylight savings time.

Excellent. This can only be good for South Africa.

Show your support by signing the petition here.

Excellent news is that Telkom has dropped their threatened R5 million lawsuit against Hellkom.co.za.

Good. Fuck Telkom.

Obviously once sanity started to prevail and the legal costs started adding up they realised they were going to lose.

More info at ITWeb.

Google have closely followed their launch of Google Desktop 2 with Google Talk.

And it works.

The Google client also integrates very nicely with an existing gmail account, although any XMPP/Jabber client can connect to the service.

There’s still the odd bug here and there, but yes, somehow Google just knows what people want and when they want it. It even supports basic proxy authentication, which is exactly what I used to struggle with on Skype and others.

Nice Google, rock on.

Don’t become evil.

First of all, thanks to the Accident Hash podcast for the (stolen) title to this blog entry.

So I get a call just after eight this morning – I was working the late shift and so was still in bed – and it’s my mom and she’s been in an accident. Obviously my first question was “Is everyone ok?”, which was indeed the case. Fortunately.

What happened? Well, a left rear wheel came off of a bakkie (South African for “pick-up truck”) which was traveling in the opposite direction on the other side of the central barrier on the highway to Pretoria. The central grassy barrier is easily twenty meters wide. This wheel then somehow managed to find its way across the barrier, which was to the right of the pick-up, and bounced up, coming down onto the top left corner of my mother’s car. Right above where my brother was sitting in the front passenger seat (left-side). And shit, it must have come down hard, but luckily nobody got hurt.

It did instantly turn me off of cabriolet vehicles.

Here are some pics:

So now its the whole insurance game once more. Painful in the least. I’m pretty sure the price tag is going to be hefty even if they choose not to write off the car. The real bad thing is that the pick-up the wheel came off (it turns out the axle broke, the whole wheel came off, not just the tyre)(tire??? spelling in head not working) belongs to what seemed like a decent, hard working yet poorly paid construction worker. (Which is the norm in South Africa.)

Although he was well dressed, one could see that he doesn’t have the money to pay for something like this. Sure, his vehicle was probably not roadworthy, and if someone had been hurt my opinion would probably differ greatly, but now the lawyers from the insurance company are probably going to go after this guy, who has no insurance, and clean out what little he has.

At a basic guesstimate of R30 000 it will probably cost something close to this guy’s annual salary.

That is sad. The guy is just getting by and now through really bad luck he could end up being destroyed financially.

And then of course we may have to find a way to afford a new car for my mother.

Nobody wins.

As I said, life sucks sometimes.