Categories
Entertainment Music

Saving Silence at Charelli’s

Last night’s adventures turned into an unexpected treat – Brad and I went out for what was supposed to be a quick drink at Charelli’s – and discovered a great rock band playing there. Saving Silence is a 5 piece outfit boasting powerful melodic rock, solid acoustic guitarwork and a few edgy twists in their set too.

Highlights of the performance were the ballad written for a cousin’s wedding (unfortunately the lead singer tended to mumble the song names), the funky reggae tune where they bring on the rapper, and a cover of ACDC’s Thunderstruck on acoustic. Very good stuff. Their album is due out around August.

As a side note, I like the idea of a good black rapper heading up a straight-laced rock band. Serious rock with just a hint of funkiness through rap, kwaito, R&B and soul could do very well in South Africa, targeting the right combination of audiences. This sort of collaboration has to be done right, in the same way it was with “Can you feel it building?” by Tweak, Pro-Verb and Josie. Artists, are you listening?

Categories
Computing

Level 2 LPI Certification Achieved!

I’ve just received news that I passed both my LPI level 2 exams I recently wrote at LinuxWorld. That rocks!

Feel free to verify my certs here.

Categories
Computing

Bold Office Moves – The Empire Strikes Back

So according to the folks at Channel9, Microsoft has just announced their new XML-based file formats. This goes a long way towards finally reaching a documentation standard for all office suite vendors. No doubt OpenOffice will be able to read these documents (the idea for zipped XML was swiped from them anyway) , as will KOffice and AbiWord et al.

What worries me now is that in effect Microsoft has very cleverly made themselves the standards-owner for XML documents. Notice that they did not fully comply with any third party XML format – they made their own. By opening their format to a “friendly XML format” and using the weight of 400 million users they can now more easily dictate what happens in this space, and others will feel compelled to be compatible because the format is an open one.

Very, very clever Darth Sidious. Now quick, go build a DEATHtoSTARoffice.

Categories
Freedom Humor

Laugh It Off Wins Constitutional Court Appeal

Congratulations must go to Justin Nurse and Laugh It Off Promotions. They stared into the face of the brute goliath SAB and dared to pull a tongue at them. The constitutional court has ruled in defense of that “tongue-pulling”. So get your browser down to laughitoff.co.za at or around the 3rd June 2005 if you want to get your hands on one of the 1000 “Black Labour, White Guilt” T-shirts they created.

More details on this story can be found here and here.

It is fantastic news to hear that our Constitutional Court still has their heads screwed on correctly, and understands the right to free speech as one of the most valued in our democracy.

Categories
Computing Freedom

Nokia is not evil

Great news for the Open Source/Free Software community is that Nokia is basically giving patent indemnity to any potential patent infringements that the Linux kernel developers may have committed.

I always had a good feeling about Nokia, and this just adds to the warm fuzziness. Now they really need to focus on building better phones, especially a Linux based phone…