Dave's Blog

As we enter another election cycle, we have yet another cycle of articles about "defacing" of posters. The latest Jacob Zuma turned into a Tennage Mutant Niga Turtle. The ernest tone of the articles sugests one should be shocked at this "defacement" of posters and should equate it with a comercial entity pating their adverts over the posters, or in other cases supporters of parties removing their openent's posters. I must admit I find some of the hacks quite entertaining, and find the implication that we should be shocked by, what is after all, political commentary a bit worrying.

As the Laugh it off case showed we allow various entities enormous power to use various media chanels and protext them from commentary through various barriers, social, finacial and legal. For instance in the case of elections, the law prevents the posting of political posters other than by registered political parties. As a generation of voters raised with the notion that media is something they comment on and culture jam, we're going to see more of this.

As an end note, I particularly liked this jam spotted near the University:

 

I've alway been a fan of Google from redefining search, the way they revolutionised webmail with Gmail, to Google maps and Google earth. So I was one of the people deeply exited when Google launched Gtalk based on the Jabber/XMPP protocol - rather than re-inventing the wheel used a well established open protocol, rather than a gaed community they created one that could interact with anyone th had a Jabber server. 

Now comes the disapointment - last Friday it seems Google's chat servers stoped talking to other chat server. The causes are not clear - our servers are talking to theirs theirs, but theirs are mute , refusing to talk back.  The problem has been discussed on the Gtalk-open forum, but it appears despite herding people that way on their support forums no one from Google actualy reads the list. As a system administrator I consider it a basic professional courtesey to inform other administrators that their systems appear not to be working. So after working through several pages of useless help information about the Gtalk client I finaly managed to submit a problem to Google and got the obligatory automated response [ref 240328311]. Four days later i actually got a response, problem was it completly missidentified the problem as a google apps problem, since then nothing. Well Google this is not the way to make friends and influence people!

While I'm gripping about commercial chat providers (IM/MSN/yahoo) let me vent my current peeve - most of these service will only allow you to login from one location, a policy that probably made sence in the early 90's, but in todays world just doesn't work. Microsoft why should I get errors when I switch my Xbox on because my computer is on at the same time? Get with the program - XMPPas a protocol has allowed people to log in from mulitiple locations for some time ...

Recently the 1000th course site was setup on Vula. The Monday Paper has the story at:

http://www.news.uct.ac.za/dailynews/?id=6451

As of wrinting there are about 1040 course sites and something in the region of 65% of students have access to at least one site based on institutional data. That figure excludes any other students who might have access to project sites or might have access to course sites in other ways, for instance from being tutors (TA's)

This is the error message I get when I try to login to the groupwise web ineterface .... (More)