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Pink for October01 Oct 2008

Its October which means that it is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and my site has gone Pink for October.

Why not read more about the campaign, download a button or banner, add your site to the list and help raise awareness.

Life on a stick22 Aug 2007

Its been a while I last blogged, its about time i did.

So much has happened these past few months, I got a Laptop (finally), I've been to England then went to Cyprus for three months. One week before leaving Cyprus my laptop broke down (Its the last time I buy an HP). I went back to England then finally arrived back in SA.

Its now been almost 2 weeks since I sent my laptop to be "repaired" by Incredible Connection with their "Only Windows works" mentality. Even though I told the tech that it was freezing in both Ubuntu and Vista and on several occasions it would freeze before booting the hard drive.

A quick summary23 Feb 2007

As I haven't blogged at all in the last two months so here is a quick summary.

The last two months have being quite interesting I've been offered (and accepted) a job overseas. I'll be going for 3 months at first to get a fell for the place after which I'll decide if I say or not.

This will be my first time off the continent so it should be fun, at least I hope it will. I should be leaving about the middle next month unless something comes up.

Merry Christmas25 Dec 2006

This is a bit late but I want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. I hope everyone is having a wonderful day.

 

Linux Christmas Tree

Going Pink for October01 Oct 2006

Pink for OctoberLast week I found the Pink for October website and it really got my attention. The idea is simple, you make your site pink for the month of October in support of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

This is a very different way to raise awareness and I guess that's why I got so interested in it. I never thought I would ever have a pink site but here is is.

 

Software Freedom Day20 Sep 2006

On Saturday (Software Freedom Day) I went to the Department of Science and Technology (DST) at the CSIR in Pretoria which is Karl's soon to be new place of work. I helped a little bit with the recording which you can find at Odeo as a podcast or you can read about it on Tectonic.

The turn out was good it shows that people are interested in Open Source. Which brings me to the presentations more specifically the "content" that was shown on the screen. There was everything from plain black and white presentations to reading off the screen (Which is always boring) and even one person using a PDF. With that said the Translate.org.za and Creative Commons guys (and girls) gave good presentations.

All in all it was a good day, I even has someone recognise me from my website but I'm not sure if that makes me famous or not.

Constructing Content20 Sep 2006

For the last few months I have been playing with the Content Construction Kit and Views modules and the final result is the portfolio section of my site. With this I created a new theme as well using some new techniques that I have learned.

All of these things I will discuss, hopefully, over the next few days.

A month of silence25 Aug 2006

BarCamp Jozi BarCamp is here and it seems I'm one of the last to know. I'm not quite sure how I could contribute though but I'm open to suggestions.

Moving on... business is looking good, I'm working on getting that all important foreign currency comming in. I've been busy with four sites this month although two of them are mine so they have taken a back seat. I've been experimenting with Inkscape which so far has proved to be very successful, no Adobe Illustrator for me (its far too expensive), and having my work in SVG format is proving useful too.

Jumping through hoops19 Jun 2006

I've decided to put a new theme up. It is by far one of the best themes I have done to date, I've even started to use Drupal's theme override ability. (Exhibit A: the RSS feed has and Atom feed icon next to it.) Its very simple but it's a start.

Back to the title of this post, as any good web designer knows Internet Explorer is just plain bad. I spent the last two days trying to figure out why it was adding adding extra space to a DIV tag, needless to say I managed to find a work around. They say version seven is going to be better but I'll believe it when I see it, which won't be any time soon the the rate Microsoft is creating software.

BarCamp Cape Town was this weekend and since I live nowhere near Cape Town I didn't go but I wonder how many people in the Jo'burg area would be interested in BarCamp?

Breaking News: Judge orders game of 'rock, paper, scissors'09 Jun 2006

Sometimes you have to wonder about the Americans.

Judge orders game of 'rock, paper, scissors' from Mail & Guardian Online

Mind games09 Jun 2006

Not so random thought:
It’s amazing how powerful your mind coupled with your emotions can be.

I’ll just leave it at that.

Now that I’m on the hunt for a job, I saw a nice web job at Canonical But sadly it wasn’t to be. So its back to the drawing board for me, hopefully I will find something soon.

On the project front I got my self a very small vps for VPSLink so at least I now have, among other things, shell access for those little extras my current host won’t allow access to. So look out for some Bazaar and maybe SVN repo’s in the near future. I just hope the Rand / Dollar exchange improves otherwise I’m going to have problems.

And finally it looks like Telkom are lowering there rates on ads line rental so there is some small glimmer of hope there.

Chaos and Disorder26 May 2006

I've come to the conclusion that running my own business is not for me, I'm just not a business person so its back to the job hunt for me, hopefully I can find something in web design/application development or systems administration and bonus points if its an Open Source environment.

Since LinuxWorld last week very little has been said about it and with good reason, it was an anti-climax. The most fun I had was on the Thursday, I had just written my exams (the results of which will be released in the next few weeks) and I decided to hang out at the "Shuttleworth corner". I was at the Freedom Toaster deciding weather or not to get SuSE 10.1 instead I ended up talking to people about Linux and Open Source. While there I meet Neil Blakey-Milner, project manager of KnowledgeTree, it was nice been able to talk to some one who knows more about the current state of open Source then I do.

And the reason why I'm only writing this today? I decided to do the insane and migrate from Debian Sid to Ubuntu Dapper. Things got so bad I had to debootstrap from a live cd (ubuntu 5.10) So I just about installed everything from scratch except I kept all my settings, well most of them. So if you have the same idea don't do it.

LinuxWorld starts today!16 May 2006

I'm going to be attending for the next three days, I just hope there is enough to do so that I'm kept busy, so far I'm still on track to get my LPIC-1, I'm determined to pass although I could do with some more study time.

Karl Fischer, whose blog I occasionally visit, will be running the community side of the event so maybe I'll get a chance to meet him and I think its about time I started interacting with the the South African Open Source community.

If you are reading this I hope you are able to attend, you don't know what you are missing.

Drupal 4.7 ... Need I say more?02 May 2006

Drupal 4.7 is finally out after a year in development and this is the best version yet. The php template is now the default template engine and there are a lot of new features, such as free tagging, Ajax and a new contact form just to name a few. It also now comes with an installer but I have yet to test it out.

As you may have guessed this site has been upgraded and I still have others to do.

In other news I was ripped off by a dishonest ex-ModenBill reseller and it seems no one can find him, as for the software I'm no longer using it even though it was not ModernGigabyte's fault, I've had it with "proprietary complexity".

On the project front I've started to learn Python which has sparked renewed interest in Bazaar-NG. It's still early days for bazaar but I like the idea of a Python based VCS, I haven't decided yet but I could very well switch to Bazaar and the fact its backed by Canonical doesn't hurt either.

Announcing DrupalCamp Johannesburg13 Apr 2006

Adrian Rossouw: Announcing DrupalCamp Johannesburg - Over the last few years that I have been involved in the Drupal community, I have noticed only a handful of South African developers, and I've always wondered if there are more of us out there.

I have also been introducing many many people to Drupal, but unfortunately every time people try to approach me for projects, I have to turn them down, as I am just too busy building Bryght.

To combat this, I am going to be holding a training session on how to become a Drupal developer, for local web developers at the end of June. I hope to help bootstrap the local Drupal community so that we can have better representation from my fellow South Africans.

Considering that there are 11 pages of people who have specified that they live in South Africa on drupal.org, I will also be heading up a DrupalZA group on DrupalGroups, just as soon as I can get an administrator to create it for me.

If you are interested in being kept up to date about this, and being put on the mailing list for South African Drupal users, please contact me via my drupal.org contact form

EDIT : I have created the DrupalZA user group. You can join on groups.drupal.org. You can just log in with your drupal.org auth, so you don't even have to create an account.

read more [Planet Drupal]

I think South African Community has a better chance now we have a central place to work from.