Once again this ANC government has managed to introduce yet another tax to punish primarily white taxpayers, how lovely. The constitution of this country forbids racial profiling, it forbids discrimination, it says everyone is equal but we have yet to see any such a thing come out of ANC mouths. Add to this the recent statement from Desmond Tutu saying that rich whites should be taxed more, literally to keep punishing them for Apartheid and you certainly know who he’s speaking for. How UTTERLY SHAMEFUL for a supposed “man of the cloth” to utter such words, he is not an archbishop’s ass. So far our Constitution is nothing more than idle words on useless paper and its clear that from now till the end of time the ANC will keep conjuring new taxes to keep filling their own pockets, they certainly are not doing this to help their own people, the last 17 years has proven that the ANC only wish to line their own pockets.

Article reads (from Buanews):

Pretoria – Transport Minister Sibusiso Ndebele says the new toll gate system on major Gauteng roads is a done deal and that it is just a matter of time before it is implemented.

“It’s done. The tolls are there, the money has been spent and decisions have been taken,” Ndebele said at an Infrastructure Development Cluster media briefing in Cape Town on Thursday.

The tolls between Pretoria and Johannesburg are expected to be up and running in the next five months.

Last week, Cabinet approved the revised fee structure for the toll system, instructing Ndebele to effect the approval in terms of the SA National Roads Agency Limited and National Roads Act.

While the implementation of the system has sparked fierce criticism and opposition from motorists, Ndebele is adamant that the user pay principle, which he said was common in all major and emerging economies across the world, will be enforced.

“The debate about nationalising the department cannot be encouraged … You cannot expect someone in Lusikisiki (in the Eastern Cape) to pay for a road that is in Johannesburg. So the issue of nationalising the department is not in the picture at all,” he said in response to calls that the debt incurred as a result of provincial toll gates should be paid for from the taxpayers’ purse.

The South African National Roads Agency Limited had borrowed more than R20 billion to roll out the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project and has introduced the toll system to repay the loan.
Motorcycles would pay 24 cents a kilometre, light motor vehicles 40 cents, medium vehicles R1, and “longer” vehicles R2 a kilometre.

In addition to the 31% e-tag discount, other discounts applicable would be the time of day discount available to all vehicles, and a frequent user discount for motorcycles and light motor vehicles fitted with an e-tag.

Qualifying commuter taxis and buses would be exempted entirely, a decision Ndebele said was taken to avoid the costs being passed to commuters.

Meanwhile, the minister also announced that his department and the National Treasury were in talks to create a ‘rural transport grant’ as part of efforts to speed up improvements in the public transport system of the country’s rural areas. Such a grant would also serve as a long term commitment to the country’s public transport strategy as adopted by government.

“With regard to the improvement of strategic roads and implementation of the Road Infrastructure Strategic Framework of South Africa, National Treasury and the Transport Department  have rolled out the provincial road maintenance grant to the value of more than R22 billion,” he said.

More than R6 billion of the money, meant to eradicate potholes across the country, has already been allocated to provinces, with Ndebele saying individual premiers were expected to outline their spending on the projects in a meeting to take place in Cape Town next week.

“I am meeting with them and each premier will have to say where and how the money was spent to improve the condition of the roads and if people were employed, how many.”

The funding is on top of the R30 billion that government is spending over the next three years to upgrade the country’s ageing rail system.  – BuaNews

It’s been several hours since I installed it and it’s certainly appearing to be less sluggish than Firefox 3 or 4 were but granted it’s only been a few hours. After installation I had several plugins that were disabled due to incompatibility but found updated versions for all of them except one but I have the most important ones I need and they all work so far, most importantly my tabbed browsing plugin (Tree Style Tab) works perfectly which is more than I can say for Chrome with their childs rendition of tree style tabs.

It’s still worrying that Mozilla are caught up in a version number war with the likes of Chrome. In the past Mozilla maintained a reputation of releasing stable versions and fixes to those versions but this year alone we’ve seen them jump in just 5 or 6 months from ver 4, to ver 5 and now to ver 6. As mentioned already Firefox 6 does appear to be stable and running smoothly so far, Firefox 4 took a mere hour to become sluggish before I killed it and went back to 3.6. Either way I’m still a loyal Firefox user, I tried new versions of Chrome recently after not touching it for well over 18 months and really not much has changed and it honestly still lacks a lot of features when it comes to plugins like Tree Style and NoScript, it seems just about everything that Google creates is permanently a BETA piece of software but it’s not to say they won’t eventually get it right. If you’re wanting to try out Firefox 6 you should go ahead and try it out, back up your existing profile and the setup file for your current version so that you can go back anytime you like in case you are not happy. I hope to see myself sticking with version 6 and I guess I’ll know for sure by days end if it’s staying or going, so far it looks like its sticking around.

But it seems Google does not share the world’s enthusiasm to Facebook and once again is digging their fingers into yet another slice of pie to further try and dominate the world. Google announced their new social networking site called PlusOne which at this stage is only available to those with an invite because, like most Google products, it’s still in a beta phase. Prior to this announcement Google introduced a new PlusOne button to their search engine and provided the API to webmasters to use on their web sites, as can be seen at the top of this post. This effectively allows you to promote certain search results to your socialite friends on Google PlusOne, pretty much a carbon copy of the Facebook LIKE button just with a different name.

My biggest question is who really has time for yet another social networking site? Facebook already dominates most people’s lives and you can walk into virtually any company right now and you would find a great precentage of employees stuffing around on Facebook. Now with Google PlusOne people will have to find even more time to say what they want across multiple networks. Of course you can download a piece of software that will do it for you but really what’s the point? Is it really necessary to let the same friends know that you just ate breakfast but now across multiple networks, seems like an awful waste of time to me.

If anything it shows how we have degraded as a human race. We have tossed personal communication in the waste bin favouring online social networks, yet in all honesty there is nothing “social” about sitting in front of a computer screen or being tied to a mobile phone all day long.

Will social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and PlusOne eventually result in the human race evolving into beings that no longer need to speak? (Scene from the Matrix)

Many of the people on Facebook these days could hardly hold down a 5 minute conversation in person but can blabber on every 5 minutes of the day when they have a keyboard in front of them. I can only see Google’s PlusOne adding to this very big problem with human communication. You can tell how it’s affected us a race by watching the teenagers of today and how they communicate with each other. They can not get by without Mxit, Facebook or Twitter, I’ve seen groups of teenagers all sitting in a row, not uttering a word to each other but instead texting and messaging each other with their phones …. but they’re sitting right there next to each other … how daft.

I have little hope for the future of our race, we may just lose the ability to speak with our mouths in the next 100 years ….. that’s what I call progress !!!

I personally hold back on any new versions because they always come with problems and so was the case with Firefox 4 which worldwide gained itself a really bad reputation in just a few weeks. I tried it myself for a mere hour or two and immediately went back to ver 3.6. I have not yet tried version 5 as I am hesitant but I’ll give it a go sometime, perhaps when they reach 5.10 or thereabout. The big problem right now is that 3.6 seems to once again have started its problems so I guess a downgrade to 3.6.15 is in order for a while.

I just wish the Mozilla team would keep focus on the absolute basics of browsers like speed and stability and once they have that right then they should worry about introducing things like Personas which to me are features for people who have nothing better to do with their lives than make their browser look pretty.

Google has the right approach with Chrome giving it a very lightweight interface but sadly Chrome after all this time is just one big piece of Google BETA software and lacks a lot of necessary plugins/features like side tabs and a no-script plugin. There are ways to enable side-tabs in Chrome but they look awful, like a 3 year old designed them and the equivalent of Noscript from the Google Chrome Plugins called “NotScript” leaves much to be desired. So after a few hours of trying Chrome again the other day I am straight back to Firefox, even with its bugs and will wait another year before I try Chrome again. Hopefully before then the Mozilla team pull their fingers out and get back on track.

In just one drive on Hendrik Potgieter Road a week ago I witnessed over 40 moving violations just going one way and another 50 or so going back home. In both directions I never encountered one JHB Metro cop anywhere … not one in sight.The only time I have ever seen Joburg Metro Cops on Hendrik Potgieter is when they rock up, seven vehicles at a time and conduct random pullovers checking vehicles and drivers for licensing. This is always done on a section of the road where the officers can hide in the comfortable shade of some trees but almost every day you can drive on Hendrik Potgieter and seldom will you ever see a Joburg Metro Cop prosecute someone for a moving violation.

The types of moving violations I witnessed in just one day are as follows:
- Vehicles using the left hand emergency lane for overtaking
- Vehicles using right hand turning lanes for going straight
- Vehicles regarding a red traffic light as permission to keep driving through
- Taxi’s using left hand turning lanes as places to stop and alight passengers
- Sand & Stone Supplier Trucks dropping sand and stone all over the road
- Emergency lane used to pass large queues of vehicles who are all abiding by the law

These kinds of violations happen every minute of the day on this road and it leads to a great deal of frustration for those who choose to abide by the law and follow traffic signals and road markings. The problem is that one driver sets a bad example and 10 follow him thinking they also have permission to transgress the law and because of the total lack of presence of any Joburg Metro Cops these problems are now starting to spiral out of control and violating traffic signals and road markings seems to be something that everyone thinks is OK to do.

Just spend 30 minutes at 5 in the afternoon at the point where Hendrik Potgieter crosses the N14 highway. Here you will see at least 5 vehicles at every change of the traffic light using the right hand turning lane as permission to cut into the long queue of traffic moving straight. You could spend 2 hours at this traffic light during peak hours and you will not see a Joburg Metro cop doing anything about it. You may see one pass this intersection on his way elsewhere but you will NOT see him stop and deal with these people who transgress the law and cause a great deal of frustration for other law abiding citizens.

As far as the trucks owned by construction companies or sand & stone suppliers who constantly drop sand and stone all over the roads, this not only leads to frustration but actual damage to people’s vehicles. I’ve personally had two windscreens smashed on Hendrik Potgieter Road from stones thrown up by other vehicles and I can bet there are thousands of people a month who go through the same thing. These companies are getting off scott free and instead the vehicle owner has to pay an excess to his insurance company to get a new windscreen in his vehicle. If Joburg Metro were pulling these trucks off all day every day and issuing the company with a fine that HURTS we’ll quickly see an end to this kind of blatant disregard for our roads.

Many articles criticizing Joburg Metro have been written in the last 15 years but it seems they continue to do as they please and instead of dealing with moving violations (part of their job) they continue to choose the easy work to do, like sitting around in large groups where they can chat with their friends and pull over cars to check for licensing and to collect bribes. But actually asking them to patrol this road 24 hours a day and to set an example by prosecuting those who clearly transgress the law and set a bad example is asking too much of our public safety workers.

Stupidly thinking that Kalahari was well into the digital age, I thought nothing more and purchased the book. Upon completion of the order I then went to download the book and all I received was a small file in .acsm format. After a bit of Googling I discovered that the .acsm file is merely a download ticket for receiving the full book. The .acsm file needs to be opened using Adobe’s Digital Editions Reader, Kalahari’s “BETA” reader software or other Ebook readers that Kalahari is trying to sell into the SA marketplace.

After already losing faith in Kalahari who failed to disclose from the start that they were not selling me a simple EPUB book, I chose to download it using Adobe’s Digital Editions reader and to avoid any BETA software from Kalahari. What DRM / Adobe Digital Editions does is lock the book to be read on only one device and at this point in time it’s locked to my laptop, so if I want to read the R140 book I just purchased I have to sit and read it on a laptop ….. how stupid.

I wonder what dark age Kalahari is living in? Their Ebook format cannot be read on a Kindle without first removing the DRM and converting the book which most people won’t know how to do. Kalahari seem to rather want you to buy one of their Ebook readers but sorry to say, nothing comes close to a Kindle and never will. So for now stick to buying your kindle books from Amazon and be aware that your Kalahari books won’t work on a Kindle without some tampering.

Instead of buying any more Ebooks from Kalahari I’ll rather pressure authors to release their Books on Kindle’s store, they’ll sell much more anyway than they ever could through local book sites like Kalahari. I’ll keep supporting Kalahari when I need printed books but they’ve lost me for good as an Ebook purchaser.

Mobile Device manufacturers like RIM (Blackberry), Apple (Iphone, Ipad) and others are not much different to buying poisoned apples (excuse the pun) at your local food market. The reason is that your mobile device tracks every single move you make, every key you press, every web site you visit, every call you made or received, it even tracks where you were at the time. What’s most disturbing is how these vendors who take your money in exchange for their product simply try to keep this information under wraps.

Well, thanks to the large community of users, these “secrets” are always discovered and exposed to the masses and as such I am helping to expose the hidden Event Log of a Blackberry phone. Sure the information is out there if you search for it but the more web sites that reference this, the better.

First off to see all the information that is currently logged on your Blackberry right now, do the following:

Hold down the ALT key and keep it down …. now press LGLG and then let go of the ALT Key. Whoa baby, you’re looking at your event log. For interest sake go to some of the entries like “a net.rim.browser” and look through some of the entries by clicking on them one at a time, you’ll see every web page you visited, the full url, date time etc. Interesting stuff isn’t it?

Now click the Blackberry button and choose “CLEAR LOG” and it wipes the entire log.

Now there are numerous privacy issues here but another big problem with this event log is how it slows down your phone. Have you ever found that when you’re doing a lot of browsing on your blackberry how your phone keeps getting slower and slower? Sure you have. Well due to the insane amount of logging going on it’s no wonder your phone slows down and it also makes you wonder WHY you spent good money buying the latest mobile device which promised to be faster when it’s actually slower due to all the privacy invasion going on.

So now you ask, how do I turn this logging off? Well YOU CAN’T !!! Simple as that. RIM have hardcoded it into the Blackberry Shell Operating System and you cannot turn it off. But you can automate your phone to clear the log every hour.

A software author going by the name of Phrehnck from Los Angeles in the US created an application called “LogMaid” and has made this available for free to all Blackberry users.

You can download LogMaid from this link. You’ll need to create an account in order to download the application but the actual application is FREE. The application auto clears your event log every hour on the hour, it does this as long as your phone is idle (backlight off) when the time comes to clear the logs. LogMaid also invokes Blackberry’s built in memory cleaner, kick starts the Java Garbage Collector and Logs an Event letting you know the logs were cleared.

What’s amazing is after clearing your logs, let your phone operate as normal and after 15 minutes open the log file again (ALT+LGLG) and see just how much information has been logged inside of 15 minutes.

It’s time consumers start to challenge the creators of these products who violate our privacy without even mentioning it to us, it makes you wonder exactly what else they are doing that they are not telling us about. Are they downloading these logs at any point? Nobody seems to know, but there are indeed ways of finding this out. If they want to know our every move, they should be handing these devices out for free and not charging money for it.

One thing is for certain … every year BIG BROTHER tightens the noose around our necks and takes away more and more of our freedoms.

Firefox 3.6 introduced a number of bugs that took almost 16 versions to iron out but all the while the Mozilla Team were spending more time developing Firefox 4 and making promises that FF4 would be the bees knees.

I resisted trying any of the Beta’s or Release Candidates of Firefox 4 until final code was pushed out. I then downloaded the final version of Firefox 4 released a week or two ago and only got around to trying it out yesterday.

Initially the new browser looked ok, a bit cleaner looking than Firefox 3 but within minutes the problems started to rear their heads.

First of all whenever I open my Firefox I have about 15 tabs of web sites I go to daily. In Firefox 3 the browser opens in about 5 seconds and all tabs load in under a minute. In Firefox 4 the browser opens in the same time (5 seconds) but then all tabs load up and one by one off they go refreshing until each and every tab has been refreshed. This process takes Firefox 4 about 3-5 minutes longer to load up all tabs compared to Firefox 3 …… so immediately THUMBS DOWN to Firefox 4. There is also no menu option or setting to prevent Firefox from doing this.

Secondly, Firefox 4 is much more sluggish than Firefox 3.6.16. It seems fast for a short while but then starts slowing down as you start your work day until eventually it’s so sluggish that you have to close it down and re-open it to get it to speed up again. Another THUMBS DOWN because I only ever open Firefox once a day in the morning and only ever close it at night when I shut down at the rate FF4 got sluggish I would have to kill and reopen it about 20 times a day.

Lastly, it’s a memory HOG. This morning with 25 tabs open Firefox 4 was using over 1GB of memory and became as sluggish as hell. I dumped Firefox 4 immediately, copied FF 3.6.16 back to my applications folder fired it up and immediately the same 25 tabs were using only 346 Mb of memory, so another big THUMBS DOWN to Firefox 4.

I’ll stick with 3.6.16 for now as it works and is finally a stable version. I’ll only relook at Firefox 4 once it reaches 4.0.16 or somewhere around there. I would advise others to stick with Firefox 3 and resist the temptation to move to Firefox 4.

Sorry Mozilla but Firefox 4 really SUCKS !!!

Firefox 3.6.16 is still available at this link – http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html

and older versions of Firefox can be found here

The tsunami, triggered by the earthquake, was simply astounding to watch on television and felt much like the days when we were watching the twin towers collapse and the tsunami in Indonesia. The words “this can’t really be happening” cross your mind but after a little while you realise this aint no movie, this is real life and real devastation.

The worst part was that this took place late in the afternoon, people were at work, children were at school, people were about their daily lives. A mere 3 hours later it was nightfall leaving those affected in the dark and in the cold and authorities stuck waiting for sunrise to start rescue operations.

Only the next morning as the sun rose over Japan could the world start to see just what destruction nature had carried out on Japan and it is something that is still hard to comprehend. Here I sit 13,000 kilometres away from Japan wondering how they could even begin to cope with such a catastrophe. Japan is a strong nation but they are most definitely hurting and in a serious state of shock.

The loss of life started at guesses of a few hundred, became a few thousand and now already is estimated at well over 10,000 and will probably climb very much higher considering that entire towns were wiped off the map in a few minutes in a torrent of rubble that obliterated anything it touched.

The Japanese authorities say this is their worst hour since World War 2 and when you look at the landscape left behind it looks reminiscent of a war zone.

What amazes me is that in the wake of this disaster the Japanese nation remains calm, orderly and structured which says a lot about their character. Other countries quickly turn disorderly when events like this take place.

To add to the chaos, several nuclear power plants are under states of emergency due to damage caused to their cooling systems by the quake. An explosion already took place yesterday at the Fukushima plant and fears of a partial meltdown still exist in another reactor at the same plant. The situation on that front is being monitored very closely. People within a 20km radius have been evacuated so if there is a meltdown very few people stand the risk of being affected. But the shutdown of multiple power plants across Japan has left much of the country in darkness in a time when they really need light and warmth and has made recovery efforts even more challenging.

Just like 9/11 changed the way we see the world, so will this event.

Nature is a force totally beyond our control and it is times like these when all our technological prowess and abilities fail us and we are at the peril of the natural world.

We are most certainly entering an age in humanity when we are seeing new levels of natural disasters. From the look of things this is just the beginning and nature will trump us again in the future with new levels of unimaginable chaos.

Japan sits at the beginning of a very long road filled with heartache and pain but they are a strong nation and they will no doubt rise to the occasion as they always do.

It’s heartening to see other countries put their differences aside and rush to the aid of a nation in pain, there is still some humanity left in us after all, but it is disheartening to see people from other nations writing the most disgusting racist slur comments on media articles all over the web. I blame the media for even publishing such vile comments but that’s the media for you, anything to cause a sensation and sell papers. It’s times like these when we see the best and also the absolute worst in humanity.

It’s times like these when we need to put all our beliefs, religions and opinions aside and realise that we are all human, we are all of the same species (fact) and we all inhabit this planet together. Nature knows no borders but man has chosen to create them and all it has led to is difference, hatred and war.

May the people of Japan find strength and comfort during this very troubling time.