I'm going to be away until Monday in Grahamstown for my graduation, and seeing Barry, Jonathan, and Ingrid again. I wonder if Barry remembers he promised me one of his good wines for graduation dinner...

Well, some good from over two years using and developing Open Source security solutions in a highly-stressful finger-pointing telecommunications environment: Barry Irwin, is going to be presenting a paper at Infosec South Africa 2004 currently entitled Lessons learned and Challenges facing the deployment of Open Source Security Infrastructures in the Global Telecommunications Arena, based on our work together doing security at iTouch.

The South African Revenue Service's eFiling service still hasn't got back to me over their non-support of government-promoted Open Source platforms. I've sent off a reminder, and hopefully they'll be more responsive this time around. Perhaps some additional requests will prioritise their reply...

Jeremy and I caught the last film of the 10th annual Out in Africa gay and lesbian film festival, at least in Cape Town. It was Latter Days, which some may remember caused some news for being banned in Salt Lake City. Basic plot: Shallow gay party boy Christian (Wes Ramsey) meets closeted Mormon missionary Aaron (solidly played by newcomer Steve Sandvoss - you'll see this name again), both change for the better.

It surprises me how people can write the sort of code I've seen recently without finding the obvious way to improve readability and usability. Here's one simple example.

I've always preferred KDE as my desktop of choice, but KDE 3.2 has really impressed me. My biggest KDE irritations (such as Konqueror forgetting what you've typed when you change tabs) have been fixed, KDE is leaner and faster in general, things are more stable (especially Kopete) and new features such as the Wallet and spell checking in Konqueror text areas are exceedingly user-friendly and effective. Go KDE!

I've set up a quick Zope/Plone site with photos from Africa Source. Thanks to Sunil Abraham, I've been looking at Zope and Plone again - it's looking really great. Just use WebDAV to upload pictures into a Photo Album - works a dream!

On the last official day of Africa Source Andy Wingo, an American teaching in Namibia, has set up blogs.fossfa.org for the delegates of Africa Source to start their own web logs. In the closing circle, it was nice to hear that a few delegates found blogging one of the best things they learned in the past week.

The final official session was the closing circle, where we received an NGO-in-a-box, a set of CDs that aims to be of use for people trying to get Open Source used by NGOs. It's an exciting project, but technical issues (bandwidth, hardware) prevented us from improving it as intended. The closing circle closed with each person expressing the best thing about the past week. I'm very excited that people found learning about blogging and Zope amongst the best, and rewarding that some people were inspired by my Python and Twisted sessions. After supper (of braai food), we had an African dance troupe to entertain us. Now, at 1am, there're a group of 12 of us hacking on translation, blogs, and CD burning drinking quality Namibian alcohol and snacks.