It's not often that I read "celebrity" news, and less often still witty celebrity news. I quite enjoyed this Edmonton Sun column on Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes holding hands and smooching all over Europe and the ensuing media coverage.
After reading this in-depth argument-ending review of Tiger (thanks for the pointer, wjv), I'm wondering where to sign up (and how to finance a Powerbook).
Competitors in the the South African Computer Olympiad (a school programming competition) now have some motivation to use Python besides the language's obvious benefits. The Shuttleworth Foundation has put together additional prizes for the top six entrants using Python to the value of R100k, R30k for the top Python user. Every entering school is also provided with a CD with Python and related software. And according to some sources, this has caused a record number of entrants - thirteen thousand students have entered the first round. Besides the above-mentioned Tectonic article, ITWeb is covering the story, and there's some details on the Olympiad web site.
Now, Joris Komen of Schoolnet Namibia isn't one of my heroes for nothing. He's taken on Microsoft's nonsensical "donations" to Namibian education, and now Schoolnet Namibia is taking on demystifying the technology available to the schools with a comic series around Schoolnet Namibia, incorporating the possibilities of computers, the Internet, and all based on their Linux thin-client environment and discussing Open Source and Open Content. Licensed under a Creative Commons license, they really seem to have thought this through to reach the kids with access to this technology, as well as their teachers. Tectonic, as usual, has the story.
Two weeks back and a bit, I got an invitation to attend "International FLOSS and Free Knowledge Workshop" in Johannesburg. A week after the invitation, in the middle of the week. That's one of those really irritating things a conference organiser can do, announce it so close that people are almost certainly unable to attend. Needless to say, I couldn't attend. Some people from Wikipedia were there, and wrote about it, writes about it too.
UWC funds AVOIR
29 Apr
The University of the Western Cape is going to spend R10m (about $1.6m) over the next three years on it's own AVOIR initiative to develop a free software student enrollment management system.
Added resume
21 Apr
Since I haven't started my own business, I have a resume I wrote for the web site sitting around. Since I am in theory supposed to find additional work for the few days a month I'm not working Jam Warehouse, I guess it should be doing something useful. (Not that I've had any free time in the past month or so. After a bit of a break from working full-time, the past two weeks of working eight to ten hours a day every weekday is actually quite pleasant.)
Stewardship
18 Apr
Due to a colleague at work being off on a well-deserved holiday, I've been given stewardship of his project for the next two weeks. Last week I got a crash update course on Zope 2 and Plone, and tomorrow or so I'll start moving stuff onto production.
Dante's adventures
18 Apr
Yes, more pictures of Dante. Dante has his first thunderstorm a few days back, bringing with it quite a bit of rain, which interacted well with Dante's proclivity for digging. He's also been going to the park reasonably regularly since the last set of pictures, and seems to use up at least 1% of his energy...
Tangential thoughts
17 Apr
As I'm in such a weird mood at the moment, I hope you will forgive me a little tangent into the political world. Jane Galt's piece on same-sex
marriage that supposedly doesn't support either side was mentioned
on Commentary
as a must-read. I agree with what Laurence seems to suggest: that the
must-read portion is not about same-sex marriage.