The Day of Reckoning for Telkom approaches fast

Posted on October 29th, 2009 by Richard Catto 1,770 views

For more than a decade now, South African consumers and business people, and indeed the whole of South Africa have been effectively sucked dry by the parasite we know as Telkom. And now, finally, it seems they are going to have to pay for their abuse of South Africa.

If there is one company which has most held back the economic development of South Africa, it is Telkom. It is the single most hated organisation in South Africa. Telkom has ruined individuals and businesses. It has held South Africa back from developing the cheap telecommunications infrastructure that our country desperately needs to compete in the Internet powered global market. It has contributed to the flight of hugely successful South African business people who realised that they could never realise their dreams in a country so crippled by Telkom. People like Mark Shuttleworth, Vinny Lingham could not soar to the heights they have achieved in a country where Internet bandwidth is non-existent, where it is sold at hugely inflated prices and where the development of additional infrastructure is hamstrung.

Telkom is the dog that has financially depleted the bank accounts of myriads of consumers and businesses, artificially driving up prices for all sorts of things across the board. Telkom has done its level best to impoverish South Africans at every level of society. They are an absolutely despicable evil empire and they must now kneel before the sword that lops off their head.

It is not good enough for Telkom to pay the proposed R3-4 billion fine. All its directors must be imprisoned for the rest of their natural lives without the possibility of parole. We must sink these bastards into the deepest darkest black hole and deny them the ability to ever see a single green leaf or the naked sky again. We must strip from them all their assets, including their pension funds. We must impose upon them and their families the poverty they imposed on the rest of us. Every single asset of Telkom must be sold and the money raised given back to every Telkom account holder for the last 10 years pro-rata. Every person owing Telkom a cent, must be forgiven in full their debt.

It is not possible for us to completely undo the harm that Telkom has done to South Africa over the last decade, but we must try. We must purge this country of their evil, and we must make the severest example of them, lest any other South African monopoly is tempted to follow in their footsteps.

FURTHER READING:
Telkom faces multibillion-rand fine for ‘abusing dominance’
Telkom faces record fine for malpractices
New threat of billions in fines for Telkom

Tags: Telkom
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Quick Restaurant quality fillet steak smothered in a pepper mushroom sauce at home

Posted on October 28th, 2009 by Richard Catto 2,422 views

As a true red-blooded South African male nothing gets my blood pumping like a nice juicy fillet steak smothered in a great sauce. However, eating a fillet steak at a fancy restaurant will put a massive dent in your wallet these days. So how does one create a fantastic fillet steak meal complete with wonderful sauce at home?

Well, you cheat, of course!

Unless you’re some culinary expert at creating wonderful sauces, your best alternative is to find a really great sauce to accompany your home cooked fillet banquet. Which is precisely what I have done.

Now, there are two fillet sauces that I love above all: pepper and mushroom, so I thought, why not combine them and have them both in one delicious sauce? I give you, my solution, which is so easy, even the most challenged stay at home bachelor can manage it all by themselves, with the minimum of fuss.

Here is what you need:

• 1 kilogram of fillet steak (R140)
• Real butter (to pan fry the steak in)
• 200ml Royco Pepper Sauce sachet containing Green & Black peppercorns
• 285 gram tin of Spar Creamed Mushrooms

Method

• Toss a large knob of butter into your pan with the heat turned up to maximum. You want to cook your fillet at maximum heat so that it sears all the goodness in and browns the meat quickly.
• While the pan is heating up, cut your 1 kilogram of fillet steak into medallions (for fast cooking) or larger chunks if you prefer it that way. The larger your chunks, the redder the interior will be. If you like your steak well done, cut the fillet into medallions about 1.5 cm thick.
• As soon as the butter is all melted and it’s reached maximum temperature, dump your fillet steak into the pan and brown your fillet on both sides, turning it quickly to avoid burning it. When it’s cooked to the degree you like it, which should take about 20 – 30 minutes, take all the meat out and place it on a serving plate.
• Turn the heat down to the lowest setting, because now it’s time to create your perfect sauce. Do not discard what’s in your pan, or swop it out for a fresh one – you want to keep all the flavour from cooking the meat in the pan, when you add the sauce to it.
• Empty the tin of Creamed Mushrooms into the pan and stir quickly, because the pan will still be super hot. The temperature will come down very quickly.
• Add the contents of the Pepper sauce sachet to the creamed mushrooms and stir until the sauces are blended together.
• Add your cooked meat back into the pan of sauce, pushing them down into the sauce mixture so that all the pieces are smothered in sauce.
• You can now serve yourself some of the fillet steak drenched in a unique pepper mushroom sauce blend. You can leave the heat on the lowest setting to keep the rest of the meal warm.

1 kilogram of fillet is enough to feed two people or 1 extra greedy person.

Anyway, try this out if you like. It works well with Rump steak as well, if fillet is a bit too expensive for you. If you like steak, and you enjoy pepper and mushroom sauces, you’ll love this meal. If you like potato chips with your steak, you can oven bake some while you’re preparing the steak.

Of course, the best way to round out this meal is with a nice bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, an intimate candle-lit table for two, and good company.

Tags: fillet steak
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DeathWatch – notable web sites that have died

Posted on October 27th, 2009 by Richard Catto 1,349 views

Like me, there exist many people who have a morbid fascination with the demise of web sites they once regularly used, read or visited. I recently discovered Archive Team which keeps track of online mortalities. Their Death Watch page, which lists web casualties, makes for fascinating reading. Yahoo features frequently on the page due to the large numbers of Yahoo sites recently shutdown.

What brought this topic on? After a long hiatus, I decided to go back and revisit my old Yahoo 360 blogs that I had created back in 2006, only to discover that the whole of 360 had been wiped out by Yahoo! They didn’t bother to migrate them to my profile, because that was supposed to be done by me. Yahoo did send me an email to this effect on June 30 2009 notifying about this, but they neglected to copy the message to my gmail address, even though I had indicated in my yahoo profile that my gmail address was my primary email address! I have never used my yahoo email address for anything. So all my 360 data is gone for good. Oh well.

Yahoo has recently gone on a crazy shutdown spree, wiping out huge portions of the Internet that they used to control, like GeoCities, for instance. There’s a fascinating article about the origins of GeoCities here. The real story in the article was how badly Yahoo mismanaged that valuable online real estate, and now they’ve just shut it all down, obliterating huge amounts of legacy web sites. The Archive Team tried their best to back it up and mirror GeoCities before Yahoo pulled the plug yesterday, October 26 2009, but guess what? Yahoo refused to assist them in any way to archive the data! Now that’s just mean!

Another site on Death Watch that caught my attention was ma.gnolia.com. Magnolia was a popular social bookmarking site like Delicious or Reddit. It was launched in 2006 and died in a single day on January 30 2009 when all data was lost due to disk failure. The crazy thing was that the owner self-hosted the 500GBs of user created data and had no useable backup. The service is being relaunched now at gnolia.com and is by invitation only. The owner has apparently learnt his lesson and will be using all the data redundancy hosting services that money can buy this time around. This post sums up what went wrong at Magnolia.

One local web site that I used to enjoy reading on and off was tashitagg.co.za. (also tashitagg.com). If you do a search on Wikipedia for tashitagg, you’ll find 6 different articles have a reference link to a tashitagg article, none of which are still accessible, which is a great shame. Tashi Tagg, and her husband, Luke, created tashitagg from their home in Kenilworth, Cape Town. It was originally centred around the first South African Big Brother reality TV show. It gathered a large readership from being ranked high for that show and went on to discuss a whole slew of other reality TV programs, such as The Amazing Race.

Luke wrote a no-holds barred column called The Daily Smoke (link goes to archived site) which was often entertaining reading. As TashiTagg grew, they decided to add blogs to their original site, which also had very active forums. However, I believe the blogs feature proved its undoing as they allowed it to completely takeover the site and ultimately led to a large falling out with their audience over an argument over who owned the copyright to material posted. Tashi and Luke Tagg clarified the issue by telling their contributors that all the content they had added in the blogs didn’t belong to the authors, but to Tashi Tagg, at which point, many blogs were promptly erased and many members departed in anger. That crucial misstep by the owners ultimately led to the disbandment of tashitagg, both of whom now edit tvsa.co.za.

What dead sites do you miss?

Tags: Dead web sites
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Fair Treatment for Brandon Huntley

Posted on September 8th, 2009 by Richard Catto 3,252 views

The national debate that has been ignited in South Africa by Canada’s granting of asylum to Brandon Huntley has turned Huntley into a national pariah and seriously prejudiced his ability to lead a normal quiet life in South Africa, should he be forced to return here.

Investigative reporters from newspapers all over the world have probed every aspect of Huntley’s life, approaching his former neighbours in Mowbray, Cape Town, a suburb not far from where I live, downloading his image from his personal FaceBook page and pillaging his profile for dirt, talking to his estranged Canadian wife and even knocking on the door of his father’s Pringle Bay beach house just outside of Cape Town.

So far only one South African political organisation has stepped forward in Huntley’s defense – Afriforum. If you view the staff of Afriforum (here) it’s immediately clear that Afriforum is staffed by white Afrikaans speaking South Africans (aka Boers, as I have previously referred to them on this blog). However, I’m not going to discredit them based on who they are. It is clear that they represent a group of South Africans who believe that South Africa is not a safe place for their kind.

What is undisputed is the fact that Huntley was the victim of violent crime in South Africa and on more than one occasion. Much mileage has been made of the fact that he did not report those crimes to the police. Well that doesn’t make sense to me. I, myself, was stabbed during a mugging back in December 2000 and I did not bother reporting it to the police either because I rightfully believed that the police were not going to do anything about apprehending my muggers. The race of my muggers were Coloured. The South African Police Services are a joke, in my personal opinion, and it is shared by many who have dealt with them when they have fallen victim to crime. So, yeah, in South Africa many people see the SAPS as part of the problem not as “solution providers” and not using them is not an unusual thing to happen. In fact, I would say that many people avoid them.

The difference between myself and Huntley was that I didn’t decide to emigrate because of that mugging. I just made a lifestyle change and I have not experienced crime since then. It is possible to live in South Africa and experience very little or no crime.

What I do find outrageous is the media’s invasion into Huntley’s private life. The Star went and read which FaceBook groups Huntley was subscribed to and decided that because he was a member of some sexually promiscuous sounding groups that his marriage was a sham and that he only did it to get into Canada. His embarrassed wife is now harbouring the same doubts, but to point to a few FaceBook groups as evidence of that I find outrageous. FaceBook is a sick joke and most of those groups on there are as lame as shit. People add themselves to all kinds of groups and it doesn’t amount to a bag of beans.

To wrap all my thoughts up into a tidy conclusion, I think Brandon Huntley should be allowed to remain in Canada. Sending him back here after he has been turned into a national pariah would be most unfair. Secondly, South Africa needs to take note of groups like Afriforum and acknowledge that violent crime is a reality that many South Africans of all races experience and that the South African Police Services are still not being used by many crime victims because of the extremely bad reputation the SAPS still enjoys. SAPS is not an effective organisation. They do not apprehend criminals. They do not treat people humanely and fairly. They, as a police service, consistently fail the people they are supposed to serve. Their reputation takes regular knocks, when for instance they arrest people like Helen Zille, when she was former Mayor of Cape Town.

So this whole Huntley case is no longer about Canada’s “bad decision” to grant Huntley asylum. In fact, Canada can do whatever the hell they like. They can let whoever they like in and for whatever reason suits them and we don’t have to like it. This is now about South Africa and how many South Africans experience it. It’s time we swept our own porch clean and stopped yelling about what Canada is doing.

Additional reading:
About Huntley’s Canadian wife
Clear evidence that Huntley was a victim of violent crime
Afriforum’s support for Huntley
Melanie Huntley’s concern for her husband

Tags: Brandon Huntley
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rpxnow, openid and this blog

Posted on September 5th, 2009 by Richard Catto 5,076 views

One of web 2.0′s great annoyances is the growing multitude of accounts one accrues whenever one signs up for yet another new online service / web site. In fact it is sheer madness.

What would be so much easier is to have one Internet account that logs you into every darn thing you use. This is an idea that first occurred to me nearly a decade ago, but only in recent years has that problem been addressed via OpenID and something called OAuth, which I will explain in layman’s terms in a second.

Each WordPress blog has a user database and a registration facility that can be turned on or off depending on the blog owner’s preferences. So if you are an avid follower of many blogs and you registered with them all (which has certain benefits, including the ability to edit your own comments) you could very swiftly amass a lot of new accounts which you would need to keep track of somehow. If you throw in all the other sites that you register accounts for it’s not inconceivable to have literally hundreds of accounts all over the web, some of which you have probably completely forgotten about. I am definitely in that category. I’ve signed up for so many services and sites over the years that I can’t even remember some of their domains, let alone what username, password combination and email address I used to sign up with.

However, in the ocean of accounts that I’ve accrued over the years, there are some that I use on a daily basis. One such account is my main google account at which I receive all my email. That is the one account I use on a daily basis. So if that one google account could be used to give me access to all those other web sites and services that ordinarily I’d have to register for, then that would solve the whole multiple account problem.

A few years ago, such a protocol was created and we know it as OpenID, and you can go get an OpenID account which will allow you to access a lot of sites, however, for most people, OpenID does not offer anything except a login. If you create an OpenID account with claimid.com, for instance, you just get an OpenID login and a profile page. Big deal. It’s not immediately obvious to many people how that helps them further in life, and I agree with them. It’s much more useful to register a yahoo account or a google account which offers you a whole range of services including an email address. Thing is, both google and yahoo have now converted those accounts you have with them into OpenIDs. Ditto for FaceBook, Twitter, myspace and a whole lot of other service providers.

Each one of those service providers offers the facility to a third party web site, such as this blog, to allow their accounts to verify the identity of the person logging in. The third party site can then give them access to a profile it creates for that associated google or yahoo or etc. account. Of course, it’s not quite as straightforward as that. Each third party site owner needs to install or write software which handles the OpenID protocol and all the individual nuances that each different service provider adds to their account offerings. Into this breech steps RPXNOW with a service that unifies these disparate third party implementations of OpenID into a single user configurable service that makes the process of accepting OpenID logins from all the popular services much easier. In the case of this WordPress blog, all I had to do was install the RPX WordPress plugin and do some easy configuration to get this blog accepting OpenID logins.

The above image is what you will roughly see if you click the link to login. I’ve customised my login screen to show the six third party account providers that I think most of my readers use on a daily basis. When you use OpenID to login to this blog via OpenID via RPXNOW, you don’t transmit your account credentials (i.e. your password) to either RPXNOW or this blog. You only tell your provider, what your password is so that it can log you in, then it tells RPXNOW that the login was successful and because we trust them to give us the correct answer, we log you into this blog and allow you to modify your profile on this blog.

The important thing to remember is that your password is never given to anyone except the service provider that holds your account, which brings us back to the other topic of OAuth.

The alternative to OAuth is Basic Authentication which is the familiar username / password combo. With Basic Authentication, all access to a service requires that you hand over your password, even to a third party app, if you wish to give that third party app the ability to modify things on your account. But that is a big security hole and requires you to trust someone other than yourself with your password. So this is a problem and most users refuse to hand over their password, which is the best practise. So the problem remains – how does one allow a third party app to access your twitter account , for example, without having to hand over your password to them? OAuth was designed to address this problem.

When a third party app uses OAuth to access your twitter account, for example, what happens is that you are sent over to twitter to sign in. Again the only party receiving your password is twitter. Once twitter has logged you in, it then presents to you the request from the third party app to allow it either Read only access or Read-Write access. The latter is more common because then you would be allowing the third party app to send a tweet to your twitter account. This all happens in a context of you wanting a third party app to have access to your twitter account so that information from that app is published on your twitter account. If you didn’t want to accomplish that, you wouldn’t grant access to the third party app. When you tell twitter to grant the third party app access, you again are not giving it your password, instead it is given a unique token which is only valid for that app for your twitter account. So the effect is that it strictly limits the app to doing only what you want it to do. If you gave the app your password, as Basic Authentication does, you would be giving it unlimited power to your account and not only it, but potentially anyone else that got hold of the password. The OAuth token is good for only one app to access it, and that is tied to a domain. The token does not expire, but can be revoked at any time, giving you complete granular control.

Some people prefer to look at pictures to understand something, I prefer words, but just so everyone is catered to, here is a pictorial guide on what I just explained in words.

The point of this discussion was to introduce my readers to OpenID and OAuth as two important new web technologies that you can expect to encounter more often now and  to help you to understand them and to know how they benefit your online experience. Do not be afraid or wary of them – they are useful tools! Feel free to test OpenID out on this blog by logging in with your favourite third party online account. You will discover how easy it will make registering and logging on to new services and sites.

If you have any further questions you need answering, post them below and I will endeavour to clarify further.

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