Gerhard Potgieter

The guys at Adecco sent me the link to their brand new blogspot. Its a blog containing all the available positions they have aswell as what the specifications is to apply for it.

They are also in the process of setting up a blog for Employers where you as a job seeker can post your qualifications and experience and then employers can visit this blog and seek out future employees.

Nice job Adecco for making job positions more freely available to the IT job seeker. The blog displaying all the current jobs available can be found here, and the blog where you can advertise your expertise and experience can be found here. All you have to do to feature on the employers blog is to send your CV requesting to post it on the blog to Hennie Swart at Hennie.Swart@Adecco.co.za, and a short description on your skills will be placed but with no name.

Mozilla has issued the first official release candidate of Firefox 3, the next major version of the popular open source web browser. This Firefox 3 Release Candidate is a preview release of Mozilla’s next generation Firefox browser and is being made available for testing purposes only.

One of the most impressive features in Firefox 3 is the new Places system, a massive overhaul of the browser’s bookmark and history functionality that is built on SQLite and provides noticeable improvements to performance and data integrity. The Places system has facilitated a number of very compelling user interface enhancements, like the new combined history and bookmarks organizer and an impressively intelligent new autocompletion implementation for the browser address bar.

Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 33 months. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 14,000 updates including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.

Performance and memory efficiency were high priorities for Firefox 3. Firefox 3 now uses less memory than Safari and Opera in some benchmarks.

Mozilla provides Firefox 3 for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X in a variety of languages. You can get the latest version of Firefox 3 here.

I installed it and did not have any problem to date, so if you are a Firefox junkie like I am or even a plugin developer I would suggest you install this RC and start testing or making sure your plugins is compatible with Firefox 3 before the final release.

Nadeo recently launched TrackMania Nations Forever (TMNF), the successor of their previous free racing game TrackMania Nations (TMN).

Being part of CTWUG we have a few avid gamers on the network and one of the games we played allot was TrackMania Nations (TMN). So with the new TrackMania Nations Forever (TMNF) I thought I would give it a go and set up a server, and as with every game on the network users prefer a stats page aswell. So after searching high and low on the web I couldn’t find a stats solutions for TMNF that produced stats based on real time results, the closest I got was TMOS - TrackMania Offline Server, so the obvious thing to do was write my own solution.

Running a dedicated TMNF server required ASECO, Automatic Server Control, to generate statistics in realtime to a online database or local database. It took me about 2 days of programming to get a stable running bug free site. I called it AsecoStats cause it is based on the Aseco 2.1.4 for TMNF.

The index page displays live server stats like how many players are currently online, current track, list all player names and best times that are currently online aswell as the Author records aswell as the best time for the track.

The Players page displays all the current players that ever played on the server aswell as their total wins and total time played on the server.

When you click on the player name you will be transfered to a page detailing all the tracks the player has ever raced aswell as their best time for each track and poll position

On the Tracks page is a list of all the challenges (tracks) ever played on the server with their author, best time and what player achieved this time.

When you click on the track name you will be transfered to a page that details all the players that ever played that track aswell as their poll position and their time.

This is all I did for now as this is the first beta version (v. 0.9b), and what the users wanted to see for now. The pages is written in php and utilizes Aseco 2.1.4 for TMNF’s mysql database. I haven’t decided on a license for it yet but if interest is big enough I will possibly release this under GNU.

For the next release I’m looking into a point system so users can get a overall server position and not just per track. Please leave your comments as to what you guys think of this and any suggestions is also welcome.

South African telecoms is really starting to take off. Yesterday I wrote about OpenWeb’s VPN ADSL that offered you 30gb international traffic for and odd R700 and something.

Today I found another ISP thats more suited to the needs of the lower end user. SAOL a subsidiary ISP of Cybersmart now offers users a bundled line and high cap account.

The package includes 15GB of unshaped data, a 384K ADSL line, a static IP, aswell as router rental all for only R499. After you reached your cap data is charged at R59 per GB which is still cheap.

Rumour also has it that Cybersmart will soon be offering a solution called Nightrider where only 1/5th of you data usage count toward your cap during 1am and 7am. So if you use 15 gigabytes during the month during these times, only 3 gigabytes will count towards your cap.

Things are really starting to take shape in the South African telecoms space, looks like this could be the work of Neotel selling SAT3 bandwidth to the ISP’s. I would just like to see the big ISP’s like WebAfrica and IS start offering similar products.

OpenWeb recently launched a 30 GB VPN ADSL service.

The service is a 30GB - 512k VPN ADSL account selling for R749 which equates to R24.97 per GB.

The service works through a 30GB local account, included in the price, connected to the OpenWeb VPN server.

This new revolutionary product allows you 100% unshaped bandwidth, P2P and torrent downloads, and pretty much anything you can think of on the net, running over OpenWeb’s fibre Based network for the best latencies!

OpenWeb gets my vote for this one, a great idea in providing South Africans with cheap bandwidth. This is no doubt a step in the right direction to provide South Africans with low cost high cap bandwidth. Great work OpenWeb, now the others must just start to follow.

Monday Nintedo went head on with Microsoft and Sony when it launched WiiWare, its new online repository of downloadable games.

From appearance a service where Wii gamers will be able to shop for new, independant games. WiiWare seems to be Nintendo’s answer to Microsoft’s XBox Live Arcade and its XNA Studio, and to Sony’s Playstion Store.

WiiWare launched with six games: Square Enix’s Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King, Frontier Development’s LostWinds, XGen Studios’ Defend your Castle, Nnooo’s Pop, High Voltage Software’s V.I.P. Casino: Blackjack, and Gameloft’s TV Show King.

Nintendo said that they would add new games to WiiWare each Monday, as there are currently more that 100 WiiWare titles in development.

And while many gamers would like to see more games in the system at launch, the fact that there are so many in the pipeline already means that Nintendo will likely not have to worry about populating the service with new weekly titles for some time.

For independent developers, the service also provides a new avenue for getting their work in front of gamers, and on a new platform. Microsoft has been very aggressive with using its XNA platform as a way of bringing independently created games to the Xbox community, and now Nintendo will be able to compete for some of those developers’ time.

Google has joined the revolution to make the web more social by introducing Friend Connect to enable people to interact with their friends.

Friend Connect follows just after announcements last week by social networking sites Facebook and MySpace to open up their data availability to be used on personal websites.

Data Availability and Connect let users move their personal profiles and applications to other websites.

Google says with Friend Connect, any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running right away without any complicated programming. This will run the complete range from invitations to member’s gallery and from message walls to reviews.

As 99% of sites are not currently socially enabled, Friend Connect has a big potential market in front of it and the route to all things profitable in this space will be through tapping into “the deep profit and user data flowing through Friend Connect.” In other words, mining that information through advertising.

Google is being cautious about approving sites to use the new code and is creating a waiting list for requests to use Friend Connect. It says it expects to give the go ahead to a few dozens sites in the next few days.

Meanwhile MySpace and Facebook anticipate rolling out their offerings over the next few weeks.

Rumor has it that Telkom will be launching a 8mbps ADSL trial anytime soon. According to several users from the MyBroadband forum, Telkom techies told them that Telkom will soon be launching a 8mbps ADSL trial.

This comes to no surprise as cellphone companies MTN and Vodacom has launched their 7.2mbps HSDPA services as a trial a month or 2 back.

According to the techies the 8mbps will be first run as a trial to current 4mbps users. My question is just with all this speed when will we have uncapped accounts or high cap account to accommodate all that speed for a fraction of the cost it currently goes for.

So lets just have a look at what the requirements are to have a 8mbps line running at its full speeds. Currently there are various 4mbps users that can’t even achieve their full line speeds, this is cause of the fact that they live far from a exchange. ADSL works at a maximum distance of about 5km from the exchange for normal low end speed. According to the graph below to achieve a speed of 8mbps you’ll need to live about maximum 1.8km from the exchange and that is the worst case to sync at 8mbps. Just take in consideration that there are other factors that can also influence sync rates to the exchanges such as.

• the length of copper wire from your premises to the exchange - this is always higher than the distance ‘as the crow flies’.
• the number and type of other digital services being used by other customers over copper pairs within the same cable sheath.
• the configuration and line quality of the copper wire pair between the exchange and your premises.
• electrical interference from outside sources (such as electric motors).
• the configuration of the copper wiring within your premises (ie use a central splitter for optimal performance).
• the software configuration and application on your computer (in particular how it uses the uplink back to the exchange).
• your ADSL hardware.
• the capacity of, load on, and access data rate of the destination host computer which you are accessing.

All and all I wont say no to a 8mbps line, and sure the majority of users out there won’t either. Maybe this is just what is needed to bring down the cost of faster ADSL speeds and maybe introduce cheap uncapped or high cap accounts. You can follow the MyBroadband thread here.

Not many South Africans know about the ZA Tech Show yet, but its popularity is growing with every podcast.

The ZA Tech Show is a weekly South African technology podcast where they discuss all the latest trends and technologies thats happening in South Africa. The podcast is now at their 10th episode and can be download for free from their website.

The ZA Tech Show is led by a panel consisting of Simon Dingle from Hypertext Media, Duncan McLeod from the FM and FM Tech, Jon Tullett from IHS, Benedict Kelly from Finweek and Brett Haggard also from Hypertext Media.

So if you are a technology junkie and would like to keep up the trends then this podcast is a must for you. Big up to Simon Dingle - founder of ZA Tech Show - and his team for a great weekly podcast, i’m sure you’ll make it big with this show.

So I’m not a big Facebook addict like the majority of www users out there, but once in a while I would log on to Facebook to leave a quick PM to friends abroad or see what everybody is up to. Personally I think Facebook is one great piece of development, and has all the features one could think of except one which was a live chat function.

A while back I saw a leaked video of a live chat for Facebook and and first thought it was a hoax or something, but after thinking about it I realized that this was one feature that would make Facebook stand out even more and something that I believe every user would use if not abuse during work hours.

So this morning I logged on to Facebook and saw this bar at the bottom of my browser, and after looking at it realized that Facebook chat finally got implemented. I must say I’m quite chuffed with the addon, looks good doesn’t bother my browsing experience and is easy to use.

To the left is a picture illustrating the the chat program expanded showing your online friends and a open chat windows. Its as simple as clicking the online friends bar en a small window pops ups showing all your online friends. Then you just double click the friend’s name and a chat window opens and then your ready to chat.

After sending a message you can close the chat window and once you receive a new message it will automatically pop up. Without any windows open the chat applications sits at the bottom of your browser just as a small gray bar with 4 icons.

You also have the option to detach the chat application from your current Facebook page and view it in a seperate window if you feel that doing all in one browser window is to much.

So big up to the Facebook Development team for this fine addon, I’m sure you hits will now sky rocket even more. Just a shame now this will encourage more companies to block the Facebook website for their workers as this means productivity will go down the drain even more now. But non the less still a great addon.