I am reminded of Winnie Mandela’s response when asked for comment
about Thabo Mbeki’s re-election bid in 1999 - she said he “deserved
another chance”. I am sorry - “deserve” is a strange modern word like
“it’s not fair!” -creation of a concept that did not exist 100 years
ago. When running for election the more important concept is what the
electorate “deserves”, not the incumbent running for re-election.
Cape Town boasts a wide variety of Jazz, with the calendar centred around
the Cape Town Jazz Festival,
on the 3rd and 4th April thisyear.
My introduction was via Monday Night Jam sessions at
Swingers,
which I found in late 2006. (Others have blogged about
Swingers
as well). Swingers can be found at 1 Wetwyn Road, Ottery - such a short
road that you cannot miss it. GPS location :-
34.000936S,18.503765E
as it seems I cannot add Swingers to Google Maps. In 2006 it was a
cramped but busy venue, the brainchild of Kevin Harris, that had been
running since about 1985. He expanded 2007, to vastly larger premises at
the same address, and it even has a
facebook group
where you can find even more photos than the links above. My pictures are
from the old location.
The Copenhagen Climate Change conference
opens next week. It is the 15th major meeting since the start at the
Earth Summit in1992
in Rio de Janeiro. Along the way we had the Kyoto
Protocolin 1997
and an attempt to extend the Kyoto Protocol at the Earth Summit
in Montreal in 2005.
I have been involved for a number of years with Hilton Theunissen and the
Shuttleworth Foundation and their efforts to bring computers to township
schools. A part of that software suite was an offline copy of wikipedia.
Early attempts
I have blogged before about my own project
Wizzy Digital Courier putting thin client
labs down in South African classrooms. That also included a copy of the
english language wikipedia.
Initially in 2003 I took the whole of the then-existing English
wikipedia, installed a copy of the mediawiki software in conjunction with
mysql and apache as database and webserver respectively. The whole thing
was around 18 Gigabytes- quite a handful.
Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini has a number of ceremonies conducted at
his palace in Nongoma, his only traditionally-built palace.
Zulu ceremonies
Zwelithini,
the sixth zulu king since Shaka and his brothers carved out a piece of
South Africa for themselves in the mid-1800’s, is the first one to have
to deal with the modern media and concepts like Human Rights.
He has a bull-killing
ritual,
scheduled this year for December 5. He is being taken to
court
over the perceived cruelty to the animal concerned.
Living in South Africa, this is a much-overused term, derogatory,
harking back to the Apartheid era. In my opinion, it indicates a strange
paucity of the English language in a very necessary area.
Let me start with a lot of my own opinions of words I have used in
Africa, starting at primary school in Kenya.
kali
Aged 6, a critical, central word in our vocabulary was kali, loan word
from kiSwahili, that (like most swahili words) had broad,
multiple meanings. It could mean sharp, like a knife, hot,
like pepper, or quick to temper for an authority figure like a teacher.
The very first thing to know about a teacher was kali or not - could
you mess around in class. The kali ones would hit you.
Toyota Cressidas are nursed into longevity serving as taxis in
Gugulethu township, Cape Town.
I have blogged about Mzoli’s Meat before. we
went there yesterday for a birthday celebration for Lerato, and this time
I made an effort to photo the ubiquitous Gugulethu taxis. In the township
proper, it seems that every other car is an aging Toyota Cressida -
recognisable by the square rear lights and the grille badge in front.
Associative memory is capable of performing highly parallel
arithmetic computation on large datasets in constant time.
Associative
memory
is a type of computer memory that is accessed by virtue of its
contents, not its location. Rather than saying What is the value
at location 42? it says All memory locations with the value 43 please
stand up.
Why is this useful, and when is it used ?
It is used whenever a fast search must be made through a list of
candidates- for a
CPUcache, or a fast
network switch.
The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences
held the graduation dinner for the class of 2009 at the Muizenberg
Pavilion on June 25, 2009. Present were Vice-Chancellors from three of
Cape Town’s Universities, and the Kenyan Ambassador Tom Amolo.
I was invited to attend this years graduation of the
2009 AIMS postgraduate diploma on what was
forecast to be a stormy day, but it cleared up in time. I
have blogged about AIMS before - on the opening of their
Research Centre.
I visited Gabon for the last
two weeks of May 2009 by invitation of Yoan Anguilet, who has a business
and NGO there promoting ICT and Science literacy in schools. We had met
previously when setting up
AUST, a new university in
Nigeria. Yoan had invited me to set up a similar system at two schools in
Gabon, as a precursor to a larger effort later in the year.
Flight
Our flight was delayed for 2 hours, circling over Libreville, as we had
the misfortune of arriving at the same time as the body of the
recently-deceased First Lady, Edith Lucie
Bongo. Edith
featured prominently in the next few days, as most of Libreville was
closed and there was blanket TV coverage of the state funeral. In fact,
we were asked to come to pay respects to the First Lady on the first
evening at the presidential palace - my luggage had not arrived, so I was
in my travelling clothes..