Rugby World Cup 2007 and RSS feed update for 7 September 2007

Hope all of you worn your casual day stickers and contributed your bit.

Today is also the start of the Rugby World Cup being held in France.  As a patriotic South African I do support the Boks … good luck to them and I honestly think they have the team to bring the cup back.

Now for my feed entries:

One of Jupiters icy moons — Europa:

Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

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Spring and RSS Feed update — 2 September 2007

Yesterday was supposedly the start of Spring, well you could have fooled me. Not here in Cape Town, it was raining and very winter like.

Onto my RSS feed items for today:

With the eclipse earlier this week, I came across this photo. Click on the image for more information.

Credit & Copyright: Yuichi Takasaka

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RSS update – 26 August 2007

Today’s items from my RSS Feedreader:

Today I share some more Cape Town beauty.
Boland Berge 5
Image: Marius Bock taken with a Nokia N80
This is from a park just behind where I stay overlooking the Hottentots Mountains.

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RSS update – 25 August 2007

I am back with another update after a hectic week back at week.  Why does everything come to a standstill when one goes on leave?

So here it is:

It is flower season in the Northern Cape so some flower beauty for you. Click on the image for some more photos and information.

Photos courtesy of Heleen Paxton in Strandfontein. Regards from Namaqualand, Daisy Tel; 027 692 3041 www.hondeklip.co.za

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RSS update – 19 August 2007

Today is the last day of my leave.  Was good to have a break away from work and just clear the mind.  Enjoy today’s tidbits from my RSS feedreader.

Back to the Space Station.

Image credit: NASA
During the third spacewalk astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Clay Anderson (out of frame) relocated the S-Band Antenna Sub-Assembly from Port 6 (P6) to Port 1 (P1) truss, installed a new transponder on P1 and retrieved the P6 transponder.

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RSS update – 17 August 2007 and birthdays

It was my birthday yesterday so I though it would be interesting to see who I share it with.  One I always knew and that is Madonna, she is actually also the same age as me.  The other is a techie thing … Debian started on 16 August, 14 years ago.

Spend some time at the beach and here is photo of Table Mountain under cloud cover.
Blouberg 1
Image: Marius Bock – Nokia N80

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RSS feed update – 14 August 2007

Since the weather here in Cape Town is real miserable today, I will give you another batch of items from my feedreader.

Picture of the day — The Trifid Nebula in Stars and Dust which is 3000 lightyears from earth.

Credit and Copyright: R. Jay GaBany (Cosmotography.com)

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This blog has been upgraded to WordPress 2.1.3

Have just upgraded this bolg to WordPress 2.1.3.  I quote

These releases include fixes for several publicly known minor XSS issues, one major XML-RPC issue, and a proactive full sweep of the WordPress codebase to protect against future problems.

You can read more here.

If there is any problems then please leave a comment.

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IBM Software Live!

Spend the whole of yesterday at an IBM Software Live! day presented by 2 of my American coleagues – Doug Spencer and Jeff Reynolds (Kelly, you probably know Jeff since he also originated from Rational)

As fairly new to IBM it was good to see the range of IBM software products and wow what a range .. Covered from Tivoli on the monitoring side, Lotus on the people side, Websphere on the middleware side, Rational on the development side and then Information Management on content/data side.

Also good to see IBM’s direction with Web 2.0 and products like Connections and Quickr.  And then the support for open standards and open source.

The venue was great (Mount Nelson hotel in Cape Town) and the food was great.  Oh and a customer of mine walked away with an Apple iPod Nano in a lucky draw. Good for you Simon. Yes, us IBMers were not allowed to throw our business cards into the bowl 🙂

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This realy shows my age … the world of IBM mainframes

I just read an entry by Mark Cathcart called Looking back, Unix System Services, Linux et al.

I started my computing life on VM systems way way back, and the fact that I actually know all the acronyms and terms that Mark was using, say’s a lot. This trip down memory lane gave a very good insight into how IBM looked at Unix and then in the later years Linux on their big systems.  I still do not know whether I totally agree or like with the i, x, p and z Series names for IBM’s hardware.  I so much more liked it when it was called 360 Systems, 390’s, 9375’s etc and OS/390 or MVS, VM etc.

Every year I hear somebody say that the mainframe is dying but it just goes from strength to strength.  When it comes to reliability, scalability and pure cost/performance then nothing beats it … even if you throw a multi CPU clustered Intel or AMD machine at it.

When looking at how IBM implement and innovate around Linux, I am confident that in years to come Linux will play an integral role in helping business in optimizing their computing requirements. As an Open Source and Linux supporter, I will use these solutions more and more in my dealings with my customers and clients.

Lastly, I am so glad that the WIN32 API was never implemented and used in the IBM software stack.  Just imagine the situation IBM might have been in today …

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