defZA's Notes Palace

Update: It seems to have run into troubles and was liquidated… sorry.

This is a almost free university in SA.
cida.co.za – City Campus

CIDA is a:

• high quality
• low cost
• mass-scale, contact higher education model

CIDA is was a registered and accredited, non-profit, private, higher education institution founded in 1999 in South Africa.

A 3-year cutting-edge business and technology degree is offered. This Bachelor of Business Administration degree (BBA) is registered by the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) and the Council for Higher Education (CHE), and provisionally registered by the South African National Department of Education.

The campus is based in Johannesburg in the former Investec Bank head office. Investec has been a major corporate benefactor by providing their R86 million building for the campus.

Currently 1330 students are registered to study at CIDA City Campus and Foundation College in Johannesburg.

Does sound interesting. Go check it out.

I believe everyone, who is willing, who wants to study should be able to study! It is possible, go for it!

Hi, I wrote a long review for this video, but can’t post it on youtube (500 character limitation).

Details:

———————

My Review

I just watched the video and am giving some feedback.
Nice work guys.
Looks like you guys were going to talk to someone on the left in the beginning 🙂 But that’s just director issues. No problem.

The content:

Those examples Fritz gave made no sense in the beginning! Even for a scientist. “Generic dynamic service grids” (must have made this up on the fly), “globally connected resource pools” (makes some sense, but no.).

“boosting productivity, maximizing resource utilization, …blah blah” that all means nothing if you are trying to explain the thing.
“user focused on their core task” – sigh. What reading their emails? Browsing the web?
“decision support” – not in this talk.
“flexible and easy to use”, “time to market” – come’on, enough marketing spam.

———-
OK, the purpose of the video?
– To educate people who know nothing about pc’s? This will never work at this level.
– For technically people? It’s too high level, I understand what a cluster is and that it has to be balanced (obviously).

This video makes the grid look like a game where you drag stuff around?

Is the grid engine a C or Java application that distributes itself to other computers (after setting up the SSH/RSH permissions to the other machines) in the grid specified in a config file of sorts? Or is it listening on a port for broadcast messages for machines running the grid client software?

Details people; otherwise this video helps no-one.

The idea is awesome though. Thanks.

Sincerely,

David

This post is out of frustration with the non-searchable, disparate state of “business directories” in the Helderberg area, namely, Strand, Somerset West, Gordons Bay and some other towns.

I was just testing out a “ink helderberg” search, never mind “ink strand” which returns nothing, and so I’m just posting a couple of adverts of ink places in the area. There are quite a few.

Ink or Toner Cartridge Suppliers (New or refill)

• Cartridge City – 4 Lourensford Rd, Somerset West.
  For all your printing consumables. All inkjet laser refills. Compatible & original cartridges at the best prices in town. All services carry our money back guarantee. Free quotes, free delivery.
  Marc 083 271 0025; 021851 9124; Fax: 021851 9125
• The Cartridge Factory Shop – 8 Morkels Arcade, Main Str, Somerset West.
  Ask for specials on all original cartridges. Pay cash and get extra discont on originals. The compatibles and refills are of the highest quality.
  021852 6655; fax: 021852 6777
• Cartridge Warehouse – Palm House, Cnr Andries Pretorius & Bright Street, Somerset West. Also Shop 6 Noble Park, Bellville.
  Inkjet and Laser. Compatible remanufactured & refilled. One stop shop.
  021 852 8606

I dare you to tell them you found them on defza.com.

Some of the directories around town

(People, why not join up and make one super cool directory?)

• somersetwest.biz
• onlinebusiness.co.za
• swest.info
• sabusinesses.com

Getting a free tshirt for linking to Afrigator 🙂

We need your help to grow Afrigator! In return for your generous participation, we’re going to offer you the chance to win an Apple Video iPod!

All you need to do is go to our Competitions page and send out some emails (using the form we’ve provided) to those people you know who have African-related blogs, podcasts and news sites. When they sign on for the first time they will need to enter your email address in the ‘referrer’ field so we know you were responsible for the sign on…

You can also blog the competition, as long as you still ask people to enter your name in the referrer field when they sign up. Not only will we be giving an iPod away to one of you, but also to one of the new users you sign up! The competition is valid until 31 May, and winners will be announced on 1 June.

Actually, come to think of it, we’d love you to start blogging about it, so we’re going to offer the FIRST 50 BLOGGERS who trackback / pingback to this post in their blogs a limited edition Afrigator T-shirt.

What are you waiting for!? Get blogging!

Above taken from: Win an Apple iPod with Afrigato

There already exist other African Blog aggregators, but I guess there’s always someone who thinks they can do it better or something! Nothing wrong with that, but you should always try to collaborate with the existing stuff first I reckon.

• BlogAfrica.com
• Amatomu.com
• muti.co.za
• Mashada.com

What’s this all about?

GIMP is a great free photo editing program. Like photoshop etc.
Script-fu is the name of the scripts that run in GIMP.
Scripts are written in the Scheme Language.

The problem

OK, this can be quite frustrating… the gimp-drawable-set-pixel function doesn’t seem to update the image in gimp!

The solution

Here’s the function you have to call to make your changes show and the script to work:

http://www.spinics.net/lists/gimp/msg14385.html

Credit to Saul Goode and Sven Neumann.

Step #1: Create a new image with a white background (any size will do)
and zoom in to the upper left corner.

Step #2: Open the Script-fu console (Xtns->Script Fu->) and enter the following commands
(the number “1” in the first line assumes the new image is the first one
created after opening the GIMP; substitute the appropriate image-IDnum
from the window’s titlebar if this is not the case):

(define image 1)
(define layer (car (gimp-image-get-active-layer image)))
(gimp-drawable-set-pixel layer 10 10 3 (cons-array 3 ‘byte))

Note that at this point, the pixel at location x=10, y=10 has “internally”
been painted BLACK (‘cons-array’ initializes to [0,0,0]) but the display
has not been updated.

Step #3: Enter the following line in the console:

(gimp-displays-flush)

Note that the display is not updated — this is somewhat anomalous (but
then Script-fu is not often used to paint on a pixel-by-pixel basis).

Step #4: The main undocumented step!

(gimp-drawable-update drawable startX startY lenghtX lengthY)

OR
Manually:
Hide and then unhide the layer by toggling its “eyeball” in the
Layers window. At this point the projection is updated to reflect that
the pixel at [1,1] has been painted black.

——–
“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do
not care who gets the credit.” — Harry S. Truman

I’m sick of blogs. and other useless sites

No-one cares about reading your stupid life events that you think are important.

Blogs are like magazines. Or magazines are like blogs.
People decide, let’s start a magazine about ‘whatever’ just because they think of one or two editions that they can fill with content.
But then after that? spam. Magazine dies. End of story.

Just put content where it’s due! Don’t go create a whole new blog just because you are going to post one cool link or something!
Collaboration people!

And don’t promise “I’m going to update/post regularly“, or even worse, “every day!“. Yeah right. Gimme a break. I’ve seen tons of sites that are like that.
Because, frankly, you won’t. You carry on with your real life.