tvgogga update
Done a bit of work on tvgogga.appspot.com tonight. Added the viewport feature for mobiles and tweaked the style a bit. Eyes sleepy now... good night.
Annular Eclipse of the Sun: 26 January 2009
There is a annular eclipse of the Sun on Monday 26 January. In Cape Town it will start at 06:58 SAST and it will take almost 3 hours for the moon to complete its pass in front of the sun. In Johannesburg it will start at 07:06 SAST. See the diagrams and the above linked site for more.
If it is cloudy, follow it in real time on your computer with http://www.stellarium.org/ ;)
Compiling Firefox Beta 5 on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon with nicer fonts
The firefox binaries available on Mozilla's site is compiled with a version of cairo that does a different type of subpixel rendering when anti-aliasing than what is used by the Ubuntu Gutsy system - I much prefer the way fonts look in ubuntu on my LCD display. To fix this I had to compile Firefox myself with the enable-system-cairo option. But for this I also needed a more recent version of cairo than what Gutsy provides - which is probably why mozilla decided to include their own version in the binaries.
You will need to get the source and compile the following packages yourself from freetype's download page and cairo's releases page:
- freetype-2.3.5
- pixman-0.10.0
- cairo-1.6.4
with the usual
./configure && make && sudo make installYou might have to install make with the following before you can compile cairo:
sudo apt-get install build-essentialFreetype needs special attention to enable LCD sub-pixel rendering because of these patent issues. So uncomment define FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING in devel/ftoption.h to enable it.
It is not really necessary to recompile freetype, I just included it to play around with it - and the new cairo is just so that firefox will compile. You can delete the new libraries (by default in /usr/local/lib) after firefox is compiled with system cairo. Then everything should be back to using the default font settings as set in the gutsy preferences. Or so I am guessing, works for me ;)
Now to compile Firefox:
Create a ~/.mozconfig file as described here.
This is mine:
. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/ff-opt
ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac_add_options --enable-optimize
ac_add_options --enable-libxul
ac_add_options --enable-system-cairo Make sure you have all the build prerequisites. I had to install the following packages:
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install libdbus-glib-1-dev
sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev
sudo apt-get install libxt-devIf you have everything, start compiling with this command
make -f client.mk buildAfter some time, build a tarball as recommended with:
cd ff-opt
make packageYou will find your new firefox package in the dist/ directory. Unpack somewhere and enjoy ;)
Before shot with Mozilla cairo:
After shot with system cairo:
Total eclipse of the Moon on Thursday morning 21 Feb 2008
It should be viewable from South Africa between 4am and 6am, with the full eclipse at about 5am on 21 February 2008.
More info here: Total Eclipse of the Moon, 21 February 2008
SEACOM prices announced – some light at the end of the tunnel?
From http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Telecoms/2911.html:
Brian Herlihy, SEACOM president, said that the idea behind the cable is to offer international bandwidth at a lower price but to increase usage to ensure profits.
In a move seldom experienced in the local telecoms arena, SEACOM revealed their wholesale pricing structure and strategy to the media.
The company will have a four tiered bandwidth pricing approach where bandwidth prices for larger products, in this case STM-64, STM-16 and STM-4 connections, are sold at reduced rates to the standard STM-1 connection.
Their price for an STM-1 connection however sets a roof for the resale of bandwidth by larger bulk-bandwidth buyers thereby ensuring that smaller players receive a competitive rate.
The price for an STM-64 connection, supplying 9.6 Gbps of bandwidth, is $ 1 663 875 or R 267-00 per Mbps per month. The price per Mbps per month for a STM-1 (155 Mbps) service is R 673-00 while a STM-4 (600 Mbps) connection costs R 575-00 and a STM-16 (2.5 Gbps) service will cost R 435-00.
or in other words:
| STM-1 (155 Mbps) | R673 per Mbps per month |
| STM-4 (600 Mbps) | R575 per Mbps per month |
| STM-16 (2500 Mbps) | R435 per Mbps per month |
| STM-64 (9600 Mbps) | R267 per Mbps per month |
As I understand it, this means the cost for an always on 128 KB/s connection will cost between R267 and R673 per month, but we still don't know the contention ratio, so I can't speculate too much.
Certainly good news though, but I'll wait to see the actual cost to the end consumer before I start jumping for joy. Only the bigger ISP's will be able to afford STM-64, although, considering the current cost of bandwidth, STM-1 will be far less than the current offerings anyway.
At least we have a specific date and pricing this time. Hopefully change is more imminent now than the imminent change promised by DoC in the past...