mydigitallife

I have not had time to even have my Muesli and I am writing about the Winnie Madikizela-Mandela film again.  Winnie is sueing Darryl Roodt for making a film about her, without her consent.  In most cases, Biopic’s do not require permission.  It falls under the category, “freedom of Speech”.  Other political figures did not require permission, nor did historical figures.  I give you a far out example:  Did Mel Gibson ask Jesus if he could do a film about him before making “The Passion of Christ”?

I know Oscar nominated Roodt’s style of film making.  He only tells the truth.  Is Winnie asking him to leave out facts?  Does she only want to be seen saintly.  Roodt, in any biopic he has done, has always stuck to facts.  That John Kani compared the situation to one comparing Nelson Mandela to Osama bin Laden in a possible 1967, is ridiculous.  Roodt will put in the good, as well as the bad, and remind everyone that Winnie is human, and not God.  Let's not forget that she has fraud (43 counts), 25 counts of theft, kidnapping and being an accessory to James Seipei's assault and murder.  This, as well as her freedom fighting will be portrayed.  Telling a true story is the best work a director can do.


Maybe Winnie, like the rest of us, has been hit by the recession, and surely, a negotiation to get a cut from the movie would be all round beneficial, or maybe that is what the problem is.  This movie has been public knowledge for a while.  So I ask, why the fuss now?

As promised, some more photos from the opening event at Cape Town Stadium.  I did take something in excess of 300 photos, but the vast majority are extremely boring.  Well...maybe these will fall into that category too for some people!!!

This one is the usual indemnity sign that you may see at any public facility.  What is interesting to me is that camera's with flashes are actually prohibited...but I doubt there are many cameras which come without flashes these days.  Apparently it is standard (as it is thought it may put off the players), but never enforced...  Another thing that is forbidden is the old South African flag.  Which is on one level odd...but understandable at another level...  But what really horrified me was listening to a family reading the sign, (I guess family; elderly parents, and middle aged son), he read that and announced that it was 'pathetic' to ban the old flag, as he found the new flag offensive.  Some people....
This is the main entrance soon after the gates were opened.  Although restricted to only 20,000 spectators, you can see that there is plenty of space.  The queues were dealt with quickly, and no one had to stand waiting for any lengthy period of time.  The backdrop is pretty impressive too!

This photo shows some of the structure of how the external cladding is held to the frame.  Maybe it is just me, but I like this modern trend of being able to see how the building works.
This is what I mean by a backdrop!  I am certain that this stadium has no peers when it comes to setting; blue Altantic to one side, and Table Mountain to the other...

It is impossible to really do the scale of the stadium justice.  It does tower over you on the podium (remembering that the level of the pitch is quite some metres below this level.  There is almost a cathedral like quality to it.

For me, and our involvement, this is what it is all about, kids in wheelchairs watching the game alongside non-disabled spectators.  These children were from FILIA school, a special needs school, aiming at children with Cerebral palsy.  I am meeting with the children, and their teachers today, to listen to their experiences and see if there is anything we can do to improve the facility.

I love the silver sheen that the stadium takes on.  It is almost pearl-like in certain a certain light.  I do think it is a very beautiful stadium, and without a doubt, it is a World class venue.

Well Yesterday I blogged about how the PS3 was finally cracked after all this time.  Well it appears that the reaction here was similar to the reaction around the world. People became very skeptical about it. Although thier logic seemed a little flawed to me.

The problem the greater web community had was How can the PS3 be hacked by a 20 year old. Personally I don't think this was the issue. I was more interested why the exploit was not provided to the greater community.

Well the Exploit is now available for download for people in the community to give it a try. I have downloaded it for research purposes, ie I wanna have a look and see what it involves. also I don't have a PS3 and I doubt I will ever get one. 

Some things concern me, which I think I raised in the last blog. There appears to be no certainty that the exploit will actually work. The indication is that it will work on the hypervisor version 2.4.2, and the guess is that it will work with other versions. Well this will depend on what Sony may or may not have changed. 

Although that is problematic, reading the instructions to the exploit, I get a little concerned with some of the timings, At one point you need to pulse a tiny solder spot on the board on the PS3 for rough 40ns which is 0.00000004 seconds or roughly the time taken for the fusion reaction in a hydrogen bomb. That is pretty tight timing if you ask me. This is not really joe blogs on the street can do easily.

Following that, if you manage to do the magical timing, there are 2 outcomes with the exploit. One it will kernel Panic, which is generally a bad thing with any computing equipment or 2 the exploit is succesful.

Hotz spends a lot of time either in his code comments and in his instructions saying that this is for research purposes and piracy is bad. I think he is being honest with that opinion, But it also smacks of him covering his arse. This gives him a legal defense against sony et al. But it is not going to stop people from taking his work and developing full piracy etc.

if anyone is interested here is a brief decription of how it works from Hotz himself. 

Looking at the expl0it and various other sources it looks to me as though this is still a serious work in progress, there is a lot of work that still needs to be done. There are missing hypervisor calls that need to be filled in, they need to do full memory maps, documentation they have nothing documented really.

And then there is the holy grail, a full software exploit that requires no hardware fixes what so ever.  I am personally not so sure if this will ever be attained. but we shall just have to see.

Oh and before I forget :) they also need to break the numerous encryption keys that are built into the system. on a rough guess they have at least 3 sets of keys to break.  Which to be honest without those I am not sure they can do as much with an exploited PS3 as was previously suggested.

I noticed something interesting this morning when I switched on my PC.

On my desktop I have all the popular browsers loaded except for Internet Explorer.  That is hidden away on my navigation bar.

What I find more interesting is that I have the same happening on my desktop PC at work, on my netbook and on my wife's laptop.  Could this mean that I hate Internet Explorer.  To be honest, it was never my first browser of choice.

Ever since I started out in the online environment I was searching for something else.

I used Internet Explorer 6 on my first PC because that was already installed when I got it.  That was what the whole case between the EU and Microsoft was all about I suppose.  There was the option of Netscape but that just didn't appeal to me.

Then I discovered Opera which I loved because of the tabbed browsing and the fact that I could view my mail within the browser. 

When I started doing more website development and needed to see what was happening on the layout and CSS side of things, one of our developers introduced me to Firefox 2 and the fab FireBug plug-in which allows you to manipulate the code real-time on the client side.  I never really touched Opera again after that.

I find Chrome and Safari really stupid, but I accept the fact that it is popular browsers that people are starting to use more.  I also think this will increase in the years to come.

Internet Explorer has grown in its own right.

IE7 was a much improved upgrade and IE8 so far just looks like a aesthetical revamp for me.  I still find it slow and I still hate it when it needs to install a plug-in to view certain elements within a web page.  You would think that upgrading it and running service pack install would fix this... but noooo.

Looking at the browsers used to visit myDigitalLife, it is still the number one browser.  But do people know about the other options?  It can also be the case that companies only install Internet Explorer on the computers of their employees.  I guess you have to have an interest in the net to really go and search for something else.

I suppose that if I was a Sales Representative who only used the internet to check emails or search for news, then I would also be using IE 7 or 8.

On the mobile side Opera Mini is still king.  However, I have used IE on the HTC Snap and I found it much better, even faster.  With cloud computing becoming a bigger role player in the future alongside virtual working environments we need to ask whether our browsers will include plug-in's that serve as tools?  Looking in specific at CRM systems to the likes of Sugar CRM and Vtiger CRM, we see that both run inside a browser.  This should be an indicator to where things are heading. 

• It is easier to develop a system to run inside a browser
• It isn't restricted by the OS installed on your PC

At the previous company this is something we missed in developing our software.  The OS.

We constantly had minor problems every time there was a upgrade on Windows XP.  This resulted in the technicians having to go and visit the clients to install an upgraded version.  If we took the route of developing the software to run inside a browser then we would never have had the problems.

I guess that is how you learn, from experience.

Still, I can get myself to use IE.