Monthly Archive for May, 2006

It’s Crunch Time in Nairobi

Published on May 29, 2006 in Info Tech and Opinions. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I’m back
Well, sorry for taking the past few weeks off folks. But it’s crunch time for the eBusiness web portal that I’m part owner of, and we needed to get things developed here and there plus add more content to the site. Most importantly, I got my pal Robbie (aka the download whore) in Ottawa (Canada) to grab me a GoDaddy.com TurboSSL certificate so that we can encrypt all data traffic between our web server and the user’s web browser.

Got protection?
Just as you need to protect yourself when going under the sheets with your “friend(s)”, it’s extremely important that you, the web surfer, are protected in cyber space when exchanging information (passwords, user names, bank account info, etc.) with strangers (web servers). Why? Well, when you send your data unencrypted over the wire, it could be intercepted by anyone sniffing your network. In the case of our new web startup, I wanted to make my users feel right at home, and not have any aprehensions with signing up. Also, residents in Africa are not too trusting with this sort of stuff, so encryption was a must have feature.

BTW, if you want to see 2 examples of the correct use of browser SSL encryption, take a look at 2 banks I deal with for online banking: TD Canada Trust and President’s Choice Financial. Just remember that https shows up in the browser address bar instead of http when you need to send vitally important (or secretive) data to the computer on the other end of your Internet connection.

Gotta jet!
Oh well, it’s time for me to hit the sack! I have a meeting with a wireless data provider tomorrow who’s service offering just might shake up the broadband market here in Kenya. If so, I want a piece of the action by starting up my very own wireless ISP with them providing me with the infrastructure to do it. Why? Well, DSL service down here literally sucks. And boy do I hate monopolies. Just take a peek at the first blog entry link below to see why I get annoyed so easily with telecom sharks. The second link clearly illustrates how customer service appears to be a foreign concept in said industry.

* Telkom South Africa: Can a Company be this Hated?
* Tracking Jumbo Elephants with PostgreSQL, Flashcom sucks, Shirky rocks

Sweet dreams. :-)

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GMail is Annoying me TODAY

Published on May 9, 2006 in Info Tech. 0 Comments

Et tu, GMail?
Arghhh!! Today I am soooo annoyed at my sweetheart, Google, who’s the mother of that great web app called GMail. Well, GMail is turning out to be a bratty little kid. It just won’t let me into my blimey account. And I’ve got email to send to the web developers with content for the Professional Resource Centre (PRC) component of our upcoming eBusiness web portal. If there’s one thing I cherish more than anything in life, it’s FREEDOM. I hate depending on anyone and anything. GMail’s hiccups over the past week or so is a threat to my freedom because I depend on this kid behaving well. Otherwise all hell’s gonna break loose.

Blesseth are the Pessimists
When I was doing my high school Coop-Ed in Computers & Accounting a long time ago, I fondly remembered this comment in the computer lab at Computing Devices Corp. (now General Dynamics Canada): “Blesseth are the pessimists for they hath made backups.“

Oh well…I’m off to Mail.Yahoo.ca to send out my web content. After all, the show must go on, right? Arghhh…foiled again by the bratty kid! Gees, I forgot that the email addresses for the web developers are in my bloody GMail account. Heck, I wonder if this GMail kid will play nice with me if I email it some digital candy. LOL. Whoops, my bad! I actually had those email addys in my Yahoo account after all.

Conclusion
Well, for the record, I’ve cleared my cache in Mozilla Firefox a gazillion times, and still no dice (er success). This is a stern warning to GMail’s developers. Get your fu#king beta house in order. Yes, I’m in awe at what your entire company have accomplished, but I’m not gonna kiss your ass when you fu#k up. And over the past week, you’ve been doing that a lot. You’re lucky that I’ve become addicted to your AMAZINGLY, FANTABULOUS web-based email client. :-)

Oh…
Any how, smarten up, GMail!
Oh, I’m also getting very annoyed with the Blogger.com WYSIWYG editor – another Google product. It’s more sensitive than a bloody prima donna musclehead. As soon as I change some formatting and click “Publish Post“, the bloody app gives me an “Your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is not closed: ” error message. Like, for Criss sakes, but I didn’t tell you to insert all of those god damn style tags. Did I? You put them there! So don’t bitch at me.

Right now, Blogger is “almost” on my endangered list. I hear WordPress kicks ass, so they better not annoy me any more. Oh, you’re not gonna bloody believe this. Blogger just gave me that error message after I clicked the “Save as Draft” button. See what I mean?

One other final thing.
Mozilla Thunderbird (email client) has a made a fool out of me after I suggested that it would be an excellent Outlook replacement. Well, the only major gripe I have with the darn thing is that it’s HTTP proxy feature is flimsy at best. In other words, you can’t grab your POP3 email unless your PC is directly connected to the Internet. How pathetic.

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