jonathan carter

a rebel without a pause

Archive for the 'South Africa' Category

A true war hero, and how wrong Americans are

Sunday, June 24th, 2007

His name is Eleon Israel, also known as “Eli”. Earlier this week, he decided to disobey direct orders and refused to participate further in the war in Iraq (Full story from ivaw.org):
“Yesterday, June 19, 26 year old SPC Eli Israel put himself at great personal risk by making the courageous decision to refuse further participation […]

Patricia De Lille wants to restrict your freedom

Monday, May 21st, 2007

Patricia De Lille wants to limit your freedom of speech, read this link for the full story. What it comes down to, is that she is calling on government to somehow regulate blogs and electronic communication to prevent anonymous defamatory comments. I’m quite disappointed, I honestly thought that De Lille was a bit more […]

OLPC and Windows (and Microsoft and the education system)

Sunday, April 29th, 2007

Warning: This post ended up longer than planned, if you are bored easily, only read the first two paragraphs
I’m a bit surprised that there haven’t been noise about this on the planets, but it’s probably due to the long weekend and people generally spending less time with their computers.
Via Slashdot, the OLPC XO […]

Geekdinner

Thursday, March 29th, 2007

Last night I went to the well attended Geekdinner, organised by Johann “Joe” Botha. I didn’t expect much from the geekdinner, the general perception was that there was going to be mostly ‘glamblogger/glamgeeks’ (we should get a proper name for those), who are basically people who dont do […]

Digital Freedom Expo - Hackers unite!

Friday, March 16th, 2007

On April the 19th, just over a month from now, the Digital Freedom Expo will take place at the University of the Western Cape and will run for two days. It will host high-profile speakers including:

Prof Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons and author of Free Culture
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia
Bdale Garbee, HP’s […]

First week at Impi

Sunday, March 11th, 2007

I spent the last week in Johannesburg, at the Impi Linux offices, where I’ve been freshly employed. It’s quite exciting, our local government is making a strong move to open source and free software, and Impi Linux is already signed up to do big parts of the migration, and it seems that more and more […]

New company & new blog

Friday, February 23rd, 2007

New Job
What an interesting month this has been! A few weeks ago, I got leads for some very good commercial opportunities, but the other decision makers at my company decided that we should not pursue it, and stick to the educational and development sectors instead. I really wanted to chase those deals, so I sent […]

Buh-bye 2006!

Saturday, December 30th, 2006

Tomorrow is the last day of 2006. Wow, it’s been a wild ride, and the beginning of the year feels like a lifetime ago. It started out well, the project that I’m most involved with, tuXlab, reached a big milestone with the installation of the 200th lab. Since then, many replications has happened in South […]

I’m bringing edgy back

Thursday, December 7th, 2006

Wow, we did it. Today is the official release date of the tuXlab GNU/Linux distribution. It’s probably the first distribution that can be considered an Edubuntu derivative. It also benefits from other Ubuntu derivatives, Kubuntu and Xubuntu.
So why a tuXlab distribution? Well, as part of the tuXlab project we have always maintained a set of […]

Novell invites local users to information session on Microsoft deal

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

Tonight I received this e-mail. It’s an invitation to a session explaining the Novell-Microsoft deal from Novell’s side. I’m thinking of going, I’ll try to take some pictures or even videos. Either way, I’ll report back on what they say…
——– Original Message ——–
Subject: FOSS Workshop - 7 December 2006
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 16:29:45 +0200 […]

CLUG Rocks!

Thursday, October 12th, 2006

CLUG is the Cape Linux Users Group, our local LUG here in Cape Town. Last week we attended the Futurex exhibition, which is one of the largest technology shows here in South Africa.
Problem was, it’s very expensive to hire some ground space at these shows. So what did CLUG do? We sent out an appeal […]

Software Freedom Day 2006

Tuesday, September 19th, 2006

3 Days after the fact, but when you have lots of work you constantly have to re-prioritise
The past weekend we celebrated Software Freedom Day in Cape Town. It took place at Khayelitsha, which is one of the poorest areas in the city. It happened at a community center there called “the lookout point”. […]