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The Contenders

Today is the national and provincial elections in South Africa. I just made my vote, and it’s the first time I ever voted. It was supposed to be the second time I voted. I didn’t vote last time, not because of apathy so much as that I knew it wouldn’t have made so much of a difference who I voted for.

This year it’s quite different, the ruling ANC party has a break-away faction called COPE, and it’s quite possible that the ANC might not get a majority (2/3rds) vote. The DA has also gained lots of momentum since the last elections, and it’s quite possible that they may win the provincial elections in the Western Cape province. If you haven’t picked up on it yet, I’m not a fan of the ANC. While they have done a lot for our country that I will always be grateful for, I am also disgusted at what it has become and how it is run. Their leader, who will most probably be our president, is immoral and corrupt, and I won’t support him or his party. The question I’ve been wondering about the last 6 months or so is who will I vote for? Our parties are mostly lame and petty. The reasons they give in their campaigns to vote for them are things like “Vote for us so that we can win!” and “Vote for us so that the other parties won’t win!” or “A brighter future for all!”. All vague and boring, they mostly haven’t really provided any good reasons to vote for them.

My Choice

I considered voting COPE for a while, being fresh and new and being low baggage. The problem is that I couldn’t really find enough supporting reasons to vote for them, so I looked at the ID. ID actually looks ok, and I like Patricia de Lille (even though she can be a bit of a freedom hater at times). I like her passion and she seems to really care for the poor people in our country. The problem is that it more or less ends there, the ID’s mission seems mostly to give free shit like medicine and schooling to poor people. Not bad at all, but we need a bigger plan than that for our country. I ended up not voting for them, but if they do some more work and planning into what they’ll do for our country (whether elected or not), I might end up voting for them in the future. I came across the NOPE website which isn’t really a political party, but if they were I’d probably vote for them. I didn’t want to vote for the DA because there’s this general stigma that if you’re black you vote ANC and if you’re white you vote DA. I also can’t relate to Helen Zille much at all, I think she needs to do more to reach out to the youth. I’m also apposed to all the religious parties, religion and politics shouldn’t be mixed.

I did end up voting DA for the following reasons:

• They promise not to form a coalition with the ANC or other ANC coalitions, so when you vote DA, you know your vote stays there
• Hellen Zille (the leader of the D.A) have been running Cape Town very well, and I think the DA will do a much better job of running the Western Cape province if they win the provincial elections.
• The DA is pretty much the only party that has a chance of beating the ANC in the Western Cape, I absolutely HATE the notion of voting for someone just because they have the best chance of winning, but in this case I do think that it makes sense to do so

CLUG Discussions

On the CLUG IRC channel and last night at the commitee meeting we’ve been talking about what the different parties run as web servers, content management systems, etc. I thought I’d post a summary, according to what Netcraft says.

Most parties also require you to add a www. to their subdomain, someone should point them to no-www.

ANC

• Web Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.6-2ubuntu4.1 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.9 OpenSSL/0.9.8g.
• CMS: Custom/static PHP.
• Requires WWW: Yes.

COPE

• Web Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
• CMS: Custom/static ASP.
• Requries WWW: Yes.

DA

• Web Server: Apache/1.3.34 (Debian) mod_auth_pam/1.1.1 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a PHP/4.4.4-8+etch6 mod_ssl/2.8.25 OpenSSL/0.9.8c mod_perl/1.29 mod_jk/1.2.18 AuthMySQL/4.3.9-2 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635
• CMS: Custom/static HTML.
• Requries WWW:No, but it redirects you to the www. subdomain.

ID

• Web Server: Zope/(Zope 2.9.7-final, python 2.4.4, linux2) ZServer/1.1
• CMS: Plone
• Requries WWW:No.

Stefano pointed out last night that most of the parties are outsourcing their web work. I still think it’s interesting to see what they are running. If it counted for anything then the ID would probably win.

Leaving the Country?

Some people have said that they’re leaving the country if Zuma becomes president and if the ANC wins in the Western Cape and if the ANC gains majority rule. I think South Africa is a great country, and I don’t have plans to leave any time soon. You do have to ask yourself at some point though “How bad to things need to get before I should leave?”. I’ve been spending lots of time in Gauteng over the last year. If things get as bad in the Western Cape as it is in Gauteng at the moment, then I will consider leaving. Not a clue where too though, I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather want to live.

Starting a political party?

I’ve been thinking of starting a political party for years now (since I was 17 or so). Back then I thought of going into politics when I’m 50 years old or older. When the last elections came and gone, I started thinking of starting my own political party a bit earlier, maybe closer to 30. I’ll be doing some research and if I actually do decide to start something for the next elections, I’ll start doing something about it in the first 6 months of next year. I was talking to an old friend at the voting stations this morning and he was asking me how I’d pay for the start-up and compaign fees. Previous years I thought that I’d save up the money and pay for as much of it as I can, but now I think that if I can’t even gather enough people to raise some funds for running the campaign, then I probably shouldn’t go into politics in the first place.

Found this in my feed reader today. Classic.

The Wine project has announced the first release candidate for Wine, the free Windows API for Unix/Unix-like systems (and even non-unix systems like MS Windows itself and ReactOS). The Wine project started in 1993, which makes this release candidate 15 years in the making.

With so many excellent software for Linux systems these days, and the combination of powerful desktop hardware with great free virtualisation suites such as Virtualbox, people often ask me what the actual benefit of having a complete and stable free Windows API is. The ones I could think of is:

• Gaining the benefits of free software. This comes down to having the ability to fix bugs yourself, or getting someone else to fix them for you. A company might have to run some legacy software under Windows, and Microsoft itself might not find it financially beneficial to fix a certain bug in their system. You could then switch to a free API and if the bug is present there as well, have it fixed. Since Wine does not run Windows under an emulator (or run Microsoft Windows at all), you do not need a Windows license, which you would need if you would run Windows under KVM/Virtualbox/VMWare/etc.

• Beneficial to ReactOS (and similar projects). ReactOS is an attempt to completely re-write the entire Windows operating system, including boot loader, registry. kernel and user interface. ReactOS uses Wine for its Windows API. ReactOS is currently in early alpha state, and plans to release an alpha that is roughly 70% of a Windows NT 5 (Windows XP) kernel by the end of 2008.

• Allows software vendors to dip their toes into cross-platform support. Software vendors such as Google have ported software such as Picassa and GoogleEarth to Linux-based systems using Winelib. Using Winelib, a software vendor can package their software to run on non-Windows systems at a fraction of the cost of what a rewrite or proper port would cost. While this may be a short-term solution for some providers, it may give them a market lead boost by being able to provide to a large audience rather sooner than later.

• Commercial Wine support providers such as Crossover or Transgaming (see Tom’s comment below). These companies patch Wine to provide additional support for certain software and also provide user interfaces to allow easy installation and configuration of Windows software. The software released by these type of companies are usually proprietary software.

• Performance and integration. Even though desktop hardware has become cheaper, and virtualisation software offers more and more nice features such as ’seamless’ window mode, running a complete additional operating system does come at a performance hit. At the very least, it will typically consume a dedicated amount of memory. Unless you do fancy tricks with shared directories between the host and guest systems, you also don’t get tight desktop integration with the software running in the guest. Running your legacy software under Wine allows you to get past some of these problems.

That’s the immediate benefits I could think of from having a free, stable Windows API available. There are probably more, and while I think that we probably won’t care about this anymore 10-15 years from now, considering all the next-generation cross-platform programming tools that are available now, I do think that the coming of age of the Wine project will be welcomed by many, and will provide many companies and individuals plenty of short-term benefits while the computing landscape transforms.

And why not!? It runs Ubuntu beautifully!

PS: I bought this machine so that I can edit video, nothing I could find for Windows or Linux really did it for me. However, OSX is really terrible for me. It’s really way too oversimplified (and then some people complain about Gnome being too simple, really!). It’s default terminal font also hurt my eyes. When I have some spare time, I’ll run some things in Ubuntu and some in OSX and sees which performs better. Ubuntu certainly flies on this machine. Pity you can’t buy them without OSX tax. That would be awesome.

PPS: Any idea of platform independent benchmarks I could try?

I like the OLPC XO-1. It’s a quite little machine, it doesn’t have venting holes, and is quite resistant to dust and water. It’s also strong, and handles small falls (like falling from a desk to a floor) very well. I also like the amount of effort they have put into creating the custom Sugar interface, and all the other things around it like the mesh networking support and the way that a user can find other users close to them.

I think the project has taken a turn for the worse though. Nicolas Negreponte, founder of the OLPC project, is pushing the project for the XO-1 to use Microsoft Windows, and they have lost top staff like Walter Bender, who was also one of the top open source guys in the company. Negreponte claims that his interest is to get the machines in as many children’s hands as possible, this article also says:

He lamented that an overriding insistence on open-source had hampered the XOs, saying Sugar “grew amorphously” and “didn’t have a software architect who did it in a crisp way.” For instance, the laptops do not support Flash animation, widely used on the Web.

“There are several examples like that, that we have to address without worrying about the fundamentalism in some of the open-source community,” he said. “One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist.”

Personally, I think that getting the laptops in the hands of kids in an irresponsable manner can do more harm than good. I previously blogged about Microsoft trying to force their old software on users, and this isn’t too much different. Microsoft is already reportedly releasing the next version of Windows next year. This means that by the time many of these XO laptops running Windows get to their target users, it would be an 8 year old operating system that’s already two releases behind the newest. I think this is terribly cruel, and shouldn’t be allowed. If I was a project donor, I would rather pay a bit more for decent hardware like the ASUS Eee or Intel Classmate PC (or even a Classmate 2) and run a modern, supported, localised operating system that truly benefits the users, instead of providing a legacy operating system on slow hardware.

Just found this via Engadget, a roll of toilet paper from Japan featuring all the features of Windows Vista SP1! I would actually buy this if I could, seriously.

A lawsuit against Microsoft for classifying hardware as Vista Capable, when it is in fact only capable of running the simplistic Windows Vista Home Basic version, has been granted by a judge as a class-action lawsuit (man, we really need one of those against Telkom for their pathetic service). Microsoft will probably attempt to blame their resellers for this, biting the hands that help feed it, but in my opinion, it should be Microsoft’s responsibility to educate their partners on the exact system requirements of their upcoming products. A computer manufacturer cannot in any way predict the exact specifications of Microsoft’s upcoming systems, not even when testing pre-release versions, since they are often in debug mode which would make it run somewhat slower.

I also think that the industry is wising up to Microsoft quickly, consumers are also learning that Microsoft isn’t the angel software house that many people previously believed, and as a result, I think we will see many more class action lawsuits against them in the next few years.

Maybe Microsoft will finally learn to play nicely. Not because they want to, but because they have to.