Jaxon Rice

Hey Foschini!

Jaxon — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:37:33 GMT

Thanks for the fucking wake up call this morning to tell me about your new stupid sports magazine or whatever it was you were sellng. I guess the "its a public holiday so don't make early morning phone calls" memo didn't get read down at the call centre, huh?

You are a bunch of fucktards. I actually feel sorry about shouting at the poor girl who phoned me - she was doing the job that her bosses told her to. So, loyal reader(s) - here is my challenge. Anyone have the cellphone numbers/ home numbers of any of the Foschini directors/board members? You can email it to me anonymously of course. I would love to give them a similarly early call later this weekend to discuss their call centre procedures. Repeatedly. And by the way, Foschini/Markhams/@ home. If you are reading this - I will never, ever buy any of your products again, unless I get a serious apology from you. Fat chance of that ever happening.

This might explain Blue Bulls fans - deleted

Jaxon — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 05:38:00 GMT

Edit: As one of my readers pointed out, I totally misread one of the lines in the original quote and misinterpreted everything. I am an ass, and the article makes no sense as a result. I have therefore deleted it.

My Thoughtleader podcast is up

Jaxon — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:39:00 GMT

A couple of weeks back Tony Lankester and I recorded a podcast for the M&G where I discussed my Web Predictions for 2008 Thoughtleader post. That podcast has just gone live - check it out if you feel like listening to me pontificate on a bunch of stuff that I am probably wrong about.

One thing that surprised me when I listened to the podcast was my constant um-ing and ah-ing, and I even detected a stutter in a few places. I am a very confident public speaker, and have performed my music live for tens of thousands of people without ever breaking a sweat, so it was unusual to hear myself sounding so tentative and unsure.

That aside, it was a fun conversation and something I am definitely going to do again. Tony made it damn easy - the whole conversation was done with Skype from the comfort of my lounge.

"Everyone has a weapon"

Jaxon — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:56:00 GMT

My brother Xan Rice is the East Africa correspondent for the Guardian. He is a good man, honest and passionate about Africa, and is based in Nairobi with his wife and three month old daughter.

My mom went up to Nairobi to visit her granddaughter three weeks ago at the start of the violence up there. She is due back in South Africa on Saturday and has been fairly blase about what is happening up there up until this morning when she sent me an email saying that she was confined to my brothers house, and that he had donned his flak jacket and gone out to report on the fresh wave of violence that had swept through Kenya yesterday.

He is no stranger to danger, having spent time in Mogadishu and Darfur, but violence in your home town is something different. He was the first English journalist on the scene of the horrific Church massacre a few weeks ago, and I have been following events through his writing on the Guardian.

If you have time, listen to his podcast from yesterday and his report about the army using Helicopters to protect refugees from a mob. It's a chilling reminder of the dangers of tribalism and just how quickly a stable country can descend into chaos. Countries need strong, principled leaders - I hope for all of our sakes that the next generation of South African leaders possess these qualities and that we don't follow the example of Kenya.

Get Ubuntu 7.10 shipped to you for free.

Jaxon — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 11:25:00 GMT

I noticed that Cape Town based ~~troll~~ blogger Richard Catto is offering to ship copies of Ubuntu 7.10 to his fellow South Africans for a mere R130. He says:

Get your copy of ubuntu 7.10 desktop or server edition on CD delivered to you in South Africa without delays or custom duties by ordering locally direct from Cape Town news right now!
This is a service for South Africans only.
It is purely to save you the trouble of downloading the large files and burning the iso image file to CD yourself.
If you prefer, you may download it yourself and burn the CD yourself.
Should you wish to save the bandwidth costs, or if you have a slow Internet connection, then ordering from us is the answer!

You can, of course, get the cd's shipped to you for free anywhere in the world straight from Canonical. Their website says it takes up to 10 weeks but in my experience the cd's get to South Africa a lot quicker than that.

Ubuntu really is an amazing OS, and I urge you to try it. If you want to try it and can't afford to download it and also don't feel like paying R130 for it, email me at jaxon@soup.co.za and I will send you a copy for free anywhere in Southern Africa with the greatest of pleasure.

edit: I originally described Richard Catto as a whackjob (it was struck through, but nevertheless...). At his request I have removed that description. I don't know him personally, and chances are he is way saner than I will ever be.

When CAPTCHAs go bad

Jaxon — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 12:59:00 GMT

I generally dislike CAPTCHA. I mean I understand that they are a necessary tool to prevent fake machine comments, user names and purchases from flooding social networks or blogs, but they can be really irritating. I have always thought that the last thing you want to do when someone is signing up for a service is to place another barrier in their way. There are also huge accessibility issues because unless they are implemented properly they can exclude blind and dyslexic users from using their intended web services.

There are, of course, good examples of CAPTCHAs, like the reCAPTCHA web service which uses the information entered to help digitise out of print books. This week, however, I came across two different CAPTCHAs that illustrated just how ridiculous some of these CAPTCHAs have become.

1.The Genius Captcha

I came across this CAPTCHA while signing up for the excellent Shozu mobile application. This is one of the places where a CAPTCHA is understandable (after this step an sms is sent to the phone number entered in a form), but it has added another step of complexity to the process by asking me to match up symbols with a bunch of letters in the key beneath the CAPTCHA.]

I am deeply ashamed to admit that I got this wrong the first time. I always knew that repeating matric would come back to haunt me - this CAPTCHA made me feel even dumber than I actually am. The only reason that I can possibly think for creating a monstrosity like this is to somehow internationalise the CAPTCHA, but I really think there must be a better solution than this.

2. The WTF CAPTCHA

This beauty comes from a website running the hugely popular Vbulletin forum software. Never mind the blind and dyslexic, how is a regular sighted person supposed to get this right more than half the time?

I have actually given up on searches on Vbulletin forums before because the CAPTCHA has rejected me multiple times in a row. Anything that chases users away from your site is a bad thing, but the worst thing about this is that is is on a search form, not a sign up or new post form.

As the spammers OCR techniques get better CAPTCHAs are getting more and more obfuscated and we are going to have to find new techniques to ward the bad guys off. Our best hope lies in the promise of distributed reputation systems and spam prevention technologies like Akismet. One thing is sure - the examples above are not a solution.

FeedDemon is now available for free (as in beer).

Jaxon — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 08:30:00 GMT

I just found out via ReadWriteWeb that Newsgator has just made all of its RSS products available for free. This is great news because they publish FeedDemon, the desktop RSS reader that I have been using for years.

FeedDemon really is a quality RSS reader, and because your subscriptions are handled through Newsgator you have an API and portability so you can sync your subscriptions on other devices too. I really tried to like Google Reader but I kept on coming back to FeedDemon.

In my opinion it was well worth the $30 a year price tag (and I gladly paid it every year too), and it is even better value as a free product.

Grab it now - FeedDemon (Windows Only)

Note: I see on the product page that they are still advertising it for $29.95. The press release today clearly states that it is now free, so go ahead and download it.

Another Amazon Delivery Day

Jaxon — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 17:48:00 GMT

Another Amazon delivery. Another supply of light weekend entertaining reading. No prizes for guessing what I am thinking about this month.

Does this mean I am hip and in the cool gang now?

Web Predictions Roundup

Jaxon — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 10:43:00 GMT

I posted my 7 web predictions for 2008 to my thoughtleader.co.za blog just before new year, and subsequently a couple of local bloggers have also posted their thoughts.

Tyler Reed posted his SA startup predictions for 2008, and I thought he got it pretty spot on, especially about Zoopy and Yeigo. Zoopy have really added some cool features and are my favourite SA startup at the moment. Their association with Nokia can only be good for their business - the move towards indexing and storing mobile content is sure to pay dividends later this year. I have also just started using Yeigo - their windows mobile 6 app is way ahead of other mobile voip players in terms of ui and functionality. I reckon that they could be one of the success stories of the year too.

Of course Tyler himself has been working on and releasing some pretty interesting things, even though he is too modest to include them in his post. Its going to be interesting to see what else he builds this year.

Vincent Maher made a post entitled some not-so-positive social media predictions for SA in 2008, including a prediction that I would do something unexpected and very successful this year. His faith in me is flattering, and I am going to work damn hard to prove him right. Yes, I have a stealth startup on the go - expect an announcement later this month :).

I think his other predictions are pretty accurate too. A lot of them are about the maturing of the SA blogosphere - this is a good thing.

Matthew Buckland wrote that Vinny Lingham was the man to watch in 2008. I ended up debating Synthasite's revenue model with another commenter on the post, and I do feel that Synthasite could really do well if they can use that $5 million worth of funding to build a decent user base.

There have also been a number of other excellent (and sometimes funny) posts on Thoughtleader with a whole of non-web related predictions for 2008 that are well worth a read.

Internationally, ReadWriteWeb led the field with their 2008 predictions post. Also worth a read: 12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008 (via Mike Stopforth), Mashable’s 2008 Predictions: Sean’s List and , just for fun, Valleywag's 25 predictions for 2008.

As I said in my thoughtleader post, I feel incredibly positive about the internet going into 2008, and I hope I feel the same way when I make my 2009 predictions at the end of this year.

Pavement Special launch is tonight

Jaxon — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 08:47:19 GMT

Just a reminder that the Pavement Special launch takes place tonight at the swanky Bohemian in Melvile.

My good friend Lloyd Gedye of Isolation.tv fame is behind this brilliant new music magazine, and I will be MC'ing the event and keeping the ladies entertained.

The line up is killer too - Jim Neversink, Kid of Doom and the BLK JKS are worth the price of admission alone. Come on down - if you're stuck in Johannesburg at this time of year it's not like you have anything better to do, right?

Ah Wulffmorgenthaler I love thee so

Jaxon — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 09:13:23 GMT

Genius

5 essential Web Developer Firefox extensions

Jaxon — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 22:50:00 GMT

I am using Firefox more and more for actual development work, thanks to a few amazing add-ons that I use on an almost daily basis. I assumed that most developers knew about them but a friend of mine who is starting to learn web standards based web development was amazed when I demoed Firebug to him yesterday. In that light, here are 5 Firefox extensions that web ~~plagiarists~~ developers will find really useful.

Firebug

This is the firefox add-on that I absolutely could not live without. When launched it provides a window at the bottom of the browser window that lets you edit and debug html, css and javascript in any page. You can easily explore the DOM and get the properties of elements incredibly quickly. The edit feature means that you can debug tricky pages and elements live. It has literally saved me hundreds of development hours.

One of my favourite features is the ability to pick a line of code in the source view and see the highlighted corresponding section on the live page. It is really useful for working out how your favourite site did something, and essential for anyone learning how the css cascade works.

Web Developer Toolbar

Chris Pederick's Web Developer toolbar was the web development add-on that really started it all. Some of its features have been made redundant by the Firebug add-on, but it still has a host of really useful functions, like disabling all css or javascript with a single click, or resizing the browser window to a predefined size (something I use all the time).

You can also validate your pages, view generated page source code and outline any or all block level elements on the page. Really time saving stuff if you are trying to debug someone else's work.

Measure It

Measure it is a simple add on that gives you an on-screen ruler that lets you check the width, height, or alignment of page elements in pixels. I cannot tell you how many times I have used this to check if an element is behaving as it should. Really simple and really useful

Colorzilla

Colorzilla is a A collection of tools, including a photoshop style colour picker and an an Eyedropper that helps to get a colour reading from anywhere in a webpage.

To activate it, you click on the dropper icon in the status bar and then move around the page. As you move along you get the colour code of that point, its x and y coordinate and lots of other useful information like the DOM path.

IE Tab

IE tab lets you right click and open the current window in a new tab, using the IE rendering engine inside Firefox. Fantastic for occasional IE rendering, and a real time saver too.

What add-ons do you use? Is there anything essential that I have missed? Let me know in the comments.

24 Ways is back

Jaxon — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 06:27:00 GMT

Drew McLellan's excellent 24 Ways has just started its 2007 run. Expect a great web design tip/tutorial daily for the next 24 days.

Day 1: Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6

Extreme Makeover blog edition

Jaxon — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 09:06:00 GMT

seeing as how Extreme Makeover won't answer my letters any more and refuse to even entertain the thought of making me look like George Clooney (apparently there "isn't enough money in the world"), I decided to perform an Extreme Makeover on my blog instead.

It's still very much a work in progress, but I like how it is looking do far. I am using as few graphic elements as possible (so far, an rss icon and a form background image), and have based the layout on a modified version of Blueprint 0.5, which is an older version of a really cool css framework that I have been playing with recently. There is a bit of Jquery, and I am pulling my thoughtleader posts in through a filtered Yahoo Pipes JSON feed. My "Side Notes" column on the whole page is my 5 most recent posts tagged "Notes" on Delicious, and is also pulled in via JSON

Speaking of Yahoo Pipes, it really is a useful tool. I built all sorts of feeds like my taking my last.fm recently listened albums and marry that up with album art and add referral links to it. In the end it cluttered up my blog, but I will probably find a way to include that all on here sooner or later.

As I mentioned I used a modified version of Blueprint for my layout, and ended up using a 10 column grid. This image shows how the grid works. The whole blog runs on Community Server 2007, which frankly is way too large for a single blog. I hope to convert this blog to Telligent's new CMS, Graffiti, when it is finally released. Nervertheless, Telligent have done a great job with their theming tools (Chameleon), and it was much easier than designing a CS 2.1 skin. IF there is sloppiness in the XHTML and javascript, it is all my fault, and I will clean it up later, ~~I swear~~ probably.

South African startup Synthasite raises $5 million in Series A round

Jaxon — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 20:24:00 GMT

Techcrunch reports that Synthasite, the browser based website builder that is backed by Vinny Lingham has raised $5 million in a Series A investment round from Swiss based Columbus Venture Capital. You can find more details on Vinny's blog and a formal press release here.

This is great news for the Cape Town based Synthasite, which launched into beta two weeks ago, and good news for South African startups in general. They have proved that it is possible to get decent VC for a South African startup, but that it is much easier when you have a professional product with unique features and global appeal. So many current SA startups are clones or variations on international ideas, and our local internet population is not large enough to justify the kind of investments that these startups are looking for.

Congratulations to Vinny Lingham and the Synthasite team