Where you’ve seen her: After graduating highschool (HAVO) she sent some snapshots to model agency Paparazzi in Amsterdam. Currently she is signed by DNA Models. Kroes has made the covers of Time, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Numero. She also appears regularly in the Victoria’s Secret catalog and was featured in their fashion show in 2005 and 2006. Kroes has also been in campaigns by Gucci, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Escada, Dolce & Gabbana, Valentino, Versace and Neiman Marcus. In the May 2007 issue of American Vogue she was featured on the cover with fellow models: Hilary Rhoda, Caroline Trentini, Raquel Zimmermann, Sasha Pivovarova, Agyness Deyn, Coco Rocha, Jessica Stam, Chanel Iman, and Lily Donaldson as the new crop of supermodels. Together with several of these new supermodels, she also modelled for the 2008 Pirelli Calendar.

Pointless quote: At the moment I believe that there is a Netherlands wave. In the past there were many Brazilian, Belgian and Russian girls. Now the Dutchies are even too!

Vodacom is launching the new iPhone 3GS in South Africa today.

Pricing for the iPhone 3GS range from a once off cash payment of R5199 for the iPhone 3Gs 32GB on a iPhone weekender S package to a fully subsidized handset on any of the finances iPhone options starting at R485 per month.

For full pricing details click here.

For more info on the iPhone 3GS on Vodacom visit www.vodacom.co.za

Cape Town was yesterday officially apointed as the venue where the 2010 Soccer World Cup final draw – at which all the qualifying soccer teams will be allotted into groups – will take place.

The week-long event will culminate in a draw on December 4 at which the 32 participating teams will be divided into eight groups and is the last milestone before the tournament kicks off next year.

The draw is expected to attract more than 2000 guests, including all the qualifying teams’ coaches and captains, and will be held at the city’s Green Point Stadium, which is still under construction. Cape Town mayor Dan Plato said construction was on track and the stadium would be completed in time for the draw.

To date, 800000 of the 3,2-million World Cup tickets have been sold, with 240000 snapped up by South Africans, 57000 sold in the US and 27000 in Australia. Not many tickets have been sold in the rest of Africa, although Ghana is an exception.

Another concern among Cape Town residents was whether the R4,5bn Green Point Stadium would be viable after the World Cup, especially after the Western Province Rugby Union indicated that it was not interested in trading Newlands for the new stadium.

[via BusinessDay]

Earlier this year Google announced Google Latitude, a service that lets you and your friends share your locations with each other. You control who gets to see your location and where on the map you appear to others. Today, Google is releasing Google Latitude for iPhone and iPod touch, available in the Safari browser.

Visit google.com/latitude from your device to start using Latitude. Add a bookmark to your home screen to quickly launch Latitude. Just open Latitude in Safari and tap the + icon > Add to Home Screen > Add. For more details, check out the Google Mobile Blog.

CentOS the RedHat based Linux operating is in jeapardy after the lead CentOS developer Lance Davis dissapeared into thin air. Normally this would not affect a project by that big a margain but in CentOS’ case it does because Lance Davis has sole control over the CentOS domain, IRC channel and I believe the Banking accounts aswell.

Fellow project Devlopers has written a open letter to Lance Davis and posted this on the CentOS website.

July 30, 2009 04:39 UTC

This is an Open Letter to Lance Davis from fellow CentOS Developers

It is regrettable that we are forced to send this letter but we are left with no other options. For some time now we have been attempting to resolve these problems:

You seem to have crawled into a hole … and this is not acceptable.

You have long promised a statement of CentOS project funds; to this date this has not appeared.

You hold sole control of the centos.org domain with no deputy; this is not proper.

You have, it seems, sole ‘Founders’ rights in the IRC channels with no deputy ; this is not proper.

When I (Russ) try to call the phone numbers for UK Linux, and for you individually, I get a telco intercept ‘Lines are temporarily busy’ for the last two weeks. Finally yesterday, a voicemail in your voice picked up, and I left a message urgently requesting a reply. Karanbir also reports calling and leaving messages without your reply.

Please do not kill CentOS through your fear of shared management of the project.

Clearly the project dies if all the developers walk away.

Please contact me, or any other signer of this letter at once, to arrange for the required information to keep the project alive at the ‘centos.org’ domain.

Sincerely,

Russ Herrold
Ralph Angenendt
Karanbir Singh
Jim Perrin
Donavan Nelson
Tim Verhoeven
Tru Huynh
Johnny Hughes

Micro-blogging service Twitter has unveiled a new frontpage featuring a prominent search box in a bid to attract new users.

Co-founder of Twitter Biz Stone said in a blog post that new frontpage is to demonstrate “the power of Twitter as a discovery engine for what is happening right now.”

The all new search box will allow non registered users to search for something and see the latest real-time messages, known as “tweets,” about the subject of the keywords entered.

Stone said this would hopefully inspire people to then sign up for Twitter, which allows users to broadcast messages of 140 characters or less to other members.

The redesign does not affect the Twitter homepage seen by current users of the service, only the introductory page at Twitter.com seen by Internet users who have not yet signed up for the service.

Even the iPhone isn’t perfect. Here are the top ten iPhone annoyances and what you can do about them.

Even the greatest gadgets have flaws, and the iPhone is certainly no exception. Praise it all you want, but the “Jesus phone” has plenty of little annoyances or nuisances that get under a user’s skin. Fortunately, technology is all about workarounds to common problems. So we’ve not only put together a Top 10 list of iPhone annoyances to vent about, we’re also offering solutions (where we can) to fix those pesky iPhone problems we hate so much.

10. Default Apps Can’t Be Hidden

The iPhone’s start screen is filled with shortcuts to prepackaged applactions that come with your iPhone whether you want them or not–for example, an app for checking stocks whose shortcut can’t be removed from the iPhone interface. Despite Apple’s insistence, not everyone wants to check the Dow Jones Industrial Average or for that matter the weather, or even use the iPhone’s calculator. That the iPhone’s prepackaged apps can’t be hidden, deleted, or otherwise customized speaks to the stubborn rigidity of Apple.

Ideally: If Apple wanted to fix this annoyance, it would have an “Appearance” option in the Settings menu that would allow users to make unwanted apps disappear without actually deleting them.

The workaround: Isolate undesirable apps on your last home page–that’s the quick and dirty method. A more elaborate trick, detailed at Macenstein, stashes apps on a hidden overflow page, though this works only until the iPhone is turned off. Jailbreakers will seek out programs such as Sbsettings or Poof.

9. You Can’t Run Pandora or Other Apps in the Background

One of the iPhone’s greatest assets is the ability to stream Internet radio stations such as Pandora and Slacker from anywhere with a 3G or Wi-Fi connection. Too bad you can’t listen to that music while checking e-mail or playing games.

Ideally: In a perfect world, Apple would allow certain apps to run at the same time as others. We understand that Apple’s trying to keep the smartphone running smoothly, but if the iPod app can play music in the background, the iPhone’s audio apps should be able to do the same.

The workaround: Sadly, you’ll have to use your get-out-of-jail-free card. Jailbreakers can download Gaizin’s Backgrounder app for full multitasking glory.

(more…)

Sony recently opened a brand new Blu-ray factory in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia. No matter how you may feel about the Blu-ray format the automized creation process of a Blu-ray disk is still pretty awsome.

Charlie Brewer from News Limited Australia walks us through a step by step (16 worthwhile photos in all) process as robots transform gem-like polycarbonate granules into laser-readable storage. Humans are present, of course, but they’re mostly around to walk through dust rooms and try not to hinder the machines.

The lead shot? It’s of the final product being boxed for retail. [news au via Kotaku]

Wugging derived from the word wugger meaning a active member of a WUG (Wireless User Group), Wugging is the act of utilising what the WUG has to offer be it filesharing, games or physically contructing highsites.

If you have not joined a wug yet go check it out, there is local WUGs all around South Africa, Im an old timer on CTWUG been with them for almost 3 years now.

Motivational courtesy of Toady on CTWUG network.

Check out your local WUG site for more details:

• Cape Town Wireless User Group
• Johannesburg Area Wireless User Group
• Pretoria Wireless User Group
• Durban Wireless Community
• Potchefstroom Community Network
• Klerksdorp Wireless user Group
• Port Elizabeth Wireless user Group
• Kimberley Wireless user Group
• Louis Trichardt Wireless User Group
• Pretoria Wireless Project

In my previous post I discovered that Amatomu was in the process of upgrading to beta version, so here is the official statement of what is happening and what happened.

It’s bad news, good news and better news for Amatomu users. Let’s start with the bad news first.

We dropped a lot of hits over the past two weeks due to some hefty fiddling on the back end of the site. These hits will not be coming back, and they have affected rankings. If you’re missing hits, we sincerely apologise.

The good news is that hits are once again being accurately recorded – more accurately than ever before – and the rankings have restored to normal.

The better news for our bloggers is the reason behind the fiddling. We’ve been hard at work, rebuilding Amatomu from the ground up. You may have noticed in the past that Amatomu wasn’t the fastest site on the Internet, even with 60 minute cache times and a dedicated server.

So we’ve rebuilt it on CodeIgniter (which is what we use for mg.co.za), and spent sleepless nights pouring over every technical aspect of Amatomu. No Sql query went unoptimised. We’ve moved servers and Amatomu is now spread between Afrihost’s dedicated box and shared space with a new M&G virtual server sitting on IS architecture.

The performance differences are staggering. Before, we had to cache for up to an hour to keep Amatomu up at all. We’ve now dropped caching, and are serving live data. If you refresh your page you’ll see things change.

We also used to process the stats in batches. That meant you could only see stats that were at best three hours old, and some that were a day or more old. Now, all stats tracking is live. If you’re on your stats page, click refresh to watch your hit counters go up.

We’ve done a lot of work to ensure that the stats are more accurate than before. You’ll see a closer correlation between Amatomu and server-side stats.

We’re also much more aggressive at fetching your RSS feeds. We used to only be able to get to each feed once a day. Now, we’re fetching them all in just over an hour. That means you won’t have to sit around waiting for your post to pop up on Amatomu.

We’ve also given you the ability to tell Amatomu to go fetch your RSS feed, and we’ll tell you if we’re having a problem getting your feed.

There are a few other subtle improvements – you can retrieve lost passwords (finally), and we’ve changed the tagging system so that you can drill down to people or companies. Logging a hit is down to around 300ms – that means there’s very little speed impact on your blog. And we’ve officially changed from “Alpha” to “Beta” phase.

We’ve also aggressively culled some blogs from the site. Sorry if one of them was yours, but please have a look at the T&C’s as we’re going to be a lot stricter about these.

The best thing about the new platform is that it gives us a lot more freedom to innovate and add new features going forward. Let us know what you’d like to see in the future, and any bugs you find on the Beta.

Kind regards
The Amatomu Team

This from Amatomu