Google organises the world’s information and makes it accessible to all. Information also comes in the shape of geographical data, local business listings and user generated maps, and for this reason Google would like to invite you to the Google Maps South Africa launch.

Google is now giving Capetonians the oppertunity to take part in the launch of Google Maps in South Africa, on Friday the 30th of October at UCT in Cape Town.

Speakers will include Jarda Bengl, Business Product Manager, Google.

The talk will cover Introduction to development with the Google Maps API.
They’ll show some examples of great implementations, then cover the basics of how to add a map to your site including Javascript techniques to create maps, place markers, handle clicks, geocode addresses, add driving directions and how to work with Street View.

Just note that basic knowledge of XHTML, CSS, XML and Javascript is required.

Everybody is welcome from Developers and Web Masters who are new to Google Maps API, Computer Science Students.

To ensure you place is booked for the Google Maps South Africa, Cape Town launch just leave a comment and I’ll send through the rsvp email address.

Nokia, the world’s biggest mobile phone maker, is suing American rival Apple for allegedly infringing patents on technology for the iPhone.

The Finnish firm yesterday said it had not been compensated – and Apple’s shares dipped as it was accused of trying for “a free ride on the back of Nokia’s innovation”.

The 10 claimed patent breaches include wireless data, security and encryption.

Nokia said they applied to all models of the iPhone since its launch in 2007 because Apple had not signed an agreement allowing it to use the technology as about 40 other companies had done.

This month, Nokia had its first quarterly loss in a decade as a seven per cent rise in iPhone sales let Apple report £1billion profits in the three months to September 26.

via

A while back The Parlotones held a private performance at the Cape Grace where they announched their new wine label, a giant mistake, available at all Woolworth stores.

The Parlotones is also about to release their brand new album “Stardust Galaxies” at the end of October. Since their previous album launch in October 2007, The Parlotones has sold over 100 000 records and 70 000 live show tickets. Now for you pleasure here is the music video of “Push Me To The Floor” from The Parlotones upcomming album “Stardust Galaxies”.

Oh yea another thing, The Parlotones has also been signed up with Sony Ericson to promote the all new W995 Walkman phone. If you are due for an upgrade why not check it out, they will also throw in a copy of The Parlotones upcomming album “Stardust Galaxies” for free. So what are you wating for? Be the first to own a Sony Ericson W995 Walkman phone and the new Parlotones album.

If you checked out the Wester Province vs Blue Bulls game this weekend at Newland there is one moment that would jump to mind and it is that of the tackle WP Flanker Schalk Burger made on Blue Bulls player Fourie Du Preez.

WP lost by only one point after replacement player Nakelavuki made a high tackle and cost the Wester Province a penalty in the last 5 minutes of the game. Im sure Western Province coach Alistar Coetzee regrets putting Nakelavuki on.

For your enjoyment, the great tackle performed by Schalk Burger on Fourie Du Preez.

Got to love the wink at the end. Well done WP, I am proud to be a supporter.

Being part of CTWUG we are alway on the lookout for new services to run on our network that could prove usefull to the users of the CTWUG network.

The latest idea we got was to provide users with a local copy of the Wikipedia website, this would enable CTWUG users to view wikipedia content at local network speeds without having an internet connection.

After extensive research I came across this nice tutorial on how to run your own copy of Wikipedia from a database dump of the real Wikipedia website. Who whould have thought that Wikipedia would offer a montly database dump of their Website for users to download, good news is that they do.

I’ll provide the steps for you to follow to set up your own Wikipedia mirror, please note basic knowledge of linux, bash, apache and mysql is required. The steps is for installing the mirror on a Ubuntu machine.

So here is the steps for setting up your own Wikipedia mirror from their database dump.

1. Install LAMP: Linux Apache MySQL PHP

   apt-get update
   apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server mysql-client php5-mysql phpmyadmin

2. Setup MySQL: You need to set your mysql root password

   $ mysql
   mysql> USE mysql;
   mysql> UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD(’new-password’) WHERE user=’root’;
   mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

   You also need to create a database for your incoming Wikipedia. Go to http://localhost/ and click on phpmyadmin. Log in using your new root password. Under Create new database, enter wikidb and click Create. On the new page, click on Privileges, add the new user wikiuser and click check all, then Go.

3. Download the MediaWiki software: This is the software wikipedia is running on. Go to the MediaWiki download page. On the right, download the .tar.gz file.

   wget http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.15/mediawiki-1.15.1.tar.gz

   Decompress it and move it to /var/www/

   tar xf mediawiki-1.15.1.tar.gz
   mv mediawiki-1.15.1.tar.gz wikipedia
   sudo mv wikipedia /var/www/

   I am installing it under the directory wikipedia.
   Change the file permissions of the config directory

   cd /var/www/wikipedia/
   chmod a+x config/

   Now navigate to http://localhost/wikipedia/ From here, the only things you need to put in are

   • Site name (I chose WikiMirror)
   • WikiSysop’s password (The administrator password)
   • DB password

   Now you need to move LocalSettings.php out of config.

   mv config/LocalSettings.php

   Now you can go to http://localhost/wikipedia/ and you should see your virgin MediaWiki install!

4. Get Wikipedia’s database dumpYou can get the latest version of Wikipedia’s database dump by subscribing to http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2-rss.xml the latest file I got was http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20091009/enwiki-20091009-pages-articles.xml.bz2

   wget http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20091009/enwiki-20091009-pages-articles.xml.bz2

   The file is 5.2GB so it should take a while to download.
   After downloading decompress the file

   tar xf enwiki-20091009-pages-articles.xml.bz2

   The uncompressed size is almost 20 GB so be sure you have enough disk space available.
   Now for the lenghty part of the process, you need to import the file into your mysql database.
   Download mwimport.sh and save it and run it like this

   cat enwiki-<date>.xml | mwimport | mysql -f -u <admin name> -p <database name>

   This process should take a few hours to complete, from 7-12 hours depending on your HDD speed and processor.

That should be all, if all went well your will have a complete working copy of wikipedia on your local machine. CTWUG members can look forward to this service very soon.

Kibo Media is looking for a Mid to Senior web developer to join their team full time.

The applicant’s daily task will be to develop websites and carry out monthly updates and enhancements to client websites and or databases.

Kibo Media is a dynamic web design and development company providing a full range of web services. Tey focus on building strong lasting relationships with their clients through delivering work in a timeous, efficient manner.

If you meet the below requirements, please email a short cover letter and CV to alicep@kibomedia.co.za in order to apply.

Requirements
• experience in web programming using CSS, HTML and PHP
• experience SEO
• experience in working with and developing in Content Management Systems and understanding what they are about (wordpress, joomla etc.). You will be our expert wordpress CMS person!
• capable of contributing to team, but self sufficient and proactive enough to manage own work
• capable of carrying out work from a brief to completion
• understand web application best practices and browser compatibility
• Client Relationship: Excellent management of relationships. Prompt response to email and / or other queries
• Understanding of “design” elements in order to ensure development meets design rquirements

Advantageous
• working with MySQL 5 databases advantage
• experience working on Linux

Personal Skills/Attributes
• Candidate must be able to interact and work with a dynamic and ambitious team
• Good communicator and team player
• Positive and enthusiastic attitude
• Strong problem-solving skills
• Can work with little supervision, pro-active and takes on responsibility for code developed
• Ability to work in a high pressure environment and meet agreed deadlines
• Entrepreneurial in terms of being able to see development opportunities
• Excellent verbal/written communication skills
• High level of attention to detail

Details

Province: Western Cape
Education level: Matric
Own transport required: Yes
City: Cape Town – Maitland
Type: Permanent
Job level: Mid / Senior

If you think you have what it takes then why not give it a go.

This year marked the 4th year of Rocking the Daisies, a music and lifestyle festival that teaches people to have fun while caring for the environment.

Rocking the Daisies grew from 1300 to 10000 antendees last year, the festival is held at the Cloof Wine Estate on Darling where you can camp out next to the dam while chilling with your buds and watching the best South African bands live.

This year Rocking the Daisies had a line-up of 30 of South Africa’s best local bands, with the likes of Just Jinger, aKING and Freshly Ground.

Check out the Zoopy TV’s video to see what you missed at Rocking the Daisies if you did not attend.

Lately I have noticed that when I leave comments sometimes the readers leaving comments aswell has no idea that I am the author of the post. This made me realise that I had to find a way of showing that I am the author of the posts in the comments section.

After some consideration I decided on just changing the background colour of my comments, I’ve seen many other blogs using this approach and it seems to work well and looks nice and clean.

Here is how I did it:

Open up comments.php and find

<li class=”<?php echo $oddcomment; ?>” id=”comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>”>

Replace it with

<li class=”<?php if (1 == $comment->user_id) $oddcomment = “authorcomment”;

echo $oddcomment; ?>” id=”comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>”>

After that add the following to you style.css file

.authorcomment {
background-color: #B3FFCC !important;
}

And that is it, all the comments made by admin will now be displayed with a background colour. If you would like to change the background colour just modify the hex value you put in the style.css file.

Capetionians can look forward to some great kite flying and kite designs this weekend at the 15th International Kite Festival to be held in Muizenberg, Cape Town.

Many kite creations will fill the skies of Muizenberg the 10th and 11th of October at the 15th Cape Town International Kite Festival, organised by Cape Mental Health in association with Heart FM 104.9.

The Cape Town International Kite Festival is Africa’s largest kite festival drawing kiters from all over the word like USA, England and some of the best local talent. The festival will kick off on the 10th of October coincided with World Mental Health Day. The theme for this years Cape Town International Kite Festival is “The world on a string”, which will showcase the best each country has to offer.

If you are a kite enthusiast why not bring along your kite, or try your hand at building a kite at the kite-making workshops, otherwise just enjoy the spectacular display of wonderfull masterpieces flying about the sky.

The whole family is welcome to join in the fun as the Cape Town International Kite Festival has made provision for the whole family. Food stalls, giant inflateables, kiddies rides, just to mention a few is family entertainment at its best.

Entry to the Kite Festival is R10 for adults and R5 for children, with all profits going towards the work of Cape Mental Health. The Cape Town International Kite Festival will be open from 10:00 to 18:00 each day and takes place at Zandvlei, Muizenberg.

For more information visit www.capementalhealth.co.za

Amatomu a South African blog aggregator has been out of Alpha phase for two months now and still it is plagued with errors.

When Amatomu moved into Beta stage two months back you could have seen that the site has been improved with faster loading times, almost real time aggregation of blog posts just to name a few. Lately it has been a whole different story, with constant DB errors when visiting the site and even showing as logged in as ThoughtLeader who I am not.

Amatomu it’s time to step up and either fix your product or just take it of the market. I’m actually a fan of Amatomu as I like the layout of their site and the way they show whats hot currently in the blog sphere and rankings per category, but I’m getting really annoyed by the fact that the site is slow as hell when you try to access some features and aggregations that does not occur almost instantly but rather a few days after you posted your blog entry. Not to mention that I’m sometimes showing as logged in as another user.

A while back Christopher Mills owner of iMod launched a campaign to get bloggers to refrain from using Amatomu, I’m currently feeling the same vibe at the moment, maybe if all the bloggers just boycott Amatomu they will get their act together and start focusing on releasing a product that works. In the mean time if you are a sole user of Amatomu check out Afrigator, they are an example of how to run a aggregation service.