Robby Pedrica's Tech Blog

Author: Robby Pedrica

  • WSBK Donnington

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Wow! Race 2 for the Superbike class at Donnington will go down as probably one of the best I’ve ever seen. I remember Fogarty and Chili at Assen many years ago; add another 3 riders and you’ve got yesterday’s race 2. Haslam, Melandri, Biaggi, Rea and Sykes all jockeying for position over the 2nd half…

  • Google and Oracle

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    I’ve been ‘watching’ the Google/Oracle trial since week – a very interesting trial which from Oracle’s viewpoint is not going according to plan. The initial suit was estimated at around $6 billion which is a considerable sum of money, even for Google. That figure has now been revised ( after a push from the judge…

  • SBK Imola

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    Great racing yesterday from Imola. Pity though to see Checa run away with it. Sykes needs to get a bit more longevity in his tyres and there are a few others that need to stick with Checa from the start ( eg. Haslam ). I have to say though that Jonathan Green grates my chops…

  • Virtualisation part 4: oVirt

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    Red Hat’s virtualisation product, RHEV, was slightly hamstrung in v2 seeing as the manager technology ( which had previously been purchased from Qumranet ) only ran on Windows. This requirement is something that has put me off that product until now – RHEV 3 has been released with a JBoss-based management server now and a…

  • Around the world in 5 minutes

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    Kien Lam’s amazing journey through 17 countries in 343 days compiled from 6237 photos

  • iPhone 4S doubles data usage

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    While that title sounds alarming, it’s not actually because of any fault in the latest iOS, but more a matter of new services ( like Siri ) causing users to consume more data. And that will be the trend going forward for most smartphone users as vendors up the ante in a tit-for-tat competition to…

  • Internet usage in 2011

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    Internet usage is breaking all sorts of records each and every year. The numbers are skyrocketing and to say they’re unbelievable is putting it mildly. Here is a snippet courtesy of pingdom: 107 trillion email sent 294 billion emails per day 1.88 billion internet users 89% of email is spam 262 billion spam emails per…

  • Traffic, accidents and death in SA

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    Accident statistics in South Africa are, I think, mostly regarded as fiction – it’s rare to find traffic death rates as high as in this country, so most drivers ( in this country ) appear to ignore the stats/reality and simply go about their daily business, driving without care or regard for law or other…

  • On-line electricity purchases in Cape Town

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    I’ve never been a fan of the PayCity on-line site. It’s amateurish and looks like it’s been put together by a group of 5 year olds. In addition, there’s no mobile option ( not SMS ) – an unforgivable missing feature in this age of always on and connected-ness. Powertime is the complete opposite –…

  • It’s phishing and pharming XMas time again!

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    Scammers and authors of malicious software will take any opportunity to trick users into doing something they shouldn’t – holidays are a favourite time for the scammer. At Xmas, we all have that warm and fuzzy feeling. But so do  the scammers and they prey on a softening of attitudes towards security at this time…

  • Apple continues to use patents to compete

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    The last year has seen a large amount of legal rangling between mobile vendors, more specifically between Apple and everyone else. It seems that according to Apple, they are the only company that can conceive of iPhone- and iPad-type technology. Not withstanding of course the massive amount of prior art that’s out there ( CrunchPad…

  • Internet Explorer the safest browser – yeah right!

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    Microsoft has always bigged up their products using whatever mechanisms they can, including paid-for campaigns/ads and sometimes outright lying. The latest statement that IE is the most secure browser ( according to their yourbrowsermatters website ) fits into this latter category. One has to wonder how Microsoft comes about the scores provided on the site.…

  • New security issue: typo-squatting

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    Malware, phishing, pharming, typo-squatting, etc. There’s a long list of security issues we have to deal with every day. Keeping track of these and responding correctly in each case is a veritable minefield. That’s after our newly updated anti-virus app has completely missed the threat. Typo-squatting is the well-known practice of serving up scams or…

  • Vodacom’s BIS service adds cap

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    One of the primary benefits of Blackberry phones has been the ‘unlimited’ data contract that is supplied as part of the deal. However, it appears that Vodacom has had enough of some thirsty bloodsuckers and is implementing soft capping by downgrading users’ speed to 2G ( GPRS/EDGE ) after reaching the 100MB limit. Anyone who…

  • Are the clouds gone yet?

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    It seems that Microsoft ( and others ) is intent on validating my cynical view of clouds. The latest Microsoft outage ( last night and this morning again ) was caused by what the company vaguely called a “DNS issue” and affected not just Office 365 but also the consumer services Hotmail and SkyDrive. The…