My Writing
Sometimes, I write , mostly for fun and my own amusement.
Indexed chronologically here are my thoughts on:
- 2003-02 Travels to Mozambique
My visit to Mozambique to install equipment for an ISP and go SCUBA diving.
- 2003-06 Politics and the Geeks
Views on how politics is affecting the geeks and thoughts on the South African ECT act.
- 2003-11 The African Internet and The Third World Dog
Ideas on improving the environment for the African and South African Internet.
Some writing by other people I liked enough to mirror
- Alice and Bob - John Gordon
- Why the future doesn't need us - Bill Joy
- Engineers view of Venture Capital - Nick Tredennick
- They Write the Right Stuff - Charles Fishman
- The Scourge of Arial - Mark Simonson
- Hacking The City - Greg Knauss
- Epic 2014
Before I could start writing, I had to get a few things organized.. well this is part of my theory on why I did not really start writing earlier.
- Work up some experience in this world and form some opinions.
- Have a Free Unix operating system.
- Learn to use a text editor.
- Learn to touch type on the DVORAK keyboard layout.
- Learn to use DocBook XML.
- Have a fine collection of tea and music.
I'm ready to start writing now. Took a few years. I'm hoping some of the things I've learned will be useful to others. I started this page on 5 November 2002, but only really started writing some time after that. No, wait thats not true, I've been keeping a textfile with notes and ideas since 1997.
I think it's a good idea to write things down, even if they seem to loose some of their impact and immediate importance if you look at them again some time later. It's better to have ideas, make notes of them and tinker with them than not having them and never sharing them.
Given the list of dependencies above, I guess you can start imagining the things I am likely to write about. Unless I fall on my head, I dont think I'll write the next Alice in Wonderland.
One of the questions that has been bugging me for a while now is, what I would have done if I lived 100 years ago and I could not spend all my time with computers and building networks. Well.. my current answer is, I would have become a writer/journalist or politician, maybe both.
This may be a good time for a disclaimer, over and above the usual natural implicit disclaimer people assume when reading personal hompages. Here are the points I need to make:
- these writings contain my subjective opinions, from my point of view.
- dont take them too seriously, we are always changing, constantly.
- I forgot what 3 was.
- oh, yeah, I make no guarantees about order, spelling and grammar.
Some of the more technical things I would like to write about:
- Docbook XML
- LDAP and directory enabled networks
- ISP industry
- Email and Mutt with GNUPG, my thoughts on email style, indenting etc.
Joe Homepage by Joe Botha is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 South Africa License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.swimgeek.com/contact/.