Having sampled London Pie Company’s “Two R8.95 pies for only R12.50″ special earlier today, I decided that I’ll go back and sample their “Hot stuff”. Being some dark liquid being pumped into a polystyrene cup from a small machine. I take comfort in the fact that it only cost R5.00.

I say “some dark liquid” for a reason. The coffee is produced by a small machine, about 45x70x50cm in size, with a spot to put the cup, an LCD display on the front, and about 7 buttons down the front next to the LCD screen, one button per beverage. You know the type. You must have seen something similar with Nestle beverages at some other establishment. Anyway.

The nice lass behind the counter promptly stuck a cup in the machine, and delicately pressed the “Cappuccino” button the same way that a woman with long fingernails presses buttons on a phone, you know, not with the fingertip, but more with the finger. A gurgle and a splutter later, out pops some foamy white stuff slightly resembling milk. “How many sugars?” Why two of course! It’s a small cup after all… More spluttering, more gurgling, and I notice a dark liquid pouring into the cup. From the looks of things, it might have been coffee. I can’t be sure until I taste this stuff.

A beep later, the lass puts two sugars into the cup, stirs with a stick, and proceeds to pour a copious amount of chocolate powder onto the white foamy stuff. And on goes the sippy-cup lid. Cha-ching.

OK, so this coffee is hot. Really hot. Even to the touch.

I’m sitting at my desk, so don’t really need the sippy-cup lid (dammit! What are these things called?! Sippy-cups are for toddlers! Or is this a sign of age where adults revert back to toddler utensils to make things easier? Like those goddamn sporks that are making a comeback!) I digress, again.

Taking the lid off, I notice the total lack of foam, and the chocolate powder along with it. This looks like normal coffee now, with a slight trace of foam floating around, it looks like somebody spat in the cup before putting the lid on. Not to worry, I was watching that girl, she didn’t.

*sip*

Dear god! This stuff is… is… is not worthy to be referred to as anything remotely related to coffee…

It tastes like dish water. (No, really!) OK, it’s not that bad, but then, it was R5. It’s weak, doesn’t have any kind of coffee taste to it. I can actually taste Cremora (Coffee creamer…). Go figure. I actually want to spit in this myself to give it a bit of taste. Maybe some London Pie Sausage Roll flavour from lunch. Argh. No, this cannot be called a Cappuccino, they’re fooling people! Don’t buy this stuff unless you only have R5 on you and you absolutely *must* have youur morning fix. And only if you’ve just rolled out of bed. London Pie Company’s “cappucino” might just fool your body into thinking there’s caffeine in there somewhere…

Do Not Buy!

Technorati Tags: cappucino, coffee, sippy-cup, caffeine, Greenmarket Square

Yay!

Nice!

Useful!

Wait, what?

OK, so on the Google Blog (And on IOL Technology and a bunch of other places I’m sure) I noticed that Google has made a code searching site. They seemed to grab the source code from a whole bunch of open source projects (including, so far as I’ve noticed, code for FreeBSD‘s ports and CPAN and and and), and you can now search through the code.

I’m honestly not sure what use this is? Other than maybe seeing how other people did something you’re wanting to do, but how do you search for that? Hope somebody else commented their code?

*shrug*

That’s all fine and well, I’m sure I’ll use it at some point in time for more than fun.

Fun? Yes! Check this out. Some guy on slashdot searched for “backdoor password” and came up with some interesting hits… I then tried to find some equally interesting tidbits, but didn’t find quite ones like that, but here are some searches I did (most end up finding some really interesting comments in code):

* fuck

* george bush

* john kerry

* i hate my job

* dumbass

* root password

You see the recurring theme here. Frustrated developers putting comments into their code, or just finding default usernames and/or password for systems.

Can you find any other interesting searches?

UPDATE: Just found this on he wordpress wp-hackers mailing list, about finding wordpress database usernames and passwords on google’s codesearch… Can’t protect stupid users from themselves…

UPDATE 2: After looking at the wordpress entry above, I did some more digging for more config file type searches, and found this search for phpMyAdmin’s config.inc.php file… Lots there too… Reminds me of that age-old normal Google Search for publicly accessible phpMyAdmin interfaces…

UPDATE 3: Just found another beauty at digg.com, about some winzip keygen found on Google codesearch. hehe.

UPDATE 4: Whoa, nice one! Quinton just sent me this beauty.

UPDATE 5: Damn, even more! Found this over at Chris Shiflett’s site, listing some rather bad security holes becoming apparent when searching…

UPDATE 6: Man oh man, this gets better. Harry Fuecks over at sitepoint.com pointed out a proof-of-concept mass-distributed-computing option… This is getting better and better. I wonder if anybody at Google actually anticipated this kind of response…?

Technorati Tags: codesearch, google, password, security

Opening the Cape Argus today, I found an Incredible Connection pamphlet.  On the front page of this pamphlet, there’s a bloody good deal to get an Xbox 360…

Here’s the deal.

You pay a once-off sim and connection fee of R202, and they give you a Nokia 1600, and an Xbox 360 Pro System, for free.  You will also then be paying R211.60 per month for 24 months, which gives you a “Business contract” with Vodacom.

So lets do the math.  R211.60 x 24 + R202 = R5280.40

The XBox 360 Pro System sells for R3699 at Incredible.

I suppose it’s not bad if you already have a kickass phone (let’s face it, the Nokia 1600 is not exactly the most feature-rich of phones), and you want an XBox 360, but still.  I suppose this just adds onto the console-phone deals that have made it into the light of day over the past few years…

Technorati Tags: vodacom, contract, cellphone, xbox

Parents, get your kids GMail
This is to all the parents out there who are constantly having their children nagging them to let them have an email account, but every day you hear more and more about how horribly and nasty spam is! Well, there’s a solution.

Yup, that’s what a lad named Krillr says. (Hey dude!) GMail is the answer. (Don’t have an account? I have a ton of invites, I’ll send you one. Comment here.) I’m not so sure. Lately there’s been spam slipping through into my inbox. And, it’s not like GMail deletes any spam either, it’s still accessible in the Spam mailbox. “Don’t open that mailbox” is not going to fly with kids… I have kids, and I want them (well, at least the eldest, he’s 8 now), to have e-mail, and access to the ‘net. But I also don’t want their innocence gone so early. Porn and spam peddlers will go through all kinds of hoops and loops to get their product out there, and I don’t want my son to accidentally click on the wrong links.

Apparently with Google hosting your mail for you (through Google Hosted), you have a bit more control over the individual GMail accounts, but not sufficient for me to give a GMail account to my kids.

Yet.

Tags: GMail, Google

“The above billboard was spotted near the Ralston exit in Redwood”

Found this on digg. Pretty nifty that there are now Ubuntu billboards on the side of the road… Even the sysadmin at my workplace has given up on Fedora in favour of Ubuntu, and so far he seems very happy with it…

read more | digg story

Ever since coming across Kevin Smith‘s blog the other day, I’ve subscribed to its RSS feed, and been reading each and every post he writes. Nothing majorly interesting, most of the posts since then on the topic of Clerks 2 (which I still need to see, even though I was offered a cam-job version of it to watch… Yech, I hate camjobs. I watched Chucky’s Bride on two VCDs. That was crap. Never again. Thank god I didn’t pay to watch Chucky’s Bride though. How crap was that movie? But I digress…). I dunno, reading somebody like Kevin’s blog puts a face and a person behind the persona and name that flashes up on the screen before and after a movie. He has a wife. A kid (shame poor kid, one day he’s/she’s going to see his/her dad’s movies. That’ll be a laugh, eh-eh-eh.).

Anyway, so Kevin’s birthday was yesterday, and he blogged about. Exciting stuff isn’t it?
I dunno, I’m not the kind of person that’s a raving fan about anything or anyone, and it’s the same with Kevin and his work. Kevin will always be Silent Bob to me (and a lot of other people I’m sure), even though he’s the genius behind the movies that Silent Bob features in. That’s besides the point. Kevin’s movies just seemed to make an impression on me sufficiently enough to step up my level of fandom from zero to one (No, I’m not on his myspace friends list like the other 80000 losers…). But I digress again…

Happy Birthday Kevin, many returns, and more movies! More! More! (Get Shannon Elizabeth back in another movie!)

Tags: Kevin Smith, Silent Bob, myspace, movies

Share Firefox with a friend. If your friend downloads Firefox before September 15, you’ll both be immortalized in Firefox 2. [ worldfirefoxday.com ]

Yup, you can get your name onto a digital Firefox Friends Wall, if you nominate one of your friends/loved ones to receive an invite to download Firefox, and they download it on or before the 15th of September this year.

The Firefox Friends Wall will be a physical wall at Mozilla headquarters in California, and an in-browser version will also be available in Firefox 2 once it’s out of beta.

I’ve been using Firefox 2.0b1 for the past week or two at work on Ubuntu, and so far it’s been stable, and usable. I’ve not been digging around too much to see what the differences between 2.0 and 1.5.latest are, I’ve just been using it for every day use, and so far no problems. I’ve had to modify one or two of my extensions to be available for 2.0 (Notably I was trying out the Mysql Community Tool bar, which works just fine in Firefox 2.0b1 by the way!). So far so good Mozilla, keep it up!

Don’t have Firefox yet? Download it now!

Tags: Firefox Friends Wall, Firefox, Ubuntu

Heh, ringtones. I’ve seen lots of comment spam being obliterated by Akismet with a ringtones theme.
But, this is not comment spam! Just like the zedge.no post I did a couple of months ago, I’ve been using Polyphonicringtonez.com to get my dose of loud and irritating ringtones (Including really cool Pacman and Super Mario Brothers themes!).
If you can navigate past all the ugly ads and popups and what not, they have a search engine for free and paid-for ringtones, backgrounds, operator logos, etc., a lots of which have previews for your PC browser.
You choose the ringtone you want, hop onto your phone’s WAP browser, browse to http://www.polyphonicringtonez.com/wap (I really do suggest bookmarking that page, it’s rather a pain to have to type that URL every time…), choose “Ringtones by ID”, and punch in the ID of the ringtone you want, and voila, a downloaded ringtone for your phone. Tada!

Most of those ringtones even work on my Nokia 6100… They support most phone brands and models, and even have some ringtones in the MMF format (not sure that that is, my phone only supports Midi…) But, I suppose most of the newer phones nowadays support straight .wav or .mp3 files, so midi ringtones aren’t that popular anymore… *shrug*

Tags: Akismet, zedge, ringtones, Pacman, Super Mario Brothers, backgrounds, operator logos, WAP, Midi

Minimum Requirements:

• CPU: Athlon 64 3000+/Intel 2.8ghz
• Graphics: Nvidia 6600/X800GTO (SM 2.0)
• RAM: 768Mb/1Gb on Windows Vista
• HDD: 6GB
• Internet: 256k+
• Optical Drive: DVD
• Software: DX9.0c with Windows XP

Holy crap!!! The above is from the Joystiq entry on Is your PC rig ready for Crysis, who in turn got it from the Crysis Online forums… This is insane!!! This is why I’ve given up upgrading my PC, rather favouring playing games on a console, or playing games on my PC that fit into my lowly specs. I don’t have a crap PC, an AMD64 3000+ and a Geforce 6600GT PCI-Express card with 1GB ram is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s now become the minimum requirements for a game? That’s just sad.

If you haven’t heard of Crysis, then you need to crawl from under the rock you’ve been living under, and go check out the several gameplay footage videos of Crysis over at Google Video or Youtube.

Tags: Crysis

I got to make the exact flick I wanted to make, resulting in my fave of the bunch.

That’s what Kevin Smith had to say about Clerks 2, which opened at the box office this past Friday… I have no idea how long it will be before we get to see the movie here in South-Africa, but if it’s anything like any of his other movies, I’ll be wanting to see it as many times in the first week, as I did Jay & Silent Bob Strikes Back. 3 times in the first week. Yes, it was that good. I even managed to con the wife into watching it on DVD once. She’s not a fan. I am. Admittedly, I’m in no way the biggest fan (of anything or anyone), I’ve seen most of the movies Kevin wrote/directed (Including The Flying Car), and it all started with a big “WTF?! This movie is black & white!!! I want my money back!!!” when we rented Clerks back in 1997. The wife didn’t like it, I was intrigued enough to finish watching it (That, and I wasn’t going to *not* watch a movie I paid good money to see… Glad I finished watching it…).

For me, Mallrats was next, and there’s nothing like Jason Lee‘s “Say, would you like a chocolate-covered pretzel?” line to bring back those memories. Oh, that line, and the “Oh look, a sailboat” series of incidents. Heh-heh.

I think it’s time to track down a copy of Clerks and watch that again. And Mallrats. And Dogma. Dammit, Kevin, I’m sure you won’t disappoint with Clerks 2. When’s the DVD coming? I must see it!

Tags: Kevin Smith, Silent Bob, Clerks, Mallrats, Clerks 2