Antony Carthy

Hi to all of you out there,

My life has changed tremendously since I last wrote on this blog - I have gotten married, had a brain operation, moved up to Johannesburg and started my business, properly.

I will be closing or moving this Blog in the next few months, and putting a professional website for me here.

Thank you for reading all my mixed, weird, wonderful, technical, food or health words of the last few years. I think we should all look forward to the new site.

Best Regards, indeed

Antony

Popularity: 32%

News24 is, as far as I know, currently the most visited site in South Africa, and by extension the most visited in Africa too. This means that their usage statistics can give South Africans a good look at the local internet market.

I find browser stats vary extensively from source to source, but we can be fairly confident that South African users fall into the following brackets.

All percentages rounded up and approximate

I was particularly surprised (and dismayed) that IE6 seems to be very prevalent still.

Thank you to Cathryn Reece from News24 for this information.

Update:

These stats are from October 2009

Popularity: 69%

Blogs have been going since about 1994, and were very appropriate to the web at the time. While they have grown and evolved, sites like Facebook and Twitter, and companies like Google have moved the web forward and given us faster, more immediate access to knowledge and opinion. In contrast to this information explosion, comparatively slow and cumbersome blogs have reached the peak of the popularity and uptake curve, and are beginning to plateau.

My blog specifically needs a facelift. I started antony.co.za a few years ago, and I haven’t really been able to improve or upgrade the Wordpress platform on which this blog is based. It started off being all that I needed, but now that I am focusing more on web, the future, new technology and web standards, I am finding that this blog doesn’t do me justice.

When I first installed the Wordpress platform and got everything working, I immediately set about experimenting and customising. I wrote code to insert gravatars, and I edited code to append a link back to my site whenever the Facebook bots crawled my RSS looking for new posts to post to my profile. While this was great at the time, it’s made it difficult to upgrade to a new Wordpress install or to get new WP themes.

Instead of fighting with Wordpress or trying to make new skins, I have decided it’s time for (to quote Raol Duke) “an agonising reappraisal of the whole situation”. I have decided it’s just about time to turn antony.co.za into something more modern and suitable for the internet right now.

While this won’t happen for some time, I am most likely going to work from the Wave Protocol and create a system that will favour the most relevant information that I want to share, such as my Twitter updates and threaded conversations in realtime.

Popularity: 100%

You might not be able to see this if you are not logged in to Google Wave

Popularity: 41%

Most computers nowadays have two or more cores. Does yours? Easy way to tell is to open task manager (Ctr+Alt+Delete or Ctr+Shift+Escape) and check under Performance. If you see two black graph boxes beside each other under CPU Usage History, then you know you have two cores.

The problem with two or more cores under Windows (XP) at least, is that most of the programs we run don’t use the cores to their full capacity, and Windows herself doesn’t seem to be that good at splitting tasks equally between the cores to use CPU power efficiently. What this means is that you often have one processor maxing out and the other one sitting pretty much idle. In turn, this implies that your system slows down and you are left hitting the desk in frustration, waiting for your screen to return to normal and for the window you just clicked on to come to the front.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. What you need to do is find the program that is the biggest hog of your resources… CPU and memory. You can do this in the task manager under the Processes tab. You want to sort the list by memory and CPU and get some kind of idea of what’s eating your PC. For me, most of the time it’s Firefox. It’s not because Firefox is a bad program, as a developer online 9 hours a day, I just push her too hard - with multiple addons and things under the hood. For you it could be another program. Maybe your email? Maybe Photoshop or other graphics software?

If you can’t find the process, go to Applications in the task manager and right click on the application. On the popup menu, click Go To Process.

Once you have found the process, click ‘Set Affinity…‘ and choose only CPU 1 in the new window (uncheck CPU 0). You have now set this process to run only on your (mostly) unused CPU.

For an added boost, right click on the process again, click Set Priority and select Realtime. This means that the process has use of the whole of the spare CPU.

Task Manager with Firefox using 2nd CPU

Tip: Double clicking on the Task Manager screen shown above will collapse it to a smaller version which you can resize to sit at the bottom of your screen to keep an eye on your graphs…

Popularity: 51%