Chronicals of… a developer in Johannesburg

It was more than a month ago when I decided to post once a day for a month, and now it has almost been a month since my last post – the irony.

Quick news and possibly excuses:

I just moved house and have no internet at my new place – until today I haven’t at least.

Work has been madness.

We’re going to Thailand in 2 weeks, very excited.

I did some neat work with CTE in SQL – I will definitely post on it.

This is Africa.

On 31st July I informed Telkom that I was moving house and that I needed the ADSL moved on the 28th.

After them confusing the data, and house number (it’s 40 not 4) I am finally back online at home.

It’s great.

“Cape Town – Winston, a homing pigeon, has made history by beating a Telkom ADSL line in delivering 4GB of data from Howick to Hillcrest, outside Durban in just 2 hours 6 minutes and 57 seconds, whereas the ADSL download was “still just under four percent complete” at 11:45.”

What a great story about how slow our internet really is

Check the site below!

http://pigeonrace2009.co.za/

Good Products (holding thumbs). Support not too good.

First I looked on the site and bought this product:

OpenWeb OpenBrowse

The website describes happy fields of ADSL honey and rivers of milk. Virtually uncapped international ADSL browsing. It doesn’t mention anything about this being an “add-on” service. Also there is no documentation or even a mention of this special application you HAVE to download in order to convert your pc into a local proxy – it only arrives in your account activation email. Furthermore, this application is linked to your external IP address and any other machines on your network now have to run through your pc’s local proxy.

The software is good and pretty stable though, so I’ll give them that.

After a couple of emails to the OpenWeb support guys – and some one-liner replies (which were no help) – I realised that I need an ADSL account too.

So I got a local one like this:

OpenWeb Local Only ADSL

So far all is good. I can browse, upload photos to facebook, gmail, google etc. Just no Skype.

All in all a good deal for what you pay.