Broken/Stukkend 3 : SARS eFiling's e-mail

My tax advisor just forwarded to me the reply he got when enquiring about the money that SARS (the South African tax authorities) owes me.

The following recipient(s) could not be reached:

eFilingAssist on 2009/07/23 03:16 PM
The message could not be delivered because
the recipient's mailbox is full.

That is, for a country of 50 million people, they did not think to solve this very usual problem. In fact, what they should do is not to have an e-mail address at all but only accept queries on the Web. Many organisations work like this and it is more-or-less as convenient for the sender because they could receive a copy of the sent message by e-mail, which - at the same time - confirms delivery. Is one morally obliged to even pay tax if the tax authority refuses to accept any correspondence?

New LaTeX plugin for gedit

LaTeX is used by most mathematical scientists, like myself, to typeset most of their writing. At a one-day workshop in economics yesterday for example, at the University of Sydney, most of the speakers had done their slides using LaTeX. The basis of LaTeX typesetting is a source file which consists of plain text which is run through the LaTeX engine to produce a PDF or other display file. This meands that one is usually working with at least two files at the same time - the source code and the rendered output. Now, the excellent text editor gedit has a plugin which displays the rendered PDF (or DVI) file right next to the source code, inside the editor!



This is a really nice feature and gedit's nice syntax highlighting and wealth of other plugins, makes it a pleasure to use. Gedit is, of course, the default text editor in Linux' GNOME desktop environment and will probably run in other operating systems as well. The LateX plugin can be found at live.gnome.org/Gedit/LaTeXPlugin.

SpringbokRadio.com - broadcasting daily

Because television was introduced in South Africa mercifully late (1976), many of us still grew up with an excellent selection of radio dramas and serials. The most popular station was Springbok Radio, the “commercial” bilingual broadcaster (all stations were state-owned). It had fantastic radio versions of The Avengers; Father, Dear Father as well as local classics such as Test the Team and Só maak mens. Many will remember the serials Wolwedans in die skemer or My Name's Adam Kane and the more high-brow Tuesday Theatre or Castle Playhouse. Now, many of these shows are available again on the streaming audio service of SpringbokRadio.com, courtesy of the Springbok Radio Preservation Society. Highly recommended!

Telkom stel weer teleur met landlyndigtheid

In hierdie webjoernaal is al heelwat berig oor Suid-Afrika se lae landlyndigtheid of teledensity. Landlyne is natuurlik konvensionele telefoonlyne, van die tipe wat natuurlik wêreldwyd ook vir Internet-toegang van die ADSL-tipe gebruik kan word. Telkom, wat pas aangekondig het dat hulle opgeblaasde notering in New York beëindig gaan word, het steeds in praktyk 'n monopolie oor die verskaffing van dergelike lyne in Suid-Afrika.

In 'n jaarverslag wat pas verskyn het, word berig dat die aantal landlyne nou gedaal het tot 4 451 000, d.w.s. 'n landlyndigtheid van aansienlik minder as 10% van die bevolking. Volgens my vinnige skatting, plaas dít die landlyndigtheid van die land nou op die vlak wat dit was met Nelson Mandela in die tronk. Voorts het Telkom in Nigerië aansienlike verliese gely. My voorstel is dat Telkom, wat steeds amper 50% in besit is van die Suid-Afrikaanse belastingbetaler, eenvoudig aan Zimbabwe geskenk word as 'n gebaar ter ondersteuning van beide lande se heropbou.

Bron(ne)

Telkom says goodbye to Wall Street www.itweb.co.za/sections/financial/2009/0906241042.asp?O=FPTOP&S=Telecoms&A=TEL (Candice Jones)
Telkom’s broadband plans mybroadband.co.za/news/Broadband/8500.html (MyBroadband)
Telkom line(')s down www.cyphafrica.com/2006/11/telkom-lines-down.html (CyphAfrica)
Telkom shocks, again www.cyphafrica.com/2006/08/telkom-shocks-again.html (CyphAfrica)

Coffee and connectivity at Jo'burg airport

I am writing this from the airside Vodacom Connect Zone at Johannesburg's main international airport (formerly Jan Smuts Airport), while waiting for my flight to Bloemfontein. The Connect Zone is simply a communal work station with desk area and electrical outlets (for South African as well as European plugs) and several special devices for charging cellphone batteries. Kudos to Vodacom for this but I am the only traveller using it right now! There is still no free WiFi at the airport but I can still access the commercial service using my ISP account and although the download speed is worse than I get on my ADSL at home, the latency is quite good and the upload speed is excellent.

Vida e Caffe (why so proud of their Regent St branch?) would be doing even more brisk business, if they were to actually switch on the second espresso machine at their airport franchise. People waiting for flights do not have infinite patience and some might actually have had two coffees, if it seemed feasible.