Wild Coast

The villagers pictured here are busy digging out a water well in the streamlet that passes by the Kham community garden and supplies its water.

There is surprisingly little water in the stream considering that we had over 50ml of rain in the past week.

The water is pumped up to the garden using foot treadle pumps.

Photos 05/05/08

A drip irrigation system is used at the community gardens.

First harvest for the T’kei mussel project

Click Here to open the Dispatch article in a new window.

By MALUNGELO BOOI
Mthatha Bureau - 2008/05/05

AN AQUA-CULTURE project started seven years ago in Transkei has delivered its first harvest – with 60 local people each carrying off five litres of the nutritious seafood to feed their families.

The main aim at the moment is food security, said a spokesperson for the Coffee Bay Mussel Rehabilitation Project. But in the long run the organisers hope there could be tourism spin-offs similar to the Knysna Oyster Festival.

Upgrading to Drupal 6.2 leaves something to be desired as far as the image module goes.

It's bad enough for the average enthusiast that uploading images is not a core feature... but here's the fix that I found posted at http://drupal.org/node/219808

insert into image select upload.nid as nid , files.fid as fid , filename as image_size from upload, files where upload.fid = files.fid and files.filemime like "image/%";

Nkosinathi Somgidi was born on the 12th October, 1991 - which makes him about 16 years old. According to Goodman (who owns and manages the security force here), he had the boy arrested some time ago for apparently assaulting his son while his son was on guard duty at the hotel. Goodman says that Nkosinathi spat at his son and slapped him in the face (through the fence at the hotel entrance).

I enquired whether it was true that the 16 year old Nkosinathi had been in prison for 2 months already up 'til now, and he replied that's not true, because he's being held at Mapuzi police station holding cells and not in "prison". I then asked Goodman why the incident occurred - but by that stage he was so thoroughly incensed at the fact that I was questioning his authority that he refused to talk to me further, and would only talk to "Mister Brown" (senior). I walked away with him still shouting at my back "How can you accuse me?"

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2008/04/22/microsoft-closing-external-hotmail-ac...

Summary: Microsoft are disabling WebDAV access to all hotmail.com accounts. This means Hotmail Pop Links and Outlook Express access to hotmail.com accounts will stop working at the end of June 2008. You should download all your Hotmail email ASAP and tell people to stop using your @hotmail.com email address as soon as possible.

For many years, Microsoft has provided external access to hotmail.com accounts via a protocol called WebDAV. This is the protocol FastMail uses on the Options -> Pop Links screen to allow downloading of email from hotmail.com accounts. It’s also the same protocol that Outlook Express uses to access hotmail.com accounts.

testing

Embed a picture: <img src="http://url_name/img_name" border="0" align="right" padding-left="4px" />
Link to a URL: <a href="http://url_name" target="_blank">Link name</a>

<code><a href="http://www.wildcoast.com">Wild Coast</a></code>

http://www.wildcoast.com/html_tips . . . this entry is mainly just a test to see if filtered html is automatically linking URL entries. Which it wasn't. Hence the above torture.

Doesn't it ever bother people when they go to, like, www.yellowpages.co.za for example, only to find they don't have the business details of some very well known national company in there, because Supaquick (for example) don't pay Brabys to list them in their print service.

Some people honestly don't get the internet and the free information economy at all.

Click here to view a scanned copy of the Daily Dispatch article.

The Masimanyane Mussel Rehabilitation Project in Coffee Bay celebrated their first official harvest of mussels on Saturday 19th April 2008.

A few years ago there were no mussels on these rocks where participants in the project can be seen harvesting:

The event was attended by tribal leaders, representatives from Environmental Affairs & Tourism (DEAT), Marine & Coastal Management (MCM) & Walter Sisulu University (WSU).

Upon reading the story about the decimation of the Transkei, a friend responded "Your account of the ancestors appearing as a tornado reminds me of the story circulating in the Xolobeni area about how the "animal/dragon in the earth" arose in the form of a tornado after the first prospecting took place - the most vicious tornado in living memory... the ancestors don't rest here, you are right."

Camagu

~*~

"Mining the Pondoland Wild Coast is the moral, cultural and aesthetic equivalent of quarrying Ayers Rock for granite, or the Great Barrier Reef for calcium carbonate." ~Richard Spoor

The Wild Coast is the most beautiful coastline on Earth; and is host to the Pondoland Centre of Endemism (PCE)... one of 34 internationally recognized biodiversity hotspots on our planet Earth.

This site is essentially a tourism information portal - where local businesses can register and upload their details and photos on the internet for free. Unfortunately, despite the fact that South Africa is a signatory to the Convention on Biodiversity, our government and certain vested interests are flagrantly threatening the PCE with titanium strip mining - and doing everything in their power to pave the way for autocratic control over the mining industry regardless of environmental impact issues.

"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence- it is a force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."

"Occupants of public offices love power and are prone to abuse it."

~George Washington

SPECIAL ALERT!

Comments due by today !!!

Public Hearings: National Environmental Management Amendment Bill (36-2007)

The Portfolio Committee on Environmental Affairs and Tourism will be conducting public hearings on the National Environmental Management Amendment Bill (36-2007).

Deadline for written submissions: November 2nd, 2007
Public Hearings: November 6th, 2007

Attention:
Ms. Albertina Kakaza
Email: akakaza@parliament.gov.za
Fax: 021 403 2808

Click here to obtain a copy of the Bill.

Contact:
Ms. Albertina Kakaza 021 403 3765

(Note: basically the amendment appears to remove the mining industry from the NEMA (National Environment Management Act) and places overriding authority at the discretion of the minister of minerals and energy. Further, it vitiates environmental controls in favor of the commercial consequences - and allows decisions to be made by any minister or MEC .

Our autocratic demockery:

The level of collusion and deceit we've seen so far between TEM/Xolco and various government departments and state organs leaves me in no uncertainty that the amendments are related to the Xolobeni Mineral Sands application... amongst others.

Comments are due by tomorrow (2 November 2007), and the amendment bill can be downloaded here:

www.environment.co.za

I've only given it a cursory glance, but basically the amendment appears to remove the mining industry from the NEMA (National Environment Management Act) and places overriding authority and discretion with the minister of mineral affairs...

It seems further to vitiate environmental controls in favor of the commercial consequences - and allows decisions to be made by any minister or MEC . . . without public consultation.

Autocratic doesn't even begin to describe it.

This site was exploited a couple of weeks ago. My own fault, for allowing PHP input. It just never even occurred to me!

Anyway... I took the usual precautions and upgraded everything... but I didn't even notice the ramifications for a couple of weeks more... until I logged out to test a problem that someone reported... and found I couldn't log back in!

The exploit came from a Chinese based IP address; and my paranoid suspicions are that they are the best internet censors in the world... and far too good friends with our government. No matter. I blackholed the entire network block - since the only 2 hits I ever received from there were over the period of the exploit.

That reminds me... it's interesting to note that only about 15% of this site's hits come from outside South Africa. I guess no one is really interested in coming here anymore. What with the crime, and sheer banana republic lunacy. (Telecoms for one thing, corruption for another.) We're the laughing stock of the world... as the only country on the Security Council to have voted against censuring the Burmese junta. Why is that do you imagine? As a supposed liberal country that used to be dominated by an oppressive militaristic police state it strikes me as rather hypocritical. But then many things about this government are - if not hypocritical - then simply downright obscene.