ADEREMI'S NOTEBOOK

“419ers” have surfaced in Baghdad (5)

I think headlines like “Nigerian 419ers surface in Baghdad” does not do justice to Nigeria. Anyone can claim to be a Nigerian and send an 419 email. The extensive collection of 419 sample letters available on web will mean there is no need for the person to crack up a head before coming up with a scam letter.

Huhcorp, We do Stuff (0)

Recently, I got an email about this exciting company, Huhcorp. As an student I wonder if they have an internship position available for Summer 2004. (Quick tip = if the company site fails to show, click on the background on their homepage.)

Ko Yoruba (Learn Yoruba) (9)

Inspired by the Mental Acrobatics’s Christmas greetings in more 50 languages, I decided to introduce my local language, Yoruba. It is a beautiful language (I would say that).

From Wikipedia, Yoruba is a sub-Saharan language. It is the native tongue of the Yoruba people, and is spoken among other languages in Nigeria, Benin, Togo and Sierra Leone, as well as by small communities in Brazil (where it is known as Lukumi) and Cuba (where it is called Nago). It belongs to the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo language family, and has nearly 30 million speakers. Yoruba is a tonal language with subject-verb-object (SVO) syntax just like English and French.

Introduction
Brief Introduction to the Yoruba Culture
Background info Yoruba language.
Photo Essay on Yoruba - Quite a long article, scroll to the end to see the photos.

Learn
The alphabets in Yoruba.
Yoruba Fonts
Abeokuta’s Basic Introduction
The Yoruba Dictionary in Working progress
Internet Living Yoruba Dictionary - The project is based at the Center for Africana Studies at Georgia Southern University.
Learn Yoruba at Rutgers.

Music
Gbedu (gbedu means “music from radio or tape”)
Nigerian Music
Radio Abeokuta
Radio PalmWine

Seasons Greetings (3)

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year.

What a crappy Present?
Google Doodle (via Google weblogs)

Mad Cow Disease could be back in town (0)

I understand the first case of BSE (also known as mad cow disease) has been suspected in Washington. Over at Meta filter, someone quotes the local news as saying:

“This incident is not terrorist-related,” Veneman said Tuesday. “I cannot stress this point strongly enough.”

It could be but we hope not.

CSS Copyright (2)

There is a big debate going on about whether CSS can be copyrighted at Mezzo blue after an incident detailed here. Personally I have learnt how to design websites by studying other people’s websites. I usually ensured that even if I wanted to use a similar concept, I understood the design and tried to remix it in my own way to ensure I was not violating their design. Still I think it is hard. It is like trying to avoid usage of some words in English grammar because they are under copyright. How awkward would that be? Another thing I found interesting was that some people declared their design open source and frowned when people attempted to modify their code. This is not to say I will encourage code stealing from other people’s designs.

I like the navigation menu on hicks design. Feels like animated flash but I am sure it was built in CSS.

Friday Five (3)

I have managed to stay up all night to complete my group project due in 10hrs as my group members lay asleep in bed. This is not intended to make me sound like I am doing more work than the rest of group. Over the past year, I have managed to receive Friday five every week and decided to resume answering the questions. Besides I am bored of thinking about pressure vessels.

1. List your five favourite beverages.
   Spirite, Tango Apple, Stella Artois, Actimel (the taste reminds me of some yogurt favour in Nigeria) and Remi’s special (4 spoons of chocolate and 1 spoon of coffee)
2. List your five favourite websites.
   Google, Guardian, Quotes, Nonags and Antithesis
3. List your five favourite snack foods.
   All goes.
4. List your five favourite board and/or card games.
   Scramble, Monopoly, Checkers, Chess…
5. List your five favourite computer and/or game system games.
   Quake,Heroes Of Might & Magic, NBA 2001…

A bus shelter and a website (2)

A bus shelter situated in Shetland maintained by a 15year boy is a firm favourite to win most popular website of 2003 run by Yahoo! [via scotblog].

A Kenyan Post (0)

I always thought that meeting a Nigerian blogger from Lagos would be interesting. I remember when I used to live in Lagos, just walking on the street used to make me laugh, there was always something lively going on. Although I am yet to find one, I have however come across the Unganisha by Ashok, a Kenyan whose stories remind of the good old days in Nigeria. The stories he tells can be easily compared to listening to my Dad and his friends talk about their business and social experiences. I can remember my Dad telling me about his experience while he was a trip and a magician (allegedly) offered to turn 50,000naira to a million naira.

A Rough guide to the Kenyan Stock Market. The golden rule for any stock market is to think long term, day trading is not for everyone and I would know.

K-meleon 0.81 released (3)

Download K-meleon 0.8.1.

The K-meleon developers plan to increase awareness of K-meleon as a “open source lightweight web browser for the win32 (Windows) platform based on the Gecko layout engine (the rendering engine of Mozilla)”. The truth is K-meleon always existed before Firebird (the flagship browser of Mozilla) in its streamlined, un-bloated and customisable form. The beauty of K-meleon is that it looks exactly as one would wish for through the use of the marco system built into the core engine. It also utilises plugins giving users the opportunity to install only the features they wish to use. K-meleon is a bit a geeky browser as customising requires a set pattern of coding in the macro system, once understood - Sky is the limit. The menu and toolbar can be customised to contain the exact tools you use daily, rather than a list of tool you could need into your lifetime. It has the usual list of features such layers (also known as tabs), pop-up blocker, support for IE favourites, Bookmarks and Opera Hotlist.

I think it is worth trying out plus my website looks considerable nicer when view using Gecko-rendered browsers especially K-meleon compared with Microsoft Internet Explorer.

And finally if you are new to open source software, Bill Zellers has kindly prepared some user tips for us all. Worth Reading.