In this post I would like to congratulate the current government of South Africa for one of their departments which has the most effecient online application I’ve seen in years.  Yes, I’m talking about SARS (South African Revenue Service).

On 1 July 2009 the tax season opened and I decided this year I’m going to do my tax first thing, so on the 2nd of July 2009 I submitted my income tax online.  With my employees submission of my tax deducted and showing on my tax documents, it just makes everything so much easier.  It took me about 10 minutes to gather all my documents at home that I received from various merchants, vendors, medical aids etc and entering the information online.  I then submitted my tax return.

Over the weekend I was checking my bank account and was just trying to figure out why I have so much money left, as I have been budgeting for some renovations in the next couple of weeks, and somehow I was a couple of grand over… and guess what, SARS has paid me back some money.  In a matter of 1-2 days they processed my submission and has refunded me the correct amount.  Now that is effecient and fast, and maybe also an advantage of doing your tax in non-peak periods.

With their email and sms notifications it is a breeze being kept up to date when your “Statement of Account’ arrives etc. and they notify you of any changes, movement etc. on your account.

Some years ago SARS did go through the growth pains of having this online service, but it is definitely paying off very well.

Congratulations to the government of the Republic of South Africa.

Luckily MySkins.co.za has come to the rescue, with their unique offerings where you can get unique stickers or skins for your electronic devices from IPods, laptops to Playstations and DSTV Decoders.

There are quite a lot of these sites online, but this is the first online shop that I’ve seen with such a large variety of skins for various different models.

After browsing through their designs, I found the one that I reckon would fit me the best, “Pulse”. You can also design your own and send it through.

I’ve ordered this one for a bit steap price of R250, but it looks quite promising, so expecting my order to come in the next 7 days.

MySkins.co.za was featured on CNBC Africa’s show Tech@Work on Sunday the 29th of July 2007.

It’s been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

We have a lot of work to do, and we’re definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision. We’re excited for what’s to come and we hope you are too. Stay tuned for more updates in the fall and have a great summer.

Click through to the site to see over 90 more of these photos.

A new South African Sharepoint podcast has been launched called “The MOSS Show”.

I’ve listened to 2 of the podcasts which give a wealth of information, where each podcasts of the 4 so far is at least 30 minutes long, which gives great insight into this great piece of technology and all the possibilities involved.

Excellent Resource for the whole MOSS and WSS community out there !

South Africa has lost it’s first position as the most violent country in the world.

It has been overtaken by the UK and Austria, and now only takes 3rd place according to this survey.

I still wonder how exactly they do these surveys.

but this statement also explains much better as well:

“violent crime, while in other countries it will only be logged if a person is physically injured.

There are also degrees of violence. While the UK ranks above South Africa for all violent crime, South Africans suffer more than 20,000 murders each year - compared with Britain’s 921 in 2007.”

That said, the murders in South Africa is absolutely past scary.

Wonder if the UK is getting more violent because most South Africans are moving there.

Living in a country where bandwidth does not come cheap, it is appalling that Blizzard has made us fall in love with Starcraft, and now take it away from us, just by making you play online, where it will mean us forking out a lot of money out of our pockets to play for FREE on their Battlefield.net server.

One of the reasons why they made this decision is bacause of piracy, but I think this make the “hackers/crackers” to target Blizzard software for making these decisions.

If this will continue and Blizzard does continue with the implementation of their plan, they will be loosing a lot of respect from their client base, and loosing loyal players (and buyers) of Starcraft.

This is my #FAIL for today.

The web can and should get faster. Learn why even small changes of a few milliseconds in the performance of a website can mean an improvement of several seconds for its users. Visit code.google.com/speed to find more information about what you can do to speed up the web.

—-

From building data centers in different parts of the world to designing highly efficient user interfaces, we at Google always strive to make our services faster. We focus on speed as a key requirement in product and infrastructure development, because our research indicates that people prefer faster, more responsive apps. Over the years, through continuous experimentation, we’ve identified some performance best practices that we’d like to share with the web community on code.google.com/speed, a new site for web developers, with tutorials, tips and performance tools

For more check out the original article at The Official Google Blog.