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!