Just Not That

Here is an alternative peppadew pickle recipe for those who find the pickle spice in the other pickle peppadew recipe too overpowering.

Ingredients for about a litre of peppadews:
coarse salt
360 ml (1 1/2 cups) white grape vinegar
300 ml (1 1/4 cups) sugar
240 ml (1 cup) water
A few pieces fresh ginger, peeled
A few garlic cloves, peeled
2 teaspoons mixed peppercorns (different colours)

Method:
Sterilize jars and lids.
Use surgical gloves to handle the peppadews or be careful where you touch.
Cut off the stems and remove the seeds from the peppadews using a small spoon. Leave in brine for a couple of hours (or overnight).

Rinse the peppadews in cold water and then dry it by shaking it in a sieve or cloth.
Mix in a pot the vinegar, sugar, ginger, garlic cloves, peppercorns and water. Dissolve sugar and then bring the liquid to a boil.
Add the peppadews to the boiling liquid and boil for about a minute.
Use a slotted spoon to fill the jars with peppadews. Afterwards top up the jars with liquid. Stir with a spoon handle to ensure trapped air is released. Screw on lids.

Let the bottled peppadews stand 3 weeks before use.

Whether it is time to upgrade to a shiny new car or get rid of the old one before it starts costing you a fortune, either way you can save a lot of driving around from dealer to dealer by using the internet. It is a great resource for searching for used vehicles and letting vehicles find you.

When you are buying a vehicle, remember to consider the total cost of ownership, not just the price you buy at. Ask people with similar vehicles about their experiences. Capital loss and insurance are probably the biggest ones to consider. Other less frequent expenses are things like service costs and tyre costs.

Best sites for buying from private sellers:

• Bid or Buy
• Gumtree
• AA Autobay

AA Autobay facilitates the deal and do licensing and registration. AA Autobay is not the cheapest option as they charge 7% plus registration costs . Almost like buying from a dealer but for slightly less.

Look at sites with RSS feeds or links to save your search. That way you can easily get a list of vehicles matching your search criteria every day.

The best way to determine what you should expect to pay is to phone a dealer and ask for the trade and retail prices of a specific vehicle. Sometimes when the demand is very high that is not an accurate reflection, in that case looking at what people advertise a vehicle for is your best indication. AutoTrader’s What’s it worth? page may be of help.

Other options are Book Value and car-prices, both of which I found inaccurate.

If you have a very specific vehicle in mind, one of the best ways to find one is to request a vehicle on some sites that provide this functionality. That way dealers will contact you to tell you that they have what you are looking for.

Popular car buying web sites that you can look at:

• Vehicle Traders
• Request a vehicle at Vehicle Traders
• Auto Trader
• Search Carfind.co.za or request a vehicle
• Automart
• Search CARS.co.za or request a vehicle
• SURF 4 Cars
• Request a car
• Search McCarthy Call-a-car or request a vehicle
• Search Barloworld Motor (Pty) Ltd or request a vehicle
• Automark

If you cannot find the vehicle you are looking for locally, you can consider buying one further away. In that case you have to consider extras such as flights to view the vehicle and transport of the vehicle to you.

Here are a list of transport companies to consider. In many cases you can request a quote online.

• Wizz Auto Transport Solutions
• Exclusive car carriers
• Motorvia
• WB Auto transport
• Autofreight

Central Cape Town

Climb or take the cable car up Table Mountain

Just stroll around the Waterfront and look at the entertainers. Lots of Restaurants and boat trips to choose from.

Feed the squirrels at the Company Gardens.

Have a picnic or walk in the Green Point park (between the light house and the stadium).

Stroll down the Green Point promenade. Kids can ride on the train, play on the jungle gyms and play putt putt.

Pick up a couple of gems at Scratch Patch

Visit the World of Birds

Go to the beach – Clifton, Camps Bay or Hout Bay

Take a boat trip to Seal Island in Hout Bay

Have a meal at Scarecrows or Deer Park Café while the kids play.

Southern Suburbs

Have a picnic at Kirstenbosch or let the kids play in the streams.

Experience a rustic farm atmosphere at Millstone, Oude Molen Eco Village in Pinelands. Horse riding, a restaurant with a tree house (boat) and resident pigs and chickens.

Walk around Rhodes Memorial or just admire the view.

Ferndale Nursery in Brommersvlei Road, Constantia – animals, playground, maze

Get close to nature in Newlands forest or Tokai forest.

Swim with penguins at Boulders beach.

Walk around Kalk Bay Harbour.

If you are not scared of pigeons, The Barnyard is a great place for kids (and adults).

Go to the beach – Fish Hoek, Muizenberg, Boulders, Noordhoek or Kommetjie

Foresters Arms (Forries) in Newlands has a child-friendly top garden, great carvery on Sundays.

Visit a child-friendly wine farm in Constantia.

Lots of attractions at Imhoff farm in Kommetjie

Northern Suburbs

Bugz kiddies play park – off the N1 highway near Kraaifontein will keep the kids entertained for a whole day with lots of activities. Take swimsuits.

Feed the animals at Stodels Bellville

Tobogganing at Cool Runnings is lots of fun for adrenalin junkies.

Lots of rides at Ratanga Junction (in season)

Visit a child-friendly wine farm in Durbanville or Kuils River

Go to the beach – Bloubergstrand or Melkbos

Stellenbosch and Somerset West

Child friendly Klein Joostenberg Farm – On R304 Stellenbosch has a restaurant and deli and lots for the kids to do.

Walk between beautiful butterflies, see a couple of monkeys and Iguanas at Butterfly World

Let the monkeys entertain you at Monkey Town

Go to the beach – Strand or Gordon’s Bay

Visit a child-friendly wine farm, e.g. Spier

See lions at Cape Town Lion Park or Drakenstein Lion Park

See crocodiles at Le Bonheur croc farm

Around 1870 Ceres was a major route to the diamond fields of Kimberley. All changed when the railway lines were extended and newer roads were built.

Nowadays Ceres is probably synonymous with juice and to a lesser degree for snow and cherries.
The Pine Forest Holiday Resort’s used to be another big attraction but its popularity declined a lot over the years.

Ceres is making a comeback as a destination thanks to Ceres Zip Slide Tours. Touted as the longest zipslide tour in Africa it is bound to make it onto a lot of adventure seekers’ to-do lists. It is run by a professional outfit that has been running a similar tour for years in Tsitsikamma.

While in Ceres do pay a visit to the friendly and colourful Baba’s Jêm. Enjoy traditional Cape Malay cooking and buy some of the delicious jams, chutneys, atchars and pickle for sale.

Other activities:
Snow (sometimes) in winter at Matroosberg Private Nature Reserve
Mountain biking on Eselfontein farm.
Horse Riding
Golfing
Pick cherries starting end November at Klondyke Cherry Farm.

Contact Ceres Tourism for more information.

How to install EA 8 connecting to a MySQL database using Crossover Office 9.1.0 for Linux (Ubuntu). This post may be of help even if you are installing EA inside WINE.

First reference should be the Sparx EA site.

Crossover Office simplifies the install – just used the CodeWeavers automated install. If you have an EA license and you get to the part where the EA Trial version is installed, cancel the EA installation (but let the Crossover automated install complete afterwards).

The automated install only installs everything you need for a basic EA installation.

At this point you need to install everything else you need. Let the options on the EA reference page guide you (Installing Enterprise Architect with Support for ODBC Connections / Installing Enterprise Architect with Support for Scripting and ODBC Connections) even if you are using Crossover. These extras are available for installation in Crossover Office.

Using Crossover Office, go to Manage Bottles and click on “Install Software”

Select “Other Application” under “Unsupported Applications”

This way you can supply an installation file for Enterprise Architect and the MySQL driver.

As mentioned earlier, the automated install does not cover scripting and ODBC connections.

For MySQL to work, you need Visual Basic 6.0 Run-Time.

Go to the “Control Panel” tab, double click on “Data Sources (ODBC)” to configure your Data Source used by EA.

On the “Control Panel” tab, double click on “Wine Configuration” and override the following libraries to “native,builtin”:

• ole32
• oleaut32
• rpcrt4

At first I got error code -2147217906 whenever I connected to the server (because of the missing VB run-time). I tried quite a few options, gave up a few times but eventually had to resolve this.

Here is what I discovered in the process.
The description for -2147217906 is “Invalid bookmark” which did not help me much. If you perhaps get a different error then download the file oledberr.exe to see what the error code means.

Manual download links:
Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1
Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) 2.8
MSXML 4.0 Service Pack 3 (Microsoft XML Core Services)
Service Pack 6 for Visual Basic 6.0: Run-Time Redistribution Pack (vbrun60sp6.exe)
MySQL Connector/ODBC 5.1 or MySQL Connector/ODBC 3.51

Hope this helps to solve any challenges you may encounter during your EA installation.