Written by Colin Fleming in 2001 and presented as his speech at my farewell party (ePages.net). Copied verbatim.
“In 1996 ePages consisted of Kerry Duys and Colin Fleming. Kerry sold an online bookstore to Butterworths Publishers (1). At about the same time I had visited a web site that was featured in the SA Top 10 web sites (2). I can’t remember who published the site, but it was pretty official. The site was called “Ewan’s Corner”. When you went there (it was an extraordinarily long URL that contained the name kestrel in the domain (3)) it was running on a FreeBSD box administered by the chairman of the University of Natal Internet Society (very grand don’t you think!!) (4)
Anyway this chairman of the Internet Society appeared to be quite clever. There was a link on the site to a strobe effect that ran through thousands of alternate BGCOLOR=black/BGCOLOR=white tags that had the effect of a strobe light. VERY COOL! (5) I would like to point out at this stage that the ePages technical team at the time were having problems with the BGCOLOR tag and took several weeks to work out that colour was spelled without a U (that was shortly after we had taken equally long to discover why we had no joy centring images). So you can see that we were out there defining the technology age!
Anyway back to the web site called Ewan’s Corner. There was another link to something that said “let me see what I know about you”. Clicking on this said you are Colin Fleming coming in from goofy (my telnet server) with a rate of xxx (in your UNIX account in those days you had a .plan file that contained information about you). This was displayed on the web site. There were an assortment of cool graphics (all plagiarised of course) and this truly was a top 10 site.
We invited the acclaimed author of the site to dinner at ePages head office. This bushy fellow arrived in a clapped out car that was in dire need of paint. He enthusiastically accepted a beer. VERY COOL – at the time it struck me that I may be a little short of booze for the evening with a thirsty student in the house. Three hours later he finished it. On one beer he managed to reverse his car into the gate. (6)
We were busy financing a webserver from SGI and asked if he knew how to drive it. He was equally enthusiastic about this but thankfully he can drive a server better than he can drive a bottle of beer. We also asked if he could build an online bookstore. After a brief hesitation he said he could. We struck a deal immediately. He got to build a bookstore and play with some cool SGI boxes and we paid him R1000 a month. Everyone was happy. That year he doubled his salary twice. (7)
Meeting Ewan spoiled me I am afraid. I thought that he represented programmers. I expected all programmers to do things like him. He was available any time of the day or night – he was always online. Simply type “talk ewan@kestrel.und.ac.za” and the familiar “whatsup” response came back. Ewan the server is down was usually the response. He shared a car with a troop of brothers, so server down meant a drive to Kloof to fetch Ewan in the middle of the night and a rush to Internet Africa’s offices. I spent many hours peering at screens over Ewans shoulder offering moral support. Nothing we threw at him came back undone or unsolved. (8) So if any of you have disappointed me you have Ewan to blame.
It was the beginning of a great 5-year relationship. He is an extraordinary programmer and problem solver. Most of you will bear testimony to this having benefited directly from his ability (and I challenge anyone to say that they haven’t learned something from Ewan). I for one have learned from Ewan that he is a poor estimator of time taken to require developing something (something he seems to have passed on to all developers at ePages). He also doesn’t commit himself. Ewan. how is the RMB trade game going? “getting there” “almost done” “90%”. Ewan – how many hours left? “Hmmmmmm hard to say”.
More importantly than programming, he is an extraordinary human being. He is caring, responsible and compassionate and the bugger simply will not say a bad thing about anyone. He endears everyone he interacts with and i haven’t heard anyone say a bad thing about him. He even tried to find good things to say about XXX and YYY. (9)
Finally, the lure of the Borg was too strong and as you all know, Ewan is leaving for a Flasher future. I am extremely sad that he is going but I am happy that Ewan is happy. ePages will simply not be the same without him. Fortunately it is only Ewan the person that will be missed rather than Ewan the technical lynchpin, as others have grown to match his prowess. Ewan – you are an extraordinary human being and I am privileged to have known you. Don’t go too far!”
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- Butterworths (now LexisNexis Butterworths) were one of ePages biggest clients. We created the first South African online shopping cart system for them, and I wrote a highly customised search engine for their online content – in Perl. Those were the days.
- The magazine was the S.A. Computer Buyer, July 1995 issue. The article was “The Web in South Africa” (those were the days when you could spend 30 minutes each morning covering any new / changed sites) and my site was ranged #34 with a :-) rating. Pictures coming, I have that actual edition.
- kestrel.ugrd.und.ac.za as I recall (the other society machine was beastie.cs.und.ac.za)
- I was a founder and the first chairman of the UND-IS, whose purpose was to give undergraduates internet access via a Unix shell (email, news groups, text browsing) and at the same time give people Unix administration experience.
- CGI scripts in Perl and csh were far cooler :-)
- Hitting the gate is an unsubstantiated rumour – but I am indeed not a beer fan.
- Happy doesn’t do it justice – I was in heaven. We had a top of the line Silicon Graphics SGI server connected to the Internet Africa Durban backbone (webserver was Netscape Enterprise server – remember Microsoft didn’t even have a webserver offering in those early Windows days). I got to play with IRIX too.
- The days of no home internet access, coaxial cables and terminator nightmares, an attention span that could serve me for days straight, and a flexible sleep policy :-)
- Names blanked to protect the guilty. See, I’m still nice.
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