to dismantle the democratic conditions of the country and also a drug student who's not studying mathematics in English, a Yishiva student who's not drafting to the army will get more money than the soldier. The government will only fund the ultra-orthodox sector. This is garage sale of the Israeli democracy. Ministers will nominate will nominate people to sit in cabinets. The defense minister will lose control over the West Bank and it's unclear who's responsible for what. This is a recipe for a disaster. Show me one country around the world, one country where the person who is in charge of the police is a convicted felon with convictions and other criminal charges. They're dismantling the education ministry. Avi Maud, a man who's obtaining blacklist of LGBT community individuals, he will be in charge. Young parents will not be able to send their children to school in a quiet hearted mind. They're handling a coup, again, the secular. The government will not be able to be on the same page with the international community of the Iranian nuclear deal. It's the first government in the history of the country that the U.S. is not seeing its closest ally. It's their ability now to harm the economy. The sheets of the industry are all warning. The government is encouraging people not to have tours.  Because of living, we'll just go up. It's in their ability now to undermine and damage whole juries. American juries will no longer see Israel as their second home. Changing the conversion bill will stop the blessed ally from Russia, the immigration from Russia. And now they're also trying to shut the opposition. They're telling us agree or accept the election results. When we won the election, they changed children of lawmakers to synagogue. They carried out a counter-compane of poison against our lawmakers, the coalition members. But we will not do those things. We will fight over the character of a country, no matter what. We will send our they want us to pay taxes and send our children to the army and be silent. This will not happen. This opposition will not get orders from the government what it can or cannot do. We will fight over the rule of law. We will fight for women and LGBT rights. We will fight for IDF soldiers. We will fight for a tolerant Jewish identity that is not an excuse for racism and discrimination. I call upon the citizens of Israel. You have lost nowadays to be involved citizens who are not staying quiet, who are not staying silent, who are obeying the law, protecting the law. But remember that you have rights and you're not going to give them up. This is an extremist, dangerous government with a weak prime minister who loves control over it even before its establishment. We are leading this battle, this fight. We're not going anywhere. We're fighting for our country. We're fighting for our beloved country. Thank you. Mr. Prime Minister, you're describing a nightmarish government. Two questions. Don't you have a responsibility for boycotting, consistently, Benjamin Netanyahu? Don't you have a responsibility for the formation of this government? Second question, you're talking about leading the battle. The opposition is so fragmented where the leaders so much in this agreement. How can they do it? This government is the government that's going to promise this vote. The Likud voters are looking at it and saying, you know what, this is all what we want. We didn't think this is what will happen. We didn't think the Likud will be a minor member of the government. So questions about the coalition divert your questions to those who are establishing it. And for the opposition, we will work together. The leaders of the opposition will work together. We're planning all our steps together and we'll continue to fight together for the dangerous movement with the defending government. Well, we just heard outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid giving what could be his last national address as Premier. I would even describe it maybe as his first speech as head of the opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu's incoming government. It was a blistering attack on that government from basically every angle describing, of course, how the opposition is going to fight against it. With me in studio to break it down. We have Yareev Oppenheimer, Project Director of the Two-State Coalition Geneva Initiative. He's a former member of the Merit's Executive Committee. And also joining us from Jerusalem is Yehuda Glick, former Israeli parliament member from Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party.  Outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid said this new government is a garage sale of Israeli democracy. It's going to weaken the military, weaken the economy, weaken Israel's ties with the U.S., with world jury, quote, a recipe for disaster. Your response to that? First of all, Shalom to you and to my dear friend Yareev Oppenheimer. I'm very happy to be here on I-24. And I want to say that Mr. Lapid gave his first speech as the leader of the opposition, and he did what he's supposed to do. He's supposed to attack the government and criticize it as bitterly as possible. But the facts are that the government that is being established is the government that was elected by the mass majority of the people of Israel. And as a matter of fact, if many of the parties that are decided to be in the opposition have an open door to join the coalition, they decided to ban the mass majority of the people of Israel. So they chose to be in the opposition. The opposition is very easy to yell and scream and criticize. In the coalition and the government, you have to do. And I hope this government finally, after three years of a long election campaign, will finally function. Right. But I'm asking you if you think his points about the government will legitimate or not. Look, when he tries to delegitimize the government, he's wrong. When he wants to criticize the government, that's what he's supposed to do. And I can say many of the things he may have said I can agree partly. But I think the government has a majority and they have a right to lead the majority. I think Benjamin Netanyahu right now has a sole support from every one of his partners. All right, Yareed, your response both to what outgoing Premier Lepid said in Yudah Yudah's perspective. I have to tell you honestly that I think Lepid was too polite. I think the situation is much worse than what Lepid said. We see now the agreement between the Likud party and the other parties. We see death penalty. We see opening the door to racist parties to run in the Israeli election. Things that we never thought will be part of the political climate in this country. And this is not just a governing. This is changing the rules of the game. This is changing Israel from democracy to post-democracy. This is creating a new system that is undemocratic. Look what they are trying to do and what they are aiming to do to the Supreme Court. To make it impossible to Israelis to come and to say the majority is taking the right of the minority. This is the role of the Supreme Court and they are trying to weaken it and to make it actually without any ability to be effective. So in democracy, it's election, it's the rule of the, it's the majority count, but it's also the right of the minority. You cannot use the votes of the majority in order to take the rights from the minority. And this is what we are talking about.  We are talking about women rights. We are talking about the Palestinians. We are talking about refugees. Today it was exposed again that refugees can be locked in jail without trial. Something that no democratic country can do. So every few hours, we are getting new promises that Netanyahu made to his partners that are totally not part of a democratic regime. So this is almost a coup against democracy. I want to have you to respond. I just want to ask you about how you feel about the description of this government as extremist, which is a term that's been used by some to describe yourself, Yoda. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I can hear the hysterical response of my dear friend, Yarev Oppenheimer, and I truly recommend to him to change his perspective. And if nobody moved your cheese, nobody stole your government. The government is now leading by its principles. And the fact that for so many years, so many people on the left think it's impossible that anybody has different opinions of their own is against democracy. And everybody thinks differently. Are you in favor of that penalty in Israel? Do you like to see electric chairs in the Israeli jail? This is something that you support because this is part of the agreement. Are you in favor of taking down the bill that is saying that the racist party cannot run for the election? Are you in favor that racist party will be able to run in the election? This is something that was published. Don't talk about slogans. Talks about these consequences. I will answer directly to those two questions. I would prefer to live in a country where there's no death penalty. But I would also prefer to live in a country where people don't shoot with machine guns at buses and at restaurants. And when they're talking about death penalty, they're talking about something very, very, very serious. The United States has death penalty, which I don't like, and they use it very openly. But if in Israel we don't use, that's where you're reaching the point where you're taking things to the wrong point. And the same thing happens with the other question asked me.  But when you see the Supreme Court, again and again, allows racist parties from the Palestinian parties who are totally racist to run. They're not racist. They're not against Jews. Show me one quote of these people against Jews. And I can show you many, plenty of quotas about Palestinians and Arabs. Yeah, really? Like you was not saying it right? Like you would have finished this point. Yeah, I have a right to speak even though I'm from the right. And the right are always right in the left or just to the left. What can I do? That's what we have left. But let me tell you, Yarev, again, when the Supreme Court uses again and again, the law against racism only on one direction, it means that this law is not doing what it's supposed to be doing. So let me take to say very simple. You, Yarev, and many of your friends who have wrongly used the Supreme Court and turned it into a political tool are the ones who weakened the Supreme Court. And today, when the right wing government wants to strengthen the Supreme Court and put limitations and say the Supreme Court should use and be a Supreme Court and not be a political court, this is what I want to see. The Supreme Court is a political court because it makes a political decision. And the reason why we have a Supreme Court is to limit the power of the majority. The Supreme Court doesn't supposed to be a popular thing because it's going to, if it's strong and it's doing a job, it needs to be against the will of the majority. It needs to represent the minority. This is why I think we don't use enough the Supreme Court until today. And what they are trying to do is to make it even weaker and to make it impossible for the minority to protect itself. So tomorrow morning, you'd agree and say that everything is nice and he loves everyone, but eventually the government that he support, and I'm not supporting, is trying to silent and to make it almost impossible to speak. They are already talking about new laws that will limit the freedom of speech, the limit, the freedom of NGOs to act in Israel. It's exactly like a non-democratic party. This is a co-against democratic regime. And I thought, maybe I'm naive, that people like you, like you, the Gleek will say, we went too far.  Yeah, Reeve Oppenheim. Yehuda, I want to give you a chance to respond. We have to go to a break. Please stay with us, but we'll come back and you will have a chance to respond to you, Reeve. And also still to come on the rundown.


lecture in the course design and engineering of computer systems. So, in this lecture, we are going to continue our discussion on performance engineering. So, let us get started. So, so far this week, we have understood what is performance, what are the parameters you vary and what are the metrics you measure when you do a load test, how to run a load test, the types of load tests. And in the previous lecture, we have seen how to do various back of the envelope calculations in order to do a sanity check of your load test results. And we have also seen basics of how do you tune some system parameters in order to optimize your hardware resource usage.  But if you find that no, no, I expect lot more load into my system and my capacity is not enough, then you have to optimize your system to improve its capacity. So, how do you go about doing this? So, first you will find out which is the bottleneck resource at your bottleneck component, you will monitor the utilization of all the hardware resources to find that which is my bottleneck resource. And then you will use what are called profiling tools. So, these tools will help you identify why is your resource utilization so high.  And once you find out the root cause, you know, then you can fix the root cause, you can apply various techniques to, you know, fix the root cause and you can improve performance. So, this is how, this is what we are going to study in today's lecture, how do you use these profiling tools and what are some of the techniques to optimize performance. And note that if you improve performance of one component, bottleneck will shift to some other component. So, it can never be the case that you have fully eliminated all bottlenecks. Suppose your database is the bottleneck and your, you know, you improved its capacity from 100 requests to 1000 requests per second. Then some other component that has a capacity of 500 requests per second, now that becomes the bottleneck. Then the bottleneck will shift there, you optimize that, then the bottleneck will shift somewhere else. So, at some point there will always be the slowest component in the system at any point of time, right. So, completely eliminating bottlenecks is something that can never happen. Only thing you can do is, you just keep on improving your bottleneck performance until you can handle all the load coming in. And once you are satisfied that no matter whatever load I expect, I can handle once you reach that level of comfort, your performance engineering stops, right. So, this is an iterative process until your performance matches whatever is the expected load into your system, ok. So, now let us see how you monitor the utilizations and use profiling tools to observe what the root cause of your problem is and some techniques that you can use to mitigate this root cause, ok. So, the first important thing is, you know, at your bottleneck component some hardware resource has, would have been at full utilization. So, the question is, which is that hardware resource? So, what you have to do is, you have to monitor the utilization of all the hardware resources in your system to find out which one is getting exhausted that is limiting the performance of your system. So, there are various tools available to monitor CPU utilization, you know. For example, top is a very commonly used tool in Linux that will tell you for each CPU core, what fraction of the CPU, you know, is it 100% utilized, 50% utilized, for each CPU core it will give you that number, by this you know, is my CPU fully utilized, is that why I am not able to handle more requests than my capacity or is something else the problem. Then there are tools to monitor memory usage, you know, if you have 8GB or 4GB of RAM in your system, what fraction of that RAM is used by users, by OS, what fraction is free, you know, are you running out of memory in your system, is that why your system is slow. So, for example, the free command in Linux will tell you that. Then there are other tools to monitor memory bandwidth utilization, note that this is different from memory usage. For example, I could have, you know, some 8GB of memory, I, this monitoring memory usage will tell me what fraction of this is occupied and what fraction is free. On the other hand, memory bandwidth is, so there is this memory bus between the CPU and DRAM, that can only serve, you know, some megabytes per second or some gigabytes per second. This bus has a certain capacity and how much of this bus bandwidth is utilized and how much is free. For example, you can only be using a very small fraction of your memory, but you could be using this all the time, you know, accessing this continuously so that this bus becomes busy or you could be using your entire memory, but this bus is lightly utilized, okay.  These are two different things, the actual memory usage and the memory bandwidth usage. Both of these, you should monitor to see which one is the bottleneck and especially when you have, you know, local memory versus NUMA memory, so this non-uniform memory we have studied, you know, to some CPU cores, some memory is closer to some other CPU cores, some other memory is closer, therefore you have to monitor what is the usage of this local memory, what is the usage of, you know, the memory that is farther away, is any of this becoming the bottleneck, all of this you have to monitor. Then you also have to monitor utilization of IO devices, so every IO device can only process data at a certain rate, you know, the disk can only do like, you know, so many reads per second, so many writes per second, it has a capacity and if you are exceeding that capacity then your system performance will hit a bottleneck. So you can monitor all of this, you know, there are tools like IOSTAT and the NUX that tell you what is the rate at which your devices, you know, reading or writing data, all of these you monitor and from all of these things you will be able to find out which hardware resource is saturated that is limiting the performance of my bottleneck component, is it CPU, is it memory, is it memory bandwidth, is it the disk, is it the network card, which of these is the performance bottleneck, okay. Now once you identify which hardware resource is saturated, the next question comes up why, why is that hardware resource saturated, why is my CPU at 100% utilization, where is the CPU spending all its time and what is causing this high utilization, that is the next question and for that we use what are called profiling tools, okay. So there are many profiling software available, you know, here are some names of the commonly used ones but there are many others also out there.  For example, these profilers will count various events, you know, like hardware events, software events like cache misses, page faults, context switches, all of these things that are happening in your system they will count and they will also help you attribute these events to parts of the program. For example, you can find out that this function in my code is causing a lot of cache misses, this part of my code is causing a lot of page faults, you can do this level of analysis, you can count events, you can attribute the events to parts of your code. Then this will help you understand, you know, how is my hardware resources being used, how is CPU time spent, where is the CPU spending a lot of its time in which functions, which parts of the code and you know, which part of the code is using, which hardware resource, all of this you can understand. So from this profiler output then you will be able to identify which are the parts of the code that are performing inefficiently and what hardware software events are happening that contribute to poor performance, is it poor cache performance, is it page faults, what is the issue, which part of the code is causing that issue. So once you get do this analysis, then you can go about optimizing your system. So if your system's performance is poor, you cannot just stare at, you know, the million lines of code and wonder, what should I do about it. These profilers will help you pinpoint saying, okay, here is the problem and you can go about optimizing that one part. So what are the events that these profiling software collect? So they collect statistics about various type of hardware and software events and these statistics are collected, you can either do per thread, per process, for each CPU system wide at many granularities. You can specify most of these tools, give you the flexibility to specify at what granularity I want to count these events and what all events do I want to count, okay. And the set of events are, you know, you have various hardware events that usually the CPU will maintain itself will maintain some count in various registers. And these profiling tools will read those CPU registers and print it out to you in a nice format that you can understand. So the various events that are counted are of course, the number of CPU cycles, you know, every CPU has a certain clock, you know, a certain frequency at which the clock runs, which counts the number of CPU cycles, right. You can just count the number of CPU cycles happening. Of course, this is the default event, there is nothing much interesting, you know your CPU specification, you know how many cycles are there. But the more interesting events are how many instructions are executed for every CPU cycle is your CPU efficiently executing a large number of instructions or is it executing only very low number of instructions for every CPU cycle. So those instructions per cycle is a very important metric to understand the efficiency. So why will these instructions be low? For example, if your CPU is waiting for a lot of time for memory access, your cache performance is very poor for a lot, it is spending a lot of time waiting for data to be fetched from DRAM. So all of these things, there could be many reasons why your CPU is not executing as many instructions for every cycle as it should. So those instructions per cycle will tell you, you know, is your CPU efficient or is it not being very efficient. Then you have various cache misses, you know, your CPU has many levels of cache and at each level of the cache, what is the hit rate, what is the miss rate, all of these you will find out. Then other things like, you know, TLB misses and your hardware does various optimizations like, you know, prefetch things into cache, how many of those prefetches have worked, how many have they not worked. So if you take an architecture course, you will understand lot more about what are all the, you know, smart things that your CPU is doing and you can measure all of those counters to see are all of these optimizations like caches, TLB, everything working well in the CPU or is it not working well. So there are all of these hardware events that you can monitor and some of the most important ones are, you know, your cache misses and TLB misses and instructions per cycle. So these will tell you, is my system being efficient or not. Then there are also software events, you know, these are maintained by the OS like page faults, context switches, you know, is my system seeing a lot of page faults, is that why performance is poor. So you can count all of these events using profiling tools. And what is more, these profilers will also help you attribute the event to specific portions of the code. So whenever an event occurs, this profiler can note down what is the program counter value at which this event has occurred. So now it will help me identify, oh, the cache misses caused due to this part of the code. Of course, these events occur at a very high frequency, you know. So every time an event occurs, you cannot, you know, store the program counter somewhere, that will be too much overhead. So what these profilers do is, they sample, they do what is called sampling. So for, you know, every 100 cache misses, I will see what the program counter value is, something like that. For some subset of events, information about the code responsible for the event is also captured like the program counter. And these profilers will not just, you know, display some hexadecimal address of the program counter, but they will actually convert it to a function name or something also for easy readability of the user. So you know that it is actually this function in my code that is responsible. So by sampling this program counter value periodically, we will know which part of the code is consuming, what fraction of CPU cycles, you know, every time for every few CPU cycles, if you profile your program counter, the program counter was here once, here once, here once, here here, here, most of the times the program counter was here, then you know that this function is the one that is actually very time consuming. And very few times in very few samples, the program counter was in other places. So you know that this parts of your code, these functions are not taking up a lot of time whereas this function is taking up a lot of time. So by sampling these program counter values, you will know where are CPU cycles being spent. By sampling program counter values on cache misses, you will know which part of the code is responsible for cache misses, things like that, right? So not just counting events, but you are also able to attribute events to specific parts of the code so that this is a starting point for you to optimize your code. You will know which part of your application needs optimization. So now let us briefly see now that you have you know monitored hardware resources, you found out which resources the bottleneck, then you have profiled your code to try and you know understand which specific parts of your code are performing suboptimally. Once you have looked at all of these measurements, you can go ahead do some performance optimizations. What optimization you do will depend on what your measurement results are like. But in the next few slides what I am going to do is point you to some of the common patterns, common issues that occur in systems and some of the common optimizations that are undertaken. So of course there are many more optimizations that can be done and you know in one lecture I cannot cover all of them, this is a full course by itself. But I will strive to present to you the most common optimizations that people do once they profile their system. Of course the most common thing is most systems will have a CPU bottleneck you know the CPU cores are fully saturated by the application and then you will profile the code to see which specific functions in your application are using up most of the CPU and then you will try and optimize those functions. For example, if there is some function some library you know the linkless library that is actually using up a lot of CPU then you might try and move to a better implementation of the linked list or if it is a you know a hash table or a map library that is using up a lot of CPU might move to a better library or in your code if you have written stored data in some linked list that is being traversed every time and most of your CPU cycles are spent traversing the linked list. Suppose that is what you find out then you might replace this linked list with a more efficient data structure right. Once you pinpoint the source of the inefficiency you can go and rewrite that code optimize that code use better high performance libraries and try and eliminate this performance issue. But if sometimes not just user code sometimes even OS code might also be consuming a lot of CPU cycles. In such cases of course you cannot replace your operating system that easily but you can optimize wherever possible. For example, if you find that a lot of CPU time is being spent in handling interrupts you have a network card a high speed network card it is getting a lot of packets and most of your CPU time is spent in handling interrupts. Then what you can do you can optimize your device driver you know we have seen this there are device drivers like the nappy driver that generates fewer interrupts or you know if all interrupts are coming to one CPU core using techniques like RSS this also we have seen before you can split your interrupt processing to multiple CPU cores right. So, you can optimize your OS also in some ways or if your file system file IOS the bottleneck up use a better file system. If context switching overhead is the bottleneck tune your CPU scheduling parameters, tune your scheduler algorithm so that you do not have so many context switches. If you find that memory allocation malloc is the bottleneck then you use a better memory allocator you know instead of doing this dynamic general purpose malloc right. So, depending on where your problem is inside the in the system software also sometimes you will be able to optimize it. So, this is one set of techniques. Now what happens if your memory usage is too high you know you have all the RAM in your system is somehow being used and because of that we have seen this before what happens if your memory is too fully occupied you will have thrashing.  You are constantly doing the swapping to disk and servicing page faults and all the time is spent handling this and not actually doing application work. So, if you are using too much memory in your system this can happen this is called thrashing. Then how do you handle this if your profiler shows that a lot of time is spent in swapping and it shows that page faults are high then you can try and reduce the size of your in memory data structures maybe not store everything in memory but store them on disk wherever possible and you can also improve the locality of reference in your program. So, suppose I have you know access some parts of my memory let me try and finish all the processing on this memory before moving on to some other part. So, if my current set of pages that I am accessing the working set size is small then these will be in memory most of the time I do not have to swap them from disk ok. So, improve locality of reference that is try and repeatedly use whatever memory you have used. So, that you are actively being used whatever memory is actively being used the working set size is small that is one technique. Then if you find that you actually have poor cache hit rates and your memory bandwidth usage is high ok. The total memory consumed is low but the memory bandwidth to read and write this DRAM that is being consumed. Why is that being consumed because you know the CPU will check caches and if it is not there in cache then it will go to DRAM and if your cache hit rate is very low your cache is not supplying most of the data then most of the time you are going to DRAM and this bandwidth will become the bottleneck. If that is what you find this utilization of this bandwidth is high and cache hit rate is poor if that is what your profilers tell you. What you can do is we have studied this before you know how to optimize your cache usage of your system you can design your data structure such that they fit into caches you can write your code such that you know your locality of reference is improved whatever you have got into cache you are trying to access that first instead of jumping around in your code you can improve your TLB hit rates you can try to sequentially access your memory so that you know the CPU hardware today does prefetching you know it tries to fetch ahead of time whatever memory things you will use. So, all of these things you can do in order to improve your cache performance and we have studied this in a lot of detail when we were studying the memory management part of the course right. So, depending on what the problem is if this is the problem then you do this optimization. Then there are many other optimization techniques also for example, compilers themselves do a lot of optimizations when the compiler generates the machine code the binary executable it itself will do some optimizations in order to use the underlying hardware better. So, you can when you compile your code you can provide various options to the compiler to do these optimizations and there are also other techniques being used today where some part of your application code can be actually offloaded to some special pieces of hardware like for example, you have the GPU called the graphics processing unit anytime you have to do any graphics processing like you know video processing or you know displaying videos rendering videos all of that you can actually offload it to the GPU the GPU will do it much faster than running some software on the CPU. So, there are special hardware accelerators available for specific applications you can use those if you are using up all the CPU to do video processing then this it will be very inefficient instead use the GPU to do the video processing. Similarly, when IO is the bottleneck you know suppose the application is doing a lot of IO to from disk or something this is the bottleneck then what you can do is you can maybe use a cache like the disk buffer cache you can store the results of IO somewhere so that they can be accessed faster instead of going to the disk. So, caching is one important technique that you can use then if nothing else works you know you tried everything all possible things nothing else works still your hardware resource is like fully utilized its performance is not improving then the only option is you just add more hardware to your system you know no matter what you do your CPU is 100% utilized your system is only doing 100 requests per second but you want to do 200 requests per second then what do you do you just add more CPU cores to your system or you just add another machine and you know run your system in two different machines right. So, that is called scaling vertical scaling is to one machine itself add more CPU cores horizontal scaling is add another machine altogether with extra CPU cores right. So, this is the last and final option I have done the best possible I can with my resources I cannot do anything more than the only way to improve performance is add more resources. So, this caching and scaling both of these we are going to study in the next two lectures. So, that is all I have for today's lecture in this lecture what I have told you is how you can use software called profilers to understand the performance of your system and pinpoint where is the performance bottleneck and I have described you some general techniques that people follow in order to fix this performance bottleneck. In the next couple of lectures also we are going to see these some of these techniques like caching and scaling in more detail. So, as a programming exercise you can try and install one of these profilers for example, perf use it to profile a simple program that you have written and actually see the output of the profiling. Suppose you have written a program where some heavy computation is being done in a function then you can actually see the profiler output that it will tell you that this function is where most of the CPU cycles are being spent right. So, get some hands on experience in using profilers and understanding the output of these profilers. So, that is all I have for this lecture. Let us continue our discussion in the next lecture. Thank you.


Happy Diwali everybody.  I'm Corbin. I'm Rick, and you can follow my Instagram and Twitter! Oh, Jesus! It's so juicy. And thank you for watching some pictures, and follow us on official Twitter account. Today is a big day. Yep, huge. It is our first Diwali celebration. Yes.  They sent me three videos, short videos. Cool. I think one of them is a cartoon one, kind of similar to another one we did. Another one is more of the, actually, what happens. Cool. And then there's a third video, I believe, because they draw something on the ground or do something like a design thing. Bring it on. Teaching. We've got three different videos teaching us about Diwali because all we know is... The lights. Lights. And then Michael Scott from the Office episode says, Happy Diwali! It's the only introduction we've ever had, but since we've become acquainted with all things India. And it's basically Christmas, essentially. Yeah, it's big. And there's still a lot of people in India that celebrate Christmas. It's still a big holiday. But as far as the Indian Rooted Holidays. Holy and holy. Holy and holy Diwali are the big ones. Yep. And we got, in our unboxing episode, somebody sent...  Yeah. But we got some... This one in particular. We got some little candles and candle holders. Yes. So we lit those for Diwali. The lights are a little low because I wanted you to be able to see it. Yeah. But let's just get into the first video. Cool beans, man. Happy Diwali to everyone. Happy happy Diwali. Diwali. And I am really excited to learn about this. Me too. Here we go! He celebrates the victory of God over evil and light over darkness. Diwali is celebrated on the New World's Night of the Path of Kanpik. In ancient times Diwali was an important harvest festival. Most of us associate the festival of lights with the return of Ram to Ayodhya after 14 years of exile. There are however many other stories that are associated with the festival of Diwali. The fireworks are part of it. The birthday of Lakshmi, the Goddess of the World, is celebrated in many parts of India on the day of Diwali. In Bengal, devotees worship Kali, the Goddess associated with Shakti on the day of Diwali. Another story that coincides with the celebration of Diwali is the return of the Pandavas after their 13 years of exile on the New World's Night of Kanpik. People celebrated their return by lighting lamps and bursting crackers. It is said that Vikramalindya, the great king, was coronated on the day of Diwali. Mahavir Teethankar, the founder of Jainism, is believed to have attained Nirvana on the day of Diwali, making it a significant occasion for the Jains as well. His personality draws is really good. The festival of Diwali is often also associated with gambling. It is believed that Parvati played dice with her husband Shiv on the day of Diwali. People believe that gambling on Diwali bring them prosperity. All these beliefs together make Diwali the festival of joy, victory, prosperity and wealth. Great things to celebrate. The drawing is... I'm always so impressed with people who can draw because I'm awful. I can do a little, not this style at all. I can do a little, but that's about it. People will say, well, you can do so many things. You're so talented. You can dance. You can act. You can sing and play. I'm like, yeah, you want to see me try and draw something? It's pretty awful. So the second one is called The Festival of Lights Explored. I believe this is more of actually what happens in real life. So we're going to do a couple videos so we get the full picture of it. Beautiful. It's awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome. This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kishnan Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kishnan Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kishnan Poojai This is a tradition of Kubera Poojai, Kubera Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kishnan Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kishnan Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kishnan Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kubera Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kubera Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kubera Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kubera Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kubera Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kubera Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kubera Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kubera Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kubera Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kubera Poojai This is a tradition of Kishnan Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kubera Poojai, Kubera Poojai


We had a family PC since about 2010 and in 2012 I started, I heard of Linux and I started experimenting with it a lot. I think my first distro was a Boon 2 12.04 that I tried out in VirtualBox. I don't know too much programming, I don't even know much programming, but I would still love to learn programming and even get a job. Maybe someday I could probably become a sysadmin in Linux, I could help people use Linux. It was a school project, of course I decided to send a letter to Linus Torvalds, he was my hero and I was actually doubting I would actually be able to find out who I could send it to, then I remembered how much I love Linux and how much I wanted to meet Linus Torvalds so I decided to send him a letter. All my other friends sent letters to more Hollywood or internet celebrities, but I doubt they actually got flown to a good place like this to meet them. Meeting Linus Torvalds was a great experience, once the whole panel thing was done he went out of the stage and went to my row and we shook hands and he signed my Linux Bible and he gave me a copy of his Just for Fun book with a signature of course. I loved meeting Linus Torvalds and it was a great experience overall, I got to have so much goodies or swag and it made me think all these things like my future is going to be great and I loved it.


Search for a home on any device, any time, anywhere. Private Property, a home for everyone. In South Africa, Malweny, Nongke, and welcome to Win a Home on Afternoon Express, my name is Danilo Acquisto. This is another exciting edition of SA's premier design and decor reality competition brought to you by Private Property. Three design duos are decorating three cluster homes in the Stone Court of Development at the Eye of Africa estate in Joburg. And while they compete for rewards and ultimately the judges' choice, the real winner here could be you. At the end of the competition, one lucky viewer will win their choice of the three transformed homes. Our design duos are now busy with their third challenge, so let's get you up to speed. Last time on Win a Home, the design duos were metaphorically thrown into hot water. This week's challenge is a double challenge. Both your master bathroom and your guest bathroom need to be completed by deadline. Despite the added pressure of completing two bathrooms, the design duos had some fun learning about exciting bathroom products. But the business of bathrooms can be very expensive as discovered by Team House and Leisure. I was excited until we were told that we need to get three more boxes of tiles. Team VC also faced the dilemma of having too few tiles for their shower. But Team Habitat were pretty happy with their design and their budget management. Budget is tight, like my panty line. And if it gets any tighter, it's about to snap. But be just on the budget. With double the drama and a deadline to meet, which design duos will find sanctuary and win with their bathrooms? Doing two spaces in the time normally allocated for one room is a very big challenge. Do you think our design duos will get done in time and within budget? Let us know your thoughts with the hashtag winahome. Now the final day saw a flurry of activity and some razzle-dazzle on site. It's a few hours away from the countdown. And I'm once again I'm wrapping little diamond. Yeah, but building a chandelier. A beer just couldn't help himself. I know I'm into a stage no more chandeliers, but it's like, Amanda, what's a room without some lighting that sparkles? I couldn't help myself. And guys, this is not the only one. A beer gun is another one as well. Yes! But that was a real bargain. I mean, that is handmade handcrafted with gloss and seeds. And it's like, what? 75 years old? Just said. I made it in Italy. So I'm not sorry. I'm really glad in this boat. I hope you're going to be explaining this to Amanda because I'm not going to be taking her calls. Honey, I won't have to take her calls.  She should be here and she'll see it. Damn, really. So the Giverid guys are installing our system. We have the small business flush and the big business flush. In our home, yeah! Team VC also chose the Giverid shower channel which ensures no concealed build-up of dirt and bacteria and the installation of both was overseen by the product manager himself. It's not often that I host conversations in a bathroom, but this time it seemed apt. Leonard from Giverid is here to install the first piece of sanitary wear and this time it's a toilet. So tell us a bit more about what their ideas were when they came to you. So initially they came to us saying that they don't have very big bathrooms so the first thing we went to is going concealed to the toilet having the tank inside the wall, having a short pan and then a nice little vanity inside the bathroom to just complete everything. I didn't think I could learn much more about installing a toilet. It's such obvious pieces of sanitary wear. So let's give some tips to our viewers around what to do when installing a toilet. When installing a concealed system, it is very important to remember your finished floor height. This can seriously affect your installation at the end of the day.  If it is too low, the toilet pan will then be too low to the floor. And in terms of maintenance of toilets like these internal ones, I'd always imagine that they're quite hard to get to, but you guys have made that simpler. Well, maintenance on the, specifically the toilet itself is very little. The contestants were very clever in going with the choice of our room-free toilet. You know, there's absolutely no room to worry about any bacteria or any issues underlying. Six all-water cups for the backyard. All the water flushes out here and then runs over the room itself. So that is a nice part. Your other maintenance section would be on the system itself. And again, with Ghiblet, we try and keep things simple. And we've gone for a tool-less operation where you can go in and service your entire unit. Well, it seems like a very simple system. So next time you thought that you were going to install a toilet and it was easy, these are some tips to consider. What Phil has to be installed is our scissor stone on the window frame. So they're going to clad it. It will take a bit of time because it's actually quite a lot. We're excited to see that happen. And our vanities are still on the way. The fittings, the bath and the toilets, everything is here. All they have to do is just fit them where they have to be. But I trust that it will be fine. Scissor stone is on point. Point. Yeah, boy. They hit the... they put the R and Balls R. Yes. That colour is to die for. Beautiful. Wow, it's our new Mulan Fog that you've chosen. Absolutely. We had to go with the new collection. Absolutely. The more is more with Mulan Fog. It's beautiful. We do. We've got a really big selection of unique colours. So it's difficult. And floor to ceiling, fully cladded. Yes. The bold decision. We couldn't resist. We are no. Once we saw the stone, we thought we need that whole shower to be an experience. Like you walk in and it's a Mulan Fog Scissor stone experience. Oh, yeah. Someone took a shower. And tell me about this entity. I love it. Sure. I am obsessed with it. I mean, it just looks like it's floating and it just is amazing. And Scissor stone is so strong and durable and yet it looks like it's so light. So light. I mean, we couldn't pick up one piece. I was thinking to put the basin on the Scissor stone, but it was strong. It was, yes, now we are the Tats. This is really what's going to add value to your property. Sure. I'm glad to even hear you say that because with the buildings that we're renovating at the end of the day is what we want to achieve added value property. I can't wait to hear what the judges have to say. Now they can really. Good luck, guys. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for this beautiful stone. The Scissor stone research and development team works really hard at creating unique colours and they've chosen really nice colours. From our new range, they've utilised them beautifully. Looking from Scissor stone is here to visit our bathroom and see how everything is going. Wow, guys. I know what you've done here. It's amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks so much, Megan. The month blanket looks incredible. I told you to think outside of the box and you actually made a box. Did you use? We made a multi-functional box. So what are you going to be putting in here then? So basically what we did with this box is that it's going to serve as like a shielding for the bathroom without having like an actual wall. There's a plant in it and then the plants are going to serve as like a screen for a bit of privacy when you're in the bathroom. And then this corner over here, it's going to be, we're going to have like a sitting cushion so that like maybe when you're running out, you can sit down and let the shield and then be on the go. So you've got almost like a shield between the two parts of the room. And with the plants, it's going to be like a tropical paradise. Your bathroom is a sanctuary, so that's such a great touch. Thank you. Thank you. And you've got the Mont Blanc in full scale in the shower. I love it. And with a glass, you really pick up the veins and all the color coming through. Literally, if you're going to be doing a bathroom, this is the product you want because it loves wet spaces because it's non-porous, right? I've never seen Mont Blanc being used like this. Completely out of the box and this is what's really going to add value to your home at the end of the day. It's awesome, guys. Using Caesar Stone in your bathroom and kitchen is going to increase the value of your home tremendously because of its high quality and lifetime warranty. So the contestants have really understood that fact and put it in the right places in that bathroom. I'm struggling, hey? I'm so dirty. I'm so, so dirty. Don't stress. These bathrooms are so dusty. I think we're going to need to clean them three times. I don't think we have time for three times. No, don't stress. Two tries, we can make it. My friend taught me how to clean. But I'm also stressed about that Caesar Stone here. I think they're going to come and ready-fix. So it's not going to take time. Okay, I hope so. Yep. It looks like I'm cleaning your face. Yes, Hazard. Wow, I love the taps. Sure, and I'm glad we got two. One for you, baby, and one for girls. Yes. So what's interesting about these taps, Brad, they've got the integrated aerator, which adds to the design aspect. So these have got the soft move function, which allows for smoother, more comfortable operation. It's also got the flow-restricted aerator, which is good for the people that want to save water and not feel guilty about having 100% comfort in using the end frittings. Awesome. I'm obsessed with our Grower Designer taps. I hope the judges feel the same. No, I feel they will. Let's see. Yeah. Our Grower show has been installed and we're quite excited about it. It's looking beautiful. It's complimenting our mixers. Everything is looking amazing. Amazing, yes. And the mixer has got buttons like abuse in a shower. That shower literally has buttons. Have you been in a shower that has buttons before? Hello. Sure. Our zebra crossing is not... It's not yet a crossing. The only thing that is crossing is the plumber carrying the toilet.  They're trying to finish up, but they nearly did. Like literally there's like a little square that's in it. That's like, you know, a Tetris bar building those blocks. Yeah. It's so exciting seeing those bathrooms speed towards completion. But what's even more exciting is that you could be a winner in our grand prize competition. Your choice of one of the three decorated homes which boasts luxurious finishes by Plaskon and Caesarstone as well as premiere home appliances by Grundig. The total prize value is over three million rand. How amazing is that? To enter, visit privateproperty.co.za and vote for your favourite design duo. You'll also automatically be entered into the bi-weekly giveaway and be in the running to win that amazing prize of your very own home. Now the show must go on after the break. Team House and Leisure reveal their finished bathrooms. Our partnership with Winner Home. The best stone is Caesarstone. Because if it doesn't improve people's lives it isn't Plaskon. Plaskon. Designed for life. Welcome back to Winner Home on Afternoon Express. Now in the latest challenge the design duos have been tasked with completing not one but two bathrooms. Time is of the essence as they have to do double the work and some of the design duos are feeling a little flushed with that deadline fast approaching. Looking good. Good. Just hope they finish in time. Hello, Team Habitat! You guys, this is the big 30 minute call. Are you guys going to be done? What are you staring at? Well, we're staring at them finishing up our tiling so that we can install these fabulous groceries. All right. And that's going to be done in time, mate. 30 minutes, the judges are going to be here. Please tell them to run a little late. Just like five minutes away. Go get them, team. Go get them. 30 minutes to go. We'll see you in a bit. Okay, cool. Thanks. My nerves. They can't take no more. It's 30 minutes prior to cut off time and we're busy running back and forth dropping off the last staff, doing last-minute touch-ups and then Daniel is coming to the van and he's a bit worried if we're going to finish on time but then, like, we are assuring him that we are going to be done because everything that needs to be in the house is already in. Yeah, and drilled in, like, literally everything. Everything is in. It's just cleaning up. A few touch-ups. Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen. 30 minutes to go and I expected some polishing, not fetching things still. Don't stress, we're almost done. We just had to get one last plant and a bag of soil and then we should be ready for chill time. So you'll be done in 30 minutes, eh? We should be ready. Go, go, go.  Run! Run! Oh, wow. Yeah, well, 30 minutes to go as things look good in here but team BC are nowhere to be seen. Here you guys are. You should be next door. 30 minutes to go, guys. 30 minutes. Yes, we are actually just taking or packing everything here and then we're just waiting for them to clean in there and we'll just chuck everything in as soon as they're done. Yeah, so all's okay. Yeah. Well, sort of, yes. All is looking good. Our only hope is that we need to finish. You know, when we start the bathroom, excursion uses everything. So what's the bathroom without the toothbrush? It's our own kind of boosting. Agreed. Well, the judges are on their way. 30 minutes, go team BC. Thanks, team BC. That's tiny, look. It's going to explode soon. 30 minutes left, guys. As the time ticks away, it's all hands on deck to finish installation of the Giveret mirror cabinets and other details to give the bathrooms a completed look. So the third room challenge was the most grueling yet for our design contestants but the rules are the rules and I have to play the villain. The contestants' tools down, your time is up. It's so difficult, we don't have any words. It's been very, very stressful. I've realised with the bathroom, you can save money anywhere but in a bathroom you can't compromise. You're going to spend a lot of money whether you like it or not. And they're the most important because you could have a mediocre house but if you walk into a beautiful bathroom you'd want to stay there. As Leseho correctly stated, a beautiful bathroom is incredibly inviting and this week's bi-weekly competition prize is sure to add luxury to your bathroom. Up for grabs is a Growers Smart Control shower system worth over 11,000 rand. To enter for this amazing prize and the grand prize of the 3 million rand home simply go to privateproperty.co.za and click on that Winner Home logo. It's that easy and your one entry not only lets you stand in line for the grand prize but also for the amazing Growers shower. In fact, it's the very same shower that Cepo and Banelle have installed in their ensuite. We're quite excited about it. It's looking beautiful. It's complimenting our mixers. Everything is looking amazing. Thank you so much, Victor. It is looking beautiful. It's only a pleasure. I must say I was very excited to hear that you had gone with the Growers Smart Control. The name speaks for itself. It puts you in 100% control adjusting from different spray patterns allowing you to control the flow of water as well as the temperature. It's got a nice reachable tray as well as some safety features. They've really concentrated on making it safe for the little ones putting a good cool touch in the unit so no matter what temperature comes through here it'll always remain room temperature and prevent you from scalding. It's also got a 38 degree safety lock which is easy over rideable with the push of a button and it all comes together with a 360mm lozing shaped shower head which covers the entire body. Is it true that it's got a wide variety of spray patterns? Yes it is. You can pick your ideal spray function a spray pattern whether you want stimulating or soothing, revitalizing or relaxing. That is amazing. Then the owner of the house can get to shower in style. And I like how it compliments our first standing bath mixer. Absolutely. It's a creative interaction between the elegant growth fittings and the Libra bath. It's the preferred choice going for modern architectural spaces. I really hope the judge is like because we're in love with it. Well now that we've seen the high tech shower the other wonderful elements that form part of Team House and Leisure's bathroom can now be revealed. In a bold move Team House and Leisure created an en suite master bathroom by removing a wall and ensured their guest bathroom continued in the style of the guest bedroom. We're done with both our bathrooms and we're quite happy about like how everything has turned out. So yeah we're quite positive that all will go well. But I was aware about how we actually neglected the other bathroom. We just allowed things to happen without really paying attention to the detail. Today we're on the natural habitat of two time challenge winners Team House and Leisure and trying to keep my voice down as not to disturb them in their natural environment. Team House and Leisure how are you today? We're good thanks for you Daddy Joe.  Legends this place is amazing you broke down walls you've added caesar stone to your different features well done and incredible master bathroom. So Danny Leisure what we tried to do here is actually was to make space for the people going to be staying here by actually breaking the wall and then with the plants we're actually trying to link it to the outside by actually having plants that grow inside the space. And then another thing was to also allow for a bit of privacy without having like a solid structure closing the two spaces together. I don't want to point you to but what about those practicalities? If a couple wins this home one person might be napping the other might need to use the loo is that very practical? I think it is practical and in regards to if it's a couple that's been like together for a while then they kind of know each other's ins and outs and like this. I think it is practical. I'll be honest I'm not completely convinced but I do like the way the whole space has come together regardless and remember these judges are going to come into this room and everybody will do two challenge wins they're going to have to really need a lot of convincing to give you that third. What's going to convince them? It was the fact that we were a bit brave and took down the wall that divided the bathroom and the main bedroom would count as an advantage. And also the lights like it's about 20 lights that imitate bubbles and it's trying to get the idea of when you take a bath and then you've got this foam bath and the bubbles are just going up and also I think the mirror unfortunately on installation it won't be skewed but I think the design they will appreciate the design. Although broken mirrors are usually a sign of bad lights let's hope that that omen does not come to your room. Let's move our attention quickly to that guest bathroom tell us about the ideas there. So with the guest bathroom we actually tried to pick the colours from the guest bedroom and introduce them into the same space and also with the art we also made it more arty than just a plain bathroom. So more of a continuation from the guest bedroom to the guest bathroom. Well seeing as we're in the jungle you're going to need to be identified very clearly so because this was a hard challenge the team from Grohe have decided to reward you guys with a little gift. Oh that's exciting. This my friend should add a little pop of colour to your already beautiful bathrooms. Thank you. Take them out. Danila gives us these bathrooms from Grohe and we're quite excited we like we love in them so much they are so luxurious and so great. Yes. And you try them on it's the infeed just like putting way to be in them. As we continue to reveal the completed bathrooms don't forget that you can also share your thoughts by commenting on our social media platforms and remember to use that all important hashtag win a home. After the break team VC and team Habitat reveal their bathrooms. Good reason. This is win a home on afternoon express. Our design duos have completed both of their bathrooms in their respective cluster homes and it's time to reveal team VC's spaces. For a French style of high contrast team VC did a modern take on a palette of black, white and grey in their master bathroom to deliver a very high end look and feel. Two bathrooms in one challenge was definitely a challenge firstly because a bathroom has so many elements and there's always something more you can do to it to add to it but two bathrooms just makes it just makes it a lot. See I'm sensing a Michael Jackson song yeah it doesn't matter if you're black or white it looks really good well done. Thank you. Thank you. Cool so what are your highlights in these two spaces? The highlights in our bathroom are definitely the caesar stone accents so we have a vanilla noir dado rail and we have it in our shelves as well so we love that. So if you look at this the greens that are in the vanilla noir caesar stone we color matched it with the plus con paint to use it to the ceiling and also applied on the walls so we wanted to bring Dubai into South Africa like create all that hotel feel in your own space at home. And that guest bathroom was also part of the challenge and nice ideas in there too. So in the guest bathroom again we wanted to echo what's happening in the guest bedroom so we brought in a very feminine feeling of the pink and green again but it's a lot softer and more playful. Nice ideas. I hope the judges see those and speaking of they're going to be making their way here soon. What are you hoping that they'll see and what are you hoping they'll put their blinkers on for? Well we're hoping they will see the details obviously and the cute things that we put in there like the brush and we're hoping that they don't look at our little mishaps. Like? We don't have any.  Yeah. It's leaning off the wall it's not attached properly and I can see all the LEDs. Was that intentional? That was a little bit unintentional. Yeah. So they were mishaps? Yes they were. Okay. With the mirror what happened is that because of we have the railing and the half tiles so when you put the mirror you forgot that we need to do like a backing behind it so that's why you see those kind of pink blocks but something that we can survive with. So I know the challenge was very hard and so the Grover team have decided to reward you and give you something warm and snugly to tuck into to let this day go. Yes please. All right. Nice to see that. So they've custom made these for you guys. Ah. Yes take them out. Let's see. The robe is so nice it makes us feel warm and cuddly inside it looks absolutely luxurious just like our bathroom.  Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank Team Grover. Good luck you two. Thank you. The final bathrooms to be revealed belong to Team Habitat who were advised by their mentor to exercise a little bit more restraint this time round so actually perhaps running out of time to style might have worked in their favor.  Welcome Danilo. Welcome. Ryan's den onto bathroom. Danilo's here. Mmm. We're not feeling like it. We're not just sold on our own bathroom. Let me put it that way. It's like it just feels like a lot still needs to be done or embellishment needs to just pop out of somewhere. Yes. So we were just okay Danilo let's give you a run through and hope you like it. What I love about both of your journeys to this point is that you guys are trying to always tell the stories you've created. So what is the story with your master bathroom space? The story for the master bedroom is the lion's den. Yes. So this is part one of the lion's den Yes. Because it made it on sweet. So you can see like the hints of gold the lights you know we kept it quite simple because it's more prone. This is where the parents would be or the cat paw but they need to be grown because they gotta have money you gotta have money in here. It's like we try to keep it quite simple clean and simplistic. Let's go through what you guys had planned for your guest bathroom. That was the zebra crossing. Yes.  Yes. What are your personal highlights and maybe some of your low lights on these two spaces? I think highlight once everything was in everything was beautiful. The Caesar stone shower came out amazing. I mean it's a monument to Caesar stones rasping and stasling the rubber tabs or gorges the gibberish meriz it's just beautiful. Yeah. Like once everything is up but getting everything up was not as easy as getting my up-to-up. So that was the frustrating part about everything was how do you get everything up when you're not allowed to tau? Yeah. Speaking of your up-to is it done definitely today to match the space with all the gold trimmings? Well I mean it's only fair that I become a lioness and the lion's dead so you can be the lion. Yeah. This is a tough challenge for both of you.  Oh my for my nose. There you go. So wow. Custom designed and made just for you two to reflect your personalities. The Nino rewards us with these marvelous gowns from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from and the house attached to it. Basically your choice of one of three fully decorated cluster homes at the Eye of Africa estate. It's time for a break but with the judging and announcement of this week's winning design duo still to come, you don't want to go anywhere. Welcome back to Winner Home on afternoon Expressway on SABC3. Now there are many things that give me anxiety but the one that gives me the most amount of anxiety is buying property. Now in our property advice series we're discussing various aspects of residential estates in South Africa and today finally in studio we have Neil Peterson, founder and editor of Real Estate Investor magazine who is going to help us all understand the ins and outs of buying property on an estate as that investment. Welcome to our loft. Thank you very much for the opportunity. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. I don't know if I'm excited or really nervous to have you on this couch because property has always been something that you get different pieces of advice from so many different people. Buy, don't buy, market's good, market's bad, it's a buyer's market, it's a seller's market. Is buying property even an investment today? Absolutely. Hands down and so let me just start and take you a little bit back. The word invest or investment is used to flippantly out there and people tend to say this property that I just bought was a great investment. They don't really know why it's a good investment. So if we start looking at what does invest mean, invest essentially means that you're investing to achieve a profit. So the second part of it is of course endowing yourself with information. In other words, investing in yourself with knowledge and those two factors people don't take into consideration. So then when it comes to investing itself, what's the difference between the investment and kind of those mistakes people make? I mean, is an investment because I take out a bond and then I have on our property that's an asset and I sell that asset, I make money. Is that regarded as an investment or does it have to be immediate returns? It's a little bit of both. I think first of all, you've got to study the market because if you speak to any sort of state agent, property broker or professional, the first thing they say is location. Yes, location is important. I think specifically when you're looking at an estate type living, which I don't really call an investment per se.  But people tend to say, well I bought a property and it's going to grow 10% this year, 10% the following year and I made a great return. It's not about that. It's a combination of both factors but more importantly it's about the cash flow and that takes a bit of study and it takes a little bit of work to understand that and what all these different terms mean. So you just need to know a few bit of terms. You need to check your references. It's very important to verify and do your own due diligence in Africa. A lot of people who are buying property just go and buy on the advice of somebody else. Instead of actually doing their own homework, their own due diligence, checking out the property, checking out the quality of the property, looking at why the owner wants to sell. The surroundings, what's going up, what's going down. Looking at the rental yields and when you start getting into technical terms, it sounds technical, it's not really that technical. It just means taking a little bit of time and effort. Something that's exciting about this year's season is that you're buying and building on an estate. I think estate living seems to be trending quite a lot in the property markets. We spoke last time a little bit about how the property values are slightly more expensive on an estate because of the lifestyle you're buying into. Is it still worth buying on an estate and what should we look into when it comes to renting or perhaps even buying and investing on an estate? Look, estate living there's a massive trend in terms of lifestyle and I think it will continue to grow and it's for one simple reason right there so they get security. People are looking for that kind of peace of mind. However it does come at a price. It comes at a premium. Sometimes there are some distressed assets within that you can get at better prices. However, you've got to say what is the reason? Why are you buying this property? Why are you renting? It comes back to your purpose. People want to make money though Neil, it's obvious. People do want to be able to make money so can I buy and rent it out and make money on an estate? Absolutely. I know people for example who want properties on eco-estates 45,000 round a day they want to keep it to a point of not the entire year because they also want to enjoy the property themselves. Yeah, it's themselves. So there's a combination of that and so yes, you can. You can get these magnificent returns it tends to be more in the higher end of the market and a little bit more riskier than your normal cash flow type investment in your sort of bottom end. Good stuff. Thank you so much Neil. This is your first season of Winner Home. You stand a chance of winning a beautiful home on the Eye of Africa estate. Your choice of one of the three currently being decorated by our dynamic design duos. All you have to do is log on to privateproperty.co.de and answer a very easy question. It's as simple as that, no need to buy. We'll be right back after the break with more Winner Home excitement. Don't go anywhere. Welcome back. You're with us on Winner Home on Afternoon Express with a very expensive exercise. Besides over 300,000 rand in sponsored elements, our design duos have a cash budget of an additional 300,000 rand to decorate the entire house and it's up to them to break that into smaller budgets for each space. For their bathrooms Team VC came in just under their projected 31,000 rand cash budget comfortably leaving a few hundred rand in change. Team Habitat had budgeted a generous 40,000 rand for their cash budget but ended up saving over 3,000 rand for their next room. Team House and Leisure had set aside 30,000 rand for their bathrooms but with the extensive remodeling ended up with a 19,000 rand contract to fee and a whopping 57,000 rand spent. Youses looks like Ceppa and Vaneli have made some very serious miscalculations. Now with some very important spaces still to be decorated, the design duos will have to plan very carefully to ensure that they have enough money in the kitty for full their designs. As with any competition, one design duo will be named the winners of this challenge but the people that make that decision are our wonderful judges. The third challenge was the toughest yet for our design duos as it was a double challenge. Would it show in the final results? It's time to find out because our judges are here. Besides the regular critique by Donald Numalo and Katlachow Kondo, our guest judges Buzwe Mabuza, the founder of Design Dreams International. My design style is more extension of personalities so it changes every single time I'm all dependent on the briefed head. Having started in the design industry at the age of 17, Buzwe has gone on to work with international clients and create some of the country's most stylish residential and business interiors. The judges arrival is always no breaking. I personally am a bit nervous because I'm not really sure what's going to go down in those two bathrooms. I wish they weren't there or they'd arrive when we're not there even in the stage because it just feels like huh? First up Team Visi who added warmth to their high contrast master bathroom by painting the walls with Plaskon's moth mist. I know they're going to love the master bathroom. Like the master bathroom is designed for everyone. Guys, I don't know what you think but I'm in love. This is so beautiful, Buzwe passes the rubber duck. I think it's quite appropriate the way you guys are carrying on right now. Anyway, I think it's a really beautiful bathroom. I love the pattern and the textures, the way in which they've also captured few touch points and spread them around the bathroom. The lines that they've actually accentuated as well I think it works pretty, pretty well. The funny thing is that they didn't go with the typical white. They've gone with a beautiful colour and they've taken it all the way to the ceiling which creates a sense of height so I guess white is art. No more white, I love it. I love this bathroom. It's so open, so sophisticated and mature. Right up my alley. Mine too. What a spectacular bathroom. Team Visi has really outdone themselves. I'm loving so many of the details in there. I'm loving the Caesar stone border around the tiles. I'm loving the Caesar stone shelf in the bath. This is so sleek, so sophisticated. It's just beautiful. This bathroom is quite classic. You know, it's got an element of minimalism to it. So it's quite clean. It's got longevity to it. I love the classic nature of it. I think what they managed to capture is the essence of luxurious living. You know, in reference to the patterns that they've used, the stones and how the patterns on the stones actually speak well with each other. Also in terms of the accessorizing, I mean, the various accents being the chrome, the gold, so that the essence is almost a million dollar style living. I'll be honest, there's not much negative to say about this bathroom. Maybe the towel rail could have been a little bit bigger and more towards the bath side than it was towards the basin. I love the bath, but I can't find the towel rail. What am I going to use when I get out of here? Having seen the main bathroom, for me the guest bathroom doesn't look like there was much thought that went into it. I think there's a distinct disconnect between the two spaces. I think that the finishes also in the guest bathroom wasn't as detailed as I would like them to be. I thought the mirror was a little bit too flat. It was just not as interesting as the other one was. The only detail that I appreciated was the towel rack. They used Caesar stone for that. That for me was an excellent detail. The rest fell flat. So it was a lid down from the rest of the house and what they're doing in the rest of the house. Next, the judges make their way to team house and leisure's bathroom, which has warm natural tones, open plan design and a planter box feature. Wow. Wow, guys. I must say, this is rather brave. I'm not sure how practical it is though.  I think for me, the selection in terms of the material in silo is great, but the problem is it doesn't work together collectively. I mean, some of the ideas are great, but execution is really poor. For example, the idea behind this mirror is great, but the fact that it's showing that it is installed skew, kind of like loses a bit of points for me on that front. You have to be very confident with your body to live in this bathroom. I feel like I'm in Tarzan and Jane's room gives a new meaning to going to the bathroom behind the bush. Hello. Team house and leisure, I work in and I'm like, what is going on? It looks like a jungle. Jungle fever. I think they try really step out of the box and try to do something different. I think the ideas are great in silo, but the minute you start bringing them together, I think they kind of lose the essence and they kind of lose their footing. I am loving that team house and leisure the element of privacy in any spaces of the utmost importance. I think this is a bathroom that a goldfish will feel comfortable living in because it's so exposed. I think the toilet area should be something that's private. It would have been nice had they enclosed that. I just don't see how a couple living in that space could survive. I mean, that's just the recipe for a divorce. What stands out for me with against bathroom is overkill. I think they went overboard with the flowers together with the artwork all within the same kind of space. So there was a shout for attention with all these elements. I love indoor plants, but this time around I feel they went a bit overboard. There was literally three plants in that bathroom. For me, it's a bit of a let down. I think the boundaries weren't pushed as much as the other rooms were. It lacks in detailing and the finishing. The blind is absolutely stunning. I can't fault it. I love the fact that it ties in to the guest's bedroom that they did. So a lovely touch. My advice for team house and leisure is that you need balance. You need balance in your direction. You need balance with your ideas and you always need to think comprehensively. Don't look at your ideas in silo. Always think how you collect them in order to tell your story better. The final stop for the judges is Team Habitat's en-suite bathroom which has a more minimalist approach to their usual bold style. We are worried about everything. It was so rushed. We didn't even have time to step back and look at the bathroom. But the time we stepped back, the judges stepped in. Unexpected. All I can say is gorgeous. Yes, I'm so happy for them. They finally listened. And look at how amazing this place looks. What I love is how they managed to actually establish vocal points in this bathroom without it being over the top. In terms of the stone and the vanity and the shower, the towel has allowed those two elements to actually come out and actually be accentuated. I mean this pendant as well as overpowering as it is it just has a great balance with everything that's going on. Overall very beautiful bathroom. The details are beautiful. It's well put together. And I love how they accessorized it just right. Nothing's been taken overboard. The right amount of bling. This team is really onto something here. I think they are bold. They are unafraid and we are loving it. I love how they can deliberately be excessive in their approach. But they execute it very well. They know how to balance things out. I love the fact that it's practical and well designed at the same time. They have separated the bath from the main bedroom. But in such a nice way, the wall almost goes halfway. So there is an element of privacy in there. So two people can live in there quite comfortably. It's really quite a considered room and very practical. I'm pleasantly surprised. Team Heaveted has really knocked it out of the park and I'm getting the style. I'm finally getting it. They know how to connect the story with the two different rooms. They know they are different in how they look. But you can see their signature in both rooms. I love that Team Heaveted has connected the guest bedroom to the guest bathroom and you can see the singleest flow because of the black and white. It almost looks like the zebra is then brought in to live in this bathroom yet again. The only negative was the chandelier. I didn't quite get it. It cheapened the look. I don't like that the shower is so dark. When you're in this point of view you do want a light shower so a lighter tile. My advice for Team Heaveted is that there's a design that you're responding to in need. So when your client gives you a brief you don't always have to have your signature on everything. With a fair amount of constructive criticism but also so much positive feedback from the judges any one of the three designed euros could clinch this one. We are really nervous. We want to win this challenge. There's a lot of effort and sweat that we put into this challenge. I'm freaked out and I'm crossing my fingers that we take this third challenge as well because I'm hoping that we take all of them. Well, that's just me being overly ambitious. Contestants, welcome back. The third challenge is complete. You can breathe the sigh of relief. You thought this challenge was going to be pretty simple. Just basins and tiles. It had turned out to be one of the most complicated challenges thus far. Who puts win back in a winner home? Who is simply washed out? Let's start with you, team Habitat. The judges loved the way that you brought the theme right the way through the home into your guest bathroom and your master bathroom really reflecting your personalities. However, they did feel that the zebra pattern that you created might be slightly too busy for certain clientele. So far it's sounding quite good. But you never know. That's how it sounded so good. We didn't win. I'm waiting for that part. They said, but! And there was not really much of a bad which was surprising. Team VC, congratulations. The judges were very impressed with your use of caesar stone for your towel ladder. But did your choice of colour this time round really complement the space? The judgement is helping us grow to be better designers. We respect that. There are mistakes as soon as we share their comments and what they say. Team House on Leisure. The judges were very impressed with your bold move opening up that master bedroom into an en suite. However, is the lack of privacy in your master bedroom to everybody's taste? Regarding privacy with the plant top orgs, we thought it would be enough to just have plants but apparently it's not enough and apparently it's a recipe for divorce. There can only be one winner however and the winning duo walking away with an extra 3,000 rand added to their budget into challenge four is Team Habitat. Sure, when Danilo said we've won, it was Are you putting a Steve Harvey on us?  Because it just felt like, are you joking?  It was really surprising. I'm very excited for that. I'm so excited for Team Habitat. Abia did say in the first challenge that they are going to come for a crown and they did come for it for real. They snatched it and he disappeared with it. I don't even know what he disappeared to. Ah, no. Our time is coming when we will win. No, I'm not jealous. Team is the bigger prize, not 3000 extra. Well, the competition has certainly taken an interesting turn with Team Habitat finally making good on their promise to take that win. Can Team VC level the playing field or will Team House and Leisure make a comeback in the next challenge? Let us know what you think on social media using the all-important hashtag win a home. Next week, the design duos find out a little surprise in store for them that could be a game-changer. Tune in next Friday at 4pm on Afternoon Express to see what goes down. From me, Danilo Acquista, have a great rest of your weekend and I'll see you next week. Bye-bye.