Very interesting and exciting article about an American who came to
Africa (Rwanda) to teach, and ended up building a nationwide fiber based
internet backbone. I know this is possible in Malawi too, and could
really transform the country:
Not too long ago, a high-speed internet connection in Rwanda cost close
to $1,000 per month. A whopping 22 customers could [...]
Great article about a mechanic training school for AIDS orphans:
Now his wife, many of his friends, and his businesses are gone. But
amid the loss, Mr. Mbuka has found a new way to function. In the shell
of his old garage a few weeks ago he opened a car-mechanic school for
orphans - for kids who, like more [...]
I recently offered a 50006000 kwacha (about 35 USD) bounty for a Malawian to
solve my problem of easily adding RSS feeds found by Firefox to Thunderbird and Soyapi Mumba solved it.
All of the pieces were already there. The Livelines
extension offers control over how Firefox handles detected RSS
feeds, and Thunderbird is a pretty decent feed reader. [...]
I just sent the following to the main mailing list for software
developers in Malawi. We’ll see what happens:
I thought I would put my money where my mouth is and offer cold hard
cash for open source development. So this little offer/challenge is open
to any developer (or group of developers) in Malawi.
I currently have setup Thunderbird to [...]
We walked through the really nice Lilongwe Nature Sanctuary this
weekend. It is full of monkeys, antelope, crocodiles, hyenas, spitting
cobras and it is all right in the middle of town. We saw a few monkeys
and enjoyed walking in the cool forest. The sign below greets you after
you enter.
These kind of articles make really excited about the HIV work I am
starting at the lighthouse clinic…
These are not good times in Malawi, a country facing an almost
certain famine, deep in the grip of the AIDS pandemic. There isn’t a
great deal to be cheerful about.
But in the small Tisungane Clinic in Zomba Central Hospital, people
positively [...]
I have very mixed feelings about Huge Chavez, but none about open
source. These two worlds collide in Venezuela which is arguably leading
the world in a nation-embrace of open source software. I was reading
about it on worldchanging, when I came across this:
Sabotage of the state oil company’s Microsoft-based computer systems by
the former managers in 2002 very [...]
It has been an interesting week of hacking.
These days it is rare to even have to think about efficient code. Memory
and processing power are seemingly limitless, except when they are not.
And this week they are not.
First off, I have been writing perl code to match similarly but not
exactly named items in a database. The database [...]
Here’s a classic SMS that I received today:
Tear gas right outside the bank
Apparently the government has recently decided that vendors have to sell their wares in the market. This means vendors who have previously sold from the street (they sell all sorts of things: pieces of metal, recycled rubber from tires, DVDs, plastic bags, radios, [...]
Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice; it makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties, it doubts our concern, it questions our commitment.
-Bono
Did you catch Bono’s talk given at a recent Washington prayer breakfast? People often argue whether a rock star like Bono has any place amid the [...]
