Hacktivate

All hail WiMax, we await you to lead us unto broadband heaven.

In case you haven't been subjected to the hype yet, WiMax (aka 802.16), is the next generation wireless technology which is supposed to extend the range and the speed of today's technology by orders of magnitude. People talk about being able to cover a 30 mile radius with one WiMax access point.

This sounds pretty good to me, particularly for places like Malawi whose wired infrastructure is decades behind the rich countries. It is the ultimate leapfrog technology - one access point in a rural town in Africa would bring communication infrastructure rivaling anywhere in the world.

The promises are huge and have been around for a long time, but I can't just go to Fry's and pick up a WiMax access point and a card. In fact I can't buy the stuff from anywhere. The reasons I have heard include: they are still refining the specification, no one has proven the technology with a real world deployment, politics are holding it back, and the price is still too high. I wish I knew the answer, but I do know that I am getting tired of waiting.

Which brings me back to my vision of wireless meshes. Wireless mesh networks built with WiFi (802.11) exist, are cheap and have already been proven to work. Covering a 30 mile radius with WiFi would probably be beyond its limits, but covering a couple square miles is definitely manageable and wouldn't require much hardware. I would liberally estimate about 4 APs per square mile - so at $50 for a WRT54G, this means $200 per square mile.

Perhaps WiMax will swoop in and deliver all that has been promised, but until then I think we can do a lot with WiFi meshes. By the way, I am in the middle of Cory Doctorow's latest book - Someone Comes to Town Someone Leaves Town and it is excellent and a significant subplot is all about building an open wireless mesh in Toronto. Great stuff!

This sounds like a really great way to celebrate Software Freedom Day.


On September 10, 2005, members of LinuxChix Africa who live in Kenya will to hold a Career Workshop for High School girls to encourage them to go for careers in Computing. We believe that computing as a whole and Free and Open Source Software(FOSS) in particular, can play a significant role in empowering women.


AfricaLinuxChix

I guess it would be even better if I was a woman and lived in Kenya. But hey, maybe I should have my own celebration in Lilongwe...

I just read two posts from BoingBoing that I couldn't help but sharing:
Economics of disaster

The poorest 20% (you can argue with the number -- 10%? 18%? no one knows) of the city was left behind to drown. This was the plan. Forget the sanctimonious bullshit about the bullheaded people who wouldn't leave. The evacuation plan was strictly laissez-faire. It depended on privately owned vehicles, and on having ready cash to fund an evacuation. The planners knew full well that the poor, who in new orleans are overwhelmingly black, wouldn't be able to get out. The resources -- meaning, the political will -- weren't there to get them out.

White per capita income in Orleans parish, 2000 census: $31,971. Black per capita: $11,332. Median *household* income in B.W. Cooper (Calliope) Housing Projects, 2000: $13,263.

Black people loot, white people find?




The images were shot by different photographers, and captioned by different photo wire services. The Associated Press caption accompanying the image with a black person says he's just finished "looting" a grocery store. The AFP/Getty Images caption describes lighter skinned people "finding" bread and soda from a grocery store. No stores are open to sell these goods.

While we were in Zomba this past weekend there were lots of fires burning. Fires are common in Malawi, because people often burn the fields during the dry season. One person told me this was to help catch
rats for eating (rats on a stick are for sale everywhere here), but it is also probably the easiest way to prepare the fields for farming in the rainy season.


In Zomba, however, there are no fields, just miles and miles of dense mountain pine forest. In the western United States, burning pine forest is cause for parachuting firefighters, chemical retardant dumped from a helicopter, and mass evacuations. In Zomba, it was apparently a different story. Driving up the windy roads, the fires would often be burning on the shoulder, but you just drive through the thick smoke only
to be hailed down be an excited Malawian a hundred meters later. Excited
about the fire? No, he just wants to sell you bucketfuls of strawberries.
This is a common theme from my life in Malawi. Things that would be utterly frightening, exciting, newsworthy, panic-inducing, etc, any where else are just part of the ho-hum here.
We asked Donald, our lodge host about the fires and like many things here, the story was complicated, fascinating and sad. Apparently the forestry department/firefighters in Zomba haven't been paid in 5 years, despite many promises from the government. So last year the firefighters
started burning down the forest in protest.


Last Thursday, Donald had to evacuate his guests (not until after a great dinner of course) because the 50 foot flames were a couple hundred
meters away. He and his staff spent the whole night stomping out burning
ash that was landing all around the lodge. Donald feels bad for these unpaid firefighters, but they almost burned his lodge down - and they certainly burned up a lot of the forest that his guests come to enjoy. It is so strange. We hear about how bad it is to buy charcoal, and burn wood here, because there isn't much forest left, but then you see a mess
like the fires in Zomba.

This past weekend we went away to the Zomba Plateau, which is a beautiful mountainous part of Malawi. We did a lot of hiking and really enjoyed ourselves, despite being a bit tired after all of the walking and the 4 hour drive required each way. Just when you are climbing through the steepest section and starting to feel really tired, you see one of the millions of daily Malawian superheros:




The first night we stayed at Ku Chawe, which is a Le Meridien hotel, and boasts one of the best views in Africa. We were less than impressed, particularly when I asked reception about where we could go walking/hiking and she offered to drive me to a local fish farm. That was the breaking point, but the call from reception at 5:45am, the construction, and the expensive and mediocre food didn't help either. So we left and found the cozy Zomba Forest Lodge, with has no electricity, but plenty of excellent food, great advice, and the type of laid back atmosphere we needed for our mini-break. Donald, the host, was a wealth of friendly and fascinating information. If you are going to Zomba, I would recommend staying at the Zomba Forest Lodge (z.f.lodge@mw.celtelplus.com)
and then hike up to Ku Chawe - you'll appreciate the views more after a hike anyways. Maybe the food will taste better too.

Have you heard about the Flying Spaghetti Monster? People are touting it as a new religion. Basically Pastifarians believe that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the world. Their oldest scripture is simply this:




A good Pastafarian will always wear pirate regalia and end their prayers by saying "Ramen". Read more about it on the Wikipedia page.

I think it is hilarious and creative stuff - but the point of it all is to mock the hard core, right wing Christian fundamentalists, who continue to try and keep the theory of evolution from being taught in schools. These conservative American Christians continue to drive me absolutely crazy. Personally, I think Genesis is more of a parable describing who created the world, rather than how it was created. But even if Genesis is a play by play of how it all began, evolution is happening, science and the rest of the world have benefitted greatly by understanding it, and most importantly there are more important things for Christians to be acting upon. I actually think teaching Pastafarianism in school would be a great classroom exercise. It would force students to do some critical thinking about their own belief systems - and learning how to think is the most important part of any education and indeed any religion.




His noodly appendage is a really fun reminder to me about the mysteries of this amazing universe, and the wonderful creativity of human beings. And who knows, maybe there will be a beer volcano in heaven?

So until I get my VSAT working I am stuck with dialup. I thought I would share a couple of the things I do to maintain an online life, without always having to be online.

Browsing the web is done in firehose mode. I connect to the internet, and then proceed to open tons of tabs (you do use Firefox, right?) full of pages that I need to read - but I don't read them until I am offline. Things like news, and essential blogs, all get loaded into various tabs that will be read later. I use Bloglines to read blogs - and I often open multiple pages to bloglines so that I can download various feeds at once. Reading blogs via RSS feeds is definitely a great way to be able to follow what is happening online without being online much yourself.

Email needs to be checked and sent regularly to assume any kind of online presence. Thunderbird helps out quite a bit by offering fairly decent offline support. So the first thing is obvious - read and write your email offline, then jump online only to send and receive. I receive and store all of my email on a server in London and then access it with IMAP. IMAP is great, even for offline use, but the one problem is it doesn't allow you to use compression. This is too bad because email is mostly text which compresses rather nicely. Zipping a text file often causes it to compress by more than 50%. So using compression could halve the time it takes to download email. How to do this? The solution is a bit complex, but I think the benefits are worth it. Ssh creates secure connections between two machines and also allows you to compress the data before it is sent over the network. Not only that, but ssh allows you to do port forwarding, essentially making ports on one computer appear as local ports on another computer. Here is the command I run whenever I go online:
ssh -N -f -C -L 143:vdomck.org:143 -l crazy vdomck.org
this makes a secure, compressed connection to London and my computer's port 143 actually forwarded to my server's (vdomck.org) port 143. Then in Thunderbird, instead of telling it that my email server is vdomck.org, I just tell it to look at the localhost. Voila, now any data sent or received with my IMAP server is done over a secure, compressed IMAP connection. Don't have ssh? Try putty or cygwin.

Skype is so killer (perhaps it will be killed by Google talk?), but until I have always on access, phone cards are a cheap way to do the voice thing. There are thousands of different plans available. Just google for one, and you can get a $5 card that will allow you to talk to Africa for hours. Skyping is too expensive for me, so instead I just email a phone card when I need to talk to someone instead.

As for blogging. Just figure out how to post to your blog via email - then you can do all of your writing offline and have it go out with your emails. Blogger makes it easy. I use the postie plugin for Wordpress. In fact, that is what I am doing right now. :-)

Rsync is another useful way to squeeze bandwidth and time online - see another one of my blog posts for more info.