Hacktivate

A couple of months ago there was a great article in the local paper that Soyapi saved for me. It was about an anthill in Chiduli - which is a village somewhere in Malawi. Chiduli lies in a flat wide valley, which unfortunately places it out of reach for cell phone signals. Out of reach except for one particular place - an anthill!



I wish that I would've saved the full article because it was full of interesting bits of information, but I think you can tell how the story goes from here. Basically, if you needed to make a call, you just go up on the anthill. But what do you do when you are expecting a call?



Apparently you just find a branch that fits your phone and leave it there. I love that someone put an entire purse up there - I guess that makes it easier to hang.

Cellphone coverage in Malawi is actually quite good even in rural areas. There is so much potential waiting to happen. The other day as I was going to work, I heard a Nokia startup tone coming from the garage. Sure enough, George our gardener has his own phone. I got his number, and asked him if he could show Alice our somewhat grandmotherly housekeeper how to use the new phone we just purchased for the house. He laughed and informed me that Alice already has her own phone - no training sessions required!

I am really excited to see the potential of mobile phones take hold in Malawi. Surrounding countries are already beginning to move towards a cashless society thanks to cellphone banking...let the leapfrogging begin!

William's presentation from the TED conference has just been published:

William Kamkwamba's TED talk

William has also started working with my team at Baobab this week. Everyone is excited to see where William's future leads him.

Imagine a witch. A good old fashioned Halloween night witch. Go on - I am serious. Okay, you probably thought of an old woman in black and a broom to fly around on - right? Well, I find it fascinating that Malawi has its own brand of witch - and that she is totally Malawian but totally pure witch at the same time.

The stereotypical witch in Malawi is also a woman. I am not sure what color clothes she wears or how old she is - can one of my Malawian readers chime in? She also flies around, not on a broom, but rather on a witchcraft plane which is really just a nsima basket - a butt-sized basket that is used to sift maize flour. It is the basket that I find most interesting. In my witch tradition as well as Malawi's, the physical item that characterizes her as a witch is also an item of household work. Women's work to be specific and sexist. It is almost like the culture needs to add mystique or fear to the female. I am not sure exactly what to make of it, but there must be some fascinating stuff in the anthropological comparisons of witches and witching around the world. (Evil eye is another good one)

There are definitely a few witches in the states - one in particular who used to come for Cheesecake at Deuz Gros Nez (ironic, oui?) in Reno. But American witches, at least in my experience seem to keep to themselves. Not so in Malawi. The newspapers regularly report of withcraft planes, especially withcraft plane crashes. Thanks to my colleague Oliver I can explain how a witchcraft plane works:

Witches have meetings that they go to. They are almost always in other countries, often Mozambique, but sometimes in London too. To get there, the witch takes her nsima basket to the local graveyard at night, where she takes off and flies to her destination. The problem is people build firewalls, sometimes just by accident. (Oliver - please remind me what they are made of again.) If a witch flies over a firewall, she crashes instantly - and the next morning she will be found naked and asleep at the crash site.

(my mostly ignorant guess is that this is probably how villagers exlain a widow who has had everything stolen from her and been beaten by her inlaws - a very very common and largely accepted practice in Malawi)

Just in case you think I am making all of this up, here is an article from last month in the Daily Times of Malawi (quoted in full since it will probably disappear soon).

http://www.dailytimes.bppmw.com/article.asp?ArticleID=5150

Three convicted for practising witchcraft
BY FRANCIS TAYANJAH-PHIRI
09:09:46 - 15 June 2007

A COURT in Karonga on Wednesday convicted three elderly people for teaching two children, aged eleven and ten, the art of witchcraft.

Uliwa First Grade Magistrate Chikanje Harawa sitting in Chilumba, Karonga, ordered the three, Thaizan Mhango (75), Gerald Kumwenda (79), and Gatry Mkandawire (70), to pay K30, 000 (blogger note: about $200 USD) each, or in default serve five months’ imprisonment with hard labour.

According to Karonga police spokesperson Enock Livason, the three had not paid the fine by close of business on the day of their conviction and were shipped off to prison.

“Harawa convicted the three on the count of practicing witchcraft, contrary to Section 6 of the Witchcraft Act. He then ordered the three to pay K30,000 each or serve 5 months in jail. They all failed to pay the fine and are in prison,” said Livason.

Mhango is from Muzang’unya Village, Chief Wasambo in Karonga, while Kumwenda and Mkandawire are from Mugowera Village, Chief Wasambo, in the same district.

The court was told that the two children (names withheld) all grandchildren of Mhango, complained to their mother that the three were forcing them to source human fresh to eat at night.

“The children alleged in their testimony that the three used to take them each night from the house they were sleeping in to practice witchcraft. They testified that they used to get out through the corner of the house and used to fly with the elders in witchcraft plane but sometimes they used what they termed a magic Mercedez Benz,” Livason said.

The witchcraft trainers are later said to have started forcing the children to kill their relatives and refund the human flesh they had been eating.

Police Prosecutor, Constable Pleasant Sichali submitted in court that the evidence of seven witnesses he had paraded had clearly proved that the three were indeed teaching the children witchcraft.

He also submitted that though the three had pleaded not guilty, the evidence tendered was beyond reasonable doubt and had proved they were guilty of the offence.

I needed to change the size of all of the scrollbars in firefox to make touchscreen scrolling work nicely. I wanted nice big, fat, finger-sized scrollbars. I eventually figured it out, but the directions were sparse, so i thought I would paste my approach here.

Find the firefox profile. Mine was here:

/home/crazy/.mozilla/firefox/9ipm15p4.touchscreen

Go into the chrome directory and create userContent.css:


scrollbar[orient="vertical"] scrollbarbutton,
scrollbar[orient="vertical"] slider,
scrollbar[orient="horizontal"] scrollbarbutton,
scrollbar[orient="horizontal"] slider{
height: 40px !important;
width: 40px !important;
}


Phat scrollbars!

I needed to setup some caching and database updating that will run once a day on our ruby on rails application.

I found this link, which gave three different approaches - all of which I didn't like.

A quick and dirty yet tried and true method is to use cron to call wget on a controller script/runner (thanks David) that does everything we need. All I needed to do was write the crontab entries - but that means later deployments will require someone to do that. My approach was to use environment.rb to programmatically edit the crontab. I just added the following to the end of environment.rb:

current_cron = `crontab -l`
rails_cron_jobs =< # m h dom mon dow command
0 18 * * mon-fri /var/www/bart/script/runner -e production 'Report.cache'
0 22 * * mon-fri /var/www/bart/script/runner -e production 'Patient.update_defaulters'
EOF
unless current_cron.match(/Report\.cache/)
puts "Adding #{rails_cron_jobs} to current cron: #{current_cron}"
puts `echo "#{current_cron}\n#{rails_cron_jobs}" | crontab -`
end


It is a total hack, but I like it. We read in the current crontab - see if we have already edited it - if not we edit it. Plain and simple stuff. Now, as we say in Malawi - somebody school me as to why this is evil bad and wrong.

I just found this article from TED. It seems like they are really committed to bringing technology to Africa:

TED and the sponsors behind the conference made an amazing commitment to including innovative young African leaders, thinkers and entrepreneurs into the TED Global conference. Of the 450 attendees at the conference, 100 are “fellows”, here through the generosity of GE, Google and AMD. That generosity took an unexpected extra step this morning, when TED staffer Tom Reilly announced to the assembled fellows that Google and AMD would be donating a new Mac or PC laptop to all fellows, and that Noah Samara from Worldspace would be giving each fellow a satellite radio and an annual subscription.

And it seems like William has now been elevated to celebrity status:

William Kamkwamba, the amazing young Malawian engineer who built his first windmill at age 14, has captured the imagination of many of the people in the crowd. A number of TED attendees have banded together to support him fiscally to complete his high school education and go onto university. A TED staffer is travelling to Malawi next week to start working on finding tutors for William to help prepare him to attend a top high school in Malawi.

Some members of my blogging community, including Ndesanjo Macha, have committed to coaching William… and critically, in coaching TED on how to provide William with help and support without overwhelming him or uprooting him from his family or community. Friends like Ndesanjo have had the experience of growing up in rural communities and moving to huge cities to pursue their education - I hope that he can help TED support William in a way that’s as constructive as possible.

Remember William Kamkwamba and his homemade Windmill made from bicycle parts?

After I made that post, Emeka Okafor invited William to attend the TED conference in Tanzania. Soyapi (who is also there) just irc'd me to say that William gave a presentation and received a standing ovation. People like Bono, Larry Page, and lots of other movers and shakers are there.

Congratulations to William!