IT in Namibia

As The Namibian reports, the intended passing of the new Communications Bill aparently tries to give the Namibian government something that it itself permanently refuses to give to the Namibian voter: complete transparency in just about all forms of electronic communications, be that by telephone, email or any other means of communication (and as far as I can see, they have not excluded normal postal communication here either).

Sweeping powers to spy on its citizens without any form of judicial oversight - and as such a piece of law that would see other countries citizens up in arms, demonstrating in large crowds so as to stop this bill from being passed. In Namibia though, the focus of the average man on the street is less on communications and more on getting (or even more importantly: keeping) a job, overcoming poverty and getting some food on the table, so it is more than likely that apart from some "academic" criticism by the (more or less: powerless) opposition parties will essentially be all that we hear, before this controversial bill is passed - as all bills presented by SWAPO stallwarts usually are.

So the interesting question now is not really "can we stop them from passing the bill" - but more: what use will that bill be in a modern society that has long since developed its ways and means of secure communications that is virtually impossible to break - especially for a cash strapped government that simply can not afford the highly skilled specialists that it would take to actually implement what is soon to be put on paper?

So you have your problems getting your head around object oriented programming? Well, you're certainly not alone - many computer science students that start with OOP have similar difficulties when turning to languages like Java or C++. One of the reasons may be that between "learning languages" like logo and modern OOP based programming languages there simply remains a large paradigm "gap".

Now researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University have created Alice as a programming tool to help bridge that gap - and just like you've been creating two-dimensional drawings with logo, you are now adding another dimension and end up creating 3D animations instead.

The cool thing about Alice is that you don't have to be enrolled at CMU in order to try it out - all you have to do is visit their website and choose between Alice 2.0 (designed with high-school students in mind and available for Windows, Linux and MACOS 10.3 and 10.4)) or choose the Storytelling Alice (only available for Windows machines) to get going.

Using an innovative "drag and drop programming" method, the student immediately creates animations while not having to worry about programming syntax - and which in turn already introduces you to concepts and prgramming styles found in Java. Alice and Java are indeed so close to each other, that a transition at a later stage becomes an easy step - so you really have a more than just "fun" way of learning to program here, as you can get your head around the concept of OOP first and then deal with all the little intricate details, including the correct positioning of semicolons and what not, at a later stage.

Since Allice is available free of charge (distributed under the Alice License), all you need to do is download a roughly 116MB (122MB in the case of Storytelling Alice) large ZIP file to get going. Storytelling Alice also comes with a handy Storytelling Alice Guide (a roughly 2MB download), that gets you and/or your students going in an instant.

Time flies - it's 2007, and the programming language Perl already turns 20 years old. Created by Larry Wall, the first interpreter became freely available exactly on todays date - 20 years ago, in 1987. It then took a long and sometimes agonizing 16 years before version 1.00_16 arrived - during that time it already got dubbed the "duct tape of the internet" (an expression coined by Hassan Schroeder, Sun's first webmaster), and since that first release it's also seen a much quicker release schedule than ever before (currently version 5.8.8 is commonly in use, still to be expected today is release 5.10).

Originally designed as a "replacement" for awk and sed, Wall tried to incorporate (at least in his view) "the best" of C, sed, awk and sh (a.k.a. "Bourne Shell", named after its creator Stephen R. Bourne).

Anyone wishing to celebrate this "round" birthday of Perl has been cordially invited by Perl developer Brian D. Foy to join the Perl forum - he hopes to make it a 24 hour global party, rolling through all the time zones in the world (which, at least in my calculation, would then obviously make it a 47:59 hour party - but hey, let's just party...).

As BBC News reports, less than four out of 100 Africans currently use the Internet. Broadband access, a common feature in most European countries which provides both faster as well as cheaper Internet access, is available to less than 1%.

These are just two of the findings that the BBC reports from the 2 day Connect Africa Summit that currently takes place in Kigali, Rwanda.

While these overall figures look indeed quite daunting, overall growth in Internet use is exceptionally high in Africa: while the figures of Internet World Stats currently show only 34 million Internet users in the entire African continent, that figure is currently also growing at a more than just "healthy" 874.6% - putting it way ahead of Asia with "just" a 302% growth rate, effectively making it the fastes growing market for Internet technology in the world.

Namibia is currently estimated to have a total of 80600 Internet users - up from 30000 back in 2000 this means that the usage penetartion of the Namibian population has grown to 3.9%, while the growth rate of that market in Namibia is a healthy 168.7% (Source: Africa Internet Usage and Populations Statistics).

The Government of Burindi also puts some absolute figures to the market in Africa: that has significantly improved to an USD 8 billion in 2005 (up from just USD 3.5 billion in 2000), yet Africa has continued to fall behind in overall connectivity when compared to the rest of the world (which obviously had their big connectivity boost in the 90ies of the last century already and as such only have a moderately growing market these days).

ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun Touré thus demands a "Marshall Plan for ICT infrastructure development in Africa" - with less than 8 years left to meet the 2015 targets of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG), drastic steps are certainly required - there are still a lot of "red flags" in the MDG Report 2007 Progress Chart, one of them being the "very low access" rate for Internet users in Sub-Saharan Africa, which in turn stand for no progress or even a deteriorating situation.

In the technology sphere, that means providing easy access to information and communication technology for more than half of the continent's population within eight years - a pretty tough call, even if the current growth rates in Afria do indeed look promising.

While the unusual codenames for the various releases of Ubuntu Linux probably keep putting a little smile on the face of every "corporate IT"-guy's face, the sheer stability and power of that popular Linux distribution will very quickly disperse that look with one of awe and respect.

The new 7.10 release is out for some days now - including the drivative Kubuntu 7.10, which I also just used to upgrade a machine here in my office.

The latest release uses Gnome 2.20 as its window manager (Kubuntu still uses KDE 3.5.8, but the new KDE 4 packages are already available), and on newer hardware automatically enables 3D desktop effects via Compiz Fusion. Also new is a desktop search applet that is now included in the default installation, fast user session switching without the need to enter your username and password all the time, AppArmor security framework, full read and write access to NTFS partitions, improved thin client (LTSP) support, and much more.

Kubuntu has added Dolphin as the new default file manager, and uses Strigi as the desktop search engine.

Both Ubuntu 7.10 as well as Kubuntu 7.10 also come bundled with the new Open Office 2.3 version, which comes with a large list of new features too. Since Open Office can also read and write MS Office formats, any Ubuntu or Kubuntu version basically can be used as a 1:1 replacement for Windows and Office - but at virtually no cost, save for the download bandwidth required.

I run both Kubuntu 7.10 as well as Ubuntu 7.10 on two older machines (Kubuntu on an Athlon 64 3500+ with 1.5 GB RAM and a PCI-Express graphics card with nvidia chipset, Ubuntu on an even older Intel Celeron D with 2.88 Mhz and just 1 GB of RAM), and as can be expected, the smaller machine running Gnome isn't really that much slower than the faster Athlon 64 running with a 3D desktop active - pretty impressive feat indeed. Tests on even smaller systems (only 512 MB and in one case only 256 MB of RAM) also show that Linux is still a good choice when it comes to "upgrading" older machines with a more powerfull operating system.

A new installation takes round about 45-60 minutes on a faster machine, upgrading the older machine directly from within Ubuntu 7.04 took about an hour. Thereafter you may wish to download the latest updates, depending on your available Internet bandwidth that step obviously varies in time, but I had both machines updated and running again after less than 30 minutes each (mind you, that's with a 16 MBit/sec DSL line - you will wait ages and then some if you still work via modem...).

So don't be afraid of the "Gutsy Gibbon" - he certainly won't bite

Damn Small Linux (aka. DSL) has just released Version 4.0 of it small-footprint Linux distribution.

Apart from some bugfixes, the new version also incorporates some new pieces of software, including tools for easier network configuration and printing.

The really cool thing about DSL is that it doesn't make a lot of demands on the hardware it runs on - an old 486DX-100 with just 16 MByte of RAM is already sufficient, plus it can run as a live distribution already from a credit card sized "business card CD" or optionally a USB stick / pen drive, so in essence you can take your Linux along wherever you go.

Since it's based on Debian Linux, which is also the preferred base for the Ubuntu Linux distribution, this small marvel proves to be a very stable "small scale" rendition of a Linux distribution.

You can download DSL here - just select a mirror close to your location, in Namibia that would probably be the fourth on the list: the FTP Server from Internet Solutions in South Africa.

I've just found a very interesting article pertaining to a concept called Education 3.0. It deals mainly with the issue that these days we do have interesting 21st Century technology available to schools and teachers, yet somehow remain bound to (higher) education methods that date back to the 19th century - with all the hidden problems that go with that "Education 1.0" concept.

Derek Keats and J. Phillip Schmidt thus "venture into the unknown" here for most teachers (and probably also: most students), but the key question is clear: if everything else has kept evolving, why is it that we allow ourselves to adopt a very conservative "sit back and wait" stance when it comes to education?

In their quest, they compare the education "versions" with what has or is happening with the Web these days: "Web 2.0" tries to describe a certain change in the way the Web is being used these days, mainly due to the fact that more and more people are colaborating using tools like blogs, wikis, community and video portals and the like.

The African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) project is a collaborative effort among several African higher education institutions to support capacity building in Free and Open Source software engineering.

Watch a Google TechTalk by Prof Derek Keats, Executive Director, Information & Communication Services, The University of the Western Cape, Bellville (Cape Town), South Africa, introducing AVOIR:



It's pretty much what I have been advocating for quite some time: only open source software allows such form of wide scale colaborative effort, plus it is a viable alternative to investing large amounts of otherwise scarce money into the purchase of software licenses and instead put that money to better use.

Today marks the first day of the U.S.-Africa Infrastructure Conference that is held in Washington from the 8th to the 10th of October.

While less an event dealing with ICT and its availability in Africa, one of the workshops entitled "information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and applications" has managed to gather a very interesting lineup of speakers - including Ms. Marie Therese Royce, Managing Director, Global Strategic Initiatives, Global Government & Public Affairs, Alcatel-Lucent, Ambassador David Gross, Coordinator, International Communication and Information Policy, U.S. Department of State as well as Ms. Barbara Keating, President and Founder, Computer Frontiers (CFI).

One of the recent developments of CFI has been the COMESA Food & Agricultural Marketing Information System (FAMIS), a new web based information tool was developed by CFI Uganda to aid COMESA in capturing commodities trade data.

Unfortunately, Namibia decided back in 2003 to pull out of COMESA effectively since May 2004 - aparently a decision made so as to concentrate their efforts more on SACU and the SADC - so there is no data available in this system pertaining to Namibia.

Notwithstanding the reasons for that pull-out, it's probably still a good idea to have a look at FAMIS and ponder about a similar system, possibly with a direct information interchange with FAMIS, for the SADC region as well - after all, droughts and famines rarely care about artificial boundaries or organisational spheres of influence either, so having a look over the "fence" is generally speaking not a bad idea.

The United Nations Institute for Training and Research, New York has set the date of the last UNITAR FOSS 2007 event for 16 October 2007.

One of the members of the second part of the "Interactive Panel" will be our fellow Namibian Joris Komen, executive director of SchoolNet Namibia, listed on the agenda as one of the actual FOSS implementers, sitting right next to Chris diBona from Google, Bill Macguire of Virgin America, Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom law Center, José Luis Prola Salinas and José Francisco Alvarez Raya, both from the Banco do Brazil.

The event is the last of a series of four seminars focusing on ICT policy issues for development. According to the info note, it "provides a forum for critical thinking and discussion relating to ICTs and their potential policy implications worldwide".

Quote from the info note:

The purpose of the meeting is to deepen understanding of the development potential of FOSS, moving beyond the policy concerns that were the focus of the 2006 UNCTAD-UNITAR FOSS seminar, and to present several real-world cases of FOSS implemented in small and medium-sized enterprises using or producing ICT-based products and services, organizations in the field of science and education, and public and governmental institutions.

Nice to see that Namibia plays an active role here - obviously the effort of Joris Komen and his fellow SchoolNet Namibia folks is now truly moving center stage. Since he and SchoolNet namibia is in constant and direct contact with the Namibian Government regarding ICT roll-outs in schools all around Namibia, hopes are high that the drive towards FOSS usage in Namibia continues to intensify - not only in schools but obviously also in companies all around the country, as new experts well versed in the usage of such software become available to the job market in Namibia.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative has just introduced a new XO donation program called "Give 1 Get 1" where interested buyers of the XO laptop can purchase two such laptops - and have one donated to a child in a developing country.

The program starts on 12th of November, interested individuals and companies can already register with their email adress today though. For the price of USD 399 you will then effectively purchase two laptops of which only one will be delivered to you. Alternatively you can already donate USD 200 now to purchase a new XO laptop that will immediately be delivered to a child in a developing country - and of course you can also donate multiples of that amount to donate more than just one PC.

The vision of the OLPC project is of course not to just deliver the necessary hardware - as Nicholas Negroponte bluntly puts it:

"It's an education project, not a laptop project.”

Plus it's not just some new "trendy" idea, it goes as far back as 40 years already, right back to the primordeal days of computing, when Wally Feurzeig, Daniel Bobrow, Richard Grant, Cynthia Solomon, and Seymour Papert introduce Logo, the first programming language written especially for children, recognising the need to teach computer usage to the next generation as early as possible in order to let them participate in todays world.

The first computers that got distributed to schoolchildren in a suburb of Dakar, Senegal, it was Seymour Papert and Nicolas Negroponte that got the sponsorship from the french government to introduce these children to Apple II computers at that time. Since then, things have obviously developed quite a bit, with lots of different associations providing similar initiatives over the years. In Namibia for example, the SchoolNet initiative is very busy providing Internet connectivity to schools especially in rural areas using Linux based systems.

This basically goes in line with the "One Server Per School" initiative that tries to do basically the same: connect schools to the Internet and as such give the OLPC project the necessary network infrastructure to which to connect.

Amazingly though, Namibia is still missing from the OLPC list of countries - and I sincerely wonder why: the original demand that any country wishing to participate orders in quantities of 250000 systems is being discussed as I sit back and marvel at the situation, and at the same time I think that if organisatzions like SchoolNet already exist in Namibia, they could become an extremely effective catalyst to change - one would just have to make their school servers "OLPC ready" (that is: able to connect to the OLPC mesh), and things could really start rolling.

So where is Namibia heading then? Or is it still looking for directions here?

Having just stumbled accross a nearly forgotten comment by a visitor on my site, which once again sent me investigating as to what SchoolNet.na was doing, it struck me as an idea to start with a little "feature series" regarding educational institutions in Namibia trying hard to bring information and communication technology (ICT) to the learners.

I will simply start with LearnLink, especially their LearnLink Project: NAMIBIA that saw Ed's Net see the day of light.

Just yesterday, the offical release of Ubuntu 7.04, codenamed "Feisty Fawn", has been made available from the website of Canonical Ltd., the commerical South African sponsor of this Linux distribution.

From their announcement on the above mentioned website:

Ubuntu is the award-winning Linux distribution for the desktop, laptop, thin client and server which brings together the best of open source software every 6 months. Ubuntu 7.04 desktop edition includes a ground-breaking Windows migration assistant, excellent wireless networking support and improved multimedia support.

Ubuntu 7.04 server edition adds support for hardware facilities that speed up the use of virtual machines as well as other improved hardware support, making it an excellent choice as a web, database, file and print server, the fastest growing area of Linux server use. Ubuntu's already outstanding support for thin clients is boosted with advanced print and sound support.

"In the coming months, many individuals and businesses will be making the decision to upgrade their existing computer systems and their operating systems," said Jane Silber, director of Operations, Canonical Ltd. "With added features to both the desktop and server editions, Ubuntu 7.04 is the most user-friendly version to date and is ideally suited to anyone who wants to make the switch to Linux and join the community of Ubuntu users. In fact, with this version of Ubuntu, it is easier than ever to move away from proprietary platforms."

At the same time as Ubuntu, the project also will release new versions of Kubuntu and Edubuntu, specialized versions of Ubuntu which include the KDE desktop environment and educational applications, respectively.

You can follow this direct download link to obtain the latest edition - or, if you already run Ubuntu on your machine, it's just a few clicks (and with a slow connection: a loooong wait for the download) through the system updater.

If you contemplate updating your PC to Vista, you might also want to have a look at the "Live CD" version of Ubuntu (you should use a fast CD/DVD-ROM though - these drives are still considerably slower than even the slowest of harddisks these days) - it may give you the idea that Windows isn't everything, and may also convince you to spend less on new hardware (which is most likely required when you update to Vista) and more on learning how to use a truly stable operating system.

In a bid to address the problem of Africa's "missing link" - here the obvious lack of cheap and fast communication facilities that truly everyone can afford, the World Bank announcement two days ago introduces the Africa Regional Communications Infrastructure Program (RCIP) that attempts to improve access to international connectivity by focusing on closing the terrestrial connectivity gap.

With an USD 424 million envelope for the overall program, we are definately talking about a major investment into the IT and telecommunications facilities in Africa - and we can only watch in awe as we read in the announcement:

"By the end of the Program, it is expected that all capitals and major cities in East and Southern Africa would be linked to competitively priced high-bandwidth connectivity. Lower prices for international connectivity will decrease the cost of doing business and significantly improve private sector investment opportunities in the region. Universities, schools and hospitals benefit; and governments will be able to deliver services to citizens more efficiently and transparently online."

That would indeed not only mark a major technological advance for many countries, including Namibia of course, but it would also be the major breakthrough that would allow companies to set foor in Namibia that deal less with exhaustable raw materials (how long will there be enough fish, uranium, diamonds etc.?) but more with professional services that are hugely in demand all over the world.

Since the announcement came on the second of April, it really doesn't appear to be an April fools joke. I (for one) can't wait to see how the IT and Telco Infrastructure is going to look like in a couple of years - finally Africa gets a chance to catch up to the rest of the world. How nice to be able to report on such good news!

One major issue in a company is: how do you create backups of your vital data? With database systems, file servers and other software that's usually not nuch of a problem - but when it comes to EMails or bookmarks in your webbrower, how do you go about saving those profiles?

The answer is here, and it's a free solution too: Mozbackup from Pavel Cvrcek allows you to backup profiles under Windows from projects like Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbrid, SeaMonkey, the Mozilla Suite as well as the Netscape browser.

Important to note is that Mozbackup can only backup the profile files if the respective program is not running - plus you do not have an ability to actually schedule your backups, as that feature will only be incorporated in version 1.5 (current version is 1.4.6, so that shouldn't take too long to be incorporated).

You can also specify a password to encode your saved profiles, so as to render the files useless to anyone trying to figure out what you have been receiving as emails or saved as browser bookmarks.

The program is still not completely bug-free, but the backup and restore functions operate as advertised and without a hitch - backing up your email data before you start some excessive "spring cleaning" is thus no longer a dream but easy to realise with this nifty tool - further enhancements are in the pipeline, and probably also dearly needed in a larger business setup, but this definately is a good start for smaller systems (any working backup is better than no backup).