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?
Continue reading "The Namibian government wants to spy on you - but can they really?"

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...).

Or, as international organisations always like to abreviate things, JFFLS (see also the JFFLS flyer) is specifically targeting vulnerable children between 12 and 18 years, giving them a 12 month training program following the cropping cycle. The children attend 3 times a week in open fields.

The manual "Getting Started!" provides detailed information on how to run an JFFLS, and can be downloaded free of charge from the FAO website via the link provided here.

Obviously these "schools" are not meant or designed to replace formal education, but rather form an addition to it - allowing children that have lost parents due to HIV/AIDS to once again build up self-esteem, livelihood options and long term food security in rural areas.


Continue reading "Junior Farmer Field & Life Schools manual for free"

Another Namibian sports site found while searching through the web is the website of the Namibia Cricket Board, bringing you news from the cricket fields around the country.

With currently 12 clubs listed around the country, this website not only offers contact details to each and every one of these clubs but also picture galleries, individual player profiles of the national team, a tribute page for all former players, and a very interesting insight into what is planned regarding the development of cricket in Namibia.

Obviously you will also get the latest news and announcements of upcoming events on this site - the ICC World Cricket League Division Two event took place in Windhoek over the last couple of weeks for example, and of course the website keeps you up to date about this too.

Namibia just defeated Denmark to reach the third place in this event - so here we indeed have a team that plays (and wins) at the top table of international events, and as such a team we can be very proud of: only four teams of the ICC WCL Div. II reached the ICC Cricket World Cup qualifiers in 2009, and Namibia is one of them.

Want to read more about the Namibian cricket team? Well then, go ahead and visit their site...

As Cameroon Online reports, Cameroon has silently gone offline last week. Aparently Camtel blames a defect in the SAT3 cable 40 kilometers off-shore from Duala for the sudden loss of communication to and from that country.

This cable also connects Portugal and Spain with Gran Canaria, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, Gabon, Angola and South Africa. In South Africa it meets up with the SAFE cable system which in turn connects to Réunion, Mauritius, India and finally Malaysia (where it meets the FLAG and SEAN-ME-WE 3 cable systems that in turn connects to pretty much the rest of the world and also back to Western Europe (as such, sporadic connections at a very low bandwidth are indeed still possible to Cameroon).

While Camtel apparently reports that to the press, no announcement can be found on their website - and as such the virtual delinking of Cameroon aparently wasn't really noticed by the rest of the world yet, despite aparent great financial losses by the business community of Cameroon by that long period of "digital darkness".

This failure once more outlines the urgent need of Africa as a continent to seek alternative ways of connecting to the rest of the world - and it also clearly outlines how difficult the situation can become if all you have in a country is a single telecoms operator sanctioned by the state: obviously nobody thought of any contingency plans if and when that cable connection fails, and now the loss is expected to be compensated again by the business community and private users. As such, failures like these will continue to strangle efforts in Africa to truly get more people online - a technical as well as political issue that aparently hasn't been discussed enough at the last Connect Africa summit...

In an ITU press release the ITU chief for media relations and public information announced that investment comitments accounting to over USD 55 billion had been made, most of which (USD 50 billion) will be used to upgrade and extend mobile networks.

One of the comittments that has been made is to interconnect all African capitals and major cities with ICT broadband infrastructure by 2012 and to extend that service by 2015 to all African villages - definately a very ambitious plan, but with the use of wrieless technology including standards like Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WIMAX) plus already available 3G wireless networks (UMTS, or in South Africa iBurst, in Namibia MTC offers 3G HSDPA based on UMTS), the mere technical aspects may indeed be taken care off effectively.

Irrespective of that, two questions remain though: on the one hand the ambitious project certainly promises faster connection to the Internet in Africa, but it does obviously not state as to who will be eligible to use these broadband connections - will that be just an ISP backbone network, with much slower connections made available by them due to national Telecoms interventions? I mean: in Namibia we certainly have the required network already, with fibre optic connections providing more bandwidth than all available users in Namibia could possibly use at any one time, yet access to simple ADSL connections is virtually impossible: while the Telecom Broadband pamphlet certainly mentions ADSL as one possible broadband option, they mention the fact that this service is certainly not available countrywide as an implication of the requirement to reside in an ADSL coverage area only.


Continue reading "USD 55 billion comitted to connect Africa"

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.

Another call rings out these days - "Stand up and Speak Out", the common slogan for all GCAP actions in 2007. Actions around the world will take place. The following are some exerpts from the Whiteband website to give you an idea of what this is all about:

The Global call to Action against Poverty (GCAP) is a growing alliance of trade unions, community groups, faith groups, women and youth organisations, NGOs and other campaigners working together across more than 100 national platforms. GCAP is calling for action from the world’s leaders to meet their promises to end poverty and inequality. In particular, we demand solutions that address the issues of

• Public accountability, just governance and the fulfilment of human rights
  
• Trade justice
  
• A major increase in the quantity and quality of aid and financing for development
  
• Debt cancellation
  
• Gender equality must also be at the heart of eradicating poverty.
  

17 October, World Day to Overcome Extreme Poverty, was created twenty years ago by the initiative of people living in poverty across the world, North and South, with ordinary citizens acting together to defend human rights violated by extreme poverty. Led by the ATD Fourth World Movement, public events continued around the world each October 17th. In 1992, the UN recognised the date as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.

Since its creation, October 17 has been a day for those living in extreme poverty to speak out and for all citizens to consider how they can contribute to the eradication of extreme poverty.

This year, GCAP has nominated October 17 as the Global White Band Day and will be inviting millions of people all over the world to Stand Up and Speak Out, mobilising against injustice and calling on political leaders to act to end poverty and inequality.

Here is a list of Namibian events as found on the GCAP website.

Despite its age of over 50 years now, the ASC in Walvis Bay is still in the party mood - and this years "Atlantis Sport Club Bonanza" is set for the 28th of October 2007, thus a mere 13 days away from now. That is, if it hasn't blown away - the extremely gusty winds in Walvis Bay last week certainly ruffled a bit more than just the feathers of the local bird population in the lagoon

As every year, the Bonanza once again sells tickets for a great lottery - which doubles up as a fund-raiser for the club, a much needed financial resource to keep all the different sports sections up and running. It's indeed quite impressive what this small sports club manages to keep up and running - an entire illuminates soccer field, an archery area, a 10-pin bowling alley (Kegelbahn), a volleyball team, martial arts classes, a full sized snooker tables that sees regular use, and much much more. Quite obviously, if it's sports you're after, then this is a club in Walvis Bay you should poke your nose into. It also sports a cosy bar area, where it's easy to catch up with the weekly going on's in Walvis - and of course enjoy a beer or two, plus the close to mandatory "Knobel" game (a dice game with three dices and a set of rules that they will tell you about step by step - that is after you lost the first round of course... ).

Unfortunately the club does not yet boast a website (if anyone from the ASC reads this - contact me, I have an idea or two for that one...), so additional information about the event currently can only be obtained via phone: (064) 204 284 - please note that the club usually only opens in the afternoon, so you are unlikely to reach anyone before 15:00 local time. Tickets for the bonanza are available both at the bar and from a number of club members - all you then have to do is answer a "very difficult" question (hint: it's green, it's white, it's ASC dynamite...), and then wait for your ticket to be drawn at the big Bonanza.

The brutality in Burma continues, while the rest of the world can't do much more but protest.

A Democratic Voice of Burma report says that Ko Win Shwe, 42, a member of the NLD who was arrested on 27 September, has died in custody - according to a CNN report he was aparently tortured to death (or as they put it: "died during interrogation" - let's just say that it's rather odd that a 42 year old falls dead from a chair in the middle of a normal interrogation process and gets cremated even before the next of kin get access to his body).

It's more than just another sad story - so here's some food for thought for this weekend: