"Exterminate all the Brutes"

Since the shipment of the LTSP servers and thinclients by IT Point in April 2011, the ICT staff of the Kamuzu College of Nursing in Lilongwe, Malawi, has been preparing the project under my guidance. This included assembling different knowledge and information sources to prepare a technical guide and full documentation for the GNU/Linux based LTSP system.

After the shipment was collected from the local tax authorities in Lilongwe, the order of the screens for the workstations was prepared, which had to be validated by the Universities directorate. Meanwhile the ICT staff have successfully installed the servers and the flat panel console kit in the rack of the ICT department and installed the core system, testing it with one client.

The system is now ready to be fully connected with all clients and to be introduced to the Students, as soon as the monitor order has been delivered and the network installation is setup. The principal will then, presumably by end of August 2011, launch and release the new system to the Students.

1.  I am implementing a Curriculum Management system using Moodle, which involves conducting lots of training to lecturers, in creating resources and uploading information into the CMS at the same time training students on how to use the resources. the CMS is currently running on the intranet, but i have just created  sub-domain for it, and its propagating around dns as i speak, it will be up by tomorrow, i will sent you a link for you to take a look. I have attached some of the photos i took on the training session, one is a workshop for the lecturers and the other is for the students.

2. Student management system – i developed this system and implemented it early last year, the lecturers met and came up with new requirement for the system, so i went back to the drawing board and modified the system, now the new version has just been deployed with a mobile module also and its been tested live during this exam period. here is the link to the system http://saris.kcn.unima.mw

3. High Definition Video conference equipment using mini-sip (an open source software), we bought video conference equipment, since as i told you before we are a multi-campus college, one in Lilongwe another in blantyre. To minimize cost we used an open source software which was under development by KTH university in Sweden, it has been a long process of testing the equipment and the flexibility of the software in low bandwidth.

am on the second phase, where i have set the clients in both campuses, i have created a tunnel between the two campuses and am doing some several tests on that tunnel. just to take note previous tests where from here to Sweden, now the tests am doing are just within the two campuses, later it will be roll out in full, to be used for the masters programmes here.

http://csd.xen.ssvl.kth.se/csdlive/sites/default/files/projects/CareNet%20Fall%202010%20HDVC%20Session%20Project%20Plan%20(v1.1)%20(12-08-2010).pdf

4. catering system for the student cafe. i have developed a small system, merged with student management system which uses barcode and generates meal coupons. this was to ease the chaos which was happening to the cafe, with finance not knowing how many students have taken food, and where just bombarded with huge invoices from the out sourced caterer. so the system provides real-time statistics on how many students have actually taken the food. The testing phase is done and the system will be deployed this coming week. i will furnish you with pictures on how the system is working.

5. KCN Digital repository, i am working hand in and with Thomas Bello assistant librarian, the guy you saw me with on skype chat, in creating a digital repository using DSPACE, we are setting up dspace from source

6.  Google technology user group (GTUG), i am also involved (i can say one of the organizers) in GTUG where we utilize google technologies in our institution, the group comprises of IT guys from different organisations and we create events and workshops in teaching some of the technologies that google uses. just some 3 weeks ago we organised a workshop which occured right here at KCN, on writing applications in android, in readiness of a certain competition that Google organised http://madinga.blogspot.com/

These are some of the projects are am doing currently and i will give you more details later on

regards,
ICT sysadmin

Hi folks!

Am here to walk you through this exciting development on the project called ‘exterminate all brutes‘, am an IT Director at Kamuzu College of Nursing, with the help of Alex Antener  we  were given the state of the art thin-clients terminals for our student usage

We received two IBM servers, 40GB RAM each, 40 thin-clients terminal and a KVM switch

Here is the link to a photo gallery of the server installation process:

KCN 2011 photo gallery

Wilson Upindi who was one of my students at the time I realised the project “Exterminate all the Brutes 2006” at the Polytechnic in Malawi recently was elected Employee of the Year of the Stanbic Bank, where he works as a GNU/Linux System administrator.

Congratulations, Wilson!

Christian Imhorst made an interview with me for the online-magazine “Freies Magazin”. The Interview is only available in german Language.

A Malawian youngster has built his own windmill generator. On a Blog the youngster wants to finance his secondary school with the story.


Boingboing as well as Soyapi blogged about it.

After demand I sould like to put the pint master of the shirts on the blog, because there is only a small quantity of shirt that have been printed. Feel free to download the master for the front and the backside of the shirt. CreativeCommons-ShareAlike 3.0 as usual.
P.S. “Anthu Ozindikira amagwirisa ntchito GNU/Linux Software” means “thinking human beeings are using GNU/Linux Software”.

The Administration of the State of Zurich in Switzerland still uses the proprietary xls, doc etc. formats of the MS Office Suite. That’s why each an every worker of the state of Zurich has to write its timetable into a table of such a proprietary file. Today while transfoming my timetable.xls file into a ODF (Open Document Format) file I coincidentally found out that the timetable with its calculations and algorithms still works perfect in Openoffice. And it also does in Neo Office (on a Mac OS X). Further I noticed, that the file shrunk by 70%, although the content of the file was exactly the same. This means that a conversion of a xls file into the odf format cleans the file and keeps it neat. If the administration of the state of Zurich would switch to the ISO certified ODF Format we could economise 70% of our storage Servers, that could be used for example for another Free Software project in Malawi. 🙂

Melissa Draper from the Ubuntu Project recently posted an interesting article about Edubuntu on the Linux.com portal. In the article the thin-client project, that I realised in 2006 at the Polytechnic, is mentioned.

As long as switzerland keeps the banking secrecy and refuses it’s humanitary tradition the african rulers will keep their money at the Paradeplatz in Zurich and the World Economic Forum (WEF) will take place in Switzerland. While the so called “very important person” will meet this week in Davos i will run my attention on the World Social Forum (WSF), that is taking place now in Nairobi.