"Exterminate all the Brutes"

The “do-gooder” Bill Gates does now, after Madonna boght her little orphan, take care for Malawian orphans as well. After an article in the Nation Malawi Newspaper of yesterday, the 7th of December 2006, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donates 2’124’992 US$ to the Malawian NGO OSA (Orphan Support Africa).
(My comment reserved).

On the very same page of the newspaper there is an article about the Malawian organisation for disabled people complaining about the bad ICT infrasturctures for handicapped. At this point I would like to link to the GNOME accessibility projekt that allows blind people to use free software with the braille line. Also Gino Filadoro has worked with free software on a project at the dept. on new media studies together with a handicapped person.

Link:
Debian accessibility projekt

On nov.3. I posted on this blog one of my drawings about an african market. Andrews girlfriend Lucie downloaded that drawing, printed and hanged it on the wall at her home. Vanessa is the daugther of Lucie. She is 8 jears old and likes to draw. She can tell you the meaning of every single detail from her drawings. As she saws my drawing, she kind of “copied” it. Or maby its better to call it, was inspired to this drawing you can see above.

Yesterday the Systemadministrator Maganizo Monawe came to my office and introduced me to the italian Carlo Fonda of ICTP who is working in the next 10 days at the Polytechnic with a couple of students and lecturers on a “Wireless Networking” Project. After a few italian phrases it was obvious that Carlos group from Trieste work with the same attitude with his project not imposing western ideas in an imperialistic way. As I read on Carlos Wiki-Website in June 2006 there was a training course taking place in Trieste and now the workshop continues in Blantyre to connect the colleges and hospitals around the Polytechnic.

Carlo was also shocked by the high ISP (Internet Service Provider) prices in Malawi and also about the fact that the VSAT equipment, that was setup by the United Nations Developpment Programme (UNDP) on top of the Polytechnic building is run by Paulus Nyirenda commercially. The Polytechnic pays 3000 US$ monthly to SDNP for the 256 KBit uplink and 512 downlink connection.

Carlo further talked about person of the Wirless community, some of them I know from the Chaos Communication Congress (like Freifunk.net etc.). I watched a speech of Elektra Wagenrad at the congress last year about “Wifi Longshots” in Bangladesh. This know-how is also part of the ICTP wireless workshop and is a convenient technology for Africa. A lot of connection cables are digged out of the grounds and find different uses. The wireless technology can bridge big distances (world record 279 km) and cover wide areas. Together with the wireless meshed networking technology it can split many different access points with low bandwidth.

In a night and fog action, we became part of the new videoclip from Joseph Nkasa yesterday evening. The clip mainly shows the singer with his wife. The lyrics talk about love. He sings that she is his backbone.To give some amusement and spice to ouf black friends, Andrew ask us to play a short sentence for that clip. We had to dance, to sing and also to kiss under the full moon.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.

Yesterday afternoon at 4:00 pm central african time (cat) the official handover of the thin clients was taking place at the library of the Polytechnic. The Ceremony was located in the audiovisual where one part of the thin clients (12 pcs) is set up. Because of his tight schedule the vice-chancellor of the University of Malawi did not join the handover. Martin Thawani, the librarian of the Polytechnic opened the ceremony by mentioning with a few words my last stay in 2004 when I worked for 5 month at the Polytechnic and set up the Servers and Network. Martin Thawani praised the Free Software project especially because of its massive success in the fight against Spam, Viruses and scarce bandwith problems in africa. (On the image above you can see the symbolic handover of the book “Free as in Freedom” between Alex Antener on the right an the librarian Martin Thawani on the left). After his talk I added, that we run in the ICT of the University of applied sciences and arts in Zurich all the servers of the students and lecturers on Free Software (GNU/Linux Debian) with a big success. und that the very same thin clients that the ICT is donating to the Polytechnic are used in our administration and that the students and lecturers of the Polytechnic also deserve to use the newest information technology, not having to use the used crappy outdated computer trash that most of the NGOs are donating. The principal Dr. Charles Mataya expressed his thanks and told us about his fistr experiences with Unix in 1981 when he did his PhD. Further he said that the Polytechnic and the University of applied sciences and arts are initiating an intercultural relationship with this project. At the end of the Ceremony the librarian Martin Thawani gave us 2 traditional malawian masks and and a carved africa map to underline his thanks.

In this place I would like to thank cordially my Boss Barbara Berger and her replacement Harry Rauter of the ICT of the University of applied sciences and arts Zurich for their support. Ramon Cahenzli as well as Gino filadoro deserve my warm thanks for their collaboration. To Nathalie Bissig I would like to express my very special thanks for her wonderful pictures which we all apreciate a lot.

The 23rd chaos communication congress will take place from the 27th until 30st of december 2006 in Berlin. This years congress stands under the “23” and keeps the nice title: “Who can you trust?”. Because the Malawi project fits nice together with this title, I’ll hava a talk myself at the third congress day about Malawi.

Today in the afternoon the official handover of the thinclients is going to take place. The principal Dr. Charles Mataya and the librarian Mr. Martin Thawani are going to present the donated thin clients of the University of applied sciences and arts Zurich to the media and are going to talk about the influence of free Software in Malawi.

See the pictures of the t-shirts that we printed for this event. “Anthu Ozindikira amagwirisa ntchito GNU/Linux Software” means “thinking human beeings are using GNU/Linux Software”. 🙂

The CD-Duplicatemachine from Andrew Msiska is close to be finished. The woodbox is now full of african carvings. The eagle stands for Andrews Artist Company, the chamäleons are dedicated to Alex, the dicdics to Ramon and the monkey to me. What about the Gnu? The Gnu is dedicated to all Gnu Friends.

Iwould like to add, that the computernerds from here, when they come into the office and see this beautifull box, they get little stars in their eyes. One Student likes it so much, that he would like to build one also for his computer.

More detail pictures will follow next week. The low Internet bandwidth at the Polytechnic don’t allow large image uploads.

The 2 Thinclient Networks are now properly setup with squid as proxy service and work perfectly. The research and article of Ramon Cahenzli was pretty helpful for the setup, because doing research on the internet in the Polytechnic is very frustrating because of low bandwidth.

The past days we did some stress tests and fine tuning of ltsp, dhcp and squid. The system is pretty fast compared to the old crappy computers of the Polytechnic. We’re now waiting for an order of about 12 TFT screens from South-Africa to be installed with the thinclients. The handover will probably take place next week.