"Exterminate all the Brutes"

For the current ICT project in Malawi “Exterminate all the Brutes v.4”, I am currently looking for a hacker, who is travelling through Africa and could possibly help to solve a Networking issue.

Your assistance would be highly appreciated!

Hi again,
Am feeling anxious as accessories will be coming on KCN this coming week. we will start with furniture which will probably be in by monday 26th of September 2011, these furniture are basically computer desks and chairs and also steel bars for security of the computer lab.

On tuesday or wednesday we are expecting the network accessories to be in and we are already have prepared for network installation. the Computer lab network diagram have already been drawn by our network team.
Things are sounding good at the moment.

to side track a bit, last week lecturers at KCN were being trained how to use Curriculum management system (CMS) built on moodle. it was an exciting event were lecturers create e-resources and link them to CMS from a network folder

ICT is considered a critical tool in preparing and educating students with the required skills for the global workplace. It educates students so that they can continually adapt to a work world of continuous technological innovations and makes it easier for students to access knowledge. ICT is regarded as an engine for growth and tool for empowerment, with profound implications for education change and socio-economic development.
Kamuzu College of Nursing (KCN) is a constituent college of the University Of Malawi (UNIMA) which has two campuses in Lilongwe and Blantyre, separated by a distance of about 300 kilometres, and major clinical sites in Blantyre, Lilongwe, Zomba and Mzuzu. Traced back from 1965 when it was called a National School of Nursing, and then upgraded to a full constituent college in 1979, the college has been offering a variety of courses in the fields of Nursing and Midwifery.

KCN has an intake of students 120 every year, and it will increase to 200 students enrolled this year, as far as KCN is increasing intake it has challenges of resources in which it has, one of them being access to computers. KCN has two computer lab in Lilongwe, one 20 seater lab and the other 45 seater lab. It also has a 20 seater computer lab in Blantyre 300 Kilometers away. Due to student congestion and scramble for use of the few computers, the college thought it wise to seek help to Alex Antener who, together with the support of e-vision (founded by da.tu.ma AG) and IT point, was providing 40 thin client computers and servers.
This project is being named “Exterminate all the brutes”, currently the servers and thin-clients were bought and delivered to Kamuzu college of Nursing. The servers were mounted on the rack, and Ubuntu was installed on them with LTSP service inbuilt, the service was tested and works perfectly.
Currently the Network accessories and the monitors are being procured by the college.

In my next blog I will do a technical step by step on how we installed Ubuntu and LTSP in IBM servers

Here are some pictures of KCN campus and a few key people around:

The following photos document the raided FMB Branch in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi.

FMB Bank Malawi

Good people of Malawi!

Regarding this alarming and critical issue on internet blocking policies, MACRA Act and media control, I would like to suggest to connect and exchange information in a more reliable, less controllable and more accessible way, which is “good old IRC”! 😎

There is a channel #malawi on irc.freenode.net. For those who are not familiar with IRC (Internet Relay Chat), the easiest is to get an IRC Client and connect to the server chat.freenode.net, then entering the #malawi channel (e.g. command /join #malawi). One can also use the web frontend.

All the best, Lx

P.S. For those of you who’d like to know how to easily access the internet anonymously with a simple SSH tunnel, I’d like to recommend this blog post.

Part 1 Introduction

Part 2 The Story of From Kamuzu then Bingu

Public Lecture Pt01 Preamble

Public Lecture Pt02 The Yoke of Colonialism

Public Lecture Pt03 Political Independence

Public Lecture Pt04 Sovereignty

Public Lecture Pt05 Human Rights and Civil Liberties

Public Lecture Pt06 Governance

Public Lecture Pt07 Policy Proposals

Public Lecture Pt08 Governing Malawi

Public Lecture Pt09 Honest Government

Public Lecture Pt10 Forex Problems

Public Lecture Pt11 Zero Deficit Budget

Public Lecture Pt12 Fuel Problems

Public Lecture Pt13 Energy Supply

Public Lecture Pt14 Conclusion

Public Lecture Pt16 Panelists Closing Remarks

Public Lecture Pt17 Bingu Closing Remarks

Source: Malawi, the warm heart of Africa

=^.^=

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

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.