Kampala

The first installations I did was in East Africa, Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and Kampala. My first trip was kind of hectic, the logistics was screwed up totally and we had a lot to learn.

Our first mistake was thinking that renting a car and self driving is a good idea. The roads in these cities are atrocious, and the drivers worse. And the irony is that for the same money you can get a full time driver with a car of the same quality. Anyway on this first trip I was driving around in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi dodging potholes and Kamikazes in cars.

We assumed that TV and radio stations would be good at technology and decided to install our computers at the broadcasters premises. I’m sure you know about assumptions and what they do to you and me. Well to say the least these guys may know something about broadcasting but there was very little understanding of computers, the systems we installed seemed like black magic and mentioning the word linux caused blank looks from all concerned.

The other mistake was thinking that communications systems are similar to that in South Africa and that because we only need to upload a few kilobytes a day to the server back home that dial up internet will be OK. It is up to the point you want to do maintenance and have to dial into the system from South Africa.

Dar es Salaam is actually quite a nice city especially the older part of town where I found some very nice places to eat. Unfortunately DTV where I had to install the computer were a bit surprised, they expected me much later.

Street in front of DTV - Dar es Salaam

The computer installation was quite simple except that it was mostly a hurry up and wait situation and I did not get to the roof, DTV had an antenna that worked well.

Next Stop Nairobi: And I find out the computers are stuck in customs with no hope of getting them out in the next two days. This caused some hectic rebooking of flights causing me to catch the last flight out of Nairobi to Entebi and booking into the Kampala Sheraton at about 1 am.

The next day I meet up with Alex from TV Africa who was quite helpful and surprisingly he had an ISP lined up in the same building as TVA, we got a full internet connection with public IP address from them. TVA had quite a weird array of antennas on their balcony all pointing at a nearby hill with a massive transmission mast on it. There was also quite a nice view of Uganda’s parliament.

Kampala Antennas

The Kampala installation went quite smoothly with only one snag. The only flight I could get back to Nairobi was the very early 5 am flight. This meant leaving Kampala at 2 am to get to the airport in time. This meant about 5 hours sleep in 48 hours, which is no fun at all. I also had one of the most bizarre moments at Entebbe airport. Going through emigration the guy checking passports asks me “Are you a businessman?”, I answer “Yes” and he asks “When are you going to the moon?” My half asleep brain really struggled with this line of interrogation until I realised he was referring to Mark Shuttleworth’s space trip. The guy was just being friendly.

Fairview Hotel Garden

Back in Nairobi I was actually quite happy to hear that the computers haven’t cleared customs yet. I had time to book into the lovely, very colonial Fairview Hotel and go to bed. The only damper on the proceedings were the gunshots going of just after I checked in and the hotel staff all saying “Gunshots Sir? No we didn’t hear any shots”. OF course the next morning when I walk out the front gate I find that the Israeli embassy is opposite the hotel. Half the Kenyan army were standing around looking menacing. With no one saying anything I assumed someone tried to attack the embassy the previous day and probably failed miserably. The Kenian army then showed up with a token presence to look as if they cared. Anyway there were no other incidents during the two days I was there.

Nairobi

I go to GTV who were just down the road to do the installation, again the radio and TV part is well sorted at the TV station but computers are a black art. An additional complication is that they don’t have any means of dialing out directly except for their fax line which, of course, they don’t want to give up. I manage to convince them eventually that the computer will actually dial four o’clock in the morning so it won’t interfere with their fax line. In the process I found out that 4 hour power failures are quite normal in Kenya. (At that time power failures did not happen in South Africa, of course it is very different now). Luckily, because they broadcast from the top of the building GTV had a decent generator set to keep them going, I guess they had big diesel tanks.

We were lucky to be able to swop flights easily when we could not get the computers out of customs in Kenya. If not it, I probably would have wasted a great deal of time and would have needed to fly there again. I was really happy to be back in South Africa after this very hectic trip.

To my surprise I found lots of info on past events but very little about upcoming events and no Boekehuis website. Why the surprise? Well “Die Boekehuis” is a very successful bookshop specialising in South African and World Literature. In 2006 they got listed by the International Booksellers Federation’s list of 50 unique bookshops in the world. Everyone in Johannesburg that I know, who has a real interest in books knows about them so they are successful.

I visited “Die Boekehuis” last week and asked: “Why don’t you have a web presence?” The answer was simple: “We don’t really have the time to properly maintain it.” They did however offer to put me on the announcement e-mail list for “Saturday Voices”. You can ask nicely for the same by mailing boekehuis@boekehuis.co.za.

This made me think and ask the question: “Does a small, maybe niche business really need a presence on the world wide web to be successful?” Taking “Die Boekehuis” and my own small buisiness as examples, no, not really. I was also simply too busy to maintain anything but a single homepage for my business. My work came via “word of mouth” advertising from mostly happy customers. “Word of mouth” seems to work even better for “Die Boekehuis”.

When I started out as a small consulting business everyone told me, I must get onto the web. Being someone that actually sells and maintains computer systems I believed them. As I said above all this turned out to be wrong. In fact in 8 years I got one serious enquiry via the website, unfortunately the person was in the USA so I couldn’t help him.

No you don’t need the web to sell 4000 year old technology. It seems that you don’t even need the web to sell brand new technology.

Amazon.com probably disagrees.

For years I used a mail client called Mutt. This was mostly because I spend my time using terminals, but also because it was the best available at the time. Mutt does not have a pretty face and definitely does not have any pretty pictures unless you ask it to show them to you. I then bought a Mac and started to use the Mac mail client.

Mail on the Mac actually performs its job quite well. It manages to sort mail according to thread (an essential feature if you subscribe to busy mail lists) pretty well. Mail also has a reasonable filter to move emails into folders and recognise junk mail. It certainly performs way better that the two offerings from Microsoft that still after many incarnations cannot sort messages properly.

Lately I noticed that my backlog of mail became larger and larger. I decided to bite the bullit and download the mutt sourcecode to compile it on the Mac. This was quite painless and pretty quickly I was able to dig up my old muttrc (configuration file) and with a few tweaks I was running mutt on the Mac.

What a pleasure! I halved the daily time I spend on e-mail and I also get through the busy lists like the postfix mail list in reasonable time.

To learn more about mutt see The Mutt E-Mail Client and My first mutt

Oh yes before I forget, if you still suffer using windows do not despair, mutt is available for Windows.

Cuil claims to be the world’s biggest internet index. I don’t really care as long as I can get relevant results from them. Unfortunately the few searches I did, did not come close to giving me relevant (enough) results. There was also a problem that the same search would give different results on different occasions or even worse it would give results with say six pages and one of the pages would suddenly say We didn’t find any results for “foo" but all the other pages would have some results. Hopefully they will sort out these issues.

I do like the presentation of results and they have some nice features to drill down e.g. if you search for a word you get tabs at the top of the page with other word combinations that appear often with the word you searched for. Try searching for "retief" to see what I mean. On the whole I don’t think they are up there with google yet. Searching for "grumpy old techie" on google gives you this blog in the first ten hits. At cuil I couldn’t find a thing about this blog or the other grumpy old techie at http://www.internetevolution.com

I will probably give cuil another try in a week or two but for now google still rules the search engine market.

You may ask “What is a System Administrator?”

The answers you will find at http://www.sysadminday.com/ are as good as any. Being a System Administrator is a somewhat stressful job and turns you into a cynic very quickly (see http://www.sysadminday.com/time.html ) and you start hanging out in places like the scary devil monastery. Your (l)users also stop talking to you mainly out of fear of hearing the truth because the last time they complained about not getting e-mail you answered “Well, maybe nobody likes you anymore”

Why does one stay a System Administrator then if the stress is so much. You will find the answer in the scary devil monastery FAQ

Sysadmins are driven by a desire to _make_it_work_. We loathe non-functioning
pieces of crap. Similarly, we hate seeing equipment working at substantially
below its potential due to moronic admin decisions.

After a while, you quit and go to work for somewhere else, where you’re
promised you won’t have to be a sysadmin.
But the machine on your desk crashes every five minutes…

Andrew is a very competent sysadmin and if he is battling what is Eric Raymond’s poor Aunt Tilly doing with this lot. 

The problem however is that very often the pretty so called WYSIWYG software simply refuses to give you what you want but that 20 year old program produces perfect results even if it doesn’t provide you with pretty pictures and dancing girls when you enter the data.

Besides text processing I see rants about these problems very often in discussions about genealogy programs. Very often the new stuff simply do not match the convenience  and ease of use of the older trusted programs. 

Microsoft created the expectation of backward binary  compatibility which made software vendors lazy and users could become set in their ways. Apple does provide much shorter guarantees of backward compatibily which keep vendors on their toes, but of course the open source way is by far the best because you only need a decent compiler to keep your software running on newer systems.

Enjoy Andrew’s Post:

I’m preaching to the choir, but anyhow, it’s a fun story.  If I had more fun, I’d blog.

My dad’s Word Perfect 5.1 has been very happy for many years in a DOS box under Windows 3.1.  It is the platform of choice - but not suitable for a new laptop which does not even have a parallel port for DOS printing.  Migrating to OpenOffice would have been nice (and it’s formula editor is okay), but the WordPerfect import filter for OpenOffice drops WordPerfect equations (it’s a planned feature - http://libwpd.sourceforge.net/features.html).

WordPerfect 5.1 happens to run just fine on dosemu under Linux.  It even works, almost out of the box, and pressing Shift+F1 to configure brought back memories:

 - Tell Wordperfect it has a VGA adapter 640×480x16 colours

 - Tell WordPerfect it has an AppleLaserwriter printer (Postscript)

 - Tell /etc/dosemurc that raw mode (”lpr -r”) is not the thing, but “lpr” is.

However, under that great and impressive flagship product punted by Microsoft under the name “Vista”, there is a great and impressive raft of problems:

- Full screen mode is not supported (is this some kind of wierd “feature”?).  You can only run in a graphics box.

- Graphics mode is not supported!  You can’t do a print preview.  When you try it, Vista pops up an “Abort/Ignore” dialog box which quits or crashes the application.

 - You can (according to rumour) do raw printing, but to do cooked printing (ie. print to the current Windows printer) requires a stack of add-on software.  Coincidentally, this same software (ghostscript) came with my Linux distribution.

In the good old days, Windows 95 would find the ISA IRQ and port numbers for the Linux installation.  A few years down the line, you use Linux to find the appropriate driver for some stubborn PCI device.  And now, it seems the only proper way to run legacy Microsoft platform stuff is to use Linux.  I predict that in 15 years time, no Microsoft product will be able to read today’s OOXML.  The only way to open them will be to use OpenOffice.  In 25 years, probably the only way to get today’s Windows applications to run properly will be wine, since Microsoft stuff will have auto-expired (windows cannot start, since your licence key is invalid …)

Because the systems monitor radio and television broadcasts there is always an antenna involved in the installation. Hence the title of this post “Africa from the rooftops” because the Antenna always sits on top of the roof and I get to climb up to make sure in is installed properly.

In the next few weeks I will post my experiences in the various countries I visited. Hopefully it will not make you throw your hands up in despair, like I very often wanted to do. Technical work and specifically internet related work is really frustrating in Africa.  The reward however is going to places where your friends will never go and of course seeing them (the places, not your friends) from the rooftops, very often the highest building in the city.

In most cases people are really keen to help you out and support you, but the resources are just limited. Try to ping 196.201.4.42 a machine in malawi to see what I mean. Doing remote maintenance is like wading through tar.

My first trip for one of these installations was relatively tame to Lesotho but the next one involved getting into the Ivory Coast without a visa. To find out how to end up in that mess watch this space.

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