jra's thoughts

Month: October 2008

  • Same conversation, different venue

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    The dirty secret of aid work… it always comes down to this… the navel-gazing, “why am I here”, “why is it so ineffective” conversation. Usually it happens around the campfire, over a bottle of locally made beer, or perhaps for the lucky coordination team in the capital city, at the nearby expat-only restaurant over a…

  • 21 words that should change your life (but probably won’t)

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    Clarity on what’s wrong with our economy and our society, and advice on how to correct it, all in just 3 lines, and 21 words: You buy things and you don’t need. With money that you don’t have. To impress people that you don’t even like. From Aaron Stewart, “Our economic woes in three lines“.

  • dnsmasq versus gPXE

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    gPXE and dnsmasq do not get along, beware. gPXE wants to find the boot filename in the dedicated slot in the reply packet. dnsmasq does something clever/stupid (I’m not sure which) and puts it someplace else. You have to use the –dhcp-no-override option to dnsmasq to make gPXE see the filename. I don’t have proof,…

  • And now a word from your local public health authorities…

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    Headline from a Scientific American blog posting: Measles is back, and it’s because your kids aren’t vaccinated There was a measles epidemic in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland this year. MSF was thinking about intervening and setting up a vaccination site in Place Ripon, but the corrupt, inefficient, and chronically underfunded local health authorities…

  • Let’s Map Africa!

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    I found a great post on Google’s Africa blog today announcing Map Maker, a wiki-like way of increasing Google Map’s coverage of places where there’s very little data available for them to start with. As with everything Google, the launch version is a little not-smooth, and it is hard to understand how the moderation feature…

  • SneakerNet Kiosk

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    I was poking around on Kunnafoni to see what they are up to. Check out la Source (“the spring”) a kiosk that makes software and media available for installation onto USB keys. My readers are English speaking, so I will include subtitles for the video here. Adjust your windows so you can see both and…

  • Morning Coffee Notes

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    With apologies to Dave for the title… This morning I see that Jon over at AidWorkerDaily.com has added his ideas to my article there, and asked me to comment. I did, go read it. While I was researching stuff for my reply, I stumbled across these resources on African IT that I’m going to start…

  • Crowd control in Ethiopia

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    My major job in Ethiopia this summer was crowd control. As a log, I am responsible for setting up the facilities where we work — a little bit of pioneering merit badge, architecture, and a whole lot of crowd control. Here are two pictures from MSF’s interventions in Ethiopia that give you an idea of…

  • The real reason for Google Books

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    I was reading about vdash and inside the presentation, I found this interesting quote: “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk (at Google). “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” That came from George Dyson, in this article on…