Something very wrong is going on on South Africa, and the world is missing it: “It is better for us to be here than go for reintegration. The South Africans want to kill us and the government is trying to kill us. Reintegration’s a death sentence. We’d rather die here together,” said Johnny Kaka. MSF is only one voice, and though they are speaking out, the immigrants in South Africa need more people to speak for them. ...

Here’s a story that’s, unfortunately, not a surprise: KINNE: And over the course of my time, as we slowly began to identify phone numbers and who belonged to what, one thing that gave me grave concern was that as we identified phone numbers, we started to find more and more and more numbers that belonged not to any organizations affiliated with terrorism or with military … with militaries of Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere, but with humanitarian aid organizations, non-governmental organizations, who include the International Red Cross, Red Crescent, Doctors Without Borders, a whole host of humanitarian aid organizations. And it also included journalists… ...

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 nice bottle of South African wine. As with everything this century, it’s moved onto the Internet. But the essential tone of the conversation, and the impossibility of resolving the problem remains. ...

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".

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, but I suspect this inflexibility in gPXE also makes it incompatible with the DHCP replies sent by qemu’s built-in DHCP server. ...

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 managed to handle the crisis themselves and MSF just monitored the situation from it’s base in Geneva. ...

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 works. Am I supposed to be able to moderate other people, or is it the invisible Hand Of Google that moderates me? I can’t figure that part out yet, but I assume it is community moderation. That’s Not Evil, and when I last checked Google was Not Evil… ...

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 click play! Hello! Hello, really! How’s it going? Fine. I’ve come to talk about la Source that I heard about the other day. It’s that? Yup. In there I can find programs, books, and videos for my mobile phone and my laptop computer? Yes. (he demos it) Do you have pirate programs in there? No! They are free programs, distributed for free. If you are an IT guy, you can even change them yourself. But how do I get the file? You choose ok, you transfer it onto your key, and you give me 100 francs. (20 cents, US) But you said it was free! Right, but I’m making it faster and easier for you to download! OK. Can you give me other stuff? In la Source you can also find movies and books (fiction, non-fiction, classics). Thanks Moussa! I will come back and buy something even bigger. This is what I was talking about on Aid Worker Daily: Open Source lets people adapt software to the circumstances they find in their culture. ...

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 following: Appfrica: African IT, Industry News and Culture Google Africa

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 what my job looked like: the lines, talking to mothers. MSF training didn’t prepare me for crowd control, which is too bad. There are some simple principles, and learning them by trial and error is dangerous and not very much fun (not for the log, not for the medical team, and especially not for the beneficiaries). The basic principle is “calm people are safe, scared people are dangerous”. Everything else follows from there. Keep people informed, and set up your site so that even if they don’t understand or can’t hear the verbal instructions, they can see what’s happening and be confident that they are waiting for something of value, and that it won’t run out before they get it. ...