Hello again after a long time away from writing. Since I wrote last, I took a nice trip around the west coast, then hung around California doing some IT work. Then I moved to Lausanne, Switzerland where I studied French for two months for 4.5 hours a day. I also enjoyed riding my bike a lot, up to 200 km a week, through the Swiss countryside. I moved to Geneva and stayed with friends there during September and some of October. I volunteered at MSF Switzerland’s headquarters, doing special projects for the Logistics department there and continuing my French with a private tutor. ...

This came from a heretical Lutheran friend of mine: Vatican airline takes to the skies I love the Ryanair quote: “Ryanair already performs miracles that even the Pope’s boss can’t rival, by delivering pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela for the heavenly price of 10 euros,” Ryanair said in a statement. So many questions: Will the Swiss Guard perform TSA or Air Marshal duties? Will they get to carry their halberds? ...

I have been playing around with OpenWRT recently, to see what IT tools you could deploy to the bush using cheap, low power computers as a base. One of the really interesting things about writing systems to live in the embedded Linux world is that you want to try to do as much as possible with the stuff that’s there out of the box. This is because smarter people than me have stuffed the tiny 8 meg flash images with useful tools, leaving no room for my bloated Perl-ware. So the question becomes, how can I live with what they gave me and still get what I want done. ...

I have recently been talking with some folks about IT tools for humanitarian aid workers. I gave a real-world reality check to them, not to discourage them, but to make sure they knew their audience as well as possible. After all, what good is a tool that looks good in demos, but fails with the users? A good step towards avoiding abject failure is to sit with your users and watch them work. That’s not so easy with humanitarian field workers. A tolerable substitute is to collect testimonies from them with the same kind of data, and try to design a system that has a chance of working in the context. ...

Check out the great blogs at MSF Canada. The quote in the title came from Made in Bangladesh by Julia Payson. James Maskalyk is also writing sublime postings. My mom asked me, “How come MSF Canada’s volunteers get to blog and you couldn’t?” The answer is just a matter of comfort level with the new medium. Like all organizations have in the last few years, MSF is currently digesting what blogs mean and how they can be used. It is not much of a surprise to me that MSF Canada, some of whose volunteers work at MSF Holland, would be ahead of the curve on this one. Canada is a small place full of curious people. Of course they are going to experiment with blogs! ...

Here’s a new book from two great guys in the Unix/Internet/Cranky-old-bastards community (of which I am apparently a member, based on the third category). The Complete April Fools RFCs by Thomas A. Limoncelli and Peter J. Salus. You an buy it on Amazon here. According to Tom: This is a compilation of the best April Fools jokes created by the IETF, the group that creates the standards for how the Internet works. It’s pretty technical but fun to read for anyone that is in software development, system administration, or any kind of computer geek. A good, cheap, gift for the geek that has everything and is impossible to shop for. ...

Here’s my problem. I work for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). I go out to the bush for 6 months and have only very low bandwidth access to e-mail, so no podcasts! It gets lonely and boring out there sometimes. We try to bring things with us to entertain ourselves, but it’s never really enough, and it is not topical. In MSF we are lucky that it is fairly easy to get postal mail, because we have a lot of people coming and going from the field, and a well developed system of “pony express” mail. ...

I last wrote from Padang, where we were looking into the state of the technology and looking to see if NGOs responding to the earthquake there needed help with it. What we found is that the technology needs were well in hand, either because the needs were not dire or because people had what they needed already. We met the operator of a small wireless ISP who educated us on where he buys equipment, how much locally purchased things like towers cost, and so on. It was a really excellent visit. ...

So I have neglected to write an update for a very long time. Here’s a tiny update to give you a taste of things to come in the next few weeks. I got back from Morocco and settled into my home away from home in Switzerland. I met Marina, a former coworker from MSF who I met in Liberia. We traveled around Switzerland seeing old friends of hers. I practiced some Italian, went cross country skiing, and spent quite a while sick as a dog from a stupid cold I got in Ticino. ...

I have from time to time astonished, annoyed, or otherwise aggrieved my friends by denying that greenhouse gases cause climate change. This is like standing up in an atheist convention and yelling, “Long Live the Pope!” Everyone knows that all civilized people believe in Global Warming, and the Grand Conspiracy to Prop Up Big Oil by Denying the Action of Greenhouse Gases. It gets even uglier because these days I mostly hang around Europeans, who have been brainwashed about the Global Warming story for much longer than Americans, and consider it one more indication that they are the more highly advanced lifeforms. (Regarding foreign policy and cheese, I will admit that Europeans are in fact more advanced lifeforms than Americans. The jury is still out on the state of the press, as I happened to read a few UK celebrity rags recently, and it appears that not even American journalism has yet fallen that low. But I digress.) ...