Alex Little

Today I feel as if I’ve actually made a little progress and have achieved something. No, I still don’t have my contract signed off and sorted out – so still might not get paid for my first month. But today I managed 2 things…

Firstly I’ve managed to arrange a meeting with Abiot (head of the computer science dept) later this week to go through where the project has got to and for me to present a proposal as to what should happen next. The proposal ought to be straightforward enough to write, as it’s easy to see that the server needs to be put online and made accessible, along with a few pilot courses. The hard part is going to be actually getting any of this put into action and finding teachers willing to invest the time in supporting their students online. As the internet is so unreliable here, we’ll have to concentrate on courses that are offered on campus rather than the distance education courses, and offer the campus based students access via the intranet in the computer labs. Not really an ideal demonstration of elearning and reaching out to those students based in much more rural areas, but about the best I think we’ll be able to manage given the infrastructure.

Secondly, I’ve got our Moodle installation configured and working with Clam anti-virus – so any uploaded files are virus checked and are rejected if found to be infected. The server itself already had over 100 viruses, so they’re now cleaned up. The ClamAV settings in Moodle seemed to be designed for Unix servers, but we’re running on Windows Server 2003 and although you can enter the path to clamscan and the quarantine directory, I still couldn’t get it working. After a little digging around, I found that on Windows, you need to specify the database directory on the path (using –database=E:\ClamWin\db). This can be entered in the Moodle admin settings (though it results in a message saying the path isn’t valid – but that can be ignored). The final step was to comment out the section of code in moodle/lib/upload/lib.php which checks that the clamavpath setting is a valid file and an executable. I’m really pleased to have this fixed given the prevalence of viruses here and the high probability that any files uploaded to the server (e.g. student’s assignments) will contain viruses.

In the rest of today’s news (or whenever I manage to get this uploaded)… we now have a cleaner/maid, who will be doing all our cleaning, washing etc for us. Petrol prices here have gone up nearly 50% in a few days, so there are far fewer bajaj’s on the road. The bajaj’s are basically tut-tuts which follow set routes around the city – this combined with the removal of fuel tax rebates for drivers, means it’s not viable for them to stay on the road. Another consequence is that food prices have gone up already and I guess they’re likely to rise further.

On the agenda for this evening is to take apart one of our 4-way extension leads & surge protectors and attempt to fix without electrocuting myself! It was new a couple of weeks ago (from Addis) and now only 1 of the 4 sockets works reliably

[Update 8-Oct-08: extension lead is working fine and I'm still here!]