Alex Little

Maybe I didn’t need to buy myself GPS after all… (from tecznotes):

Walking Papers is a website and a service designed to close this final loop by providing OpenStreetMap print maps that can be marked up with a pen, scanned back into the computer, and traced using OSM’s regular web-based editor, Potlatch. It’s designed for the casual mapper who doesn’t want to fill their pockets with gadgets to record what’s around them, the social mapper who might be out and about taking notes and comparing them with friends, and the opportunistic mapper who might make notes during a commute or a walk if they had a notebook-sized slip of paper to write on. Finally, it’s designed for the luddite mapper who would like to help the OpenStreetMap project but needs help from a distributed community to convert their handwritten annotations into OpenStreetMap’s tagged data and local conventions.

Recently I was sent link to Chisimba, a ‘Web 2.0 enabled, Free Software development framework for creating web and distributed applications’, developed by African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR). From the info on the site it looked an interesting project, although my first impression was that its trying to be all things to everyone, with modules for blogs, wikis, CMS, LMS and more. It appears to have taken elements from Moodle, Joomla, Drupal and Elgg and packaged them all into one application, which may or may not be a good thing.

On downloading and installing on my laptop, I soon found that this was still very much a work in progress, as there appeared to be lots of little bugs/annoyances that would probably have been resolved if it was a little more developed. A very minor example of this was the fact that the next/previous buttons on the installation were the wrong way round (for me anyway), with next being on the left hand side and prevous on the right, rather than the more usual arrangement. The installation itself was a little fiddly, however that was mainly because I had to upgrade my version of PHP, install some PHP libraries and some PEAR libraries too, before it would install.

A lot of effort seems to have gone into creating modules, 100′s of them by the looks of it, so thought I’d take a look at installing the blog module. Unfortunately the automatic ‘download and install’ kept giving me an error, so then tried an offline installation of the module – a 35Mb download of all(?) the modules is available – but I couldn’t find any info on how to install a module in this way. I’ve posted a query on their discussion forums, so hopefully I’ll get a reply to have this resolved soon.

Overall I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t have a proper play with the modules, but will come back to it once I get a resolution as to how to install them. Having said that I can’t see this framework taking off, there are many other established frameworks out there and I don’t think Chisimba offers anything different enough from these.

The Guardian website has an article about whether it is better to dump old computer equipment or donate it to charity (possibly for sending out to developing countries).
Seems a crazy argument to me that PCs, laptops etc. shouldn’t be donated (and instead be dumped), the reasoning given is that extending their lifetime would increase emissions, due to:

subsequent e-missions – the greenhouse gases incurred by the internet itself

This appears to ignore the fact that if a PC or laptop isn’t donated, then the organisation might buy new equipment anyway.

Although I don’t agree with dumping old equipment, I have reservations about sending developing countries what to Europe/US is old or obsolete equipment, but expecting it to be good enough for poorer countries. In some situations, yes it may be that something is better than nothing, but in others it feels very wrong to expect people/countries to develop properly using others’ cast offs.

For example, where I’ve been working, the department is very short of computers (with rapidly increasing student numbers), but computer science students cannot gain good practical computer skills (many students have hardly used a computer before starting their degree) on a 6 or 7 year old PC with 128 Mb Ram attempting to run XP.

As an aside, another factor in donated equipment is that some countries put up barriers on allowing computer equipment to be imported. For example, Ethiopia applies a 100% import tax on any electrical equipment. I’m not sure if other countries impose similar taxes.

[Image from Extra Ketchup: http://www.flickr.com/photos/extraketchup/737490219/]