Alex Little

On Wednesday we will be holding the orientation workshop for the Digital Campus project, so there is much to be getting on with in preparation for this. The workshop is just to introduce the selected teachers to the training course, answer their queries and, most importantly, arrange the schedule for the training over the coming semester.

All seems to be progressing well, with a few minor hiccups. We had some banner made and put up around the campuses to promote the workshop (see photo). I also wanted to get the syllabus/brochure colour copied, but then I found out how much this was going to cost – 25 copies of 12 page brochure at 5 birr per page – makes 1500 birr (approx 150 USD), so not exactly good use of money.

Speaking of money, a transfer arrived into my bank from Alcala Uni, so I’m now able to purchase the monitors, keyboards etc and also pay the first installment for the tables we’re having made. Understandably, the university was a little wary about transferring money into a personal bank account of some random person in Africa – I’ve been told they thought the money may end up with Somalian pirates!

The networking of the lab is almost complete, we just need the electrical work completed so the switches etc can be tested properly. We also need to find someone who can sign for the switches from the store and take ongoing responsibility for them – this isn’t as easy as it may first sound. ICT think the colleges should sign and take responsibility, then the colleges think it should be ICT’s job – bit of a catch 22.

We did have a minor disaster this week with one of the servers – a power supply failure. On Wednesday morning it looked as if ETC had completed the work on the DNS server, to make our elearning server available off campus using the domain name. But just as i was checking this, there was a power fluctuation and although the server is plugged into a UPS, the server power supply failed. I was a little unsure that the power supply was the only problem, until we tested with the supply from another (identical) server. It will now be out of action for a long time, until new one can be purchased (imported) – no 24/7 callout cover contracts here. So I’m now in the process of moving the site over to another server so it’s available until the server is fixed.

Fingers crossed that all will go well at the orientation workshop.

When I got into work today many of my colleagues have been commenting about the fact that I was on Ethiopian TV yesterday – it’s from when we were interviewed at the Meskel celebrations in Adigrat a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, not having a TV at home, I missed it completely and it’s unlikely there’ll be a repeat – so will just have to wait for the DVD to be issued

Slightly less high profile, I was asked a few weeks ago to write an article for the Digital Planet blog site about my experiences of living and working in Ethiopia, at the end of last week my article was posted up on their site, you can have a read at: The hidden issues of IT development in Ethiopia.

Other significant developments this week include:

• Approval of the Mekelle University Elearning Strategy. This was actually much easier than I thought it would be – the strategy is based on a JISC template, geared towards UK universities and other HEIs, but was relatively straightforward for us to adapt for use here.
• Upgrading of university internet connection – to 10Mb. A proposal is underway to double the speed of the connection – but I’m unsure yet when this is likely to happen. With all the new computer labs being built it will be important to ensure that the internet speed is also increased. The cost of this will be huge, an extra 5Mb will cost 10,000 US dollars per month.
• Work has now started on the network installation in the new Computer Science building – the same week that students return to lectures for the coming academic year. Unfortunately though, only 12 computers are currently working for the 100 third year students to use. I’ve suggested that one of the labs currently reserved for training is opened up for students to use. A proposal has been made to get nearly 200 new computers for the department, but is will take some time for the purchase of these to be processed and approved – likely to be several months.
• I’ve been asked to help run a workshop for the University management to persuade then that the university should adopt and open source policy – and that . There’s already been some success in this area, more IT staff are using Ubuntu and also in the Computer Science department.

Just over a week ago the new intake of volunteers arrived in their placement, so the arrival of Martin, my new housemate has doubled the number of VSO volunteers in Mekelle – ok, Marcel is also still in his placement, but is currently back home in Australia for a break.

So have spent the last week or so trying to introduce Martin to life in Mekelle – seems to be going well so far. We had ‘fun’ last weekend trying to get a wardrobe from the VSO furniture store last weekend. Firstly we’d been given the wrong address, which explained why the keys we’d got didn’t fit. When we got into the store, to be able to remove a wardrobe, almost all the other furniture had to be moved/rearranged first. After we’d finally extracted the wardrobe from the store it wouldn’t fit through the door in the compound gate. No problem you may think – open the gates – but they’d been concreted shut. So after taking the wardrobe to pieces we finally got it out into a pick-up to take back to our house.

This weekend, Mike, one of the new volunteers at Maychew Technical College came to visit us in Mekelle to shop for all those things he can’t buy there. He’s come as a n IT advisor at the college, so I’ve invited him to come and have a look at what we’re doing at the Uni here. Would also be good for me to go and see what they’re up to down in Maychew.

Work has been slowly progressing in the labs – our new Cisco switches have now arrived – after the supplier tried to make a bit of extra money for himself by giving us DLink hubs and assuming we’d either not notice or not know any better. The electrical works still needs to be finished in the lab before we can test the new network. I’ve had to ask them to redo some of the work to align the sockets on the wall – the photo shows the current state. Although it may feel a little petty to complain about things like this, my feeling is that if it’s allowed to pass this time, it sets a precedent of what is acceptable quality, when actually it takes very little effort to get right in the first place.

The Computer Science department is still in the process of moving, but there’s not a hope of everything being ready for the new semester which starts next week. Although the new dept still has no network installed and is unlikely to do so for several weeks (and be connected to the rest of the campus network), I arranged to run some training for the lab technicians last Thursday. So half an hour after we were meant to have started, no one had appeared. Whilst on the phone to the department head, one of the technicians arrived. The others technicians weren’t going to be able to come, so I thought I’d continue anyway. We then found that the only lab we had a key for didn’t have any electricity supply to the sockets. The lights were on, but the electrical work hadn’t been finished. I then abandoned the training – maybe more will turn up next time.

I did however make some progress in other areas. I’ve been trying to get ETC to put a record in their DNS database for our e-learning website – but have had little luck being put through to the right person. On Thursday afternoon, Habtom (assistant head of ICT dept) and I went to see the head of ETC in Tigray. So, on Friday afternoon we finally managed to get the correct phone number for the head of the DNS servers in Addis, and we’re making progress. Originally, in Mekelle, they wanted to charge us 1000 birr for the entry, despite my explanation that it was only a subdomain we wanted not, a full new domain. Fortunately the, more technically aware, person in Addis isn’t going to charge us this and even suggested that he’d help us get our own public DNS server set up at the Uni here. So Friday ended with some good news – just need to make sure I follow it up this week.

Last weekend was Meskel – a celebration of the finding of the true cross. Last year I’d arrived in Mekelle just in time to celebrate Meskel so this year we were going to head up to Adigrat as there is a bigger celebration there. Unfortunately all the hotels there were booked up, so we didn’t go in the evening. Instead we stayed in Mekelle and headed up the mountain overlooking town to watch the bonfire being lit and the torchlit procession down into town – much as we had done last year.

Early on Sunday morning, we drove up to Adigrat just for the day to see the daytime Meskel celebrations there, held in the football stadium, a bonfire ready to be lit on the centre spot and the whole town out in their traditional clothes. First a few speeches by some of the chief priests from the region, then the fire was lit and people used the ashes from the fire to draw crosses on their foreheads.

On our way back into town we stopped at a friends family’s cafe for a couple of drinks, where a TV crew from Ethiopian TV (ETV) interviewed us. So if you’re able to receive ETV, we may be on sometime this Sunday. In case you miss us on TV here are a few photos:

Head priest returning after lighting the bonfire

Spectators in the grandstand

Waiting for the fire to die down to collect ashes

One of the horse riders who had been racing around the stadium before the fire

Interview for ETV

When was back in the UK I made a lot of use of RememberTheMilk (RTM), after a bit of a play around with a number of ‘to do’ applications. Now, without good internet access I’m unable to make much use of RTM. I know it’s meant to have an offline mode (using Google Gears), but I’ve never managed to have that working reliably.

Since being in Ethiopia, I was back to using a notebook and pen for keeping track of things I needed to do – which, obviously worked anywhere, anytime, but isn’t great at reminding you which things need to be done in the future.

I started having a look at the programs available in Ubuntu and found Tomboy notes (http://www.gnome.org/projects/tomboy/). There are other to do applications but none appeared to allow synchronisation (the most useful feature in my opinion) between different computers. Although Tomboy is not really a to do list application I have been able to use it as such. I have a number of notebooks, one of which is called ‘todo’ (unsurprisingly), then I add notes (tasks), the title preceded with the date the task needs to be done, in the format YYYY-MM-DD (so they keep in proper date order). This has proved to work well over the last couple of months and I’ve had no problems at all.

After having moved the our elearning server over from the Business Campus over to the main data centre at Arid Campus, I was then ready to change the operating system. Originally the server was running Windows Server 2003, but all the rest of the main University server are running either Debian or Ubuntu – so it made sense to switch over to one of these for consistency if nothing else

So yesterday morning I backed up the Moodle database, files etc and set about installing Ubuntu – it was actually far quicker than I’d first thought it would be. Within an hour I had the basic system back up and running, with just a few small tweaks left to do. So I was very pleased there weren’t any major disasters getting this set up. The only slight issue I found was that I also upgraded Moodle from 1.9.3 to 1.9.5 and it complained about the database not being unicode which was slightly puzzling, all I needed to do was run:

ALTER DATABASE `moodle` CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

and then the Moodle upgrade continued normally without any complaints.

Since the change of operating system I’ve already found a number of advantages:

1. I can now set this server up as a cache form Ubuntu/Debian desktop updates – using apt-cacher (thanks to Liam for the info and guide on getting this set up). There are already a number of people using Ubuntu here on their desktop, and the more bandwidth is saved by using apt-cacher. Now just to let people know how to configure it on their machines.
2. ClamAV works much better with Moodle/Unix than it does with Windows. It was possible to get working with Windows, but needed a bit of tweaking (see: http://alexlittle.net/blog/2008/10/07/ive-finally-made-some-progress/).
3. It seems much faster in generating pages (ok, I don’t have any benchmarks to verify this – but the site generally feels much more responsive than it previously did.)

So I’m pleased to have finally made the change, plus there are more staff (usually from IT dept) beginning to use Ubuntu.

Although there seems to be plenty of talk on the new broadband internet connection for East Africa, for me it only means that Ethiopia will get yet further behind it’s neighbours. Being an undersea cable, it’s natural that coastal countries would be first to benefit, but there has been little (no?) mention of Ethiopia being connected, despite other landlocked countries (Uganda, Rwanda etc) being talked about. The BBC article talks about the expense and slow speed of internet access in Kenya, but if those connection speeds were available at those prices in Ethiopia – that would represent a huge step forward. The new faster connections are a great for some countries, but remember there is still a long way to go in improving internet access across the region.

Last weekend I had a fantastic trip down to Lalibela (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lalibela). It’s one of the main tourist attractions in Ethiopia and, in my opinion, was far more worthwhile visiting than Axum. Although a small city, it feels like a small village, with very few large concrete building common elsewhere. I guess this has a lot to do with it’s UNESCO World Heritage site status – only slight ruined by the huge covers that have been erected over some of the churches to stop them decaying further – I’m sure there are ways this could have been done to fit in better with the local surroundings.

If was only a flying visit for us, 6 of us drove down via Samre and Sekota, this is the cross country short cut, around 300km on unpaved roads against over 500km if you go the paved route. In the entire 7 hour journey we only saw one other vehicle on the road.

On Saturday morning we visited, with our excellent guide, the amazing 11 rock churches in the two main church complexes in the centre of Lalibela. Around 800 or 900 years old, the churches have been carved down into the rock, some consisting of only one solid piece of rock:

The priests here seemed much amiable to tourists, especially compared to some priests at the rock churches around Tigray and Mekelle.

In the afternoon, we took a trip on mules up to another church, Asheton Mariam, around 7km from town. Unfortunately they’d doubled the entrance fee a couple of days before (for the Ethiopian New Year), and we were all a little reluctant to pay 100 birr (approx 10USD) to get in, so actually we didn’t go inside. It may seem a little odd not spending this money but it soon mounts up when you’re visiting many churches, plus all of us had residence IDs, but no discount for that.

Then on Sunday we drove back – stopping off at Yemrehanna Kristos – around 45 km form Lalibela. It’s a church and palace built inside the mouth of a cave, further back in the cave are 1000′s of skeletons of pilgrims who came to the church to die and be buried – over the course of the last several hundred years. A little gruesome, with all the skeletons are just piled up at the back, only one or two having coffins.

The traffic was rather heavy on the trip home, must have been at least 10 other vehicles on the road. It gave me chance to really try out my GPS, so now I have the entire route from Mekelle to Lalibela to upload to OpenStreetMap, plus many villages and towns on the way – few of which we found the name for.

It was a great trip and I’d recommend anyone to go and visit. Being more of a tourist town than Other places, it is more expensive to eat, drink, sleep, but certainly worth the extra money

On all the major holidays here, the telecoms company sends various greetings to all mobile phones, we also occasionally receive them from other (government) institutions. Here are 3 texts I received over the last few days:

“New Year, New Life! Test for HIV, test with your partner, get your children tested and brighten the future of your family! Free testing. Happy New Year”

“The Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation wishes all Ethiopians a happy and joyful festivity of the Ethiopian New Year 2002″

“Wish you a happy and prosperous new year. Compliance to laws including the laws governing tax and customs is basis for a sustainable growth”

From the BBC:

The world’s biggest social networking site has launched a slimmed-down version for people with slow or poor internet connections.

Facebook has said the Lite site will be faster and simpler because it offers fewer services than the main site.

Initially it is meant to support users in developing countries and where bandwidth constraints make the current version too slow to use.

Over the last few months I’ve noticed more and more people here using Facebook – the connection we’re got at the Uni has been gradually improving and it’s finally now got to the point where you can usually reliably load Facebook. But then we’re on a broadband connection – users in internet cafe’s etc have had slim chance of loading up Facebook when on a shared dial up connection. Now with Facebook Lite, I guess I’ll start to get many more friend requests…