Alex Little

I saw this poster on the campus where the Bar Camp is being held. I’ve not yet worked out whether basketball is considered risky or socially useful…

Introductory Bar Camp session

Just got back to my hotel after a full day at the first Bar Camp to be run in Ethiopia. I flew back to Addis yesterday morning and after catching up on a little sleep, headed over to the venue to help get set up and stayed on for the launch party in the evening – then this morning the real conference started.

Around 300 people attended today, with a really varied range of sessions happening throughout the day – from Google apps programming to participatory community planning and even a yoga session. My colleague, Goitom, from Mekelle Uni, ran a session about network centric computing architectures – covering the research he has been doing into thin-client system and labs. Even though it was much more technial than most of the other sessions, we had a good turnout, with plenty of follow up questions and discussions

Many students from Mekelle Uni managed to attend the conference so was good to see them helping out and getting involved – especially since it was a two day bus trip for them to get here.

'Ishi Beca Ciao' playing at launch party

I ran a session as an overview to our Digital Campus project, similar to the presentation I gave at Elearning Africa in May, all seemed to go well, despite it being at the end of the day and up against a parallel session where a guy from Google was giving away free t shirts!

For tomorrow, I’ve put myself forward to give a presentation about open educational resource, so will now need to get a presentation together to give.

Later this week I’m heading back over to Ethiopia to attend BarCamp Ethiopia, which looks like it’s going to be good. I’ve signed up for a few possible presentations and now that I’ve got my laptop running as an LTSP server I hope that Goitom (from Mekelle Uni) and I will be able to do a practical demo of a thin client system – rather then just telling people about how thin-clients work, I think it would be great if we could get a system set up for people to have play themselves.

After the BarCamp I head back up to Mekelle and Jaime and I will run more elearning training. We’re rerunning the basic Certificate in Online Education with new tutors from the Health Sciences college (and possibly a other staff), plus we’re starting an advanced certificate for those tutors who completed the basic certificate last year.

Will try to keep the blog updated regularly!

Heatmap with weighting applied

Following up on the playing around I was having with heatmaps the other day, I made a few updates to the heatmap.py script to allow for each point to have an associated ‘intensity’. When the points are plotted, the intensities are normalised and each point plotted with a relative intensity (as shown in the image on the right).
Few other little changes I made:

• allow the area covered by the size of the final image to be specified, rather than using the max & min x/y coordinates from the input points
• change how the the dots are built – in theory should be a little quicker – but I’ve not tested with large enough dataset to know if it makes a big difference
• in my demo script I’ve shown how you can convert the latatitude to its Mercartor projection coordinate

For those interested in the changes I made to the heatmap.py script you can download the diff and an example script. Any feedback, comments welcome

Up and running

Yesterday I came back from the Small Is… festival organised by Practical Action and Engineers without Borders (EWB).

I’d gone over partly just out of interest – when I was working at Aptivate in Cambridge I was sharing a house with some of the interns at EWB helping to organise the festival. Partly to see what my brother was up to when he runs the solar power workshops etc that he’s run at many festivals over the past few years. But also to help out Alan from Aptivate in setting up a solar powered thin-client network.

Just before I finished my short placement at Aptivate, Alan and I had spec’d out what we’d need to be able to run a small thin-client lab on solar. Alan had bought the equipment on Friday and so, Saturday, at the festival, was the time to actually try and get it all running. All worked out really well and within a couple of hours we had the system up, running and 3 terminals (including the server) connected to the internet, all running for a single solar panel.

Moving away from the rain

What we’d do differently next time:

• plug the PV panel into the battery before 3pm – so it had some time to get charged up and so demonstrate for longer
• be more consistent with the power supplies – we had 4 different power outputs that we needed to supply (5v, 12v, 16.5v and 19v). Using the same type of terminals would have helped with this – we had 4 different types of terminal.
• add up the current more carefully – we blew several 10amp fuses because we’d put too much load on
• lay our the server/terminals etc onto a board and have everything neatly arranged to screwed down, to make it easier to explain to people what was going on – rather then the spaghetti of wiring we ended up with

Equipment used:

For the PV system:

• Lorentz 95Wp PV panel (model: LA95-12S)
• Rolls 12v deep cycle battery (model: S12-128AGM)
• Morningstar SunSaver-20 charge controller (model: SS-20L-12V)
• + assorted wires, fuses etc

For the network:

• IBM Thinkpad X41 (running Ubuntu 10.04 with LTSP)
• Samsung N netbook fitted with Pixel Qi daylight readable screen (configured to PXE boot)
• Aleutia T1 fanless PC (configured to PXE boot)
• Aleutia PC (I’m not sure of the model – configured to PXE boot)
• 2x Iiyama Prolite E2271 HDS 22″ monitor – one of the only low power monitors we could find that will run from a 12v external power supply
• Netgear DS104 4 port hub
• Vodafone GSM mobile broadband dongle

From the outside

My 'hello world' heatmap

Over that past few days I’ve been playing around with creating heatmaps to overlay onto OpenStreetMap – the image on the left is where I’ve got to so far. My interest in this is for creating heatmaps from data collected during my colleagues health sciences research in Ethiopia.

There are already several programs and services available to create heatmaps, for example gheat and OpenHeatMap. But none of these quite suited me, gheat because I didn’t want to create a full tile server – just an image to overlay on a particular area of the map and OpenHeatMap because I wanted to have access to the code to tweak how I wanted.

I then found heatmap.py which (using a similar algorithm to gheat) did almost exactly what I wanted. There were only a couple of changes that I needed to make:

1) Update to account for the Mercator projection – I wanted my overlay to be on a view of the whole world (zoom level 2 in OpenStreetMap). When I first ran the program the areas over northern Europe (and others) were almost but not quite inline with the marker overlays, but this was due to the projection. I just edited the input script to convert my lat/lng coordinates into Mercator coordinates. I also hooked up the heatmap.py script to read the lat/lng coordinated from a MySQL database.

2) Allow the script to have weights against each point. The current script looks at the number of points in a particular area (or on top of each other) to generate the ‘heat’. I also wanted to allow for points to have a weight – as mentioned here. I’ve not yet implemented the weighting, but I’m not anticipating this to be too tricky. GHeat (as far as I can tell) doesn’t allow for weights on points, but OpenHeatMap does (please let me know if I’m wrong about this).

All has been much easier than I’d expected, I’ve learnt a little more about python and once I’ve got the weighting working how I’d like, then I’ll share the code back.

For the past week or so, I’ve been over in Cambridge doing a some programming work for Aptivate (a not-for-profit IT development company). It’s been good to get back into doing some programming work after quite a long break – over the past couple of years I’d only really worked on a few personal projects. Quite surprised how much I’d forgotten, but more surprised how much I’d actually managed to remember.

At the moment I’ve been working on a survey application for health centres in Rwanda, to collect baseline information about the facilities and services they’re able to provide, with a view to better target resources and measure any improvements made.

What I have found interesting has been Aptivate’s use of peer programming and agile development methods. Rather than programming alone, pairs code together. At first you may think of this as being quite an inefficient way of working, especially given a limited number of programmers and many projects to work on. But actually, I’d argue the opposite is true. Whilst working alongside someone, there is far less temptation to get distracted by checking email or wandering off onto the internet.

I’ve been caving in quite a few places in the UK, but never in the Peak District, until this weekend. I went up there with a few friends from Winchester for a long weekend to do the round trip route in Giants Hole – was a fun trip, but was very pleased the water level in the Giants Windpipe section wasn’t too high.

Here’s a video showing some of the more interesting sections (Giants Windpipe starts just after 6mins):

Will need to sort out getting a robust & waterproof camera to take down when I go next time, otherwise I just end up with a photo of us all standing outside the entrance, a bit like this…

Rob, Steve, Paul, me and Steve outside entrance to Giants Hole

I’ve just moved back to my old house in Northampton and have been trying to figure out if there is a way to get a decent broadband connection at home but without a 12+ month contract. there do seem to be a few places which offer shorter contracts (1 or 3 month notice), but then a phone line is also needed – which again, requires a 12 month contract. Plus for the short term contracts, there is a connection fee. The only place I found that would offer short term broadband plus phone was IDnet (http://www.idnet.net) – but this is going to be an expensive option. £17.99 per month for broadband, £10 per month for line rental and £47 connection fee = total of £130.97 for 3 months (or about £44 per month). I’m currently using a o2 mobile broadband dongle (£15 per month or 3Gb download), so works out at £45 for 3 months, unless I start going over the 3Gb limit (very likely). Although even with allowing for spending on extra downloads, this will still works out much cheaper. If anyone has any better, cheaper suggestions (not including hacking a neighbours wireless connection!), I’d be very interested to hear.

The main downside I’ve found with the mobile broadband is the speed, it’s noticeably slower than fixed line broadband – although with the connection speeds I had in Ethiopia, the mobile broadband in UK is a vast improvement in terms of both speed and cost. Whilst in Addis the other day I noticed that the CDMA internet connection was far slower than that available in Mekelle, I expect as a result of the number of people using CDMA now and the lack of capacity in the infrastructure. As a result more people are buying EVDO connections – these are monthly contracts and quite expensive (approx 460 birr per month minimum). If EVDO becomes too popular it’s only a matter of time before these seem slow and unreliable.

Apart from these hassles, moving back to the house has been good. Realised just how much stuff I managed to pack into the loft, so have spent the last couple of days moving everything down and getting it sorted out. Most of which I’ll get rid of in one form or another (freecycle, charity shops etc).

Visiting a school near Wukro

Yesterday, I had a visit out to Wukro, to meet some the heads from the local health bureaus and visit some schools in the area. Two of the PhD students from Mekelle have projects in this area, looking at prevalence of parasites in children and how this may be reduced. We’re investigating using phones and GPS to collect the survey data, and have it automatically sent to a server (via GPRS) when the data collector comes into a mobile reception area. We’re also looking at how learning materials and/or diagnostic tools could be made available electronically (again using phones) to the Health Extension Workers.

We visited two schools, both a fairly short distance (10-15km) from the main Mekelle to Adigrat road, but both feeling quite remote. Both were primary schools with around 1000 pupils each – but neither had access to clean water and one had no electricity – although both did have mobile phone reception.

Getting connected to GPRS ought to be relatively straightforward, however the SIM card needs to be GPRS enabled first. It’s free to enable, but isn’t automatic. We went to the ETC office in Mekelle to ask them to do this, but for some reason currently it can’t be enabled for Tigray mobile numbers (0914xxxxxx), I then asked them to enable my Addis mobile number (0910xxxxxx), but was then told it can only be enabled in Addis. So we’re a little stuck, being unable to test the GPRS availability on any of the phones that we have between us. The good news is that SIM cards are now much cheaper – 85 birr each (with 15 birr credit included), compared to the 360+ birr I paid less than a couple of years ago.

The past month has flown by, feels as if I’ve only be back for 5 minutes. I’m generally very happy with the progress we’ve made on the project over the past year. Looking forward to coming back again in September again to see how everything has moved on again.