Alex Little

Over the last week, as well as preparing for next weeks delivery of our Basic Certificate in Online Education to nearly 50 new staff, I’ve also been looking at ways in which we can extend the project. Possibilities we’re investigating include offering the certification to staff at other Ethiopian universities, testing the thin client infrastructure at another organisation and taking thin clients attached to a data projectors/whiteboards into the classroom.

Getting the network into the classroom would allow us to help close the gap between the classroom teaching and the online activities – currently they are very separate, but if students can see the Moodle content/activities in the classroom, they’re more likely to realise they can access this content and more in the computer labs. It also gives us the possibility to test out whiteboards and other technologies.

The labs we installed last November are still working well, only a few of the terminals aren’t working and these are almost all due to poor network or power connection, rather than the terminals themselves. We still have a few issues regarding getting the labs open outside normal working hours. The Health Sciences lab is well used as it’s always open during the normal working day, but we still have to work on extending these hours and also make sure we can get the Technology Institute lab open.

Mike and Elfu in the new lab

In the Technology Institute, as well as ordering several hundred new PCs (not yet all purchased/distributed) they are building a new thin client lab on a similar model to our existing lab. This lab is reusing old PCs as thin clients – with the new PCs arriving there should be plenty of old PCs available for use. It’s a huge room, space for 60 terminals. All the furniture is being produced by the university’s workshop and I was pleased to see that they are using my design for the hexagonal tables which we have in the other labs.

[Our labs need some better names - any suggestions welcome ]

Metalwork for new tables

We begin delivery of the elearning training again on Monday and we have had a lot of interest from staff. Our plan was to deliver to 15-20 staff, but we had over 50 staff asking to join. Only a few who have told us they are leaving for masters soon we’ve had to turn down. I expect that, similar to last year, we’ll have a fairly high drop out rate, but even if half complete we’ll have more than 20 new courses online for student access.

In personal news, I was very pleased to get my first shower in over a week on Friday – the water in our area of town had been completely off. The well near our house was restricting the amount of water anyone could take, despite the best rainy season for 10 years only just ending.

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

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).

On returning from Ethiopia (the second time – at Easter), my little Asus Eee PC 701 was really starting to show signs of wear – after heavy use for the previous 2 years, the trackpad buttons had started to go, plus the space bar was getting far less than responsive. So just before I returned I ordered a new Asus Eee 1008HA which arrived a day or so after I arrived back in the UK. The increased screen size, disk size and slightly larger keyboard have all been great, but there have been a few things that I’m not so keen on:

1. the USB ports are too far recessed for some of my devices (notably the CDMA mobile internet dongle) to be properly inserted, so I end up using a small USB hub or extension lead. Plus there are only 2 USB ports
2. It feels a little too fragile. The 701 was chunkier and so felt more solid, with this I feel I should be wrapping it in cotton wool before I put it in my bag. The monitor adapter (the VGA dongle) and network port, plus the covers for the USB and headphone sockets, all feel as if they’ll break easily.
3. There’s not an easy way to upgrade the RAM. I had seen a video on YouTube on how you can open it up, but it’s not just a case of unscrewing a panel and popping in a new stick of RAM.

The reason I’d bought another Asus Eee was because of my experience with the first and I’d basically bought the 1008HA without having seeing one for real. Although I’ve not had any issues with the new machine in the nearly 3 months I’ve owned it, it only feels like a matter of time

Monitor comparison - my new 22'' desktop vs the 7'' of my Asus EEE PC

Since coming back I seem to have been unexpectedly busy – I had assumed that I wouldn’t have much to do, but have lots to prepare ready for returning to Ethiopia in June and attending the eLearning Africa conference at the end of May – where I’m giving a presentation about the Digital Campus project.

I’ve managed to catch up with many friends so far, but it’s been a little different than I’d expected. My time is very flexible and free at the moment, but everyone else still has work and other commitments, especially during weekdays.

I spend a very frustrating Monday trying to get my new computer set up correctly. I bought a new desktop machine with an ATI Radeon HD 5450 Graphics Card which doesn’t seem to work well with Ubuntu (9.10). I had a hard time figuring what was causing the display to freeze up at apparently random times. After being in use for anything from 5 mins to 8 hours, the screen would freeze up, with only the mouse moving and the only way of getting out of it being to do a hard restart.

I had got the ATI drivers installed as it was the only way I could get the full resolution from my monitor (1920 X 1080). I’m quite sure I had everything installed correctly, despite being confused by all the advice and postings about installing these drivers.

In the end I read a post which mentioned trying out the next release of Ubuntu, Lucid Lynx (10.04) – even though it’s not officially released for a week or so, it apparently has better support for ATI graphics cards. After the installation of Lucid Lynx, I haven’t need to installed any proprietary drivers and the monitor is working well at it’s full resolution. There are a few other issues at the moment (such as not being able to install Adobe Flash plugin), but then it’s still an Alpha pre-release so these issues are to be expected and should be resolved when the full release comes out next week.

We’re still having a few problems with the server over at Ayder (Health Sciences) Campus. It’s made more problematic by the fact that the contractors digging up one of the nearby roads cut through the fiber cable linking Ayder to the main campus. So not only is there no internet at Ayder, there is no network connection to the Moodle server to allow staff there to be uploading their courses and activities.

On Friday and Monday I spent several hours (about 7 or 8 in total) on Skype to Eduardo in Barcelona who is helping us to get the server fixed. Things are made a little easier by the fact we have 2 identical servers, alpha and bravo. Alpha is (generally) running fine at Arid campus and bravo is the broken server at Ayder, so the plan was to make a copy of alpha onto one of the spare disks, modify it slightly (name, IP address etc) then use this to fix bravo.

The clone had already been made – to one of the 4 physical disks in the machine. All I needed to to do was switch the disks around to test the clone, then take the cloned disk to Ayder. Unfortunately we couldn’t get the cloned disk to work and on Friday it took Eduardo and I a little while to figure out what the problem was. It turned out that the way the disks were numbered on the server label:

didn’t actually match how the were referred to by the operating system, so rather then switching the disk in positions 0 and 2, we should have been doing 0 and 1.

Finally we got this issue resolved and the disk ready to take to Ayder, plus a few other backup options that Eduardo had come up with in case this disk didn’t solve the problem.

On Monday, I took the disk over to Ayder, got on Skype, and spent a few hours messaging Eduardo (and a little later Mike) and we managed to get the server booting up correctly. In the end we managed to fix the problem without needing to use the disk we’d had the confusion over on Friday.

But unfortunately all is not quite finished. The terminals at Ayder aren’t yet connecting to the properly. So next job is to get that resolved.

All of which means that we still haven’t been able to get the lab open for students to use, but hoping to be open properly in the next week or so. Still much more work to be done, so will keep us all busy for the coming weeks I’m sure.

I’ve used Camtasia Studio (Windows) a few times before for creating some training/how-to screencasts, but now I wanted to have a go doing something similar using open source software (on Ubuntu Jaunty) instead. To make it more interesting I also wanted to run it all on my Asus Eee PC (4G) – not exactly a machine designed for heavy video processing.

First issue was how to record the screen, for this I used RecordMyDesktop. A very simple program to install and run, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Selecting the area to record (I wasn’t selecting whole window) was a bit fiddly and sometimes took me several attempts to capture the right area, without chopping off a side or two.

If you’re recording a for a long time and your screensaver kicks in (or screen goes blank for power saving), you’ll need to disable the screensaver and power saving – unless you particularly need a recording of it.

What I had most trouble with – and only came up with a workarounds solution to – was capturing the audio. RecordMyDesktop wil capture the audio fine but had problems getting the recording volume level right without creating a lot of hissing. The hardware on the Asus for sound isn’t exactly fantastic. In the end I found that I had best results when using a jack lead to plug the headphone output into the microphone input! If anyone has a better solution to this or some advice about on the recording levels to capture the audio more reliably, then please let me know.

So, now I’ve created a .ogv (OGG video) file but want to edit it a little. I wanted a really simple video editor for 2 reasons, firstly I don’t wand to spend the time learning a bit video editing package and, more practically, secondly, I don’t have a huge amount of disk space left on my 4Gb drive!

I opted for Aviremux, though unfortunately this doesn’t accept OGG video files, so I used mencoder to convert to AVI (basic instructions).

For the actual editing I used Aviremux. I found it very easy to get started with and use – unlike some other video editing software.

In the end I found that my original screen recording had sound out of synch with the video – not in the initial few mins of the capture, but further in. I’m not sure why this should be the case – if anyone has any idea why, I’d be pleased to hear them.

Overall, it was a little frustrating getting this to work. I’ve not managed to achieve what I set out to do, but think this was more to do with the hardware than anything else.

I’m not generally what you’d call an early adopter, and not usually into gadgets. For example, I only bought myself a GPS device a couple of weeks ago, shortly before the hype about the GPS system failing within the next year or so.

The same is true of mobile phones, for years I’ve only owned a very basic phone which only does phoning and texting, no mp3 player, camera etc.

Well, last week a friend gave me their old Nokia 6230i. The camera seems reasonable and I started thinking about how I get the photos off the camera onto something more useful (such as my laptop). The options were to use a cable, bluetooth or IR, but since my laptop (Asus EeePC) has neither bluetooth nor IR, I bought myself a cable, also thinking that a cable is likely to be the most reliable connection method anyway.

I installed Gammu, but then kept getting the message that “No response in specified timeout. Probably phone not connected.”. Trying a few different settings made no difference. I also installed KMobileTools, which did manage to connect to the phone and retrieve contacts lists, but only has limited functionality for managing or transferring files.

After spending most of an afternoon trying to get this working I gave up, and posted a message on the Ubuntu forums, but no replies as yet.

Whilst searching for a solution, few people seemed to be using a cable connection, far more instructions and help seemed available for those using bluetooth – or maybe they jut have more problems getting it set up?. So my next plan is to get a little bluetooth adapter and see if I have any better luck with that. Unless anyone else has any better suggestions/solution?

I’d be quite surprised if it did work with bluetooth, especially since it’s always had a bit of a reputation as being fiddly to set up correctly. But maybe I’ve an instance where bluetooth can do what a physical cable connection can’t?

Since I’ve been back in the UK, although I’ve been pretty much tied to the house, with Amazon now back available to me, I’m able to spend money again. One of the items I bought was a GPS. Originally I was going to be borrowing one from someone in Addis to be able to do some mapping of Mekelle, but since I’m in the UK it seemed to make sense to get hold of my own whilst I was here. I eventually opted for the very basic Garmin eTrex H, thinking that it does everything I would want and I’m unlikely to spend money buying maps to download onto it – the main reason for buying it was to contribute to the OpenStreetMap project.

Once it had arrived my first challenge was getting it hooked up to my Asus EeePC (running Ubuntu) and installing the right bits of software.

For up & downloading to the GPS I installed QLandkarte, which only started recognising my device once I’d also installed the gpsbabel package.

Next I needed a desktop program for editing OpenStreetMap – using the online Potlatch application wouldn’t be a great option for me once back in Ethiopia with no decent internet connection.

I started off by installing Merkaartor but quickly ran into problems. When I tried connecting to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) server to download a map to edit, I kept getting “403: Forbidden” messages. The problem was that the particular version of Merkaartor the Ubuntu package manager installs doesn’t work with OSM Protocol v0.6. I think there may be a version of Merkaartor which works with v0.6, but I’m not generally very keen on installing software outside the Ubuntu Add/Remove Applications

I then tried Java OpenStreetMap (JOSM), again installing from the Add/Remove Apps and I was getting similar problems in being unable to connect to the OSM server. Again the problem was the protocol version.

Merkaartor and JOSM appeared to be the only programs available for editing OSM on Ubuntu (please let me know if there are others), so I had to resign myself to manually installing one of them. I opted for JOSM as it was quite easy to run manually and once installed all seems to be working relatively well.

I do however had a few gripes about the user interface, especially on the small screen of the Asus EeePC. For example some of the dialog boxes are fiddly to expand to get the OK/Cancel buttons to appear. Also, the drop down list of “presets” (the different map features, places of interest, amenities etc which can be added) is too long to appear on the screen, but there’s no way of navigating down to the bottom of the list to see which options are available.

Apart from that, I feel like I’ve got the hang of OSM editing (a little at least) and I’ve managed to add a few new roads. Hopefully once I get back to Mekelle, I’ll be much more productive, especially since I’ll be starting on a blank canvas.

My previous comments about the computing ability of some of the Computer Science students may not have been too generous, however, if they’d all been given a laptop on arrival at Uni, something like an Asus EEE PC or OLPC XO, I’m sure many would not be having the problems I mentioned.

The OLPC project is certainly having some problems and I previously criticised how the OLPC laptops were being used in schools. Looking back now I realise that maybe the project isn’t meeting it’s intended aims, but even if it’s just getting students used to being able to use a keyboard and a computer generally, then surely that’s not a bad thing? I’m dealing with first year computer science students who have little idea about even login names, passwords or keyboards.

In the last week I conducted a mini-survey amongst our Computer Science Uni students about their access to computers and attitudes towards having access to course materials online, almost all (around 90%) said that access to a computer was one of their main problems. Given that this survey was online (OK, maybe not my brightest of ideas for this type of survey!), the total figure is likely to be more than 90%. For info, there are about 10-15 working PC’s per 80-90 computer science students and less than 10% have access to a PC outside the those provided by the university.

I’m sure that giving the uni students a laptop, even just a cheap one, would be immensely beneficial to the next generation of computer science students/graduates. So if anyone is looking to improve the computing capabilities of those in the developing world, you could no worse than providing laptops to university level students. In my opinion, the more access and practise students have with PCs, be that Window or Unix, the better.

As an aside, I’ve been quite surprised by the number of university computer science students who don’t yet have an email address. I hadn’t even thought to ask this in my survey, but it’s come up in training sessions, when students fill in their profile, many have asked what to enter in the email field if they don’t have an email address!