Ruby on Rails Presentation in Lilongwe, Malawi

There will be a presentation plus discussion on Ruby and Ruby on Rails this Sunday 1st April, 2007 at Kamuzu College of Nursing, Lilongwe Campus from 2 PM.

Mike McKay, a colleague of mine at Baobab Health Partnership, has volunteered to make the presentation after some members of ICT Association of Malawi mailing list showed interest in this programming language and its web framework.

In September last year, Oliver Gadabu, another another developer at Baobab, gave a talk on Ruby on Rails in Blantyre on Software Freedom Day organised by LinuxChix Malawi. That was probably the first public discussion of Ruby and Ruby on Rails in Malawi.

At a Medical Informatics Association of Malawi (MIAM) meeting in Lilongwe on 29th March 2007, Oliver made a presentation on Baobab's ART system which is developed using Ruby on Rails. Mike McKay followed with a brief demonstration of the system.

The Potential of Twitter in Africa

Although blogging has become so popular that the word has made it into the Oxford Dictionary, only a few privileged Africans have a blog. This is related to fact that computer access is very limited and of the few computers available, even fewer have Internet connectivity.

So people have resorted to using the radio for mass communication. There are popular programs on a nation-wide radio stations that let listeners announce illness and death of family members to their friends and relatives. Unfortunately, there are more and more friends and relatives that have migrated from their native countries to developed where they can't listen to these announcements.

So the launching of Twitter provides a good alternative considering that the use of mobile phones is much higher than that of computers. In Malawi for example, there are about 50,000 Internet users against about 700,000 mobile phone users out of a population of about 12 million. Twitter allows users to post a small update via SMS, instant messaging client and the web. Anyone who chooses to follow you will get that update on the Twitter home page, or their mobile phone of they choose to. Unlike most mobile phone web services, you can update via SMS from anywhere in the world and from virtually any handset.

Although Twitter was designed to let users announce what they're doing at the time of posting, we have already seen other uses coming up. The train system in San Fransisco (BART) uses Twitter to announce changes in schedules; conference participants use it to post notes of the sessions at the conference and there are updates from news companies like BBC via Twitter.

I have always wanted a way to document quotes from TV programs, movies, songs, podcasts etc. Lines from content that is not yet indexed by search engines at the moment, at least outside their labs. Twitter seems to be the way to do that instantly while watching or listening.

So how can Twitter be used in Africa?

Realising that a lot of people in the developing world have migrated from their home villages to cities both within and outside their countries and continents, they still need to some updates about the goings-on in their home towns.

Here is what I can think of now:

• General announcements to friends and relatives all over the world like illness, death, weddings, engagements, academic and professional achievements, births and maybe even Kitchen Top-ups :)
• Scores, fixtures and general updates on of soccer games live from the stadium or after the game. Everyone is crazy about soccer, right?
• General news and gossip including crazy odd news (e.g. "Nkhani za m'maboma" in Malawi)
• Political Campaigns and news. Politics can be fun, you know.
• Scripture reading and notes from a religious service. This can be our adaption of SXSW twitters where conference participants updated their friends on what was happening ;) I don't know if they'll even allow you to look at the phone during the service, though.

You'll probably think of more and better examples.

Go to Twitter and see how others are using it or to TwitterVision for an interesting visual presentation. I'm testing some of these ideas at twitter.com/soyapi live from Lilongwe, Malawi.

Happy Twitting, Tweeting, Twittering or Tweetering! Whatever you want to call it. They probably don't have lawyers yet.

How to contact Zodiak Broadcasting Station (ZBS)

I have received a couple of requests for contact details of Malawi's Zodiak Broadcasting Station (ZBS) after publishing a post about ZBS in 2005. I have also noticed that none of the online business directories include Zodiak's details at the time of writing.

So, if you want to get in touch with Zodiak, here are the details:

Zodiak Broadcasting Station (ZBS)
Area 47, Lilongwe, Malawi
Tel: +265 1 762 557

I hope that helps and I don't mind if you let them know how you got the details ;)

Update: removed wrong mobile phone numbers

meebo usage graph in Malawi

via hello malawi!

Categorising Search Engines by Content Type with SearchWith

While most people search the web in general, there are times when one needs to dig deeper in one particular area. It can be news, photos, videos or looking up the definition of a word.

This is not news at all and all major search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Live/MSN and Ask, provide links to search a particular type of content. But since these are commercial companies, with competition to fight, they only link to their own search services even when other engines provide a better service in some of those areas.

This is an opportunity for an independent search tool that focuses on providing one interface to the best search services in a particular area by default and letting power users customise it with their favourite engines and adding other content types.

That's where SearchWith comes in. SearchWith extension for Firefox, Thunderbird and Flock is a search extension that I wrote that enables users to search different types of content on the web (and your computer for Google Desktop users).

SearchWith allows users to categorise engines per content type (e.g. YouTube, Google Video and Yahoo Video under Videos), add/remove engines and content types (called Services in SearchWith) and choose which engine is used by default -- all this without bloating the context (right-click) menu.

The latest version also allows searching multiple sites simultaneously when you use the Advanced Search dialog accessed by SHIFT+clicking on an option under SearchWith menu or right-clicking without selecting text.

Check it out at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2194 or, if you're in Firefox, you can just Install SearchWith

A Visit to Yahoo! HQ

So after the Non Profit Developers Summit, I managed to get myself at Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale, CA. These are the creators of the most popular website on the Web if you need to be reminded.

This was a Monday afternoon and I took BART and CalTrain from Oakland to Sunnyvale Train station from where my host Rabble took me to Yahoo! HQ. I printed myself a visitor badge and proudly wore it. We passed by Yahoo's Cafeteria where I got a delicious piece of pizza and a cup of Capuccino. The pizza in US is much thicker than that in Malawi and Yahoo!'s pizza isn't an exception, by the way. Then we headed to the building where all the web celebrities at Yahoo! spend their day. OK not all of them but a good number of them.

I met Leonard Lin, who co-founded upcoming.org and now runs Yahoo events like Hack Day. I also met Pasha Sadir who developed Yahoo Travel Planner and created the coolest web application of the moment, Yahoo! Pipes. I also met kevnull and Daniel Raffel (just finished listening to his SXSW 2007 podcast) who also work on Pipes.

After some minutes, I realised I was sitting next to Caterina Fake's desk. Caterina is the co-founder of Flickr. In fact, the book I picked and started browsing through belonged to her. She cheerfully came into the room and you can rightly tell from her blog posts how cheerful she is.

"Actually, you can have that book" she said to me while I held a "Design Like You Give a Damn" book in my hands. "Thanks", I responded and took the opportunity to get an autograph from the web celebrity :) Since I couldn't get a picture at Yahoo, this is the only graphical evidence that I met her, right?

I also wished I took a picture of the room but kevnull already has one on Flickr so I don't have to describe it. It really feels like a good place to work at despite not getting as much publicity as Google does.

Thanks to all Yahoo Engineers aka Technical Yahoos, for making me feel welcome. Thanks for the schwag too. I got something to give my techie friends when I got back in Malawi. And you know what? My coding kung-fu is getting better already!