One Geek

I’m not sure which is more depressing. That I am having to read boring technical notes on application logic programming or that I actually understand the boolean logic language they are using.

At the moment I am encoding two different lots of video whilst still using my laptop for normal stuff. It’s amazing that I can still surf the net whilst my CPUs are at almost 100% load. Good work Intel and Apple.

As far as I can work out the main reason for changing the term Information Technology(IT) to Information and Communications Technology(ICT) could well of been to make Google work better. Seriously search for “it” leads to so many false hits. I guess it is more common then IT. Anyway better get back to my research now.

How much do I hate poorly written software. It drives me nuts.

Bigpond’s Movie Download client is complete rubbish, seriously I mean the client on my computer couldn’t keep track of how much of the movie had been downloaded. It crashed more times then I care to count, and was generally bad. It lacked any kind of indication anywhere of it’s current status and what was going on. It eventually somehow downloaded my movie, the key seems to be to NOT run the download client, and let the creepy background service do it’s own thing. The most annoying thing though is that there is no good technical need for the existence of the Movie Download software in the first place. It really is just there to stop you copying the movies, and to hold your hand. So frustrating.

Today, I have amongst other things been working on an online store using MIGS, a MasterCard gateway service. The documentation and the error messages for that system are not very nice. A weird thing that happened to me was it took hours to get an auto reply message from MasterCard. What’s the go with that?

Then take the example of a nice piece of Apple software I just used, Isync. Enable bluetooth, launch the application, click on my phone and suddenly my contacts, and calendar are synchronised. So beautiful and easy.

I really have the greatest empathy these days for people who use computers without having a good amount of experience and knowledge. Some software is just awful, and there is absolutely no need for it to be.

Found an interesting CBS 60 minutes segment on the OLPC $100 project. It made me like the creator more, but I also agree with some of the shortcomings the segment pointed out. It doesn’t descend into the technical side of the project so it is a pretty easy video for anyone to watch.

Onegeek.net’s domain name expired this morning and I had forgotten to renew it. All fixed now, only took about an hour for it to come through again. God bless DNS.

I think I managed to do some good work whilst here. I set myself the goal of providing at least $100,000 of value during my time volunteering. Except I forgot to work out how I was going to calculate that. Ops..

Anyway here is a somewhat incomplete list of the work tasks I completed:
Specify the computer systems required for a 200 bed hospital.
Setup a loadbalanced, redundant set of servers to deliver a custom application (Turbocare) using a MySQL backend.
Designed a network
Documented howto setup 90% of the hospitals systems
Misc work on Turbocare including testing and some coding.
Train and mentor two computer systems administrators. One in Delhi and one in Dimapur. (They should be meeting up in a few months, along with the guy I trained in Raxaul. I wonder if they’ll talk about how crazy I was. )
Setup online courseware for two programs (No content in them yet)
Setup an online LDAP Address Book (Not quite finished)
Setup backend for three websites (None of them have much content as of today, but I am promised it will come).
Created some mailing lists (Strangely these are actually used)
Gave a short session in a HMS workshop. (It was title Basic Health Care for Hospital Computers)
Provided evaluation of three Hospital Management Systems. (Mostly informal)
Meet with far too many vendors (I may be a bit of a people person, but I am not really that much into sales people. Particular the ones who call at 10pm on a Friday night.)
Developed a healthy coffee addiction
Researched mobile phone jammers (It’s too hard to get people to switch off phones in meetings)
Evaluated video conferencing solutions(not much though, cause I didn’t like the idea at the time)
Setup far too many wireless networks (But on the plus side, it is a good way to make friends)
Worked on credit card donations options ( Somehow it all ended up going nowhere)
Evaluated a variety of Content Management Systems (Oh so boring)
Evaluated Wireless long distance VPN system (Evaluation is such a nice word isn’t it)
Created specification for PBX system, evaluated some PBX’s and meet with a vendor.
Became official present shopper for colleagues in Dimapur. (Would be fun in a place like Delhi, just hard work in Dimapur)
Helping Damsel’s in distress with IT issues.

I am sure I am missing some tasks I preformed but I think that will do for now. No wonder I’ve been feeling tired. I am pretty amazed I managed to actually develop some friendships in my time here. Although sadly that last work task of helping damsel’s in distress is actually one of the ways I made friends here.

I think I need a new life but for now I’ll settle for leaving India and going on a holiday.

Some Saturday Night’s aren’t very exciting. I am spending this one working on documentation for the project. I only have 20 working days left in Nagaland, and that’s with a 6 day week. Found out my servers are meat to be coming on Wednesday. The big UPS also comes then, meaning I should be able to run multiple computers at once, which is important for testing. The other equipment should arrive some time before I leave.

If you are a geek with absolutely nothing worth doing you can check out the google code project for the software Wes has written here. I’ve been doing some documentation on the Wiki, very tedious work I must say.

At least my MacBook is very nice to use, and I have a good iTunes collection to keep me entertained.

In related news it’s only 50 days until I get home.

So I had a hidden backup file in a web accessiable directory, containing an old version of my blog. Now that backup file got expanded by google and included in code search(which was released this week), where my DB password was there for anyone to see. I don’t think that it was a particularly risky to have a known password but just in case I have changed it.

I found out about it due to some kind geeks leaving comments on my blog. Thanks people.

I’ve been spending the last few days rolling out a new network at the EHA Offices in Delhi. I added a file/print server to the network on Thursday, did some more configuration on Friday, and linked the new 7th floor office with the 8th floor.

Whilst an electrician did the cable run for me I still had to put the connectors on the cables. Crimping the RJ45 connector onto the CAT6 cable was very painful and slow. I really suck at doing it, took me 20 minutes to do my first connector. I got a bit quicker by the time I was finished. Still it is my least favorite networking task. Brought me flashbacks of the 2004 workshop I ran at Duncan Hospital last time I was in India. Anyway got the networking all done, and everything seems to work.

Oh and I had an Onion Masala Dosa yesterday, that was interesting and in the evening I went out and had Mexican with Wes. Which was surprisingly good. It’s great being in Delhi food wise, though not as good as Sydney.

I have a meeting tonight which I would normally not do on a Sunday but seeing as how I am heading off so soon, I decided it was OK. It’s something about tele-medicine.

I am now seriously considering placing a Windows 2003 Server into my infrastructure at work.. It makes me feel dirty.
In the end though it really does come down to terminal services and printing, and to a lesser degree Active Directory.
Then again my thin clients will be running rdesktop from Linux, and everything else apart from admin computers will be Linux based. The Windows will also be quaratined into a VMWare client running under Linux.
I still feel dirty though. I think I might go and have a shower..

I have sucessfully setup a VOIP PABX (Phone System) with 3 extensions in my home using free software and a 2 special pieces of hardware. At the moment I can’t dial out but who needs that. I can receive calls from outside and voice mail working. Eventually the system will tell the cricket scores when someone dials “6″.

For those of you wondering what this has to do with poverty reduction, it’s about cost cutting and improving efficiency at the same time. I should be able to save the project a lot of money doing a homebrew PABX system.. I hope. And the cricket scores, well this is India.

Setup a mysql cluster tonight.. Doesn’t store anything useful yet but my test with a few integers worked.. Time to go to bed me thinks..

I had a thought the other night that poverty reduction and the MDG’s are a lot like software development.

1) They are both involve incredibly complicated and interrelated systems
2) Companies are always hyping their products but failing to live up to their promises, just like countries promising more and better aid and development funds but often failing to deliver.
3) Both have grass roots movements.
4) Patents create problems in both areas.
5) Both are very costly to do and often miss deadlines.

I’m starting to generate lots of documentation for my IT Department. I am using a Wiki which makes it so easy to post pages and edit them. I am finally sold on the wiki concept.

It is now less then 95 days until I arrive home for my whirl wind trip. And 109 days until Howie and Jenny get married.

So much work to do before then. Oh well maybe the ceasefire talks will collapse and I can just stay home after the wedding.