Users are users - everywhere

Am talking about computer users. Computers users in Dubai, Nairobi, London, Kampala or Los Angeles have one thing in common - they call the computer guy when they are at their wits end. They also tend to pile all their computing problems on the computer guy. Users look at the computer guy and see strange things.

Recently, i embarked on revamping a choking small network of about fifty mixed static and dynamic users largely depending on a SAAS infrastructure. After about two weeks of traffic sampling and random tests, i proposed a couple of changes on the Internet provider's interface. That got done. For the first time, the online speed tests reported the right bandwidth for the network.

Going forward, i got approval for more changes on the internal network. But as in any transition, a few things get in the way and you get a glitch here and there. At times like these, users who have no clue what you are doing come up with crazy suggestions - to help you - or, to help the company. They suggest restarting the router. They suggest (behind your back) getting someone else who knows what he is doing.

As usual, i fixed the problems. Just another network. Done.

When users call me and say: "my computer is not working", i switch from normal hearing mode to selective hearing mode. That way, i start with a problem and end with a solution. That trick works all the time.

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Of poverty, bribery and corruption

On the morning of the 23 of October 2013, i arrived at the Entebbe International Airport, Uganda, set to board a British Airways flight to London.

I had with me the usual stuff people carry to relatives and friends who live abroad - salted smoke-dried fish, inter alia. The man at the security scanner looked dejected and kind of mean when he asked why i was carrying a lot of dry fish. To him, ten pieces of dry fish was a lot! He said that i must be taking it for export.

Well, i explained with due humility that it was for home consumption and of little value, to say the least. Then he kept asking this and that question, and quoted airport and aviation rules against fish. I found it incredulous and i told him as much. Matter of fact, one of my sisters had flown out with lots of fish with her only a couple of weeks earlier. My explanations fell on "deaf" ears!

Then he suggested that i buy him soda (or tea?) to allow me take my fish. I did not pay attention to that and proceeded to zip up my luggage. He stopped me from zipping the bag and insisted i get him some money first. I hate bribes. I preach against bribery and corruption. Anyway, i just told him i have no money. The man insisted that i go back out and get money from my people outside. Strange!

When i showed that he was wasting my time and that i was not going back, he left everybody else pass and he zeroed in on my bag like it had a special interest item. At one point i thought he wanted to plant drugs on me and get me behind bars for fun or something. So i asked him: "By the way, how much money do you want"?
"Fifty thousand", he said.
"Oh, i do not have that with me." The man became even more serious. I could now see tears of poverty or sheer greed welling up in his eyes. Mr Festus Kananura, shame, shame, shame! On a good day, i could give you twenty dollars without doing anything for me, but demanding a bribe from a law-abiding citizen is way off.

Poverty is a disease. Bribery and corruption are driving our country down the drain of backwardness. Entebbe is the gateway to Uganda and to the world. Simple minds like that of Festus Kananura should not be there, stamping mind-dirt on hardworking jetset personalities.

I missed my flight and of course caused a few heads to roll. To my face, Kananura denied asking for money. He has a seared conscience (1 Timothy 4:2)! The Civil Aviation Authority's security department personnel showed clear absence of impartiality when they refused to play back the CCTV footage of my time at the security scanner. I wonder whether the CCTV even works. The automatic ticketing gates were working on and off. Someone must have "eaten" the maintenance budget!

When i came for my flight two days later, no one made a fuss over my fish? Why? Oh, Uganda! For me it was just dry fish, but some people fly around the world to save lives. Delaying them causes death.

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Write it down, tech support

A few weeks ago, i received a call that appeared too important to avoid answering. My usual phone was switched off for about a month and i was using another number known to a select few. (I do that to take a break from the constant haunting of the connected world). That usual phone had rang just a couple of minutes after turning it on! When i answered, it was a call from a high office - a really high office in my tribe - Office of the Nnabagereka. Nnabagereka is the official title of the wife of the king, Kabaka, of Buganda.

After the usual pleasantries, a lady who works in that office informed me that they could not connect to the Internet, and asked me to go over and fix it for them. I established that the router was up and running and then guided her through a few check mouse clicks. Her report indicated that her machine just needed credentials to connect!

So, i cleared the phlegm in my coarse throat, and popped the big question in a robotic voice: "Do yo have the small book that came with the Internet thing?".
Positive.
Then i switched back to my normal voice and said: "Okaaay. Check and see what i wrote in there, use it to connect". And she reconnected herself to the cloud in just a couple of minutes.

Being a Christian, i thought the lady must have prayed before calling me, causing me to turn on the phone.

Techs: always write down the basics your clients need to get going. Keep a copy and leave a copy with them. It is not always necessary to drive to your installed base - and it is not always necessary to invoice them for minor support.

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Business directory - "Online"

At www.adgalacity.com, we are pleased to be preparing ourselves for a new way of using business directories in Uganda and the region around - the online business directory!

Usually, a business directory is a must have in every business undertaking. One never knows the limit of who to contact during the running of normal business operations. One day you might need to call a break-down towing company, the next you might find yourself looking for a snake handler, or the company that supplied you with office equipment. At home, you might be calling up guys to slash your lawn.

Why do you need it? Because you can never keep (or know) all the contacts you need.

Send your business info to get listed a.s.a.p. Meantime, i will be back to complete this story.

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"Jam" that cellphone

Technology frees us. Then it binds us again.

For a couple of months now, i have been considering the idea of buying a mobile phone jammer - a gadget that renders nearby mobile devices impotent. I am not a mobile phone vigilante, so to speak, but i have been subjected to idiotic chatter by way of sitting near a person who has no etiquette in public places. More often, the blabbering twats are usually ostentatious villagers who have just come to town, or yet to-be-civilized recent immigrants from some neighboring states, or cell phone users who came out of the slum but still have the slum in them.

Overseas, the cellphone jammer is on rising demand, major suppliers being Indian traders. Buyers include owners of cafes and hair salons, hoteliers, public speakers, theater operators, bus drivers as well as commuters on public transportation. Wanna buy one? It is a blunt countermeasure but it frees you from the bondage of insensitive talkers. By the way, the late Col. Muammar Gadhafi loved cellphone jammers a great deal.

I remember seeing notices in buses in the U.S.A.: "keep your phone conversation very brief and talk quietly, or turn it off". Vehicle manufactures should take my word and integrate in-car cellphone jammers that kick in once the engine is started. If you want to use your mobile, stop the car and turn off the engine, then talk. That could save lots of lives lost due to road accidents caused by mobile phone use while driving.

In San Francisco, some geek said that using his jammer was initially fun, and then became a practical way to get some quiet on the train. Now he uses it more judiciously.

All that happens in the wireless realm - frequency.  And talking of which freedom comes again from frequency technology unveiled via the self-driving cars from Google. Test drives have been successful and such cars should be on the roads soon. Volvo also did succesful test drives where are lead car driven by a human was trailed by three self-driving cars mimicking the lead car through a couple of hundred kilometers in Spain. Control technology is not new: space craft are usually unmanned (e.g. the Mars polar lander), drones used in modern military warfare are unmanned but very accurate.

Way to go.

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(With extracts from an article by Matt Richtel, NYTimes.com)

Android beats iOS

Just a few months since the demise of Steve Jobs, a hot debate has been ignited by the other Steve. I read on technobuffalo.com that Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, aired his thoughts on Android and iOS, admitting that Android has surpassed the iPhone’s functionality in many ways. In fact, there’s one feature in particular Wozniak likes on Android that would have certainly left Jobs fuming: voice commands. Woz said that Android’s voice command capabilities are handled much better, revealing “I have a lower success rate with Siri than I do with the voice built into the Android.”

Jobs candidly admitted his passionate hatred toward Android and went as far as vowing to destroy the OS “because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this.” Woz has taken a more level-headed approach, saying both OSs have their pros and cons.

Woz said that his primary phone is the iPhone because of its beauty, "but I wish it did all the things my Android does, I really do.” In addition to Woz’s voice functionality complaint, the man believes Android has a huge advantage with its navigation capabilities. He also opined that Android gets a bad rap in the user-friendliness department, “If you’re willing to do the work to understand it a little but, well I hate to say it, but there’s more available in some ways.”

So what Android phone does Wozniak prefer? Even with access to Google’s latest and greatest, Wozniak likes the Droid Razr. Still, Woz believes the iPhone is the best overall smartphone, a device he highly recommends to folks looking to get into the smartphone market. ”The iPhone is the least frightening thing. For that kind of person who is scared of complexity, well, here’s a phone that is simple to use and does what you need it to do.”

These comments are what makes Wozniak such a cool guy. 

The man respects both sides of the coin, and in the case of smartphone OSs, doesn’t resort to bashing. Instead, Woz’s comments reveal his inner geekness and love for tech, merely pointing out that both Android and iOS have their good points as well as bad.

Having gone through the above, i remembered that the geek in me had voiced similar sentiments before the geek in Woz did - not that am at his level. No.

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Drones, iSaint Jobs, and Libya

I recently assured an angry reader of this blog that i will squeeze time and do an end-of-the-year-2011 blog post. Needless to say, this is the one. Sorry about the long silence.

2011 like many years before it, had lots of surprises, disappointments, thrills, ups and downs. Thats the way life goes. It has been like that long before homosapiens learnt how to count time. In fact, the only reason people started keeping track of time is to keep track of events - both planned and unplanned events - including acts of God.

Talking of which, i personally believe that for rats and roaches to team up and run after a head of state, a head of state of an oil-rich country; forcing him to run out of his palacial tent into a sewer culvert in the middle of the desert; and making the same head of state cry out for mercy, before he was killed and buried, in an unmarked grave, at an undisclosed location, was indeed an "act of God".

One Libyan man recently said on Al-Jazeera TV that "the Tunisians have always been calling Libyans dead people who fear death, but now that we liberated ourselves, we have proved that we are not dead people and we do not fear death".

And then the earthquake in Japan that wobbled the very foundations of a real nuclear power plant causing lethal leaks, not mentioning the instant deaths and destruction of infrastructure. That act of God sent me wondering: why would human beings explode nuclear bombs in Japan many years ago, and as if that was not bad enough, fate allows an act of God to play with the security of a nuclear plant in the same country? Double trouble and tragedy. We do not yet know the full impact of that nuclear disaster.

By the end of this year, East Africa will have no less than three submarine communications cables connecting the region with the rest of the world. Just a couple of years ago, there was none. Nevertheless, we are still to see the real and desired effect of the high speed cheaper communications cables manifested on price and speed at the end-user level. The Internet "www" still means "world-wide-wait" - web pages still load without any pomp or swag.

Keeping track of some of the thrills, it was in 2011 that i discovered the beautiful minds of the guys at Android. The IDEOS smartphone running on Android thrilled me with its networking capabilities - at such a price - less than US$ 150 in Kampala at Orange.

The passing of the iSaint at Apple was such a down - money would never bail the wealthy geek out of the hand of the angel of death that was calling him for over a year. Jobs, so far, has been immortalised in Budapest, Hungary, courtesy of Graphisoft, the creators of ArchiCAD. To counter-balance that down, an uplifting moment came through the philanthropy of another very wealthy guy who, years ago, declared that he wants to give away his billions of dollars before he dies. Charles Feeney, 80, just recently dished out US$350 million towards construction of a technology-based satellite campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City.

Surprises? One big surprise: how could a US drone, intact, end up in the hands of Ahmadinejad? I read somewhere that the guys employed GPS spoofing and caused the highly sophisticated aircraft to land normally at a location of their choice. As we know now, they said that drones are going to be mass-produced and made available cheaply and easily.

My biggest disappointment was why Obama, er... the CIA did not go and pick it up a.s.a.p - at whatever cost - human or otherwise. Please do not call me a gibbering twat. That drone should have been hunted and picked up. Now i live in mortal fear of flying objects!

Well, there is so much to review but so little space. Finally, the lesser disappointment of 2011 - for me - was the ever rising pump price of fuel.

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