April 2012 - skunkworks - Skunkworks Site

Geek/Petrol head inspiration
by Peter Karunyu 30 Apr '12

30 Apr '12

Just found two tidbits of news on the net that might inspire a geek struggling to make it through the afternoon with eyes open... 1. Microsoft is testing HomeOS<http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/30/microsoft-research-home-automation-homeO…>, an operating system to sort of run your house 2. Richard Hammond of Top Gear is coming to Kenya<http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/30/bbc-planet-earth-live/>in May, or maybe he is already here :-)

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Oracle DBA Wanted
by mail2lawi 30 Apr '12

30 Apr '12

Hi guys, If you have or know anyone with: - Excellent Oracle DBA skills - Oracle certification (mandatory) - Experience in a banking environment or with a core banking system (added advantage) Send CV to robmugambi(a)gmail.com

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Developer needed for Joomla project
by Moses 30 Apr '12

30 Apr '12

Dear all, Someone is looking for a developer to work on Joomla project. If interested, please send your CV/testimonial/expression of interest to laz(a)dskenya.com Regards, Moses.

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CISCO Router Repair
by Jared Koyier 30 Apr '12

30 Apr '12

Dear All Am looking for pointers on who can repair a faulty CISCO router. Regards Jared Koyier

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Safaricom Network Quality
by dmbuvi＠gmail.com 30 Apr '12

30 Apr '12

I was talking to friends yesterday, and it appears I'm not the only one suffering from below : Dropped calls, esp at 3 or 4 minute mark Periods of no Internet , till I reboot my phone Maybe its just me and my friends, no ? Sent from my BlackBerry®

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Offtopic: Anyone still stocking Nokia 5800 Xpress Music handsets?
by Michael Kamunge 30 Apr '12

30 Apr '12

Hi! I know this is a long shot, but if anyone still has the said handset in stock (new), kindly contact me off-list with pricing details. Thanks! Mike

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The Size of this Elephant (from my blog)
by Paul Kukubo 30 Apr '12

30 Apr '12

Listers I thought id share from my latest blog post (www.paulkukubo.co.ke) I have pasted the entire piece here. The size of this Elephant. The recent #140friday twitter and off twitter debate was centred around a simple and important theme. If the Kenya Government procurement ecosystem developed a preferential orientation towards local firms, the result would be that we would develop greater capability. It was argued by some that the government seemed to indicate an inclination towards foreign big name firms. Whereas the facts don’t necessarily support the claim, I doubt anyone would argue with the basic premise of the argument. Local businesses should benefit from tax based projects. I offer some discussion points that may guide the continuing discussion. How do we turn preferential advantage into true national capacity? The recent procurement of seats from the Prisons department for the national assembly is a welcome effort by any measure. Without the benefit of detail, one hopes that the process has created capacity for the Prisons department to be competitive in furniture making regionally and even become a net exporter. One hopes they have worked with some of the best furniture designers locally and created synergies that can be replicated. One hopes that the low cost of prison labour has also been value added by developing prisoners who can become great furniture makers once they leave. Use of materials is important. Have we used woods plastics, composites that wee sourced from locally sustainable sources. Parliaments are important national symbols in so many ways. They must represent the best of our national collective aspiration. How they look and feel is important to our national psyche. We can draw parrellels here for ICT. 2. Sometimes,even the government does not necessarily know what it does not know and is often seeking to know what it should know first, before seeking answers. The whole area of drilling down from service objectives to architecting an ICT solution can be daunting. For example, we need to have a simple, easy to use lands information management system so that Kenyans can search for land titles. One issue that may arise here is that only 30% of Kenyan land mass has been adjudicated, and surveyed and provided with title. Your ancestral land may not be under title yet. So how is a lands system relaxant just yet for you, some may argue. Another issue might be that the lands ministry collectes substantial revenue in fees and rates that has to be remitted to the treasury every year. The same department then has to go back to treasury to seek finance for a new system to support its operations. Treasury has myriads of pressing priorities. The Kenya ICT Board proposes a system that allows a private sector partner to provide a system and recover its revenue from the collected fees. The issue becomes one of structuring the deal so that the best in class partner can be found and government is guaranteed of improved revenue whilst having a system that can carry us to the next generation. Many systems in government can be delivered like this. The task and the system goes beyond the technology implementation to change management, capacity and capability development. Indeed the systems and processes will need to change to accommodate this need. The partner in question must therefore have capability to underwrite this massive task. 3. There is great public sensitivity around this subject of local capability. I choose to use capability instead of capacity, because capacity may imply the potential given the right mix of circumstances, whearas capability would mean the collective experience. Telling private sector that certain capability does not exist locally even when it might be true, raises huge emotion and rightly so. What does one mean? How dare one? The intended service outcomes occasioned by the new constitution are huge. 47 counties that must replicate central government capability in the management of their affairs. The experience with local governments provides lessons about how comes this can be. Do elected officials make good administrators?, Do counties as autonomous entities have the structural capacity to manage their affairs? ICT offers interesting options here. We can share critical systems across counties reducing the need to duplicate say financial and HR systems and indeed people. Is the private sector in the. Idle of this conversation? 4. The past experience on major ICT projects as projected in mainstream media has been less about the intended service outcomes and more around the procurement. In the past there may have been substantial capital made out of over specified, created for self gain ICT projects. This has changed, but the private sector appetite by some may of have. Obfuscate the issue, create a project that no one really understands, make money and run is common in many economies in the world. The onus is on us all to create a new confidence in this space. A new governance contract which says we ad committed to right priorities. The private sector especially can do this by collectively aligning to national priorities. 5. National capacity building is mostly a discussion about what talent I’d needed from the universities. Some major changes are in the offing here with both task forces of government education reform. The issue is that the building local companies that have capability is a continuous process involving planting the right seeds in school, developing talent, allowing the right ecosystem to thrive in terms of capital and talent flows, business and market access, the right local and international partnering, national incentives systems. And most of all time. Like we say in Swahili, nothing is better that experience and we must eat salt. Lazma tule chumvi. The responsibility of Institutions like the Kenya ICT Board therefore is to ensure we stay in touch with the sector intimately enough to understand their pressing issues and work with other government agencies to direct critical concerns as they emerge. Another responsibility is to help the private sector understand the public sector better in meeting their needs. Having said that, the public sector pie is very big. And there is much hard work done to make public efficient and effective. Indeed looking at the presentation made by the the PS Ministry of Information and Communications, the ICT Secretary, and various permanent secretaries, government directors and state corporation CEOs during 4th Connected Kenya Summit recently, one can attest to this. A true partnership between public and private sector is emerging through consultation and this must be encouraged. The elephant is big and fat and has to be eaten a piece at a time.. Asante Paul Kukubo Chief Executive Officer, Kenya ICT Board PO Box 27150 - 00100 Nairobi, Kenya 12th Floor, Teleposta Towers Koinange Street Tel +254 20 2089061, +254 20 2211960 Fax: +254 20 2211962 website: www.ict.go.ke local content project: www.tandaa.co.ke, www.facebook.com/tandaakenya twitter:@tandaaKENYA BPO Project: www. doitinkenya.co.ke Digital Villages Project: www.pasha.co.ke personal contacts _______________ Cell: + 254 717 180001 skype: kukubopaul googletalk: pkukubo personal blog: www.paulkukubo.co.ke personal twitter: @pkukubo ____________________ Vision: Kenya becomes a top ten global ICT hub Mission: To champion and actively enable Kenya to adopt and exploit ICT, through promotion of partnerships, investments and infrastructure growth for socio economic enrichment

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Great story on Estonia as an Internet nation
by Paul Kukubo 30 Apr '12

30 Apr '12

In 1995, four years after Estonia <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/estonia> broke free from the USSR, Toomas Hendrik Ilves read a "very Luddite" book by Jeremy Rifkin called The End of Work. "It argued that with greater computerisation there would be fewer jobs," remembered Ilves, then a senior diplomat, now the country's president<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/03/president-ilves-made-estonia>, "which from his point of view was terrible." Ilves and many of his colleagues saw it differently. In a tiny (population: 1.4 million) and newly independent country like Estonia, politicians realised computers could help quickly compensate for both a minuscule workforce and a chronic lack of physical infrastructure. Seventeen years on, the internet<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/internet> has done more than just help. It is now tightly entwined with Estonia's identity. "For other countries, the internet is just another service, like tap water, or clean streets," said Linnar Viik, a lecturer at the Estonian IT College, a government adviser and a man almost synonymous in Estonia with the rise of the web<http://www.eubusiness.com/europe/estonia/040420021538.qhs3vusx> . "But for young Estonians, the internet is a manifestation of something more than a service – it's a symbol of democracy and freedom." To see why, you just have to go outside. Free Wi-Fi<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/wifi> is everywhere, and has been for a decade. Viik says you could walk 100 miles – from the pastel-coloured turrets here in medieval Tallinn <http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/tallinn> to the university spires of Tartu – and never lose internet connection. "We realised that if the government was going to use the internet, the internet had to be available to everybody," Viik said. "So we built a huge network of public internet access points for people who couldn't afford them at home." The country took a similar approach to education. By 1997, thanks to a campaign led in part by Ilves, a staggering 97% of Estonian schools already had internet <http://www.tiigrihype.ee/?op=body&id=45>. Now 42 Estonian services are now managed mainly through the internet. Last year, 94% of tax returns were made online, usually within five minutes. You can vote on your laptop <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6407269.stm> (at the last election, Ilves did it from Macedonia) and sign legal documents on a smartphone. Cabinet meetings have been paperless since 2000. Doctors only issue prescriptions electronically, while in the main cities you can pay by text for bus tickets, parking, and – in some cases – a pint of beer. Not bad for country where, two decades ago, half the population had no phone line <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3603943.stm>. Central to the Estonian project is the ID card, introduced in 2002. Nine in 10 Estonians have one, and – by slotting it into their computer – citizens can use their card to vote online, transfer money and access all the information the state has on them. "There's nothing on the ID card itself, because that could be dangerous if you lost it," says Katrin Pärgmäe, who is in charge of public awareness at RIA, the country's internet authority <http://www.ria.ee/en>. "It only gives you access to the database if you type in the right code." You can also present the card at the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. On public transport, it doubles as a ticket. Many people also have special ID chips on their mobile sim cards that allow them to pay people by text. To a British audience, the ID card will have a whiff of Big Brother. But many Estonians argue the opposite: that it allows them to keep tabs on the state, rather than the other way round. "You'd think, given our history, we'd have a problem with it," said Ilves, in an oblique reference to the days when the KGB had an office down a cobbled street in central Tallinn. "But I feel much more secure with a digital ID. If anyone goes into my files, they're flagged. Whereas if my files – which would exist anyway – were made of paper, no one would know who was looking at them." Every Estonian can see who has visited their data, and they can challenge any suspicious behaviour. In one famous case, a policewoman was caught accessing information about her boyfriend. During a recent election campaign, a candidate was swiftly punished for accessing personal information about would-be constituents. "I don't know what the idiot was thinking," said Viik. "You can't hide." To an outsider, it is not immediately clear why Estonia took to the internet so much faster than its Baltic cousins, Latvia and Lithuania. All three won independence at the same time. All three needed quick ways of revamping their ailing infrastructure. But to Estonians, the reason is simple. Estonia has a sizeable Russian-speaking minority, but the country's ethnic Estonian majority feel Nordic, rather than Slavic or eastern European. In the early 90s, this meant they looked to tech-happy Scandinavia for both inspiration and investment. Those Finnish and Swedish businesses that did invest expected their Estonian counterparts to communicate by email rather than fax. And pretty soon it was the newcomers who were leading the way. "I remember when one of our banks was bought by a Swedish one, they came over and said: 'And now we're going to teach you how to do computer banking'," recalled Ilves. "And we said, 'well, you might want to look at what we're actually doing with computer banking ourselves.'" At the last count, 99% of Estonian bank transfers were online. It helped that many politicians in the early 90s were unusually quick to "get" the internet. "The people in power after the collapse of the Soviet Union were really young," said Jaan Tallinn, the co-founder of Skype, the Estonian internet telephone company, and a co-developer of file-sharingwebsite Kazaa <http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/15/www.kazaa.com>. "They knew what was going on." Mart Laar was 32 when he became prime minister in 1992. Ilves is slightly older, but had learned to code as a child, growing up in exile in the US. "I thought if I can do it, anyone can," he said in his strong New Jersey accent. "I was completely at ease with computers." The internet was also seen as a buffer to Russia<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/russia> . "We were afraid that Russian armies might take down the TV tower, the central radio station, or newspaper press," said Viik. "Three addresses shut down, and we would have been disconnected from the rest of the world. "But the internet would still work – and so we realised that this would be a great way of keeping in touch with the world in case of emergency." Ironically, when an attack did finally come, it came via the internet – and promptly disconnected Estonia from the rest of the world. In 2007, the government infuriated its Russian-speaking minority by moving a Soviet war memorial from central Tallinn to a cemetery on the city's outskirts. Violence flared on the streets, and later reached the internet. The first cyberattack was simplistic, and easily dealt with: thousands of unknown individuals bombarding government, media and banking websites with "denial of service" (DoS) attacks. "It was like an internet riot," said Hillar Aarelaid, who led Estonia's response, at the time. But what started as an emotional backlash soon became a far larger, longer and better co-ordinated assault on Estonia's very being. It lasted three weeks and could only be contained by restricting internet traffic in and out of the country. It was, in effect, a cybersiege. "This is how a lot of myths were created," remembered Pärgmäe. "Those outside the country couldn't access Estonian websites, but they didn't realise that people inside still could." Rumours circulated about the collapse of the Estonian online banking system, and how people were struggling to buy groceries. "But actually the longest downtime for a bank's website was just one and a half hours." The debacle had two positive effects. First: Nato founded a cyberwarfare thinktank in Estonia<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_Cyber_Defence_Centre_of_Excellence>, to learn from the experience. Second: the government set up the Cyber Defence League<https://www.eesti.ee/eng/riigikaitse/eesti_kaitsejoud/kaitsevagi>, a network of 100 volunteers from the cybersector who, among other roles, will form – a kind of territorial army during future strife. "Traditionally in western countries," said Ilves, "you've had a weekend-warrior thing where volunteers run off into the woods and do target practice. In Estonia, we have a unit of IT people from banks, software companies who in their spare time for one day a week work on cyber issues." This kind of collaboration between private and public sectors was also central to Estonian innovation in the 90s, Viik claims. "The government started several IT programmes as a catalyst," he said. "But only in a few was it the main sponsor. From the early days, government philosophy was not to hire programmers, but to use the services of private companies, which in turn increased the competitiveness of the Estonian IT sector." Case in point: the ID card. "It's private companies who developed and manage the service – and who can now export their new-found competencies to other countries." Viik argues that this benefits both the private sector and the state, who otherwise would not have the resources for ID card technology. But some think the overlap between occasionally threatens Estonia's open internet. For many years, each Estonian citizen had the right to a free domain name. As in the UK, they could not register top-level domain names – but they could bag a ".pri.ee" site, similar to a ".co.uk" site in Britain. In 2010, that changed: the government outsourced the responsibility of allocating domain names to private registrars. The pri.ee domains were abolished, and individuals were instead given the right to top-level ".ee" websites. The only catch was a £15 price-tag – one of the highest rates in Europe<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/europe-news> . Many academics and high-profile techies were outraged<http://kogukond.org/in-english/>, and some founded a pressure group – the Estonian Internet Community (EIC) – that campaigns to give ordinary citizens more of a say in how Estonia's internet is run. After public outcry, a new set of free domain-names - era.ee - were introduced. More generally, it is feared that the same politicians who had such enlightened attitudes to the internet in the 90s may be starting to lose their progressive edge. "They're still in power," said Jaan Tallinn, "but I'm not sure they still understand what's going on. Technology keeps progressing. Young people follow the curve. But as they get older they get inertia, and they start deviating from that curve." Ilves himself is fairly critical of parts of Acta<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement>, the hugely controversial international agreement that opponents fear will curtail the rights of individual internet users. But there is a perception that other politicians could be doing more to oppose its introduction. "It's difficult because it's actually an EU agreement," admitted Jaagup Irve, a PhD student at the Tallinn University of Technology, and an EIC board member. "But the government isn't doing enough to stop Acta<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/acta> ." Viik says that among politicians of all stripes there has always been "a silent consensus" about the importance of the internet. For many years, Estonians could expect whomever they elected to have the best interests of the internet at heart. But Irve thinks the public can no longer be so complacent. "People think a government is like a smart missile: the thing practically flies itself," he argued. "But today it's more like a bomb that we have to guide. We have to guide the government, and that's what the internet society has woken up to." *• Explore the seven-day special series on the Battle for the internet<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/series/battle-for-the-internet> * • This article was amended on 17 April 2012 to clarify details of the registration and selling of domain names. -- Paul Kukubo Chief Executive Officer, Kenya ICT Board PO Box 27150 - 00100 Nairobi, Kenya 12th Floor, Teleposta Towers Koinange Street Tel +254 20 2089061, +254 20 2211960 Fax: +254 20 2211962 website: www.ict.go.ke local content project: www.tandaa.co.ke, www.facebook.com/tandaakenya twitter:@tandaaKENYA BPO Project: www. doitinkenya.co.ke Digital Villages Project: www.pasha.co.ke personal contacts _______________ Cell: + 254 717 180001 skype: kukubopaul googletalk: pkukubo personal blog: www.paulkukubo.co.ke personal twitter: @pkukubo ____________________ Vision: Kenya becomes a top ten global ICT hub Mission: To champion and actively enable Kenya to adopt and exploit ICT, through promotion of partnerships, investments and infrastructure growth for socio economic enrichment

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Local Repo's
by Watchman 30 Apr '12

30 Apr '12

Brothers and sisters of Kenyan Tech. I want to set up Local FIleshare Repo's, Opening the downloading environment to free up bandwidth. Can i get some assistance from ISP's for this? Rahim. -- get to know more about me. *http://about.me/rahiminkara * this list is being *watched.*

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Life without Internet
by Odhiambo Washington 30 Apr '12

30 Apr '12

It appears to me that 100% of this list can live without a spouse, but not without Internet. Vote yes/no. I'd like to see your votes:) -- Best regards, Odhiambo WASHINGTON, Nairobi,KE +254733744121/+254722743223 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ I can't hear you -- I'm using the scrambler. Please consider the environment before printing this email.

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