• There is now an Ushahidi Election Violence, Issue and Rioting Reporting Map instance up for the Tanzanian elections taking place next Sunday. You can also apply as an ushahidi voluntia translator and verifier at this Google Form. As of last week, one of four polls suggests opposition may have an edge. I do not take a position for any party in the elections but I do hope that they are carried out peacefully. I especially hope that my friends in country, Watanzania and Wamerikani alike, are safe. (As Pernille points out, UCHAGUZI is a collaborative initiative between TACCEO, Tanzania; HIVOS, Netherlands; Haki Elimu , Tanzania; the biggest Tz national ICT community Jamii Forums, Tanzania; Rakesh Rajani’s TWAWEZA , CRECO, Kenya in association with USHAHIDI and SODNET, Kenya as technology & strategy partners. Wengi wameunga kuhifadhi taifa, Jamani! vz)
• Beyond the election questions, there are other really bright people: Mtanzania Silicon Valley Diaspora Entrepreneur Mbwana Alliy has an insightful guest article covering no fewer than 5 different promising Tanzanian+Silicon Valley and Tanzanian nzima initiatives. Lete Maendelo! He suggests that the reason you don’t associate Tanzania and the modern tech scene is mostly just a lack of reporting of things south of Lake Victoria. He calls for more coverage.
• One mentioned startup was Envaya, a website to help government offices and NGOs in Tz and East Africa communicate with constituents easily on mobiles and the internet, cofounded by a returned ICT Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Pemba in 2007. Also see Kabissa.org and Maneno. Each site has similar goals but different approaches.
• Word on the ground is that Tanzania Beyond Tomorrow (touched on in this post) is looking at leveraging Moodle-based BrainHoney as a part of the software foundation for the initiative. Chisimba (+ one of their rockstar developers on twitter) also seems a good related Africa-oriented e-learning platform to follow.
• Google Baraza African oriented Question and Answer site is doing an initial community launch. You can apply for an invite here. A Ghanaian Blogger’s ideas are here, Peace Corps colleague Jon McLean here, but do not miss Google’s cute video on the service here if your modem can handle the download. Grab and answer your question for Africa as soon as possible! So far it seems to be successfully bridging East and West Africa as I’ve not seen in a website, though there is little South African participation to date. See also Majibu.com, the preexisting East African Q&A startup.
• WhiteAfrican has just posted an up to date Snapshot of mobile data rates across East Africa that follows on my own Snapshot from 2009.

As an administrative note: I have broken out my Peace Corps-relevant posts into a separate category that you can visit using the link along the top. They won’t appear on the front page but will appear in my RSS feeds. I’m gratified that my last post was picked up and republished in the Peace Corps newsletter, I hadn’t thought of that! Thanks Aron. Ultimately though, I don’t want to weaken my main practical themes on the blog.

Related articles

• Facebook Arrives in Tanzania (insidefacebook.com)
• Tanzania approves new highway across Serengeti (gadling.com)

• Lisp and Functional Programming – Reddit collectively says it’s so great
• Semantic Web – I just finished my entire senior project at University on processing websites and I have had the sneaking suspicion that Semantic Web might be The Proper Way to accomplish my goals. That said, no tools from that camp presented themselves in research. More on that project later perhaps.
• “Web Services” – Mashups are one thing, but where do you draw the line? I love dapper which makes RSS/XML from bloody ugly old fashioned sites!
• Unix (not Linux) – It always feels wrong. Props to Stallman and GNU, there is something to those tools.
• YouTube

I do get:

• Twitter (I like the Group Instant Messaging idea)
• Google Reader (Podcasts, News, Blogs)
• IMAP – Store email on the server so it is always in the cloud, Gmail works too, less personal with the benefit of free backups.
• Google Desktop- Google for my mind. Now on Linux, Mac AND Windows. I hope that they have porting tools to move the data files between platforms!?
• Greasemonkey – I should do one of those cliched posts where I list all the scripts I use.

Further explore and accept:

• RAW camera formats - Here I come Nikon D80.
• FreeBSD – Installed but it’s still not me. Gentoo makes more sense.
• Grandcentral.com – Route all your calls through one number? Google just bought them.

Facebook might be like AOL but College students have free audiences there, more than can be said for most blogs.

It is nice to be able to flick your wrist to do all the common tasks in a browser without touching menus, reaching for toolbars, or the keyboard. Personally, I’ve got a tablet so the pen is often the most convenient interface. Back, Forward, Next (in series), Previous (in series), new tab, close tab, minimize and maximize all in two mouse moves or less.

I used to use “All-In-One Gestures”:http://perso.wanadoo.fr/marc.boullet/index.html which is a fork of the “Optimoz Mouse Gestures” extension. It was forked before reliable diagonal gestures were implemented though and it has stayed san diagonals for years. Optimoz was broken in Firefox for a time with no maintainers so I had to move to All-in-One, I got used to a few of the bit features and didn’t check back on Optimoz.

I sorely missed diagonal gestures, instead of 4 gestures with one move (Up, Down, Left, Right) I could do eight!, but I tolerated AIO. Two gestures which were especially handy as one move-gestures but don’t fit into the UDLR orientations were Grow Image and Shrink Image. Did I mention the loss was a tad annoying?

A new extension has come about though which adds two more amazingly useful one move gestures into the mixin’s though–”NextPlease”:https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=390 . This extension adds interfaces for Next and Previous page, filling out and in my opinion, fully justifying the diagonals as legit gestures, if there was any question. All-In-One supports these gestures but only for the non-diagonal gestures–Up (Link-in-new-tab), Down (Link-in-new-window or Scroll Down) , Left (back), Right (forward) are already taken with important moves. No flick to next page for you there.

So, how can you flick to the next page?

2. Install the “Optimoz Mouse Gestures extension”:http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures/installation.html
3. After you restart firefox, click the links below to add the NextPlease gestures to Optimoz:
   • NextPlease (9) – Diagonal Up and Right for Next
   • PrevPlease (1) – Diagonal Down and Left for Previous

The other two classic diagonals are all enabled by default–Grow Image is Down and Right, Shrink Image is Up and Left.

I found a post which suggests a fix for the unstable debian libwine-cil package to get .Net/Windows software running (or closer to running) on Mono. I’ve installed the packages from the mono-for-debian site too.

+4. When trying to run a SWF application I get the
+System.DllNotFoundException:user32.dll exception. What's wrong?
+
+In order for SWF and winelib to operate properly you need to have
+symbolic links for the wine dlls in the <prefix>/lib directory. While
+the rpm should install those automatically as part of the postinstall
+script you can also manually create those with the following command:
+
+cd <prefix>/lib
+for i in <wine_dll_dir>/*dll.so; do ln -s $i lib`basename $i`; done
+
+<prefix> is the base directory where mono is installed under (ie. /usr
+or /usr/local) and <wine_dll_dir> is the directory where the wine dlls
+(user32.dll.so, gdi32.dll.so, etc) can be found (ie. /usr/lib/wine or
+/usr/local/lib/wine)

In my case I’m trying to get RssBandit running as a curiousity and due to the fact I haven’t found a comperable RSS reader for Linux yet–and I’d like to use the session syncing capabilites of RssBandit which are currently unstandard. (It appears that they’re cooking something on the back burner in the way of standards though, which is laudable. IMAP&Webmail combo is wonderous, I’d love to duplicate it in my agreggator.)

You also have to run the wineserver manually. Of course to get that error you’d have already of had to know that. So /usr/lib/wine/wineserver.

I get an error right away:
Unhandled Exception: System.IndexOutOfRangeException: Array index is out of range.
in <0x001e9> System.Resources.ResourceReader:ResourceValue (int)
in <0x00076> ResourceEnumerator:get_Value ()
in <0x000da> System.Resources.ResourceSet:ReadResources ()
in <0x00088> System.Resources.ResourceSet:GetObject (string,bool)
in <0x0001f> System.Resources.ResourceSet:GetString (string,bool)
in <0x00125> System.Resources.ResourceManager:GetString (string,System.Globalization.CultureInfo)
in <0x00014> System.Resources.ResourceManager:GetString (string)
in <0x00047> RssBandit.WinGui.Forms.SplashScreen:InitializeComponent ()
in <0x000f7> RssBandit.WinGui.Forms.SplashScreen:.ctor ()
in <0x0004f> (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) RssBandit.WinGui.Forms.SplashScreen:.ctor ()
in <0x0001e> RssBandit.WinGui.Forms.Splash:ShowThread ()
in <0x0005f> (wrapper delegate-invoke) System.MulticastDelegate:invoke_void ()

The K5Diary2RSS screen scraper app I mentioned in an earlier post creates very mangled output. I’m not sure what to think of this with respect to Mono. Shouldn’t it run identially? It seems the compilers generate the same output, or at least generate the same output on either platform which they are run on (.NET CLR or Mono CLR) respectfully.

RSSBandit is Open Source so theoretically I could go in there and bugger around with it. Hmm.

Edit: I take back the not having a linux feedreader app statement. Liferea is nice and very fast compared to RSS Bandit’s weighty .NET baggage. The typically underpowered gtkhtml is a perfect fit for a RSS newsreader and tabs are probably overkill in Bandit as I use Firefox’s tabs & gestures to navigate the sites anyway. I would love to see syncronization added though.

Michael Crichton relays that we should never have banned DDT in a lecture of his at CalTech (among lots more meaty claims) while calling out environmentalism of religious zealotry.

When a magazine article in “21st Century Science Tech” I ran across made a parallel claim I was interested.

The 1972 U.S. ban on DDT is responsible for a genocide 10 times larger than that for which we sent Nazis to the gallows at Nuremberg. It is also responsible for a menticide which has already condemned one entire generation to a dark age of anti-science ignorance, and is now infecting a new one.

I did another google search to collect my research. I found one back-patting environmentalist group page on DDT, it’s problems, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Also, thankfully a posting on The Straight Dope (which previously has shed light on terrible confoundings like the scroll lock key) addressing 21st Century Science.