Muyiwa Taiwo

According to this story, a Linux company, Mandriva, had sold computers with a customisable, open source operating system to the Nigerian government at a very low price. According to the head of Mandriva, the reason the Nigerian government chose their solution was because it could be customised to suit the customer's needs. The machines were tested, the government signed for a consignment of 17,000 computers, and the company started delivering. Suddenly, TSC, the company handling the contract on behalf of the government said to Mandriva, "we will pay you for your software, but after you supply the computers with it installed, we will delete it and install Microsoft Windows".

Now, Windows is not customisable, and there are several undocumented little programs that can send information back to Microsoft if you don't take steps to stop them. Fortunately, someone at the government funding agency in Nigeria, Nigeria's Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF), seems to have their head screwed on right, saw through the scam that the arrangement is, and stepped in to shut it down. Did I hear you say "Hooray!"? Well, it's not quite as simple as that.

It turns out that "Microsoft is still negotiating an agreement that would give TSC US$400,000 (£190,323) for marketing activities around the Classmate PCs when those computers are converted to Windows" according to Microsoft's Nigeria Country Manager, Chinenye Mba-Uzoukwu (see here). Mandriva's François Bancilhon, in a sarcasm-laden letter to Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, says the deal got "more competitive". Others might say it got dirty. Others may even say that Microsoft is bribing TSC. Or what would you call a situation where someone is paid to replace a perfectly good operating system with a bloated, buggy, and insecure one?

The Nigerian government, or its anti-corruption agency, the EFCC, must investigate who has been offered and obviously agreed to take money in exchange for compromising not only the security of Nigeria's IT infrastructure, but perhaps more importantly, potentially lock in the next generation of Nigerians into an operating system that other countries are rejecting in their national IT infrastructure. Anybody found guilty should be charged with nothing less than treason.

The One Laptop Per Child (laptop.org) is a US$100 laptop that promises to revolutionise education and development among some of the world's poorest children. According to the OLPC Foundation, "starting November 12, One Laptop Per Child will be offering a Give 1 Get 1 Program for a brief window of time in North America. For $399, you will be purchasing two XO laptops—one that will be sent to empower a child to learn in a developing nation, and one that will be sent to your child at home." In other words, $400 gets your child a laptop, and another one is sent to a needy child in the developing world. And, your child gets a pen-pal in that child, since they can stay in touch via e-mail. You can donate here.

As they say, touch a child's life and you never know what other lives might be touched in turn. Read more about the OLPC and the "Get 1 Give 1" program in this New York Times article.

There has been a lot of negative comments about what's wrong with the laptop — no hard drive, no CD/DVD drive, etc. But until you see one in operation, you have no idea what a powerful idea this rabbit-eared laptop represents, and about its potential to change the world. This YouTube video review by David Pogue of the New York Times also shows what a powerful kid-magnet the OLPC is.

According to Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC founder and former chairman of MIT's Media Lab, complaining about the perceived shortcomings of the laptop is "as if people spent all of their attention focusing on Columbus’s boat and not on where he was going". Walter Bender, a computer researcher who served as director of the Media Laboratory after Mr. Negroponte and now heads software development for the laptop project, likens the XO to a Trojan Horse — “the soldiers inside this Trojan horse are children with laptops.”

This video shows how easy it is to copy another person's fingerprint and successfully authenticate using it on a fingerprint reader, the sort that is becoming increasingly common either built into laptops, or as USB attachments. Although the sound track is in German, it's quite easy to follow what's going on. Basically, all you need is some reasonably good computer skills, plus

• The lid from a plastic bottle
• Superglue
• A digital camera
• Wood glue
• Cosmetic glue
• An image processing program
• An inkjet printer

So, if you think fingerprint recognition is safe, you probably want to think again.

"In 1999, Eglash discovered that fractal geometry – the geometry of similar shapes repeated on ever-shrinking scales – is apparent in the designs of many cultures on the continent of Africa, revealing that traditional African mathematics may be much more complicated than previously thought. He documented fractal patterns in cornrow hairstyles, weavings, and the architecture of villages, as well as many forms of African art."

African women have been braiding their hair for centuries, and indeed, braiding seems to be a hairstyle fashion that never goes out of vogue in Africa. So, i was quite intrigued to discover that there is actually some "serious maths" behind those cute-looking braids. This happened when I stumbled across Ron Eglash's work on "culturally situated design tools" (CSDTs), a set of computer programs which help "educate students about the mathematics principles used to design cornrow hairstyles, Mangbetu art, Navajo rugs, Yupik parka patterns, Pre-Columbian pyramids, and Latin music, among others". Read about the African origins of cornrow braiding here, and here for how Eglash's software tools are sparking student interest and increasing their achievement in mathematics.

Apparently, as in the case of nanobiotechnology which I blogged about some time ago, fractal geometry has been long known to the peoples of Africa, and it's true what the good book says about there being nothing new under the sun.

Since May 27 I've been on what must be New Zealand's slowest broadband connection, with an upload speed of between 12 5 kbps and 32 kbps, and download speeds of between 700 560 kbps and 2 Mbps. This on a plan which is nominally supposed to be 2 Mbps / 128 kbps.

Slingshot has not been able to tell me what the problem is, nor have they made any efforts to fix it. They have refused to acknowledge that it is a fault arising out of the provisioning for my service by Telecom, preferring instead to tell me that Telecom has tested my line and my line is capable of achieving the contracted speeds.

I've just watched a segment on TV3 about the dangers of driving on New Zealand roads, especially those posed by [mostly teen-age] drink-drivers, unlicensed drivers, etc., and I remembered that a friend had sent me pictures from the scene of a fatal accident.

Please be warned that the attached pictures are of an extremely graphic nature, so please do not try to view them if you are of a queasy disposition. However, I urge you to share the images with anyone you know who has ever behaved irresponsibly behind the wheels.

"We need a revolution in our understanding of science and of the world. Living in an age dominated by science, we have come more and more to believe in an objective, empirical reality and in the goal of reaching a complete understanding of that reality. Part of the thrill that came with the announcement that the human genome had been mapped or with the idea that we are close to understanding the big bang rests in our desire for completeness.

But we’re fooling ourselves."

The above quotation is from an article by Robert Lanza appearing in The American Scholar, in which he seems to be arguing that all of what humanity accepts as facts, including all our theories of quantum mechanics, evolution, spacetime, etc., are nothing but our creation. In other words, all those things are real only to the extent that we make them real. So, time only passes, and we move through space because we create the concept of time and space.

The following is from a Nigerian tabloid, the Daily Sun

On the apprehension of the people that barely a month to the election, the INEC had not released and published the voters’ register, Umeadi [Philip Umeadi is INEC's Commissioner in charge of information] dismissed the fears as unfounded, saying that the commission had since released the register and even forwarded it to all the political parties in soft copies, via diskette.

I cannot but keep wondering what the level and quality of IT intellectual capital in Abuja is. How would one explain the claim by INEC that it has fitted information about 61 million voters that it claims to have registered onto a diskette whose maximum data storage capacity is 1.4 million bytes. If we assume that the quantity of information collected on each registered voter is 100 bytes (to account for their name and address as a minimum), then 61 million people will result in 6.1 billion bytes, which will need over 4,000 diskettes to store! This is plainly ridiculous.

Christmas in Binghamton may not have been white, but we sure more than made up for it on Val's day eve. Here's a shot of my street following the snow dump of Val's day eve.

I wonder where the parking meter wardens are — surely, they won't let all those cars park for free? Jokes aside though, I was quite impressed when I looked out of my window and saw that in spite of the heavy downfall, the buses were actually running! I'm certain that if we ever had this quantity of snow in New Zealand, the whole country would be shut down for days, if not weeks!

Here's a couple more pictures — these were taken at Binghamton University.

It's been "real" winter in the US north-east for some days now, with up to ten feet of snow in places, but we've been lucky in Binghamton so far. Well, that's going to change starting tonight, Valentine Day's eve. There's a heavy snow warning in place, and we've been advised to only go out tomorrow if we really have to.

The last time I saw heavy snowfall was back in the eighties in the south east of England, so when I learned that we could have up to three feet of snow here over the next couple of days, I thought I'd get a couple of shots. These were taken around midnight on the eve of Valentine Day, 2007.

And to my Kiwi friends who've been asking for pictures of a white Christmas, well, I guess Christmas has finally come to Binghamton — in February.

I can hardly wait to see what things will look like in the morning.