On Friday I am off to Rwanda. Finally. This trip was supposed to happen… um… back in September I think. Then contracts weren’t signed, paperwork got complicated – other work came up. So the trip was rescheduled for the 15th of Feb. But Dave… its the 20th today! Very true. After all the months of postponement, after we scheduled the 15th and booked hotel rooms, we were informed that we have been kicked out of those rooms to make way for Dubya and his enormous entourage (we’re talking thousands of people here). So great, the President has just been in Rwanda and I’ve got to follow up behind him?? Did he piss them off? Did he say anything untoward to their President? Am I going to have to hear about it?
For the curious. I will be starting work on a project in which we will be building a system that allows health workers to collect public health information door to door via cell phone/pda. They collect this data already on paper and we want to take advantage of Rwanda’s very strong mobile phone network to make the process easier and quicker. I’d tell you more if the funders would only approve an announcement (red tape – mumble mumble). Oh, like everything else we do, this will be open source and the Rwanda Ministry of Health’s to own.
To put it very succinctly – internet access going out of Africa is bad. Very bad. Don’t believe all the hype of all the cool new ways of opening up Africa with the Internet. Its not here yet, and won’t be without some major investment. At any rate, I’ll try to post some while I am there but I doubt I’ll have the patience to put any photos up. Hmmm… maybe I will reacquaint myself with text browsers!
When I look through my web stats for this site I see the following browsers being used (in order of popularity):
- Firefox
- Internet Explorer
- Safari
- Mozilla
- Opera
- Playstation 3
- Playstation Portable
- Camino
- AvantGo
- Konqueror
After getting over my shock of people still using AvantGo and Mozilla, and then pondering why IE is still so damn high, I do realize that quite a few folks are still searching for something in their browsing experience. What they are searching for is as individual as one’s taste in art I am sure.
However, this morning I type this through the Wordpress web interface via Firefox’s new version 3 beta 1. Damn y’all… this thing is fast. I like to think that its all due to Federico’s work on image loading, but that’s only because I like Federico and his is the only blog I’ve read that has detailed work on Firefox’s speed. Obviously there had been a lot of work on making it faster – hell, the download is about 1/3 smaller than it used to be even.
In comparison, there is memory usage. I’ve not had much trouble in this regard. The only browser I’ve ever had memory problems with is Safari which always spiraled out of control and into the realm of the mac spinning beachball for me. Firefox never had that problem, on mac or linux (my two used platforms). ZDnet did some memory usage testing (on windows) between the latest 2.x version of Firefox and the new version 3 and noted that initially 2 does better in memory usage but as the pages keep loading 2 spirals upwards while 3 stays low and steady. after 12 pages 2 was up to 103,180KB while 3 was at 62,312KB. Interestingly, IE came in at 89,756KB.
Of course, using beta versions of Firefox can be painful if, like me, you rely on some browser plugins. They all break with the new, unrecognizable version – but perhaps I too have been searching for something more in my browser.
Wow – I find it quite interesting that Red Hat is entering the appliance space. Most interesting because so many former Red Hat engineers got there first with rpath.
I’ve used rpath appliances (found conveniently via their rbuilder site) and I find myself promoting them quite often. Not because they are old friends, but simply because I find their technology extremely useful.
I think this news is flattering to rpath actually – they are doing something right, and that is shown by who is copying them. I don’t mean that as a put-down to Red Hat either, I am sincere in my praise of rpath and the direction they have gone. And yes, Red Hat should be in this space too. I am sure they too will do well with the idea. In fact, if Ubuntu wanted to really have a server product, they could do a lot worse than just doing it as customizable appliances.
I was lucky enough today to play with an OLPC. It was very very cute. Seriously. I dig the interface even though the one I played with was having some stability problems (don’t we all?) It has the tiniest little keyboard on it – which is only obvious if you are designing it for children… but still, tiny. The music app kicked some serious butt and I’m told the browser part does too… but that was part of the stability problem with the one I was using.
I’m hoping we will be able to use them on one of our projects – we’ll have to see.
Oh, by the way – that’s the first piece of hardware I have ever seen Open Firmware on – go figure.
