Intriguing, how its been....

It's been a long while since i last posted...procrastination? perhaps. But there definitely has been a lot happening. The last time i was keen to make a posting, i was halfway across the country, 36,000 ft above sea level, bathed in the warm evening sunlight right above Lake Victoria and heading off to conduct an assessment on the data constraints at various health facilities. That turned out to be a great opportunity to explore the use of tablets in data collection. We were using my newly acquired tablet, the viewsonic with forms developed using JQuery Mobile and storing data using webSQL, a now deprecated HTML5 standard (i think the correct term is obsolete...is it just me or does it not make sense to already have deprecated standards and tags in HTML5?). I was in the company of other staff from the office, a lady from JHU and ministry of health officials...was a great time. we slept at this small hotel in Bondo(one of the worst performing districts nationwide-healthwise anyway) and i learnt a great deal...everything from applying this technology to the politics issues about it...can't ever forget the politics :) That was then.

Well i came back, worked with Ministry officials to develop a facebook page to promote breastfeeding in Kenya and had it launched by the Director of Medical Services! The @#^&%$ Director of Medical Services liked my page, y'all. was very cool for me. The page is now gaining popularity and it makes sometimes ponder on the diversity of the topics that foldks talk about..very interesting. And then beating odds, i organised a training session on basic IT skills based on the ICDL curriculum for 60 faculty from Medical Training colleges all over the country. It's now progressing very well and i am one proud lad. I still have a lot to get done at the office...to be quite honest i'm overwhelmed(if i was in the office, i probably would not be making this blog post :P) and there seems to be some reluctance to get additional assistance for me. There's a meeting this Friday for ICT staff. Other than my supervisor's rumuored good fortunes, i am keen to see what kind of issues come up to support Program Technology. I don't want to sound proud or disregarding but i don't see the future of ICT support for Technology in our organization being in setting up servers and in user support...it's in getting technology to to the field working alongside my collegues to make their work faster, more and more exciting/fun...we need a freaking IT and Hardware team, hire international M4D consultants and grow the program technology dept to more staff with different capabilities...too bad my supervisor does not see it that way @#$%^&. Anyhow, we wait with bated breath for Friday.

I have been developing some applications as well. A graphing application using PHP/GD to draw complex charts plotting >1000 points and their SMAs for a canadian called Ivan. that's been pretty fun. I have also been helping out a lady from Great Britain to finalise her Master's project that involves laying out UML diagrams using Hierarchial and Orthogonal Algorithms in Java. I'm using Sugiyama for the Hierarchaial algorithm and the Topology shaped metrics approach. I promise to dedicate a new blogpost just on these topics. And what else is hot in tech...well, a guy called Mark just produced an API for MPESA callled PesaPI in PHP/MySQL. I just need to understand his code and develop the port for Java. I am hoping beyond hope that this code is not some souped up SMS gateway code that requires a phone to work but a fully fledged API that interfaces directly with MPESA...i await. Huawei produced a sleek new phone called the Vision...seriously hot and i made a presentation at the staff meeting on tablets...very exciting(and my supervisor's idea as well to have this presentation...soon after he cancelled all procurement for tablets...a weird man, that one.

Well i have to sign off though, knowing very well that there's most likely no one reading this blog(except by accident, i'm sure) but it's all good.

ciao

of EpiSurveyor and ViewSonic....

This has been one of those crazy weeks. Multiple simultaneous activities, a slew of new friends made and a weekend plus public holiday gone unnoticed given the huge amount of work that had to be done....It's really weird; i should be used to this by now....but alas, every new day brings new challenges, opportunities but the same ol' 10-14 hr work days. oh, well.

It all started with preparations for the Global M&E conference. As part of the preparations, i worked with a team of 2 others; one from Washington and one from Baltimore to decide and develop a mobile Data Collection activity that would be undertaken by the participants once they got here. This was a great activity for me. It means that i get to understand even more these platforms that i am always advocating to program staff. And so we made plans for 18 Mobile Devices, the use of EpiSurveyor and the use of a minimal MOH711A as the form to be programmed to the devices. While deciding on the phone models was easy enough, there was still the process of determining which were available in the Kenyan Market and whether Tablets would be included as part of the device mix. Eventually we decided to not have tablets and settled on the Nokia 6303. Great....Now came the trickier part; getting the approval from Finance. I couldn't get the approval immediately because several finance staff were on leave...with only 4 working days left. Anyhow, i finally got the approval on a Thursday (after reviewing a few more quotations) and preparation of the L.P.O. began. To cut the long story short, the L.P.O. was approved on Thursday afternoon, money wired to the provider's account but it was not until Saturday afternoon that we could obtain the devices. I had already been up many nights that week (and the previous) to develop the EpiSurveyor forms and all that remained was deploying the forms onto these Nokia 6303s. And so i got the SIM cards and airtime (using my own funds), installed them into the phones which i then configured for internet access. Not a hard task, but for 18 phones, it was ridiculously monotonous. I met the two folks i mentioned on Sunday, prepared for a presentation on the devices for the coming Tuesday, made a pretty decent presentation (i think!) yesterday and from what i hear, the participants just left for the field trip that involves data collection (we are not allowed to call it that, by the way) at 13 health faclities. I feel rather disappointed i can't go but i can't wait for the feedback! Should be interesting :P I don't think i'm done with the conference stuff, there are still a couple of internet woes and i'm helping out in that too....but i have to admit, this is all great.

Right, off to the tablet. Yap, you got me right. I got a tablet on Sunday! It took a lot of research on which device would be most cost effective, feature-filled and had a vibrant developer community and i finally settled on the Viewsonic GTablet. I have to admit that the viewing angle sucks but i'm just getting started with it. It's an Android 2.2 Froyo device with a 1Ghz Tegra 2 processor, 512 MB RAM, 16GB internal storage memory, 1.3MP camera, standard ports(USB, microUSB) that totally kicks ass! I am planning to install a custom ROM on it(Vegan-Tab) and get access to the Android Market for some similarly kick ass apps. It's amazing how just buying this device has catapulted me to a new world (of tablets...) which hopefully will turn out fun.

So a couple of things are pending (at work and personally). For some reason when i do more to get more off my work load, a set of newer activities all begging for attention pop-up! ha, i guess the work just never ends. As long as it's fun....

Hi All, Today is the beginning of my new and strange adventure of this thing called "blogging". I've been a big fan of blogs and i work in a position where i'm always encouraging staff on the use of websites (the Web 2.0 kind) and other online tools to work better, smarter and reach farther...i believe in what i say and in what i ask folks to get involved in, and what better way is there to prove this than to start(and consistently use) my own blog.

I have to be clear though...i'm not doing this just because i need to prove that web technologies work to my collegues and friends but since there's so much i feel i can share with the world, so much i can connect with with folks from all over the world...and because it's kinda, well...fun! just writing these few introductory lines gives me this strange overwhelming feeling that i may be looking back a year from now at the posts i made and just being amazed at how so much will have happened.

So i'm not really going to put a lot of personal stuff here...no embarrassing little details or any of that bedroom stuff. i think there's enough of that out there...and i'm not that kinda guy. just plain ol' me stuff.

What kind of guy, am i....you ask?

Well, very laid back for starters. i can pretty much stand a lot, just as long as it doesn't hurt or demean other people; differing points of view, differing working methodologies even different way of thinking. It's interesting really...a while ago i was in a work-related retreat where the facilitators had us take a personality quiz (u probably have heard of some of these, if not undergone the horror of going through one) but turns out i hate criticism! i hate criticism! i don't agree and yes sometimes i'll get a little worked up at someone opposing a proposal i have made but more often than not, it's because i can see that they have made little effort in validating their arguments or are just being obstinate (and hence stuck up) and i think i'm generally pretty flexible.

Anyhow back to the content of this blog. i expect it will be rather techie (here's the chance to jump ship) but i promise to add a lot of interesting stuff about my world as i go on that's just plain ol' me. Stuff about my environment, people and those kinds of things...maybe even politics. Hold on tight and welcome to my world!