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developed using JQuery Mobile and storing data using webSQL, a now deprecated HTML5 standard (i think the correct term is obsolete...is it just me or does it not make sense to already have deprecated standards and tags in HTML5?).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