Improving Network Management for Universities and SMEs Chris Wilson Aptivate Ltd, UK My own opinions, not my employer’s A presentation at AfNOG 2012 Download here: Improving Network Management for Universities and SMEs
AfNOG 2012 Setup
May 5th, 2012
I’m at the AfNOG Workshop 2012 in Serrekunda, Gambia as one of the instructors in the Scalable Services track (SS-E). A local TV company has reported about us on the local news, and you can watch the video. (Thanks to Nadejda Loumbeva for finding it on YouTube!) These are my notes from our setup for [...]
A tale of five bugs: Django Intranets on Windows
April 17th, 2012
I’m in Ethiopia working with the ATA to help install their Intranet. (Aside: Ethiopia has great, cheap food and beer, and fairly bad Internet.) Because they really want to run the server locally, and they only have Windows servers, we agreed to try to make it run on Windows. We haven’t done many deployments of [...]
Sending email from Django
March 29th, 2012
Yesterday I wanted to send email notifications for document changes in the Generic Intranet. I found that the built-in Django method requires you to hard-code the email body. It doesn’t support rendering email from templates, unlike Ruby on Rails, which is surprising and a shame. I spent some time coding template support for it, and [...]
Content indexing in Django using Apache Tika
February 1st, 2012
For the Documents module of our new open-source Generic Intranet, we need to be able to extract the text content and metadata from various kinds of documents: PDF files Microsoft Office DOC, XLS and PPT files and the new XML equivalents, DOCX, XLSX and PPTX. I found various tools online to help extract this text, [...]
Rough Guide to rural data collection with ODK
December 5th, 2011
This post has three purposes, which I think overlap sufficiently to combine them: A User Guide for the system that we developed for UNICEF, IDS and RuralNet Zambia A Developers’ Guide for anyone wishing to build something similar Notes on lessons learned that may assist future implementers Project goals Automate the data entry part of [...]
Embedding jinja2 templates in Django templates
November 15th, 2011
We recently integrated the Askbot forum into the Django-based websites we developed for the RIMI4AC Project. Askbot uses the Jinja2 templating language but this was incompatible with the standard Django templates we had used up to this point. Here’s how we solved the problem. When we were asked to recommend a forum to be integrated [...]
How can a $35 tablet computer change the world?
October 21st, 2011
Osama Manzar poses some very interesting questions about India’s new $35 tablet computer “for the poor”. However he doesn’t attempt to answer these questions, leaving the reader in no doubt that he thinks the answer is No! in all cases. I must admit to being skeptical about any such innovation, and I’ve been listening to [...]
Jazz Talking: The Agile & Participation Event
September 28th, 2011
A format for a multi-disciplinary conversation – two experts, on a sofa, in front of an audience.
Computers in Schools: Sound solutions
September 5th, 2011
Activities with sound are ideal for kids. Preferably lots of sound. Especially when it comes to teaching language, reading and writing. When you have a classroom full of children with computers, each working at their own pace on speech or language tasks, they need private sound rather than the built-in speakers of their laptops. Otherwise [...]