Entries in Life

Oh no! I’ve been here too long, I don’t have anything to write about! I think this is mostly because I spent yesterday at the hotel doing the sorts of things I normally do: development, sys admin, etc.  I didn’t get a chance to actually start customizing the system like I originally intended.  Instead, I realized I needed to set up monitoring and interim backups for the server I set up at the Ministry of Health.  From the looks of things I might not get to started on the customizations for a couple of days.  Ugh… dcm, however, actually left Kigali and went out to a health center in a village. I was hoping to join him, but there wasn’t enough room. Well, I’m off to the U.S. Embassy.  More when I return.

I forgot to mention: I’ve started to put up pictures of my trip.

In many ways, this trip feels like a big CV padder — you know, finding the most impressive way of describing something possible.  When all you did was help desk support, you throw around words like “training” and “communication” as if that makes picking up the phone and walking someone through a few steps it takes to make a headline bold more important. International Travel, working with the Head of IT for a countries Department of Health… It all feels pretty surreal to me.  The surrealism is accentuated by the way I’ve thought about the world as a big globe floating in space, and my self a minute little speck on one side of it.  Well, the speck has moved! Today I actually start customizing iHRIS Manage for the ministry. Hopefully it is as straight-forward as I think it is going to be.

Because Banana Beer is the Lutefisk of Rwanda, Vanessa insisted that dcm and I try some.  So last night’s dinner was actually somewhat Rwandan, as compared with the other food we’ve been eating. (Photo by dcm.) The restaurant (La Republica) had a great view of the night time city.  The menu was a bit sparse, but did include goat dishes.  And Banana Beer. dcm took a couple of sips of the muddy stuff and, after declaring it “tastes like mead”, he refused to touch any more.  That left Vanessa and I, operating under the twin principles of “Waste not, Want not” and “Eat what is put in front of you” respectively, to finish it off. I ended up swigging the last of it down and regretted having any before I was finished.  The syrupy stuff didn’t make me retch, but the way it sat on my stomach was unpleasant, to say the least. The other food, (goat soup and plantain) was really good, and considering the buffet of native-ish food we visited for lunch, I’d give the countries fare a B overall so far.  Not too outstanding but, with the right seasoning, quite edible. Just don’t give me any more banana beer.

This morning, I finished up the installation of the HRIS server for the Ministry of Health.  Now I have remote access to the box and will begin setting up monitoring on it so that we can better maintain the system.  Afterwards, I had fun showing the head of IT around the command line a little using PUTTY. I’m in the process of uploading some of the photo’s I’ve taken.  Uploads take forever.

I was thoroughly exhausted this morning and slept 2 hours past the time I was supposed to meet the others for breakfast.  Ouch! I finished setting up the developer laptop and used bzr to download the source code for iHRIS Manage to the laptop.  I’ll customize the software for the Ministry of Health using the laptop and then, if we’re able to hire a Rwandan to do in-country development, they’ll have everything ready to go with php-mode set up in emacs and (of course) a link to my PPA so they can get updates easily.  Up till now, I’ve been pretty scared of the customizations they needed since I have to finish them up in the next few days. Once Vanessa started sending them to me, I was really relieved.  Most of it does look pretty simple.  “Add a field here, change a label there.” Speaking of in-country developers, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that dcm and Vanessa were able to find someone with LAMP experience.  One can always hope. In the afternoon I met with the head of IT at the Ministry of Health and installed Ubuntu on the server for them.  He doesn’t know much about Linux but seemed willing to learn.  I’d like to have someone here that I can talk to if we have problems, so I’ve been trying to at least get him or one of his underlings comfortable with Linux. We walked back up the hill to the hotel and dcm soon crashed.  I guess it was his turn to be worn out Overall, I’m really pleased with the way things are turning out.  I came into this really scared, but I’m getting more confidence by the day. One thing I would like to see is more support for Rwanda in Linux and especially Ubuntu.  When I’m setting up Ubuntu, “Rwanda” is not a choice for either the French or English language.  And, despite lots of work being done on Linux translations to Kinyarwanda, where “Ubuntu” is actually a word native to the Language, I can’t choose that language as the default in the installer.  This affects other areas of the installer, too.  When it comes time to pick a timezone, I can’t.  I have to tell the installer I’m in South Africa, which means that za.archive.ubuntu.com is picked for the Ubuntu mirror — a far better choice for the network connections I’ve used is still one of the U.S.-based mirrors.  (I’m not the only one to think Linux distributions should be more aware of Rwanda, either.) Finally, it would be great if RwandaTel or some other organization took an interest in promoting Linux in Rwanda.  They could set up a kernel.org mirror so that I could get my Linux fix faster!

In response to my complaint about Zimbra’s slow web interface, Nathan said I should use Amazon’s EC2.  The problem is that even if I use EC2, the server is in a single place … and I can’t choose that place.  And Zimbra is still a very heavy web application. And, worse, Amazon (unlike Google and Yahoo!) is not obsessed with page-load times.  When I cleared my cache and pointed YSlow at Amazon’s front page, it took over 40 seconds to load!  And a good 10 of those seconds showed nothing but an empty page.  Twitter (front page load time, 15+ seconds) uses Amazon’s S3 for image hosting and if you go to someone’s page on Twitter (say, USofA, 75+ seconds!), you can watch each of the images for the people he is following load slowly, one after another, as they fill in on the page.  People are using S3 for a content distribution network, but that isn’t what S3 is.  I expect EC2 to fair worse than S3. By contrast Google took under 5 seconds and Yahoo! (a lot more images) took  about 10 seconds.  (Nathan’s page to just over 12 seconds.  My own page took over 20 seconds and didn’t display anything for a while, something I need to work on.) This is where I’d like Zimbra to focus.  So that even those of us who only have one server hosted in California (or on EC2 somewhere) can get to our email quickly. But I can’t just sit on my butt about speed.  Actually coming to Rwanda helps me understand that page load times matter — a lot.  We don’t know what sort of connection people will have to any applications we build.  For Ajax apps, Google Reader gives a good idea of how to build a useful, responsive application even when you don’t have a 1MBit connection.

(Oops! I slept in! Curse these blackout curtains!) I have Zimbra installed on my mail server.  I liked its web interface well enough… until I got to Rwanda! Now, part of the problem is that this is my own server.  I don’t own several different globally dispersed operations facilities like Google does.  So I have a lot of latency between Rwanda and California, where the server is. But over these connections, Zimbra seems to take forever to load up.  Since I’m used to using OfflineIMAP and Gnus normally this isn’t too big a problem. Still, it makes me that much more aware of how much each  HTTP request costs.

I stayed at the Capacity offices as long as I could.  I could feel the fatigue hitting me pretty hard, but after lunch (including some kind of purplish yam and a good dose of caffeine) I managed to get the System 76 Laptop in some kind of working order. I should give props here to dcm who suggested that I “download the internet” and take it with me to Rwanda.  I managed to get around 175GB of the Ubuntu repository mirrored onto a disk.  This proved invaluable when I was installing the system and applying updates.  For a little while I switched to the usual web-based mirror and was told it would take a couple of hours to download everything I needed (for perspective, at home, the download times take no more than five or ten minutes).  Having the disk handy meant I could install packages directly.  The mirror isn’t complete, so some things did have to be downloaded, but the majority of stuff was right there. One bug I ran into showed up after I did an “aptitude dist-upgrade” after doing a clean install.  All of the sudden I couldn’t log in via GDM.  (The last time I had problems with a gutsy upgrade, it was using XFS so probably not something that was a core concern.) Weary from lack of sleep and not really in the mood for too much trouble-shooting, I ended up purging “ubuntu-desktop” (and its dependent packages) and then reinstalling it.  Strangely enough, that did the trick (for the most part). After that, I told Vanessa I was ready to give in to sleep.  We walked back to the hotel with me snapping pictures like a madman on the way back.  I saw some armed police standing outside and asked if I could photograph them.  “It is not allowed.”  Fine, no close ups for you! Once back I crashed in the hotel.  The turndown service woke me up twice.  First when they came in un-announced — or maybe I didn’t hear them knock and only woke up when they opened the door — and the second time when they called me (two times in a row).  I was so confused I thought they were asking for someone named “Tom”.  I was pretty annoyed, but it didn’t keep me from falling back to sleep quickly. Finally dcm woke me up so we could go have dinner at the Mille Colline.  Curried Veg, yum!