This is a continuation in my series on low bandwidth development.
When it comes to the low bandwidth market of web development, you're bound to encounter old browsers, or more to the point, "non-modern" browsers. Typically, "modern" browsers are Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. You may be asking, "What about Internet Explorer?" That one gets tricky. While version 6 is often lumped in to the group, most people don't consider Explorer a modern browser until version 7 or even 8. Some don't even consider 8 to be "modern" either as its HTML 5 support is sketchy. Of course, the newest browsers aren't the truly impossible issue for those of us developing in the low bandwidth environs.
What is difficult is supporting older browsers. There is a lot of Explorer 6 running around still (about 25% of the browsers out there actually). There is even some Explorer 5.5, Explorer for Mac OS 9 (the infamous 5.23), as well as Mozilla, and Netscape. Most of these browsers have been discontinued. It's hard to even get copies of the old versions let alone an actual system to run them on. Most of the time, you can usually just let this be, but sometimes it's more of a worry.
One day, when testing out Maneno with IETester (one of the finest things a web developer could ever download), I found that in Explorer 5.5, part of the site would keep refreshing out of control. It was unusable and pretty much unstable. While the site was also ugly to view in 5.5 (because 5.5 is a heap of junk for CSS support), this posed more of a problem and there was definitely no way I was going to bother hunting down the issue for the tiny bit of traffic that arrived on that browser. I realized that this browser would have to be blocked somehow.
A pet project of mine is End6. It's a simple JavaScript widget that appears only if someone is using Explorer 6 (also a heap of junk for those who don't know). It's a simple prompt to get people to upgrade. A bit more than passive and a bit less than aggressive. I'd suggest taking a look if you want to try to get people off Explorer 6, which benefits all of us from end user to developer. Unfortunately this widget isn't enough. People can still access the site once they click through the warning. No, completely blocking some of these troublesome browsers that could cause the user problems is the only real way to go, as it is for many websites.
So enters browscap.ini. This is a browser definitions system that generally stays up to date with whatever browsers come out. The current version doesn't yet recognize Firefox 3.5 beta 4, but I wrote that in. It's available in PHP, ASP, and can be downloaded in a raw form as well to meld to your specific needs. All told, it's mighty cool.
Maneno is built in PHP, so it's rather easy to implement. You just edit your php.ini file to point at this ini file and then program as you want for implementation. I check to first make sure that $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] isn't empty as it will often be for search engine spiders or others. Then I call get_browser() and it gives you a lovely, associative array of such things as "browser" and "version". Run some simple logic to check against them and then kick out users to a warning page (see below) if they have too old of a browser. Post some links to more "modern browsers" so there is a call to upgrade as well. We're currently blocking anything older than Explorer 6, Firefox 2, all of Mozilla, and all of Netscape. I would have loved to block Explorer 6 as well, but given the high percentage of deployment in our user base, it's just not possible currently.
All told, these blocked browsers make up about less than 0.75% of Maneno's traffic. Why care about such a small amount? Well, for starters, upgrading is good for these folks if they do it, since these browsers aren't generally supported, and in the case of old Explorer version, extremely insecure to use. For another reason, it's to make sure that people are using browsers that I can test. Otherwise, I don't want something unforeseen to happen to their system because I couldn't anticipate it.
But what about if they can't download a new browser due to super low bandwidth issues? For this, I am currently working on sending small flash drives to selected folks that have Firefox on them in French and English, so that they can install them anywhere that is needed. I encourage others to do the same or bring a burned installation CD with them to do the same thing. And why is there no problem torrent for Firefox? That would make all this a lot easier as it could be downloaded gradually! Maybe Maneno should host this?
Over this last Tuesday and Wednesday was the Netsquared N2Y4 conference. It was a two day event that focused on mobile technology innovations, as well as having the winners of several contests announced at the end of it.
Overall, it was a good meeting. As is natural with any conference, some sessions were better than others and some keynotes were more engaging than others. But, they pulled it off well in the end and more than anything it was a great venue to learn more about projects that I hadn't heard of as well as meet new people in a variety of fields. Oh, Maneno also gave a talk about what we're doing as well which was great as we did this in more of a discussion setting which allowed us to interact with people who had some new ideas on what we're doing which we are now looking in to. I liked this format a lot since having an information exchange is so much more useful than being lectured to.
In brief though, I just wanted to call out a couple of projects that I liked and caught my eye. The reasons for liking them vary, but it's generally because they are sensible, technologically-minded approaches to solving everyday problems.
They are working to set up what is in essence a call center for SMS. Using the almighty Frontline SMS, they are creating a gateway to connect farmers, markets, and suppliers in Cameroon. I like it because it's simple and extremely cost-effective. It is also easy to maintain with few pieces to break in it. They managed to get a $1,000 award from the Microsoft challenge, which will help their efforts. They should have gotten more, but so it goes. We'll have an interview with Valery Colong in the near future who heads up technology efforts. Read more about them
This project requires a bit more implementation, but I like it because it sprung out of the founders' annoyances with how things weren't getting fixed in their neighborhood. As a person often annoyed by a great many things, I can appreciate this. I love the fact that they were presenting a system that is already up and running, although this may be a reason why they didn't win any of the awards in that it seems like it's all there. Another reason is that they're actually a for-profit enterprise that already has some decent contracts with municipal governments. Still, it's a good project worth checking out a bit more despite not having crystalline altruism nor being based in Africa. Read more about them
These guys got really overlooked and I hope they're able to stick with what they're doing as it's solving a common problem in regards to mobile phones in countries where power is a real commodity. I didn't manage to see their full presentation so I don't know where they are getting the mobile solar chargers for the mobiles and most that I've seen can't keep a phone running all day unless gigantic in size. I think that their approach may need to get a bit tighter and more focused (which is one of the reasons they probably got passed by voters), but they're talking about something no one really wants to address right now as basic electricity needs aren't "sexy". Sure, it's great to get Frontline SMS running for a project, but how on earth do you keep the mobile phones running that report back to it? More people need to think this through. Read more about them
Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is basically making your website look better for search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and that other one Microsoft keeps trying to shove at us that we don't really want. When working on building SEO, there are two main methodologies: white hat SEO and black hat SEO. White hat is essentially legitimately making your website more appealing through content, good coding, and getting linked to from other relevant websites. Black hat is generally buying referring links on a website with a high ranking that point towards your website. White hat is an organic process that takes longer, but is cheaper over the long run and is actually sustainable. Black hat is an artificial process that is actually quite looked down upon, costs a great deal, and is typically not sustainable without a lot of money. Black hat is in fact so bad that if you get caught, a search engine like Google will de-list you from their index.
So, why do I bring this up? It's not to bore you, but to explain something interesting that is happening right now when you search for 'Kenya' on Google. At the very top of a list of about 128 million results is a rather average-looking tourism website for a company that operates in Kenya. This is interesting as according to this search, it outranks the Wikipedia page, Kenya Government page, Kenya News Results, the CIA "Factbook", and a whole bunch of other results. How is this possible? Surely those other results it sits on top of are more relevant?
I would warrant a guess that yes, the other results are indeed more relevant and that this company is buying referral links for black hat SEO purposes. Sure, I have no proof of this as I can't see what this company is doing nor what Google is doing as performing a backlink search on Google is indeterminate. But, check out a similar search for neighboring 'Uganda' on Google. It pulls up Uganda's Official Tourism website, Wikipedia, and again, the almighty CIA "Factbook" as the top three results. This is much more what one would expect on this type of search. Hell, it doesn't even have to be Africa. A search for 'Germany' on Google yields a similar result to this Uganda one.
The reason that I don't link to this Kenya site in question is because I don't want to throw any traffic their way. I would just like to see them go back to some minor listing on Google and leave us with the more relevant sites that we actually want.
Since setting up the Translation Assistant on this site, I've been chomping at the bit for more Google functions in more African languages as the Assistant only functions in the Colonial languages of Africa. That bums me out, man. According to folks at the 'Plex, the only one that's close is Swahili and the body of text needed for full-blown machine translation is only at around 40% completed or so. That's with a pretty decent blogging scene in Swahili as well as a Wikipedia in Swahili with about 11,000+ entries. So, you can just imagine how it is with other languages on the continent... That also bums me out, man, but there is hope.
Today Google announced one small step in the right direction to get more Swahili functionality on Google's systems. This is just the "search suggestion" tool and all told, it's a small thing. But, this is only the second African language to get this functionality; the first being Amharic at the start of this year. Yeah, I know, it's not machine translation, but it's something and as I'm working with two translators on a full-blown Lingala and Fula version of Maneno, it's nice to know that a big, mighty company such as Google is putting forth even the tiniest bit of effort to show that they are interested in such things. It's these such things that might help them win against the encroaching big blue monster.
One small side note in that folks should notice that in addition to the standard French translation that appears after the English, there is also a translation in Swahili. I've been really curious to know if the French and Swahili are just machine generated versions or done by someone who actually speaks the language. Anybody have feedback on that?
For some time, I've been thinking about what the best setup would be for a cheap, yet proper kit of items to take along for blogging purposes when one is moving about a lot. Erik Hersman asked a similar question with his Weapons of Choice article. A lot of great people (and me) chimed in there as everyone loves showing off their gadgets. That was all a lot of fun, but what if you can't or don't want to lug around a laptop? What if having a DSLR is going to be more of a hindrance (due to its size) than a help? And most importantly, what about if you're just going to be getting online via internet cafes?
In addition to all these questions, let's toss in to the mix that we want to keep it cheap, but at the same time durable so that if it needs to last it can, but at the same time, it's more affordable to a greater group of people. You could maybe call all of this the "African Blogging Kit", but I think that it is something that can apply to just about anybody who is dynamic, on the go, and needing the information they collect, write, and relay to be lightweight and easy to deal with.
This is by far #1 on the list. These days, a lot of storage comes cheap. For instance, this one is only $10, yet has 4gb of storage and an aluminum case for durability. One might say that you can store pretty much everything you need in email these days and access it as needed, but I have yet to be in any internet cafe outside the US where my GMail account is snappy enough to warrant this. Also, having your files accessible in an offline format is always preferable in my book. And if you don't own your own computer, then this is really the absolute best way to maintain your data. Additionally, if you need to carry around your local language font in order to type in a language like say... Bambara or Fula, then this is an absolute must.
Upgrade: 8,16, or 32gb drive, although the cost goes up a good deal at the higher end.
This vies with the Flash Drive for a top spot, although it's a lot easier to store the details of an event in your head than a PDF file, so that's why the Flash Drive wins out. Still, memory fails us and we need to write things down. It goes without saying that a notebook and a couple of reliable pens are pretty important to the dynamic blogger. For me personally, I don't like spiral bound notebooks are the spiral part gets tangled up in just about everything you have in your bag, but they are the cheapest and can lay flat on a table, so it's really a matter of preference.
Upgrade: For notebooks, costlier options than cheap Mead notebooks are Moleskin or my personal favorite, Miquel Rius. For pens, it seems that most people love the Zebra Pen and someday, I need to give them a try over the ubiquitous Bic that are in such abundance.
You need it. You love it. Get a local SIM for it as soon as you arrive somewhere. Their convenience is as endless as the choices. Anyone who moves around knows that you've just got to have one if you're talking to people. As for models, my only real preference is Nokia and cheap. The Nokia have been the most rock solid phone for me just about anywhere I go with great battery life (which is a key factor) and solid construction. You can usually pick one up for less than $20 used, which offers a great value.
Upgrade: The only limit here is cost. If you are blogging to a site that is powered by an SMS gateway like Frontline SMS (as Maneno will be down the road), then a full QWERTY keyboard on the phone is quite handy. It's also nice just for banging out text messages. Of course, these fancy phones are generally more expensive, bulky, and suck up more power.
This gets more in to that gray area of "nice to have" as you don't have to have photos. Still, a well written text article is great, but it's nearly impossible to compete with one that has a photo as well. In regards to equipment, everyone goes nuts about cameras like the Canon 5D Mark II and yes, that's a great camera, but if you know what you're doing, a nice fellow like the Canon A470 for around $90 does a fantastic job. Plus, a compact point and shoot is a lot easier to carry around and it doesn't freak people out as much as the barrel of a huge lens in their face. I'm a fan of the small form factor and cost when it comes to a camera and needing to be portable. Plus, you can usually shoot decent video with them as well. The only down side to the camera is storage. If you're relying on the aforementioned Flash Drive and the camera memory to keep all your photos, you're going to run out of space quite fast unless you're just uploading everything to the web and deleting it from the camera. This is definitely not an ideal option, which is why the camera falls rather far down on the list due to all the added hassle it brings. Oh, make sure that whatever you get, that it doesn't have a proprietary battery format and you can snap in a couple of AA batteries in the off chance you are far between places to charge the camera's batteries.
Upgrade: Obviously, you can spend more than $90 on a camera. Geez, you can spend $20,000 for an amazing camera body and incredible lenses, but why? If all you want are photos to illustrate an article, then it's just not necessary. One upgrade that may be worth looking in to are multiple large memory cards for the camera so that you don't have to shoot in a low format and/or download so often.
You're often not going to find an easy way to get those photos from that camera to the computer unless you luck out and the internet cafe has a reader for your specific card format. Just to be safe, carry a USB cable. They're just a dollar or two and even if you don't use it, you might make some very grateful friends along the way who forgot theirs.
Upgrade: Firewire is nearly dead these days, thanks to USB 2.0 so forget needing one of those. Otherwise, you could spend $50 on a fancy cable, but why? You're probably going to be transmitting photo data to a desktop computer, not the human genome out in to space.
These fellows start making things more expensive quite fast, but a sound recorder like the Zoom H2 or H4 can be a nice addition. A compact video recorder like the Flip is great as well, but completely unneeded if you have a digital camera that shoots video as well.
But that's about it as I can see it. A solid kit to blog like crazy when out and about without carrying around or buying something akin to what the CIA uses for surveillance. If you have any other ideas on what to add or think my suggestions are ridiculous, the comments await you below.
Open Source is what basically makes the internet run these days. 90%+ of the servers running websites out there are using Linux, a super-powerful, yet free operating system developed by people around the world, simply working to make a better system. Maneno is running on it as well as PHP, MySQL, MooTools, and a number of other items that are created by people and released to use for free just to make the world a better place.
Somewhere far down the road, doing this with Maneno is in the cards, but the system really needs to be at the right spot because once you open up the source (the code driving a system), it's there for everyone to see. I generally see this as a good thing, since other peoples' opinions and contributions to your work are going to make a better product for everyone. But, it's really a matter of waiting for that right moment not just for the project but for the individual as well.
Ushahidi announced that they were going open source some time ago, but with their Open Beta, it appears that people are digging in to it more. Erik put up a post a few days ago about having an Open Source community around a project. His post is quite honest (he actually said he was "pissed off" which I still can't visualize) and a good read for anyone who is looking to go this way with their work. He also showed that you need to have an open mind and really be on your game to make it all happen from the start.
Seeing that, I'm seeing a hundred different ways that we could stumble with a Maneno release some day. We're already in Open Beta, but that was needed because of how Maneno works with people joining and entering the community. Of course now I'm wondering if the better path is to be an Open Source project from the start or to create a release/branch when it appears everything is solid. I think about this because if you're worth your salt as a developer, then in reality, your project is never completely solid. This either drives you insane or drives you to release it to a (hopefully) large and waiting audience who are willing to help make your project better and hopefully benefit the greater internet good. I guess at the end of it all in a perfect worlds, all paths should head to Open Source.
I first learned about Mobile XL on White African. At first glance, it doesn't seem like much, as there are a number of mobile browser out there (Opera Mobile being one of the better open-format ones I've used). The big twist with Mobile XL however is that it does all of its transmission work via SMS. There's no data connectivity needed, which means that the reach of their browser in Africa is massive, despite being limited primarily to Nokia phones.
Word has come down that they've partnered up with Go Places to provide mobile restaurant information served up over the Mobile XL browser:
Providing information about restaurants to mobile phone users furthers our commitment to increasing awareness of the many wonderful eating venues within the East African Region. The XLBrowser provides consumers with a new way to quickly and easily find great places to eat from anywhere at anytime.
This is quite wonderfully fantastic. It's the first large scale instance that I've heard of where someone is doing what Yelp or Qype are doing. Obviously there isn't the user review components...yet, but I find those to be such a secondary element to these type of ventures. It's the directory of information and the ability to find new places that's the most important. That being the case, the East African region will hopefully benefit from this partnership and people will discover more than what their Lonely Planet or Rough Guide decides to tell them. Maybe locals will even learn about new places as well!
I admit that at the Berkeley HRC New Machine conference, I tended to go to the more geeky and technology oriented talks. This is for me, one of the more interesting aspects of just about any line of work whether it be waste disposal or in this case, human rights.
The sessions were broad in the topics that they covered. They ranged from mapping systems, to databases, to forensics, to mobile phones. But the one thing that was hammered at time and time again was the need for data security. It was music to my ears and quite honestly something that corporate business here in the US needs to pay a great deal more attention to.
There is however one fundamental difference in losing a computer of say, Social Security (or other national ID) numbers and losing a computer of say, testimony in an ongoing investigation for crimes against humanity. With the former, it's a massive inconvenience. With the later, lives are literally on the line. I suppose to some extent, the reason that it isn't life or death is the (still inexcusable) reason why corporations are so bad with data security. Amazingly, governments are much the same as was shown by a drug enforcement operation that had to be shut down due to an operative "misplacing" a USB drive on a bus.
Obviously in the talk, 'Databases, Data Sharing, and Data Security' there was a good deal more about securing data which was mostly summed up in this tweet of mine. This fellow also caught a bit about data on UN machines NOT being encrypted, which is a rather sordid way of doing business. Computers are quite easy to lose in everyday life, let alone when someone is busting around the ends of earth.
The session on 'PDAs and Phone for Data Collection' was interesting in that it was Eric Hersman who said that it's a new medium with boundaries needing to be pushed. But, at the same time, people were definitely data security minded. There is the issue however that SMS is not a secure mode of data transport to start with. While it can be monitored quite easily, the real issue lies in the corpus of data collection you end up with. With something like Frontline SMS, there is the onerous issue that you can log all of the messages received with that program, so what do you do with that data? Again, security is key as the data one collects for good can easily be used as a weapon for bad.
Good talks overall though and if anyone wants to see some of the audience cliffnotes of the PDA session, they can go here: #conf_pda. As you see, the audience was quite involved with that session due to it being a hot topic in both the corporate and NGO worlds.
By way of an update, today it was announced that two very large colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area had a security exploit open for six months that allowed access to confidential data of 160,000 former and current students. Way to go...
I've mentioned that Namibia beckons in the past, but I should also mention that I'm quite fascinated by The Gambia as well. It's a very small country (the smallest in Africa) which may be part of the fascination, along with the fact that one of its main exports is peanuts. Also, I'm always intrigued by countries that are in the middle of or bisect other countries as The Gambia does to Senegal. I even found out that the airport in the capital, Banjul, happens to be an emergency shuttle landing site. All very interesting, but amazingly not the most interesting tidbits I've now heard to date.
The opening plenary address for the Berkeley HRC New Machine conference was by Trevor Paglen author of Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World (side note: why are all the book titles from this conference damn near longer than a Twitter twit?) It was a great opening talk. I learned a great deal about the science and research that was behind discovering and uncovering the CIA's secret flights that they used for rendition of suspected terrorists in the days after 9/11. The really cool thing was that Paglen and his cohorts made use of information that was all publicly available at the time from flight schedules, to finding out that there is an actual airport code for Guantanamo Bay, to showing a CIA black ops site on Google Maps.
The talk was especially beautiful to me in showing data in visualized formats. I always love this as I love data and I love seeing what it's doing if applied to a physical space or time. Somewhere along there, Paglen put up a rendition flight map. A lot of the sites were ones that people probably knew about if they had followed the press coverage of all this nasty rendition business. But there, in the lower part of one of the maps I saw a flight path to... yup, The Gambia. It appears that on some level (and I don't know to what level) these cover flights had passed through the airport of this small nation. It's a decently odd choice, but then again, looking at these flight paths in general it shows that all the flights were done in such a way to really cover what they were doing; not to be direct and efficient.
While on some level, I'm bound to be let down, I really need to make a trip down to Banjul whenever I get to Dakar someday soon and see what all is happening there. Of course, I should probably keep it to a purely touristic inquisitiveness lest I end up in some really dumb trouble
At the Berkeley Human Rights Center's The Soul of the New Machine conference, James Surowiecki gave a keynote talk at the end of the first day. His day job is being an author at The New Yorker, but he has also written a book which is lengthily titled, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. It's the subject matter of this book which is the reason he was at the conference giving a talk.
The talk was great. He quickly delved in to the pros and cons of crowdsourcing. He talked about how it's often the case that when working within the crowd/group setting, within 15 minutes, the overall intelligence of the group drops to lower than the dumbest member, as opposed to rising higher than the smartest member. The later obviously being the more desirable result. He went on to describe why this is often the case and it was enough to make me want to take a peek at his book and read more.
The one point that stuck out though was something that Surowiecki probably wasn't even aware of. I almost feel bad for citing him on it, but it's something that people (especially Americans) need to keep in mind when drawing comparisons of good and bad. He talked about the disappearance and following search for the USS Scorpion submarine in 1967. It was an interesting talking point as it showed how, when working with a crowd, John Craven was able to quite accurately figure out where this sub was on the ocean floor. It was a very compelling point and showed how well a crowd could be used for good things. It's just unfortunate that right before he said that crowds can sometimes be bad as was seen in Rwanda with their genocide. The particular "crowd" showed how the power of the crowd can go bad.
I am not saying in any way that what happened in Rwanda was not a terrible, revolting devolution of humanity, but at the same time crowds have gotten out of control in say... pre-WWII Germany for instance. Or how about less extreme examples such as Paris, France or Berkeley, California. In other words, white people crowds, in Europe and the US can be bad as well. The way that Surowiecki's comment comes off is that with the Craven example, white people do great things in a crowd, while black people in Africa do horrible, savage things in a crowd.
Like I said, I don't think that Surowiecki is even aware that he made this comparison and in listening to him, I doubt he would do this on purpose. It's just that this is an "acceptable racism" for those outside Africa, specifically in the US and Europe to see Africa as a land of savages. While I find political correctedness ridiculous on many levels (ex. people who say things like 'this is sooo gay' in passing are rarely actually anti-gay) this is one of those points that needs to paid attention to. Subjugating an entire continent to the perception that they're a bunch of bloodthirsty savages instead of regular human beings, like every other person in the world perpetuates that line of thinking, even if it's only at the back of peoples' minds. It's what keeps the broken bandage aid flowing in to Africa as opposed to more proper development aid, market connections, exports and imports, and being part of the rest of the global economy for as bad or good as that may be.
