Selected TechNotes - October 2006

Anonymous browsing

The free open source browser, Firefox has previously featured in my writings and I often mention it as a good alternative browser, which also support tabbed browsing (i.e. you can run many screens within the same browser window rather than opening a different browser window for each page). An interesting addition to the family, based on Firefox is an browser that allows anonymous browsing called “Tor” or “Torpark”. You can find a free download at their website www.torpark.org. In addition to providing anonymous browsing, it is “portable” as well. This means it will run directly from a USB memory stick and does not need to be installed on a PC. If you check my last blog (further down on this page) on the “Virtual PC”, you will see that this can be added to the collection of programs mentioned there. The browser works with a network of servers, each helping to mask the origin of the page requested – your Internet address remains “masked” and you remain anonymous. The browser runs a lot slower than a regular browser like Firefox or Internet Explorer and is only worthwhile using when you really want to remain anonymous. Remember that the regular Firefox also has a portable version than runs off a USB memory stick. You can carry both with you. The regular one will store its cached web pages (the web pages you visit) on the memory stick and not on the PC you are using. In the Firefox preferences, you can set the program to delete your cached pages and the history when you close the program. This is an excellent idea for when you do your Internet banking or don’t want some techie looking at the pages you have been viewing.

Online Office programs

Also previously reported are products like ThinkFree Office, which offer programs like Microsoft Office, but which do not have to be installed on the PC you are using. If the PC is connected to a good internet line, these services will provide you with much of the basic functionality of an office suite of programs. ThinkFree comes with free storage capacity of 1gig, and you can keep documents private for only you to use, share them with limited friends who also have Thinkfree logins, or publish them to the web so that anyone can read them.

Other services that provide similar services are AjaxLaunch (www.ajaxlaunch.com) and GOffice (www.goffice.com). These applications will be especially slow on dialups and slower Internet connections. The online storage may be one of the best features about them – that is, to be able to save copies of your files online so that should your PC or memory stick go missing or become faulty while travelling, you will still have copies when you reach your destination.

Another contender emerging in this space is Google (as always?). They have a suite of tools emerging from their labs including the email (gMail) system that has been around for some time, an instant messenger program (Google Talk), a calendar system (Google Calendar) and a web page creator and Google Page Creator – to create and publish web pages. See: (pack.google.com)

Another backup option

I’ve said it before – if you don’t backup your work, you will lose it some day! Another free option is MediaMax (www.mediamax.com), which provides a set of online folders and 25 gig of free storage space. This is a lot of storage space! You can upload all sorts of files and choose to keep them private to yourself, or to share some (or all) with your friends. The regular internet page will let you upload and download files from most internet-enabled PCs, and there is a (free) downloadable program, which will help you copy larger numbers of files and folders to your new storage vault. Once again, you can upload the files you need and carry with you on a memory stick, just in case – as well as keeping copies of files for that very rainy day when your PC’s hard drive goes faulty. You have been warned again! Backup your files!

The copyright holders make no representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the accuracy or application of the material in this report which represents the opinions of the authors, nor does it warrant the claims of any of the products. The results and recommendations may or may not apply to the specific circumstances of third parties. Third party use, therefore, is at the discretion of the user.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Selected TechNotes - September 2006

The Virtual PC

The “virtual pc” is not really a PC, but a small device that will help those people who like to travel light. Some of the problems one encounters when travelling and using other people’s PCs is that you leave a history of your activity behind on every PC on which you work. You also do not have your favourite bookmarks in the browser and you need to carry a USB memory stick with you to carry files anyway. If you are the super light-weight traveller, or one without a personal PC, but a regular user of PCs in different places, you could try the “virtual pc”.

Start with a USB memory stick of at least 512meg; try to get a 1 or 2 gig memory stick if you are going to go to buy one for this exercise. A 512 memory stick will carry most of the programs you would want to carry, but not much more. For this, it is worth it to try to get at least a 1 gig stick or ideally a 2 gig (budget and availability permitting).

Incidentally, I use the term “memory stick” in here, but these devices go by many names like “thumb drive”, “flash drive” or “pen drive”. By whatever name, it is a very useful little data storage device that can also store working programs. These are programs that will run directly off the memory stick, when you plug it into a PC. Most PCs will run the programs, but you may find a few incompatibilities with older operating systems and, unfortunately, Macs.

Once you have bought your memory stick, go to http://portableapps.com/ and look for the typical programs you need in your daily life or while travelling. For a start, you might need Portable Firefox, which will enable you to run your own browser and carry your own bookmarks with it. It will also ensure that you do not leave a history on the PC you are making use of. Portable OpenOffice is an absolute must – this will enable you to open all kinds of files and save them in many different formats, including PDF. There is seldom a problem with opening regular Word documents, which can be edited and saved as Word again when done. Portable Thunderbird is useful as an email program. You can use a PC that is not connected to the Internet to prepare lots of emails and then, when you get the chance, plug the “portable pc” into a connected PC and upload all your email. You can easily set up a free email account on Google (someone needs to invite you to open a free account) and then set up your “portable pc” to synchronise email with it whenever you get the chance.

There are other programs that will satisfy some of the needs of the more demanding users like Portable GIMP, which could be a useful program to have if you need to edit graphics, Portable NVU for editing webpages, Portable FileZilla for doing FTPs, Portable Sunbird for a calendar and games like Portable Sudoku. The collection of programs has grown every few weeks when I take another look.

Some tips: Create a folder for each of the programs and copy or install the program to its own folder. Then create a shortcut for starting each program in the “root” of the memory stick. If this does not make sense, ask the nearest geek or teenager, they will be only to happy to help. While you are there, create a folder called “My Documents”, just like the one you would have on your regular PC if you were carrying one – don’t leave all your data files in the “root” of the memory stick – it just makes it a mess. If you do all this, when you plug your memory stick into the next PC you go to, a folder should open up showing you the “root” of the memory stick. Here you will find the shortcuts to the various programs you have installed on the memory stick and your folder of documents called “My Documents”. Double clicking on the program you want to use will launch that program, running directly off the memory stick. You carry your own programs, history, favourites and data files with you wherever you go without the need to carry a PC.

Happy travels!

Useful links:
Portable Apps: http://portableapps.com/
About memory sticks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive
And: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Stick

A working draft of this document is at: http://wikieducator.org/Virtualpc

The copyright holders make no representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the accuracy or application of the material in this report which represents the opinions of the authors, nor does it warrant the claims of any of the products. The results and recommendations may or may not apply to the specific circumstances of third parties. Third party use, therefore, is at the discretion of the user.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Selected TechNotes - June 2006

Workplace literacy
We all speak about how times change, but seldom stop to think just how the technology changes really are affecting the way we work. In the mid 90s, it would have been "normal" for many people to not have an email address. By 2000, most people had email addresses, but some would have had an assistant print out emails for them to make responses to on paper, with the assistant then typing and sending the reply. By 2005, thankfully, this practice had mostly ended and most people now seem to respond to their own emails. In some cases, an assistant may respond on a busy manager's behalf, but they have at least stopped printing out the emails.

A trend that started around 2000 has been slowly catching on and is now transferring into the general workplace. These are the practices of collaborative document creation and self-publishing. I've written about these technologies before (e.g. Blogs and WiKis), but have not previously stressed how these are now transferring into being "the way things are done". The creation and management of a website is another area that has undergone a major shift. Let me explain more . . .

Whereas five years ago, we might have had one web developer responsible for a website, the newer software (e.g. SharePoint, Jahia) now allows teams of people to create web pages, which are then added to a to-do list for the final web publisher/editor to check and accept. This task of passing drafts around could generate a slew of emails (possibly 5 to 20 emails for a draft page). This can now can be done with no emails, or possibly just one to remind everyone of what the task is and where to check the page. The entire job is done online as opposed to by multiple email exchanges.

The creation of documents for proposals, reports, etc. is a regular task in all organisations and one that can generate dozens of emails, each carrying a different draft. To ensure that everyone is informed, we have a habit of copying everyone we can think of as well! This fills people's inboxes and increases the overload of information coming at us each day. This task of collaborative document development can be done in a number of ways today, requiring almost no emails. I will not bother to describe the expensive ways of doing online collaboration, anyone with money for this can find out quite easily. Two no-cost ways of adding collaboration tools are: WiKiEducator (www.wikieducator.org) and ThinkFree (www.thinkfree.com). Both services are free; WiKiEducator focuses on supporting the education sector, while ThinkFree is open to anyone. WiKis are essentially an easy way of publishing a document on the internet. It allows anyone else to read and edit the same document. All versions of the document are kept so that an administrator can "roll-back" to a previous version. The online tools on WiKis (including www.wikipedia.org) are simple to use and enable people with an internet connection from any country to participate.

ThinkFree (www.thinkfree.com) is an online service that provides word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation program functions like an office suite. The free service provides 1 gig of free online storage for documents, which allows you to roam the world while accessing your documents from internet cafes and other peoples' computers, simply accessing your programs and files via a web browser. Once created, documents can be made visible to a selected group of people for review and possibly for editing (you can select what others can do with your document) and you can make it available to the world. Thinking about publishing a few pages of your writing? How about this as a means for free publishing for others to read. To show how this works, I'll publish this edition of my blog to ThinkFree so that you can try it out. Just click here.

Other services are budding in the area of free online collaboration; watch out for www.Writely.org and Spreadsheets.google.com - both are free services by Google, presently in beta.

Backing by files
I've written on previous occasions about backing files and still hear of people who say they had some major PC crash or the theft of a PC and how they lost years of work. Rule one: BACKUP your files! Rule 2: have a copy of the backup in a location other than where you live and work!

Some of the problems with backing up are the hassles and cost with buying backup devices (tapes, DVDs, external hard drives) and making them work. It's quite understandable why many of us don't get around to it. Another problem is that if a thief is serious, when they strip the valuables from your home - they will take the backup devices and media as well, leaving you nothing.

Online backups have been available since the late 1990s, but were less than popular because of bandwidth limitations; this situation has improved for a lot of people. Another problem was that the companies were sometimes bought by other companies that did not seem to care much about the service being offered - and shut it down. The good news in all this is there is a new online backup service. It offers up to 2 gig of free online storage and you can buy storage above this level at a very reasonable rate.

The company, Mozy, asks you to download a little program that enables you to select the folders you want to backup and then it does it whenever it can with no further interference to you. You will no doubt want to check their statements about privacy and encryption of data. The service seems really simple and I hope they stay around for years to come! You can try my reference: https://mozy.com/ref/27XDX1 Congratulations to Mozy for making the service available for "normal people" - I hope you keep the service running and don't sell the company!

4th Pan Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning (PCF4)
PCF4 is looking like it will be a major gathering of educators from developing countries. It has 4 themes: Innovation, Learning, Collaboration and Foundations. Online conferences will be hosted in the weeks before the main forum and will be announced shortly. Information on the Forum is on the web at: www.col.org/pcf4

The copyright holders make no representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the accuracy or application of the material in this report which represents the opinions of the authors, nor does it warrant the claims of any of the products. The results and recommendations may or may not apply to the specific circumstances of third parties. Third party use, therefore, is at the discretion of the user.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Selected TechNotes – January 2006

Control of the Internet

There has been a lot of debate in the past few months over the control of the Internet. Well, really, it is the control over the registration of “top-level domain names” – the names like .COM and .ORG. All groupings of names below this level are dependent on the registration held by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, http://www.icann.com).

It is the opinion of CIO Insight author, Stephen Ryan that: “The Internet has been developed through consensus from the engineering, not the political, community for the past 30 years, and it continues to run in a manner that is effective, efficient and responsive to its users” (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1790290,00.asp). There would no doubt be opposing opinions, but the track record of expansion of the Internet and what people are accomplishing through it, certainly seems very good. It is my perception and opinion that many international organisations, with huge cash flows, seem to struggle for very long and accomplish very limited global cooperation. And yet some governments still try to limit what information their citizens are able to access. This has become much more difficult because of the Internet. Hopefully, cases of genocide and human rights abuses will slowly be reduced through the free flow of information in spite of the attempts to limit access to information. One may wonder why some organisations and governments still try to place restrictions on access to the Internet when information always finds a way to filter through.

On the one hand, can the world allow something of the power of the Internet be controlled by any one government (albeit by a non-profit company under its control)? Or can we risk imbedding the control of such a powerful business and development tool to fall prey to the vagaries of politicians who are in office for a short time, or their bureaucrats? Is it time to develop a new way of collaborating that is more acceptable all-round? An organisation, as one example, that has had to cope with comparable complexity is the IMS Global Learning Consortium, which strives to support the adoption of learning technology worldwide. They work with 50 members and affiliates to develop and promote “the adoption of open technical specifications for interoperable learning technology”. Quite a mouthful and no doubt very difficult to reach consensus and compliance. All their specifications and publications are made available to the public at http://www.imsglobal.org/.

Recharge stations

More and more devices these days need recharging, which results in a multitude of cables, transformers and clutter in the home. A company in the US has come up with the idea of making a small cupboard that fits on the wall with a fold-down table. All rechargeable devices are kept inside the cupboard. When closed, it stands just 18cm out from the wall. Called the eNook, cupboards of this design are destined to be a useful space saver in homes and some work areas, see: http://www.anthro.com/eNook

Improvements in Webmail services

eMail accounts that are based on the web as well as programs that download emails to your PC are both popular and have been undergoing big changes. The storage space available in these has increased from typically 5 Meg, to over 1,000 Meg and sometimes over 2,000 meg (e.g. Google mail). Many services, such as Hotmail, can easily be started by going to the website and creating an account at no charge. Others, like Google, also free, require one to receive an invitation from an existing member. All in all, there is no shortage of free email services, once one has access to the Internet. One may ask what is the next “frontier” – after the massive increase in storage space lead by Google, AIM and Hotmail? It seems this will be the improvement in the quality of the user experience. Online services are set to become more like their PC-based counterparts. Examples of these, which are in beta at the time of writing, are Windows Live Mail (http://ideas.live.com/), AIM Mail (http://webmail.aol.com/) and Yahoo Mail (http://mail.yahoo.com/). Features allow users to drag and drop emails just like in the desktop programs.

The next generation of eBook readers?

I’ve written and spoken many times about the convenience of reading books on PDAs – especially because of the portability and convenience of being able to change the size of text, background and text colours, as well as brightness. There always seems to be a problem with how the reading lights are positioned in aeroplanes. They always seem to have bright spots and even those are seldom just where I would like them to be, to make reading comfortable. The PDA (a Palm Pilot Tungsten T5 in my case, http://www.palm.com/) has been the answer for me. It is small, light and I can change the brightness so that I can read in a bright or badly lit airport; or even in a plane with most of the lights turned off. Not only can I read eBooks on it (http://www.ereader.com/) and abstracts of books (http://www.getabstract.com/), but I can also listen to audio books (http://www.audible.com/) and music.

Some users have told me they feel claustrophobic reading on the small screens of a PDA. For some of those users, the tablet PC may be the right kind of device. Now Sony has announced that it will be producing a new eBook reader with a screen that is bigger than a PDA, but smaller than a PC. They apparently did not have such success with the last eBook reader they brought out a few years ago; maybe this time they will succeed. For more information on this development, see: http://newsletters.businessweek.com/c.asp?id=596781&c=58c95909b4e0ec6e&l=6

Risks with carrying notebook computers

More of us than ever are carrying notebook computers between the office, home and while travelling. This gives rise to the possibility of having your notebook stolen – along with all the data you store on it. If you ever typed all your credit card details into a document to fax and then saved a copy, it is still on the PC that is now in the hands of some thief. There are a number of ways you can reduce both the stress of recovering from the loss of a notebook PC and reducing the risks associated with the potential abuse of the information stored on that computer.

An article in a recent computer magazine may be of some help, see: http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,123402,00.asp.

Backups can be done while travelling using small, portable hard drives. You can carry the hard drive in a different suitcase than the one in which you keep your PC or leave it at home – then email all important files to yourself at a webmail address. If your PC is stolen, you will have the backup you left at home, plus the files you emailed yourself.

The copyright holders make no representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the accuracy or application of the material in this report which represents the opinions of the authors, nor does it warrant the claims of any of the products. The results and recommendations may or may not apply to the specific circumstances of third parties. Third party use, therefore, is at the discretion of the user.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Selected TechNotes – August 2005

A fuss about patents
You may have heard something in the press about patents recently and wondered what all the fuss was about. It appears that more and more patents are being issued to companies for seemingly everyday things. On face value this may not seem very important, but unfortunately, after delving into it recently it seems like this could be quite an expensive exercise for many of us on the planet. Patents and copyrights always seem to be lumped together in many discussions, but there is a distinct difference between them. Copyright gives a copyright holder protection for the specific piece of work that has been published, for example a book, an article or a computer program. A patent is a protection against the idea. As I understand it, this means that another person cannot duplicate a patented idea.

A few examples have been emerging in the news recently such as the writing of stage plays and other literary works. If a new literary work in some way resembled an idea of the previous literary work, it would appear that this would be a patent infringement; whereas if one was only dealing with copyright one could easily have two different original pieces of work, each carrying their own copyright. It has even been suggested by Richard Stallman in the Sydney Morning Herald: “if patent laws had applied to novels in the 1880s, great books would never have been written”. No doubt this is a great concern to many people, especially authors today who would have to check every book ever written to see if there were any similar ideas used by any previous author.

When it comes to computer programs, one can understand the necessity for copyright protection if a person's livelihood depends on writing that particular piece of code or text. However should the idea of an accounting program be patented, preventing anybody else from writing an accounting program, this would mean that the world would only have one company able to provide accounting software. Can you imagine if only one company was able to produce an instrument that had a face like a modern-day clock or watch? What would a clock or watch cost if only one company had a patent for the design on the face of the clock? Does this perhaps have something to do with the incredibly high prices of certain new watches and clocks that use significantly different designs?

Can you imagine patenting a marketplace? If a particular company had a patent for a place to buy and sell goods and it had to be paid a royalty every time such a transaction was concluded, I suspect most transactions would have to be concluded on the so-called “black market”. It is quite amazing therefore that the United States’ patent office has even gone as far as hearing the case from Amazon who has filed a patent application for an online marketplace! IMHO (in my humble opinion), I cannot imagine that Amazon has been the only online marketplace to exist since the Internet became popular in the 90s. Even so it seems as if Amazon was granted a US patent for "methods and systems of assisting users in purchasing items" in March 2005. Somehow, I would have thought that the same words could be applied to thousands of other companies also trading on the Internet.

It may be surprising that Microsoft has apparently tried to patent emoticons, an idea that has been around since before web browsers came into use in 1995. Incidentally, a form of emoticon was used by a hotel chain in their guest surveys more than 20 years ago. Not to be left out, Google is also claiming that it should have patent rights over providing a form of online advertising. This is apparently based on the idea of advertisements accompanying the text provided from one company’s web system to another in what is frequently called RSS (really simple syndication). In reasonably plain English this means that one company provides text, for example news which another company's website displays. The text is drawn from one website to another by program coding and the Webmaster does not have to copy and paste it each time a user looks at it. If the idea that if an advert is imbedded in this transferred text is patented, we should all pay for this privilege! It's just my opinion, but this does sound rather strange.

Fortunately there is some good news: the European Parliament has apparently rejected a rule that could have legalised software patents in Europe. The manufacturing companies of course still carry copyright on everything they produce, but they cannot prevent somebody else from writing a program from scratch that might try to achieve similar ideas.

Coming to terms with copyright
After hearing a number of laments from developing countries about the cost of learning materials and sometimes its availability, the Commonwealth of Learning embarked on an exercise to provide a few simple guidelines to Commonwealth countries. This can be found at: www.col.org/copyright

There are a number of flexibilities available to countries in international agreements, which enable governments and institutions to reduce their costs for educational purposes. No one appears to have a problem with paying reasonable prices for anything, but when a book equates to a month or more in salary, something is going wrong. In some cases the book is possibly available, but for some reason cannot be delivered within the country where it is needed. Ministries of education are now actively seeking ways to support their institutions in gaining access to essential learning materials, which are otherwise unavailable due to price, being out of print or for some other reason, undeliverable.

If this is of particular interest to you, you might want to check out the website listed above.

Another plan to disable the Internet
One hears of these stories every now and then; apparently there is a flaw in Cisco routers that could enable hackers to take control of them. If you know the right stuff and are a very good programmer, “they” say you could get into a Cisco router remotely, shut it down and it won't come back up again. The person who found this out and told others at a conference (fortunately he didn't give all the secrets away, but did say enough to convince people) has been legally barred from speaking to anybody about this. Cisco in the meantime, is working away at stopping would-be hackers from finding their way into the routers and causing trouble. If your organisation uses Cisco routers, which is highly likely, your IT people should be applying every update patch as they come out from Cisco to ensure that all doors have been closed and are bolted. Security of our IT systems is becoming more and more important.

The copyright holders make no representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the accuracy or application of the material in this report which represents the opinions of the authors, nor does it warrant the claims of any of the products. The results and recommendations may or may not apply to the specific circumstances of third parties. Third party use, therefore, is at the discretion of the user.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Selected TechNotes – May 2005

Tagging becoming mainstream
The process of “meta tagging” items has tended to be the domain of a few geeks and librarians in the past, but this is set to change. Tagging is what librarians do when they catalogue a book. The tags enable one to search for the item being tagged, by searching for it against the tagged fields. These may be the author’s name, keywords or subject. If all your pictures were tagged, you could search for a particular kind of picture without having to open a single folder. The new gMail™ email service offered by Google is using a system of tags rather than folders. Mail items are either in your inbox or in the archive; but each item can be tagged by a name from a list that you compile yourself. The system also automatically maintains a single “email” for a particular subject line (a “conversation”) thereby reducing the number of scattered emails on the same topic. You can then search for any email using the well-known Google search tools. With over 2gig of storage space at one’s disposal, there is little pressure to delete any emails. An interesting characteristic is that the only way to get an address is to receive an invitation from an existing gMail™ account holder, even though the system is entirely free. The advertising required to pay for the service that raised some concerns is fairly unobtrusively placed on the right hand side, just like it appears in the familiar Google search. The service seems “low bandwidth” (i.e. it works well on slow dial-up and institutional connections (readers in developing countries will understand this). This is a very welcome tool for people who do not own their own computer and need a place to keep files (just email the file to yourself and tag it as a “document” or “file”) and emails in one place (http://gmail.google.com/).

Have you been chipped yet?
The universal identification code for humans seems to be coming closer with trials at night-clubs in Spain under way. Clubs are inserting a tiny identification tag into a person’s arm or other selected part of the body that can be easily scanned on entrance to the club. The ID gives instant access to the person’s personal details and most importantly, the person’s access to money to pay for their night’s entertainment. Each club is, at this stage, reported to be doing their own thing, which might mean multiple chips for clubbers. A single, universal, personal code (ID) could be useful for accessing, information for entertainment, like these clubs, access to medical information, etc. The fear is the amount of information anyone might have on them, should the systems be broken into illegally, by criminals or legally, by government agencies.

Open Source as a way to expand the IT budget
The proprietary software (e.g. Unix, Sun, Microsoft) versus open source (Linux) seems like a good way to heat up a discussion amongst techies these days. People are taking opposing views and digging their toes into the sand to keep their position in the tug-of-war. The real answers in the part of the world that comprises well over 2 billion people is that institutions just don’t have the money to pay for their computing needs, to help educate people, to make the countries less “developing” and more “developed”. There’s a line of logic that you can only spend the money you have and for a while, the debt you can raise. After this, you need to fit your expenditure to your income or run into serious trouble.

Institutions need to take their IT budgets and spend the money as wisely as they can on those items that absolutely require hard cash – like hardware and absolutely necessary programmes that require license fees to be paid. If you have a course that trains people to use “Microsoft Word” you cannot use another computer programme. However, much of the education or training an institution wishes to offer might be found to be more generic, opening some opportunities for low priced alternatives. Also, those behind-the-scenes services that the IT folk desperately need to offer to improve services to users can frequently be cobbled together on old PCs and free software – a lot better than just saying: “we do not have the budget so we cannot do it”. So, if you IT department is asking for more money that the institution can provide, ask how creative they can get with what they have – all the old PCs that have been replaced and the free software they can download from the internet. This only applies to institutions that find their budget a little short in the IT department!

Cost of bandwidth in Africa
On a recent trip to three African countries, I again asked about the cost of bandwidth. The cost differences to industrialised countries are quite astounding. An ASDL or cable connection in industrialised countries cost about USD40 per month (less actually in most cases I hear of), the bandwidth is, let’s say about 500kilobits (I know it varies and providers will give much higher rates). A company in Kenya told me they are paying (now, in 2005) about USD500 per month for a 32-kilobit connection – i.e. a slow dialup connection speed. This would cost USD10 to 20 per month in industrialised countries. A 512kilobit connection was reported to be about USD 5,000 in a second African country. This example represents a cost some 125 times higher, which is reported to be much higher in some other countries in Africa. This causes me to ask where the governments are in all this? Internet bandwidth for educational institutions is a crucial tool for learning. The Internet contains thousands of free books (e.g. the African Digital Library), hundreds of thousands of reports and documents of value (e.g. the COL knowledge finder) and thousands of pieces of learning content that lecturers and learners can access (e.g. the COL learning object repository) – and all this saves the institutions thousands of dollars on otherwise purchased books, journals, etc. The alternative is no doubt true, that lecturers and learners can do without the resources, but what is the real cost of that to the quality of the country’s education? It is time to resolve this long-standing issue. A top management team that does not feel it has sufficient technical competence to tackle the issues on their own can easily collaborate with other institutions and international agencies to form the necessary technical and negotiation skills to confront predatory service providers. Bulk buying of bandwidth through collaboration can help drive down costs. Maybe we should publish the prices institutions pay so that we can compare these both within countries and between countries? [See: http://www.cto.int/ ;
http://www.comnet-it.org/ ;
http://www.inasp.info/training/bandwidth/]

The copyright holders make no representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the accuracy or application of the material in this report which represents the opinions of the authors, nor does it warrant the claims of any of the products. The results and recommendations may or may not apply to the specific circumstances of third parties. Third party use, therefore, is at the discretion of the user.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Selected TechNotes – March 2005

Grid computing becomes useful in industry
A computer assisted design job that was taking three months to be completed, is now said to be done over night. This is thanks to grid computing power provided by the IBM grid computing system. Landrover is now able to use the power of hundreds of PCs spread around the company to carry out the testing of designs. The system is able to allocate work to groups of PCs and have the results by morning.

At the other end of “reality” is the “IBM Blue Gene/L”, a super computer that has now set a standard of 135.5 teraflops – that’s over 135 trillion calculations per second! or a “135 thousand million” calculations per second. This was achieved by linking up some 32,768 IBM power processors. The next step, they say is to move this up to double this number, that’s well over 65,000 power processors, which should be able to push processing power to 270 teraflops (or a thousand million calculations per second). If you need this kind of processing power, but cannot afford the millions of dollars needed to buy and run it, IBM is now renting out access to one of its own machines. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/emergingtech/0,39020357,39192667,00.htm

Time for PDAs to give way in the business sector
With Sony announcing it’s withdrawal from the PDA market and more and more multipurpose cell phones offering PDA features, the time for businesses to drop PDAs is rapidly approaching. PDAs have now moved into the “space” occupied by digital music players, book readers and games. Cell phones have moved from being machines that carry voices, to messaging devices (the better cellular networks communicate across over 160 countries now) and are now adding synchronized calendars, tasks, and contacts to its range of functions. Those with higher quality screens can be used to read documents and even play games. Whereas some communication systems using GPRS cellular networks (so called 2.5G) are likely to cost you $1 to $3 per message coming in or going out (depending on length) and are limited to just over 60 countries world-wide, the short messaging system that has been in use since just after the release of GSM phones still only cost a few cents per message and move freely between over 160 countries. Sometimes older technology just makes sense.

An emerging technology in the cellular space that needs watching is called “3G”. This will replace a range of names such as “GPRS” and “EDGE”. It is being rolled out in countries in Europe, Africa and Asia and reduces the cost of emails and data sent over the cellular network from around $8 per Meg to about 10c per Meg. Your choice of what to buy into will depend largely on where you live and where you travel. The more countries you visit, and expect to be in contact, the more basic you need to keep your technology – the short message system of GSM phones is the most cost effective and ubiquitous, as mentioned above – if your correspondents all use cell phones. If you are planning to move around a small piece of the world where 3G has been implemented, this is the way to go – and provided your correspondents all use cell phones or email. There is a link to useful information on the card you can use in your notebook PC to connect to the Internet. If you get one of these in your country, check very carefully on the prices you will be paying, especially on international roaming. If the service defaults to GPRS when traveling internationally, you may be paying as much as USD40 per Meg (read: “incredibly expensive”)! http://www.vodacom.co.za/packages/3g/overview.aspx

COL Launches a Learning Object Repository Released as Free Open Source Software
COL has launched an online database of learning content that provides software to Commonwealth countries free of charge. Institutions or governments can establish a shared repository by accessing free open source software from COL’s Learning Object Repository (LOR).

A number of online databases of learning content – or Learning Object Repositories - have been created around the world including CAREO, MERLOT and EdNA. COL has worked with eduSource and CANARIE (a not-for-profit corporation for advanced Internet development supported by its members, project partners and the Canadian Government) to develop the necessary tools, standards and protocols. The partners invested more than CDN $8 million in this venture. The software produced by this consortium has been made available in COL’s Learning Object Repository under a free open source software license.

Vancouver-based 3waynet Inc. developed complementary open source software that, when used together, could provide a fully functioning repository. In co-operation with COL, 3waynet created all the programming “connective tissue” to make these systems work together and provide an easy-to-use webpage to access content.

The system includes the ability to add information about the learning material (“learning objects”) with “meta tags”. These are IMS-compatible (IMS Schema 1.2.2) and the system is able to “federate-search” other repositories when the user is looking for learning materials. Installed on a local or shared server, this will enable course developers to locate learning materials along with the necessary copyright information from multiple continents.

COL is hosting the software and is collaborating with the African Virtual University, headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, that will upload and make available open source courseware that Commonwealth countries can access free of charge. COL anticipates partnering with other groups as awareness of the LOR grows. More information on the LOR is available at: www.col.org/lor

The copyright holders make no representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the accuracy or application of the material in this report which represents the opinions of the authors, nor does it warrant the claims of any of the products. The results and recommendations may or may not apply to the specific circumstances of third parties. Third party use, therefore, is at the discretion of the user.



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