IHS

Arise, Geek!

It’s the day before DEFCON and I’m depressed. I’m going to miss DEFCON for the first time in I don’t know how many years. These past months I’ve really started to feel distant from the community. (Mostly my fault. I haven’t even been blogging lately so no one has an idea of what I’m up to. Let me fix that. Again.) Part of me as a geek is slowly dying. I haven’t really done much technically in the past year. I’ve done a couple teaching gigs (forensics) and ethically hacked a government system (anti-forensics.. heh..) but other than that a lot of my days are spent in the trenches of decidedly low-tech projects.

I moaned about my slow techdeath to John Chamberlin, a Linux guru and fellow geek, and we came up with the idea to start a Linux User Group (LUG) in Jinja. So we did it. Here are the photos from our first meeting. We gave an introduction to Ubuntu and gave out free copies of 10.4. The attendance was small at first, with only HFC employees in attendance, but as the meeting continued, our audience grew to about 30.

Kyle and Simon came down from the Kampala LUG and through the training and the after-chat, part of me came back to life. It was great being able to chat in “geek” and for the first time in a long time, I felt invigorated about tech. It’s been hard work for the past year and somewhere in the dust, muck and politics that is my life here I had lost that.

But I’m back just in time to really really REALLY miss DEFCON. Enjoy the photos.

Fred’s amazed! A Linux User Group in Jinja! Wow!

John Chamberlin makes introductions.

Johnny doing that thing he does so well… talking and making faces.

John prepares to give an intro to Ubuntu.

HFC and Linux… a match made in heaven!

John’s into it now. We’re using the OLPC’s as test machines as well. We had these from Bugembe, as our staff is doing updates.

Here’s Simon and Kyle from the Kampala LUG making intros and talking a bit.

Crash

I knew the minute it hit the ground, that was it. Jen’s MacBook fell the impossible distance from the table onto the concrete floor with such impossible force and with such a sickening thud that I knew in my soul it was done. The details are sketchy, but it just… happened.

I’ll do my best to recover the years of photos and documents we never backed up. The prospects are grim. Based on how hard it hit and how bad it’s acting, it’s a total loss.

I really feel like vomiting. Jen had really gotten into Facebook lately. It was a way to communicate with the world, and a way to keep in touch with her friends. Jinja is so freaking lonely for us that Facebook had become a bit of an oasis for her. She never was a computer user, but after two years with the Macbook, she was creating documents, emailing, writing schedules, designing DVD’s.. so many things. And right now, it looks like it’s all gone. (Most of the intellectual property of the cafe is gone, too, but that’s not even on the radar at this point.)

And it’s not like we can take it to the Apple Store. There isn’t one.

This made me realize how insane we are for using Apple products here in Uganda. If anything happens to these machines here, they’re DONE. No one works on them and even if they did, the parts alone would be too expensive. But we’ve come to rely on them and we’re used to them. Switching back to Windows at this point would be painful at best. We’re wired for OSX.

But we might have to start using Windows because we might never be able to afford Apple products again. In the US, when I was working, it would hurt to buy another Macbook, but in this case I would run out and buy one if it was totalled. But on this path we’ve chosen it’s simply not possible anymore.

I’m in deep mourning. For Jen and also for the inevitable future that awaits my machine as well. For the first time in about five years, I’m almost regretting our move to the Mac.

Signed copy of f0rb1dd3n on auction @ DEFCON!

Jayson Street has been a big supporter of HFC for a long time, and he’s at it again. He’s taking a copy of the latest edition of his book “Dissecting the hack: the f0rb1dd3n network” to DEFCON, getting the whole crew to sign it and he’s auctioning it with all proceeds going to HFC! For more info, see http://f0rb1dd3n.com.

My iPhone has a cold

Wild ebay auction!

Monte has donated one of his rigs to the cause. See http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250665614014&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT#ht_1116wt_1137. It’s really cool of him to donate all of the proceeds for this auction. Spread the word!

Offensive Security does it again!

The folks at Offensive Security (you know, Backtrack?!?) have been HUGE supporters of us in the past, and they’ve done it again. Their “How Strong is Your Fu” charity event netted over $2500 for us! This is a lot of money for an organization as small as ours, and I’m thrilled at the creativity that was poured into such an event. Thanks to the whole offsec crew and all the participants that took part in the event! We’re so very grateful!

http://www.offensive-security.com/backtrack/how-to-hack-your-way-to-blackhat-vegas/

Hello, World.

I’d like to thank Monte and Tim for waving the flag for me. Yes, we’re OK.

The bombing is a tragedy, but it’s also a surprise. Everyone here is shocked. Uganda hasn’t had to deal with this crud since 1998. But now, here we are.

The Ethiopian  restaurant was showing the World Cup. That’s exactly what we were doing in the cafe. It could have been us. I should be flipping out. I do that quite often, about lots of things. But in this case, I’m not really stressed out too much. I was worried about that my parents would think, so I made sure to call them at 2AM their time to let them know we were OK.

The newspapers here are graphic, as always. Out of the four or five we have access to, only one was suitable for the cafe.

As a (possible) side effect of the blast, the main data trunk lines bridging Kampala and Jinja have been damaged. This is on the heels of another outage thanks to a Seacom repeater problem and weather conditions which delayed the repair. All this to explain why I’ve been offline for the past two weeks.

After a good amount of research, I bought an MTN 3G modem which is giving me dial-up speeds. It’s enough to blog, but even email is difficult right now.

The timing is atrocious; I was just in the process of planning for DEFCON. But as it stands right now, I don’t have money for the flight, or lodging or anything. I’ve also been unable to coordinate the DEFCON booth. Tim tells me there’s a discussion thread somewhere, and I’m really appreciative for that, but it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to do much for quite some time. Bottom line is that I don’t think I’ll be at DEFCON this year..

As for us, we’re all pretty exhausted. The cafe has been open for nearly two weeks now, and as a family we’re at the cafe from 8:00AM to 11:00PM, and Jen and I aren’t in bed until well after midnight. But business is OK, sometimes. On our second night, we were packed. There were no empty chairs, and the food was taking 2 hours to get to the table. We learned a lot, and now things are better. The food is coming out quickly, and the quality is good. Folks are raving about our soft pretzels, onion rings and our “Burnin’ Love” burger, inspired by one of our favorite restaurants in the US — Red Robin. One of the game rooms is open with an XBOX 360, but the CD drive keeps getting “stuck” (says “Opening” and “Closing” but doesn’t “do” anything) and I’m afraid it’s on it’s last legs. The second game room is on hold (the money’s gone) as is the Internet (thanks to the above).

In our first busy night, we grossed more than the training center’s made in two months, so that’s encouraging. It’s nice to think that we’ve hit on something that could sustain our work and our life, but the word from a successful local business owner is that only 3% of restaurants make it and that restaurants are hardly ever “sustainable” — especially in Uganda — and that the business is cutthroat. Great.

So I’ll keep you all posted, and hopefully send some pictures soon. Thanks for your prayers and support, especially for the families affected by the bombings.

Johnny

I am

so tired. The kind of bone-crushing tired that makes me loopy. I see elephants. Pink ones. Like in that scene in Dumbo where he was really drunk. But I need to post… something. Regardless of how short, I need to post. To the handful of people that have hung in there to see if and when I’ll actually post something of interest or value. This post likely contains neither. But for what it’s worth,

Hello, World.

I am alive. I have not been eaten by a lion. I have not yet succumb to the pathogen. We are just…busy. The cafe opened. 18-hour days are…long. There are these words that help in times like this. Adjectives. They help us describe things. They fail me right now, but suffice it to say that “long” in this context means … really … long.

At the end of the day all I want to do is

sleep.

OLPC Training

I love the concept of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child). However, the implementation really falls short. Case in point: Rehaboth Integrated School in Bugembe near Jinja, Uganda. A generous donor gave 100 OLPC’s to the school, and they’ve sat in a closet for almost two years. The primary reason is that the staff had no real idea what to do with them. They needed training. (They were also waiting on the donor to release them to the school. They wanted the laptops to go home with the students… a HORRIBLE idea in a developing country.)

That’s where we were happy to step in. Together with Monte Hoover, a recent graduate of West Point and the faculty and staff of West Point, we broke those machines out of the closet and began putting them to use.

Monte wrote an amazing game of Tetris Math and together we installed it and began training the staff and students of Rehaboth.

This was an amazing partnership, and I’m proud of the work we did there. Enjoy the photos!

Monte, Henry and Fred installing Monte’s "Tetris Math" app on the OLPC’s at Rehaboth Integrated.

Henry and Monte showing off the OLPC.

The crowd grows…

…and grows until eventually Monte is swallowed up by a crowd of enthusiastic students!

These things are magnets for kids!

They just can’t wait to try them out!

We did some teacher training as well, again at Rehaboth Primary.

Monte teaching a group of P7 students.

More teacher training. The teachers really had fun!

Fred and Henry translating and teaching with Monte.

More P7 students.

The students loved Monte’s program! It was a real winner.

Gerod helping out with the student training.

Monte sitting with a student that’s playing his game. The students really loved this thing!

Thankfully, we had a little time to see the sights. Here’s Monte at the Source of the River Nile. Thank you Monte for your excellent work for HFC and the teachers and students of Uganda. We will never forget you! We hope you come back soon!

Who cares

It doesn’t look like much, but this is really a heartbreaking picture sequence. The fist picture shows the lab at St. John’s Wakitaka in all it’s glory. The second shows the lab after we ripped out all the nComputing desktops.

Seven months ago, I created a contract for St. John’s. The contract stated that the school would care for the equipment. We assigned financial penalties with infractions. If we found fingerprints on a monitor it wold cost then 10,000/= (about $5US). But each penalty was created to teach them something about how to care for the equipment. At the end of a successful six month training period, we would turn the classroom over to the school, confident that they could care for the machines. If they followed the rules, there would be no penalties, and the classroom would be theirs, free of charge. They would have a free lab, and we would have confidence that the significant investment in them would not be wasted.

Six months passed, and the school hadn’t signed the contract. However, the school was using (and abusing) our equipment. We were stuck with repair and maintenance bills and the staff and students could operate with complete impunity since they hadn’t signed the contract. We pressed for the signing of the contract and were met with more excuses.

At this point, we locked the classroom, hoping to force a decision on the issue.

Two months later, the contract was still not signed. The headmistress offered lame excuses, like “I forgot to bring the contract to the board meeting,” and other such things. I called the chairman of the board, Firipo and asked for a meeting.

He graciously accepted me into his home and explained that the contract couldn’t be signed because the penalties seemed too steep. We explained our position. We couldn’t give them a free classroom. It wouldn’t teach them anything, and in months the classroom would be ruined. In the end, I reluctantly agreed to redraft the contract. I removed the financial penalties, but reiterated that after a certain number of penalties in a month the classroom would be removed permanently. Deep down I knew this was a mistake, but I agreed to do it none the less. This meeting occurred on April 23. I produced the limited contract on April 26th, against my better judgement.  On May 31, I emailed Firipo again seeking a status and he informed me that, “The Headmistress had not yet made contanct (sic) with other stakeholders in the school to get thier consentor (sic) views.”

I replied to him on June 1 saying that:

“The headmistress has really not taken this issue seriously enough. I
understand there are holidays, but the new contract has been in play
for an entire month. She has wasted every opportunity to address this
issue, and has failed with every extension, including this latest one
that put our equipment at risk.

I have done everything I can to work with St. John’s in this matter,
but the staff has left me no choice. Our equipment is sitting unused
and is is uncared for and is spoiling. We will remove the equipment
this week.”

His response came on June 3:

“Iam humbly requesting you to hold on with your action for another week.
When  I am back in Jinja I will go and talk to her.”

I did not want to wait another week. I KNEW it wouldn’t make a difference. I didn’t reply to his email, but I waited for a week.

There was, of course no movement on the (now FREE) contract, and no more emails from Firipo. The rumor was that the board would meet on Friday June 18th to discuss the contract.

So after much deliberation, Fred and I came to St. John’s yesterday (June 17, two full weeks after the requested extension) and removed the nComputing systems. This was the “new” part of the classroom. I decided to leave the used laptops for them, but even this was against my better judgement. However, I agreed to help St. John’s years ago, and I felt bad leaving them empty-handed. Further, the Hon Migereko, who is a great man, asked us to do this project and I didn’t want to disappoint him. However, the school administration has failed him, actively refusing a $30,000 investment, squabbling over quarters.

I printed up this notice and posted it on the locked lab door:

“To the staff of St. John’s Wakitaka-

We regret to inform you that the 12 new desktop stations have been permanently removed from this computer lab, leaving only the laptops. The reason for this is that the administration of this school has refused to sign a contract stating that they will properly care for this equipment. We have waited for seven months for the school administration to sign this contract, and this shows that the school is prepared for the substantial investment of new equipment. Had they acted in a more timely manner, the equipment would remain, but their lack of attention to this matter can no longer be ignored.

This computer lab marks an enormous investment in St. Johns, and we are unwilling to leave new equipment in the hands of an administration that is unable to commit to the maintenance and protection of that equipment.

A meeting of the school board has been scheduled for Friday, and the contract is again under review. If, at that point, the contract is signed, the remaining laptops will stay in the lab. Otherwise, the laptops will also be removed.

We are saddened by this turn of events. At Hackers For Charity, we prioritize ICT education, and understand the disappointment this will cause the student body. However, we can not stand alongside a school administration that does not share this priority.

Hackers For Charity.org”

Within moments, the school deputy took down the sign and requested a meeting with me. I didn’t return his call.

I felt heartbroken over the situation, but I knew that our investment in St John’s was wasted. This was not a school that cared about ICT training. They wanted a free gift, and wanted us to just go away. I’ve seen the result of that kind of arrangement. I see it reflected in the smeared visage of ancient, dusty CRT monitors. I’ve seen it in the mountains of spoiled unused techno garbage that litter countless thousands of computer classrooms all over the country. I’ll be damned if I’ll contribute to the ICT dung heap of this country.

That day, I visited two more schools in Bugembe: St Florence and Wanyange Girl’s school. Wanyange Girls’ School boasted over 70 computer workstations, most of them nComputing terminals. They were well maintained and running very smoothly. The lab at St Florence was tiny, but spotless. I could have eaten off the floor. The place was amazing. Wanyange in particular sparked my interest, as they wanted to open their lab to the community. More on that later.

But the point of this post is that I’ve moved on from St. John’s. At this point, I’ve learned a valuable lesson about computer classrooms in Uganda. I’ve seen the difference between schools that care about computer education and ones that don’t.

And I’ll never again work with a school that doesn’t care.