Hackers For Charity « Hackers For Charity

I’m in Uganda (obviously) and life was getting a bit rough here. I was just about to grumble a bit about how we’ve had like six hours of power in four days and whine a little but about the mosquito bites, lack of sleep, loss of Internet, kilos of ruined food, and my overall drop in productivity when I read the story about Brad. I’m not going to grumble about my circumstances any more because this serves as a stark reminder that when we think we’re up to our neck in crap, it’s guaranteed that someone we know is going through something infinitely tougher. I’m not talking about a stranger in a third world country, I’m talking about someone we know.

Brad is an amazing guy. No matter what I was dealing with, he always has a way of lifting me up. His smile is permanent. His laugh is contagious.

Despite his very serious situation, I refuse to write about him in the past tense because my earnest prayer is that he will pull through. I am praying that all his well-wishers will get many more opportunities to tell him in person that he is a light in the darkness and that his smile is appreciated. He is one in a million.

We’re working on a fundraiser to help with his family’s expenses but more than anything, please pray for Brad and his family.

http://www.social-engineer.org/brad-smith-updates

Day three without power at the house. That means no shower (no water pump) and no hot water (no hot water heater). Splash baths with cold water just leave me feeling greasy and disgusting. Yuck. This also means that there’s no Internet, no electronics charging and no real accomplishments to speak of today. This makes me realize that my life just may be far too digital, even here.

I began to pay the rent for the next six months at the Training Center, and I started going through the end-of-month students report. I’ll post the details here soon.

I really have to try to get these updates on the actual day they happen. But at least I have an excuse for yesterday-we had no power. After a terrific storm with hurricane-strength winds, black clouds and not a drop of rain, the power flickered and then died. Everyone else had power back within ten minutes, but not us. The crappy power is becoming more and more of a nuisance. On the other hand, there’s something kinda nice about candlelight and peace and quiet .. until the mosquitoes come out and the sinus-scorching mosquito coils start burning.

The storm did drop the temperature nicely for a few hours, so that was nice.

Anyhow, today I worked on two hard drive recoveries, one for  LightGivesHeat (which failed because of the click of death) and one for Busoga Trust Bank (which succeeded despite the rampant viruses). I also did some software installs for Ekisa. I worked with Emma (our HFC Uganda web-guy-in-training) to get him rolling with XAMPP and Joomla on his laptop as he prepares to put together a social networking / CMS site together for a local paper-based teen magazine.

I also cleaned my desk, a task that takes an hour every couple of days because I just don’t clean up after each job.

On a personal note, I started two new books, which is just suicidal because I read at the speed of a salted slug.

Full day yesterday. I spent about six hours unsuccessfully trying to restore Internet at The Keep. It will consume more time again today. In the process I nuked our intranet site and our wifi landing page so I had to recreate them.

I worked with the electrician a bit on the inverter at the Keep that I didn’t have the money for, but miraculously someone repaid a loan in the exact amount I needed.

I finally finished burning all the operating system update DVDs for the community, but few people seem to be coming in for them. That’s a bit of a downer considering the pitiful bandwidth available and hearing from so many people that it would be “wonderful” to have updates on DVD.

Slogged through about 100 pending comments that were queued up on the website. I didn’t know they were there. I found about two dozen volunteer offers that didn’t make it to the volunteer form (emailed them), discovered more than one extremely generous offers of assistance (emailed them) and discover three irate donors whose comments had been queued no less than six months (still working on how to best make amends there).

I also sent a long email to the designer thats working on our new volunteer engagement and mapping system that we are hoping to launch at Shmoocon.

We had a few visitors from all over (northern Uganda, Kampala, etc) and we watched a bit of Monday night football which we get a day late on ESPN/DStv.

All in all it was a really long day.

Worked with an American ex-pat professor that’s working and living here in Jinja last week. He was terrified about the fact that his hotmail account had been hacked and all these messages were being generated from his email account. I checked the time stamps on the sent emails and saw that they were sent very early in the morning when his machine was turned off and his Internet was disconnected. I ran a few scans on his laptop and everything came back clean. This pointed to the fact that it wasn’t his machine but rather his email account that was compromised. A bit more researched revealed that his email account’s “secret answer” was basically set to his password (one character difference). I spent about an hour getting his account back in shape, changing his passwords and secret questions and teaching him a bit about how hackers use this stuff to compromise his account. He was ecstatic to have regained control of his account.

This came as a shock when we heard the news this morning. We were not immediately familiar with the names of the victims, but they may have been customers at The Keep or the training center. Either way, we are saddened by the news, and our prayers are with the families of the victims. This happened five minutes from our home at the road in front of Kakira Sugar Works, just past Bugembe.

http://www.newvision.co.ug/news/18725-two-american-evangelists-perish-in-jinja-accident.html

From a new school in Uganda:

“We need a computerized way to handle:

* student registration
* student grades (recording, posting, etc)
* student emails

It would be great if all that were web-based, and it would be even better if it could integrate with Quickbooks Enterprise Solutions software we use for accounting so that we could allow students to see their financial status.”

I’m looking for suggestions about (open source?) approaches, and also looking for someone to be the point person to interact with the school contact.

Thanks, everyone!

I wonder if anyone out there can help us. We need to host some charity web sites that are being built here in Uganda. Does anyone have hosting they could donate? We don’t need tons of space or bandwidth, but the host will be used solely for charity sites. Ideally, I’d like to hand over a cpanel to the charity, so a “reseller” arrangement might be best. If we can’t find a donation, I could use help finding a good provider.

Also, I have a local charity that has web host problems and I need a web-saavy volunteer to help them get their site back online. Thanks!

I spent a lot of time downloading while I was in the US. Every hotel I stayed in was blessed with a blocked pipe thanks to my non-stop download queue. The bulk of what I was downloading consisted of Windows and Mac updates so I could baseline them and start providing monthly software updates to the community.

When I first started working in Uganda, I was stunned at how viruses snuck into every corner of the IT landscape and even more surprised at the devastation they caused. As an organization, we’ve done our best to keep treat the symptoms. We did A/V scans, quarantines, data recoveries, system updates and A/V updates but really we weren’t making a dent in the problem. I began to realize that most of the systems we were working on were hideously outdated and the primary reason for this was that there  wasn’t enough bandwidth to download all the service packs, security patches, application updates and A/V updates required to keep the systems safe.

Today, after several days of pulling all the packages together, we’ve released our first set of DVDs that will update Mac and Windows machines with all the latest updates. The Windows version is nicely automated, but the Mac updates are a pile of DMGs for now. (Anyone know a better way to update Macs other than chucking a pile of DMGs at our clients? Let me know.)

Next, we’ll work on A/V updates, and I’m looking for something that will automate that process as well so we can automate the download and installation of updates. Again, let me know.

My only fear with this little project is the inevitable: I just know that some unscrupulous people will get a hold of these disks, duplicate them from their virus-infected machines and try to sell these freely-offered updates for profit. My hope is that we’ll remain a trusted source for these packages and that we can make some dent in this problem.

Here’s the email that I sent out to the community.

————-

Hey everyone! Hackers For Charity is offering free operating system
update disks to anyone that needs them. The disks are free for the
asking, but we are requesting a donation of 20,000/= (if you are able)
to help us offset the (rather significant) costs we incur in
downloading the updates and creating the disks.

There are two sets of disks right now: one for Windows and one for Mac.

The Windows disk includes an installer which will automatically assess
your system, determine the updates that need to be applied and
incrementally upgrade your system to the latest version, after several
reboots and restarts of the program. The Windows disk will currently
update Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2003, Windows 7 and Office
2003-2010.

The Mac disk does not contain an auto-installer, so updates must be
applied manually. We are looking for a solution to this, but for now
updates are listed in categories by OS X version and application.
Novice users can simply install the latest operating system update,
while more advanced users can delve into the various application
directories. The disk will currently update OS X 10.5 (Leopard), OS X
10.6 (Snow Leopard), OS X 10.7 (Lion), iLife, iWork and all auxiliary
Apple applications. In addition, this disk contains the latest version
of iTunes for Windows and Mac as well as the latest updates for the
iPad 2 Wi-Fi and the iPhone 4 (GSM versions only). Note that if your
iPhone has been unlocked and/or jailbroken, you should not apply these
updates as you will lose your unlock, perhaps permanently. Older
versions of OS X, to include OS X 10.4 (Tiger) as well as Power PC
versions are included on a second supplemental Mac DVD, provided on
request.

Each disk can be re-used by multiple computers legally, as there are
no licensing issues since the updates are provided free from the
respective web sites.

Our plan is to update this disk every month and provide the updates as
a service to the community. We also are working on an anti-Virus
update disk to provide updates to the various A/V products.

If you’re interested in any of the DVD’s, stop by The Keep any time.
We’ll ask you to fill in a form with your name, phone number, email
address, organization name/web site and email address.

Thanks everyone.

Have a good day!

It seemed like a week of nothing but iPhones. Here are three of the five I worked on this week.So many staff and volunteers are coming with “unprepared” i* gear and it’s been fun getting them off and running. We were happy to provide service to: Bujagali Energy Limited Bujagali Hydropower Project, Arise Africa and the Orthodox Presbyterian Uganda Mission. Check them out if you get a chance!