Thanks to everyone who attended #sploit502, especially all the HFC supporters! Adrian (irongeek) was kind enough to raise quite a bit of money for us through class registration, and he blew up our Donor Cloud! Thank you everyone!
Continue Reading...We’re back, safe and sound. I really thought the trip would be sketchier.. I don’t know what I expected exactly, but overall it was a really good trip.
We had a chance to visit some of the farms we’ve started through the food for work program. We slept at the AOET Kenya guesthouse. We went to Lake Nakuru and had our first official safari.
And I was reminded of a few important things. First, even though we live in Uganda, we live a good life. The guesthouse in Kenya reminded us of that. We enjoy running water, decent power, and comfortable beds. Second, we live on an amazing planet. The Giraffes at Lake Nakuru reminded me of that.
I’ll write more later, but for now it’s hello and goodbye for a while. I’m headed to Jordan for a teaching gig. It’s one of those “time to pay the bills” things. As always, I’m anxious, and hoping the time flies by. I can’t wait to get back to work in Uganda, and as always, I’m going to miss my family like crazy.
Continue Reading...We’re off to Kenya. We’ll check back soon. Personally, I’m looking forward to a bit of prayer, reflection, and navel-gazing. Not sure I’ll get an opportunity to do that, but I feel like I need it right now. I’ve got to get my feet back under me. Thanks for the kind emails and comments. I really do appreciate them all.
Continue Reading...It’s just one of those weeks. Already.
Yesterday we had a dozen council (Local Government) guys in our cafe. Normally that would be a good thing. But these were the guys that like padlocking businesses who don’t have their paperwork in order.
If you’re asking “what paperwork” then you and I have something in common. Seems businesses here need a trade license. To get that, you have to be a registered business. Thanks to the same lawyer that bungled our family’s visa paperwork (and had us looking down the barrel of a $20,000 fine) our business registration’s not done. Fred tells me the council guys started yelling and pointing and threatening and then they pinned him down about this “Hacker” thing. That’s when he put them on the phone with me.
So today we paid a visit to the council office. Nice folks. No yelling. No pointing. I just told them what we were doing, and it seems they’re going to try to cut us a break because we’re doing community work in the training center. But the problem is, it’s not really community work by any standard. Yes, we charge next to nothing, but if we do OK, we will make a little something.
(What’s the rule to forecast profit? If we fill each of our 24 seats every hour of every day we’re open, we’ll make $4,500 a month. Subtract our expenses of around $1,500, and we’re at $3,000 in profit. So do we cut that in half? ($1500) or by two thirds ($1000)? What’s “the” formula?)
So it’s not a pure community project. Yes, police officers train free, as do Local Council members, UTL employees (partnered for bandwidth discount), certain NGOs and kids we are putting through our scholarship program. But if the cafe takes off, and we are able to swing it, things will start to really take off. We’ll be able to afford to get more creative with pricing, more lenient with discounts / scholarships, we’ll be able to open our rec / training center for kids, and we’ll be able to start more programs in the villages.
I spent several hours doing the necessary paperwork and talking to the local officials, but thanks to a printer problem, they can’t print the papers we need. I spent two hours trying to find a recommended mechanic in Jinja, only to find out he was in Kampala. I did this because we’re trying to go to Kenya Wed-Sat to visit the food program there and go North to see the Pokots and do some HFC-funded relief work. It’s a long drive and since the whole family is going, I wanted the car to be in good shape. Guess we’ll have to say an extra prayer for the car. But it turns out the AOET Kenya program is hurting because an HFC bank transfer didn’t make it. So after investigating it, I find out the money is in our US account. Which means I have to wait for a manual bank transfer (3+ days). That means that when we show up in Kenya, it’s on a bit of a sour note because they’re in the hole because the money we promised never showed up. And I think it will be even more awkward because we had planned to take cash to help the Pokots, but how can we do that when we owe AOET? And the point of the trip is to see the Pokots, and we can just show up and snap pics and video when these people are dying thanks to the drought / floods / floods / more floods?
The whole thing is a real mess. But Jen is excited, and now the kids really want to go. It’s a bit of a field trip sine we really haven’t “been” anywhere other than Jinja and Kampala and the family’s getting a bit stir crazy. We hope to see Lake Kayunga as well, and the assorted wildlife there, so I can see the allure.
But I’m just blah about everything right now. Finances are getting tight again, and to right that I’ve got a training gig coming up, but that pulls me out of pocket right before the opening of the cafe. So I’m not even really jazzed about the gig nor the money it will generate. I can only focus on how mush there is to do, and the fact that Jen’s ticked off at me because I get too hyper focussed on one thing at the expense of all else. For the last three months, it’s been the training center. Well guess what? It’s running ok. The rest of my world may have crumbled around me in the mean time, but at least there’s that, right?
Thing is, I just don’t multitask very well. I never have. And it sucks (really sucks) when that one thing I focussed on actually works, and hardly anybody notices. There’s a part of me that likes the pat on the head and all, but this is bigger than that. There’s a fundamental flaw in the way I do things that’s been baked in for the past 30+ years, and for a while that was beneficial.
(“I will not give up until this billion-dollar government security system FALLS!” And whaddya know, it freaking’ DID fall, and that made my employer happy and the government sad.)
Back then, this flipped-out version of ADD or whatever it is made me money and made me popular within a certain small, yet brilliant, percentage of the population.
But now, I don’t know. It just sucks and other things suck, and that just sucks.
The Jinja fiber is down, so we’re back to dial-up speeds.
Our exterminator did a terrible job so we’re mosquito bitten and flea bitten and the little weird snakes are back, and the ants are carrying off whole potatoes again. But we have potatoes, so that’s good.
The lawyer is dragging his feet on the visa paperwork and the creation of Hackers For Charity, Ltd, the legals business entity of HFC Uganda. Yes, the same lawyer that got us good and boned at the airport.
Our contact in the Ministry of Finance is being ridiculous about the tax waiver on imports, so we’re still not tax exempt despite the fact that he’s doing this as a favor for one of the most powerful men in the country. And after six months, he says we’ve got to start over from the beginning because I “didn’t keep behind him” despite the fact that I did everything he asked for, and bugged the living crap out of him about it.
I wanted to take a bike ride today and get some exercise because people are no longer politely ignoring the fact that I’ve doubled in size over the past three years. But that didn’t pan out, so here I sit exercising the strongest muscles in my body which might not even count as muscles… those weird tendons on the back of my hand. Even that’s not working out because I think I’m getting carpel tunnel.
I’m at least a month behind on emails, and there are excited people getting unexcited and polite people getting less polite, but there’s not much I can do about that because I have no bandwidth and it’s time for bed and for the fifth time I’m being reminded that I sit in front of the computer too much and the kids are waiting to say goodnight to me.
I don’t even know what to call this post. Maybe I shouldn’t even post it. Seriously depressing crap.
And just like that, we have a title.
Continue Reading...I spent some time today working with Jen on colors for the cafe. Here’s what we came up with. The cafe is moving so slowly. We’re short of money. That makes things move slow. Time to be just a bit nervous. But…Oh, hai… Photoshop is one of my favorite distractions. But this cafe thing will work. I just know it.
What a week.
First, the training center. I found that the Ncomputing machines were not a good fit. Most of the training we have is on DVD and with the nComputing setup, only one machine has a DVD drive. So we replaced that table with the machines sent from Whitewolf. Unfortunately, we blew three of the power supplies. The first was because I’m a bonehead and the power supply was set to 115V. The second was because the switch was broken on the supply, and even though it said it was set to “230v”, internally it was still set to “115v”. Guh. The third was because one of our helpers plugged the monitor power cord into the computer (which was set to “230v” so it shouldn’t have mattered). So now, that table has to be set to 110 completely (monitors included) so we have no more mistakes. We did manage to get one of the power supplies fixed in Kampala, and one is toast. The jury’s still out on the third.
The center’s doing well though. We have some customers and we’ve shifted the hours because no one was coming in the morning and lots more people were coming at 4:30 when we were about to close. We’re open from 11:00am – 7:00pm Mon-Fri, and part of the day on Saturday. The DVD-only content is going to be a problem, especially if more than one person wants to train on the same course at the same time, but I’m going to email TotalTraining to see if they will allow us to use more than one copy of their training. We have a staff, though!
We have Gerald and Josh working most days, and Henry and Teo volunteering their time in the center in exchange for training. I’m excited to have Ugandans working in the center. The prospect of running day-to-day operations in the center was overwhelming, considering everything else I’m doing.
That brings me to the topic of the cafe. There are times when I have my doubts. We’ve been led every step of the way with this thing, but it’s a ton of work. We don’t know the first thing about running a restaurant, but all the pieces are in place. We picked up some restaurant management books while we were in the US, and thankfully, Jen is reading them and running with her new knowledge. Now that the Training Center is at least functional, I need to jump in to the work at the cafe. That’s funding everything, so it’s important.
I had a gig scheduled in Quebec but thanks to the VAV (Volcanic Ash Victory) my flight was canceled. We really (really) needed the money from that gig, and I was looking forward to the conference. The organizers and attendees were great the last time I was there, and the hotel was fantastic. But they offered an alternative, and will accept a video copy of the preso. So yesterday I filmed No-Tech Hacking in my back yard. It was a family event. We set up a podium, set up the video and wireless mic (thanks, Syngress, for the gear from that Stealing The Network video shoot) and recorded the talk. I was up until 3:30am compiling the video, let it render until 8:30, then started the upload process. The video is about 450MB which is MASSIVE for the bandwidth we have. But it’s doable, as long as FTP cooperates, which it didn’t. For some reason I’m getting a 500 I won’t open a connection to 172.17.1.130 (only to 196.x.x.x) when I try to upload to my web server. This can only be bypassed with quote pasv and passive run from the command line, but I need a graphical FTP client so I can resume if (when) the power goes out or the Internet goes down. SSH was too slow (don’t get that really) insisting that the upload would take anywhere from 12 to 16 hours. The connection kept dropping, and after a bit of rsync to resume, my approximate upload time jumped to days, not hours. I don’t have that kind of time. If the video isn’t in their hands by tomorrow, I don’t get paid. I honestly thought about Amazon S3, but I don’t have the time to muck with that right now. So MobileME came to the rescue, and that’s plugging along nicely, telling me I’ve got about 6 hours to go. Fingers crossed.
If this works, I might see if anyone’s interested in playing the video at their con. It’s cheaper than flying me over. =)
Gotta go. I have a ton of email to get through, and I have to rescue our front age before May 1. Thanks so much, sproutbuilder. Wix, here I come. Can’t somebody build us a decent web site? Sheesh. =D
Continue Reading...This would make a great T-Shirt. What say we add it to our collection of head-turning T’s?
So what’s the deal? Well, this is about our training center in Uganda, and the others we’d like to see elsewhere around the world.
A few companies have provided express consent for us to use some of their training material in our center. However, thanks to various donors, we are in possession of tens of GB worth of training material, some of which was obviously downloaded from the Internet (torrents, RapidShare, etc).
This puts us in an interesting predicament. The “Robin Hood” in our hacker brain loves the idea of using this stuff in a non-profit capacity to help some of the poorest people in the world find gainful employment in ICT. The Christian (Johnny) / Non-Profit (HFC) / Conservative (Johnny again) side of us feels as though it’s wrong on some moral / ethical / legal way.
The justifications are plentiful:
Even our most faithful / fervent / spiritual / l33t supporters are aggressively split on the issue, so we’re not sure what to do.
All we know is that people are lining up to get into our center and we’re at capacity. Each one is desperately seeking training so they can get a good job and pull their families and villages out of abject poverty. They’re psyched about web design, graphic design, music, programming, networking and more… bit-heads that are soaking up an education that their university-educated peers have never had access to. And to feed that hunger and really mke a difference we need lots more content… much more than we have legitimately.
We tried our hand at approaching one of these companies requesting that they allow the use of this donated content in a non-profit capacity in our center in Uganda and they refused, encouraging us to “remember that great things are achieved by hard work and dedication” and letting us know that “[we] will only hurt [our] cause and those [we] are trying to help by taking shortcuts or engaging in activities which are illegal or unethical”. I will leave the story there, because revealing more about the story will reveal more than we want to about that company. But suffice it to say that the end result of taking the “high” road was a rather staggering “loss” of content.
The more I thought about that situation, the more I realized the futility of approaching training companies in search of partnerships and donations. I mean, look at us, we’re just a bunch of shady, good-for-nothing, bright (but often misguided) hackers. So what does that mean? Just because we’re hackers, does that mean we can just blaze ahead, set our (not Uganda-based) OC-768 bit-pipes to full suck mode and SITERIP every commercial training site at a glorious 50Mbps?
I don’t think so. We’re about more than helping and training the poor. We’re about showing the world there’s more to hackers than meets the eye. So we have to have a higher standard, methinks.
But indecision means we lose training content because we can’t afford to buy everything we need. As it is, we’re on a shoestring budget with every penny going directly to our work.
If it was just me, I’d let it rip. I’d use the content and do some good with it. But as an organization, we’ll take a lot of heat and scare off potential donors if I just use the stuff.
So about that header, “Pirating for Charities”. I’m trying to draw attention to our plea. Is there a company out there that will come along side us in our quest to educate and empower the hungry here in East Africa? We’d love to see this training spread to other areas around the world, not just in Africa, but in the poorest sections of the US, Great Britain, Asia and more. Even Greenland. (Yes, there are 57,600 people in Greenland. Guess how many training centers they have? Like one, in an expensive hotel, with 8 stations.)
Below you will find a list of the content that has been donated to us. If this content is yours, and like the first company we approached you want us to delete the content, we will…and we will never again darken your door with the plight of the poor. If, however, you want to help, contact us and allow us to use the content we’ve “inherited” here in Uganda, and perhaps allow us to use other content as well. It would make a real difference.
We’re going to hope that someone will come alongside of us and provide us with training content so that we can erase all the borrowed content and go fully “legit”. We’re determined that our “shortcuts” and “creativity” are strengths, not weaknesses, and we’re going to send the loud-and-clear message that despite the perception, hackers aren’t “evil”… that the overwhelming majority of us are non-criminal. We’re brilliant and creative. We have jobs and ethics and morals and families, and we can make a difference.
And yes, we’ll take shortcuts to disrupt poverty whenever we find them. No apologies there.
On to the list. This is what’s on our drive:
CBTNuggets content:
TrainSignal content:
Professor Messer’s Free CompTIA Network+ Certification. Although this is listed as “free” there is a cost associated with downloading the videos, which we have not paid.This is good training, and it seems inexpensive. We have purchased the A+ content and are trying to download it, but the speed here in Uganda is too slow.
The Shon Harris CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) Collection.
Linux+ Training with Mike Myers. This is of unknown origin. I don’t know if it is sold commercially or not.
Get the word out. Raise some eyebrows. And maybe we’ll get someone’s attention. If we do, we’ll make a huge difference and I promise, we’ll make the T-shirt.
“Pirating for Charities?”
Let’s not go to extremes.
Not yet.
Continue Reading...I spent all day yesterday working on the disks we purchased from TotalTraining. I created backup ISO’s and copied the data to our servers for use in our center. That doesn’t sound like much but it was an 8-hour affair.
I wasn’t really sitting in front of the computer all that time. In true African style, it was not a point A to point B exercise.
First, there was the plumber at the door to fix the sewage smell in our bathroom and fix the shower head we bought at (thank you God for) Wal-Mart (in Maryland… There’s no Wal-Mart on this continent. A real bummer, that. I miss Wal-Mart. I understand now why our Ugandan friends asked to be dropped off at Wal-Mart and why they spend endless hours there poking through the clearance sections. Just about everything in Wal-Mart is amazing after spending any real time in Africa. Even the boring stuff that we’ve seen a bajillion times took on new life. “Wow, look at all the energy bars and vitamins,” I remember thinking in awe. “Oh, look at all the bread choices,” I remember thinking in amazement. “Wow, look at all the cheap DVD’s,” I remember thinking in an I-don’t-really-need-that-but-I’m-turning-back-into-a-slave-to-the-lie-that-is-consumerism-that-eventually-makes-you-a-slave-to-your-stuff kind of way. And there we have what is becoming a trademark of mine: an entire paragraph in parenthesis. (The only thing missing is the (multiple nested) parenthesis. I feel better now, here in my grammatical comfort zone.)
Then, there was the electrician. Thanks to our recent adventures with thieves, we’re cracking down on security at the Long castle. We’re lighting the property, tightening up night security and doing lots of really interesting high-tech and no-tech stuff that would be silly to list here since Jinja thieves can most likely read and surf the web.Come to think of it, I’ve kinda buggered myself by writing that No-Tech hacking book. Now I have to make sure none of that stuff works against my own junk. “Junk” of course not being a euphemism for naughty bits. Where in the world are all those oddball British terms coming from? I worked “naughty bits” and “buggered” into the same paragraph. Blimey. Guh. There I go again.
Then I had a long meeting with Geoffrey, our head of security and with our night guards. There was also the myriad phone calls now that people know we’re back. We’re appreciative of most of them.
I also spent several hours yesterday rewriting our community center page. That’s because I’ve had a really long moral / ethical struggle with some donated training content and I’m seriously thinking of registering the tagline “Charity Pirate” and “I pirate for charity”. That page will certainly cause some discussion, but I’m not officially announcing it yet. I haven’t officially decided what I’m going to do. But then again, I think I just announced the page, but only to people bored enough to have read this far. So I don’t have to worry to much about you people. Wait. What am I saying? Not worrying about bored hackers? I must be losing it.
Continue Reading...Five weeks went WAY too fast. It was wild being back in the US, but it didn’t feel like home. We were in our house for like four hours, and it didn’t feel like our house. Which meant it didn’t feel like home. Hanging out with friends and family was amazing and it was VERY hard to leave, but still… Uganda feels like home. I hopped in my truck on day one and drove on the left side of the road with no problem whatsoever. It felt more natural than US driving.
But the return wasn’t easy-cheesy. Declan threw up on the plane after we landed in London (sleep deprivation and that unsettled feeling from altitude), and then Uganda was less than welcoming. We were initially refused access to the country because our $100 US bills (for visa payments) were too “old”. They did offer us 1000UGX to $1, about half the exchange rate, though, which was quite hospitable. Then we came in one bag short (out of 24, that’s not bad), and then we packed the vans in the pouring rain.
But still, we are blessed. We are safe. We have so much to be thankful about, and I’ll write about it in the days to come. For starters we had LOTS of gear donations, and I’m very thankful for that. I’ll be posting an official thank-you with photos very soon.
One thing I’ve realized is that I don’t blog enough. So I’m resolved to do better. Here goes nothing.
Yesterday (Tuesday) was my first work day. I went to the bank and paid Fred and Geoffrey (our head of security). I stopped in to see the training center, and it looked great! We have a new desk and bookshelf and a few more tables which we’ll use for the machines we’re adding.
Fred installed a bunch of Kensington locks (donated!) on the laptops for security purposes and I went back to the house to start working on the training content we got from the US.
I made backup copies of the ten DVD’s that Lynda.com donated (they want us to use the DVD’s in a one-per-person capacity) and I made backup ISO images of the content we purchased from TotalTraining. I also copied the contents of the TotalTraining ISOs onto our web server and promised Geoffrey I would make a course list. Apparently he’s getting pounded by requests for the course list. It seems we have a LOT of interested customers. Although, many people are uncomfortable paying by the hour. They want a discounted monthly rate. We can’t do that. This is community project, but our prices are rock-bottom as it is.
So I’m off to pull together more content for the training center. More details later.
Continue Reading...
