Welcome to the Blog at Patrick Wozny.com.  The site at this domain has a number of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Web applications and I installed them here to help me expand my understanding and experience in how they work.  So, this is not so much of a personal resume type of blog site that the vanity-plate personalized domain name suggests – at least not yet.

Any exceptions of actually seeing content here should be tempered – again not that I believe anyone is waiting with baited breath for my next word, but being that I live in Ethiopia and have very little bandwidth or even electricity makes it very difficult to post.  In fact I think this is my 5th attempt at a first post just today.

I haven’t made any definitive plans for this space yet other than to experiment.  However, since my other little blogs are  unreachable from inside Ethiopia, they unfortunately had to be abandoned while I am here.  I have hopes to import the content here at least to sort through my old posts and see if any of it is worth continuing here or elsewhere.

The former blogs content may not be related to each other (or to anything else), and in several cases may not have been written or posted by me.  Importing will change the author to “admin” (aka me), and while I could theoretically correct this just after importing in Wordpress I don’t appear to actually be able to do this with either my particular installation.

I don’t expect this to cause any problems, but modern life seems to require remembering to mention every possible disclaimer.  Just because it appears here on a website bearing my name, doesn’t mean that I am endorsing or approve of it, or, that I even read it, thought it, let alone wrote it .  However,  if it has typos or repeated words that was probably me.

Ciao,

Patrick

I had a CDMA connection for a year, well actually I still have one, but since October 09 it really has ceased to work at an effective speed.  It was was nice while it lasted.  I have trouble downloading email and often web pages simply refuse to appear.  I thought this might be a temporary issue and though it is sometimes either better or worse, but after a few months of extremely slow connections I am ready to call it dead.

I added an EVDO modem in Sept and while initially it was very fast, it is has proven to be both an expensive and tricky connection to maintain.  My current version initially worked well enough on the Leopard versions of OS X, but an upgrade to Snow Leopard has done the driver in.  I had cobbled together a Mac driver for my old CDMA, which sort of still works under Snow Leopard even though the connection is not very usable once I do connect.  I will use another connection to hopefully find a more compatible driver update, but I am waiting a little while for some solution to emerge.  I had a created a makeshift router for my old connection on my home network, and am thinking that perhaps I should just look for a commercial router to purchase to save me the trouble (at least at home) and quit worrying if Snow Leopard or Windows 7 updates will break the modem connection again.  I am worried though that EVDO will sooner or later go the way of CDMA too.

There have been several new articles including some from the BBC concerning the growing availability of broadband connections to East African countries.  The recent buzz is due to a new fiber optic cable East African Marine System (Teams, as shown in the graphic above), is operated by an African owned and government backed company called Seacom.  The cable now connects South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Mozambique to Europe and Asia.   While this is potentially a great leap forward for the region, Ethiopia is unlikely to benefit directly.  Still, at least anecdotal evidence suggests that connections here have been slightly less sluggish since the new connection has come on line.  Perhaps there is slightly less traffic jamming up the older existing links.  While Ethiopia is not one of the first countries to connect, there have been statements which imply that Ethiopian Telecom is planning new connections to Seacom by the end of October, however, I haven’t heard what bandwidth this connection might be nor what we might expect as users in terms of improved connections or cost.  Other countries like Rwanda were not originally part of  this new venture have nonetheless placed this connectivity as a key part of their development strategy.

Rwanda is seeking this strategy of development through an information technology approach as detailed in this BBC article .  This is a difficult route to go without much existing tech capacity and little in the way of other infrastructure like water and power, however, there have been a few countries which have made this kind of leap with some degree of success.  I have lived in several countries where little existed in terms of traditional telephone switching capacity and lines, but fairly quickly rolled out mobile phone technologies that delivered phone access to many areas still waiting for landline coverage.  Similarly I have seem many instances where leased lines were slow and problematic for years – then a country or city take on point to point wireless or even wireless wide are networks that turn out to be reasonably fast and reliable connections and by pass the older wired infrastructure.  This is largely the case currently here in Addis where I can usually get a serviceable connection through CDMA wireless “modems”, but my dial-up barely functions if at all.

My CDMA modem is this USB model pictured above, and was about the first to reach the local market.

Here CDMA has proven very popular, so much so that it may be reaching the point of being oversubscribed before long.  It hasn’t happened yet, but they are running out of the GSM cards and some of the people I have talked to are having problems with activation and other delays, these problems now suggest there may be issues a bit farther down the road.  Hopefully local connections will not become too jammed and the increased bandwidth from new Seacom connections will keep things moving swiftly beyond Ethiopia.

Living in Ethiopia is quite challenging to those who depend on or at least assume the Internet might be available on any given day or week.  This is not the biggest problem facing Ethiopians, but it a significant barrier to development, a constant hindrance to business, and a severe annoyance to people like me .  I recently saw a couple of blog posts with a map depicting part of the reason why this might be the case.  The whole cause behind our low level of connectivity here is much more complex, but these two maps provide a wealth of information for the whole continent – and an easy way to make visual comparisons with the rest of of Africa.

At the beginning of this year breaks in undersea cables in at least three places  (likely due to ship anchor strikes) almost literally cut off Ethiopia from the rest of the world’s Internet for more than a month.  Right now the BBC’s page and Twitter, both of which almost always loaded previously, will not come up come up now.  Just paranoid speculation on my part, however, I suspect this may have to do with Iranian efforts to restrict access within Iran of the BBC and Twitter during the current crisis there.  This could of course simply be very heavy demand stopping access, however, with earlier disruptions in 2008 in the Mideast (and here) there was also speculation about Iran – again, without any credible evidence that I saw.

Ethiopia has no sea coast, and I believe that all links to the major sea cables go through Djibouti.  There are virtually no publicly accessible VSAT connections permitted in the country with 3-4 exceptions where the government has decided to test these links by certain organizations and businesses.  Some international organizations and embassies have their satellite linkages too, but are actually considered to be outside of Ethiopia.

Internet Cafes have only been permitted for a few years now, and pre-paid access through a GSM sim card has just recently become available, but actual throughput is quite low, so our linkages to these big pipes you see here is actually quite low and slow.

From ManyPossibilities.net

The really nice thing the author (Steve Song) of this map did was make it available with it’s data layers so that you can customize for your own purposes (with creative commons agreements … I am struggling to get this post up and will post as a draft for now, with links and proper credits coming later).  The author has posted links on the map on his site to details about the cables like the size of the contracts, companies or governments financing construction and completion dates.

Internet access inside Africa from the International Development Resource Centre (IDRC)

The second graphic is really a whole presentation and probably too slow loading to keep on the mainpage, plus I have had to reduce the size to fit inside my margins making the text pretty hard to read, so click on the map itself  to see it full sized on the IRDC Acacia project website.  But even a cursory look will tell you that Ethiopia lags behind many African countries on variety of telecom measurements, but points to opportunites for those willing and able to help get Ethiopia up to speed.

I worked in Nepal for about 3 years until the year 2000 (the year 2056? on the Nepali calendar) When I first arrived there our office used dial-up connections made over an international long distance line to an ISP in Singapore. In fact the wait for a new telephone line and number stretched into years, or they could be purchased from someone else without a wait for severl hundred dollars. The were no VSATs, but within a few month there were two seperate 64 kbps lines into the country and local dial-up.  As band width increased there were at least two ISPs willing to attempt leased line connections, however, the local telephone infrastructure couldn’t support reliable connections.  We had faced similar problems in other countries like Haiti, and had opted there to go aaround, or more appropriately over, local unreliable infrastructure using then emerging wireless links (Lucent Wavelan) for example.  There weren’t many laws directly governing these kinds of wireless equipment then, nor for the most part even the VSAT links.  Soon there were unlicensed VSATs and point to point wireless signals everywhere, with the government of Nepal scrambling to catch up and deal with new technology.  It was an exciting time of rapid change.  Ethiopia is far more organized and more able to manage this processs and avoid some of the previous mistakes, but now more than ten years later it feels like a similar situation in terms of need and oportunity – so in that sense it is a bit like stepping back in time.  It is exciting to be here and guess what the future might bring to Ethiopia.

I have relocated and am house hunting here. Ethiopia seems like a great place to work and live. The high altitudes of Addis (nearly 8000 feet) remind me of home. The people I have met are almost universally kind and very bright. I have had a longstanding appreciation for their culture(s) and can’t wait to see some of the ancient churches and other sites.

The downside, at least if you are reading this, is that Internet connectivity remains quite a challenge for me and most of Ethiopia. I haven’t been able to even see this blog, let alone update anything. I will have to let you do you do your own research as to why this might be the case – or how I am managing to update now

The logical step here is to move this blog to an easier to get to spot … but I haven’t quite decided what and where would be the best spot. I am open to suggestions, just leave them in the comments and I should get them by email, even if I can’t log in to approve them so that they appear here.

I have migrated a family blog to wozspace.org that seems to working and I am updating … if this post starts to get too old and stale to believe that I am coming back you might want to check in on me there. I will be back though.

Some poor countries have scored well compared to richer ones in a report assessing the treatment of children in African nations.

Poverty is not an excuse to treat children badly – that is the central message of the report.

The independent pan-African advocacy organization, which is based in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, found that some of the poorest countries score surprisingly well.

It is only slightly surprising to me that some poorer countries often do a better job caring for the welfare of their children, because beyond a certain basic level what we are dealing with is simply where the government place their priorities

There has just been too much going on in my life over the last several months to keep writing for this blog, and while I haven’t exactly considered this a “personal” blog, one’s personal life does have a way of intervening now and again. There were some medical issues that we are still dealing with and we moved from Ghana to wandering around the states, to now when we are packing up to move to Ethiopia. So, while I am not yet fully back, I have decided to be a bit more personal in my entries.

So, first up the presidential choice: We have been living in Phoenix, Arizona and have some ties to the state. People here seem to mostly like McCain and generally respect the guy, but aren’t all that impressed with him as the best choice for president. We are just a few days from the election as I write this, but local polls show fairly weak support for McCain.

I didn’t support Obama in the primary and even Hillary Clinton wasn’t my first choice – McCain was almost certainly the best Republican choice – But I quickly made my own mind up watching the Republican Convention. Ugh! What an ugly bunch and so proud of their ignorance.

Less personally for this blog I had in mind evaluating the candidates on their likely approach on Development, foreign aid and assistance. And while I think this is still interesting and both honestly do have some good ideas and significant differences, whomever gets elected won’t likely have much luck or resources available to pursue a grand aid agenda or restructuring. Obama however seems the likely victor and while I haven’t found much in terms of fully developed policy positions, he still has probably one of the closest personal histories/relationships to foreign aid we have ever seen in a president.

I am very sad to see her go – Certainly Obama is a much better choice than McCain for most every issue I can think of, and, with regard to global development there is really no contest – I intend to elaborate on this point in the future. However, I still think the country and the world will be missing out on the the unique understanding and perspective Clinton would have brought to the the global agenda for change.

Opposition in Africa means the new command’s headquarters will more likely be in US or Europe.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0516/p03s03-usmi.html

Washington – When Pentagon strategists sought to create a new military command to oversee Africa, they believed they could build one that deemphasized military might and would serve as an exemplar of what so-called US soft power could do around the world.

But in recent months, the Pentagon has had to scale back its ambitious vision to adapt Africa’s political terrain, military officials acknowledge, adding they remain committed to the original idea of a military command to promote peace in the region.

OR Check out this editorial by David Ignatious, “Into Africa Without a Map”.

I recently made a visit to the regional Catholic Relief Services (CRS) office here in Ghana for to talk with them about commodities and fair trade, but especially about cocoa and child labor. People who know me generally also know that this is a favorite issue of mine – but those who know CRS probably know they market fair trade chocolate through Divine Chocolates sourced through a farmers’ cooperative in Ghana.  What peoplevprobably don’t know is that this is really some very good chocolate with or without a fair trade label attached.

The new Ag Bill in Senator Harkin’s Ag committee affects the way  CRS, CARE, Save the Children, Mercy Corps http://www.crs.org/about_us/newsroom/speeches_and_testimony/releases.cfm?ID=38 will do business.  I am nor certain this is all together a bad thing either for farners in the US or Aid recipients, but change is always difficult for many people, even if they ultimately end up benefiting.

The possible elimination for title II food aid put me in the category of those worried about the futre of food aid, but hpefully that new provision like being able to buy locacally will eventually reduce cost and ensure sustainability.