The Silicon Cape in a nutshell

Cape Town is Africa’s own little Silicon Valley, or in some way at least, becoming that. We have many locals who are passionate about technology and what it can do for our country and our continent who are also completely willing to share their knowledge and help and teach others while at the same time, growing local industry. We have user groups such as the Cape Town Linux Users Group (CLUG) who provide regular talks on technical and beginner Linux topics twice a month. We also have the Cape Town Python Users Group (CTPUG), the Cape Town Ruby Brigade and the Cape Town Wireless Users Group (CTWUG) on which I’ll expand later. These are just a few of the local technology volunteer support groups we have and there are much more. There are also many technology companies that have development offices here, such as Amazon.com, Yola and Thawte (which was also founded in Cape Town). There’s always new technology and software startups all the time and there’s a few local venture capital firms that focus specifically on technology funding. A group of people who are passionate about making Cape Town more of a local Silicon Valley created the organisation called Silicon Cape, which aims to bring together local entrepreneurs and geeks to help make the Silicon Cape vision a realA large, free and open network that connects the city could do wonders for our local technology development.ity. Silicon Cape has also attracted interest from our former mayor and now the premier of our province, Helen Zille who realises how important technology is to our local economical development.

Cape Town Wireless Users Group

I joined CTWUG around 4 years ago, it used to be just small pockets of people connecting to each other, later these smaller groups were connected and today, CTWUG covers large parts of Cape Town where you can reach any part of the network from any node. It has even extended outside of the larger Cape Town area into areas such as Stellenbosch and there’s also a vibrant community in Paarl that are connected to each other and hopefully some day, directly to the rest of the WUG.

Many are quick to dismiss Wireless User Groups as networks where people just share files and pirate content. There is certainly a lot of file sharing happening on the WUG, and in some cases there will be some piracy, but as with any big network it’s almost impossible to police. The WUG does provide a lot more than file-sharing though. Across South Africa, Internet is quite expensive and in many cases, prohibitively so. We have many users that don’t have any Internet connection at home, and we don’t explicitly provide any Internet access on the network. Instead, some users run Internet-like services on the WUG. So some users who do have an Internet connection will do things like run an email server that allows users to send and receive e-mail to the rest of the WUG as well as the rest of the world. There’s also a Jabber server that federates with other Jabber servers on the Internet. I run a few services myself. There’s CTWUG Statusnet which is a Statusnet installation that brings microblogging to the WUG, there’s Wugtube which hosts user uploaded video content and also a Big Blue Button installation for video conferencing and chatting. Besides the 3 services I host there’s lots of other services hosted on the network which includes a Facebook clone, a Teamspeak server, many gaming servers, personal wug sites and repositories and CD images for many Linux distributions as well as Windows and OSX updates.

The wug certainly can’t replace an Internet connection completely, but it works great as a secondary network to the Internet and also for people who simply can’t afford an Internet connection. Even for those who do have an Internet connection, there’s still a lot of benefit to getting connected. By installing system updates, for example, you would only get about 419 KB/s on DSL (or at least, that’s what I get on my 4mbps line which is Telkom’s current fastest offering) while installing from the WUG would typically give you up to 1.2 MB/s (and even more) depending one your location and the mirror you’re using. Currently we only have around 500 people actively using the WUG. One of my personal goals is to get schools involved. We have a few hundred schools in Cape Town and most of them have no Internet or often, they have to share a 3GB monthly package among the whole school that typically only the admin staff and some teachers will have access too. Hosting mirrors of Wikipedia, Wikinews and other useful sites, along with the usual WUG services could have great impact for these schools in my opinion. There’s a seperate project for connecting schools together called Schoolwan that connected 35 schools to each other and to a centralised server for content, mail, etc. Even though it’s a really, really cool project, I believe that it would’ve been a lot better if it had decent funding and if the benefits of using a network such as this could be properly introduced with some good cultivation. With CTWUG schools could gain some benefit of connecting to an existing network with existing infrastructure and a large volunteer community. CTWUG has strict rules about pornography and adult content and users who share any such content publicly on the networked are disconnected without any warning.

There’s also a local project called Wizzy Digital Courier which started off as a Sneakernet e-mail service where schools could carry around their e-mail on USB disks and sync up using UUCP. With the Wizzy project also came the concept of a Wizzy server, which would dial-up after 19:00 when phone calls are cheaper and gets the content requested during the day and stores it in a wwwoffle proxy so that users could visit the websites they have requested the previous day. Many Schoolwan schools also had a Wizzy server. One idea is that some of the more resourced schools who have uncapped DSL could share their off-peak bandwidth to get and cache some data for the less-privileged schools using something like a Wizzy server.

There’s a lot I’d like to say on the topic and I’ve only touched a few things here, the point that I’d like to get to is that wide-area wireless networks can be extremely useful in areas where Internet is either slow or expensive, and probably too even so when a good Internet connection is available.

Cape Town to get City-wide Wireless

ITweb reports that there are plans to roll out fiber-backed wireless throughout the city. A R400m (about €41.2m) plan to roll out this fiber network was planned when Helen Zille was still the mayor of Cape Town. This alone will save the city about R90m a year in costs to Telkom and other operators to our municipalities.

There’s little information available on who will be able to access the network or with which networks it will peer with, but it has great potential and I hope that it will grow in to a network that will add value to as many people in the city as possible.

Usually after being away from home a while I tend to get a bit down and have thoughts like “nobody likes me” and “I’m not cool enough”, etc. Not that I actually believe it, but those kinds of thoughts are hardly ever really rational. My DSL connection in Gauteng has been down (Thanks again Telkom), and 3G coverage here is sparse at best, so keeping in touch has been a bit tough as well. I decided to go to Centurion Mall, which I haven’t tried out yet to go get a haircut and buy some new clothes. It’s very humid here at the moment, so I hoped that that would help me feel better and fresher.

The barbers were booked until Tuesday and I wasn’t really feeling like shopping anymore so I just had a quick lunch and decided to go back. On the way out, a guy came to my car and asked if I could give him and his sister a quick lift. I never pick up hitch-hikers and it’s my policy not too. They looked like poor people, but I didn’t want to judge and didn’t put too much further thought into it. I don’t really know why, but I decided to be nice and give them a lift anyway. He said that they were selling car fresheners in the parking lot and if I’d want to buy one from them too. My car was just in a service yesterday and they put new freshener in my car, so I really didn’t need one (and I don’t like them much anyway). I saw him counting money and thought that they did quite well today. He was also fidgeting in a bunch of plastic bags the whole time that they had with them. He started throwing papers out the car. I was really annoyed, because I don’t ever throw anything out of my car and I expect the same from my passengers, and it’s rude polluting.

He asked if I could perhaps take them a bit further- just another 5km’s or so, it would really help them a lot. I thought that a total of another 10km or so won’t really hurt me time-wise so much, I might as well do it. It turned out to be more like another 15km further, I dropped them off in Pretoria. In some ways, I’m a bit obsessive compulsive. I do things in a certain way and in a certain order, it helps me to tell when something is wrong or when it’s not how it should be. I usually put my wallet in my cupholders space, it fits in there nicely and you can’t really see it from outside. I noticed that it was upside down from how it usually is. I wandered if I was just in a rush when I put it in there, or whether I was paranoid. I saw them walking away, and thought what the heck, I’ll just quickly look before I drive away. I knew I had about R450 in my wallet.  I opened my wallet- and it was empty, he took all the money in my wallet. I climbed out of my car and ran on to them. I told him that I want my money back. He said he didn’t take it and that it’s not in his character to steal money. His sister started rambling on about how she was in the back of the car all the time but I didn’t really listen. I told them that I know that they took my money and I don’t believe anything they say. I also realised that I’m in a very unfamiliar area and I didn’t know whether they had any kind of weapons with them, so I just turned around and went back to my car. I realised that the papers he was throwing out the window all along was gaurantee slips that was in my wallet for things that I bought for my company. Luckily all my credit/garage/debit cards and my drivers license were still safe inside. The money isn’t such a big deal, but I’m really disgusted at them. What kind of low-life would steel money from someone who’s nice enough to do them a favour?

I’m not at all bitter about it though. It happened about 40 minutes ago, I’m just wondering what the lesson is here.

Is it perhaps that I should learn to stick to my personal policies? Was this perhaps a slap on the wrist for giving strangers a lift when I know that I shouldn’t?

Is it perhaps God’s way of telling me “Stop being so fucking miserable, you’re not all that bad, look, there are way worse people in the world.”?

Is it perhaps that I shouldn’t trust people who don’t look trustworthy. I’ve had poor people try to trick me out of money a few times in the past before, but because I’m usually quite sharp and on the lookout for things that aren’thow they should be, I managed to not get caught.

Perhaps it’s so that I can repeat the message here:

• Don’t pick up strangers, ever.
• Trust your instincts, if something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t.

I don’t really know what the lesson is here, I was very angry with them for a minute or so, but I’m glad that I managed to let it slide so quickly. I’m also thankful for what I have, and looking forward to being back home again next week.

Telkom “transforms to attack”

• From ITWeb, Telkom is transforming to attack, supposedly moving away from acting like a parastatal. While they’re trying to convince everyone, yet another Telkom hate site emerges.

Motorola boss doesn’t do e-mail

• According to this Engadget article, the CEO of Motorola, Greg Brown, is so out of touch with technology that he doesn’t use his computer for communication. His secretary actually prints out his e-mails and brings it to him! That’s terrible for someone who is supposed to lead a communications company.

Sony BMG are mass-scale software pirates

• Saving the best for last, Sony BMG is probably one of the most proprietary companies on the planet, aggressively enforcing their copyright wherever possible. It turns out they are large scale software pirates themselves. This article points out that the BSA found that Sony BMG had a piracy rate of 47%! Scumbags. I guess this is one of those times where I get to shout “THAT’S WHAT THEY GET!” (thanks Nofx)

A lawsuit against Microsoft for classifying hardware as Vista Capable, when it is in fact only capable of running the simplistic Windows Vista Home Basic version, has been granted by a judge as a class-action lawsuit (man, we really need one of those against Telkom for their pathetic service). Microsoft will probably attempt to blame their resellers for this, biting the hands that help feed it, but in my opinion, it should be Microsoft’s responsibility to educate their partners on the exact system requirements of their upcoming products. A computer manufacturer cannot in any way predict the exact specifications of Microsoft’s upcoming systems, not even when testing pre-release versions, since they are often in debug mode which would make it run somewhat slower.

I also think that the industry is wising up to Microsoft quickly, consumers are also learning that Microsoft isn’t the angel software house that many people previously believed, and as a result, I think we will see many more class action lawsuits against them in the next few years.

Maybe Microsoft will finally learn to play nicely. Not because they want to, but because they have to.

Telkom Protest

Friday, I attended the protest against Telkom and their appauling service. Telkom, our national telecoms monopoly, have been raping our country and been causing great damage to our economy for decades now, and a local non-profit, IkamvaYouth, organised the protest. People from all over Cape Town who were fed up with Telkom joined in on the protest. It was actually quite fun, and the first protest I ever participated in. The police and traffic department was amazing, there was plenty of police officers to make sure that we stay together and no one got lost along the way, and nothing got stolen/damaged. The traffic officers did a good job of blocking off traffic where we needed to walk through traffic, and it went quite smooth. Phantsi Telkom, Phantsi! (“Down with Telkom”)

Thank you to the city of Cape Town for allowing us to do this.

Rugby World Cup

Last night I watched the 2007 Rugby world cup final at my father’s place, South Africa vs England, with South Africa winning the cup. The atmosphere here was electrifying. Many high-profile people were there. Amongst others, Nelson Mandela- former president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki- current president of South Africa, Jean-Pierre Raffarin- French prime minister, Gordon Brown- English prime minister and Prince William & Prince Harry from the British monarchy. The ceremony after the game was excellent, but what bothered me a lot was the bad manners of the English team. They shook hands with the French and Brittish prime ministers, but when the got to Thabo Mbeki, many just walked passed him and ignored him. I told my friends that I thought that this is incredibly rude, but they said that the English team might not have known that he was the South African president. I don’t want to believe that the English are that stupid. But they’re either that, or very rude.

Ubuntu Gutsy Release Party

Today I attended our very modest Ubuntu-ZA Cape Town release party. There’s lots of overlap in our local community, and many of us in the Ubuntu-ZA community are also together in other communities such as UCT-LEG, CLUG, CT-WUG, CT-PUG and more. We discussed issues in Gutsy, burned some discs, and briefly discussed goals for the next six months.

• The protest has been moved to 19 October, due to shortage of police staff.
• Where Telkom couldn’t provide a connection in 6 months, Amobia established one in a few days.
• Telkom, after saying that they won’t be able to provide service, have done another survey this week, and have committed to install the DSL line in November (“next month” again?).

On Friday the 12th of October, my favourite non-profit organisation will be protesting against Telkom‘s appalling service. The protest takes place on 12 October 2007, from parliament in Plein street, to Telkom’s offices in St George’s mall. I’m incredibly unhappy that I won’t be able to attend it (see update below), since I’ll still be in Joburg for business purposes.

I do urge everyone who reads this to give their support to IkamvaYouth for this cause, or even better, attend the protest.

• More information available on IkamvaYouth’s website: http://www.ikamvayouth.org/node/682
• On-line petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/toyitoyi/petition.html
• Confirm your attendance on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=12368825643

Telkom’s incredibly poor service is doing damage to our country, and it seems to be getting worse with every passing year. This is a good opportunity to make your voice heard, make use of the opportunity.

UPDATE:

I will be able to attend the Toyi-toyi after all. I will be flying down to Cape Town next Thursday, and will leave for Joburg again at the end of the weekend.