Hujambo!

Has anyone seen the movie Sita Sings the Blues? It’s an animated full-length movie which has some interesting ideas behind it; a note from the artist on the official website:

I hereby give Sita Sings the Blues to you. Like all culture, it belongs to you already, but I am making it explicit with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Please distribute, copy, share, archive, and show Sita Sings the Blues. From the shared culture it came, and back into the shared culture it goes.

How cool is that? This is the exact idea behind the Linux kernel, the Free Software Foundation, and the FLOSS movement in general. Do what you want with it, as long as what you do with it remains under the same freedoms. It’s not a restriction, it’s a lack of restriction.

Download it and pass it on; it’s free.
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Here’s a group photo from the Introduction to Linux seminar I gave last weekend.

The seminar was held at ILRI, Nairobi on April 17th. The Regional Students Group of East Africa seems to be very active in Kenya (especially at ILRI, where the seminar was organized). The intended audience of the seminar was students doing a grad or undergrad course in a field related to Bioinformatics. The slides for the presentation are here.

I’m giving a seminar on the Linux operating system at ILRI on Saturday, April 17th. The audience is around thirty aspiring bioinformaticians from the Regional Students Group of East Africa. Most of the participants are from Kenya, but we’ve had confirmations from students in Uganda and Cameroon as well. I haven’t taught since I left Tala and Holy Rosary College about eight months ago, but I like talking and I like Linux, so it should be a good day!

I’ve been pretty busy at work lately, so I haven’t had so much time to prepare my notes. The target audience is beginners, but the talk is all day and should be both hands-on and intensive. Not wanting to let anyone down, I decided to leave work early today to work on my notes from my house, only to find that there was no electricity in Westlands. Fantastic!

I have walked to the Sarit Centre in Westlands and am now working away to the sweet taste of an iced coffee inside Java House. I might head over to Art Cafe in the Westgate mall just to change the scenery a bit. I still have about 50% of my slides left… oh no!

There’s some Ethiopian Orthodox holiday going on right now. Nobody’s explained it to me, but most of my Ethiopian colleagues have sworn off milk and meat until April, and there’s a man chanting over a loudspeaker in some church next to ILRI’s campus for hours at a time. I asked someone at lunch today what the man was saying but he said nobody knows. I laughed for a second but realized he wasn’t kidding; the man is chanting in Ge’ez, a dead language from Ethiopia’s past.

Add it to the list of things that make Ethiopia completely different than any other country I’ve ever been to (especially its neighbors in East Africa). I’ll be in Addis Ababa for another week; plenty of time to buy a bunch of gourmet coffee beans and postcards. Stay tuned and wish me luck!

I’ve been in Addis Ababa since this morning. The taxi picked me up at my house at 5:30 and I was in the ILRI Addis office by 10. Not bad! I’ll be in Ethiopia for another ten days or so, mainly doing some capacity building of the ILRI Addis web development team on the Linux platform (they currently use Windows as a server platform but want to move some applications to Linux servers). I was in Ethiopia last year, but I didn’t take a bus this time so I am already off to a better start.

I’ve got a great room in the hostel here at the ILRI campus. The campus is much more beautiful than I’m used to (hard to believe if you’ve seen the Nairobi campus). For example, today I was sitting in my office just before dusk and I saw a dik-dik grazing in the grass just outside my window. The working environment here is much different too. After lunch we all went for coffee in the campus bar, then took a walk around the compound. I thought my counterparts just wanted to take a stroll, but looked behind me and saw another twenty people just walking and chatting. It felt like a walk to cure cancer or something, very leisurely and social. We don’t do that at ILRI Nairobi…
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