Day: September 4, 2005

QRV 4 Louisiana

Ever wondered about the National Guard / Police in Lousiana and the on-going rescue operations?

I don’t know about the States (=> it is forbidden to listen to police/fire department/rescue/etc. radio communications (BOS) on 4m and 2m band over in Germany), but someone hooked up a radio scanner to the net some years ago and now we’re able to follow the radio communication of the National Guard over in Louisiana. As far as I hear it now, their communication seems to be quite disciplined.
Of course there are many more radio scanners online. I especially like those VHF ones for they usually cover local radio traffic. Nice!

…And the internet is one of the reasons why my interest in amateur radio/ham radio stopped way back in 1996 when I first got online. Next time I am in Kenya, I’ll take my HF/VHF/UHF radio scanner with me and look for a nice, high alltitude shamba in Limuru where I’ll put up my antennas :-)

73s de jke

The African Hacker

An interesting story about a coder in Accra, Ghana:

<< Besides being compact, his programs also write frequently to disk, reducing the chances of losing data if power is lost, as it often is. Because Internet connectivity remains relatively expensive, his programs also work offline as much as possible. And to combat the rampant piracy, beta versions of software rarely leave Soft’s premises, finished products don’t have an autoinstall function (you need a Soft technician to launch them), and batches of bug fixes are often delivered individually to customers rather than generally released. (…)
Software vendors doing business in Africa constantly battle technological ignorance. (…) >>

This is SO true…not only on the African Continent…

<< Ghana’s* educational system is exceedingly theoretical and designed to train people to manage, say, a Mercedes dealership rather than to build a Mercedes," Chinery-Hesse says. "What we require is more practical education. >>

* = Ghana, Germany, … you name it, same problems everywhere. Imagine I had to learn FORTRAN for my studies in civil engineering. Why? Because it is a) simple, b) shows the structure behind coding and most importantly c) the prof only knows Fortran as a programming language. C++? Visual Basic? No chance!

[found via: cyrusfarivar.com]