Day Off

Between the Robots and Sunday night dinner I forgot to blog.

I am really doing badly with my daily deadlines and I attribute to my inability to stop writing code once I start. This morning I am not going to code. Instead I am going to finish some web design/business card designs and some writing that I started. I would like to also update my iphone firmware and download a flash card app so i can study kung fu.

I am redoing the chang projects website. I accidentally deleted the files the other day to I am redesigning practically from scratch. The good thing is that I am off tables forever and have totally converted to css (about 5 years after starting css). CSS is hard for me, because I have bad memories of div and layer problems in IE and Netscape from the dawn of the internet age.

I am exploring web hosting on the cloud via rackspace. This seems much cheaper than mediatemple's virtual server. I also bought a very cool url for my social networking software and I will probably be revealing it in a few days. The server in Lilongwe is down for 3 days because they are transferring ISPs. I have been communicating with the Ministry of Health, and there are massive problems with managing expectations. So, now, I am managing expectations and making people feel good. Tomorrow 13Bit is going to PA to interview a woman walking across the US to raise awareness for global warming.

Today I was reading "My Mother was a Computer" by Hayles. I was looking for inspiration to finish my song about the singularity and I think it did the trick. It is not a bad book, although I think it probably does not belong all in one book. Most interesting to me is the treatment of computer code as an art, and the discussion of code as performative. (Ah-hem I presented a paper on this in 03). Ok so this is a philosophical idea - Performative statements. I think AJ Ayers talks about it. So you look at something like marriage. The justice of the peace, by performing the marriage ceremony - by saying 'i now pronounce you man and wife' - has a meaning beyond pure linguistic communication. It is performative in that it changes the status of the couple hoping to be married. This statement 'does' something within our judicial system (unless you are a same sex couple) - but then you sort of enter the world of language game - the performance only takes place in a particular judical system.

So code is like saying 'you are man and wife' - it 'does' something. Code is performative.

Anyway, Hayles disregards the literary content of code, saying that the only meaning of code is the execution. This is myopic. The clearer the code the greater lifespan (ie more people will reuse it). Same goes for speed. In this case memory management could probably be sacrificed for speed unless you are developing for microcontrollers. The language of code perpetuates English language dominance since most code structure is written in English (I did not go to Brown so I dont use the word Hegemony).

To break it down there is
1) A poetics of code: This is the language of code, the names of your functions and variables, the types of patterns that you use, the architecture of your project. The clearer a book the easier it is to transmit information, same as code. Code is executed by a computer but it is compiled by a human. As long as humans are writing code, they will need to read something and the clearer and more elegant the the code is, the easier it is to communicate the ideas within the code.
2) An aesthetics of code: In thought aesthetics is truth. Truth is beauty or beauty is truth. In code speed is beauty. The elegance of a piece of code is the optimization of its algorithm.
3) A politics of code: Who can use the code. Copyright issues. Power structure. What sorts of metaphysical assumptions are built into software paradigms. How does the use of English perpetuate a certain western power structure? How do the rules of code perpetuate Aristotelian logic?
4) An ethics of code. What does code do? What ought it do? What constraints should we build to control the effects of code? Once we control 2nd (and 3rd and 4th) order effects our notion of ethics as a 1st order personal or interpersonal interaction must change.


This is all completely irrelevant in the face of horrible diseases that affect the bottom billion. I need to do more RapidSMS now.

I will post my singularity song soon

Sunday Dispatch from Lilongwe

So I have less than 1 week left in Lilongwe. This morning while I was eating my daily breakfast of 2 eggs over medium on toast with a bowl of fruit and a cup of tea, I looked up at the masive tree shading the patio.

Its a type of tree I have never seen before coming to Africa with a medium size barky trunk, and little tubular smooth branches. There are experiences of newness everywhere if you stop and take a breath and refresh your eyes.
I'm sure this is also the case back home in the US, where we walk around with blinders in a tunnel.
My room is above the kitchen of a resturant - to which I owe the proliferation of cockaroaches. At night I can here the chatter and bustle, like I am living above a jazz cafe. This is especially true, when I put on some Don Cherry Mu (Thanks to Chris Barke).Yesterday, I did some negotiations at the market, and brought some tzschatkies for people back home. I did manage to exchange some tee shirts and pants, and all my video out and lumia DVDs. When you go to Africa, bring discmans, mp3 players, old phones, old cameras, sneakers, baseball caps. Use these as
currency. These are worth something, they are like bicycles on the black market.Something happend with my bank card and I cant get cash. I topped off my cellpone credit and called chase 7 TIMES! They said they removed the block but I still cannot get cash out. I am hoping it is some weird Malawi ATM issue. I will take care of it at Monday. I am looking forward to Stanley returning. I asked Benson last week to help me call the US, and it took him 3 hours to help me out.Im not brining tzchotchies back for Paul. Paul wants a local tee shirt. I am looking for a tee shirt - but I dont think there are local malawi tee shirts.

Clothing in Malawi -I was acutally discussing this with people the other day. Most Malawians wear clothing from the US - perhaps donated. There is a high prevalence of AIG shiny shirts. I saw one guy wearing a red socks cap. This is actually a detrement because it underminds the local Malawi manufacturing efforts, which cannot compete on price with the US products. There are a fair number of chinese emigres who have ope
ned up clothing factories here - but I am not sure what has come from it yet.
Back at Kiboko:I have become friends with an older french man and 2 guys from Liverpool. I take this as 13bit sign - because Paul is rereading the Beatles biography - one of the 13bit canonical books. The older french man is reading a bio of Sarte by BHL. One of the things I love about France is that they read philosophy. It is like Argentina where Homeric epics and Freud are sold in trainstations and airport kiosks
.
I am working this weekend, since it is my last weekend here and I still have some work to do. This is because I foolishly refactored my code - which in some cases has resulted in some worse code - espcially in my breadcrumbs functionality. I really should not have refactored. NEVER REFACTOR IN THE FIELD - that being said I think my refactoring will pay off in the long run - but it has caused me grief - and I still have to write some spaghetti code because I am running out of time.

The most important reasons to be in Malawi for this project are:
1) The ability to go into the field and get feedback from HSAs
2) The ability to meet with the ministry of health and gauge their technical capacity
3) Other related work that people are doing in Malawi.

On step 3, when I met with Isaac yesterday I asked him how the local healthworkers at his hospital - St Gabriel's finance their SMS fees. Well, apparently, Josh Nesbit of Frontline Medic (another SMS eHealth company), received a grant fromStanford U last summer to implement a basic SMS health alert system - like 911.
He had 5 grand at the end of the summer and used this to fund the SMS messages -its a year later and they still have 1 grand left.

Now, while this is not necessarily a sustainable solution - IT IS AN EXCELLENT USE OF GRANT MONEY. It will help the system to gain a toe hold while a more sustainable financing solutions are explored.

So if you get a grant for a software project what you should you do with the money? I think a good use is to pay for something on the ground where your project will be implemented (rather than a new prada handbag perhas). For the Malawi INFSS project - I would hire a local developer on contract for a few thousand dollars. I would have spend most of my time working with him/her to spec out the systme and to work on social/process engineering, training materials and some iterative coding. This would have probably added 3-5k to the cost of the project, but it is these sorts of details that make the difference between tranquility and 100% success and stress and compromise . However - You still have the problem of no stakeholder committment. I think stakeholders need to contribute something, if you expect them to take the project seriously.

I have learned so much from working in Malawi and implementing this project. In many cases, the only way to learn how to implement one of these projects, is to implement one of these probjects.

Hapita