Another side of Janet Mbugua

Watching Janet on the telly, reading the news, presenting Sunrise Live, her smile filling the studio, giving us one more reason to smile or laugh or criticize her joke or just to love her, one would never have thought of the real Janet Mbugua. The Janet Mbugua outside the telly, the Janet Mbugua without the make up, Janet Mbugua the "life of the party" as she would put it.

After her leaving KTN, wonder why they say "we never fully appreciate the things we have", I googled a bit about her and got some very interesting stories. "Tender, She calls" is a story by Janet Mbugua which kind of reflects her other side. Maybe not each and every other sentence, but the whole story does bring to light some bits of her that we dont know. The story kinds of smoothens the blurry picture that one might have of her, its a kind of glue that glues the different pieces together.

Anywayz, long story short. With the personality of Janet Mbugua that you know, read this interview from the standard. Any pictures forming, or different pieces of puzzle? Then read Tender, She Calls by her and tell me if that story might not be mixed with bits and pieces of her real life experience if not all of it is about her, although that might be far fetched.

Wat do you think?

kenyan men we are at it again

A funny look at kenyan men.

http://www.eastandard.net/mag/InsidePage.php?id=1144017336&cid=303&

the whip has been cracked, or is it will be cracked

Life for Nairobi's residents has just got a little bit more interesting. Woe unto you who dont follow the street lights, have nuiscance dogs and depend on mikokoteni (hand carts) to go about your businesses Phillip Kisia, the new Nairobi Town Clerk wants to do some whip cracking.

More on this in http://www.eastandard.net/InsidePage.php?id=1144017316&cid=4

Uhuru's Budget

After reading this years budget I was convinced that Kenyans we dont lack people who think straight. UK is one of them and the technocrats who were involved in the budget making process. Though there were no tax reductions on some of the common items for you, me and Wanjiku, we will definetly reap from it in some few years should it be implemented.

The huge allocations to be channeled through CDF is quite encouraging and the only final thing that UK should do is pass a motion making our greedy MPs mere patrons with no or very little say on the day to day running of the CDF committees. This would be where the rubber meets the road. Imagine that we can have 210 Alliance High Schools, or Mangu or Starehe!! My brother would not have to rot in a sub-standard school just because he missed the cutoff by a few marks. What about the opportunities people will enjoy in each constituency.

So hold your breath and lets hope that we will be able to navigate the murky waters ahead.

[MapServer Error]: msLoadMap(): First token must be MAP, this doesn't look like a mapfile.

In my development machine, I managed to set up mapserver to run on both windows and PUbuntu OS without much problem. On pushing the files to the host, I kept getting this as a first warning followed by another warning PHP Warning: Failed to open map file mapfile.map and then the killer PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function setextent() on a non-object . This was so disturbing since I was using the exact same copy of files both in the development machine and the server, although the sever was running on fedora.

Basically it boils down to this. Depending on the version of mapserver that you are running the map file might not be used on both versions. Some versions of mapsever requires a directive MAP at the beginning and an END at the end of the map file and a SYMBOLSET directive at the begining of a symbol file and a END directive at the end.

These two directives have made my life a living hell for 3 days, so I am posting this to help anybody who might be in the same pool.

Internet Everywhere Follow Up

In last post, I hailed Internet Everywhere from Orange as the internet solution of choice for people like us, who are on the move and internet is a must everywhere you go.

Now this is a quick follow up or just a big complain.. infact this post should be Orange your customer service SUCK!! What about that?

So this ka Internet Everywhere(IE from now on) works fine until 3wks, on a sato, into using it when it dies on me. Am like iz how? So on monday I take it to the orange guys and they start acting dumb, ati everything is fine on their side its the system fault. Since am a developer I kind of understand and I am like hey, do your thing I will wait. There is a guy there by the name Korir? Please Korir if you reading this, go into a PR class, your customer skills SUCK? First, not everybody is a kid in terms of technology, we kinda understand some things so treat us like "grown ups" and am sure there are guys out there who can teach you a thing or two. So basically this guy tells me that he will sort me, it was at 5pm, and i should wait. He keeps me waiting only at the end he tells me that the person who should sort me out is out and he cant do anything. That is after keeping me there for close to an hour. HALLO then why didnt u tell me that at the beginning? So I go home cursing like... but since the ka IE wont work I vow to show up at their offices the next day.

So the next day I show up at 8am and meet the supposed "saviour" Koros, another guy good PR aint part of his vocubulary. The guy takes me round in circles, circles, circles instead of just telling that there is a problem with the all IEs on post paid. One thing, if that guy tells u leave your number he will call you, dont even dare! That will never happen. He started telling me that right when I was buying the ka IE till "my one week of crisis", when I discovered my mistake. Its like he has a hobby of collecting customer numbers.

All in all when I discovered that its a kind of a "universal problem", I just chilled till when it would start working, which was a week later.

Now this is another funny part, when I went to pay my bill, nobody knew how much I should pay. Yea some of you would say that since I am on post-paid should it should be a flat rate, I was paying late and had either overused my bundle or my month was up. They checked their systems and did all they could, they just couldnt figure out my consumption.

So am just waiting with abated breath. Anywayz at least its working.

Will keep you posted!

Orange's Internet Everywhere to my rescue

Orange's Internet Everywhere rocks. As their motto is 'the fun gets faster', I am surely feeling it though am not on broadband. For you folks who dont know what am talking about, its the Orange internet offer that is driving me crazy(in a good way).

When I came back from Russia my first order of business was to get myself an internet connection. I choose Telkom(thru landline) which i came to deeply regret(why is a topic for another blog). Since then I have been looking for suitable Internet option to suite me(a software developer who is always looking the next great thing...) until I came across Orange's internet everywhere.

Bundles

Orange is offering different bundles in pre paid and post paid, all of them at affordable prices.

For prepaid* you have the option of:

bundle(Mb)	budle price(KSh)	Price/Mb
daily bundle	150	6
50Mb	250	5
100Mb	450	4.5
250Mb	850	3.4
2000	2000	1

*The cost of the modem is 4500Ksh

For postpaid** the options are:

Bundle(Mb)	Monthly Bundle Price(Ksh)	Package Price	Price/Mb
50Mb	250	4000	5
100Mb	450	3500	4.5
250Mb	850	2000	3.4
2000Mb	2000	free	1

**After choosing your preffered bundle, you pay the monthly bundle, cost of the kit and a deposit twice the choosen bundle

Modem

The orange modem is a sleek black flash kind rectangle with the orange logo on it's front. It is no larger than the traveller flash disk, only that it is a little long and more square. In short it is easy to carry around without getting in the way.

Orange's Modem

The modem emits a green light at intervals depending on its status: 2 blinks in 3 secs, showing it is searching for network, a blink in 3 sec to show network presence but not connected and if the green light is always on the internet is connected. The modem at times get pretty hot but not in any level to be dangerous.

Connection and Speeds

The conection is fairly stable, with no nuiscance of disconections and reconnections. Even while working for long hours(6 hrs) with 'heavy lifting' the connection is still stable although the modem can be quite hot although it does not affect the speeds or connection.

One thing that I am absoloutely loving is the speeds that come with it. The modem has a max download speed of 236.8Kbps and upload of 228.0Kbps. Although I have never cloaked any of these speeds, while using speed test it clocks a round ping of about 620-650 ms, download speed of 0.25Mbs(~250kbs) , and an upload speed of 0.09Mbs(90Kbps), while pinging servers in Nairobi. Pinging a server hosted in NY(optimum Online), it clocks a round ping of 992ms, downlaod speed of 0.07Mbs(~70Kbps), and an upload speed of 0.07(70Kbps). These speeds however fluctuate with time, with night times having the best speeds while slowing down during the day. One thing I can confess is that their speeds suck during the weekends, as I had problems downloading a 600Kb file at one point.

The modem has one major downside, its so hard to get it working the first time and especially if you have prior connections, be they wireless or LAN. I can now confess, that although am pretty good with comps when it comes to installations and use of new software and hardware, till now am finding it hard to get th modem working on my desktop, although it works pretty well from my work's laptop.

Management

The modem comes with an Internet Everywhere dashboard which enables you among other things to moniter your data use. Its quite interesting as the dashboard provides an option of adding netwoks other than the orange network. This provides a means of adding the networks of other service providers eg Zain while at the same time using the orange modem(I am not sure if this can work), or using a third party modem like duxbury with any network carrier. This is quite interesting as it opens the platform for other carriers to use the orange software and modem.

Something quite sad with the management panel, is that it tracks the internet use on a particular machine rather than the total usage of the modem. If you use the modem on different comps, it just monitors usage on each comp separately and if you want to know your overall usage, you must add all the usages to get the full picture. If any of you orange guys might read this post, please do something, coz keeping tabs on all comps where I use the modem can be quite labourous.

All in all, any of you guys in Kenya looking for an affordable internet connection, Orange is a 'better option' than any of the other guys out there.