Of Fiber and Floppies

Today traffic was terrible.  On my way to lunch, I jumped out of the matatu early and walked the rest of the way.  As it turns out, President Kibaki was coming into town, so all the main roundabouts were completely shut down.  He was actually here for a big deal: the big public launch of the undersea fiber optic cable that has finally arrived from the other side of the Indian Ocean.  This was the last stretch of ocean in the world that didn’t host an Internet connection, but now East Africa is finally caught up!  Here’s a local news blurb on it.  And one on Forbes.

I didn’t see the big event, but I did see 50-or-so Mercedes vehicles screech into town, surrounded by motorcycles, sirens blaring.  It’s a safe bet that Kibaki was in one of them.

In mildly related news, I’ve updated my learning software page to reflect all the changes I’ve made to my educational floppy disk in the past couple months.  I was thrown into a cycle of changes as I tried (and succeeded, I believe) at getting the thing to work on a 486 with 8MB of RAM for an old computer in Embu.  It also works on my Core2Duo with 3GB RAM, so it works on a wide range of computers now.

I’ve also gone ahead and given the disk a name: FUZOMA Floppy.  FUZOMA is a liberal blending of the Swahili words for “teach” and “learn.”  (It’s also a word that had no matches on Google until I registered the domain name.)  For now I just have one huge page dedicated to it here on the blog, but sooner or later I’ll get around to moving stuff over to fuzoma.com, because it feels way too cramped on a single page.

I also wanted to mention that over the course of making this floppy disk for the students, I’ve tracked down and contacted a number of shareware authors from the old DOS days and pestered them with questions, and everyone has been remarkably helpful thus far.  Special thanks to Bob Ferguson for sending me the EditV source code, which helped me as I designed the FUZOMA text editor for the kids as they learn to use the computer.  Also David at Bozz Software for reading my long emails, and Dom Domes and David Alves for making such great learning programs.

I’ve gotten positive feedback on the project from two other volunteers in Kenya thus far.  Nic had some nice things to say on this blog, and although Daniel doesn’t get into it on his, he told me that he used the typing game as a bonus for his final exams!  It’s a start…