Hemispheric Phonesick Blues

One of the things that still surprises me is the variety of cell phones that people have here. So many people carry multiple phones so that if one provider's network is bad you can use your second or third phone to complete your call. However, it can be inconvenient to carry 2, 3, or four phones, but the Chinese made an app for that, a phone that takes two sims! I am waiting for the day when the mobile phones will be able to take 3 and four sims.

Apart from folks having two phones there are many smart, yesterday I bought a Tecno 0707 for $64.00, it has some nice features such as a qwerty keyboard, it takes two sims, has GPRS, and various VoIP and internet features. I think that it would work beautifully if I was running WindowsXP instead of FedoraCore10. As it is I think it compares favourably with the Smartphones that we were issued at Tekmate. One of the reasons why I think it might be cheap is the Tecno Telecom does not use WindowsCE, PalmOS, or any other well known, commercial embedded system. I would guess that its either some version of Linux or an off the shelf OS from China or India. The only thing that I am having problems doing is adding duplicate phone numbers to my contacts. Over here many folks have more than two numbers since the networks are so bad so you need to store all the numbers. Unfortunately I have not been able to add a second number to each contact, even though the phone support vcd version 3.0.

Some of the brands that I never heard of before are Itel, Tecno, there are many others that look very nice, in the states many of these would be popular but they are not available either because of tarrifs, Americans would not care for the features since they have full fledged laptops and desktops that masses of Nigerians use their phones for. There is also the possibility that they do not meet the technical and safety requirements that are enforced in the US, though I really do not think the phones are badly made at all.

Some of the things that are different from the United States is almost no one buys a phone and a plan. Everyone uses prepaid sim cards and they buy their phones separately. Some folks will keep the same mobile for six years and kust switch sims. As a result of this all the phones sold in Nigeria are unlocked. To add minutes you will buy a recharge card, phone calls in Nigeria are some of the most expensive in the world even though the networks are so unreliable. Another thing that is different is that since masses of the people do not have electricity they take their phones to phone charging shops where they will leave their phone for a couple of hours so that it can charge. It is also a good idea to keep a spare battery sometimes and buy a phone battery charger. The last thing that I will mention is that 90% of the phone have their volumes turned up to 11 so that you can feel the awesome awesomeness of the each humble stranger's ring tone, but then again this should not suprise me since the average Nigerian loves tweeter shattering bass.

The Theory of Social Revolutions

One of the things that I like about Librivox is that there are lots of free audio books on the site. With my work I do not get to read as much as I used to, lot of the time I am reading papers or textbooks for my lectures. Lately I have also been reading lots of papers on distributed computing or other things from Redhat about LDAP, Apache, Subversion, Nagious or other things having to do with sysadmining. As a consequence the only times I get to read for pleasure nowadays are usually in bed or in the toilet. In both cases I am usually done in less than five minutes. As a consequence of this it can take me 2 months to read 200 pages, whereas, I used to be able to read 130 pages a day. One of the audiobooks that I finished listening to in December was Brooks Adam's The Theory of Social Revolutions, aka TTSR.

I consider TTSR to be somewhat similar in scope and approach to Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the United States Constituiton in that he does not simply accept the notion that the founding fathers did not have a class or factional interests that might have differed from the masses of Americans who were supporters of the revolution. One of the themes of the book is that laws are created and enforced by people who have a partisan goals. He gave examples of how the constitution was created by agents such as Danton and Robspierre so that they could kill their political opponents. Prior to the republicans taking over the French government the first two estates made laws that suppressed the middle and lower classes. There were other examples of George "Hanging" Jeffreys used his position to kill the enemies of Charles I.

After showing how such politriking hurts the judiciary and civil society Adams discussed methods of keeping political actors from affecting legal decisions. He thinks that in some ways a British style constitution is better than an American one which relies on a single document.
Being that Adams was a constitutional lawyer and historian I figured that he is more aware of advanatges of various legal systems, even as recently as four years ago judges in the US Supreme Court were trying to decide if they should look at trends in other country's legal systems to see if American laws are consistent with best practices. I tfound the book fairly interesting and enjoyed the sections on the French revolution as well as the interactions between the first three US presidents and the judiciary.

Books I Would Love To See Written

Maybe I will have to try and write this myself sometime or maybe not. BUt I would really enjoy a science fiction novel about archeologists, twenty thousand years from now, searching through the digital archives of the early 21st century and looking at emails, political blog posts, jokes, youtube videos and coming up with theories about trends, literature, social movements and history of that time based on the little information that they have now. This will could be very funny since most historians look at old writings and try and interprete what happened and what the events mean. Unfortunately many primary sources are lost and frequently researchers rely on secondary and tertiary sources. To make it even funnier I would like to have an obscure, kook be considered an authority by the scholars in the future because their writings are the only ones found. Other ideas for this are to have the futuristic text and form critics do the thing on blog posts that were meant as jokes or on the form critics of our time.

My second idea is to have a book about a man who hitchikes to Spain from eastern Nigeria all because he is obbssesd with a picture of a Republican soldier who died during the Spanish civil war. I would love it if it include tales within tales of all the people he encounters on his trip.

The Sleeper in H G Wells

I read the Time Machine when I was about 12. It was nothing like I expected it to be with its Morlocks & Eloi. With what I know now about literature I feel comfortable classifiying The Time Machine as both science fiction and modernism. In the end it shows us a brave new world that is a terrible place, a place where humanity has degenerated on the way to progress. I really like the book and have read it twice. I read about Wells on Wikipedia and found a lot to be impressed about. In his later life he was a kook who had odd ideas about aeroplanes. But that is okay. Along with the Time Machine I read The Chronic Argonauts, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr Moreau, The Food of The Gods, lots of his short stores and The Sleeper Awakes.

The Sleeper Awakes is an obscure preqeul to the The Time Machine with a man who wakes up to find that he has slept for hundreds of years and is now the owner of the world since his stock holdings have grown to incorporate everything that can be owned . Furthermore, the managers of his vast fortune have become the world government. In this world there is now racial equality of a sorts with Africans being used to police and supress worker unrest in England, this causes a great deal of anger in our humble hero who believes in white supremacy to the very core of his being and he is willing to do everything he can to prevent it. Ultimately he fails when his plane crashes to earth. There are some interesting things in the novel such as aerial dogfights, strafing and bombing before anyone had built a working plane let alone used one in war which is very interesting.

The prose in the book is very dated to a modern reader and it has all the faults of most Edwardian/Victorian age science fiction. I think the biggest thing is the casual and blatant white supremacist views that Wells advocates in the book. I migh blog about this some more late or maybe not. The pattern is similar to what you can find in Bulwer Lytoon's The COming Race.

Solitude Was Mourning For Jasmine & Leye

Solitude Was Mourning

I see solitude standing by the window,
long after she spoke to Boethius
she came here just to see the hamarttan winds blow.

Leye oh Leye why did you have to go?
It was not your choice to go gently into the night.
In St Cloud we did not know what a tangled web Fortuna would weave.
Your elegy will always be a song called youth.
Death gave you came in spring with a load of discontent.
Leye your bones lie now in the city of lakes

The taker came, and now there are none to comfortless are left bereft
Is there no art to make your dry bones live?
Now only time will soften some aspects of grief.

From the first day your were my friend
I saw America again in your eyes.
Engineering was your game and in the mighty middle west
true love also came.
You were both two scholars united and now all we can do is
stare at solitude standing with her ashes in her hair,
Her cheeks are weepy in aspect.
with torn robes, she walks into the night of remembrance.

When my father told me my ears refused to believe.
When my father told me I said this cannot be.
When my father told me my eyes had a shocked stare.

Mr. Bello was a cheerful man
I am proud to say that I too knew him,
if only for a little while,
Leye I will always wish you were still here.

Power in Nigeria

The one thing that we know and love about Nigeria is that there is never any consistency. It is almost like everything in this country operates under the rule that if things cannot be just they should be arbitrary. In the land of African giantsthe lights don't just work as they do in other nations instead there is frequently no power sometimes for days or at work every five minutes we will get brown outs and blackouts.

As a result of this we do things like freeze the plastic baggies of faro water so that in the event of a power failure the things in our freezer will not go bad. Along with this intermittent, random power outages. The Power Holding Compnay of Nigeria will sometimes send wattages as low as 120 and other times as high as 280 so of course most electrical devices get damaged at the high voltages.

To add to the problems there are no standards for outlets and sockets here, some are like the UK ones, other are two round holes, so you cannot buy an applince and be certain it will fit in any of your outlets. Instead of applying one standard to outlets and plugs they can be anything.

This should not suprise me but it still does how everything is done worse than subpar but the only design ethic seems to be we make shitty because nothing should work. It is almost makes me think that Nigerians like confusion, discomfort, failure, and suffering.

Happy Birthday to Kahn's Algorithm

This evening I was giving a lecture on TCP timeout and retransmission. We looked at different situations where the client does not get an ack or response to its syn request and the students got to see how the RTO algorithm works in real life, I think they enjoyed the lecture. We also looked at a RFC 793 which covers Transmission Control Protocol and looked at how Microsoft made some changes to their implementation of TCP in 2003 Server so that they could understand how actual implementations can differ from the RFCs.

The last thing that we did was look at the email that Phil Karn sent on A New TCP Retransmission Algorithm. We talked about Khan's research and how is statements on packet radio applied to IEEE802.11 networks, and finally we loked at his famous algorithm and I commented about how he got his research data and tested his algorithm as well as the quality of writing in his informal email as I was looking at it I saw that the message was sent on Tuesday, 7th April 1987 at 20:59. I had shared this with my class on Tuesday, 7th April 2009 at 20:44. Twenty two years to the exact day of the week! Of course this made me very happy and I told the class that if we all had sodas I would have proposed a toast to Phil Kahn.