Human Planet

Recently I've read two posts one talking about a 16-years old millionaire and a 14-years old Kuwaiti iPhone developer. This reminded me of something I promised to blog about but I seem to have forgotten for awhile.

In the final ceremoney of the Technology Summer Camp that the Excellence Center in Birzeit University arranged, the kids got the chance to present their Scratch developed games.

The most amazing one to me was a 13 years old kid who developed a game using Scratch Programming Language inspired by the latest events of the Flotilla freedom ship that was heading to Gaza before the Israeli Army attacks it and stops it.

The game tells the story perfectly. The main character of the game was a well-known guy in Palestine, Raed Salah. The gamer will try to move Raed and make sure none of the Soldiers that come on the ship with their guns stays on the ship. He has a wooden stick which he used to hit the soldiers and drop them from the ship.


I truely was amazed (You could hear me whistling and mumbling "that's amazing" in the video above). So I did a small interview with the kid to see why he did it and what he thinks about it. Here's the video interview with the little kid.

Finding out that we have an amazing minds and promising kids. I wonder if anyone would actually take this any further and invest in such kids development or would they will go unappriciated and unnoticed. That's one of the reasons I blogged about this. And that's one of the reasons you will share this with your friends and contacts.
P.S. I will be posting a longer post about all the Summer camp and all the participating kids.

The next Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is just around the corner and for the first time I am organizing a workshop there.  I think the title of the workshop speaks for itself.  It is: “Core Internet Values and the Principles of Internet Governance Across Generations.”

The idea is very simple.  We are going to have a group of very smart people.  Some of them are internet pioneers from different countries, some of them are established researchers, and some are well known practitioners.  We will also have a group of young, less known (yet) people, whose activism and professional lives are related to the internet in one way or another.  The panel itself is quite large and we are also counting on having a very diverse and engaging audience from the IGF community.

So, the plan is to have a discussion among the panelists and then involve the floor, about core internet values and principles.  The question is not only what those values and principles might be, but whether the perception of these values and principles varies across generations and what that may mean for the future of internet-related policies.

This is where I would really appreciate an input from anyone reading these lines.  What do you think are the core values and principles of the internet where we can find the widest gaps across generations?

One example may be the notion of privacy.  I think since online social networks became popular there is an ongoing debate about how the younger generations’ perceptions of privacy online differ from that of their parents.  We all heard Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that the age of privacy is over.  But is it so for everyone?

What are the core values and principles of the internet that you still hold dear?  Which ones do you think were important in the past, but are no longer important?

Please share your thoughts!

After quitting Exalt Technologies to leave to Google. Few problems regarding visa to Switzerland or UK managed to keep me for few more couple of months in Palestine before going to the US. So long I've waited to try and jump off and just try entrepreneurship.

While I am still having troubles pronouncing the word. I am trying to learn what does it mean by doing. One thing I've learned that it ain't easy!

I've been working for more than 6 weeks now on a new business idea with 4 of my friends. We're pretty excited about it and working very hard to get it to real life. I will be blogging more about it later.

One thing I also learned that an entrepreneur needs an inspiration, a model, another entrepreneur to look up to. My inspiration was Yousef Ghandour. The only Palestinian guy that I know with 2 kids and a wife and still have the guts to jump off and take the risk while working on his project Timevel. Each time I fail at finishing a stage I just say to myself, "If Ghandour can do it, hell I can!". That was enough to boost me off.

Besides Yousef, I got my inspiration from talks and articles. One of them being Wael Fakharani (Of Google) talk at TEDxCairo "The Discomfort Of Our Comfort Zone". Video embedded below (will try to find/write the English translation later). This is just amuses me. And I always keep reminding myself that I can just go and be in my comfort zone at home with my Family, sleeping most of the day. But I CHOOSE and I WANT to be in my discomfort zone. This also reminds me of a quote of one anonymous entrepreneur who said: "Being in your comfort zone wouldn’t ever benefit you. Get out of it, face the real world."


Two more videos that gave me a boost are the following:


and


and fo course I won't be forgetting the most amazing speech I've ever heard. Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement. Which I keep watching from time to time.


I just hope one day we would be one of these who give you a boost to dare and do something and stop hiding in your comfort zone.

You have your own inspirational people, talks or quotes? Share them with us.

Over the past few months I had the pleasure of working with a great group of people on planning the next symposium of the Global Internet Governance Academic Network.  The final program is now available online and I am also posting it below.   I think it will be a very interesting day and if you are interested in internet governance, you should definitely try to participate (there should be options for remote participation announced soon).

I have more Internet Governance Forum related updates, which I will post soon.  In the meantime, here is the program of the symposium, which will take place on September 13th:

9:00-9:15 Opening

9:15-10:30 PANEL 1: Internet governance theory and issue

Moderador: William Drake, Centre for International Governance of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva

• Peng Hwa Ang and Natalie Pang. Going Beyond Talk: Can International Internet Governance Work?
• Everton Lucero. Global Governance of Critical Internet Resources: A Perspective from the South
• Jean-marie Chenou. Multistakeholderism or elitism ? The creation of a transnational field of Internet governance

10:30-11:00 Poster session and coffee break

11:00-12:15 PANEL 2: State power and Internet governance

Moderator: Rolf Webber , European Law Institute and the Center for Information and Communication Law at the University of Zurich

• Joanna Kulesza. State responsibility for acts of cyber-terrorism
• Jeremy Shtern. Models of Global Internet Governance and the Projection of State Power: The Case of Facebook and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
• Lorena Jaume-Palasi and Ben Wagner. Nosy preferences of Google and China: Modelling an internet governance conflict using Amartya Sen’s liberal paradox

12:15-12:30 Sponsorship slot

12:30-13:30 Lunch – Sponsored by MIT Press. Welcome speech given by William Drake, editor of the MIT Press series on “The information revolution and global politics” and Milton Mueller, author of the newly released book, “Networks and States: the Global Politics of Internet Governance.”

13:30-14:45         PANEL 3: Interaction of technology, operations and governance

Moderator: Meryem Marzouki, LIP6/PolyTIC – CNRS

• Brenden Kuerbis. Securing Internet routing: Influence and control of critical Internet resources through social networks and delegation
• Dmitry Epstein, Qiu-Hong Wang, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Milton Mueller. What’s in the name? A behavioral study of the use of the URLs in China and the US
• Laura DeNardis. The Privatization Of Internet Governance

14:45-15:45         PANEL 4: IGF practice, multistakeholderism and emerging issues

• Nanette Levinson. Evaluating and Analyzing Collaboration In Cross-cultural and Cross-sectoral Perspective: Indicators from The Internet Governance Forum
• Ivar Alberto Hartmann. Universal Access policies and Internet Access as a Fundamental Right: The Constitutional Law Perspective informed by the Brazilian Case.

15:45-16:00         Closing

16:00-16:30         Poster session and coffee break

16:30                    GigaNet Business meeting

POSTER SESSION:

• Charlotte Bogusz. Openness and Privacy v/ Security : The example of filtering measures.2
• Charlotte Bogusz. The promotion of the general interest through ICTs : The French and Senegalese examples
• Daniel Oppermann. Analysing cybercrime from a multistakeholder perspective
• Luiz Costa. The Internet and the Constitutional restrictions on foreign participation in Brazilian Media
• Luiz Costa. A case study on the Brazilian E-Commerce Forum
• Mona Badran. Is internet changing the social life of Egyptian college students and affecting their privacy?
• Rolf H. Weber. Policies for Governing Critical Internet Resources
• Shawn Gunnarson. Securing ICANN’s Accountability
• Sofiane Bouhdiba. Internet governance and Education: the Tunisian Virtual University in the context of the Tunis agenda

If I have to describe a day in my life for the past two years, it would be a boring time-sequence directed by a late-20s petit-bourgeois caught in a laidback city and terribly missing the chaos back home 12 time zones away. Since I left business school a year ago, I have realized that I spent more than half of my time either in deep slumber or half-awake and daydreaming. I’m afraid that too much

Technology experts from charity Telecoms Sans Frontieres are providing emergency telecoms services to the victims of the flooding in Pakistan.

TSF, which has been in Pakistan since 9 August, said it has been providing telecoms services to victims of the flooding to allow them to call relatives and friends abroad. Around 945 families have been provided with calls so far, according to TSF. “For many people, the call provided by TSF is the first call since the outbreak of the disaster,” the organization said. “Many victims have lost their mobile phone or are in places with no electricity to recharge or simply have no money to buy credit.”

According to UN officials, the Pakistan floods cover an area the size of England with up to 20 million people affected. At least 1,600 people have been killed, with health officials warning the toll could rise as water-borne diseases spread, TSF reported.

TSF said it has 8 mobile teams, equipped with satellite and GSM phones, in the districts of Peshawar, Nowshera and Charsadda and plan to operate in the country for at least a month. The teams are composed of one man and one woman to allow both men and women to make a call, TSF said.

TSF staff also provides support to OCHA/UNDAC and the other UN agencies in the inter-agency office in Multan, Punjab Province. This assignment is scheduled until staff from the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster and other OCHA partners (IHP) take over. TSF continues to coordinate with the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster (ETC) as per further needs for ICT support to aid agencies.

Telecoms Sans Frontieres (TSF) deployed to Haiti in January to respond the impact of the earthquake in the country. The charity specialises in setting up communications infrastructure to allow aid-agencies to communicate on the ground more effectively.
(Source: eweek europe, TSF)
Further details

GUADEC is the GNOME Users' and Developers' European Conference, and I got to go there this year, following my visit to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit last year and LiMo & GNOME's announcement of their partnership. GUADEC is the place to be if you want to find out what's going on with GNOME, catch up with key developers from a wide range of GNOME projects, get involved in writing or contributing software, or generally hang out with a bunch of scarily smart individuals.

This year as an added bonus, two days of developer training were available, which seemed like a great opportunity to fill some gaps in my GNOME knowledge, so I went along to that. The training was organised by Dave Neary, who did an excellent job of putting together a packed schedule. It's really great to see professional-level training at an event like this, as it helps dispel the myth that open source is somehow less serious. The course was well-attended with about 10 people from a very diverse group of companies and backgrounds, including one hobbyist who paid for the fun of it!

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend the full second day of training, due to a schedule clash with the GNOME Advisory Board meeting. The Board meeting more than made up for it by being an excellent opportunity to hear the views of some of the organisations and companies who are investing in GNOME. It was a great opportunity to put names to faces as well, with a superstar list of representatives being part of the Board.

Following the training was the usual packed talk agenda. This is not an easy conference to attend - it kicks off at 09.30 every day, and with more than 60 talk slots over three days, not including BoFs and hacking. It's pretty intense! The talks are of a very high standard, often extremely technical, and give a very good insight into GNOME.

Some of the talks that particularly caught my eye included:

• Who makes GNOME, by Dave Neary. The statistics weren't surprising: a huge number of people are involved, and a very wide range of companies (with no single dominating company) and a good mix between large and small companies. It was good to see some hard facts to back up the GNOME open development story. A big thanks must go to Dave for publishing this report.
• State of the GNOME 3 Shell, by Owen Taylor. It was really interesting to see GNOME Shell taking shape, with a definite feeling of progress since GCDS. I've been playing with it on a horribly underspecified laptop, and can't wait to see it complete.
• GNOME's next place in the industry, by Alberto Ruiz; The future is JavaScript, by John Palmieri; My platform is bigger than yours by Xan Lopez and Gustavo Noronha. More on these below...
• Clutter: State of the Union, and Everything You Ever Wanted to Do With Clutter were sure to be crowd pleasers, given that Clutter is all about exciting user interfaces and effects. It didn't disappoint, with lions and tigers and monkeys and robot ponies:
  
  On a serious note, it's great to see continued investment in Clutter as a UI toolkit. I think it's delivering some exciting innovation in netbook UIs and elsewhere.

During my talk at GUADEC(GNOME, Linux Mobile Stacks and You!) I tried to drive home the fact that mobile needs to become an important part of GNOME developer thinking, more so than now. To demonstrate this, I showed some statistics on the size of the mobile market, compared to other platforms. I also talked about how difficult it is to find key information about GNOME compared to competing projects, and the comparisons that are taking place between GNOME and other technologies even now. The GNOME Foundation does a fantastic job of outreach, including sponsoring people to go to GUADEC, but like any open source project it's important to ensure a constant flow of new developers and to make it ever-easier to develop for the projects. I hope that message got across.

One of the most interesting themes of this year's event (and I've only been to two, so I can't draw any inferences on patterns) was the focus on the future. From this year's event it's easy to believe the future is the web, simpler scripting languages, results-driven development and making application development simpler. All these tie neatly into the way that iPhone has changed the industry and made people think more carefully about the elusive third party developers and apps stores. Solutions like better scripting integration, cool UI toolkits and frameworks like Quickly are only part of the story, but all contributing to give GNOME a boost and making sure it's around over the coming years.

Please disregard this post.  I am just testing a new plugin…

It’s been quiet on this blog for a while, so I decided to share an observation based on some conversations I recently had at one of the Internet governance meetings.  The conversations were about ICT companies and the point was that while Western companies are extremely enthusiastic about emerging markets, they do not consider their regulatory systems with the same rigor as they do in the developed world.  In other words, while in the developed countries these companies invest considerable resources in working with the governments and lobbying, in the developing countries their efforts are primarily in marketing.  Even when they do work with governments, it is mostly done through the marketing departments where the governments are viewed primarily as costumers, less as regulators.

I heard similar observations from a number of industry players and also from a government official.  I listened and “filed” these observations, but they were  brought back to life with the recent explosion of the BlackBerry story.  You may know that the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and now also India and a number of other countries, are threatening to ban BlackBerry unless RIM allows them access to the encrypted email data of BlackBerry users, stored on the company’s servers.  India gave RIM an ultimatum until the end of the month to comply and the rumor is that the Indian government has similar plans for Google, Skype, and perhaps others.

I wonder how did RIM find itself in such a situation?  Will other global technological companies find themselves in a similar situation soon too?  Peter Svensson writes in Washington Post today:

“Threats by the governments of India, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to shut down BlackBerry’s corporate e-mail services reflect unease about a technology that the U.S. government also took a while to accept.  The foreign governments are essentially a decade behind in coming to terms with encryption, a technology that’s fundamental to the Internet as a medium of commerce. (…) RIM, the company behind the BlackBerry, doesn’t have years to wait for foreign governments to adopt the more relaxed U.S. stance toward encryption.”

I assume Svensson is right about his historical perspective; after all, writing about this is his bread an butter.  At the same time, given that all the governments currently having an issue with BlackBerry are in developing countries, I think he is missing the point made by the people I talked to about the Western companies’ attitudes to the emerging markets’ governments.

It did not take the US government years to figure out its stand on encryption on its own.  On the contrary, this position is a result of years of dialogue, argument, and debates between the government and the various interest groups, primarily the industry, through its lobbying activities, and the civil society.  We can see a similar discussion taking place these days around the issue of net neutrality.

It seems to me that until the RIMs, Googles, and Skypes of this world won’t take the regulators in the developing world as seriously as they take the governments back home, we will continue seeing more “BlackBerry” cases.  Until the multinational MICT companies will not engage in a meaningful  way with the local governments in the emerging markets, the barriers to their activities there will continue growing and become more sophisticated, especially when it comes to such a politicized area as information.

So, I wonder if it is the time for these companies to start lobbying in the developing world just the way they are lobbying here.  While I am aware of the potentially harmful influences of lobbying, it is an integral part of the policymaking mechanism and, for better or worse, it also has an educational impact on the policymakers.  At the end of the day, usually those are the governments that are catching up with technology, while the industry is ahead of the curve.

What do you think?  Is it the time to lobby?

It's been a busy few weeks, so I'm a bit behind on writing up events.                            

At the end of July I was in Cambridge for another of the Open Source and Software SIG meetings. This time, the theme was "Open Source Software vs Commercial Hardware: When the unstoppable force hits the immovable object ".

The Cambridge Wireless events are usually quite good fun, with a wide range of individuals and a great mix of businesses represented. The format of the event includes a number of talks with ample opportunity for questions, and some networking opportunities before and after the event. They are quite informal, and this tends to result in some lively discussions. This time was no different.  (Disclosure: I'm one of the SIG champions, so I'm biased. But another of the champions, Dave Roberts of Ogma Solutions, did a lot of the heavy lifting for this event, so this is not entirely impartial praise!)

I didn't get a chance to make extensive notes on the talks themselves, but the slides can all be found online.  I did however scribble down some questions and comments - only a few of which I got to ask the presenters during the event.  As the Chair of the panel session, I felt obliged to let a few others ask questions too ;-)

James' talk on Open OS, the phone and the converged device was entertaining and provocative. His (self-confessed) increasingly wild assertions that user experience will become device agnostic feels right to me, especially with the pervasive usefulness of solutions like Dropbox and GMail. Are there any other pervasively useful cloud solutions that are as successful, by the way?

 

 

I really liked James' focus on integration being a key problem too, calling out Apple and RIM as examples of successful but closed vertical stacks. It seems obvious that hardware vendors need to work more closely with open source projects in order to compete, bringing more tightly-integrated stacks to market. Linaro is just the start of this.

Nabeel's Impact of Mobile Open Operating Systems on the Mobile Operators provided an excellent snapshot of the operator perspective. He asserted that operators fear a monoculture and exposure to risk, and that the success of the iPhone represents a big risk to them. For example, if the antenna flaw had been serious, the cost of exposure and recall for the operators would have been great, and the damage by losing such a premium item in the line-up is extensive.

It seems to me that the monoculture we're heading for in open source mobile operating systems is equally risky - whilst I think Android is great, I really want to see more than one Linux-based mobile operating system succeed. Competition most certainly breeds innovation. I think the operators have a vested interest in a small degree of fragmentation, and should continue to recognise that.

Two other comments from Nabeel caught my eye - firstly, according to my notes, he indicated that commodity open source mobile devices only attract something like a 3% margin (a far cry from Apple's ~ 30% margin). Is this true? I'd love to see the numbers on this. Secondly, during the presentation, the Vision Mobile developer survey was mentioned, including one particularly insightful quote from an anonymous developer, "Operators should get out of the way of developers". Speaking as that anonymous developer (oops), I think it's worth clarifying that efforts like O2 Litmus (and to a lesser extent, betavine) are good, but the operators do a lot of other things that actively hurt developers (content transcoding is one of the less contentious examples). Facilitate, don't frustrate.

Nigel's talk on Open Source Business Models discussed the 3-6 month product gestation period that's becoming typical, and how open source is the only way it can be possible to put together a product within such a timescale. This left me thinking that maybe we have an industry founded on unrealistic expectations, and the all-you-can-eat buffet of open source mobile components being thrown at products simply won't work. Maybe this ties neatly into Dave's opening comments in Mobile Platforms 101. Hardware might become a commodity, as software becomes more important.

Perhaps that's the true unstoppable force hitting immovable objects: the need for an open source platform approach in a very product-oriented sector. Can we really have both?

Pakistan has been severely affected by unprecedented floods triggered by heavy rains. It has led to tragic loss of lives besides widespread loss of livestock, destruction of physical/communication infrastructure in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit-Baltistan, Azad Kashmir, Punjab, Balochistan and Sindh. Flooding has submerged whole villages in the past week, killing at least 1,600 people, according to the UN. Pakistan authorities believe more than 12 million people have been affected, with the figure likely to rise as flood waters head south.

Christian aid agencies have warned that the destruction of transport and communication links is leaving many victims of the Pakistani floods virtually “cut off” from outside help. Ashraf Mall, Tearfund’s Country Representative for Pakistan, said:

“It’s one of the biggest floods in the history of Pakistan. People need food immediately as they have lost their homes and possessions. But it is not proving easy to respond to this emergency. Bridges and roads have been destroyed and the disruption of transport and communication links is making assessments difficult, with many survivors effectively cut off from outside help.”

Some pictures of Pakistanis coping with the floods can be seen here. Some ways to help through your donations are listed here.

(Sources: SAMAA, Christian Today)

In cities and villages across Peru, basic information that was once nearly impossible to obtain – about municipal budgets, public services and elections – is now accessible through a few simple clicks of a computer keyboard. Comun@s, which stands for Municipal Communication at Your Service in Spanish, is a project designed by AED and implemented in cooperation with USAID and the government of Peru to bring more transparency and public accountability to municipal government through information and communication technology.

AED teams based in Peru travel to the municipalities to install computer equipment located in public kiosks, called Modulos Ciudadanos, and provide training on how to use them, including how the community can tap into new online systems established by Peru’s government. In addition, AED helps local officials create municipal Web pages with useful information for their citizens. The project provides training on the importance of transparency to officials and residents in 84 municipalities that are scattered across seven regions of the country.

“Through this project, people can actually approach their government, become involved in their government and feel empowered to take part in their government,” said Maria Victoria Pascual, AED’s chief of party in Peru. “They become a part of the future of their community.”

Information on the modules is available in three of Peru’s languages—Spanish, as well as Quechuan and Ashaninka. The most popular feature so far, Pascual says, provides users with information on how to obtain basic documents, such as driver’s licenses, national identification cards, and marriage certificates—and what those documents should cost, so that people trying to buy them aren’t taken advantage of at the local level.

(Source:AED)

Full Story

CHDK used in university for capturing blackboards

Hi all,
During last semester I developed a set of scripts that lets me photograph pictures of the blackboards during my university courses, categorize them while I am taking them and automatically generate PDF document for each course week. Because physics equations are not the simplest things to input in to a laptop in realtime, I have developed the following method. I am writing the post because I have a feeling this tool could help people in many ways, since it did change how I study in lectures.

You can see my blackboard photographs here (and here is a simple pdf example, if you get lost in the Hebrew).

How it works in a nutshell

The work flow - photograph, store, generate pdfs

During the lesson I take the photographs of the blackboard with a script I wrote for CHDK. In the script you set the course and week of the semester and this is stored per-picture on the SD card.

When I get home, I can quickly clear the card using the build.py script, moving the pictures to my computer, I might be taking dozens of photos a day, so its useful to do this a few times a week. The images are automatically stored in corresponding folders (e.g. /camera/coursename/pics/week1/ ).

Once the images are in the directory structure, all that is left is to generate PDFs from each ‘week folder’. There are quite a few things taken in to account here, due to the fact that the images are resized for fast PDF rendering, to setting the temporary folder of Imagemagick (it needs a few gigs to generate the PDFs!). The final outcome is a PDF file per-course per-week. From here I will go in to the technical configuration.

What you will need

• Canon powershot camera running the CHDK software (Cannon Hack Development Kit). I use a Cannon powershot A590
• Python + bash (+ Linux)
• Imagemagick installed (the convert command)
• Free space is important (both for PDF generation and storage of your photos)

Setting up CHDK script

I will not go in to the details of installing the CHDK, I wrote about this already, and its a post I recommend you read!

Once you have CHDK running on your camera you will need to use this script for shooting pictures (copy it to /CHDK/scripts and load it).

The script lets you pick the course and week, you can edit the script to have a little abbreviations for courses. For example (line 3 in blackboard.lua):
@param c Course (0=inf,1=QM,2=ds,3=fn,4=op)

It will give you a message each time you photograph with it.
The script saves files with the images filenames to the LOGS folder on the card, containing the course ID and week number.

Screenshot of the CHDK script menu

Importing you photos from the camera automatically

Using the build.py will move all the photographs from the camera to the disk, you will need to set a few things in its header, here is how the build.py file looks:

### configuration ###</p> <p>#path to which the camera is mounted<br /> cameraMount=&quot;/media/CANON/&quot;</p> <p>#path were the photos should be moved to<br /> DESTDIR = &quot;/media/Elements1/University/camera/&quot;</p> <p>#path where the photos are in the camera (you might need to change this if you took more than 1000 photos)<br /> PICDIR = cameraMount + &quot;DCIM/100CANON/&quot;</p> <p>#the number, and hte course folder to move it to<br /> course= []<br /> course.insert(0, &quot;infi&quot;)<br /> course.insert(1,&quot;quantum1&quot;)<br /> course.insert(2,&quot;dast&quot;)<br /> course.insert(3, &quot;lab2&quot;)<br /> course.insert(4, &quot;oop&quot;)

Its pretty straight forward. The last list sets which ID number corresponds to which course.

Generating PDFs

The script to generate the PDF is called genpdf.sh, It basically scans the folder and generates the pdf files using imagemagick, it also creates a small file with the picture list, so it only generates when there is a change. Generally useful script! I recommend you set the temp folder that it uses for the generation to be somewhere on your disk (and not just /tmp), because it can take as much as 10GB sometimes to generate!
Here is the settings header:

#this temp dir is where the PDF are generated, it can reach gigabytes! so its recommended to set it to a place with space<br /> export TMPDIR=/tmp</p> <p>#path where the images are saved<br /> PICS_DIR= /media/Elements1/University/camera

Camera setting tips – How not to blind your lecturer

If you are using this tool, here are just a few minor tips for getting a good result:

• First use the manual setting in the camera (the M option). If the course is in a closed lecture hall you can tweak the exposure time to get better resultes. As you can see I also set the picture to grayscale.
• Make sure to set the flash off! Also you can set the AF-Assist beam off (its the red light on the camera). The manual setting remembers these options, so this is useful too.
• I personally try not to photograph lecturers,  I suggest you do the same.

What courses are good for this method? – Tips for Lecturers

I found that some courses are better than others to photograph, usually if you have a tidy lecturer who doesn’t erase in the middle of calculations, then you tend to get a good result. Also there are some lectures that think that the whole lecture can be done with equations only, no text. Those lectures tend to be much harder to follow, I would really suggest that they add notes, it tends to help everyone. Even a tiny title over a calculation can really change things, students don’t always follow.

That’s it! This technique really changed how I study in university, I am sure there are ways to improve the process and the code or use this for another things. I would love to hear feedback and would be glad to assist anyone attempting this.

• Here is a package with all the scripts you need

The Primary Education Project (PEP) is a five-year initiative targeting all public primary schools in Macedonia. PEP seeks to improve the quality of instruction and increase employment skills in youth.

PEP’s ICT in Education Component is supporting the computerization of Macedonia’s primary schools by training teachers, developing maintenance solutions, providing digital content, and introducing innovative uses of ICT such as computer control, robotics, electronic music, video & audio recording.

The highlights of ICT component are that it supports the development of digital content for Macedonia’s schools and helps to adapt and localize existing applications in Macedonian and Albanian. The focus is on Math and Science, but content is created across the curriculum. This will enable students to benefit from modern technology in all subjects. PEP has also introduced innovative hardware and software solutions in selected primary schools in Macedonia. The range of hardware varies from low-cost lap-tops to electronic microscopes, music recording equipment, robots and control technology kits.

Macedonia, once the least developed of the Yugoslav republics,has been transformed into the world’s first “wireless country” of its size or larger. Through a grant from USAID, and support from Microsoft, Motorola and several other partners, AED project Macedonia Connects worked with a local internet service provider to connect every one of the country’s 430 primary and secondary schools to a wireless network. Now a vast majority—95%—of the country’s population has access to wireless, broadband internet service.

(Sources: PEP, USAID)
Further Details

The JEI is one of Her Majesty’s Queen Rania Al Abdullah’s nonprofit organizations. The JEI works hand in hand with the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Information Communication Technology (MoICT) to support Jordan’s efforts to improve the education system and its use of ICT to transform the learning environment in Jordanian schools and advance learning for all students.

Since its launch in 2003 by the World Economic Forum partners, the JEI has been involved in multimillion dollar initiatives that have had a strong impact on the modernization of education in Jordan. The JEI relies highly on partnerships and collaborations with local and global entities. The global partners include WEF, USAID, UNESCO, CISCO, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, HP, IBM, SMART etc. Direct contributions to the Initiative from global and local partners have reached over US$ 25 million.

The initiative has so far reached more than 80,000 students, up-skilled more than 3,000 teachers across 102 Jordanian Public Schools. Thousands of electronic lessons have been developed and many electronic teaching tools and equipments have been deployed in schools. The JEI has also employed SMART interactive whiteboards in its discovery schools. The JEI has also piloted installing 100 Intel Classmate PCs in discovery schools.

The JEI has not only received an award from Ministry of Education but has also received 2009 UNESCO award for use of ICT in education.

(Sources: JEI, WEF )

Further Details

Hashtags working in Hebrew

Hello all,

I have been using twitter quite a lot recently and to users that are using non-Latin tweets, it might have occurred that the hashtags don’t work.

So I took the time to write a greasemonkey script that does the job (for Firefox, Chrome, Webkit and others).

It will add a search link on the word, unfortunately due to a twitter bug, I had to remove the number sign (#) because twitter can’t search with it.

• The script should work with all non-Latin languages (tested Hebrew, Arabic and Chinese)
• The script does not work when the “more” button is pressed. If anyone knows how to solve that please contact me. fixed!

I hope this becomes a useful tool for people.

• Download the script here
• Userscripts.org page

India, known for the “world’s cheapest” innovations, unveiled a prototype of a $35 tablet computer aimed at students.

The project is part of an ambitious education technology initiative by the Indian government, which also aims to bring broadband connectivity to India’s 25,000 colleges and 504 universities and make study materials available online.

The government even plans on subsidizing the cost of the tablet for its student which would bring the purchase price down even lower. According to Kapil Sibal, the country’s Minister for Human Resource Development, this is their answer to MIT’s $100 computer.

The Linux-based computer at first glance resembles an Apple iPad and features basic functions you’d expect to see in a tablet–a Web browser, multimedia player, PDF reader, Wi-Fi, and video conferencing ability. It has 2GB of RAM (but no hard disk, instead using a memory card) and USB ports and could be available to kids from primary school up to the university level as early as next year.

(Sources: telecentre.org, cnet news, bbc news)

The computer has been named “Nano” and has been developed through joint efforts of IISc Bombay and IIT Chennai. Although the computer itself has been developed through the interfacing of various off-shelf components yet it has been engineered to be rugged and all-weathered, suited for use by children, and can be termed as a very promising innovation. The use of opensource software and cheap hardware, memory cards instead of hard-disk, makes the promise of $10 (aimed target) somewhat plausible.
Full Story

A tale of five ambitious girls

Sidra, Amber, Tehreem, Hafsah and Zainab Sukhera are the ambitious girls studying in APS Quetta who, after completion of their metric exams, got a brilliant idea to use their time, ambition and intellect to use by making a difference in the society. They thought of making donations in SOS village but since there were summer vacations they couldn’t do much. They didn’t have a hefty saving of pocket money, nor were they inspired by teachers towards social work. Still they had a simple idea of establishing a Mini Tuition Club (MTC). The idea seems pretty old and banal, yet there it provides us with a food for thought! MTC is a remarkable example of the penetration power of media and advertisements. Telenor’s Karo Mumkin project with its simple yet emphatic advertisements aired on all TV channels relating to some (hypothetical) Baluchistan university making it compulsory for students to teach other students as a degree requirement to change Pakistan, might seem like a cliché’ at first (even I thought of it as a cliché’ till I got to see its impact through MTC), yet it does stimulate the thoughts of our youth to direct their energies towards bringing a change. Another example of a similar project is the “Kal ke liye aaj badlo” by Mobilink with their inspirational advertisement.

Getting back to our story of MTC, it’s not a matter of debate if these ambitious students got their inspiration from these advertisements or not, the only thing that matters is the inspiration from these advertisements coupled with their ambition led them to set up a simple tuition club. MTC was setup in C.M.H. Quetta (Baluchistan), utilizing the existing resources. The target students were those female students of mediocre families who aren’t that fortunate enough to get good teachers (as their schools aren’t that great). Since it was summer vacations, 11 students signed up for the club, due to transportation problems. The unique aspect of the club was the level of effort that was put into preparation of the lectures by the teachers (metric students).

 The teachers belong to the era of technology, it is the generation that has actually been using technology for getting education out of it, and they prepared the lectures through all sorts of online tutorials and didn’t resort to the text bookish lectures. They copied the elaborate diagrams on paper from their Google search results and gave the hand outs to the students. The administration of the hospital also provided the students with some computers to utilize them for learning. Using ICTs to improve the teaching methods (even in an indirect manner) is a success story of the technology. The students were mostly from urdu medium schools and therefore they couldn’t really get hold of the superb lectures on various science topics at online resources like Khan Academy. No worries, our crafty teachers were smart! They themselves listened to the online lectures and then compiled their handouts and lectures in accordance with it, translated into urdu, for easy comprehension of the students. The teachers also consulted various text books of O levels to use the illustrious pictures in those books for explanation, not to mention the detailed descriptions in theses better compiled books.

What these ambitious students did might not be truly ‘innovative venture’; however, they did make us realize that there are no barriers to people who want to make a change. They can bridge the digital divide by serving as a link between technology and the non computer literate student to bring the immense educational content, available online, to use.

What did these students have? They had an encouragement from their parents, knowledge of ICTs through the generation above them (brothers and sisters), an ambition to bring a change and an inspiration from TV Ads which presented to them the bigger dimension of small steps towards bringing a change and to make dreams a reality. These students have also given us a clear message that the ideas projected in TV advertisements aren’t a farfetched dream but in fact quite practical if implemented at grass root levels. They have a simple question to all readers…. “its summer vacations… Why don’t you too do the MTC”?

Author’s note: This simplistic idea is very replicable and workable. We can all really join hands to bring many new and interesting things to complement it. To teach the computer literacy the young students can be put onto the typing tutor, which will give them a leap start into the world of ICTs. It will prevent them from jumping into computer games (that might actually backfire and create problems for their parents if they insist on buying computers for themselves, which parents can’t afford). Competitions of typing can be held in students too! Next step can be to provide them with encyclopedias like Britannica etc on CDs for learning. Students of higher grade can be provided access to internet to learn and explore Wikipedia and other educational content in supervision. Every institute has some old PCs like Pentium 2 or 3s which can be given to the children for experimentation. Let us equip and teach our children to use ICTs to their learning and education.

For the Pictures here's 173 Pictures taken with my Evo, and here's another 251 taken by @rasharasem Camera.
As early as it gets, my roommate woke me up at 5:30am. Carelessly without even opening my eyes, I started calling my friends to make sure they’re all awake. Done so, hit the shower, wore my Nexus One TShirt that I got from GTUG Palestine Android Hackathon event, and headed out at 6:10am.
Meeting @moonitta at Abu Jassar square, waiting for 20+ minutes with no cars having five empty spots (We were going to pick up @hammamsamara, @rasharasem and Reham on our way). That was it to decide to go separate.  Got to Ramallah around 6:40 a 7-passenger van left to Qalandiya while I await the rest of the guys, once we got everyone, we headed to Qalandiya, got there around 7:00am.
Shocked by being shocked with a Typical snapshot of Qalandiya Israeli Checkpoint. Busy as hell! over 150 people (including some of us) where still outside the first entrance door. Great enough this didn’t take as much time as we thought it would. 30 minutes later we were inside the checkpoint (some took even more as they came a bit late).

Tried waiting for @zafersh for sometime, but he was stuck inside the business of the checkpoint. Had to leave without him.
@Tova_s from Mercycorps had already arranged the transportation for all of us with 2 vans waiting behind the checkpoint. That was a great help, so thank you @Tova_s.
While on the way, and at another Israeli checkpoint, called in Hebrew Moda’een, they told us to get off the vans and get inside to get rechecked all over again. This time was even terrible than the first time. Especially that I foolishly took my packbag with me carrying the laptop around. They spent like more than 20 minutes just inspecting my MacBook Pro! I mean what’s their to inspect! They kept flipping it around, hitting it around, putting it in differnet pauses. And I was dying inside seeing my full-month-payment-interning-in-Google Macbook get smacked out each time they get it back and forth inside the XRay Machine! It’s just a laptop for God sake! They even asked me to remove the battery and I was like “uh.. no can’t do! Battery is built in.”.

Anyhow, one more check on the IDs and Permits and we were out. This one was exhausting and kinda depressing, but once we were out the guys got their shiny smiles back and ready to Go Google. A bit of traffic jams and we were at the Avenue! Awesome!

Getting inside, registering our names and getting our badges printed out, to find out that there’s amazing amout of desert and light breakfast. And the first thing caught @rasharasem eyes were the Google IO Cupcakes! “Yay they’re here, we wanted some since the IO!”. And what caught @HammamSamara eyes was the free chips at the GTUG Booth. (And He actually spent most of his time there).One of the most enjoyable thing we found, at least me (@mkhatib7) and @rasharasem was what I like to call “Binary Hunting”. They had these binary strings printed all over the posters and on the badge. I was kinda hoping it would be something like Google IO QR Codes Treasures, but they were binary strings that translates to some stuff like: “Welcome to Devfest”, “Have a great Day”, “Session Room”, “Agenda”, “Hacker Launge”, “My Name is”...etcAt 10:00am the keynotes started out, starting with Tal as MC and a small speech Marissa Mayer, VP of search product and user experience. Followed her Brian Rakowski Product Manager of Chrome.
After the keynotes, we took a 10 minute break, and the parallel sessions started. There were two tracks one for Webmasters (Web) and one for Developers (Dev). We were so excited about the Chrome Web Store and Extensions, unfortunately we were out of the session in the first 5 minutes as the speaker was speaking in Hebrow rather than English. Luckily enough, the next two sessions were in English. Chrome Developer Tools and HTML5. After which was the dinner. Unfortunately most of us didn’t like the dinner and barely ate something. The food didn’t taste as good as it looks. After the lunch, it was time to do some hacking. The session were already started, but we found some spots to sit down on the lovely beanbags. I personally liked the hackathon, the bad thing was as @rasharasem puts it “it wasn’t challenging” hence most of the guys left a bit early and maybe didn’t even hack around with the code. But we kept coding, and we loved it, and didn’t leave until we got it working. 
We’ve met some cool guys there, @aloncarmel and @amir_harel enjoyed talking to both of you and hope to meet sometime soon again.At the end, we picked up our Chrome TShirts and headed to Jerusalem. The guys were too excited to visit the Dom of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque. Unfortunatelly not all of us made it there as at our way back the second van was returned and they had to even go to Ramallah rather than Jerusalem.
The 6 guys who made it to Jerusalem including me, went for a quick tour in Jerusalem, visited Al Aqsa and Dom of the Rock. And had a Kabab and Falafel Sandwishes while going home to Ramallah.
Thanks everyone who made this possible. And hope all enjoyed their time as much as I did. Now I leave you with my Awesome Google Cupcake along with my Super Cool Nexus One Loading TShirt! And my amazing Android-powered HTC Evo 4G mobile.