One too many mornings

October 13, 2006

Africa, in self pity?

Filed under: Politics — jp @ 12:22 pm

Joachim’s colleague reckons that Africa has been wallowing in self pity for the last hundred years.
The thing with Africa is that European, Western, and Asian superpowers are still in a semi-colonial role in the contintent by propping up dictators who give them the valuable resources while keeping the average folk, under educated and poor.

With Germany and Japan after the war they *were* helped back on their feet, to an extent that German economy was the powerhouse of Europe by the seventies. The “aid” given to African countries is more or less taken back in loan repayments anyway. That doesn’t really count as help in my book.

Access to education is probably the most important thing for Africa rather than hard cash. Try selling that to a starving / poor family though.

All too easy for corrupt leaders to blame Europe, to get support for themselves.

Thought-provoking but ultimately a pretty condescending view of Africa.

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October 12, 2006

Nursery

Filed under: House — jp @ 5:37 pm

The saga that is decorating the nursery continues although I hope this is final chapter. Rather than plain white the walls will be a more calming yellow/straw colour, and I’ll get come coving to tidy up the ceiling. Once that is doen there is fireplace and skirting to strip and repaint. Couple of weekends should see it.

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gateway 3.0

Filed under: Work — admin @ 5:29 pm

In the great tradition of things being done properly by version 3.0, (windows, gcc, debian etc thanks for that Terry), it give me great pleasure to release version 3.0 of the tvgateway firmware. This brings in tons of fixes and usablity and performance improvments, support for decrypting channels and just general tidying up of the code base. I’m proper proud of this one, and I hope there is not some nasty bug lurking there once it gets in the field. To that end it is going to be tested at a few beta sites.

This is the first project I have taken from start to finish in quite a while as I tend to have to move onto new products and leave the final polishing to others. It is also finished just in time for my impeding departure on paternity leave, which should happen anytime soon.

October 2, 2006

Technorati?

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 2:26 pm

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