Category Archives: Cities and places

Stories of places.

Malmö tech city

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A summer’s rainy morning in Malmö.

I’ve just hopped off the morning train from Copenhagen, clutching a crumpled paper that I just finished. I got wind of it through the NoSQL Summer reading club’s Malmö instance.

On the way into the office, I saw my FOSS friend T, waiting for a car. Handing him the printed copy of the paper, I enjoyed a few minutes of database banter before heading into the building.

This is how I want my tech community to be like. Present, alive, and friendly. Thanks!

You can follow nosqlsummer on Twitter. Below is their pitch.

A seasonal, worldwide reading club for databases, distributed systems & NOSQL-related scientific papers.

A NOSQL Summer is a network of local reading groups, that will decipher & discuss NOSQL-related articles, from late June to early September 2010. Each group sets its own meeting pace (usually once a week or once every two weeks) and select which papers are up for discussion.

At every cycle, members read the selected paper at home and then meet up for an hour or so to discuss, debate and answer their own questions.

We then encourage you to produce an annotated version of the paper, or short summary that we can then publish here for the rest of world to peruse.

Please note that, in most cities, you do not need to sign up to attend NOSQL Summer meetings. You just need to have read the paper planned for the week by your local chapter and show up at the designated meeting place!

Feel free to skip a meeting or jump in at any time. We’re trying to make this low-maintenance and flexible, for everybody to get a chance to learn more about a fuzzy concept that’s here to stay.

Kiswahili Add-on for Firefox

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Kiswahili (SW) Language Pack, an add-on for Firefox.

A while ago I joined a Tanzanian mailing list called eThinkTank Tanzania, which sports 1200 subscribers. It’s my source of cool East African IT news. I’ll try to republish good stuff here, and in my Delicious bookmarks feed. Some stories need some background, so I’ll try to frame them here, on the blog.

Recently, at Hacknight, Sebastian Büttrich held a talk about Tanzania and its possibility of getting Internet access everywhere. Lots of work is being done, and things happen – like the undersea cables – but Open Source hackers are needed. “Billing software, not very sexy to Open Source hackers, is needed.” Perhaps it is possible to create it, but will we be able to make it fun? Under which circumstances is it fun to build billing systems?

Full disclosure: as a kid of 11-13 years old, I lived in Tanzania, at a Swedish boarding school for children of missionaries. My parents ran a printing press for Pingstmissionens U-landshjälp, in the northern town of Arusha. Yes, that’s something like “Swedish Pentecostal Church Mission to Developing Countries… Aid” – er, my lingo-engine’s rusty in this summer heat.

Update: Via bjathr, I found DIY Mesh Guide from the Wireless Africa wiki.