Tim Keller

I’ve been rather quiet of late – here’s why: Our team at Umoya have been hard at work on supplying our uniti app to the National Disaster Management Centre for 2010.

In September 2009, we starting building Umoya’s next software platform using staffroom (our school management app) as a base. We distilled the framework down to its core, and called it the ChirpFramework (a reference to staffroom’s original name – ChirpSchool). We chose PHP on the front-end so that our developers could rapidly deploy new features, and MySQL on the backend as we understand its performance characteristics in staffroom. In between, we have some bits holding things together.

Since November we’ve been actively developing uniti – our unified collaboration app for business and government. Here’s some more about it:

DISASTER management centres around the country will use software developed for the World Cup to coordinate a multi-disciplinary, multi-sectoral approach to expected xenophobic attacks and their consequences.

The need to manage the risk of disasters during the World Cup prompted the Western Cape Disaster Management Centre to ask Cape Town ICT company, Umoya (www.umoya.net), to devise a web-based platform that has since streamlined emergency communications country-wide.

Known as “uniti”, the software helped more than 350 disaster management workers, including command and control centres, to share real-time information that provided up-to-the minute readiness to deal with any eventuality during the World Cup said Peter Beretta of Umoya.

“The National Disaster Management Centre has procured the program for operations in all provinces, where it is being used by Disaster Management themselves, as well as elements from the police, Red Cross and other government entities,” said Beretta

Jackson Rikhotso, Western Cape provincial deputy director responsible for disaster preparedness, said the “uniti” software “helps us to get accurate information for proper decision making”.

“It contributed to the smooth running of the World Cup,” said Rikhotso.

Hailing Uniti as a “major milestone”, Mlungisi Gongqa from the national Disaster Management Centre in Pretoria said: “For the first time in the history of national disaster management we are able to network with everybody across the country, and improve response time.

“We can report and analyse situations more quickly.”

Gongqa said on Friday: “We are already plugged into Uniti in all the provinces so it will be easy for picking up xenophobic incidents as they arise from municipality to municipality and from province to province.

“We will use Uniti to log in every incident of xenophobia, and will follow up on every one of them, no matter how small.”

Andre Harrison, also of Umoya, said: “Although Uniti was developed for the World Cup, it has legs beyond that. To help the country cope with attacks and their consequences, the system can be developed further to make it more specific for the needs that arise out of the displacement of people. As these events occur, the software is able to develop in synch with what is happening.”

Beretta said Uniti facilitated communication between line functions like police, ambulance and fire services, and was already being used by some district and local municipalities, including the City of Cape Town.

The management of refugee camps was being developed to link all the camps and their managers, who could communicate with each other easily and quickly.

“Camps that have the Uniti software will, because of their integrated communication, be able to register the refugees in and out of camps, keep full biographical details of displaced persons, and provide accreditation details of NGOs, social workers and people working in the camps.

“The software also facilitates the transferring of people between camps. It is able to link family members in different camps. Part of the software is a web presence that allows details of missing persons to be published on the website.

uniti’s core is the thousands of contacts it provides of individuals in all areas able to respond when disaster threatens.

“A centralised address book of all relevant disaster management, police, emergency services, defence force and fire department staff makes it possible to reach the relevant person when necessary,” Beretta said.

“Your data base gives you the name of the relevant individuals, contact details and photographs of each. All you need do is click on ‘call’,  and the program dials your landline or cell phone while calling the other person.”

The “uniti” system includes the ability to listen in on or join two-way radio talk groups, voice recording, situation report logs, a forum for text conversations, and a web intranet facility for posting alerts, updates and images. It also plots the recorded incidents using Google Maps.

“It is already being used daily for communication between Disaster Management and emergency services. The program allows everyone to know when and where anything is happening. We get several hundred entries a day from users.

“We have designed it so that it is mobile. You can access it from your cell phone or a laptop and it is rapidly-deployable anywhere because it is a hosted application and only requires access to the internet.”

It takes two hours to train someone to use the system, he said.

This evening, while Googling for something unrelated, I came upon a Twitter status page. I clicked through and thought nothing of it. Later I came back to the tab and the URL caught my eye: http://7920074.appspot.com. What?!

Am I missing something, or is Twitter testing their web interface on Google AppEngine? I seriously doubt it… I guess this is just some hacked up transparent redirect to twitter.com?

Just a short post today with a cool satellite pic of South Africa’s snow-capped peaks, courtesy of the awesome SAWDIS.

In early 2010, I had the pleasure of photographing our good friends, Aisling and Mathew, shortly after their engagement.

Mathew was my Best Man and Aisling was Amy’s bridesmaid at our wedding last December. We’re delighted to be fulfilling the same roles when they tie the knot on 25 September 2010.

[ Photoset on Flickr ]

Social Media and Your School

Join Umoya Web developer, Tim Keller, and Lanner House headmaster, Arthur Preston, to find out how you can build an online professional learning network, promote your school using Social Media, rethink how your students submit work, and understand what all these buzzwords like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and Weebly actually mean to you.

South African Principals’ Association, 19 May at 15:00, Norman Henshilwood High School.

Update: Arthur Preston has blogged some additional thoughts about this talk.

A seldom used, but incredibly useful, aspect of PHP is the ability to reference variables by name, based on the contents of a variable. Don’t worry if that sentence didn’t make sense to you. Let’s see an example:

$a = "hello";       // $a is "hello"
$$a = "world";    // Now $hello = "world"
echo "$a ${$a}"   // outputs "hello world"
echo "$a $hello" // also ouptuts "hello world"

This is useful in the situation that you need to access an object class variable at runtime. Let’s say we have three class variables:

$this->cycle_1_mark
$this->cycle_2_mark
$this->cycle_3_mark

At runtime, we have a variable $semester which holds the current semester. To it access it, we do something like:

$myObject = new Object();
echo $myObject->{"cycle_$semester_mark"};  // outputs the value for the substituted class variable

More on PHP.net:Variable Variables.

I like Windows Home Server a lot. It offers most of the features we need at home: central file hosting, backup to the cloud (using an addon), media streaming, and backup.

However, this morning I experienced an issue while trying to join a Windows 7 Professional computer to the Home Server.

During the installation of the Connector software (found at http://yourserver:55000) you are asked to enter the server administrator’s password. Strangely I was repeatedly told: “The password is incorrect.  Please retype your password.  Letters in passwords must be typed using the correct case.”

The solution took a while to find, but I eventually I came across a post by AMLane on the Microsoft forums that solved my problem.

1. Run secpol.msc (You’ll need Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate)
2. Drill down through Local Policies | Security Options
3. Find Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level
4. Set this to Send NTLM response only
5. Reboot the machine

I imagine that similar strange bugs in WHS will be dealt with in the upcoming Home Server 2.0 codenamed – “Vail”, now available for beta testing.

It was August 2005 and I bunch of us had gathered on someone’s Relto in Until Uru. The topic of the night was how we should go about starting a podcast for the Myst/Uru Community. Back then, the idea of a podcast was a little more foreign than today, and plenty of time was spent arguing about what the hand-crafted RSS feed should contain.

Fast forward almost 5 years and The Cavern Today, spurred on by the return of Myst:Online Uru Live (again), has decided to “reboot” and start at Episode #1 again after months of non-production. Have a listen to our latest episode entitled, Something Old, Something New.

My role since the beginning has been to looking after the servers, forum software, and website. this February, I began a major redesign of the website using Wordpress.

Initially, I was sceptical of Wordpress’ applicability to podcasting, but I was soon proven wrong. With the addition of a couple of simple plugins and a good theme, Wordpress can be a podcasting powerhouse!

A couple of tips for using Wordpress to podcast:

• Create and use categories from the beginning. In this way you’ll be able to publish multiple feeds, and therefore, multiple shows.
• Choose/Build a simple theme which shows off your content, gives the visitor easy access to an MP3 download, and offers an iTunes Subscribe button.
• Get a plugin to take away the audio-file management headaches. We use Blubrry PowerPress.
• Choose one of the many Twitter plugins for Wordpress to auto-tweet when you publish a new episode.
• Allow comments! The whole point of podcasting is to build and serve a community. Allowing comments means instant two-way communication with your community.

Happy podcasting!

Don’t sit on the bench, get to DevDays 2010 and score with us! Laduuuuuuma!!!!

It’s here! Microsoft DevDays is the premier developer event of the year and is all about learning, sharing and interacting with one another and having fun! DevDays 2010 brings you the best of current developer technologies, along with a preview of soon-to-be-released Microsoft tools and technologies.

I spoke at DevDays 2009 and had a blast. This year, I’ve been invited back to deliver two new talks:

• Getting started with Silverlight development
  Interested in Silverlight development but not sure how to get started? Learn the basics of Silverlight application development – the tools and fundamental concepts behind Silverlight. Find out how to re-use your existing .NET development skills to build exciting new applications. This session will focus on the fundamentals of Silverlight including layout, data binding, data access and styling.
• Open Source and Microsoft – Working Together
  Microsoft AND Open Source? What?! Come and learn how Microsoft platform works with open source platforms like PHP and Java form the server room and into the cloud. Come and learn how Microsoft is opening up and supporting open source development and technologies.

Find out more, and register at http://www.microsoft.com/southafrica/devdays/default.mspx

Most importantly, entrance is free! Please join us for a wonderful day of learning and networking.