A few days ago a friend of mine sent (mass emailed, but he’s forgiven) some detail about his latest upcoming philanthropic trip to the Himalayas. He has let me reproduce his email verbatim here.

Yup it’s me and I have some news,

I am off on a small journey to the Himalayan Mountains in a couple of months and I need a little help. I plan to spend 3-4 months (maybe more if need be) in a rural village in Nepal doing some volunteer work with the school there, and also around the village itself. I will be working in conjunction with an existing small Canadian charity that helps with the running of the school. The village itself is far away from any road let alone a town and thus is self reliant on most aspects of daily life.

My role will involve helping the School by teaching staff and children on various aspects of technology. I plan to try and improve the current network and provide more exposure to computers/internet to the people which they can user for their respective benefit. I also will be involved in the wireless connectivity project which aims to connect as many of the villages to the Internet and thus the rest of the world. Might even teach a bit of Maths/English if I feel able enough

There is plenty to do, but like all things they cost money. I can fund my trip myself and my stay there, but there are requirements for resources like Books, Computers, Wireless equipment and all that costs money. Since it is a volunteer project I want to be able to help build their current capacity to develop by providing useful assets. This is why I am approaching you to help me do the best I can for the students and people of this village while I am there. If you are keen on giving a small contribution it will be much appreciated, remember no contribution is too small.

Click on the Link and it will take you my Volunteer Site.

http://www.anukoolsathu.webs.com/volunteeringinnepal.htm

Sincerely appreciate your help,

Anukool

So inshort, he’ll be volunteering with with an NGO helping to run a school in a village called Nangi. Nangi is located at 7400feet above sealevel and has no access to roads, a 9 hour (at best case) hike is the fastest way of getting there. This NGO, Himanchal Education Fund is run by a local Nepalese teacher and has been featured on the BBC years ago.

Several mates who have been to the Himalayas have all been back to help and volunteer. There must be a certain magic about the place and I am keen to take it all in when I visit towards the start of next year. And it’ll be extra brilliant as i’ll have my brother who would have been there for a couple of years by then to show me the sights.

Back in February 2008, IBM decided to include what previously were optional licenses right into the DS3000 family base unit (with no increase to the cost of the DS3000 base unit). These were the DS3200, DS3300, DS3400 Software Feature Packs (39R6540, 42C2142, 42C2143) and the DS3000 EXP3000 Expansion License (39R6537).

This means that out-of-the-box a DS3200, DS3300 and DS3400 will now include:

• 4 storage partitions.
• An attachment license for 1-3 EXP3000 expansion units.
• Windows and Linux on Intel Host Attach License.

Now note that this is effective from a firmware level of v06.70.23.00 and newer. By including these in the base unit, they are now no longer orderable items, which means that existing customers can enable these changes by downloading new firmware on or after 2/12/2008. Here’s a handy link to the support site for the DS3400 to get you started.

Its well known that I have an unhealthy obsession for mobile / small form factor gadgets; an ipaq rx, nokiaN95, iPodTouch and recently the EeePC can almost always be found on my person plus a medley of devices scattered around my room.

So I was especially excited when Intel offcially (finally) annouced their new Atom procs. As I understand it, in addition to the CPU packaged are integrated graphics with HD video playback, HD audio plus other I/O capabilities on the radio front.

Youtube has several video’s of devices based on prototypes of this proc being demo’ed at trade shows. Pretty darn niffty!

All exciting technology, but I have a feeling I wont be satisfied until direct neural interface and machine-human implants become a solid reality The closest that ive had to this experience was having some good geeky whiteboard pow-wows with the bio-medical research team … and as I said before AL, im putting my handup to be a subject, we dont really need ethics approval for human tests do we

Has it really been 10 years since Mozilla officially launched!

March 31, 1998 is the date that Mozilla was officially launched. It’s the date the first Mozilla code became publicly available under the terms of an official open source license and a governing body for the project — the Mozilla Organization — began its public work. It’s always been known in Mozilla parlance as “3/31.” We’ll be celebrating Mozilla’s 10 year anniversary throughout 2008.

To remember this jwz has brought the Mosaic Communications Corporation website back online.

home.mcom.com a snapshot of that web site from 21-Oct-1994.
mosaic.mcom.com a snapshot of that web site from July 1994.
He’s also hosting his personal collection of old Mosaic browsers.

Very retro, all goodness. When I started on this post I was going to go back several years and write a bit about what it was like surfing the then very fresh ‘internet’ in the early 90s, the BBS and Brunet’s intranet pages but then decided that I should be spending this time reading the posts and articles by technology connoisseurs who were knee deep in both the development and politics of that age.

What about the next 10years?

The challenges before us are great. But the opportunity is many times larger. We have the ability to affect aspects of Internet architecture and user experience. We have the organization, we have the frameworks we need to work in, we have the voice. And most important of all, we have the Mozilla community. The many thousands of people actively engaged, and the multiples of that who support Mozilla goals and offerings.
It’s our world. Let’s make it great. Here’s to another 10 years!
- Mitchell Baker, Chief Lizard Wrangler

Hats off to the Open Source Hackers who have rocked ‘Mozilla’ to the success it is today.

The Storage Networking Industry Association will be having their “SNIA ANZ Storage Academy 2008” on the 26th of March at the Langham Hotel in Auckland.

Seems that this year, the focus will be on virtualisation technologies. Now virtualisation although somewhat a ‘fad’ term amongst vendors recently in NZ, it is a term that has been around since the mainframe days of old. In its purest form, i suppose you can summise virtualisation as the hiding of detail. In the context of Storage sub-systems, vendors these days perhaps use this term rather loosely? So should the term Storage Virtualisation only be applied to sub-systems (/devices) that abstract all layers in the storage software and hardware stack?

SNIA is a vendor neutral and standards driven organisation … so it will be interesting to listen to the presentations delivered around this topic.

Entrance to this event is free (and I hear that lunch and refreshments are included). So if you do decide to attend, come on over and stop me for a chat. I’ll try keep my tweets updated as to my whereabouts.

So, i was meeting up with some friends the other day, and one of them left me puzzling over a simple “you’ll love your phone that much more soon” statement.

And now with todays announcement im feeling rather giddy. (thanks HGK)

Nokia and Kordia have teamed up to bring Nokia Nseries users access to free wireless internet at locations across New Zealand.
Simply visit a Wi-Fi hotspot, run the WLAN Wizard application and select the Kordia Metro WI-FI access point. Then hop online and surf to your heart’s content.
This service is available to all WiFi enabled Nokia handsets, purchased in New Zealand through an authorised retail store.

Kordia’s coverage shows some rather sparse areas, but to date ive been able to connect to their wifi spots in most places ive visited in the Auckland CBD. Their speed and reliabilityis quite sufficient - NJ and I were able to do some rather sucessful demos of Second Life over a Kordia wifi connection (thank you to the Kordia rep who let us on).

Im just about to rush off and see how things work out … watch my twitter for feedback.

(after thought: i do not know if that wifi connection were we on while demo’ing SL was open to the general auckland public or created specifically for that particular event)

Yes, I havnt been updating this weblog all that much have I? Shame on me!

Since my last update quite a few things have been happening … worthy of mention here? Perhaps.

I suppose when writing for a medium that suggests a slightly more structured approach, one wonders about the actual value of the content. One of the ways to know is by actually writing more and with feedback, fine tune content.

edit: By ’structured approach’ i imply one that reads more as an article as opposed to an impulsive twitter stream.

There has been lot going on … and ive been filing things away to write about. But a very sad event took place this beautiful morning here in Auckland.

Sir Edmund Hilary.

Sir Ed is best known around the world for his conquest of Everest. Recently I had the chance to talk to Peter Hilary at a seminar (thanks AB for the invitation) … and the impact the Hilary family have had on the people around the Himalayas’ is simply profound. Peter spoke very passionately about his father and its evident from those who knew him well, Sir Ed was not only a great adventurer and philanthropist (and one of my heroes) but a solid Kiwi Bloke.

I think my mind is still twrilling to write more. Our thoughts are with the Hilary family at this time.

“Well George, we finally knocked the bastard off.”
Hillary’s first words, to lifelong friend George Lowe, on returning from Everest’s summit

Back at work today … and on Windows after close to 10 days of solid Linux and MacOSX use. This is quite a rare occurrence for me as even on the best of days I find myself, even for a small amount of time on a Windows machine. For some reason things just seem clunky and I miss my multiple desktops

At some point during the firework display that brought in the New Year for Auckland … i found myself thinking that I really should maintain just one place for my rambles.