in search of light

Microsoft launches Internet Safety & Security Campaign in Secondary Schools

2009-03-17T11:13:00.000Z

Microsoft in partnership with the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Education, and Focus on Ghana, K-Inet, and AIESEC (the world’s largest student run organization) launched an Internet Safety & Security Campaign as part of its Unlimited Potential program which aims at facilitating information technology capacity building in Ghana and making students’ good cyber citizens.
According to Statistics on internet usage, Ghana ranks 10th in Africa on growth in internet usage but another disturbing statistics ranks the country 10th in the world as a top internet crime perpetuator. Ghana’s integrity and approval rating globally has thus suffered immensely as a result of the increasing rate of cybercrime reports alluding to the country. Several intelligence and editorial works have revealed an ever growing existence of what is termed “419 internet scam syndicates” or SAKAWA.
MISSFOG (Microsoft Internet Safety & Security Focus on Ghana) as the campaign is dubbed is a year’s long program that would benefit eighteen (18) different senior high schools from six (6) different regions reaching over 20,000 senior high school students in the country. This campaign would also be extended to four (4) University campuses in the country. Whilst workshops and seminars are held in the Senior High Schools, a major workshop and awareness on Technology’s approach to cyber crime would be held on University campuses to facilitate essay writing competitions at that level.

Speaking at the opening ceremony launch, Mr. Joshua Kwabla Kwashie, Country Director for Focus on Ghana stated that this is an important milestone in the education of Internet Security & Safety in second cycle institutions. “I believe much will be accomplished with this project. Students would benefit most as they use the internet often and they would play a vital role in this internet security & safety initiative”.

“As a non-governmental organization that envisions sustainable development of ICT in Ghana, we intend to expose young people to the effect of inappropriate contact, content and conduct on the internet whilst developing them on the use of ICT”, he said.

The Unlimited Potential Programme is a Microsoft initiative targeted at delivering relevant, accessible and affordable solutions in three interrelated areas that are crucial to developing economic opportunity - transforming education, fostering local innovation and enabling jobs and opportunities.
Citizenship Lead for Microsoft Anglophone West Africa, Mrs. Jummai Umar- Ajijola announced that MISSFOG is a collaborative effort to address the and we encourage all stakeholders to take action no matter how modest to discourage cyber crime and encourage positive Ghanaian leadership in cyber space. This is one of the many initiatives we have and intend to undertake in the country and would like to invite other interested stakeholders to come on board and make Ghana an internet safe country.

“Microsoft Anglophone West Africa under its Citizenship activities is working to ensure a sustained social and economic impact for everyone. We look forward to expanding the collaborative platform by integrating with ongoing and future legal and technical initiatives by other stakeholders”, she said.

Also speaking at the ceremony as the Key note speaker was the Minister for Education, Hon. Alex Tetteh - Enyo. He commended Microsoft on its numerous activities in the country for the last five years in fostering education, improving the use of ICT and building a better future for the young people of Ghana .

“The Ministry of Education and the government of Ghana pledges its continuing support to this initiative. This government recognizes the importance of Internet usage in education and through this collaborative effort with Microsoft is bound to change the way the youth engages with technology in Ghana ”, he emphasized.

The economy of Ghana is bound to fall if organizations and other stakeholders do not take action in helping the Ministry of Communications and the government integrates information technologies into the activities of the society and also harness the full potential for effective development, the Minister of Communications Honorable Haruna Iddrisu, said.

By the end of the year, Microsoft hopes that it can expand its partnerships in driving this campaign and reach many more students across the country.
Microsoft in its sustainable strategy to ensure that this campaign reaches almost all senior high school students presently and in years to come would be creating Microsoft –Keep Internet Safe (MS-KIS) clubs in Senior High Schools within the country.

-end-

For more information please contact:
Jummai Umar-Ajijola at jummaiu@microsoft.com
Or Joshua Kwabla Kwashie at info@fogghana.org

For editorial contacts only:
Victoria N’dee Uwadoka at i-victou@microsoft.com

CuteLibrary finally goes open source

2008-10-30T16:39:00.002Z

Like I promised in my previous post, I have finally uploaded cutelibrary on sourceforge.net, this is my first true open source application and intend to put in all i've got. The current release is what i call concept release, this is like a preview or review release, not meant for production, its just to get things started.

Visit the project home at http://cutelibrary.sourceforge.net/

CuteLibrary '08 - My First Real Rails App

2008-10-29T13:37:00.002Z

For sometime now I have been trying to learn Ruby on Rails, personally for the pursuit of knowledge. I have never had time to really do enough learning until a couple of weeks ago when a friend requested i developed an application to manage is small video rental shop. I told myself why not take this oppotunity and master Rails, and it turns out I am more in love with Rails than ever. It took only 4 days to fully develop the application.

I am planning to make is open source, I have already requested a project for that on sourceforge and once its approved i will post the notice, keep those fingers crossed...and Oh! Its called CuteLibrary '08

Fixing annoying RAILS warning console message

2008-10-17T12:29:00.004Z

Note: This applies to Mac OS X, but I hope you can relate it to other OSs

Anybody who has updated to the latest RAILS version 2.1.1 will notice a warning about a deprecated function

Gem::SourceIndex#search support for Regexp patterns is deprecated /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rails-2.1.1/lib/rails_generator/lookup.rb:211:in `each' is outdated

Although this is nothing more than just a warning message, it could be very annoying to a developer sometimes.

To suppress this warning, Open this source file

/Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/source_index.rb

add # to the beginning of line 260 and 261 to comment out the warning message and save the file

ChromiFox shows the "SUPERNESS" of Firefox

2008-09-22T09:49:00.003Z

I must admit the Google chrome browser has one of the sweetest interfaces a browser could possibly ask for. I was doing my usual early morn research when I came across ChromiFox a firefox theme that mimics the Chrome Browser, this is beautiful, it supports Firefox 3 on Mac OS X, Windows & Linux, what more can you ask for?

Interspire Email Marketer 5.0 Cracked

2008-08-26T11:55:00.002Z

Surely Interspire's lastest email marketing web application is one of the best I have personally used so far if not the best. I remember I developed a keygen 2 years ago to generate licenses for SendStudio 2004 and NX including FastFind and the others.

I sent the company an email suggesting ways of better implementing the validation class, honestly its not a problem if they hosted the application themselves, that way they are the only people who can see thier sourcecode, but selling it out is a different ball game.

I suggested they rewote the license validation class in C or C++ and rather loaded it as the third party module, they can further even put core dependent functions in there so that the whole system breaks down once people try to play around with it.

Rather i saw a base64_encoded class, what dumb move was that? Anyway the validation was slightly different from the old ones and a bit complex, but with patience you can even see the heart of an ant.

I have developed a license maker as a prove-of-concept to show that there is still weakness in that area for such a great product. Click Here to view

Introducing SQL Buddy – Web based MySQL administration

2008-08-24T15:32:00.001Z

This is so far the simplest lightest most elegant web application that anybody can use to manage MySQL databases. Its open source too, Click Here to visit the website for more information and lastest downloads.

Bypass DockChanger Usage Limit

2008-08-20T02:49:00.003Z
Dockchanger is an application that allows you to change the appearance of Mac OS X Leopard Dock. Its really a great application, my frustrations came to light when I had exhausted my usage limit. After doing through the system to see what can be done I came across a plist file that changed everything. The steps are outlined below
1. Open ~/Library/Preferences/com.whimsplucky.dockchanger.plist by double clicking on it or with your favourite Plist File Editor. 2. Find and change this line in the property list "changecount", change the value to some big negative value, I used this on my "-500". Meaning I have 500 + 10 tries left, SWEEEET!.
Hope you enjoyed it.

14 Ways to Learn From Creative Programmers

2008-08-12T00:40:00.000Z

The common stereotype for programmers is this: nerdy, pocket-protector wielding, and very, very boring. One doesn’t typically link a programmer as a creative individual. However, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Working with code is one of the most creative jobs one can have. Programmers have to balance two very different worlds: a world of structure and a world of imagination. They create abstract concepts using very structured programming languages (like PHP or Java). It’s not an easy task. Programming is actually a great exercise in creativity. Here are a couple reasons why:

Programming gives ultimate control. Creating something from nothing is possibly the best example of creativity. The ultimate control over software or web site that a programmer has is perfect for taking the application to any direction that they wish.
Many ways to do one thing. Programmers have to essentially build a framework for the web site. They’re laying the foundation for something that, up until that point, is just an idea. The programmer uses a wide palate of tools and methods to find

Programmers are a great example of thinking outside the box because programmers can actually create the box. Here are 14 ways to Learn From Creative Programmers.

1. Learn a new language
2. Start from the ground up
3. Question everything
4. Do it for fun
5. Never stop testing ideas
6. Find a passion
7. Master your tools
8. Start making abstract associations
9. Think of structure as a tool, not a limitation
10. Don’t rule anything out until you try it.
11. Always look for a simpler and more elegant solution.
12. Don’t be afraid to build off the code of others.
13. Don’t be afraid to collaborate.
14. From the very basic, create the beautiful.

Is this your idea of a Hacker ?

2008-05-20T11:19:00.001Z
My idea of a hacker is not those so called nerds who just crawl around secrity systems. Just as a thief who breaks into a house does not neccessarily need to be an achitect, so are these so called hackers. They just dig into one aspect of softwares and that is security. The world is sometimes funny. we pay much attention to distruction and fail to notice those who build. Its very funny how music moves so fast thesedays, people downloading here and there, people storing thousands of tracks on a single PC with a small hardrive, many players have evolved bcos of audio. Now the focus is not the audio or the track, its the format, MP3.

I always call such inventers hackers. look at the compression ratio as compared to WAV. Do you have any idea the mathematics involved in this? Do you know how many years the inventer spent to get it to this stage. MP3 has brought alot of ideas into music. a wav file format of about 40mb will be about 4mb in MP3 format and still retain the same quality and even add more stuff to the file like cueing,pictures etc.

Read this if you wanna know the inventer http://inventors.about.com/od/mstartinventions/a/MPThree.htm. People who invented cryptographic algorithms, high class algorithms, they are the ones that should be called hackers and not these punks who only use some of these algorithms to do things of ill nature.

Open Source and the African Programmer

2008-05-20T11:06:00.003Z
Open Source is really a big thing these days, from software giants to individual developers, nobody can really turn a blind eye on the milestone Open Source is making and will continue to make.

My question here is, why are too few developers in Africa involved in Open Source? Its not easy to understand this problem when you have not been a developer in Africa. Too many to these developers are highly under paid and they continually struggle to make ends meet, this forces them into only working to get a better standard of living. I am a developer myself and I am too familiar with this situation, we sometimes undertake projects that is highly below our skill and talent, yet you see us working on such projects only because we are too underpaid.

Back to the issue at hand, this is why most of these developers hardly get the time to partake in open source projects, making free software is just not what a typical programmer in Africa has in mind.

My believe is that, until the African Programmer is better rewarded, this problem will continue to linger on.

Farewell Guido Sohne

2008-05-20T10:34:00.002Z
Its a mystery that I will spend a life time trying to solve. Guido Sohne was somebody I aspired to become like, he was not only an excellent programmer but an accomplished person. Guido was so deeply rooted in knowledge and he was a very generous person, shared his knowledge wherever is went. I am gonna miss you soo much pal, may your soul rest in perfect peace.

Posting Blog Articles via Desktop Applications

2007-12-30T14:23:00.000Z
Life with the computer is really getting easy by the minute. I know most people already know there are applications out there that support posting articles to your blogs without actually going to the blogsite.

Actually this is my first article via a blog editor (Gnome-Blog)

Here are a few:

Gnome-Blog, Blogtk, Drivel.

Cheers!

The world is out of order (any hope?)

2007-12-06T13:28:00.000Z
When I listen to music or watch TV, i like to get inspired, motivated and pushed to go higher, these days all I see is sex related. Where are we going, what is the world becoming? Sometimes its almost an irony when I see some poor folks and hustlers jumping and singing along when a rapper is busy bragging about his chains, women, money and how much cocaine his lungs can take, damn! whats the BIG idea!

Thats why i stick to emcees like immortal technique, Nas, 2pac, Notorious BIG, Common, Bob Marley they are the ones who enlighten our minds, they are the ones who remind us what reality really is, they are the ones who tell us that it's good to fantasize sometimes but is better to face reality all the time.

I once saw this show on TV, BIG Brother, what the fuck is this? A live porn telecast on TV channels under a cloth-name BIG Brother, and the world is so busy looking at a group of nobodies living in a house just like everyone else does on this planet, my God!

Looking at the way the whole world moves and how majority of people are influenced by irrelevant things, I finally understand why the best are always few, why the very strong ones at the top are so small, its because they pay attention only to the important details.

Someday when I am stupidly dusted, I can sing alone with 50 Cent on Candy Shop and brag about my women, my cars and my money, but for now, I am sticking to 2pac, immortal technique and the like.

Writing a Performance Report

2007-12-06T13:17:00.000Z
My Boss asked me to write a performance report on one the applications we developed for a client of ours. Actually its our Internet Banking Application, ibankplus re branded CALNet for our client.

First I was like eeem.... ok, then a few minutes later I was sitting and thinking about where to start and where to end. Man, this was even more than coding (laughs). Then it hit me, a journey of a thousand miles starts with... we all know what happened next.

Now I am almost through with it, typing the whole thing with Open Office Writer, this is actually my first time of using this application fully like this, i must admit i like it, the only thing I will like the developers to fine tune is the fonts, its kinda rough.

I will move it to MS Office to do more designs there after the whole thing is completed.

Inspiration on Rails

2007-12-04T12:26:00.000Z
If you have ever witnessed a professional ROR (Ruby on Rails) developer, you will be quickly blown by the lightening speed things are done. Man! I had the oppotunity to see a friend Guido Sohne (One of the illest programmers to hit Africa) whiles he was coding in rails, i was blown, this inspired me to quickly pick-up some free Rails pdfs online and begin learning it on my own, a few hours into my first day of self-tutorials i realized i should have learn't Ruby 2 years back, the code is stupidly simple and clean, a few lines could bring down the walls of Jerico.

I will encourage every web application developer to try ROR. Its awesome, its features is beyound the scope of this blog, for more details go to http://www.rubyonrails.org/

Becoming a creative application developer

2007-11-09T14:50:00.000Z
Every programmer trives to become better & better as the years pass by, most of us become amazed at the things we can do now and we look back and we have no regrets. They are days when you really wanted to give it all up, they are moments when you have really great ideas but could not find a way to implement it correctly or not at all.

I believe what makes some of us creative is the fact that we constantly research whats going on in our circles, look at other applications and get ideas. We are also patient enough to implement good ideas right (believe me, I have spent two years trying to understand some codes). Creative developers know when to borrow a third party code and get the work done, we know when to get the wheels reinvented and when not to. We know the difference between gimics and real stuff. Simplicity is key too.

You must try and go through your old codes and get functions to work better and faster, checkout for redundant codes, look out for new ways of implementing a routine. I believe this practice keeps your intelligence and logics constantly double edged sharp. This helps you to create new applications faster, better and lesser in bugs.

Above all, constantly learn.

Are we seeing change in focus?

2007-11-09T14:35:00.000Z
Just a few years down the Microsoft & Linux roads, we were constantly choked with news about how user friendly Windows was and how secure Linux on the hand was. Today I believe this trend is changing, mostly due to the fact that users of both OS Platforms are becoming bored with the one sidedness of theses OS's, that is windows being user friendly but lacks security, and Linux on the other hand being secure but so difficult to use.

I know the trend is changing now, as you can see microsoft is now more concerned about the security of windows than ever, there is more news on the security of Windows Vista than how user friendly it is (don't get me wrong, Vista is highly user friendly). Our Hardcore Linux on the other hand is trying show thier firendly side with the release of some eye candy addons for linux that will even make an iMac user jealous. Compiz & Beryl are some of the eye candy addons for linux that can make a difference. Ubuntu Linux is an example of a fairly easy to use Linux distribution.

I think in all, I must comend both developers of these OS's that they are doing a great work, trying to bring together the best of both worlds.

Simplified CAPTCHA SourceCode

2007-11-09T14:13:00.000Z
I would like to start be passing all the credits to Rodney Amato a developer at Interspire who gave a whole lecture on CAPTCHA with his article. His article is so useful and easy to understand. It was coded in way to allow you to add your fonts into a separate folder and the background images into another folder and the code just randomises them together with the characters. Its really cool. I just corrected one minor oversight in the original code, If you read the original article you'll notice i have a comment there. Download File

Quick but unclean way to create MS Excel File

2007-11-09T14:05:00.000Z
Ever wanted to export data into Microsoft Excel Format from any programming language ?. Well there is a dirty way to do it, and it works just fine. Try to export the data into HTML Table tags and save the file with a .xls extension, Phew! we are done.

PHP on Rails

2007-06-28T08:19:00.000Z
With all the jumbo jambo about ruby on rails lately, php programmers have been waiting for something similar until CodeIgniter came along. Man! this framework is great, the developer Derek Allard from Ellis Labs should be given a medal of honor. Even though i have not mastered codeigniter yet its just 2 days i have used it and i am already seeing its speed and easy style of completing complex programming tasks. Its supports almost everything php programmers might need in thier applications and more, from uploads, image manupulation libraries, sessions, validation libraries, database support for almost all the popular RDBMS, calendar libraries. The framework tries to use the Model-View-Control (MVC) approach. check out the site for yourself http://www.codeigniter.com . I hope we the uses try to comtribute some extra codes to make this framework a masterpiece & it needs a lot of publicity.

Becoming a super software developer

2007-03-01T13:52:00.000Z
Many people have asked, how can I become very good at programming? I tell you what, it all depends on you, the first question one must ask is that do I love developing softwares as a hobby or because I wish to enrich myself? If you wish to develop softwares to enrich yourself then this article is not for you. Why do i say this? To become a very good programmer one must have the ability to withstand a lot problems that comes with each new software you try to develop, one must be able to self motivate when times get rough, one must have a strong ability and skill to stay up for very long hours to get solutions to programmatic problems, one must even dream about coding when one is asleep (sometimes), one must be patient enough to grasp a lot, one must have a very good command over at least one OS, linux preferably, one must know what shell scripts, batch files, registry files, etc are. To become good at programming you must infact learn a lot of new things almost twice as fast as people in those fields. For example you want to develop a network software, you must have a networking background in order to achieve this, to develop a payroll software you must know some level of accounting before you can achieve this, to develop a software to scan microscopic elements in the body, nobody must tell you to master biology, how can you develop a banking software when you have no knowlege in banking and finance? There is more to programming than we actually know, many books will just teach you constructs and few examples, but will fail to mention that you must master those fields you develop softwares for too. I have programming professionally for 6 years now, but i really started programming since age 16. Anybody who wants to develop softwares for the love of money will find it hard to go through these processes, its only those people who really love programming deep down in the heart. I am not trying to establish a theory that we should not make money from programming, but can tell the difference between a flashy footballer and a real footballer. Many people are also not patient enough to master coding with time, i remember back in the days when i downloaded source codes, i was like man! can i ever read this, can i be as good as these codes look. but a few years down the road I am even correcting those codes i use to marvel at, I even develop security codes to fix flaws and the future I know hold limitless possibilities. Practice they say makes perfect, we are so much in love with becoming excellent software developers and yet we find it impossible to even sit for 3 hours at least and try some codes. In the programming world nothing there is no room for fantasies, you either know it or you are out, every thing is binary. We must also develop the ability to see big problems as a huge chunk of small problems and attack them bit by bit, we must be able to think outside the box. Its also very important to know your strengths and weaknesses, as the popular saying goes "know your strength and know your enemy". I have my own weaknesses and strengths, dont be in a rush to solve things that are above your head, believe me, it will come around one day, it took me about 2 years to crack certain codes, yeah!! 2 years!! and when i finally did, I had learnt more than the code I cracked. Have a genuine love for solving your own coding problems, you can get help from a better programmer but dont make it a habit, this way you learn a lot of new things whiles trying to solve one thing. I use to code about 10 lines of code to complete one task, now i can reduce the lines to about 3 and still do the same task and even more effienciently. You must forgive me if this article does not follow any style of writing, I wrote it straight from the head and did not have time to rearrange anything. Let me sum up some of the points here.
To become a good software developer you must
Have total command of computer usage
Read a lot of computer related books
Have have a clear cut vision of what type of softwares you wish to develop
Be very patient
Don't get personal when you are critisized
Always take on things that challenge you
Download and learn from open source softwares
Read alot of source codes from other people
Always have a positive thinking mind
See all problems as a huge pile of small problems
Have a habit of getting a solution no matter what
Must be prepared to sacrifice a lot, especially time for your girlfriend.
Have a complete picture of how you want to be 10 years from now
Have your own computer, speed and size is not an issue, just get one for yourself
Get some level of professional training in programming, will speed you up.
I will be updating this article sooner or later again... Please feel free to add your comments