Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category
uniti successfully deployed for the Soccer World Cup
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.
School kids – want to learn computer programming?
Calling budding programmers, developers and geeks!
An Oxymoron’s Guide to PHP on Windows
I had the privilege of speaking at SA Developer Cape Town last night. Twenty-something local geeks turned up to hear about how well the Open Source PHP language runs on Windows IIS, using FastCGI.
For the longest time, the utterance of “PHP” and “Windows” within the same sentence meant the speaker was either temporarily insane, or horribly misguided.
In ‘An Oxymoron’s Guide to PHP on Windows’ you’ll discover just how much the situation has changed in the past 12 months. Thanks to Windows Server, IIS7 and FastCGI, running PHP on Windows finally makes a great deal of sense. It performs admirably and facilitates integration with familiar Microsoft technologies like ASP.net and Silverlight.
Google Go
Google is touting its new Go language as a modern systems programming language which is expressive, concurrent, garbage-collected. Go takes the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python, and combines it with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++.
In its Go FAQ, Google explains the main motivations behind the project:
No major systems language has emerged in over a decade, but over that time the computing landscape has changed tremendously. There are several trends:
- Computers are enormously quicker but software development is not faster.
- Dependency management is a big part of software development today but the “header files” of languages in the C tradition are antithetical to clean dependency analysis—and fast compilation.
- There is a growing rebellion against cumbersome type systems like those of Java and C++, pushing people towards dynamically typed languages such as Python and JavaScript.
- Some fundamental concepts such as garbage collection and parallel computation are not well supported by popular systems languages.
- The emergence of multicore computers has generated worry and confusion.
Bold words from Google, especially considering the number of new languages which have come and gone over the years. Surely its too risky to put the corporate name behind the project? Not once you hear who’s on the team.
The project is being staffed by some serious Computer Science heavyweights: Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike (Unix Team, Plan 9 OS, UTF-8, Inferno), Ken Thompson (inventor of B – forerunner of C, UTF-8, shepherd Unix and Plan 9), Ian Taylor, Russ Cox, Jini Kim and Adam Langley.
Coming from a C/C++ background during my university days, my first Go experience felt quite nostalgic. I grabbed the source via Mercurial, compiled it in the Terminal, and configured some shell environment variables. What I was left with was a native Go compiler for my x64 architecture (6g) and a Go linker (6l). These are the recommended compilation tools until the GCC-based (gccgo) version catches up.
Installation on Snow Leopard
Before you follow these steps, you should have XTools installed. You should also be running Snow Leopard as your OS. These instructions should also work for 10.5 Leopard, but you may have to use GOARCH=386.
Environment
Go needs a couple of shell/environment parameters to be set prior to installation.
Add the following lines to your ~/.bashrc file:
export GOROOT=\$HOME/Go
export GOOS=darwin
export GOARCH=amd64
export GOBIN=\$HOME/bin
Now use the source command to apply those changes:
source ~/.bashrcNext we need to add the bin directory for Go, and map it on the system path:
mkdir -p $HOME/bin
echo "$HOME/bin" > go
sudo mv go /etc/paths.d/
eval `/usr/libexec/path_helper -s`
Source Code
The Go team are currently using Mercurial to handle the source code. If you don’t already have it installed, you can install it quickly and easily with the following command:
sudo easy_install mercurialI encountered an issue whereby UTF-8 was not set as my locale language type. While some will not experience this, I had to force this by adding the following lines to your ~/.profile file:
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
Adjust according to your locale, if neccesary. Big thanks to ricafeal for this.
This will use the Python easy_install tool to install the mercurial package on your system. Once complete, its time to checkout a copy of the Go source code:
hg clone -r release https://go.googlecode.com/hg/ $GOROOTThis will place a full directory of Go source in the directory defined in ~/.bashrc as $GOROOT
Installation
All the Mac OS X particulars are done and you can follow the standard installation procedure. That includes:
cd $GOROOT/src
./all.bashIf you get a message stating…
--- cd ../test
N known bugs; 0 unexpected bugs
… you should be good to go (oh the puns).
Hello World
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
fmt.Printf("hello, world\n")
}
To compile:
$ 6g hello.go
$ 6l hello.6
To execute:
$ ./6.out
hello, world
You may also want to check out Jeremy’s great little script which lets you compiler (6g) and ink (6l) in one, well, go.
More Go later this week!
Silicon Cape idea – Develophpers Cape Town
I was privileged to get to spend the day with some of the brightest entrepreneurs and founders in Cape Town at the Silicon Cape launch. It was incredible to see how quickly founders Vinny Lingham (of Yola) and Justin Stanford (of 4Di Capital and FireID) have been able to bring their vision of a Silicon Valley in the Cape to light. The event included big hitters like former Mail & Guardian Online GM Matthew Buckland, South African billionaire Johann Rupert, Western Cape Premier Helen Zille, and Dr Ramphela Mamphela.
The essence of the day can be consumed via various news sources, but ultimately three goals were exposed:
- To develop a digital innovation hub
- To give entrepreneurs a kick-start
- To set up a Cape VC fund for start-ups
The main take-away for me was an issue raised by a delegate during the open-floor panel discussion: we have a drastic skills-shortage in the local tech start-up space. While the Silicon Cape may foster a community of entrepreneurship, we can’t do much without high quality, skilled employees. The majority of our bright minds are picking up corporate bursaries after High School, and moving straight into black suit and tie after 4 years at University. If we’re going to have great startups in the Silicon Cape, we need great programmers, sysadmins and techies who are available for employment.
With that in mind, I’m going to kick off a little group around this. I think it should be called “Develophpers Cape Town” – a community for PHP devs, aspiring and experienced. Let’s see if we can get some discussion going in the comments here. What is needed most: training, social geek-out events, hackathons, etc?
It is clear to me, that the Cape is onto something really exciting and potentially powerful. Let’s be a part of it.
CSV to HTML
I produce websites for a lot of school’s in and around Cape Town. It’s something I started doing when I was in High School, and it’s kinda stuck.
Last night I received a Word document with pages of teacher’s names and email addresses for a website. As I looked at it I imagined the huge amount of time I was about to waste either in a WYSIWYG editor or copying and pasting HTML tags.
Then I remembered that I had a B.Sc and more than 2 brain cells. I moved the Word Table to iWork Numbers (Excel would have worked just as well), exported the file as a CSV document, pulled open Textedit and wrote a quick PHP-CLI script to suck in the CSV and output the relevant HTML.
Hope it’s useful to someone else out there!
#!/usr/bin/php $job: ".htmlspecialchars($name)."
n"; } ?>
