Jintha's-i

Meeting the Demand of Power through Alternative Power Sources

2010-07-21T07:23:00.001+02:00

The Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi proudly proclaimed that it provides power everyday all day long in its vision statement which it has since been forced to change. In the background of its vision the opponents to this vision statement claimed that the frequent power outages did not warrant the existence of this statement.
This was perhaps true albeit that a vision statement should point to a future state that an organization wants to be at, and ESCOM was only pointing to this state. A vision can also be a state which may never be attained, but has to be strived for.
ESCOM faces a power demand of 360 Mega Watts and is only able to meet this demand with 240 Mega Watts hence the need for load shedding. With Malawi, being classified as the second largest growing economy, this demand on electricity is only going to grow leading into more power shedding and thus further away from ESCOM’s vision.
The demand for power on ESCOM also leads to other administrative issues, one of which is late connection of Power for different projects. An ESCOM applications officer in Zomba, pointed out that it takes up to 2 months in order to have power connected. This might sound worse, but I have heard, stories of people waiting up to 1 year and even beyond without connections. While most people are worried with this situation some have decided not to stay idle and have resorted to using solar energy in the absence of ESCOM power. This is mainly being used for household power. With the economic boom (2nd largest growing economy in the world), it suggests that there will be demand for industrial power. This means that the power has to be harnessed from somewhere somehow. Explored options have been: Interconnection to Mozambique : Deemed unsustainable because of high costs and donor dependence.
Use of power saving devices : Energy saving light bulbs, recently reduced. They are still more expensive despite the removal of duty on these bulbs.
Increasing capacity of Kapachira power plant – this is work in progress, by the time that this is completed, there will still be more demand than ESCOM can supply. (Making ESCOM still king in energy business)
The demand for power makes it evident that ESCOM will not meet its vision even after the options above. What is needed is power to the people. I don’t mean deregulating energy market, because this can see organizations such as ENRON emerge. Rather, the solution that people have discovered in the name of solar should be encouraged. In order to encourage this Solar energy devices should have their cost further reduced by removal of import hurdles. In addition to this, alternative power sources should be an available power option for most households. This will definitely reduce the power demand on ESCOM and hence balancing the power supply. Maybe other green power (in addition to hydro) will make ESCOM reach its vision.

Chaka Chabwino

2007-12-31T18:02:00.000+02:00

Wishing you all a prosperous 2008. Chaka cha Mayankho!

Malawi Constitutional Review - Malawi's Own English Dialect

2007-04-21T11:40:00.000+02:00

Taking into consideration my adoption of the queens dialect and the crimes committed in finding the right word to use when borrowing/lending to or from someone, i decided to install the queens dictionary, in order to minimise my crimes against her dialect. So i went to my trusted google and did a search on Ubuntu English Dictionary.

Well amongst the responses was "australian english dictionary". Then i said to meself, why do we have australian english dictionary. Pride maybe. The australians have pride. I imagine that maybe they had a master from great britain that taught them the queens language and came to a word they just pronounced the way they could.(I wish i knew that word; but in my motherland, i also align my pronounciations to my mother tongue!). So maybe let's say the instructor said "Be aggressive!", the aussies understood it as "be aggro!".

Well then with a pile of such customizations, to avoid bitting ones tongue off trying to say "aggressive", i would propose to the country's debate on a national language, to just have Malawian English.

Anyone knows that when i say "can you borrow me a pencil" i mean "can you lend me a pencil"
So maybe damn the queen's strictness and pump up Malawi's pride and have our own dialect of english.

"I am sinking" would be equivalent to "I am thinking"
"I was replacing the tayala" would be equivalent to "i was replacing the tyre"

I mean friends, countrymen, Malawians, there's an opportunity of upholding our pride here and having our own dialect of Malawian English!

So maybe the constitutional review should seriously consider this in malawi!

Malawian Singer Backs Madonna

2007-04-13T15:45:00.000+02:00

Recently one of Malawi's leading dj Annie Matumbi, released a single where he launched a commical attack on Malawian NGO bosses that opposed the adoption of David Banda.

In his rhetoric he raises the questions of "why the bosses only became active after the adoption when they knew all along about the adoption?"

He also observes that NGO bosses usually have flashy cars, and live in plush areas as well as send their children to expensive schools.

In one of his lines, he mokes the bosses by saying "Ana anu akadwala ndiye kuti ageya","your kids are only sick when they burp" ,implying that they have enough of everything.

He also recognizes that, NGOs that have been against Madonna, have not looked at internal issues and addressed them adequately. He cites the example of street kids as an outstanding example.

He finishes his song with an ironic twist by joking on any Madonna future visit, "tsono a malawi tikadzongomva kuti Madonna akubwera, tidzakasonkhana ku airport, tidzangomva kuti amadzagula ng'ombe", "people will flock to the airport the next time Madonna comes, only to hear that she came to buy cows!"

Literature Cited
Annie Matumbi, Madonna Single

Generating Reports in Rails

2007-01-05T11:45:00.000+02:00

One of quality control measues in software development is the ability to produce reports that are of importance to the users of the system themselves.

The reports ought to be produced at the expected time and should also be tailored to meet the required format so that decisions should be made at the right time.

The above requirements have particularly been impressed upon me with the fact that i had to produce reports for the hospital pharmacy that the organization that i work for provides software to. The ordeal seemed fine on specification(they all seem so!), but when i dived into the actual production of the reports, i realized that huge join queries had to be used in order to generate them.

The application had been developed in VB 6.0, and at this point i was mainly proficient in VB 6.0. I wrote the algorithm of retrieving the data in my mind, but the idea of big queries, and opening and closing connections, kind of put me of writing an application to appropriately produce reports once and for all. I thought that, well, somehow i will produce the queries manually and the rest will take care of itself!

Meanwhile my colleagues had been experimenting with some web technolgies and had talked of ruby on rails. What, are these people all talking about. They are talking of monday languages, come tuesday, they are fading!

However my colleagues, went ahead to implement searches with rails ajax hooks such as observe_field, and produced dynamic searches in no time. "I can do that in VB 6.0 ", i said to myself amid sighs of "cool!,cool!".

So i did my queries, manually and exported them to excel, as i usually did. They did not however fulfill the required format, and they also reached the rightful stakeholders at the wrong time.Something like 2 days later.(Which was bad, considering that some of the data was required for drug forecasting at the pharmacy).

Well i became frustrated. The next day, i did. I had to regenerate some of the queries and add make some corrections. Now there is nothing so bad to be told that your work is not good enough, in a polite way of "can you look at this figure, it shows 10,000, but we only had 400, this month". And this is repeated 10 times.

Okay. Let me try something new. Let me really see how flexible this ruby thing is, so i jumped in with my colleagues did, the hello world legendary program. It worked and this brought gratification.One of my colleagues was a propeller head at web programming languages. He got ruby's message quick and led us into the unknown.......We wrote the base code for the application figured out the aciverecord querying style.

I was immediately impressed at how i could shrink gigantic queries like this :

SELECT epics_drugs.item_code,epics_drugs.description,sum(epics_dispensations.dispensed_quantity) FROM epics_drugs,epics_dispensations,epics_orders,epics_lots WHERE epics_drugs.id=epics_lots.id_epics_drug and epics_lots.id=epics_dispensations.id_epics_lot and epics_orders.id=epics_dispensations.id_epics_order and (epics_orders.date_created >=”2006-07-01 and epics_orders.date_created <=”2006-07-30”)

Into:

@consumptionTotal[drug] += dispensation.quantity_dispensed if dispensation.order.date_created.between?(begin_date,end_date)

Now this was fantastic! Referential integrity was being used in rails and there was no need for me to respecify this. Don't you folks like it when you don't have to say the same thing twice?

A second thing that store my heart were helpers such as the time helpers that allowed me to do logic like:

if order.date_created > 3.months_ago

end

In short coming from a visual basic 6.0 background, the economy and flexibility of ruby code has kept me with it up to now. Currently, i am developing a medical records system for Anti-Retroviral Therapy patients at Baobab Health Partnership, with my colleagues.

Amazed with rails' productivity i shared this exciting technology at a Linux Chix conference right here in Malawi Africa. I will talk about this in my later posts.

Now Rails makes my days.

Changing Rails Environment During Tests

2006-10-26T09:59:00.000+02:00

Most rails developers know that rails encourages a testing culture, right from when you generate your controllers. Rails creates a test folder which contains subfolders for unit tests, functional tests. It also creates a fixtures subfolder and mocks subfolder.
Rails also creates three enviroments to operate in, namely the development environment, production environment and test environment. They all require separate databases to run from.

The fixtures subfolder will contain sample data to be used in testing and rails defaults the format of this data to YAML. Fixtures can contain data to be used for various test cases for an application. The following is an example of a fixture:

Normal Registration
first_name: Oliver
last_name: Jintha
Date_of_birth: 1982-04-17

Awkward Registration
first_name: 0liver
last_name: Jintha
Date_of_birth: 1982-04-17

Extreme Registration
first_name: Oliver
last_name: Jintha
Date_of_birth: 2982-04-17

Having defined the fixture and written the appropriate unit test for it, the next thing would be to load the fixture data and then to run the actual test.

Loading the data can be done by the command:

rake load_fixtures

This will however load the fixtures in your default enviroment and it will delete the data in your default database, as such, it is required that you specify the environment in which to run before proceeding with loading the fixtures.

This can be done by this command:

export RAILS_ENV=test

Then you can load the fixtures using:

rake load_fixtures

This will not delete your data in the default database as it did in my case.

Literature Cited
Dave Thomas, David Heinemeer Hansson(2006),Agile Web Development with Rails,Raleigh,North Carolina Dallas, Texas(USA), Pragmatic Bookshelf.

http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/book/5

Describing Malawi

2006-10-05T13:03:00.000+02:00

The flames.
From the depths of Africa.
From the depth of central Africa
I repose.

It is said that
in the flames, the blades that make
me up have been estimated to
12 million kwacha.

The flames are multilingual
multitribal and they have been
blazing from 1964.

In the years the flames have
been thwarted by drifting energy;
they have been driven to a corner
by some powerful flames
in the years the flames have been
pulled away.

The flames are Malawi.