May 2007

A Kikuyu, a Luhya and a Persian are standing outside Nakumatt Prestige at 8pm. Which one is selling popcorn, which one is eating popcorn, which one is watching?

I am an information junkie. I used to be one of those people with a million different email subscriptions flying into my email inbox each day. News lists, global security information lists, sports, technology, you name it I had it. One day last year I revolted and unsubscribed to all of them except two. Why? First of all it was information overload! Secondly the growth and wide availability of RSS feeds and other ways to get information means I no longer need to fill my email inbox to get the information I want. Now I am signed up to only two daily email lists on my main email account and both are vital reading and if you don’t have them you should get them!

One is The Global Voices daily digest (blogs) written by David Sasaki and his bunch of merry men and women. The other is The Fiver (football) written by a bunch of nutters in Fiver Towers. (OK I admit I do have one or two other weekly email subscriptions that such a pillar of society such as myself has no business reading, step forward Holy Moly!) What lists out there are worth a look.

So which RSS Feeds am I reading or do I think are worth reading, or do I feel I should be reading? All is revealed on the MentalGator. Yeah I noticed some of you noticing my site pulling your feeds and was bound to oust me before long so I might as well publicise it. It is quite small, I will try to keep it under 30 feeds, unlike the monster that is the KENYAUNLIMITED AGGREGATOR! It is rough around the edges, needs a serious css over haul and some options need changing but it will do for now. If this all works out then, I’ll change the software that powers the KenyaUnlimited aggregator to this one.

It’s been a while since I shook with laughter while reading a blog post but Greg Black got me laughing and holding my head at the same time while I was reading this.

The guys at Very Sawa Technology Studios are on to something with the launch of Jahazi. When you have White African, Kobia, JKE, and the Skunkworks crew all ooohing and ahhhing over one of your products its time to start thinking about an IPO.

And finally

KBW exists. And KBW exists primarily because its members want it to exist and contribute to help it exist in various ways, not because Mentalacrobatics started it or the KBW Admin Team helps sustain it, although those are factors as well. If KBW members do not want KBW to exist it will not. It really is a simple as that. That is why, at the end of the day, my opinion on each and every attack on KBW is not that important and why I will not comment on each and every blog post that mentions KBW negatively.

If KBW loses credibility then bloggers will simply leave KBW and no others will join. In the same way, if the Admin Team can not be trusted then KBW members will simply stop conferring with, contributing to and indeed trusting that Admin Team.

I can tell you honestly that when I fire up Thunderbird each morning the KBW admin email address is the most active of all the email addresses and of those messages new member registration and new members requesting assistance take up a healthy number. Do not take my word for it, look for yourself.

KBW does have its share of yahoos. What is healthy is that we all have different opinions on what constitutes a yahoo, and believe me I have my opinion as well. I can take the personal attacks, they stopped bothering me a long time. (When cartoons email your parents to inform them that their son is confusing the youth of Kenya on behalf of StateHouse and should be arrested – you learn to laugh at life – otherwise you can go mad).

This does raise interesting questions on the issue of ownership of the Kenyan blogosphere. Methinks I have just found the right topic for my next podcast.

I was talking last night with another veteran of Kenyan online communities and we were reflecting about the back-in-the-day days. If it is beef and “online war” you are after let me tell you right now KBW is the wrong place to look. We are but a bunch of amateurs.

In 1997 as an innocent 1st year undergrad I joined an online community called KenyaOnline. Walalala. VITA! This was just before the 1997 general election and I tell you MPs, aspiring MPs, their cronies, even MINISTERS (apparently writing anonymously – remind you of anything) were all throwing, what the KOL community called, online rungus at each other. I must admit I found it brilliant to start of with.

By the time 2002 had come along and those same wazee, wabunge and wamweshimwas were still throwing insults at each other it had become tiring. However things mellow out and KenyaOnline is still going strong in its current incarnation on yahoo groups.

Any of you who were around for the drama on mlevi.com, rcbown.com – remember when rcbowen was THE Kenyan page on the internet – if you weren’t in his guest book then you basically didn’t exist online – and even at the height of drama on mashada.com then you know that KBW is a relatively stable place and actually quite quiet in comparison.

There many who like to cultivate a them and us mentality about this whole online thing. The KBW Admin Team is always accessible, if you have any concerns then you know where to find us.

With our numbers growing and our membership diversifying, with the power or blogs increasing and recognition of bloggers growing day by day I am confident, as I always have been from that day 1 when I was the ONLY member of KBW, that this project that we are all involved in, is here to stay.

To truly appreciate the miracle of flight you need to fly a distance that you travel regularly by other means. Flying to the United Kingdom or the United States from Kenya, well, that’s the only way to get there so we can be excused in getting complacent! But flying from Nairobi to Kisumu, now that is an eye opening experience.

I have ranted before about driving to western Kenya. The roads are terrible, car breaking, and dangerous to drive on and that’s just the tarmac. The parts that are not tarmaced are not just car breaking but body breaking too. After that 8 hour drive you step out of the car and your spine feels like it is going to snap. (Spare a thought for the commercial vehicle and public transport drivers who do that route several times a week some even twice a day.)

And then there is flying. You get into your seat, you take off, and half an hour later you land in Kisumu! It still boggles my mind to this day at how simple and easy that trip is compared to the alternatives! Once when we called my brother who had dropped us at JKIA to tell them him we had landed in Kisumu safely we found that even had not even reached the Nyayo Stadium round about!

As soon as the plane touched down in Kisumu on Thursday I heard something I have not heard in a plane since the late 1980s. Applause. The whole cabin broke out in applause. KQ507 has re-awoken the appreciation, constantly taken for granted, for a safe trip.

A big thank you to everyone who has left a tribute, linked to, and help spread the word about the KQ507 tribute site. A big thank you to Fareed, Vincent and all guys and gals at the Capital FM Breakfast Crew for responding. Thanks to Ndesanjo and Global Voices for spreading the word. An extra big thank you to the family members and friends of the passengers and the crew who have left tributes, man, they are moving.

One thing this tragedy has brought home to me is just how connected we all are. I have had emails from Nigerian, Ethiopian, American, British and Indian friends all telling me how they have been personally affected by the flight. We live in a global village.

As a kid it really used to irritate me that the call signal for Kenya Airways was KQ and not KA as Dragon Air had got to it first. I used to feel we were dissed being sent all the way down to KQ what happened to KB KC KD etc I would ask. But now in my old age, KQ has a regal almost mystical tone to it. Kaaaay Kyooou. Nice!

In memory of the Kenya Airways Flight KQ507 that crashed in Douala, Cameroon on Saturday, KenyaUnlimited has set up a KQ507 tribute site where you can leave your message of support for the families and friends of all those affected by this tragedy. These messages will be printed and delivered to Kenya Airways at an appropriate time.

The page can be found here.

Please visit the KQ507 tribute site to leave a message of support and sympathy.
Please link the KQ507 tribute site from your blogs and websites.
Please spread the word about the KQ507 tribute site.

It would be brilliant if we could deliver a big bundle of messages full of heartfelt tributes.

If anyone out there can create a button we can put on our blogs to show support that would be brilliant too.

Our brothers and sisters from outside Kenya and Africa please feel free to leave a message as well.

Let us stand together, united, to honour those on Kenya Airways KQ507. Pamoja.

After the tragedy this morning with the loss of Kenya Airways flight KQ507 with 114 people on board I am more or less sure that a big debate will sprout up on how safe Africa’s skies are and on how safe African airlines are. This post aims to put some facts on the ground before hysteria takes over the debate.

The airline

IOSA is the global benchmark for airline safety management. It is designed to assess airline operational management and control systems based on internationally recognised standards. Any airline wishing to join IATA must be IOSA registered. By the end of 2007, all IATA members must successfully undergo the IOSA audit in order to retain IATA membership. Carriers must achieve registration by the end of 2008. IOSA is open to all airlines. Four African airlines already have IOSA registration; South African Airways, Kenya Airways, Comair, Royal Air Maroc and Egyptair. Kenya Airways is a safe airline.

The plane

The plane involved in the incident today was a brand new Boeing 737-800. The plane was collected from Boeing in October 2006 and went into service in November 2006. No ramshackle plane this. These Next-Generation 737 are the newest and most technologically advanced single-aisle airplane in the business today. It flies higher, faster and farther than previous models and competitors. In addition, its flight deck features the latest liquid-crystal flat-panel displays and is designed to accommodate new communications and flight-management capabilities.

Africa’s skies – the real story

Last year the IATA Director General Giovanni Bisignani said, “Africa is our biggest concern. While the continent represents just 4 percent of total air traffic worldwide, it accounts for 25 percent of the accidents.” All this following a decision by the European Commission in March 2006 to publish a “blacklist” of 92 airlines, dominated by African airlines, that it banned from European skies because of poor safety records. The “blacklist” includes 50 airlines registered in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 13 from Sierra Leone, 11 from Equatorial Guinea, 6 from Swaziland and 3 from Liberia. (Yes that was FIFTY from the DRC!)

As Christian Folly-Kossi, secretary general of the African Airlines Association, which is based in Nairobi, says in the same article, he was worried that shaming a handful of African countries would damage the reputation of all the region’s airlines, including those that have made significant strides toward improving their records … Folly-Kossi criticized the EU’s blacklist, calling it “inappropriate” because it names dozens of carriers that are not operating or do not fly internationally … “The reality is that, with this list, the public perceives all African carriers as potentially very risky,” he said. “I take it as a kind of unfair competition because the message implied is that you should fly on a European airline if you want to be safe.”

Africa is a big place. You lump all the countries into one category you are going to have problems no matter what you are talking about.

How does Africa compare globally?

Not very well to be honest. But the stories that Africa’s skies are the worst in the world by a mile are incorrect.

Image soucre: IATA Safety Report 2006

According to The (annual) IATA Safety Report’s Regional Results, Russia and other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) had the highest accident rate of all the regions in 2006, with 8.6 Western-built hull losses per million flights—13 times the global average. IATA is actively working with the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), States and operators to improve the situation.

In Africa, improvements have been made to enhance safety. However, the accident rate remains the second highest in the world at 4.31 accidents per million flights. IATA is working with relevant organisations to further reduce it with a focus on upgrading onboard systems and navigation databases.

Hopefully this post will inject some sense of perspective when we debate this issue.

Upgrading WordPress

Having come to WordPress via MovableType I had no problem manually setting up the WordPress database and files. The famous 5 minute install really does take only 5 minutes. When it comes to upgrading however, there was the tedious process of downloading tarballs, extracting them and re-applying modifications to WordPress every time a new version was released to perform an upgrade. A process which gets complicated when the internet connection drops or there is a power outage or some connectivity issue that stops the FTP process in its tracks.

Luckily there are couple of solutions to this problem which work by automating the process of upgrading WordPress. One was upgrading WP using SVN. This was going to be my preferred option until I saw the very real potential of getting tangled up in command line interfaces and blowing up the whole server. Then I considered doing a backup of my blog database, deleting my blog, reinstalling it via Fantastico, and then reloading the backup. That way whenever I wanted to upgrade I would just wait for Fantastico to upgrade its version of WP and then use the simple upgrade option to upgrade.

But this morning I found a much easier solution that did not required me to delete everything and start from scratch. Ladies and Gentlemen the WordPress InstantUpgrade plugin. Download it, put in your WordPress plugins directory, chmod a few files, press upgrade and 2 seconds later, heck 1 second later, everything is upgraded and working like a charm. I am shocked at how simple and quick that was. My WordPress upgrade problems are solved. Be sure to read the instructions and this post first though.

Sidebar clean up

Previously I had a link to every single KBW member on my sidebar. Now that KBW has 400+ members this is no longer practical. In anticipation of a site redesign coming soon (Mentalacrobatics 5.0) I have removed all the blog links from my sidebar. Don’t worry I still love you all. (Well apart from the ones running around bullying other KBW members in a misguided attempt to deflect blame on their own bad blog administration practices. Don’t you get it? Your blog, your responsibility. No point running around blaming everyone apart from yourself.) There are two places where you can get the complete KBW members list; on the sidebar of the KenyaUnlimited Voices blog and on the RingSurf KBW members page.

RSS Feed
For a few posts my RSS feed was like nyama choma that had been roasted on an electric fire = flavourless. Something was stripping all formatting from my RSS feed leaving the post displayed as one big lump of text with no formatting or pictures in your RSS readers and aggregators.

To cut a long story short if you are using WordPress version 2.x with PodPress versions 7.5, 7.6 or 7.7, PodPress will strip all non formatting from your feed. To get around this downgrade your PodPress installation back to 7.4 and you’ll be good to go.

Update 1:
Almost all the visits to this post are coming from people Googling “KQ507”. Please read my follow up post on Kenya Airways and safety in the African sky. You may also want to read a round up of what Kenyan bloggers have been saying about this tragedy and keep an eye on the KenyaUnlimited aggregator for the latest thoughts from Kenyan bloggers.

Following the disappearance of Kenyan Airways flight KQ507 that has gone missing after losing communication with the control tower shortly after takeoff on Friday night from Douala, Cameroon, Kenya Airways has set up crisis desks at the Panari Sky Center and at the Intercontinental Hotel in Nairobi.

Kenya Airways have also set up the following emergency crisis number to their “emergency centre”: +27 11 20 71 100 (South African number).

Why don’t KQ set up a local number and route calls through to the South African centre? Making people in KENYA dial an international number to find out information about a missing KENYAN flight is just not on.

Why is the KQ “emergency centre” in South Africa anyway? The Pride of Africa has some work to do in handling situations such as these.

And why aren’t the people who answer the JKIA information lines (0722205061) ever polite, instead of transferring you mid sentence to another person?

No one likes a know it all
Even if the know-it-all is always right
Even more so if the know-it-all is good looking
And especially when the know-it-all says, “I told you so.”

But heck – who cares?

I TOLD YOU SO!

The Mighty Reds of Anfield lock horns with Meeeeeeeeeelan in Athens in a repeat of the 2005 Champions’ League final.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again, the Champions’ League trophy is the most fussy of mistresses. She only lets a very select few battle for the right to call her their own.

Liverpool and Meeeeeeeeeeeeelan happen to be amongst those few.

Manchester Buccaneers and Spartak Chelski do not happen to be amongst those few.

Chelski: “we’re chasing a historic quadruple.”
Liverpool: “NO you are not.”

What a routine win, it was a walk in the park really, no sweat. Chelski have been crying all season about how they never get awarded penalties, look what happened when they got 5. Useless.

Buccaneers: “We’re gonna win the treble.”
Meeeeeeeeeeeeelan: “NO you are not.”

Hehehe!

As for the Buccaneer fans who had the audacity to come in here and start talking about history and “big clubs”, where do I even start educating you?

Quote of the day

“I guess when you’ve invested £500m it’s a fantastic season to win the League Cup.”

Rick Parry wins the battle of wits against Mourinho

We won it five times; we won it five timeeeeeeeeees, in Istanbul we won it five times!

It’s only on loan; it’s only on looooooan, in ancient Greece we’ll bring it back home!

Tonight for One Night Only
Showing at a screen near you

The Massacre at Anfield

A Liverpool Football Club Production

Directed by Rafa “The Gaffa” Benitez

Starring

Steve “Captain Fantastic” Gerrard MBE
Luis “Semi Final Goal Scorer” Garcia
Momo “So good they named him twice” Sissoko
Jamie “The Minister of Defence” Carragher
Peter “Crouchigol” Crouch
And The Koppites a.k.a The real Special Ones as the 12th man.

Prediction: Liverpool will beat AC Milan in this year’s Champions’ League Final in a repeat of the greatest game of football ever played.