Merry Christmas

Well it feels very different here to back home; no tinsel, no tree and definitely no snow! The rains however have arrived on cue, the weather here has changed dramatically in the last couple of weeks and now it rains for about an hour each day. The rain is announced by a sudden drop in temperature of about 10 degrees which is incredibly welcome as otherwise it’s around 35C and very humid. As soon as the temperature does drop you know you have about 5 minutes to find shelter before the heavens open. The rain can be very heavy and on my tin roof sounds almost apocalyptic! It’s a refreshing change though and things are already starting to get much greener. The whole place seems to be coming alive which is great except that includes the insect world; millipedes a foot long, damsel flies as big as your hand and armies of flying termites which seem to get into your house whether you leave the windows open or not!

Today is my last day in Lilongwe before I leave for Likoma Island where I’m spending Christmas with Nat and Judy. Likoma promises to be something of a paradise; white sandy beaches and palm trees with the warm waters of Lake Malawi lapping at the shore. There is however very little phone reception, no ATM’s and only one shop so it could be quite a quiet Christmas. The place we’re staying at has a dive centre so I’m hoping to do some scuba while I’m there; I’m also going armed with a Christmas pudding courtesy of my father so we can inject a little traditional Christmas spirit.

The journey also promises to be an adventure, the regular ferry that runs twice weekly has broken down so we’ll be braving it on a local boat which no doubt will be packed with people, poultry and drying fish!

I hope you all have a very merry Christmas and a happy start to 2014, I’ll be back on the 2^nd of Jan and will be sure to post some pictures as soon as possible.

Production Ready

Our iHRIS pilot phase is now drawing to a close. We’ve had some really useful feedback from our users and have done several iterations of development to address the points raised. We’re now in a position where we have imported the entire HR dataset into the new system and in the New Year we plan to slow down our rate of change and enter a more maintenance-like development cycle. This means that iHRIS will be live and users will start cutting over to the new system, using it as their primary HR planning tool. With this in mind it was very important for us to setup our production server before Christmas and migrate our first official release to the new environment.

Just in the nick of time USAID came through with the goods and our shiny new HP ProLiant arrived in the office. Now all we needed to do was rack it in our “data-centre.” I use that term in its broadest sense as in true Malawian style our data centre is actually a single rack cabinet in an air conditioned room (not common out here) with a backup generator that broke down two years ago! The rack does of course have a battery backup but with all the kit plugged into it we can only really survive a power cut of 10 minutes or less.

With none of us being proficient server technicians, installing the new box was not without its moments of comedy, but we got there in the end;

The Ministry of Health closed down for Christmas on the 13^th of December; this gave us the opportunity to sneak in this week and try to sort out the spaghetti mess that is the ministries computer room while nobody else was there. Over the course of three days we managed to tidy Teddy’s office so it vaguely resembles a useable space and also sifted through the mountain of discarded desktop machines they have, find the ones that still have a pulse and set them up as proper workstations in the computer lab. We even had time enough for some guerrilla networking which will hopefully mean we can all get IP addresses a little more reliably in the New Year!