21/1-09 at 05.06 Bart

Two weeks before my leave out of Cambodia we deployed a computer room in a rural school here in Cambodia. The deployment is part of a serie of pilot projects of the Masterplan for ICT in Education. This Masterplan is written by the Ministry of Education, and will contain plans to introduce ICT in the Cambodian education system. One of the objectives of this plan is to teach ICT to 10th grade students. There are 315 upper secondary schools in Cambodia, so they need to be equipped with computers. Part of my work has been to prepare plans and research technologies for deployment of computers in upper secondary schools. One particular problem in Cambodia is the availability and price of electricity. A major newspaper in Cambodia cited last year that only 17% of rural Cambodia is connected to the power grid. Since many rural power supply companies are privately owned, the price is often prohibitively high. On many places electricity costs around $1,- per KWh (US dollars that is!). So we have made sure that the computers have a very low power consumption. The computers you see on the picture below only use around 20 Watts, which is about 20% of a typical desktop setup.



All the software on the computers are in Khmer language. We have trained the teachers in teaching ICT, and there are training materials in Khmer available. All the software is free and open. The operating system in openSUSE Linux, and there is an office suite in Khmer, OpenOffice (there are no other office suites available in Khmer) and  various educational programs have been installed, like the desktop globe program Marble (an open source alternative for Google Earth). I also made sure there are some games on it (not very educational, but hey, what did you use your computer for when you were in highschool?). The fact that it is in Khmer makes it easier for the teachers to maintain, and easier for the students to understand. Using Khmer language software means that the speed of teaching can be much much faster as there is no language barrier. See on the picture below how interested the teachers are!



Finally, we made sure that the software can be installed and maintained very easily. With help of a program called Kiwi, we made a bootable USB stick, with a program called partimage. This program can deploy exact copy of a harddisk to an other computer, and it takes no more than 10 minutes. So installation is a question of pressing the button! And in the future, when the computers have software problems, the only thing needed is boot from USB stick, press the button, wait 10 minutes, and the computer is in its' original state again! And all this with free software!

13/12-08 at 18.29 Bart

Last weekend we went to Sihanoukville, which is the beach town of Cambodia. Bart, another Dutch guy working here is working on a project to protect the marine life in Cambodia. Together with some other concerned individuals, they have started an NGO called Marine conservation Cambodia. This NGO tries to do this with a holistic approach: They work together with the goverment, the local fisher communities, businesses and tourists. The NGO does consulting for the tourism sector, so the industry gains an insight on how to preserve their most valuable resource, the marine life of Cambodia. The NGO also gives diving courses to government officials, so they can see with their own eyes how beautiful the marine life in Cambodia actually is. The local fisher communities gain through tourism and better access to government officials, to protect the areas which are their livelihoods. They get additional training on sustainable fishing, so the marine life is protected, without harming their incomes. It was a nice visit, and I hope to be able to go back soon.

13/8-08 at 16.50 Bart

We finally got it working last week: A multi seat setup. Multi seat means that you connect multiple screens, keyboards and mice to one computer. This saves a lot of money, maintenance and electricity! It doesn't work with all mainboards though, and we wanted to do this with an existing set of computers. This was onfortunately not possible, since the motherboards of those pc's did not accept a second VGA card. We did it on another machine, and this one is going to be tested in the National Institute of Education, where secondary school teachers are trained. On the picture below you see me and Nicolas, my French colleague.

24/5-08 at 08.17 Bart

It has been quite a while since I posted my last message. Sorry, I am just not very good at blogging. However, I will post some more information on the project we are doing on this blog, so keep on watching.
I started yesterday with a new project on Flickr, called project 365. From now on, I will make a picuture every day, for the next 365 days and post these on my Flickr account. There will be some text accompanying it as well. It allows me to learn to take better pictures with my new camera (a Nikon D80) and give me a kind of diary. Well, enough about it, just click here for my pictures on Flickr

Anita and I have got a picture site as well! Please follow this link to see all our pictures!

26/2-08 at 03.57 Bart

Last week, queen Sofia of Spain paid an official visit to the kingdom of Cambodia. She also paid a visit to our hubmle project. She was shown desktops in Khmer language, the Khmer keyboards, and I explained to her about the low cost computers we are making. The queen was so impressed by low cost computing, that she thought it would be great for her own country and Europe as well! Below is a picture of our demonstration to the queen.

26/12-07 at 04.51 Bart

The first low power computers have been deployed in the National Institute of Education (NIE, the place where teachers for secondary schools are being trained). Unfortunately, the first batch of 30 computers do not have the Cambodian made casings yet due to logistical reasons. The lab will be used for real teaching and the lessons started this week, which meant we had to use normal casings. The next batch of 30 will be equipped with the Cambodian made casings though. The machines are running both openSUSE 10.3 and Windows XP. It gave me the chance to install an installation server, which greatly reduced the installation time. openSUSE comes with some nifty installation tools (like autoYAST) which automates the complete installation process. The clients were plugged into the network, and pressing the OK button twice was enough to install openSUSE. Great stuff! Especially for the lazy sysadmin. Lazyness is an important virtue to have as a sysadmin, since being lazy, you want to do things right in one time. Mistakes mean extra work (and we want to avoid that).
Here is a picture of some machines installing openSUSE

03/12-07 at 11.14 Bart

26/11-07 at 16.26 bart

We've got him!

Some mice have been bothering us the last few weeks. Saturday I was woken (rather violently) by Anita who was telling me to have a quick look in the toilet. See the result ...

It looked quite dead to me, but I fear it drowned when I flushed the toilet though ... 

20/11-07 at 15.52 bart

A lot has happened since the last time I wrote. Since a couple of weeks I have been promoted to "Director of low cost computer lab". I will be managing the installation of a low cost computer lab at the NIE (National Institute of Education) where teachers of secondary schools are being educated.
Intel has donated 60 so called "little valley" boards, with a Celeron CPU on them. We are now in the process of making our own, Cambodian made casings! We have this done at the Don Bosco technical school in Phnom Penh . There, Lay Thea, the manager of the welding section,and his team have made our first Cambodian made computer casing. The first prototype will be ready tomorrow. I hope we don't forget to take our camera this time.
In an effort to make this blog a part of our communication channels, I am going to update it more often, so stay tuned for more!

15/8-07 at 11.53 Bart

One of my collueges is member of a group of 5 Cambodian bloggers which have introduced the term "Clogging" for Cambodian weblogging (or blogging). Together they have given 14 workshops in Cambodian universities to introduce the student into the wonderfull world of blogging. According to them, more than 1700 students have participated. And they did it all on a volunteer basis! Quite impressive I must say. Now they are organising a conference in Phnom Penh, called the "Clogger Summit". It seems to have a very interesting agenda. Click here to find out more
about this event.