CashFlow 101

I played CashFlow® 101 yesterday for the first time with friends.

I must say it is quite an entertaining game yet at the same time a learning experience. It took us a bit of time to get up and running as we all had to understand the rules of the game. Too bad we did not have too much time and some of us had to leave early.

However, I managed out of the rat race second. My next target is to see if I can get out within 30 minutes :). I am now looking to get my own game as this was borrowed, and at the same time get 202. The weekend beckons... :)

Learning: Ruby

Stephen Covey says that one's current knowledge has a half life of 2 years at most.

Dennis Waitley goes on and on about dedicating oneself to 'Life Long Learning'. It's always good to keep learning something so as to remain relevant in today's knowledge based economy.

I feel that I'll always dabbling in technology. So, I have decided that I'll start finding out what the buzz is about Ruby and web development. The author - Yukihiro Matsumoto, a.k.a. ``Matz'' - says that when he was developing Ruby, he wanted '.. a language more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python'. I'll decide what project i can work towards achieving sooner or later.

Some resources,

• Official Ruby home page
• Official Ruby on Rails home page
• The best way to learn Ruby: read the free book Programming Ruby
• Primary home for open source Ruby projects: RubyForge
• Ruby on Rails open source projects
• Ruby on Rails how-tos
• Four Days on Rails, an excellent next-steps guide to use after "Rolling with Ruby on Rails

Any one in Kenya with experience with Ruby, please come give a talk @ skunkworks :)

Music Break

Now that it's Friday, I'm going to feature the latest addition to my music collection (Yes, I buy music).
I've listened to Joseph Hellon's Ekkaleo roughly 6 times. Love the jazz and african touch. I first listened to Hellon playing a sax in 1994 in high school and was really amazed. A really talented musician, I have heard him play 'Take Five' on a (you wouldn't believe it) wandindi. Throw in Krucial Keys (Aaron Rimbui), Kanjii, JJ and the rest of the crew, and you have real quality production.
If you've been looking for positive, uplifting jazz from East Africa try out Ekkaleo . Visit Sternsmusic and SoundAfrica to listen to samples online.

Bloggers Code of Conduct ;)

Is it too late to bring civility to the Web?

The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.

Read more ->

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in Kenya

These are some of the various initiatives/community efforts going on (that I know of)

Mailing list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kenyalinux/- oldest one I think?
www.lpakenya.org - recently launched Linux Professionals Association
www.osskenya.org - just recently come across it.

I wonder how many people and organisations in Kenya actually use a Linux distribution for ordinary day to day tasks.

I use Ubuntu for my personal (and non day job :) ) stuff but unfortunately :( have to use Windows at work - policies). OpenOffice for Documents, AmaroK for Music, Firefox for the web, I'm about to start on GnuCASH for my personal finances, GAIM for Yahoo,MSN,gtalk, skype for linux(no video though). List is long.

There's lots of legal FOSS software alternatives available - have a look at this chart:

http://linux.wordpress.com/2007/04/08/why-use-software-illegally-when-you-can-use-legally/

and this website: http://www.osalt.com/

I think for a developing country like ours, more and more people and organisations need to be exposed to FOSS alternatives which will go a long way in reducing the cost of software ownership (legally that is :) ), while, due to the very nature of FOSS, encouraging development of custom/homemade software solutions and services.