Year: 2009

Yeah, I know I’ve been away for what seems like a very very long time,
so figured the best time to get back would be now when the year is still not yet out.

I especially want to wish you all a Merry Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or what
ever you celebrate … And may 2010 be the year when your dreams are
fulfilled.

For an update on what’s been happening, please visit the AEx News Site

Enjoy and see you in the new year!

Back, from a long break , more like I’ve been busy. Two articles caught
my eyes this week

First: The New Vision, a leading daily newspaper in Uganda reported that
Microsoft has hired some lawyers in Kampala, to help them fight software
piracy especially illegal copies of Windows. As rightly noted by the
paper, very few people realize the adverse impact, such ‘a war on
software piracy’ could have on local business. Its estimated that up to
95% of Windows OS copies in use around the country are not genuine.

Second: Microsoft disclosed the pricing of Windows 7, the next major
release from Redmond, WA. Basically the full version of Windows 7
Professional is $299.00, with upgrades going for $199.00 per copy. You
can read more at: here

Well what is the alternative for Ugandan business and individuals who
can not afford these costs and wish to avoid penalties for using
illegal copies of windows?

You guessed it – Linux! Try it today, and you’ll ask yourself why you
never switched a long time ago. Linux is very stable and will free you
from all those viruses/malware and instabilities you have grown
accustomed to while using windows.

Just a quick update on my family:

This weekend the Zikusookas welcomed the newest member of the family, Jasmine Malaika.

Mona and Jacob, congratulations on your new born child. We are all happy for you …

If you have not yet heard, virtualization is a technology that allows you to run multiple operating systems on a single computer including Windows, Linux, BSD and more.

Assuming your company or organization runs five (5) physical servers today, With Virtulization, only one (1) physical server is needed. The cost savings are tremendous. Virtualization dramatically improves the efficiency and availability of IT resources and applications in your organization.

Lately, I have been using FreeBSD guests under VirtualBox 2.2.2. You can read about Sun VirtualBox (Now under Oracle) at: http://www.virtualbox.org.

One thing that does not work out of the box is USB on Linux hosts especially Red-Hat derivatives such as Fedora. I know several people out there who are having difficulties connecting USB devices such as flash disks, USB printers, cameras etc to VirtualBox

I have posted a FREE bash script to help you resolve it. After running this script, your USB devices attached to your VirtualBox host machine will be visible to guests. Cool! You can download script at:

My VBox USB Script

Looks like Uganda Telecom (UTL) mobile phone subscribers are experiencing difficulties today. My UTL connection has been on and off all day … actually there was a complete outage from yesterday till mid day – my goodness I can’t stand it! Just curious, I thought I outta check out the company’s website for any mention of it, but then again what am I thinking – this is Uganda. So we get disconnected and no one takes accountability. Unbelievable!

Am back after a long week traveling. I spent much of last week in my home town of Soroti. It was a welcome change from the busy and hectic schedule.

I drove east-ward on Tuesday. My observations:

The state of the roads have somewhat improved. For those who remember, the Jinja to Bugiri road two years ago was a real nightmare. Well after all those years of waiting and waiting , it seems the road is almost complete and only took me 30 minutes to get from Jinja to Iganga versus the previous 70 minutes. Not bad. Well not bad, until I heard a couple of day’s ago that a bus accident killed 12 people due to over-speeding. The accident occured between Iganga and Jinja on the Tirinyi road. My condolences to all those affected by this loss

Am now back. Spent much of this week doing some post upgrade cleanups for AEx hosting. Till next time …

Like most parts of the world, It’s a public holiday here in Uganda.

The whole of my neighbourhood lost power today morning at 3am. Restored at 8am, however my house was still off. Turns out there was a fault at the transformer. After several futile calls to the power company’s call centre, I decided to call the local guys. Thanks to Joseph at UMEME in Entebbe, power at my house was reconnected at 1pm.

Other than getting a day off (plus a long weekend) I suspect for most of us, Labour day is no longer significant. By the way, when I lived in the US, I always wondered what it would have been like to have this day off. One thing, today’s national celebrations were held in my home town of Soroti (http://www.soroti.org)

Happy May day everyone.

This week my web hosting company, AEx (http://www.aexhosting.com) completed its three month migration process to the new servers.

Its been quite a challenging week, not only because we had to migrate servers that were installed almost six years ago, but our local ISPs were also having problems of their own.

This blog is somewhat of a nice outcome of all of this.  I hope I can now keep everyone updated on this site.