Counting everyone in Nigeria

Well the big news in Nigeria this week is the upcoming Census. There are going to be restrictions on travel over next week to prevent people being counted where they are not normally resident. Most States in Nigeria are expected to declare public holidays on the days of the census in order that people will be at home to be counted. Problem is in places like Lagos, when there is a public holiday, the majority of the population being non indigenous to Lagos, may like to visit their home town where their family live. In order to stop that the Federal government have announced that there will be a partial restriction on travel on Friday and Saturday (24th and 25th of March). Don't know what this means exactly yet, and as the Census starts on Tuesday aparently I'm not sure how much help that will be.

In other news: I finally got us a new Internet Connection to replace our Multi-Links setup, with MyNetcom and it seems satisfactory so far. The cost for those interested is =N= 75,000 for the equipment and one month of service at 300kbps. After the first month you can change your tariff to one from a range of 100kbps at =N= 6000 monthly to 600kbps at =N= 45,000 monthly.

I was torn between MyNetcom and CobraNet. Although I had heard good things about cobranet I decided against them for a number of reasons. First their website does not give enough information about their service. secondly, their ADSL service requires a GTE phone line to be installed and I didn't need that extra hassle. Third if we were to use the wireless service we would no doubt need to have a mast installed because the technology used requires line-of-sight between the two antennas, we have a lot of trees and 4+ storey buildings around. The MyNetcom wireless service uses 3G mobile phone technology to connect so you just have a 3G modem connected through an ethernet port on your computer and the whole thing sits on your desk, meaning you can take it with you should you need to work on the move or in different locations. Finally the Cobranet prices were practically identical (=N= 70,000 set up, 12-21k per month) to MyNetcom but they did not mention providing a facility to downgrade the tariff if for instance we would have one or zero people here for a month.

I also finally found a workaround for those Internet Exploder rendering bugs, simply creating a horizontal line solved the positioning problem I was having. So as much as I'd like to I don't have to install Mozilla Firefox on the data entry pc's. I am now working on the Perl and MySQL back end, hopefully bringing in some tried and tested modules from the perl CPAN repository to replace some of the parts of the old system I had written myself and were a bit clumsy and a little temperamental, like session management and user administration.

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