Oh, Great!

Ex-Governor of Bayelsa State, Alamieyeseigha was sentenced to two years imprisonment for basically stealing everything he could get his hands on while in government. You may remember him as the guy who allegedly escaped police bail in London by dressing as a woman. After two days in prison he has been released.

Old News Update part 1 : Umaru Yar'Adua's inauguration

I have just finished a rather difficult assignment for OU which has been taking up most of my free time the last few weeks. So now I will finally get around to making a few updates which should have been done a while ago.

Yar'Adua Inaugurated as President of Nigeria

If you remember, I made some comments on the Nigerian Election and Yar'Adua's successful bid for the presidency. He has since been sworn in and visited the G8 summit in Germany and made promises to improve the election process.

He has declared his personal assets of $5 Million. He has now decided to form a "Government of National Unity" inviting members of the All Nigeria Peoples Party(ANPP), Action Congress (AC), Progressive Peoples Alliance (PPA) to join with Yar'Aduas Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to form a government... I am sure this will take a lot of effort to sort out.

Meanwhile, there has been a long wait for the government to be formed and it looks like, finally, there will be a government in Nigeria very soon.

I am sure there are plenty of contracts to be signed when they finally get to work.

Nigerian President Elect: Umaru Yar'Adua

I think everyone is aware now that Umaru Yar'Adua has been confirmed as the President Elect after Elections on Saturday in Nigeria's Presidential Elections.

I don't think we will ever know the full facts of what was going on with all the chaos on Election Day, I just hope that Nigerians can accept this result, and work towards improving things for the next Election in 2011. Jeremy of NaijaBlog has summarised some constructive improvements to the Election procedure which I fully endorse.

From my point of view, The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Yar'Adua are very popular in Nigeria. Whether or not this is for the right reasons I cannot judge. It is the responsibility of the opposing party representatives to show the people why they might be wrong, but Nigerian Politics doesn't seem to work that way. If the Election had been transparent, free and fair I believe the same winner would be announced and for that reason I don't believe all of Nigeria is going to take to the streets in protest, but I am ready to be surprised.

It may be Fundamentaly Flawed but Nigeria has Elected a New president and the best thing, in my eyes, is for Nigerians to move forward and embrace this first ever handover of a Civilian Presidency because it is significant progress.

Voting in Lagos

Chippla Vandu of Chippla's Weblog has posted an outstanding account of one persons heroic effort to vote in the Gubernatorial Elections in Nigeria Yesterday.

Let us hope that the Presidential Elections next saturday (21st April) will go more smoothly.

Guardian UK: Lagos turns on Kickbacks

The Guardian (UK) has a story in their 'comment is free' section.

It doesn't really add anything new to the news from Nigeria but it's quite a good background piece on the current political climate.

Nigeria and Me.

I've had a number of comments asking why I'm not back in Nigeria.

Simple fact is that I was Supposed to be starting work on a new project in Nigeria at the beginning of the year but as those of you who have done business in Nigeria will no doubt know, such things very rarely happen on time in Nigeria, especially when elections are due.

I work with a formula, which I'm sure is a re-utterance of many other more enlightened people:

Time to do Business in Nigeria = Time Anticipated * Nigerian Factor

The Nigerian Factor is a concept quite hard to grasp without spending time in Nigeria. In my experience, in this formula it can be expressed as a number between 2 and infinity. The number is proportional to the number of people involved in the contract process with weighting for the political seniority of those involved and inversely proportional to the amount of bribes thrown around. Clearly bribery is out of the question if we want to keep our morals intact, so waiting is what we do.

Unless the miracle happens and a contract is signed I will be sitting here in the UK. I can't wait forever, so I may be making some difficult choices soon.

Meanwhile, I am just submitting my first sets of coursework for my two OU courses for this year, M256: "Software Development with Java" and T209: "Information and Communication Technologies: people and interactions".

Remember this number

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

It is, apparently, the encryption key required to decrypt HD-DVD and Blu-ray content. Hmmm expect lots of 20GB Torrents soon.

See: How it was done.

National Geographic Features an article on the Niger Delta

Stealing links from other blogs is not a habit I like, but this article in the National Geographic, which came to my attention once again via Jeremy's blog, is worth spreading far and wide. The photos in the photo gallery will stick in my mind next time I fill my tank with Petrol.

Source: National Geographic

As a side note, the company I work for has often been involved in community projects sponsored by the oil companies, some are very successful, others, especially the most recent projects have suffered delays after delays. Mostly because of Political interference as far as we can tell.

Still in the UK

I'm still in the UK, no confirmed dates for my return yet.

I've spent my time working on a new CMS enabled corporate website for my employer, and in my spare time a new template for this blog, hopefully to include the new blogger features.

Apart from the dreadful Christmas Oil Pipeline Explosion that killed 260 people and the complaints about the ongoing fuel shortages, I haven't heard much from Nigeria. Shamefully I admit I haven't been reading much of the Nigerian press websites

It seems every other blog has jumped in on the "Celebrity" Big Brother Racism row. In my opinion Programmes like Big Brother are good reasons to throw away our televisions, but it seems some people do watch avidly including many Nigerian friends here in the UK. I'm not going to add anything to it myself, except suggest you read Nkem's posts (Bigot Brother, Bigot Brother coverage)

PHCN/NEPA Pre Payment Meters

PHCN have recently provided us with a new Meter for our power consumption. This meter is a pre-payment meter meaning we have to purchase credit from the PHCN offices and then enter the code given on the receipt into the meter to get power. A display on the front indicates the kWH remaining for your current credit.



Since installation there are many problems that make this new meter a complete nuisance

1. The Meter will only indicate what credit remains or allow you to enter more credit when there is power - When there's no credit the only way you can tell there is power is that a zero is shown on the LCD display


2. If you run out of credit you better hope it's not at night or on a Sunday, the office is closed!


3. Our consumption seems to be measured much higher on the new system. We will be using test equipment on ours soon to confirm it.


4. According to some sources we will be paying ₦50,000 for this meter in 24 monthly instalments - We did not ask for this meter, nor were we given a choice so why should we pay? - Also we paid for the old meter too so why were those removed from our premises without permission?


5. PHCN sent us a ₦7562.10 Power Bill for December after we had the pre-payment meter installed in November!

Bah! This is Shenanigans!

Conspiracy

Sometimes in Nigeria, and I suppose many other parts of Africa, it can seem that people and events conspire to frustrate and prevent you from performing your job properly. From Monday ~8am until this evening we have been without a Mains electricity supply from PHCN. So we had to rely on Generators, of which we have two. Both of them failed on Monday night, leaving me to sleep in a quiet but very hot bedroom. In the morning I had to wait until the Generator repair man could come to take a look. Eventually he came and got one of the Generators up and running. This was about 1pm I guess because I had already read half of a Jeremy Clarkson book by the time it was up and running.

So finally I got some A/C and started up our computer systems, so I could check my email and start work. The PC we use to connect through our ISP refused to start. Windows XP Bah!

Eventually I traced the problem to a dozen or so corrupt files in Windows System folder and the only option was to run the repair function of the Windows XP install CD. This I'm happy to report, actually worked and all the corrupted files were replaced. I believe I may need to fetch some Updates again now.

The hard disk it turns out had a few bad clusters so I decided to replace it rather than take a chance that it will not get worse. So I used Knoppix to mirror the disk onto a new hard disk (I like keeping a stock for this reason) and then removed the old drive altogether.

As you can see I'm back online and everything is back on track. Today I was able to finish the work I was supposed to have ready yesterday.

These things seem to happen far too often here, There's always a spanner waiting to fall in to the gears and stop progress.

Outsourcing the British High Commission, part 2

As an update to yesterdays post I thought I should share some big worries I have with this online application system for requesting UK visas for Nigerians.

As I was going through the process of entering the details on the form I used an apostrophe / single inverted comma (') in one of the fields, and got back an error message that rings 100dB Alarm Sirens in my head as a web developer with some experience.



The error message indicates that there is no validation done on user input to the system! This means a suitably skilled web developer, wearing their black crackers hat, could use this 'feature' to put code of their own into the script! I haven't done any further tests but trust me that this is an amateurs mistake.

I am using Mozilla Firefox to access the site and I can see that there is JavaScript code on the page to prevent the user entering ' on the form as well as some other characters, but because of bugs in the JavaScript code this does not work with Mozilla Firefox (at least the version I'm using, 1.5.0.7 on Debian GNU/Linux). This isn't the argument though as the server application should never rely on the client sending valid information. This is rule number one of web security! Accessing the site in Internet Explorer prevents you from entering ' at the keyboard.

My fictional friend William De'Ath Could be a useful person to test this out with.

Further details easily obtainable from the site show what scripting language to use and what operating system is running it.

I am thinking about who to contact to investigate this.

The JavaScript side works on Firefox for the UK based online application service, I haven't tried to circumvent this to see if that is susceptible too.

Nigeria High Commission

Nigeria High Commission
Originally uploaded by ajbrowe.

Paid a visit to the Nigeria High Commission today, The place was absolutely packed. nearly 200 were waiting for visas and my guess is almost the same were waiting for passports, all in one quite medium sized basement waiting room.

I arrived early, 9am, and got a ticket. I was 28th in the queue. If not for waking early to reach the High Commission in time for the doors to open, I doubt I would have managed to get out of there in time for my train home. It was 12:25 when I got out, and the queue seemed to be still growing.

Monday and Tuesday this week were public holidays in Nigeria for Eid ul-Fitr. The NHC closes on Nigerian and UK Public holidays, so Today there were Three days worth of people trying to squeeze in. I do feel sorry for those who had to wait hours upon hours, and especially those who were getting their first taste of Lagos!

Fighting Spam

Off topic but I thought I'd share something with you.

Over the last three months I have been testing anti-spam technologies. For a long time I have been relying on Mozilla Thunderbirds built in Junk mail controls for all my email accounts and it worked very well until about 3 or 4 months ago when I suddenly started seeing a much higher volume of spam and much of it was not being marked by thunderbird.

So I then started investigating better ways to tackle the problem.

The Spamato project is a java application that plugs in to various email applications, (Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird included) and processes incoming messages through 6 advanced filters. After a short period of training this seemed to catch at least 90% of all spam I received. To date it has missed 7.7% of spam and incorrectly identified 2.2%. These figures are improving every day but are much better than plain vanilla mozilla junk mail filter. Everytime Spamato detects a spam message a sample of the 'Spam song' sung by the Vikings in the Monty Python spam sketch is played. I haven't got irritated by it yet!



Now just detecting spam automatically and deleting it is not really Fighting spam is it? So the second stage of my spam fighting process is to try to shut down the spammers operations. This is not easy to do on your own, you would have to identify the origin of each message, determine if the address has been 'spoofed' or not and then send complaint letters to the administrators of the appropriate networks or ISP's. That's where SpamCop comes in. The website is a little confusing but the basic service they offer is giving you a unique email address @spamcop.net where you can forward your spam. Spamcop process the messages and within a few minutes you will have a response email giving links to the processed messages where YOU can then quickly forward complaints to the appropriate people. SpamCop handles spoofed IP's and other details, and also collects details the origin addresses so that if several spams originate from the same location the addresses are placed on a black list. Spam messages processed must be as fresh as possible. SpamCop will not process a message older than 48 hours.

It takes a little time and effort but I do get a good feeling doing it, also, importantly, I have noticed a significant drop in spam. An account where I would regularly get 20+ spams per day now rarely receives more than 10 and recently I have had a number of days where I have recieved no spam At all! Once in a while I get a nice feeling after reporting a 419 spammer and I get a response from their ISP that the account has been closed down.

There are a number of theories for this drop in spam. The least likely I'm afraid is that the spammer has been arrested/shot/hung, drawn and quartered (delete as appropriate.) The most likely situation is that some spammers have deleted my address from their list because the complaints that occaisionally get through to them become bothersome. They still continue to spam everyone else.