[dvlug] Quiet period

[Grant Bowman]

Jambo wote, (hello everyone)

I hope things have gone well the last couple of Fridays at Caffe La
Scala. I'm looking forward to returning. Getting up at our meeting
time in Walnut Creek means getting up here at 4 AM, now 5 AM (after
the time change) which makes virtually attending meetings problematic.
I have done it a few times but intended to do it a few more.  :-)

I've been a bit occupied lately. I have been showing two Kenyan
graduates of http://nairobits.com how to use http://git-scm.com for
the project we are working on to connect the Rift Valley with the
Silicon Valley. We will soon be including others from the
http://dreamfish.com community that are interested in PHP, CSS and the
two key open source code bases we are using among others, status.net
and wordpress.org. We are working to deploy a test site soon.

Dreamfish is my host here. Functionally the site will make it as
simple as possible for people to describe what they are working on,
see what others are working on and connect in other ways. Dreamfish
strives to "work like humans" online and offline by connecting people
from 26 countries throughout Africa, Europe, Americas and Asia. In
many cultures the words “dream” and “fish” reference a life-affirming
sense of something larger than ourselves. Some of us are more
dreamers, some of us are more fishers; working together we dreamfish,
engaging our diversity and making us more effective.

These past few weeks, working with remote branches in git has me
learning more about how it works internally. Linus Torvalds originally
wrote the git engine and handed over the maintenance soon after. It is
very useful as a distributed revision control system but takes some
getting used to because it internally tracks trees and commits, sets
of files, not files individually.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)  We have also been
resolving some unexpected problems with the team in the past few
weeks. With mixed feelings I am counting down the 16 days left until
my return flight. The journey from SF to Nairobi took almost two days
less the 11 hour time shift. My first visit to Nairobi, Kenya & Africa
has been very worthwhile and rewarding. I look forward to describing
my experiences when I return. I plan to be at the meeting in Walnut
Creek Dec 9th.

Tuonane baadaye, (see you later)

Grant