My latest E-Book experiences

Yesterday I finished a five-day course here in Béni Abbès, Algeria, teaching staff from the ANRH on the use of Geographic Information Systems, particularly ArcGIS and Quantum GIS. At the end, my “batteries” were fairly down – but how to recharge them? Returning early back to the hotel and “relax” was not an option – too hot (the only properly air-conditioned space accessible to me is our office).

So, I looked for the “literal” way – having discharged great chunks of my knowledge I tried to look for some new topics on “which always wanted to know more about but never found the opportunity”.

Since quite some time I wanted to become more acquainted with “R”, particularly their potential for spatial statistics. Those program packages which I used before where too limited regarding the available algorithms (Surfer, ArcGIS Spatial Analyst), required software licenses and were not really suitable to run on a web server.

Just two days earlier my colleague Sebastian Norrmann had sent me a link on how to find and read scientific literature at remote sites: PaperC. Well, actually they had just a single book on R (but certainly a good one). Some time after scrolling through the book “R in a nutshell” from Joseph Adler, they asked me to register, and, not too much later, they requested me to buy the page(s) I was looking at – at a price of 10 Cents (valuable Euro-Cents, not the cheap American stuff) per page. Of course, I could also buy the whole book – no discount given in spite of the considerable volume of about 672 pages.

Thus, PaperC might be interesting if you are looking just a a few selected pages, but certainly not for a whole book. Friendly enough, they were offering a link to amazon.com, where I decided to buy the book as ebook (Kindle format) for less half the price (35.41 US$ which is about 27 €). I do not own a Kindle device, but I have the Kindle reader on my Notebook, since yesterday on my MacBook and sometimes on my Android smartphone. This “sometimes” is another story, which I am planning to tell soon.

When I started to read the new ebook on my MacBook, I got another surprise: a link to the publisher's website with the offer to get just for an additional 4.99 US$ the DRM-free version of the same book in a variety of formats: PDF, mobi (readable on Kindle) and epub (readable for instance with Aldiko under Android (very nice) or with Stanza on my MacBook. Forget about Stanza under OSX - it spoils tables, drops images and neither shows different fonts or links.

In addition to these DRM-free ebooks (I can even print the PDF!), with my upgrade at O'Reilly, I get lifetime upgrades – which I understand will include future editions of this book. If I would have known that before, I would have directly purchased from O'Reilly for 35.99 US$. Lessons learnt.

This year, my hedge of Japanese wineberries (Rubus phoenicolasius) is fuller than ever.



The petals of the flowers are tiny and stay only for a very short time. Thus the flowers are less attractive as for instance our European blackberries.



Not attractive? Apparently the bees see this differently and pollinate them happily.

In the past, N'Djamena had mainly two types of roads: dust roads (for most of the year) and “waterways” after heavy rains. Four-wheel drive vehicles were needed even in the city.

This is changing now rapidly: more and more streets are getting a proper drainage and well-founded tarmac.



The new roads are carefully sweeped every day.





Some people say, this is not just for keeping the roads visible, but also to prevent the sand to creep into the new drains and block them.

The mango season in west Africa is over, guava season has started. And, while you can get mangos nowadays easily in Europe (mainly imported from Brazil), this is not the case with fresh guavas. They are probably too difficult to transport, having a rather thin skin.

Guavas belong to my favourite tropical fruit, and they are not difficult to eat, you neither need a knife nor a spoon for that. But, while I would dare to eat a raw tomato just after washing it thoroughly, I think that would be risky with the not that smooth skin of a guava.

Fortunately, they sell little sachets of potassium permanganate in the pharmacies in N'Djamena. After floating in the watery solution for a few minutes, my guavas were ready to eat!

When I see something, I want to know its name – at least, when I find it interesting. Yesterday, when browsing lazily around at Wikipedia, in an article on The Gambia, I saw a picture of a animal I see almost every day but could not properly classify: Agama agama.

Its English name is “Common Agama“ or “Rainbow Lizard”; the German name is “Siedleragame”. A “Siedler” is a “settler” or a colonist. But this animal is also particularly frequent in large settlements throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, like in N’Djamena (where the first photo below was taken) and in Bamako (second photo, taken today at the hotel pool). The French name is “agame des colons” (which is equivalent to the German name) or “margouillat”. But that later name is vernacular and also applied for several gecko species and thus misleading.

Yesterday I visited the Mali national museum in Bamako. Besides the excellent permanent exhibitions related to the culture of Mali (wood cravings, pottery, textiles), they have there also temporary presentations that change every few weeks.



Presently the exhibition “Cities of the World” from the South African artist Titus Matiyane is shown. Huge panoramas (often more than 20 m wide), drawn in water colors on smaller sheets of paper. The naïve style was particularly charming - and most of all the following text that forms part of the drawing of Dar es Salaam:

“The Germans didn’t have so many colonies, but Tanzania was the one closest to their hearts since it was the party colony. It’s where they all like to dance in the pre-love parade era. And this is how the country’s name came about, tanz being German for dance.”

Rym, that's a well known name to my colleagues and me who stay at the hotel of this very name whenever we visit the Algerian oasis town of Beni Abbes.



Looking further around, you will find that this name is not so unique. You will find it as a cigarette brand ...



... and on shops in Beni Abbes as well.



Asking the locals, what “Rym” stands for, they may answer that it depicts a beautiful woman. Well, these are not easy to find in this country ...



... and the few ones to encounter are rather shy.



OK, we need to ask the more educated people. They will tell you, that “Rym” stand for are very rare species of desert gazelle. And indeed, I found it. Not in the wild, but in Wikipedia. And there, on the English and French pages, it is even called “Rhim gazelle”.



The extreme rareness of the animal in the wild is hopefully not to be blamed to weapon making of these craftsmen at Beni Abbes market:

Popup image: Amourers working in Beni Abbes

BTW, as the Arabic script on the cigarette package may indicate, “Rym” is not pronounced like the German “Rüm” but rather like German “Rihm” or English “Reem”.

Let’s start from the end. This is a bill for a healthy meal: wali na nyama (rice with meat) and a bottle of water (half a litre). This is what they serve at the canteen at Maji Ubungo – where my office is when I am working in Dar es Salaam. The price is 1900/= TSh. which translates to about 1.20 Euros.



The dish looks a bit like this – although this picture shows ndizi Bukoba style instead. Rice I can get everywhere, plantains not – just the choice is clear. They also serve ndizi Moshi style – different type of banana, and not that soft. Another staple food would be ugali made from white maize flour – but for that I would need a really spicy sauce to give it more taste.



The food is served from these steel containers.



And this is the restaurant building from a distance.



It’s never too hot below that roof thatched with leaves from the coconut palm. It’s beautiful both from the outside and the inside.



And this is how a similar roof looks in Central America (picture taken in August 2007 in Tikal, Guatemala)



BTW, this is how water is now offered everywhere in Dar es Salaam. Different from Jordan or Cameroun, the bottles are correctly labeled as “drinking water” and not as “mineral water” - the mineral content is in fact very low.

Like with many places in Europe, it are not the big boulevards but the smaller streets branching off from them which really show the charm and the individual characteristics of a city.

In Dar es Salaam, Mkwepu street is one such street, starting near Kivukoni Front close to ferry docks for Zansibar. Ten years ago, this was a street one rather wanted to avoid, one Dar es Salaam has improved a lot during the last years.

A few hundred meters away from the former Ministry of Water you find the offices of the Census Office of the National Bureau of Statistics. We visited that place to request GIS files for ward boundaries (the administrative level below a district). Waiting in front of the building for our car to bring us to Maji Ubungo, I used the time to take some pictures of this street.



The houses, which were from the thirties of the 20th century, may not be of particular historical value like those buildings erected under the German colonial rule. Thus, there is the danger, that in a few years the crumbling buildings are pulled down to give space to modern skyscrapers of the type you find now in any metropolitan city of the world.

In recent years, Christmas markets have become increasingly popular in Germany. One might even say, they became a pest. It is difficult to avoid them. One method for that would be to escape to Africa - but than, what about the last minute presents for Christmas (except forelectronic stuff that I can order through the Internet)?

With the recent economic boom in Tanzania, you can not only get real German rye bread, but also something equivalent to a “Weihnachtsmarkt”. All nicely together at the Slipway at Msasani bay in Dar es Salaam.

As everybody should know, I am working 7 days a week (sweat), but not necessarily 24 hours per day (yawn). Thus, I started my stay at Slipway with a work meeting with staff from the local company GeoData Consultants Limited about water point mapping.



After that, it was lunch time. I am not so much a friend of deep-fried food, although that is popular both at Christmas markets as well as in Tanzania. If I find a chance to eat my fish raw, I take it. And the fish at the “Azuma” Japanese restaurant at Slipway was very raw (not marinated like the Carpaccio de capitaine in N'Djamena) and plentiful.



Only the rice was a bit too sweet for my taste. I was the only guest at the Azuma ...



Downwards towards the water front there were a few more people.



This is the Christmas market atmosphere that brings me into good mood! After being strengthened by the good food, I was ready to visit the many small shops and market stalls and look for local handicrafts to bring back into the cold.