Battling Hunger in the Horn of Africa

A humanitarian crisis has slowly unfolded in the Horn of Africa. Drought, conflict, and rising food prices have affected more than 13 million people in the region. On 20 July, famine conditions were declared in several southern regions of Somalia. The Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit (FSNAU) forecasts that famine conditions will spread if humanitarian assistance does not increase. In response, WFP is planning to feed over 11.5 million people, including 3.7 million people in Somalia, 3.7 million in Ethiopia, and 2.7 million in Kenya.

Restricted aid access

Access to some vital areas is restricted to humanitarian aid organizations. The hatched area on the map shows areas in which some aid organizations are unable to work— including the places where people are most in need of assistance.

Operational efficiency

The figure of USD $0.50 per person per day is based on the average combined daily costs of World Food Programme's operations within Somalia, Ethiopia, & Kenya, as well as the number of people reached by those efforts.

If you cannot see the embedded map above, click here: http://horn.wfp.org/main.html

Save a child today!

How can Govs help FOSS businesses

Dear Lazyweb,

A group of FOSS ambassadors (of which I am one) have been invited to visit government officials who are "interested" in open-source. The goal will be to pitch open-source and why adopting it would have various benefits on a national level.

A more specific point that should be discussed is How can the government help local FOSS businesses grow in order to help, support and grow a FOSS-oriented eco-system (Developers, Support professionals, VARs...)

If you were in that meeting, what points would you make ?

Thanks!

Ensemble meets Hadoop on the cloud

So you wanted to play with hadoop to crunch on some big-data problems, except that, well getting a hadoop cluster up and running in not exactly a one minute thing! Let me show you how to make it "a one minute thing" using Ensemble! Since Ensemble now has formulas for creating hadoop master and slave nodes, spinning up a hadoop cluster could not be easier! Check this video out


If you can't see the embedded video, here's a direct link http://youtu.be/e8IKkWJj7bA

Yep that's how simple it is! If you want to scale-out the cluster, you only need to ask Ensemble to do it for you:
$ ensemble add-unit hadoop-slave

So is this easier than configuring a hadoop cluster manually? Leave me a comment, let me know your thoughts! Also let me know what you'd like to see deployed next with Ensemble