– It's Superman you really love... and no other man, not even a supernatural one, can take his place in your heart!
– No, Simon -- don't leave! Wait!
– It's no use Lois -- you can't lie to a ghost
Peak supernatural melodrama from the pages of the Lois Lane feature in the Superman Family magazine. And it was a two-part story continuing from issue #166. I always say Lois Lane stories are the best and I might be biased, but hear me out, in this story: Lois Lane becomes a secret agent to investigate a murder (full of plot twists), the intelligence agency headquarters she's part of is inside a trash truck, she and her reluctant partner become increasingly attracted to each other (slow burn), though he eventually dies, becomes a ghost and keeps protecting her from criminals making Superman jealous. What can I say... Action, intrigue, romance, espionage, supernatural thrills, Kryptonian martial arts, a drug dealer with a robotic arm... What's not to love?
From Superman Family #169 (1975) by Cary Bates & John Rosenberger
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Ventriloquist Simon Cross (approx. 1867-1954) travelled across England performing at fairs and fundraisers with his Ally Sloper dummy under the stage name Professor Nomis (”simon” spelled backwards!).
Simon James Cross (born 31 May 1965 in Hereford, England) is a former motorcycle speedway rider who spent most of his career with the Cradley Heathens.
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One of Praekelt’s best and brightest, Simon Cross, was in Rwanda recently to attend the mHealth System Design Workshop. We managed to twist his arm into writing a blog post about his experience there and some of the exciting developments which are underway as a result. Simon’s post highlights some of the difficulties being faced in the mHealth arena, but also suggests that important progress is being made in overcoming these challenges.
The impetus for the workshop was provided by a recent moratorium on mHealth projects put in place by the Rwandan Ministry of Health. The numerous disjointed mHealth initiatives currently underway in Rwanda have placed a strain on the country's healthcare infrastructure and are hampering the provision of medical care to patients. In some cases healthcare workers have been asked to complete as many as eight separate forms (each for a different mHealth project) for every patient they interact with.
The aim of the workshop was to facilitate integration of mHealth systems, standardization of system components and sharing of information in order to avoid duplication of work, not only during the development of the mHealth systems themselves, but also in the broader healthcare system within which such mHealth projects are deployed.
The fifty-odd attendees of the workshop were a diverse mix of project implementers (developers, project managers) and policy makers (government officials, NGO policy advisors). Discussions ranged from the need to have policy in place that encourages integration all the way down to the details of how such integration might be implemented.
There were developers present from UNICEF, ThoughtWorks, Praekelt (me), Dimaggi, Jembi, OpenMRS and DHIS2. For many of us it was our first face-to-face meeting with other developers from the African mHealth community. Encouragingly, the community appears to share a lot of common ground. Possibly because most projects operate with constrained budgets, small development teams and tight schedules, there is a strong preference for simple but effective technology choices and open source solutions.
Among the developers present, Java and Python appeared to be the languages of choice and (simple) XML and JSON the preferred data exchange formats. There was a strong consensus that RESTful HTTP interfaces were the correct choice for external APIs and that APIs that publish or consume sensitive information should be protected using HTTPS and basic or digest authentication.
The developers got to spend Thursday and Friday hacking away on some of the things that had been discussed. I worked with the UNICEF developers on integrating our own Vumi with another mobile messaging platform, RapidSMS, by providing a Vumi backend (from which we're hoping to create a standard API that can be used across many text messaging systems). The Jembi and OpenMRS developers worked on improving the OpenMRS APIs (Jembi have been using OpenMRS in their RHEA project in Rwanda).
The coding sprints were graciously hosted by the kLab innovation space which has a loft office with amazing views, a great internet connection and some really talented people. If you're in Kigali you should stop by and say hello.
Of course all good workshops eventually come to an end, but we're hoping to continue the great discussions started there on the [email protected] mailing list. If you're a developer interested in mobile solutions to African problems, come and join us.
