Mimi kumshtaki

This page is written in response to the lies that +Phil Daintree has written about me, and spread on the internet. Despite years of searching he has been unable to find anything I have written that is untrue, and he has had to resort to vague generalities, faked emails, and badly fabricated screenshots (you can see the joins if you zoom in using any bit mapped image editor). +Phil Daintree  is welcome to make any comments to these pages, as he has done in the past. If I agree with what he says I will amend my writings, if I do not agree I have allowed his comments to stand next to mine so that people can make their own judgements. I have every confidence in the intelligence of readers to make a sensible judgement based on the facts. +Phil Daintree will not allow me the right of reply to any of the lies he has told about me. It seems to me significant that he realises that if people see both sides of the argument they will see through his lies.

On the odd occasion I manage to beat the censor and manage to give my advice to people on the webERP forums and mailing lists I find that +Phil Daintree removes the advice I give. As can be seen here:

http://weberp.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=1949
and http://weberp.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=1945

and many other places on that forum, my advice that I freely give just gets removed. I wasn't able to understand this until recently, when I got informed by several people that what happens is that once they have posted an issue to the mailing lists or forums +Phil Daintree writes privately to them saying he will give them the solution in return for money. This explains why he doesn't want me helping them for free as it undermines his business. Now I have no problem with people earning money out of the work I have done on webERP but if I give my advice for free on a forum supposedly meant for a free exchange of advice I think it should at lest be left there. I will leave it up to the readers to judge on the honesty and morality of a person who would act like this.

+Phil Daintree has taken to publishing private emails between us without first seeking my consent. Here http://weberp.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=2005&pid=4483#pid4483 and in one of his comments here http://weberpafrica.blogspot.com/2013/12/banned-for-trying-to-help-african.html for instance. Now there is nothing in t6hese emails that is either relevant or that I would not want published (indeed the first is an example of his stupidity in banning me from the forums) but it is generally accepted both in email and written correspondence that you don't publish private correspondence without the agreement of all parties. I will leave it up to the readers to judge on the honesty and morality of a person who would act like this.

+Phil Daintree has said that I was never banned on the forums. However this screenshot from the forum shows that he is telling yet another untruth:

As can be seen it is a lie that I have not ever been banned from the forum. I will leave it up to the readers to judge on the honesty and morality of a person who would act like this.

+Phil Daintree has said that he never refused to allow me to post my thoughts to the mailing list when a long term contributor to webERP died. Here is a screenshot:

Nearly 6 months on it has still not been accepted my the mailing list administrator (+Phil Daintree). As can be seen it is a lie that he has never stopped me sending my thoughts on Mo's death. I will leave it up to the readers to judge on the honesty and morality of a person who would act like this

The comments to this post include serious allegations against me and so I have forwarded details of this serious allegation against me to Windsor Engineering Group Limited (the employer of +Phil Daintree  ), the New Zealand online police department, the ACCA, and to my solicitors. - Tim

Project Mtuha on android.

Am very happy to announce that an android client for Project Mtuha our new open sourced health information system for Africa is being developed. Here is a preview of this client working on android device:

This fantastic app is being developed by Firas Ataya, Firas Tanan, Ammar Aranjy and Mostafa Natafji of the University of Damascus in Syria. We hope to have some very exciting news related to this project very soon.

Stay tuned!!

Banned for trying to help African hospitals improve services

This page is written in response to the lies that +Phil Daintree has written about me, and spread on the internet. Despite years of searching he has been unable to find anything I have written that is untrue, and he has had to resort to vague generalities, faked emails, and badly fabricated screenshots (you can see the joins if you zoom in using any bit mapped image editor). +Phil Daintree  is welcome to make any comments to these pages, as he has done in the past. If I agree with what he says I will amend my writings, if I do not agree I have allowed his comments to stand next to mine so that people can make their own judgements. I have every confidence in the intelligence of readers to make a sensible judgement based on the facts. +Phil Daintree will not allow me the right of reply to any of the lies he has told about me. It seems to me significant that he realises that if people see both sides of the argument they will see through his lies.

Earlier today I politely asked +Phil Daintree if I could mention Project Mtuha on the webERP forum and mailing list. The KwaMoja code is descended from webERP and so there is a great deal of webERP code in Project Mtuha. I asked him if he could come up with a form of words that was acceptable and I would use that  wording. Unfortunately not only did he say no, he has again banned me from helping webERP users on the forums and mailing lists, in order to stop me from mentioning our integrating our open source hospital for Africa.

The exact text of my email to him was :

"Subject: Project Mtuha

 Phil,

I would like to publicise this project on webERP. I realise you will
find a lot of things sensitive about it, so I am asking if you have
any ideas how this can be done to our mutual satisfaction?

Thanks
Tim"

I think it is clear that I was trying to be conciliatory, and at no point did I threaten to publicise the hospital system without the permission of +Phil Daintree  .


It is most disappointing that he should try to punish the webERP user base in this way.

It is also very strange as +Phil Daintree frequently uses the forums and mailing lists to promote his own commercial proprietary projects, while denying me the chance to put forward our open sourced free solution for African hospitals.

I thought we had moved past such silly behaviour when we spoke recently on the phone, but it seems Phil was not telling the truth. This is not the first time he has made such an agreement verbally and then reneged on it a short time later. It seems any agreement with him cannot be trusted!

It is typical of the way that +Phil Daintree works to make vague allegations and then when pressed for details he changes the subject. His tactics are to throw mud around and hope that some of it sticks. He has been proven again and again to be a liar and to be untrustworthy.

Announcing Project Mtuha

I blogged recently about a plan to produce an application based on merging +KwaMoja with Care2x, and I thought it was time to update on progress. Currently the project is called Mtuha.

We have been working on the interface, Registration, Admissions, and Billing modules, but to continue much further with the project we require some form of sponsorship to make it happen. Please let me know if you have any ideas for this.

The interface now looks like this:

The icons along the top left of the toolbar represent different security tokens that the user will have in their login. For information about the security tokens used in KwaMoja see this blog post here. 
 
Holding the mouse over one of these icons brings down a menu containing those options allowed for that security token.

Clicking on any of these options loads up that script in the browser.

We have created a minimal framework that enables forms to be designed, and submitted. Also all forms can be edited, and each element in a form can be made mandatory, and it's visibility can be toggled on and off. This can be used for all forms, and converting the current forms in KwaMoja and Care2x to this framework is very easy.

The registration form contains many elements, a few of which can be seen below, but any of these can be hidden, or added, made mandatory, or optional.

There is a stock type of "Registration Items", and any items set up with this category will appear as options at the bottom of the registration screen:

On completion of the registration, the above appears, and any options that user is entitled to perform are shown on the right. Clicking on print, just prints the patient detail label. Mtuha can be setup to use the bar code, so that when the bar code is scanned by a mobile device (phone etc.) you can be taken to a chosen place in Mtuha for that patient.
There is a new patient search facility, which is the same as used throughout Mtuha when a patient number needs to be found. When you start to type in any of the search fields, the list of possible patients automatically updates. At the far right of each patient details there is a small icon. Clicking that icon will bring up a list of options that the particular user can choose to perform on that patient record.

This particular user can only modify the registration details, or admit the patient. If the user was a cashier then they would see options to bill the patient.

Clicking to admit the patient takes you to the admissions form shown here.


Like the registration form it is fully customisable, and all fields can be made optional/mandatory, or be hidden/shown.


As with the registration form, there is a stock type called Admission. Any items setup with this stock type will appear at the bottom of the admissions form. You can select one or many of these billable items, just as with registration.

If the user then logs in as a cashier, and searches for a patient they are then presented with an option to bill the patient, rather than previously seeing the options to register and admit. Selecting that option brings up this screen, showing any unpaid items for that patient.


Clicking on the button prints a bill for this patient. However it also does a lot more. If any of the items are physical stock items then the required stock movements are processed, together with all related General Ledger transactions. Each cashier has a separate cash account set up for them, and processing this bill will debit that account, and credit the profit and loss account with the sale. At the end of their shift there is a report that should be run by the cashier detailing all the cash they should have received. This report is checked against the physical amount of money the cashier has, and is then passed on to the accounts department.

As I said at the beginning of this article, what we really require now is funding to hire more African developers, and pay for my time.

Help required!!

I have had a plan bubbling away for sometime to take care2x and KwaMoja and merge them together as one complete integrated package. I have written before about how KwaMoja and Care2x have been used in African hospitals, using the KwaMoja api to communicate between the two applications. Now my idea is to create a single open sourced application with a unified interface and a single login that can be rolled out across hospitals all over the continent.

However this requires resources which as ever are in short supply. To get good African programmers who can work full time on this project requires money.

My idea to raise this is to start a Kickstarter project to generate the funding. However I need some help, as a lot of this stuff requires marketing skills that I do not possess. For instance they say a promotional video is more or less essential to a successful project, but I do not have the first idea of how to create one.

There is no money to pay for these services up front, but if someone wants to volunteer (remember that KwaMoja and Care2x have been written by volunteers down the years) I could look to recompensing them later if and when the project gets funded, as a promotional video could be useful in pushing the final software to hospitals. Obviously anybody helping would also gain a lot of publicity for their skills.

If anyone is interested in helping this in any way, then please send me an email on tim.schofield1960@gmail.com.

Thanks in advance!!

Africa and Open Source software

Africa is the most under represented continent when it comes to contributing to open source projects, yet it stands to gain the most of any continent from it. This seems so sad to me.

Why is this so?

There is a perception with many African developers I have met that Open Source is something done by rich western volunteers, in order to benefit people like themselves. There is a tendency to mix it up with the work of Save the children fund, or Oxfam. I have heard the following said many times: "I am an African I can't afford to be a volunteer". It is viewed as a resource to be taken from, but not to give back to.

This is not to say there are no African open source developers, just far fewer than there should be given the wealth of talent on the African continent.

Why should Africans should participate fully Open Source? 

There are two very obvious reasons why individuals can gain from fully participating in open source projects

Firstly by interacting with other programmers it is possible to increase your skill set in ways that would otherwise be impossible. Many of the worlds best programmers are involved in open source projects and are happy to mentor those who are new.

Secondly by contributing to open source projects you enhance your reputation globally. Most if not all the worlds big software companies monitor open source projects looking for talented programmers. In what other way could a student at an African university bring their talents to the attention of the likes of Google or Facebook? Open source show cases your skills.

Proposal to build an African software industry

So much for how contributing to open source can help individuals progress, but what about on a country level? Every year African countries spend millions of dollars on software licenses, almost all, if not all of this money is paid to western companies and none of this money ends up in the African economy. This is despite the fact that all the software necessary is available through open source. So my proposal is this:

I will use Uganda as my example here but this applies equally to any African country.

I propose that the largest university in Uganda (Makerere University) would create a Linux Distribution, based on one of the big distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, Suse or Fedora. This would be branded for Uganda, and include any applications specific to Uganda, together with any local language translations. This distribution would be maintained by the university and would be used as the basis for their teaching, and funded by the government with money that would otherwise have gone abroad. It would be an excellent resource for all areas that are taught in the computer science department. Creating this is not a huge task as there is a large amount of documentation on this subject to be found on the web.

The distribution would contain all the applications needed, such as LibreOffice for word processing and spreadsheets, Firefox for web browsing etc.

The government would commit to moving all their computers to this distribution. If the city of Munich in Germany can achieve this I see no reason why Kampala can't.

The contracts to support the government departments would then be handed out to local support companies, who would have been trained in the distribution at the university. Thus the money instead of going to large American multinationals would stay in Uganda and would circulate within the Ugandan economy, making a sustainable Ugandan IT industry.

Private industry would see the increase in skills with Linux, and the consequent decrease in the skill levels in other operating systems. They would start to take the pragmatic decision to move to this Linux distribution.

We have seen recently how the big American corporations have been "encouraged" to give the security services back doors into their operating systems, allowing the likes of the NSA to view what is on the computers of anybody in the world using their operating systems. This would include (in theory) any member of the Ugandan government. Using a Ugandan operating system built in Uganda, with the code open to view would stop this happening.

So there it is, a simple recipe for creating a sustainable IT industry within Africa, keeping the money in Africa, and potentially exporting IT to the rest of the world, instead of constantly leaking the money out of the Africa. All of this could be achieved with the technology available now. All it takes the will in the government to make it happen. Lets put pressure on them to start making it happen today!

How the webERP community takes second place to Phil's vendetta

This page is written in response to the lies that +Phil Daintree has written about me, and spread on the internet. Despite years of searching he has been unable to find anything I have written that is untrue, and he has had to resort to vague generalities, faked emails, and badly fabricated screenshots (you can see the joins if you zoom in using any bit mapped image editor). +Phil Daintree is welcome to make any comments to these pages, as he has done in the past. If I agree with what he says I will amend my writings, if I do not agree I have allowed his comments to stand next to mine so that people can make their own judgements. I have every confidence in the intelligence of readers to make a sensible judgement based on the facts. +Phil Daintree  will not allow me the right of reply to any of the lies he has told about me. It seems to me significant that he realises that if people see both sides of the argument they will see through his lies.

Back at the end of July a user posted a bug report on the webERP forums (http://www.weberp.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=981). As +Phil Daintree has made it so I am not allowed to help people on the forum I sent the user the fix privately and sent it on to +Phil Daintree. 

I also posted the fix to the nabble forum in order that the maximum number of users got the benefit of the fix.

Unfortunately +Phil Daintree refused to commit my bug fix, being happier that the community should use buggy software than recognise that I had fixed the bug. My post to the nabble forum was also taken down by +Phil Daintree  at the same time as the post about how many bytes a particular JavaScript function used.

The same user has now upgraded and found that 4.11 has over written the fix given to him (http://www.weberp.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=1935).

Who suffers in this scenario? Not me, I have the fix. Not +Phil Daintree, or +Phil Daintree's paying customers, they too are given the fix. No the people he makes suffer are the webERP community who are denied the bug fixes I am supplying.

The project is being run to help +Phil Daintree in his vendetta against me rather than for the benefit of the community.

Come on +Phil Daintree step aside and let the community run this project!