INEC'S DDC MACHINE : THE HOLY MATRIMONY OF TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICS

Recently going through one of the daily newspapers and stumbled upon a cartoon of which i could not but felt same feelings that must have preceeded this awesome creativity. The caricature goes thus:

Warning signs:

Man: As a result of the faulty DDC machine, the man said he, his wife and daughter couldn't register

INEC official: I'm sorry about that. So why does he want to see me?

Man: He wants to REGISTER HIS ANGER



Funny as it may sound, to me the man was right after all INEC called it voters' registration. Since the man, his wife and daughter couldn't register their biodata, they opted to register there anger of which fourier analysis would have played a major role here.



It came once more in the history of Nigeria another round of voters' registration with a projection to capture 70 Million eligible voters' biodata in two weeks in preparation for the 2011 poll. To a point i began to wonder how feasible that could be having known Nigeria of its numerous try-and-error way of accomplishing things of national importance.



I was lost in wonder land, thinking about how this can be accomplished. Wow, finally i thought for once i was closer to an answer when i took a moment's retrospection into the then Maurice Iwu's administration. Technology will do the trick! As a software developer myself i should have thought of this in the first place, well i am sorry if i disappointed you but for a minute, think it this way that i am thinking too much to be oblivion that the 84 Billion naira man once had a University school portal.



Hmmmmn... what a holy matrimony between technology and politics. But how are we so sure that Mrs. Politics would remain faithful to her her husband, Mr. Technology? Well, INEC gave it a try.



in the wake of the voters' registration, curiosity that almost killed a cat is enough to drive a software architect like myself into knowing what and how this system called DDC works and possible hacks but then i wasn't given such opportunity as i wasn't in possession of the DDC machine. However, Looking from far into the screen of the DDC shouldn't cost more for my 9 year linux user kid brother (Joshua) to figure out an Ubuntu Gnome interface. "That is cool", i must have thought. Another interesting feature is that when you boot they system it boots to the data capture interface. I must have heard one of the operators whisper it to someone "Hey, we cant minimize the form, infact we cant view desktop" but just like any secure system, the software has a bypass algorithm(backdoor) for people whose fingerprints could not be captured, a process they call "Special registration".



Another interesting feature is the DDC's system time which had already been pre-programmed and since you have no access to system terminal and all function keys had been used specially by the voter's registration form, a usually hack of using short-cut keys must have been defeated. If you have a good brain in your skull you might as well consider passing your way through the BIOS to work around the system time. A sad news might be a possible BIOS password needed to have access. How about booting the DDC with a liveCD, perhaps get hold of terminal and execute something like $sudo date +%T -s "10:33:33"? i am so sorry hacker, liveCDs were build such that it has no power to change anything on the base system. Daser would usually have a work around this, but that's by the way.



if you are such that think too much, sorry to say this Ctr + Alt + F[1-6] will each lead you to a blank screen with a blinking cursor waiting for punch card input. lol. By implication, run level 1 to 6 is blocked, you've only got run level 7 to work with. So bad as it might look for you, you can enjoy the comfort of navigating through directories perhaps steal information with a liveCD. Well am sorry if you are not schooled properly, thats all you've got.



so why the work around system time? timing is very important to the registration process and its security was needed to kiss good bye to the old days where politicians would take the machine home and have a mid-night vigil registering ghost voters. so if your voter's card reads 1:00 am or 3 am, so sorry for you, you are under arrest. I therefore score INEC 70% on system time security.



First day to the fourth day of the registration witnessed an annoyingly slow process with 95% of the blame apportioned to the scanners (finger print biometric device). On this, the INEC's software which was initially on version 1.2 was upgraded to version 1.8. This i sensed a fowl play or rather a cover-ass operation. Verification was traded for speed of finger print capture scoring INEC 55%.



However said, more and more can go to the print, but i've got to go back coding else i become the most wanted in Jega's list. hmmmmn. i no talk am oh.

DASERSOFT TECHNOLOGY SERIES

If you are reading this article, i believe you are alive and well schooled in the 21st century. If my believes are right then I am sure you must have heard or at most case read about software frameworks or content management systems/frameworks. If you haven’t then I think you need more time for re-evaluation of your computer skills and perhaps I will recommend a change of profession.

Software frameworks according to wikipedia is an abstraction in which common code providing generic functionality can be selectively overridden or specialized by user code providing specific functionality.

Web communication technology has brought about a drastic revolution in the contest of frameworks through the dissemination of information on the how tos of building a software framework and most importantly to tutorials on how to use the existing frameworks such as Zend Framework, symfony and Kohana

.

We all discovered one way or the other that we are geeks or more appropriately software developer who are trying to develop one software to another as a way of doing what we love best to do, or as a career trying to meet ends. but always we find ourselves in a nightmare of revisiting our previous codes or revising our existing codes on other projects. It becomes a nightmare because of the ways our codes are poorly written and structured often neglecting design patterns and (Don’t Repeat Yourself) the DRY principle in software engineering which states that

“every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system”.

Since coding is poetry, I make bold to classily code repetition or ambiguity in software as a bad programming practice making my defense from the DRY principle as it tends to negates codes reuse and even alter an anti-collaborative effort when extending your codes to another developer.

If you are with me on good practice then welcome on board to dasersoft’s technology series found at my official blog. In this series, I will be discussing on various framework concepts and design patterns.

THE ART OF ZEND FRAMEWORK: AN AFRICAN MARKET MODEL PERSPECTIVE

ABSTRACT

The Zend Framework is at its most basic level an open-source object
oriented web application
framework written in PHP 5 and licensed under the new BSD license.
From this humble basis, Zend
Framework has been used to build large scale applications mostly
running on Intranet of nationals
and multi-national organizations. More unique applications appear
every day, further demonstrating
how versatile and powerful the framework can be.

Often at times, the questions that ponder the minds of so many
PHP programmers are issues
pertaining to bottlenecks not application level's but on aspect
of the learning curve regarding the
DOs and DONTs of Zend Framework,
sufficing me to put down this paper as an alternative way
to teaching Zend Framework to newbies or conventional
PHP programmers who have the intention of
using the Framework for their subsequent developments.
In this session, using this model, Zend framework will
be dissected intravenously from its
bootstrap to all its component libraries and discussed
right from its conception to its design
therefore exposing some issues to programmers.
INTRODUCTION
Driving a long way from the main Abuja City Central
Area of Nigeria with a programmer friend,
Layi Funsho (who happen to be a PHP programmer too)
to the Nigeria Immigration Service
Headquarters situated at a suburb (Sauka Village) along
the airport road left no shadow in
my mind than wondering how people who live in suburbs
survive the lack of aura of
civilization 2.0 brought about by web 2.0.Something
Eventually struck my mind
regarding their involvement in the country's capital market share.
Guess what? Zend Framework architecture is a complete
model that best describes the
scenario and in reverse this market model offers a simplistic
approach in teaching towards the comprehension of
the Zend Framework architecture in a way limiting the learning
curve of the framework.
A brief into into the market model: Well established
companies move imported food or goods
from the seaport to the various urban and rural markets
in Nigeria. The marketing channels for
imported foodstuffs are shown in the Figure below.
Empirical evidence from various studies
revealed that there is some level of concentration
in the rural and urban foodstuffs markets in
Nigeria. The degree of concentration at the wholesale
level is greater than the degree of
concentration in the retail subsector
(Adekanye, 1988; Okereke, 1988; Anthonio, 1988; Okoh,
1999).

The zend Boostrap:
Your Bootstrap class defines what resources and components
to initialize.
By default, Zend Framework's Front Controller is
initialized, and it uses the application/controllers/
as the default directory in which to look for action
controllers. Issue that will be raised involve the
initialization factor as observed by the
application/configs/application.ini and resource
creation and allocation performed by the bootstrap in
comparison with having a central Urban wholesaler
who distributes to the Rural
wholesaler and every point in time the rural wholesaler returns
to the Urban Wholesaler for resources needed by
its populace. On the other hand the Urban Wholesaler
who acts the bootstrap contains information regarding
access to the
database and other external libraries as seen in the
below model with the importer.

Fig: Marketing channels for imported foodstuffs

CONCLUSION
In conclusion it thus offers a better model
for the teaching of zend
framework's most especially to newbies of PHP
and even to experience programmers.
With respect to this, our organizations have
used this model for the training of
its programmers and has proven worthwhile.
Zend framework will thus be observed
as an art rather than its scientific
complications arising from high technical languages.
It can thus be concluded that our market
model involving rural and urban relationship
is a direct relative of the zend framework
in terms of architectural design.

DASER SUNDAY DAVID
Chief Technology Officer,
Frendtool Technologies Ltd,
Jos.
Nigeria.
+2347031285559

Setting up the pace

Am coming up soon....