I enthusiastically recommend (mt) Grid-Service. So I am rather surprised to get news on Friday, explaining that they are changing database passwords for all (mt) Grid-Service accounts. If you host your website on (mt) Grid-Service, you will need to pay attention to the notifications and do what it takes to make sure that your sites continue operating normally. Even if you don't, this is another reminder that you need to keep your passwords in a safe place and not use easily guessed passwords. 

Many Kabissa members have been asking recently about twitter, how @kabissa uses it and how it relates to them. Learn more online through a free webinar led by Allen Gunn of @aspirationtech - spaces will be limited so click http://ow.ly/1giXZ to sign up now!  

I just received notice of the next Drupal Convention coming up next month, and am curious to see if African developers are planning to attend or contribute. Drupal is the open source platform that powers the Kabissa community website, and DrupalCon is always a much heralded and powerful event. Follow on twitter at @drupalcon and @drupal. Details below. 

Do you use gmail? If so, be aware that it exposes you to a potentially serious privacy flaw - if you work in human rights or otherwise don't want to share who you email with to the public, you need to read this post for an explanation.

If you run a community website you are no doubt familiar with spam spam spam - people fill up your site with fake users and content pointing to their payday loans and other useless spam sites. They do this to increase their rankings in google, not because they want to contribute to your site. 

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I was pleased to learn via @afrinomad today that my father, Peter Eigen, has been included in the TED Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world. In his talk at TEDxBerlin, he talks about his anti-corruption work, for which I am of course very proud. I am grateful that he is on the Kabissa board as well. 

Keeping your web browser up to date is always a good idea to make sure websites function properly for you, but now you will soon start having problems with Gmail and Google Apps if you don't, according to an email I got from Google today (see below). This is an aggressive move on the part of Google that advances the field and will ultimately benefit everybody. I actively use Google's Chrome browser and Mozilla Firefox, both of which I strongly recommend over Internet Explorer.

Attached is a zip archive (2MB) containing the materials Kabissa used in 2007 to facilitate a pilot elearning course titled Running Online Groups. Although we decided not to go on with providing elearning, our elearning pilot project taught us a great deal about the power of elearning in Africa. We are releasing the materials today in the hopes that they will be useful to ICT trainers who might use them to design their own elearning courses. If you do decide to use them, please let us know!

I got an interesting email just now from Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the One Laptop Per Child project. I've pasted it below - if you have any extra XO laptops lying around and no longer need them, you may want to donate them to be used in child education projects in Haiti.

Personally, I am a little ambivalent about the offer - in it he seems to reinforce the idea that the laptops are not as useful as we all had hoped but that they are still useful for use by children in poor countries.