₦airaland Forum

May be because we live in a society where the certificate is viewed as proof of competency.

It depends on so many factors which include: how good you are, your network, the kind of company you intend to gain employment in and so on.

Unless in exceptional cases, I will suggest still getting a degree from a university.

Browser incompatibility is a horrible menace and it can't be evaded at least while we still have companies like MSFT that will rather prefer to create their own standards and follow others. However, there are safe practices that can be followed to minimize problems arising from browser incompatibilities.

One of them is to use well developed CSS frameworks. I tend to drift towards Blueprint - http://code.google.com/p/blueprintcss/. There are a lot more other CSS frameworks out there that you can use for your apps. Using a CSS framework will save you from having to do a lot of CSS hacks since they have already been incorporated.

Secondly, if you do lots of AJAXy kind of activity in your apps, instead of writing your own XHR routines, you are better of using a mature library for that. Examples include jQuery (my favorite), Dojo, Script.aculo.us and MooTools.

Third, avoid using clever Javascripts. You're better off using the Javascript libraries to do your DOM modifications than doing it yourself.

Fourth, the W3C standards are great. Ensure your HTML/XHTML are well-formed and pass the syntax checks and so on.

The last time I made enquiries, it was going for N150,000. Hope this helps. By the way, you can always contact Pekun Famoroti ([email]pfamoroti@interswitchng.com[/email]) who's in the Business Solutions Group. You could also call him on phone: +234-1-4739101, 4616299, Ext 1401. Alternatively, you could check the web site: http://www.interswitchng.com/product.asp?id=7

One other useful investment web site is SBA Research. Not only can you track your Nigerian Stock Exchange investments, you can do so for other African markets too.

UBN is simultaneously offering a public offering and rights issue. The public offering closes on Wednesday December 21, 2005, while the rights issue offer will close on Friday December 30, 2005. More information (and their financials) is available on their web site.

@Eby: Let me start by explaining mutual funds. A mutual fund is an investment instrument whereby investors invest money into a pool and the funds collected that way are then invested by a funds manager for the purpose of making returns on the investments made by the investors.

Mutual funds have different goals and are for different types of investors. You could recall my previous post, I did mention something about risks. A mutual fund could be focused on investing in low-risk investments or high-risk investments or even a combination. Usually the fund managers may decide to have a percentage of funds going into different investment instruments.

So why mutual funds you may ask, mutual funds enable investors to benefit from investments that they might not be able to invest in as an individual. Many investments require large amounts of cash and except for high-networth or institutional investors, you may not even know about them but because of the large amounts of cash available for investing by the funds manager, even a starting investor can benefit from such investment opportunities.

For more information about mutual funds, I would suggest you visit this site.

IBTC and the Discovery Fund are examples of companies selling mutual funds. You can visit those sites for more information on the mutual funds they have on offer.

As regards IPOs, I suspect you actually meant N20 per share. There are a number of factors that influence the direction of movement of the price of a stock. I cannot say categorically how fast (if it would as a matter of fact) the price of UBN would rise. But if you would read some research reports on the stock, you may be able to get information and then decide if it would be a good buy. Union Bank has paid good dividends to their investors over the last three years and I'm not sure if that would continue since there's a likelyhood that - although they are getting more funds, they might not be able to keep up with the competition.

If you're doing some short term speculation, yes may be it would be a good buy. Probably you'll want to sell when it rises to about N25 (like I said, there are no guarantees). A good investment advice is that you do not invest what you cannot afford to lose.

Oh splendid! I must say this is really a good idea and could sell like hotcake (if properly managed). A student community can be one of the best places to market this kind of product but you'll have to make sure the product is properly packaged and reasonably priced (students are very sensitive to pricing of products).

Your concern about how to combine the business with your academics is a good one and I would suggest you do some planning. If for instance, your work load is not much, then it would be rather easy to combine the two. If on the other hand, you find out that you are having a lot of work and having to do a lot of studying, then you might and probably should consider hiring and training people who can do the production and/or marketing of the product.

dimples81: I wonder whether to advice you that investing in every investment opportunity really isn't the way to do it. Why? Cause every investment carries an element of risk. You've got to evaluate your ability to take on risks before jumping in on an investment and you must do your DD before risking your money. I want to believe you've read my reply on a similar topic.

As far as I know, it's not yet possible to do day trading on the Nigerian Stock Exchange.

@dimples81: Being an investor for well over two years now and learning about investing for about three years, I consider myself to have accumulated a pretty good amount of information about investing in general and in stocks in Nigeria and I feel I could share of my knowledge. There's a lot of information out there about investing, if you'll search well. I would go on to list some strategies that I would use but you must never take someone's strategies and just apply them like that because each individual has different risk-bearing abilities and if I'm a very "risky" investor and you are more of the conservative type, then my strategies may turn out to be just too risky for you and you could lose money badly. Have this at the back of your mind that the riskier an investment is, usually the more your ability to make profit and the more the amount of training required to succeed.

A lot of discussion has already taken place here and I just barely scanned through so apologies if I'm repeating anything that has been said.

You should understand that there are basically two markets you can buy investing instruments - the money market and the capital market. In the money market, you have investment instruments like fixed deposits, commercial papers, bankers acceptances, treasury bills and bonds. In the capital market, you'll deal with instruments like mutual funds, unit trusts, stocks, derivatives, etc.

With the money market, you are dealing with basically debt - you lend money to the government, bank or company with an agreement to get your money back with an interest at a specified time. If you are looking for safe investments, this may be your route as there's little or no risk usually involved but then the returns are not as high and rewarding as you would if you decided to take some risk in the capital market.

Mutual funds can be an easy way to invest in the capital market whilst also minimizing the risk because you have expert fund managers who periodically invest the money in the pool (contributed by mutual fund investors). They make loses and gains in different investments but at the end of the day, it averages out to a profit (on most occasions).

If you're a risk taker and would not mind monitoring the market and investing a lot in learning how the stock market works, then you are positioned to make money from the stock market. You might want to take advantage of IPOs. Most stocks would appreciate almost immediately after the IPO and that could be a time to sell. If your strategy is to buy in on IPOs (Initial Public Offerings) and sell once you've determined they are high enough, then you could make money that way.

I would like to stop here for now.

@pie1ect: well compared with other businesses, profit margin can be really low 4%. So it all depends on who is doing the business to tell if it's worthwhile and that's the reason why proper management of the business is very important. One wrong sale and you'll be set back terribly.

What kind of "sense the environment" are you referring to? 'Cause you could easily use a microcontroller in tandem with certain transducers to sense various physical qualities.

VTU stands for Virtual Top Up. It's an electronic airtime top-up application developed by Nefto for MTN Nigeria. See here and here for more information.

Interesting topic! I never gave thought to the fact that you could start a business with N4,000 and thinking about it now, I realized that it's possible!!! A lot of suggestions have been provided and I want to say I'm impressed that this buddy is thinking about making something of his life with the money he has.

I may not be able to give super suggestions on what kind of business to do but may be I would share a little experience. Early this year, I became tired of the fact that I had to rely on income from my parents, a salary and then some little income that I could get from doing little businesses and I wanted to have the feel of doing business! I did some consulting and started selling MTN VTU airtime in school.

I bought a VTU SIM card and paid a distributor to supply airtime to me so I could sell. The VTU SIM pack came with a manual on how you could operate the system and in a couple of days, I was up selling airtime. At a time, (without agressive advertising et al) I was making some good income. Now it really required about 18,000 to run the business then but it's a lot easier now as you can buy airtime worth 4000 (as a minimum).

I really do feel you shouldn't neglect the fact that you are to start small. You shouldn't despise your days of little beginning. You'll learn a lot in the process of starting small without incurring much debt. So this is my little advice to you:

1. Find something you can start with the capital you have. It may not give you so much in return but be faithful.
2. Work hard and be dedicated in building your business.
3. Watch your expenses and do proper accounting. Know how much you're spending and how much you're making.

Thanks.

The pleasure is all mine

I've been a web developer for a number of years and I am rather comfortable with building even complex web applications.

Having previous programming knowledge is an advantage since you can easily switch from the regular procedural or object oriented programming to building web applications. But be warned, they are rather different.

All what Kazey's said are good and I'm in complete agreement. However, you must be careful not to get stuck in the forever-student syndrome and continue seeking for knowledge when you should be practicing what you've already learnt. I for instance learnt PHP (the rudiments) in a week only from reading the manual and lots and lots of experiments - may be that would be probably the best way to learn! Everyone has different ways they learn best so you'll need to find yours.

Philip Greenspun is one man you should read if you'll be a serious web developer. Here are my recommendations:

Software Engineering for Internet Applications
Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
SQL for Web Nerds

Good luck!

Tell you what? This is the best marketing concepts explanation I've ever had. Nice one Seun! I particularly like the customer feedback.

BIND 9

Yeah that's right!

What would you call a geek born in Greece?

There have been several attempts in the past to form an association. I started one (not very active these days but I'm sure when I have the time or someone decides to join in the efforts then it would become more active) - You can find this one by visiting our Yahoo Groups home page. The second one I knew of (now defunct) is the Nigerian Web Developers Association. I can't remember the url now.

@joftech, if it's your organizational policy to disallow downloads with those extensions, it's okay but have you considered what could happen if someone downloads a file with a .txt extension but the Content-Type is that of VBScript or something like that - it would provide the same effect (depending on the browser) as downloading a .vbs file. May be you should consider blocking by content type instead of by file extension.

Secondly, from experience, I've found out that if you have Windows^TM (since the OS seems to be the one giving the most problems) installed on your client systems, having them automatically download updates (which are executables) and installing them is a good thing - trust me it would save you a lot of headache especially when there's a worm epidemic.

On the network I administer, we use a proxy cache that throttles the bandwidth allocated to a request when the file size of the download is really large. That way, you could choose to download an ISO and it would not become a bandwidth hog for the rest of the Internet users.

Third, a well configured firewall would stop the activities of a number of worms even if they do infect any of your systems. I once had a problem with a mass-mailing worm and I was able to stop the activity of the worm sending itself as a mail attachment by blocking access to the SMTP. The only problem I had with the worm was that it kept trying to resolve MX records for a number of mail destinations - I'm still looking for ways of blocking MX lookup requests from the DNS server (since we don't need it). Do you know how?

FYI, a number of ISPs in Nigeria (Lagos in particular) are already offering DSL services so the fact that stable telephone lines are not common does not mean that they are non-existent and cannot be used when they are available. So it would be better to have ADSL when it's possible and available than wireless. The logical reason for this preference is that wireless has it's own problems. Now I would not consider security as that has really been improved upon (since WEP) but there's the possibility of a congestion. Even though the Internet bandwidth may be enough, the radio bandwidth is limited (thank God for standards) and so you would now be requiring more access points for additional subscribers. IMHO, this is an expensive approach!

I don't intend to start a flame war but to seek to FIRST understand and then be understood.

Yup that's right and as a matter of fact, many WiMAX equipment are still undergoing compliance and interoperability tests so it might be a while before we start seeing any appreciable deployment of WiMAX infrastructure.

ADSL is something we should really take serious because it uses already existent copper cables used for regular telephony. I'm sure quite a number of IT companies would be looking this way as well. As regards fibre (I still keep coming here abi), it would be a very cost effective solution for large corporations so watch out for it too.

Just like Seun said, sender ids on SMS messages can be spoofed - it's just like email too: you can spoof the sender address of an email. There's one other way however, you can use to track the possible origin of the message. First you would have to log the time and date of the SMS and also something called the SMSC or SMS Center. This information can be found when you choose to view the details of the SMS (there should be some facility like this on most phones) This is like the server from where the SMS originated. Armed with those, you can take the investigations further.

Hmm... I wonder how your customers would feel seeing that they cannot download executables! How about this? Why don't you run a content filter for the downloads? Use a content filter with your proxy cache (if you use one) and use a free antivirus engine like ClamAV. As a matter of fact most of the antivirus companies (at least I know Pandasoftware) have free Linux versions of their antivirus software. You could easily pay for the updates and have the software do the scanning of the downloaded files before they reach the client systems.

Funny enough I saw something like mod_clamav for Apache! Hmm... I wondering how that could be used.

Permit me guys. Usually I just skim replies so if I say something that has already been said, please just take it in good faith.

I would first like to state that there are many more advantages of using fibre over VSAT apart from the issue of latency. Fibre is capable of handling much more bandwidth than the capacity of VSAT. Some may argue that but I can assure you that when you get to the gigabit range, it doesn't make sense to use VSATs.

Secondly, the original poster said something about losing connectivity when the cable breaks at one point. Now you need to understand that proper fibre deployment is done in a ring configuration. If one part of the cable breaks, data is carried along the other path. To explain this, imagine a ring, torus or circle whichever is more convenient for you to picture. Now you can always find the shortest distance between two points on the ring and the best configuration would carry data using the shortest path. If that 'shortest path' gets broken or severed, the 'longest path' would now be used to carry the data. If you get this picture, you would understand the redundancy that has been built-in to most fibre optic installations to handle breaks along the cable.

Another major thing is the hefty price for bandwidth.  My brother, it's no child's play, and there is no way the price will ever come down.

Dude, I don't believe you're saying this about fibre! The price you are paying for VSAT today is not the same that used to be paid one year ago. Fibre is definitely cheaper than VSAT! It is more economical to distribute bandwidth over fibre than over VSAT. The fibre cable is much more capable of handling larger amounts of data and it doesn't require placing satellites in orbit or large VSAT antennas.

And for your information about fibre, I don't think you've done your research very well because if you have, you would understand the reason for fibre access being expensive is because of the monopoly NITEL had over it and much of the hoarding has been done away with and it's easier to gain access to SAT-3 bandwidth than it was last month.

The days of VSAT are numbered and we need to start looking at fibre, ADSL and (as you mentioned) WiMAX as ways to obtain and utilize bandwidth.

FetchFido has tons of free games you can play online from Asteroids to Pacman 3D, this site would keep you entertained for hours.

http://www.fetchfido.co.uk/games/menu/games_menu.htm

Would I be wrong to say that most of the really good web developers out there are freelancers? These are people who have worked their way to those positions of authority. I agree with Seun - knowledge especially if it's knowledge you obtain from the Internet or some other unstructured sources takes time to assimilate. I hardly know of a really good Nigerian developer who's not a browsing freak

I'm also a web developer (PHP guru extraordinaire ) - of course I do have works to testify to that and I do have friends too who are professional web developers and I tell you ALL of them learnt through materials they got off the Internet!

The Nigerian web community hasn't come of age but with more and more sites like Nairaland, etc. springing up, we'll get there but we mustn't forget that access has a major role to play in the pursuit of this goal.

What an informative thread. Seems like most of the people on this forum have been reading my mind about having a CSD option for Glo Mobile Internet.

Vmobile has both CSD and currently, GPRS option (did you know that?). I have a friend who works in Vmobile and he confirmed that they do have GPRS connectivity now. I don't know if it's gone public though.

I don't know if you guys have noticed this. After impressing my friends with the wonderful Glo Mobile Internet service, one of them decided to go get a line and as I'm speaking, there's nothing he hasn't tried to get his line provisioned. He's even been to the Glo World Friendship Center (or whatever they call it). It seems like it's only those of us who got in early are still enjoying the service. Same with my uncle! He's not been able to provision his line. I really do think these Glo guys need to sit up!!!! Why all the promises and then you cannot deliver? I term this incompetence!

Nokia (for now) is the clear leader in the mobile phone market. Even based on the results of the poll.

All the phones I've used in my life are all Nokias (3410, 3100 and 7110). Why Nokia? It's got the best navigation on any mobile phone. If you've used any Nokia before, you can be sure that you can use any other model. There's an exception for the Symbian based Nokia phones - generally still, their user interfaces are standard.

I choose a Nokia phone because of it's global support. As a mobile application developer, Nokia gives the best support to their development community - I've not found more documentation and development tools for any other mobile phone brand than that of Nokia.