Diary of Thursday, 10th February 2005

Prepared by: Bonaventure Twagirimana

The day started at 09:04 with the lecture entitled Radio "Propagation Basics" by prof. Dr. R. Struzak, ITU-BDT, Switzeland. Most of the participants were seated at the Giambiagi Lecture Hall, Adriatico Guest House in the beginning of the fourth day of the school. The Professors discusses very quickly a bref l introduction to radio propagation models giving comparatives statements about simple models. He stated about free space model, Okumura-Hata model, LOS model and 2 ray propagation model. After one hour, participants had a coffee break of 15 min.

At 10: 30 a lecture intitled "Introduction to open source" started. It was held by Mr. Marco. Fundamentally Marco stated clearly the definition of OSS programs as those which run with user license free for any purpose to modify the program and to redistribute the original or modified program without and payement or restriction to whom it can be redistributed.

The example taken and well commented were the apache web server and the GNU/LINUX operating system. The lecture were interactively a mixture or power point presentation as well as movies to explain the history and the evolution of LINUX OS. A very interesting discussion was raised up for the purpose of comments about the major benefit of use of Open source program like Linux in contrast to Windows Operating system which is a proprietary product. Mr. Buettrich from Danmark how is an expert in Linux gave a clear explanation for the advantages of using OSS program rather than proprietary program. He said "there is a huge amount of advantages to use OSS program in developing as well as developed countries if one realize that the program cover everything he/she want successfully".

Afternoon, after lunch break the lecture continued from 14: 10 with the presentation of Mr. Vicenzo Pianese, ICS, Italy. The title of his exposé is : "Methodology for the preparation and preliminary evaluation of technology transfer project". The speaker has a lot of experience in project management through UNIDO, his has been involved in project investment promotion for several years. He raised idea about technology transfer in general saying "Technology transfer includes Hard. and soft. elements of technology. It is an active term, which is affected between technology and potential issues." He presented a sort of road maps or guidelines to follow in order to implement a technology transfer project. The explanation, in general was based upon standards of an integrated process of 4 interrelated stages called project cycle. The stages are: Preparation, Evaluation, implementation and operation.

At 16: 20 the participant went to main Library which is located on the first floor of the Main Building of the Abdus salam center. The librarians showed and gave detailed explanation of their services and facilities which includes: information and references, On-line catalogues of books and journals, accessible from any office on campus and world-wide, Access to electronic journals, on campus, Access to scientific databases, on campus or at the loan desk area.

Bonaventure Twagirimana
National University of Rwanda
Msc. in ICT, PEARL PROJECT/NUR outreach center
Po box 52 Butare — RWANDA. E-mail : bona1v@yahoo.com