yonkeltron

This afternoon I read a really thoughtful paper about Free/Open Source Software in schools published in the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology. As an aside, the CJLT has a really solid collection of papers and I look forward to paging through them in the coming months. Anyway, this paper, Open Source Software and Schools: New Opportunities and Directions by Gary Hepburn, presents a tasty discussion of the benefits and advantages to using F/OSS in schools.

After a brief overview of the proprietary software model, Hepburn devotes a solid page examining the issues surrounding using proprietary software in schools. He cites the cost of doing business with Microsoft (according to the Microsoft School Agreement), as of Winter 2005 with a school of 400 machines, to be US$7200 for the OS alone and US$19,200 for a complete desktop package. Additionally, he notes that, in general, “…using proprietary software requires a high degree of accountability” on account of license compliance issues and other legal liabilities. Alongside the financial downsides, Hepburn makes a very good point when examining “…school’s complicity in exposing students to commercial products and corporate interests”. The idea of a classroom as a corporate marketing machine is rather unappealing.

While it’s not hard to find literature extolling the virtues of F/OSS, Hepburn does a nice job of emphasizing the potential benefits for schools. One particular point that caught my eye was his comment that “Schools can also burn OSS on to a compact disc and give it to staff or students to take home and do what they wish with it”. Granted, projects like OpenDisc have been leveraging the flexibility of F/OSS licenses for some time now, but I have been toying with the idea of using virtual machines as distributable workspaces. Personally, I find the idea of being able to send a student home with their own system saved on a thumb drive very compelling.

After touching briefly on the subject of Linux, Hepburn goes on to discuss some of the neater software packages from the F/OSS world. In particular, OpenOffice.org gets a shout out though I don’t know if I agree with his insinuation that OO.org requires fewer system resources (specifically hardware) than MS Office. Overall, I do agree with his other major points which support the ideas that the F/OSS community is better equipped to respond to change and correct errors. Moreover, I fully support the idea that more diverse exposure to different types of software will lead to an overall greater computing literacy.

With a healthy sprinkling of Lawrence Lessig quotes and shameless support for F/OSS, this paper is definitely worth a read.

Want to see the latest episode of your favorite TV show? Did you miss it on TV and don’t have a DVR (like TiVo)? Don’t want to watch grainy and partial clips on YouTube or pick it up from some other illicit means? Starting this week, you’re in luck!

A new joint venture of FOX and NBC has all of your favorite programming online, in decent resolution for free. You can watch what you want, when you want and you don’t need to subscribe for an on-demand service only to be even more tied to your television set. Hulu has stuff from NBC and FOX channels like SciFi, Bravo, FX and others. It even offers a bunch of full-length movies that you can watch at your leisure. Best yet: it also seems to be presented with limited commercial interruption through episode sponsorship. I’m watching the latest episode of House as I write this. Go to Hulu.com and check it out for yourself.

My real criticisms are that the Flash player is rather heavy and can slow down easily, thus skipping frames. Also, the resolution is decent but doesn’t scale well so avoid the full screen player. That being said, there is, supposedly, an HD gallery but I haven’t poked around in it yet.

While some may cringe in horror, all must know the truth: After nearly three years with Kubuntu, I have made the switch back to good-old, reliable Debian.The truth is, I got tired of all of the little issues which crept up in recent releases. It would seem that as the entire *buntu family moved farther away from their collective Debian roots, their stability decreased and all the new features rapidly became points of difficulty and malfunction. Key features would fail or randomly stop working when no major system changes had been made. Sleep (suspend) only worked episodically and upgrading to a new distro version failed miserably with each release, thus necessitating a full re-install.

Furthermore, the “bleeding edge” nature of Kubuntu’s six-month release cycle often left me with plenty of bugs and no where to turn. This only served to further highlight the lack of support both from official sources as well as the community. The wiki is full of holes and devoid of support documentation considering that so many pages just detail use cases for certain packages or provide a justification for why packages deserve to be included in future releases. Hardly an effective resource.

The community support outlets are also sub-optimal. The IRC channels are crowded and poorly manned so there are a great many people asking questions and precious few who are answering them. Even a quick search on the forums yields multiple threads all pertaining to one topic because so many opt not to search before opening a new discussion. That being said, the Debian IRC channel isn’t exaclty known for having a warm-and-friendly atmosphere…

All of these things combined to make me rather annoyed with Kubuntu. So in response, I wiped my root partition and installed Debian. Thus far, I feel it was a good decision. I installed stable (in the words of my roomate “Debian stable is the bunker under the mountain“), got the absolute basics working before upgrading to testing before putting in the heavy stuff.

Almost everything worked as soon as I installed it. The good thing about fixing issues in a distro as dependable as Debian is that once you fix a problem, it’ll basically stay fixed until broken. Furthermore, bugs that I encounter are bugs directly related to the software and not some wonky configuration or environment issues made present by Kubuntu. Sleep works fine and I have yet to find any of the “deal breaker” problems that I was constantly forced to work around with Kubuntu.

So far, so good.

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Microsoft and the companies that sell Windows maintenance products make money on your ignorance. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Generally speaking (and for the purposes of this rant), the average computer user most likely fits into one of three categories:

1. Novice users - “Timidius Clickitus” - These are the users who use computers for limited tasks which are usually work related. Vacations typically involve a complete break from email and the like. Most likely to be found begrudgingly anthropomorphizing the computer into an arch enemy, “Technology hates me…”
2. Comfortable users - “Digitalium Vulgaris” - Mostly under 30, this category encompasses those users who are relatively at ease with technology. Even though society (and their grandparents) keep telling them that they’re “so good with this sort of thing”, they have little idea what they’re actually doing. If you squeeze Facebook/MySpace/YouTube, these users drip out. Most likely to be found saving everything to the desktop, being amazed by keyboard shortcuts and confused by Wikipedia’s edit links.
3. Power/Expert users - “Snotnosi Smartypantsicum” - This group has an eclectic mix of Windows sysadmins, programmers and hardcore gamers who have more “power” tools and tweaks installed than a NASCAR racer. They constantly experiment with altering the behavior or aesthetic of their desktops in search of the “One True Workflow (TM)” which they will then tout over the inefficient lives of their friends and family. Most likely to be seen getting excited over Windows Updates and oogling over the amount of lipgloss applied to the Vista graphics. Note: these users are not-too-distant cousins of the automobile fanatics who believe a spoiler will make their cars go faster

Now, please be aware that I am being somewhat hyperbolic as I make these sweeping generalizations and that I do it for a reason. Microsoft and tech support companies count on the users of these three categories needing (at least) help from the categories above them. Even the most experienced users, because Windows is proprietary software, have no real idea how things work underneath and can only move things around hoping that what worked before will work again.

This general lack of education has created legions of cargo cult users who don’t know what they’re really doing. For confirmation, one need only look to the entire niche market of “system imaging” applications which are programs designed specifically to create working snapshots of Windows installations which can simply be copied onto hard disks, avoiding the lengthy install process. While this is legitimately useful for installing custom Windows environments when organizations acquire new machines, it’s also used as a form of “workstation triage”. Back when I was in high school, the service techs would spend no more than 15-20 minutes poking about with a given computer before they would just decide to wipe the disks and re-image the machine. That’s right: without specific knowledge of the nature and inner workings of the system, it’s easier to give up than it is to resolve the issue.

The end result is that people get annoyed and upset when they have to call one tech support agent after another only to be told that they need to send their computers in to be re-imaged anyway. So, in this ever-worsening world of enforced ignorance and stunning aggravation, who enters the scene to deliver the struggling masses? Microsoft.

That’s right! The company that deliberately withholds critical information (calling it a “proprietary trade secret”) is the same company that brings in the big boys of personal computing to mop up the mess with your hard earned dollars. The only catch is that you have to pay for the help. You pay for new versions of software which usually contain little more than bug and security fixes. Then, because of the poor quality of the software, you pay other companies for anti-virus products, personal firewalls, spyware removal tools and pop-up blockers. An entire market has been created to fix Windows’ flaws with more software.

Beyond that, if somehting goes wrong, you pay the waiting armies of “certified professionals”, such as the Geek Squad, to rescue your computer from the clutches of “EVIL HACKERS” and the fictitious horde of internet assailants who, after stealing your vacation photos, have nothing better to do.

How much does all this cost? Adding the $99 for a the Windows Vista Home Basic (yes, basic!) upgrade pack to the >$130 price tag of Norton 360 All-In-One Security with a 2yr subscription adds up to over $230. Then if you pay the $249 for Geek Squad to come to your house and upgrade it you might as well take advantage of the discount you get by having two jobs performed at the same time and have them install Norton for you…another $59. All in all, you end up paying over $440 before taxes. Sound like a lot to you? Yeah…same here.

It just bothers me a whole bunch when good people pay for bad products. Learn to use Linux.

—- END RANT —-

Amongst all my dabbling with Ruby, I have taken some time to compare the Ruby on Rails MVC stuff with the original Smalltalk implementation found in the Squeak VM. Now, I’m really not familiar enough with the Squeak MVC stuff to comment, but I did stumble across this well-though-out blog post entitled, “My Full-Circle Journey Back to Smalltalk“. In this post, the author (Ken Treis) tells the story of his experimentation with the many languages of web development and (as the title implies) his eventual return to the world of Smalltalk. He goes on to identify eights places where he feels that Ruby missed the boat. While all of these are really interesting points for consideration and discussion, the sixth point talks about how, in terms of live interaction, nothing beats Smalltalk workspaces.

Beyond the shadow of a doubt, I agree with that. I learned early-on with Python that it’s nice to have an interactive interpreter, but irb doesn’t provide anything near the features of workspaces. With a workspace, you can highlight any code fragment, snippet or statement and have it evaluated. Also, because the entire environment is Smalltalk-powered the code can meaningfully interact with anything and everything. Want details on a given object? Pop up a menu and the “inspect” option pulls up an object inspection window that lets you take a direct peek at the object’s internals. Need a different perspective? A browser offers an ideal way to take a more structured look at the environment and it’s contents (notice the similarity to RDoc generated documentation). Workspaces even integrate with the Refactoring Browser to help clean up your code!

In fact, I can’t think of any editing environment that offers the same level of flexibility as workspaces save for one editor: Emacs. Now, before I get flamed, I am a pretty big Emacs fan. Except for when I’m hacking with KDevelop, it’s really my default editor. That being said, I want to make a point by drawing a parallel: While the base of Emacs is written in C, eveything about the editing environment is written in Emacs Lisp. As a result Emacs is the best editor for Lisp and Lisp-like languages. The similarity I’m trying to point out is that the best development environments are those which are expressly aware of the language being developed within them. The easiest and best way to achieve such integration is to implement the environment in the language itself (i.e. Squeak in Smalltalk and Emacs in Lisp).

I imagine a new development environment, which I will refer to as “Rumble”. Rumble should be written entirely in Ruby and it should borrow the best elements in both design and features from Smalltalk workspaces. I imagine that the Rumble environment provide both the educational and exploratory opportunities that exist within the Squeak world. This way, just like extensions to Emacs are written in elisp, extensions and improvements to Rumble could be written in Ruby. If we had such a development environment, I feel that it would add tremendously to the appeal of Ruby as it makes it an even more compelling platform. Who’s with me?

***Sorry fur der krossenposten***

Ein bin der Ahprul, 2007

Mayn Enschteemede Kolligeners und Freindenpeeple,

Das is en zerplashure mit cheekenblushen, zat ich bin anouncen ein tidnewzenbite. Der Advansener Opratin Systemer Laborworkenrum Vissnschaftlekher Institut (OSLab) ist bin movenlokashon a der undergroundenbazmant fun Lab I. Der laberworkenrum ist en der 060. Der OSLab bist a vissnschaftlekher istitut fun der explorenlearnen a der machine kontrol. Vus ist der machine kontrol? Das machine kontrol ist der softenwarez mit der nomen “opratin systemer” (OS). Der OSLab always bin superbusyworken mit der projekten fun der komputer blinkenlights. Ussen bin doin der workenlearnin mit der followen subjectntopiks:

• Der explorenlearnen a der machine kontrollen opratin systemers: Linux, Minix, Planen Neiner, Gettunveryhotten (Inferno), und der famelie fun mikrokernelen und der distributed machine kontrollen.
• Der experimentin mit der komputenmachinen fun mediaworxen; mediaworxen mit der spitzensparkin und der elektrolichten.
• Der makhen der softenwarez fun der Worldenwiden Netwurken Intarwebzen (Internet).
• Der brokhen der altenolder komputer springerwork mit der bigschteelhammerzen.
• Torchenflamin der Makintosch und der Vindowz OSen.

Kum und visten ourden laborworkenrum mit der turenlooken! Lookenfinden der rumplacken sayen das:

Der Advansener Opratin Systemer Laborworkenrum Vissnschaftlekher Institut (OSLab) - Laborworkenrum 060 Lab I.

Mit happifacen und thumpinbumpinmusik,

Jonathan E. Magen
Jonah Berquist
Der Uber OSLab Experten der Technischeners

http://www2.evergreen.edu/oslab

My dear brother Ari has gotten his braces off and has acquired for himself a shiny, green retainer. Apropos, nothing makes me miss home more than staring down my brother’s throat. Weird.

I’m so excited I could Go Perpendicular!

According to multiple - sources, former US President Jimmy Carter has agreed to a public debate with Alan Dershowitz. This event will be streamed live from Brandeis where Carter’s tush-whooping will take place.
Here’s to many a “Dersho-wizz-bang” and “Dersho-what-now” as Alan the Annihilator takes Jimbo to school.

Today, more than ever before, it is official that I am a scientist. While it’s true that I’ve had a lab for coming up on a year, I attended my first grant workshop and bought my first lab coat. These two things are important for just as many reasons.

1. I need grant money to keep doing science
2. All the scientists on TV have labcoats

I know that #2 isn’t very scientific….but it was dirt cheap and I feel very special. Also, when the room gets chilly at night, the coat is just what I need to take the edge off.

After my last blog entry, I got a comment from someone who had apparently been reading my blog for awhile now (through #lugradio) and saw I was in Israel. I immediately got an invite from him to come to the Haifa LUG in order to meet everyone. Although I was not able to make it as I was in the dead sea (details forthcoming in future posts), this is most certainly indicative of what community should be. In the words of Yoni Rabkin-Katznell, referring to the building of bridges between software communities, “It’s what needs to happen”. Ya know what? I agree with him. Furthermore, it’s people like Yoni who make the virtual connections of the internet just as meaningful as those we forge in real life.

Next time I am in Israel, it would be my pleasure to accept his invitation and give a talk at Technion to the committed free software community of Haifa.