Stuff from life
So, writing on my blog hasn’t been required for any of my classes this semester, so I haven’t taken the time to write. I have been quite busy, though. I am graduating in April, getting married in May, and starting a full time job with National Instruments in July. All of which is very exciting, and all of this also has kept me very busy.
In the mean time, I’ll keep thinking about things. I have an interesting programming problem i need to solve before too long. I created a web site for my eagle scout project years back. It was an index of cemetery records for Malheur County, Oregon. I hosted it on Geocities; however, Geocities recently shut down. Before it shut down, I went and grabbed the pages off of their server, and stuck them on my own. The site is currently hosted at http://jwhitecl.webhop.net/malheurcountyrecords/. The problem is that I don’t want to host it. The information should be made available, and there are other sites that host this kind of information. I was planning on transferring all of my information over to one of these sites, USGenWeb, but their cemetery records are in a very different format than my own. I plan on writing a script to convert the cemetery records, but this is a non-trivial transformation. I’ll post more on the details of this problem and the solution I come up with before too long. (Probably during the month of June)
Leadership, Technology, and Decision Making
At Epic Systems, I worked on medical software. One of the main concerns doctors had about medical software was that it would start making the decisions that doctors should. They feared it would create “cookie-cutter medicine.” It is a valid concern, and applies whenever leadership depends on technology. When it comes to working with people on a personal level, computers can facilitate good decision-making, but can also be poor decision makers. They just cannot consider all possibilities, as a skilled leader does.
Internet Addiction
Addiction is a mental disorder. Unfortunately, in our society we look down on people with mental disorders. One way of coping with this is for the addict to seek refuge in his or her vice. Luckily, for the internet addict, it isolates them from the world. A big part of the destructive cycle of addiction is with our society. People are more willing to address their addictions when we treat them like normal people with normal problems. They would not run from society as so many internet addicts currently do.
Internet Safety?
Antivirus software gives an illusion of security. People lose all benefits of antivirus software when they are not careful online. You do not just go to a slum somewhere with one hundred dollar bills hanging out of your pockets and a shirt that says, “Don’t mug me – The police will get you” and thinking that law enforcement will prevent any problem. Law enforcement is not good at prevention. It is good at reacting to problems. Antivirus software is the same way; however, many seem to think that antivirus software is some type of magic protection. People should demonstrate the same level of caution online that they do anywhere else.
The World is Round
While I was in southern Chile, there was not a lot of technology. I took some time every week to write an email home, and I went to the small Internet cafes that are ubiquitous down there. They had old computers – most of them were second hand computers from the United States or Europe. The vast majority ran Windows 98, and occasionally we could find ones that used Windows XP. This was in 2005-2007. The majority of people did not own a computer. They had cell phones, but rarely were they new. Most were four or five years old, and they could not afford to buy more than a few dollars of minutes every other month to make calls. They received relatively few benefits of the flat world; but had to contribute a lot to it.
In southern Chile, they produced many exports, and had some contact with the outside world. There were some tourists, but few foreigners besides that. They had some fisheries and berry farms, and exported their salmon and berries to China, Japan, Korea, and the United States. This did not change things for the people, though. The vast majority earned minimum wage, or about $300 (USD) a month. The world may be flat for those that have a little more money, but it is not for the rest of the world. For the developing world, the world being flat just means that their work is what helps keep the standard of living high in developed countries, and they reap no real benefits beyond the low pay their jobs offer. I do not know if any of you have noticed, but for them the world is round.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
This was an interesting article; however, I felt it left out much of the good that ‘cathedrals’ bring to society. They do especially well with business applications, and provide the ‘boring’ software that many open source developers do not really want to work on. Contrary to the author’s perception of the world, there is a lot of closed source software that is well-maintained and high quality. I think that quality of software is more dependent on the quality of the developers, designers, and management than the development model used to develop the software. Microsoft produces both good and bad products. So does the open source world. I think both closed and open development models are vitally important.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/
Why Intellectual Property Is Heading Down the Wrong Path
While protection of intellectual property is good, I am wary of the influence of large companies in the creation and enforcement of intellectual property laws. Large companies, such as Microsoft, IBM and HP, have lots of influence. They make lots of money and have many employees. They can afford lobbyists and wield a lot of political influence. They also influence their employees’ political views. In addition, I have yet to meet a person that gives priority to intellectual property when choosing who to vote for. I suspect people usually put other political issues in front of intellectual property, as I often do. As a result, large companies get too much say. There are some organizations, such as the Free Software Foundation, which make their stance clear on IP; however, they are not powerful enough to sway politicians. It is extremely important that individuals make their voices heard about copyright and software patents.
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2003-09-07-1.html
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/wrapper.jsp?arnumber=1220592
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1197470&isnumber=26946
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_control_of_ideas
Crapware
PC vendors add too much software to the computers they sell. When I bought my laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1501, it came loaded with so much extra software that the boot time was unbearable and overall performance was terrible. It was so bad that I ended up getting a clean copy of Windows and formatting the hard drive. Since then, I have not touched any of the software Dell included with the computer. It bothers me that PC vendors use the term “bundled software,” giving the illusion that it adds some kind of value. It rarely does. It usually just makes the computer annoyingly slow. Another thing that really bothers me is that there is not an option, at least with Dell, to opt out of bundled software. I am not a fan of Apple, but I think it is time for the rest of the PC industry to take a lesson from them and quit bundling so much software with their computers.
Women and Computer Science
There is a stereotype about computer science. It exists for a reason. Not all, but many, people in computer science act outside of the social norm. A counter culture was a part of the computer revolution and it continues on today. Late nights, strange choices in entertainment, lack of social lives, among other things drive many people away. This includes, in my opinion, many women. I believe the biggest reason why there are so few women in computer science is the strange culture. I do not know why men are so much more tolerant of this strange culture, though.
Net Neutrality
Recently, a group of major Internet companies sent a letter to the FTC advocating net neutrality. Many people have taken a strong opposition to net neutrality, worrying that it will stifle Internet companies’ ability to innovate. These same people fail to realize that they are dealing with companies with flawed business models. Flat rate pricing for home Internet access just does not work because Internet use is not uniform. If companies change their business plans to a pay per byte model, net neutrality is not only possible, but preferable. Users will not eat up disproportionate amounts of bandwidth without paying for it. If they really need it, they will pay for it. If they are concerned about losing profits from light Internet users, they should simply fix a minimum monthly rate. As of right now, the opposition to net neutrality reeks of conflict of interest. Stop worrying about Internet companies’ income. They are businesses. They will have to change, but they will do better in the end. Heaven forbid they actually make people pay for what they use.
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/10/net-neutrality-pitting-web-giants-against-state-ags-mayors.ars
