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I enjoyed an outdoor lunch today with a young Dutchwoman. She is married to a hard-charging American litigator and there is a big age difference. I asked whether this wasn’t a recipe for epic problems. She said “I established a system where if one of us does something to upset the other, he or she says ‘I put something into the complaint box and we can discuss it tomorrow.’ Chances are, the next day I will already know what he was talking about and I will bring it up.” Ultimately, though, she said it was necessary to accept the other person. She knocked on the square wooden table and said “You can round off the corners, but your spouse will still have the same basic shape.”

[In case you’re wondering who eats lunch outdoors in February… I’m in Puerto Rico, staying in a charming family-owned hotel (i.e., the 646-room Caribe Hilton) and taking a daily holistic mood-improving medication made with local ingredients (i.e., pina coladas, supposedly invented here at the Hilton).]

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Some good things about the movie “A Separation”… It is dramatic even though nothing extraordinary happens, a tribute to the filmmakers (I think it is much more challenging to make a movie that is realistic than one in which amazing stuff occurs). The characters spend the entire movie enmeshed in the Iranian legal system, which seems to be a lot more efficient than ours and perhaps just about as effective and fair. The judge, parties, and witnesses interact in a cramped office, not in an august courtroom. Generally speaking, there are no lawyers. The judge asks questions himself and tries to figure out who is most credible.

Given the extent to which Iran is demonized here in the U.S., it is helpful to see a movie in which Iranians live more or less as we do. Husbands and wives argue. Aging parents need to be cared for. Children study. People get stuck in traffic or wait for buses.

There are some big issues explored in the movie, but they are presented in the context of fairly small events.

Wikipedia says that the movie was made for $500,000 in Iran. If so, that’s a pretty damning comment on Hollywood.

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One of the changes from having a child in the house is that friends and relatives want to have video chats with me whereas previously they were content to talk by phone (or not to talk at all!). I’ve tried Skype and Facetime and Google Chat on computers ranging from a 6-core monster to an iPad 2. Whether hardwired to the 5/15 Mbps Verizon FiOS connection or connected via 802.11n, the quality is almost always terrible, with jerky video and unreliable audio.

I can’ t figure out why this is. A reasonable voice phone call can be had with a 12 kbit/second connection. The same computers and Internet connection are used very successfully to stream high quality videos down from YouTube and NetFlix. The same network was used very successfully with Vonage for smooth voice calls. It can’t be a server issue, I don’t think, because these services should be peer-to-peer. I don’t think it is a too-hard-to-compress issue. The 6-core machine can compress a 1080p AVCHD video into a 720p .mp4 file in about 50% of real-time (i.e., can process 2 minutes of video in 1 minute), so presumably even a single CPU core should be able to do compression on the low-resolution videos that are standard for these services.

Why is it that the golden age of video conferencing is not yet upon us?

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We finished our three-day RDBMS/SQL programming course yesterday at MIT. It was a very satisfying experience for me and a great one for many students due to the heavy teacher-student ratio (this weblog was very helpful in attracting volunteers, another triumph for the Web!). I was pretty wiped out after three days of 10:00 am to 7:00 pm. It is easy to understand why lab courses aren’t more popular among computer science teachers. Consider how painful it is to debug your own code and then imagine a room full of 50 newbies pointing to 15 lines of rather bizarre SQL and asking “Why doesn’t it work?”

One funny moment was the student who showed up to the lab course without a laptop computer. In the old days, of course, it was not uncommon to show up and ask another student to borrow a pen. But a whole computer? Yet sure enough, another student pulled out a spare laptop, freshly installed with Ubuntu, and said “You can use this one.”

Michael Stonebraker gave an amazing 2-hour talk and question/answer session. Afterwards, my friend Avni gushed “That was fantastic. It made volunteering for all three days worth it.” When I complained about the implication that my own mini-lectures and solutions discussions were less than inspiring, she tried to make me feel better. Somehow this included saying “Wow, John [Morgan], you’re exactly half Philip’s age.”

Considering that students flew in from as far away as Indiana and San Francisco and almost unanimously said that it was worth the trip, I will check off the class as a pedagogical success. Fortunately we won’t be teaching this again for another year, so my ego will have a chance to heal…

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Folks:

Back in November, I published http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2011/11/03/where-does-google-actually-say-that-they-wont-read-gmail-messages-or-google-docs/ wondering if Google ever promises not to go curiously through one’s Google Docs (or elaborates beyond a single FAQ on the question of whether Google employees are allowed to read Gmail messages). Lately I’ve been getting a variety of notifications from Google about the new improved privacy policies but I still can’t find anything on the subject of “Can Google read my word processing docs and spreadsheets?”

Thanks in advance if you have figured this out…

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Politicians anxious to keep feeding the government are talking about new tax ideas, e.g., a special tax that would kick in when a person earned over $1 million per year. One problem with this approach is that it represents a further discouragement to investors and entrepreneurs in a country that is already looking like a bad place for most kinds of investment.

Employees and managers have done a lot better than U.S. investors over the past 10-20 years. A mid-level employee might earn $400,000 per year. An investor or entrepreneur, by contrast, might earn very little for 5-10 years and then finally cash out with $1-2 million. For that one good year, the investor looks like a rich guy, ripe for high taxation, but in reality the employee has done far better, especially on a risk-adjusted basis.

This is not an argument against a special tax, by the way, merely a reminder that it will further push the U.S. toward a culture in which young people want to be employees and managers at established companies.

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Today we celebrate the memory of one of our greatest Americans, Martin Luther King, Jr. I wonder if any of our politicians will stand up and say “It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white because probably there are at least a few hundred million people in China who are smarter, better-educated, and harder-working than you and private companies would much rather hire any of them.”

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Readers: Thought you might enjoy this article from New Yorker magazine about oil production in Ecuador, its effect on the environment and local people, and the ensuring international litigation in U.S. and Ecuador. The stakes are high, with the lead U.S. lawyer, Steven Donziger, standing to earn $200 million for himself, but the war is long, having started in 1993 and being far from finished. One tip for attorneys: don’t let anyone videotape you saying, about judges, “They’re all corrupt”, or, about an expert witness report “We could jack this thing up to thirty billion dollars in one day”.

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News reports of how badly Japan was doing never quite squared with my experience as a visitor to that country. A recent New York Times editorial attempts to explain the apparent discrepancy.

[The article is interesting to read, but I’m not sure that I buy the entire argument. The Japanese government has indulged in some massively wasteful projects. Still, they probably can’t compare in profligacy to the U.S. federal and state governments (for example, retirement age for public employees, including police officers, in Japan is 60, compared to as young as 41 or 42 here in the U.S.).]

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(Techie) Folks:

We’re expecting a pretty good-sized crowd, perhaps 60 people, for our three-day database programming course at MIT January 30-February 1 (course page). Students can often get un-stuck simply by asking the adjacent person for help, but the more teachers the better the course goes. Especially on the first day people will more likely be stuck due to a mechanical problem such as “Can’t figure out how to get back into text editor” than a conceptual problem.

Via this posting I’m looking for volunteer teachers (all existing course teachers are also volunteers, so don’t feel slighted if you’re not getting a fat paycheck!). It is a great experience to spend three days with bright young people, many of whom come up with creative ideas for queries that would never have occurred to us SQL old-timers. Here are the tasks that people are likely to have trouble with

• getting Virtual Box installed on a laptop (it is supposed to work on Windows, Linux, and Mac, but of course laptops can be quirky; Netbooks and the handful of Macintosh laptops proved the most trouble-prone last year)
• getting our virtual machine installed and running within Virtual Box (we’re going to provide both Virtual Box and the VM on a USB stick for in-class installs and, for those students who preregister, ask them to download and install everything prior; as a last resort, students whose laptop cannot be tamed can partner with others (arguably a better way to do the course, as part of a pair))
• navigating around within Linux, finding files, editing PHP scripts, saving them back, opening a Web browser to see the effect
• actual data modeling and SQL querying
• MySQL quirks
• Eclipse and the Android SDK
• the Java language (for the Android app development segment only)
• border collie biting their ankles

Nobody has a monopoly on the one right answer, so don’t be shy about volunteering if you are stronger in some areas than others. Certainly when students have sysadmin issues I bounce them to one of the other teachers (I’m lucky if my own laptop works!).

To evaluate whether or not you’re qualified to assist, please visit http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/three-day-rdbms/ and pull the “Day 1 problems” document. It has a link to our virtual machine on web.mit.edu and you can see what is entailed.

I hope that you’ll agree that this is the perfect chance to give back to the community. Instead of sweating in a malaria-plagued jungle trying to figure out how to nail a house together, you will be in a comfortable heated recently renovated MIT classroom (link) and you’ll actually be adding substantial value with the skills that you’ve worked for years to build. For folks curious about teaching techniques, it is also fascinating to see just how much can be learned in three days when people work in a lab environment rather than struggling with problems at home.

Thanks,

Philip

p.s. Lunches and dinners throughout the course are on me!

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