Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Being with Jimmy Wales here in Cape Town reminds me to tell a story about walking the dog in Harvard Yard.  I peered through the window into one of the classrooms where the children of the American aristocracy learn the big ideas for $40,000 per year.  What had the professor prepared for these eager young minds?  What secrets were they going to learn that poor public school and public university kids would never have the fortune to hear?  For 15 minutes, she taught from a video projection of the Wikipedia page on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

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Andrew Wermuth, the documentary filmmaker behind Balloon Hat, very kindly agreed to experiment in the making of a couple of photography tutorials for photo.net:

• The three basic controls that affect the image (applicable to any camera)
• Using the Canon Digital Rebel XTi (applicable to most digital SLRs)

Comments would be appreciated.  Should we do more of these?  Give up?  Change the style?

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For South African readers of this Weblog, my schedule is shaping up…

April 17:  Stagger off BA flight from London early in the morning; talk from 13h15-14h30 at the University of the Western Cape Computer Science Department Seminar Room (about teaching software engineering).  Evening:  Collapse at the Cape Grace Hotel on the waterfront.

April 18: Fly Cessna 210 with Mark Semonian (sightseeing, aerial photos, instrument approaches for Mark).

April 19: Attend http://digitalfreedom.uwc.ac.za (hear Larry Lessig and Jimmy Wales speak)

April 20: Attend http://digitalfreedom.uwc.ac.za  ; keynote talk at 10:50 on “Building and Sustaining Online Learning Communities” then a nuts and bolts talk at 14:00 on why the RDBMS has been so important for building multi-user Internet apps (expecting an audience of 0 since this is in parallel with open-source hero Brian Behlendorf talking about how to be an open-source hero)

April 21: Sightseeing around Cape Town

April 22: Departure in the Cessna 210 for game parks, Victoria Falls, Botswana, Namibia, etc.  Mark seems to be a last-minute guy, so it is unclear exactly where we are going….

May 7: Return to Cape Town.  Crash in corner of Mark’s apartment.

May 8: Evening flight to London (12 hours) and then home to Boston on May 9.

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I leave for Cape Town, South Africa on Sunday night.  U.S. AID is being kind enough to send me there as part of their program to help Africans improve their capabilities in information technology.  It is easy to be enthusiastic about the potential of the Information Age for economic development in Africa.

For a country to participate in the benefits of the Industrial Revolution, it needs a lot of infrastructure:  cheap and reliable transportation, capital sufficient to build large facilities, management to coordinate hundreds or thousands of workers, efficient and non-corrupt import/export procedures, etc.  Africa was never a good candidate for being a rising industrial star due to its distance from world markets and the general chaos and corruption of post-colonial governments.

What about generating economic growth from expertise in information technology?  India has tremendous problems with infrastructure and a sluggish and corrupt government, yet its IT sector has been booming for two decades.  What makes IT such a great opportunity?

• you don’t need physical transportation; a land-locked country or one where airfares are very high can be competitive
• you don’t need a big factory; a competent programmer at a PC connected to the Internet can earn a good living
• small-scale IT enterprises aren’t natural targets for corrupt government officials
• competitors in First World countries are weak; the average programmer in the U.S. is incompetent, constantly missing deadlines and delivering bug-ridden undocumented code that fails to meet customer needs.  The average programmer generates rage in the heart of his or her employer.

What are the special challenges?

Expensive telecommunications is one challenge. Telecom is one of the few things that can be taxed in Africa, so it is.  It can cost 5-10X as much to get an Internet connection in a poor African country compared to a rich American suburb.  The effect of these high costs is devastating to the economy, but governments can’t resist.

A deeper challenge is education of software engineers.  American universities pretend to educate computer science majors, but in fact nearly all of the practical learning happens during summer jobs and in the first year or two after college, assuming the CS major is lucky enough to find some mentors.  (If he doesn’t, he usually remains incompetent as a software engineer and switches careers.)

The education at an African univesity has to be substantially better than at a Stanford or MIT.  The African CS graduate won’t have a lot of good jobs from which to choose.  The African CS graduate needs to be able to compete on the world software engineering market immediately upon graduation.  For this to happen, he or she needs to learn how to be an engineer while in school.  That means all of the problems identified in http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/undergrad-cs need to be fixed.

It is a tough challenge, but every university that has tackled it has succeeded.

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PC World magazine lists the 50 Best Tech Products of All Time.  Two out of 50 (#24 and #36) are anti-virus or anti-spyware Band-Aids.

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I’ve drafted an article on buying a new plane and would appreciate comments.

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I had great success last summer posting a summer aviation internship.  There were lots of applicants.  This year, I decided that I should try to find someone who was competent with Linux, the RDBMS, and HTML, i.e., a Computer Science major with some practical skill as well.  So I added a bit of software development/sysadmin skill to the job requirements.  The result?  Almost no interest or applications.  There are plenty of guys who were good software engineers, sold their companies, then came down to Hanscom to learn to fly.  Why wouldn’t there be CS undergraduates who want to learn to fly?

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I have completed a comparison of very light jets and would appreciate comments.  (This is the beginning of an attempt to organize my thoughts before purchase.)

Thanks in advance.

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Here’s an email from this evening:

“I know you probably get a lot of e-mails, but I wanted to thank you for posting your aerials of Panama City, Panama on the net.  

“I am a Landscape Architecture Student at PSU and we are studying an area that you took photos of, El Chorrillo, next to the Casco.”

This is what I love about the Internet.  Back in January 2004, I took some photos with a point and shoot digital camera and stuck them on the Web.  More than three years later, a guy searches and they end up being helpful to him, at no cost to anyone (except a loss of social life, perhaps).

[I responded asking why the images were more useful than Google Earth and it turns out that they are higher resolution and the oblique angle allows the estimation of heights.]

 

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The newspapers are full of stories about the fourth anniversary of our adventure in Iraq and the start of our fifth unprofitable year in this corner of the world.  How do we get out and explain away the fact that we were beaten by the Iraqis, 60 percent of whom are illiterate?

Maybe it is time for Congress to redefine the mission of the U.S. military so that withdrawal from Iraq will be required by the new mission statement.  We can sell our Iraq operation the way that a big company might sell a division after its focus changes.

Suppose that the mission of the U.S. military were defined to be “Shooting and bombing people who don’t like the United States until they are too weak and poor to act on their animosity”.  The first few weeks of the Iraq operation fit this mission statement pretty well.  We destroyed a lot of infrastructure and military hardware to the point that Saddam Hussein was no longer in command of anything very impressive.  The recent U.S. operation in Somalia fits this mission too.  We sent some AC-130 gunships to circle at 5000′ and blow up the cars and trucks of the escaping former government.

Who will take over the nation-building and relief operations that our military has been saddled with?  We have other U.S. government agencies that specialize in development work and we can always pay other countries to do the grubby on-the-ground stuff (as we are in most African conflicts these days).

Once the U.S. military’s mission has been explicitly redefined to a purely military one, our troops can withdraw from Iraq the very next week, saying “this operation is no longer the kind of thing that we do.”

[Note that this proposal is neutral as to the level of belligerence that we wish to apply to the rest of the world.  I am not advocating that we shoot or bomb more or fewer people, only that we say “the military’s mission is exclusively belligerent.”] 

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