Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A business-minded friend of mine wanted a Web site with a lot of database-backed features, such as user registration, classified postings, auction bids, a user reputation system, etc.  A simplified eBay.  She also needed all the graphic design done.  She posted her specs on www.rentacoder.com and the numbers to implement this system came back at around $450 for the entire job, including the graphic design.  The five bids all came back fairly close to $450 from programmers in Bangalore, Romania, and Canada(!).  She put the project on hold for reasons unrelated to implementation so we don’t know how it would have worked out.

Has anyone used rentacoder?  I wonder if the undergrad CS majors one sees posting SQL puzzles and Lisp problems on USENET are going to start.  (Though if they spent enough time on rentacoder.com perhaps they would change their major eventually.)

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As I plan and pack up for Alaska I have had a couple of offers from guys who wanted to come with me from Boston to Anchorage (we leave Wednesday).  It turns out that the Cirrus SR20 is not that practical for long trips unless you are either very thin or totally friendless.  Full fuel is necessary for some of the long legs in the remote regions of Alaska, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories where airports are widely separated and airports that sell fuel are uncommon–mostly you only get fuel at airports that are accessible by road or ship.  With full fuel my old Diamond Star would carry 570 pounds.  The Cirrus has a longer range but the penalty is that it only holds 520 pounds fully fueled and its performance at gross weight is marginal on warm days or at high elevations.  You need a lot of runway and to make sure that you don’t need to outclimb any terrain.

The airplane isn’t any fun without Alex in the back seat.  Alex needs his Science Diet Nature’s Best, which isn’t widely available, plus some other accessories.  Dog+food is about 100 lbs. total.  The plane needs a towbar, canopy cover, and tie-down ropes at 20 lbs.  For navigation one needs paper charts and approach plates for a total of at least 20 lbs.  Survival equipment is required by statute (until 2000 or so the kit was required include a gun and ammunition) and a full tent, mattress pad, and sleeping bag is really a good idea for forced landings as well as impromptu camping when hotels are full or not dog-friendly.  That’s about 35 lbs. together.  You want some electronics in the airplane, such as headsets, EPIRB (the emergency locator transmitter that Cirrus includes in the airframe is an ancient 121.5 MHz design, which is not very effective for getting rescued), and maybe a little Iridium phone.  That’s maybe 10 lbs. put together.  If I want to take a camera and some clothing and my 195 lb. carcass it looks as though I will have only about 100 lbs. left over for a human passenger.  If I want to take a little folding bike that comes down to 70 lbs. spare capacity.

How does a minivan compare?  A 2005 Toyota Sienna has a “curb weight” of 4120 lbs., 2000 lbs. more than the Cirrus.  Its gross vehicle weight is 5690 for a “payload” of 1570 (the curb weight includes full fuel).

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On Friday my friend Rich asked for a ride up to the Wiscasset airport (KIWI) on the central Maine coast.  He wanted to take his dad and I had already arranged to practice approaches with a CFI buddy so it was fortunate that the Cirrus had only “tab fuel” on board (26 gallons, good for 2.3 hours).  It was an uneventful instrument flight up towards Portland, mostly on top of a layer of clouds at 2500′.  Once on the ground at Wicked Good Aviation we petted the big Black Lab and his 6-month-old puppy friend then borrowed the “courtesy car”, an old Cadillac that would have been called a gas-guzzler until the SUV came along and demonstrated that 18 mpg is not as low as a family car can go.  After chatting with the contractors who are fixing up a house on the peninsula, Rich said “let’s take the boat over across the cove to a restaurant.”  We ferried ourselves out to the boat’s mooring via canoe and had an uneventful trip to and from the restaurant, which is next to an old Civil War-era fort at the mouth of the Kennebec River.  At the end of the boat ride we had to ferry ourselves back from the mooring about 20′ to the beach via the canoe.  I got out on the beach and watched as Rich and my CFI buddy went back to pick up Rich’s dad.  As soon as he stepped from the boat into the canoe the canoe flipped over, dumping everyone and everything into the salt water.

What do three average Americans carry when they are in a boat these days?  Cell phones, digital cameras, etc.  In the 1950s the total cost of this incident would have been a little time to let the clothing and wallet dry.  On Friday the total cost of the electronic items destroyed was closer to $5000.

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My bank has been purchased, for about the fifth time.  Currently it is called “Bank of America.”  None of the previous changes of ownership or name bothered me but this time the new color scheme came with “no dogs allowed” signs in the front of every branch office.  I’m not sure that I can stomach 0.2% interest if I can’t have a dog at my side to provide some comfort as inflation and corporate looters erode my turbine-powered helicopter fund.  Anyone have a suggestion for a dog-friendly bank in the Boston area?

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I’m working on a flight plan for the Alaska trip, leaving on Wednesday of next week, and I’m thinking about stopping in Winnipeg and Moose Jaw (because I have never been to those provinces), Edmonton for an oil change, Yellowknife, and Inuvik if the weather is favorable so that I can see the midnight sun.  Anyone have sightseeing tips for those places?  How long should one plan to spend in Winnipeg and Moose Jaw?

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“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” — MLK, August 28, 1963

In the last couple of weeks I applied for a National Science Foundation grant (to go to Antarctica as part of their artists and writers program) and an FAA flight instructor’s certificate, both of which involved cumbersome Web-based application systems.  The NSF won’t let you proceed with any application unless you tell them your race, your sex, and your “ethnicity” (Hispanic/non-Hispanic).  They say that they won’t look at an application unless the cover sheet includes an explanation of how you are going to spend the money in a way that helps what they call “underrepresented groups” (i.e., you’re supposed to say how you are going to hire people with particular skin colors or sex chromosomes).

In using the FAA system a few days later it struck me as odd that they didn’t ask my race, sex, or ethnicity.  In fact this might be one of the last government agencies that handles applications for its services without regard to race, sex, or ethnicity.  The FAA doesn’t say “We really like your skin color, Mr. Airline Transport Pilot certificate applicant, so for you we’re going to cut the required number of hours of experience from 1500 to 500.”

[In case you’re curious, the NSF won’t let me know for some weeks but folks who’ve gotten the grants say that one is almost always denied as a first-time applicant.  I passed my flight instructor test with the FAA examiner (3.5 hours of oral exam plus 1.7 hours of flying a rented Piper Arrow with retractable landing gear).]

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People who sell $1 million condos often complain that paying a 6 percent standard (read “fixed by collusion” among realtors) commission is too much ($60,000 for what might only be a few days of work).  Economists who have studied the real estate market, however, find that in some ways the commission is too low because realtors don’t work very hard to sell clients’ houses compared to their personal houses.  In other words they sell a customer’s house relatively cheap so that it will sell quickly rather than work for many weeks to get the best price and 6% of the extra.

Why haven’t we seen anyone propose a commission structure that says the realtor gets a 25% commission… but only on the amount above the assessed value of the property?  Your typical $1 million NY or Boston apartment is assessed at maybe $850,000 and could be sold for that price with almost no effort in a few days so the commission paid on such a sale shouldn’t be more than $1000.  If a realtor could sell the place for $1.2 million via clever marketing, however, she should be entitled to a fat commission.

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Somehow it seems that I have committed to staying in Boston for the cold miserable months of February through May 2006 to teach 6.171 (“Software Engineering for Internet Applications”).  After reading this article on John F. Kerry’s grades at Yale, I’ve decided to give all of my students Ds.  Apparently that is the path to leadership in America.  The A-students end up going to graduate school and making $48,000/year as humanities professors (until they get denied tenure, at which time they take an entry-level job as a high school teacher, age 42).

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The trip back from Quebec City involved a stop in Burlington, Vermont to clear customs, borrow the “crew car” at the airport gas station (FBO), rent bikes along the lakeshore, and fly back to Boston at around 6:30 pm when the afternoon thunderstorms were supposed to be dissipating.  Each leg of the flight was about one hour and we were in the clouds almost the entire time.  The new airplane has a datalink with the National Weather Service’s NEXRAD system for finding rain showers, thunderstorms, and lightning strikes.  As another demonstration of the power of U.S. government bureaucracy this datalink adds about $10,500 to the cost of the airplane.  If you buy a battery-powered receiver to plug into your laptop and use without connecting to the airplane’s electrical system the cost is about $800.  Consequently, just as with the GPS systems that would warn Cessna pilots out of the Washington, D.C. airspace, hardly anyone with an older airplane has this kind of datalink.  On the second leg the datalink proved very valuable.  The air traffic controllers in this region have a simultaneous display of air traffic and weather and you can ask them for vectors to keep clear of heavy rain but it is very nice indeed to see it all in on the airplane’s dashboard moving map.

As it turned out the rainstorms and lightning were still active in some areas of Vermont and New Hampshire.  But with the datalink we were able to steer clear of anything worse than light rain.  My old plane didn’t have the datalink and I probably would have chickened out and stayed on the ground until the FBO’s weather terminal showed the RADAR calming down.

I’m already missing the friendly people of Quebec.  The Departure controller asked if I’d enjoyed my weekend there.  I especially remember Eric Proulx, a farmer in the city market who showed us photos of his goats at the Ferme Tourilli, and gave us samples of his delicious Cap Rond cheese, which he says is available in one Boston store (I’ve emailed him to find out which one; he couldn’t remember at the time).

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I promised a friend to take her for an excursion by private airplane to a foreign country where they speak a strange tongue unknown to 97 percent of the world’s population.  She readily agreed.  We folded ourselves into the four-seat propeller-driven single-engine Cirrus SR20 and entered the clouds above Hanscom Air Force Base near Boston.  We didn’t see the ground again until about 600′ above a long runway amidst a cold rain-soaked landscape.  “Welcome to Quebec City,” I said to her.

[Tip for dogless travelers:  the Auberge St-Antoine is truly a fine hotel in the old city.]

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