Steven D. Brewer's blog

I was awake in the early hours of the morning, when I saw saw one of the first tweets that said that Aaron Swartz had committed suicide. More and more followed as an unquenchable wave of grief swept over the internet community as the new day began.

I didn't know Aaron personally -- I think I interacted with him a time or two on the net. But I feel the profound sense of loss since I identify with so many of the causes he was so passionate about: freedom of information, individual empowerment, and the potential for technology to make a difference in people's lives.

Others have written already about Aaron's life and passing -- I particularly liked Cory Doctorow's piece RIP, Aaron Swartz. But there is one thing I'm reminded of that I'd like to say.

When I arrived as a new faculty member at UMass, it was the first time that I was really a boss -- someone who supervises employees. Every semester, I hire some students to operate the facility I manage, the Biology Computer Resource Center. It was an eye-opening experience that taught me a lot of lessons about the need to assume responsiblity for other people.

I think it was the winter of the second year I was there that, when classes resumed I discovered that one of my staff members didn't come back and I learned that he'd committed suicide.

He was a slightly goofy kid, a bit overweight, who tended to wear oxford-cloth shirts with sweaters. I never knew, for sure, but I always sort of assumed he was gay. He was very serious, very polite — very tightly-wrapped some might say. But he was very sweet and charming and I really liked him. And on the last day before the beginning of the spring semester, he killed himself.

I've never quite gotten over it. I still tear up to think about it. And I always ask myself if there wasn't something I could have done to make sure he was connected; to make sure he knew that someone cared about him; to make sure he understood that he mattered; to make sure he knew that I was willing to do whatever it took to help him resolve whatever problems he got himself into. He was my student, dammit. He was my charge. And I can't escape the feeling that I failed him.

I never quite look at my students the same way anymore. They're my kids too, now. I try to make sure that I check in with them, that I really listen to what they're saying. I try to never let one of them bounce off me when they have a problem: if they have a problem, I have a problem too until it's fixed. And I'm more careful grading students too.

I still have to assign some students failing grades. But I always try to make the process transparent and to make sure students know that a failing grade doesn't mean that I like them less, or feel any less responsible for them, or that they lack options. Sometimes students don't have the options they want, but it doesn't mean that they have no options.

I'm so sorry that we failed Aaron. Let's try not to lose any more.

Dum la kelkaj monatoj post kiam mi demisiis kiel sekretario de Esperanto-USA, mi demandas min kien nun. Mi ankoraŭ ne havas klaran respondon, sed kelkajn aferojn mi decidis. Kaj novan ideon mi ekhavas.

Ekde pli ol 20 jaroj, mi aliĝas al la Esperanto-movado. Post du tagoj, mi ne plu estos membro de ajna Esperanto-asocio. Mi intencas realiĝi al nek Esperanto-USA nek UEA. Mi plimalpli decidis tion antaŭ monato kiam mi ricevis peton ĝisdatigi miajn informojn por la "delegita reto" kaj mi respondis por anonci ke mi ne plu estu delegito.

Pri la problemoj de la Esperanto-movado, mi ne nun volas repridiskuti. Mi jam kelkfoje faris tion. Sed mi diru unu-du vortojn pri la tiel-nomata "Delegita Reto".

La delegita reto estas emblema ekzemplero pri la problemoj de la Esperanto-movado. Jen granda reto da homoj kiuj ricevas nenian taskon nek gvidon nek organizan subtenon de UEA. Ili nur kreas liston da homoj sen ajna supozo ke delegitoj faru ion ajn. Kaj la tuto restas kaŝita malantaŭ pagomuro. Stulte. Kia malŝparo da laboro! Jen ĉio dirinda pri "La Esperanto-Movado."

Mi nepre restos Esperanto-parolanton. Mi havas sufiĉajn amikojn ke mi ne tute forlasos Esperantujon. Mi tage verkas ĝisdatigojn dulingvajn. Kaj plaĉas min verki Esperantajn eseojn kaj hajkojn.

Esperanto, tamen, fariĝas multe malpli granda parto de mia vivo. Tio ne estas en si mem malbona afero: mi dediĉas min pli al miaj laboro kaj familio, de kiu mi ŝtelas tempon por Esperantumi. Ankaŭ mi simple priĝojas la vivon: mi legas, ludas komputile kun mia frato, ktp.

Unu ideon pri Esperanto mi daŭre pripensas.

Por mi, unu el la plej bonaj spertoj en Esperantujo estis la semajnfino en kiu Robert Read organizis feston por prilabori la novan retpaĝaron de Esperanto-USA. En unu loko, kunvenis aron da homoj kiuj kune laboris por atingi celon. Ni vere faris ion per Esperanto — ion konretan kion ni povis poste indiki kaj diri "Jen io!"

Tro ofte, mi spertas ke oni Esperantumas plimalpli sencele. Oni babilas pri hazardaj aferoj kaj tro ofte la diskuto temas bagatelajn aferojn. Mi pensas precipe pri la poemo Estas Mi Esperantisto:

Mi parolas kun rapido :

"Bonan tagon ! Ĝis revido !"

Ĝi sufiĉas por ekzisto ;

estas mi esperantisto.

Ofte, la babilado deflankiĝas al disputoj pri gramatiko. Ege tedaj, laŭ mi. Multaj esperantistoj amas tion: mi ne. Mi volas fari ion.

Kion oni faru? Kion ajn! Unufoje, mia loka grupo faris ŝildojn kaj portis ilin ĉe manifestacio: tio estus bona tasko por prilabori kune. Aliaj ideoj: kune prilabori Esperanto-kongreson, kune prilabori paĝojn por Vikipedio, kune prilabori eseojn por libro aŭ antologio, kune prilabori la tradukojn por softvaro (ekz. Libreoffice) aŭ retpaĝaro (ekz. Facebook).

Mi pripensas retpaĝaron kie homoj kiuj volas prilabori ion, povas reklami kion ili faros — kaj kiam: aliaj povus partopreni aŭ vid-al-vide aŭ pere de la reto. Kelkaj lokaj grupoj povus proponi projektojn kaj inviti ke aliajn samtempe tra la mondo partoprenu.

Mi starigas retpaĝaron ĉe la adreso prilabori.org. Mi esperas ke aliaj volas prilabori ion kaj pretas starigi projekton tie por reklami kunlaborantojn. Aliĝu kaj partoprenu, se vi volas fari ion. Kaj se vi volas nenionfari, faru do nenion.

The secret committee that I wrote about has issued their report. The majority report recommended the campus switch to Blackboard Learn. The minority report, drafted by the associate dean who had contacted me, argued that it would be a terrible mistake to do so. A colleague and I drafted a motion for the Faculty Senate to charge three committees to report on the issue and report back by the end of January. It might have been better to ask for an ad hoc committee and given then a bit more time, but we were concerned that, given the recent history on the campus, we might be surprised by a fait accompli during the January break, and come back to find the decision already made. Our motion read as follows:

WHEREAS changing the selection of a Learning Management System profoundly impacts the ability of Teaching faculty to accomplish their academic goals and


WHEREAS the Learning Management System Advisory Committee, in a short time and with minimal Teaching faculty input, has recommended that the University of Massachusetts Amherst switch from Moodle to Blackboard Learn and


WHEREAS a previous, year-long study, that included considerable input from all of campus, had identified Moodle as the best fit for the campus,


BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the Faculty Senate (1) charge the Academic Priorities Council, the Academic Matters Council, and the University Computer and Electronic Communications Committee to review the findings of the Learning Management System Advisory Committee and to present a report to the full Faculty Senate at its first spring semester meeting, on January 31, 2013; and (2) recommend that the University of Massachusetts Amherst postpone action on switching Learning Management Systems until these reports have been received so that the impacts on Teaching faculty can be understood.

During the Announcement period, the provost took a few moments to express his concerned that there had been a "misunderstanding" about the committee. He said that the previous year-long study had focused on faculty who used learning management systems, but that the Deans had felt left out -- like their voices hadn't been considered. And that the committee had given the task to the Deans to solicit faculty input. But he indicated that he welcomed the further study and appreciated the short time line that would allow action to proceed and opened up the possibility that we might yet retain options for both LMSes to be available for faculty.

During the Question Period, I stood and said that, rather than asking a particular person a question, I had a couple of questions for the whole audience. (As an aside, it's worth noting that, in the faculty senate, the Administrators generally sit on one side of the auditorium, and the faculty sit mostly on the other.)

"How many people have read both of the reports from the LMS Advisory committee?" About 15 people raised their hands -- essentially all on the administrator side.

"How many people were even aware that this committee existed prior to the motion appearing on the Faculty Senate agenda?" The same hands went back up, again almost all on the administrator side.

I thanked the presiding officer and sat back down. I probably should have followed up my questions with remarks to the effect that nearly every faculty member I've spoken with has been stunned and perplexed to hear that this process was going on and that it had been constituted the way that it was. But I thought my demonstration still made a powerful statement.

The agenda was mostly dominated by the theatrics around a motion to ask the administration to rescind the multimillion dollar debacle of moving to FBS football. I had been involved in drafting that motion as well, but the Rules Committee had refused to put the motion on the agenda. There was an effort to suspend the rules to consider the motion, which failed when the ex oficio administrators, in bloc with the rules committee, managed to thwart the more-or-less unanimous will of the faculty to consider the motion.

As an aside, I have been, for years, trying to get faculty to recognize the importance of occupying the faculty senate seats and attending the meetings. Only 25 faculty showed up (of the 57 senators currently extant; of the ~100 we could have). So its really our fault for failing to recruit our colleagues to participate. That doesn't make it any less egregious and embarrassing, to see the administration trot out their various ex oficicio members with the goal of thwarting the will of the faculty.

We requested to suspend the rules again to consider our LMS motion earlier in the agenda, before the regular business of the Senate, so that people who wanted to speak to our motion wouldn't have to wait until the end. This time, the motion to suspend the rules was unanimous and the vote on the motion was also unanimous.

So we now have a month in which to make our case that the campus should support innovation and Free Software rather than be a mere consumer of a closed-source corporate product. At least now the lines have been drawn and the battle is out in the open.

Due to the unsatisfactory licensing changes with VMWare, we've switched to using Virtualbox to provision guest operating systems in our computer labs. (VMWare used to license a version in perpetuity, but now licenses expire after a year, which guarantees we'll have to rebuild all our stuff every year no-matter-what. That's a deal-breaker for us.) Virtualbox is entirely satisfactory for our needs.

We do want to have guest operating systems shared across all users, however. With VMWare, we jumped through some hoops to build a fresh copy of the GuestOS for each user as needed, but we hoped to avoid that this time around and share the images across users. We found, however, that when a user launched the image, it re-created all the files owned by the user and readable/writable by no-one else. Suboptimal for our porpoises.

After a bit of research, I found this article that explained how to set ACLs in MacOSX to override the unix permissions. That seemed to work great, and I imagined that I could just capture the changes using radmind. I blithely made a transcript and, upon inspection, realized that it hadn't captured anything. I did a few searches and found this, which suggests that ACLs can't be managed with radmind. Sigh.

In the end, I tweaked the perl script we're using to run radmind. After it completes the update and before it restarts, it applies the ACLs to the Virtual Machines directory. Problem solved.

I suppose Thanksgiving was originally a harvest festival: a chance to reflect on the bounty of the earth before the winter comes along to leave you shivering and starving in your hovel and wishing you were dead.

Today, of course, it's entirely disconnected from the harvest. Who cares when they harvest cranberries, when you're just going to open a can anyway. Unless you're one of those crunchy locavores.

I'm supposed to be grateful that my spouse got one of those horrible Keurig coffee makers for our house. For me, one of the great pleasures of life was making a pot of coffee. Now I can spend that amount of time digging through a bin of little plastic cups and making each cup individually.

It could be worse, I guess. I could keep beans in the freezer, and then have to grind them, and then have to boil the water separately, and then have to pour them over the grounds bit by bit, and then have to wash everything. But only a crazy person would do that.

Maybe I'll get out my Guardian Ware coffee maker and start using that. Now there's something to be grateful for.

For a couple of years, we've had a web-based system that I wrote that lets people authenticate against their University account and then set a password on the local authentication systems we have in Biology, Microbiology, Geocsiences, Chemistry, and Biochemistry. It's been a godsend for the end-users that can reset multiple passwords at the same time and not have to know which of the 10 or 12 password stores is really the one that matters right now. I used to spent hours helping people sort out which particular one wasn't what they thought and then resetting all of the other passwords to match. Now, they can do it themselves.

The system has been based on Pubcookie, but the University has been migrating away from Pubcookie to Shibboleth. I've been trying to get Shibboleth built for months, but it was a higher priority to get MySQL, Apache and PHP updated, so we'd been working on that first. But finally, a couple of weeks ago, I was able to dive in and start working on shibboleth.

They warn you that compiling shibboleth on Solaris can be rough. There are a bunch of prerequisites (curl, openssl, boost, xerces, opensaml, xml-security, xmltooling) some of which also have prerequisites. First, I discovered that that curl had been compiled against LDAP which was compiled against libsasl, which was causing some incompatibilities. I recompiled curl without ldap. Then, in compiling xerces, I was having problems linking with libiconv, so I had to munge the LDFLAGS to add -liconv later in the search path. But eventually I got shibboleth installed, configured it, started up the daemon, and tried to connect. I was redirected, authenticated, but when it tried to catch the redirect back, it failed: the daemon had dumped core.

I checked and double-checked everything. We weren't getting any error messages in the logs. I loaded the core file into a debugger and tried to interpret what it was saying. Eventually, I posted to the shibboleth-users mailing list and got a curt reply from the main developer saying that the backtrace that I'd provided was insufficient to evaluate where the problem was and said the application would need to be "stepped".

While investigating how to step the application, without much success, I found that I could start the daemon without dissociating from the controlling terminal. When I did that, and tried to connect, I got an error message back that said the problem was in the xerces transcoding library -- our old friend libiconv. I had already had indications there were problems with it, so I went back and looked at that some more. I found that xerces could use either gnu or solaris iconv and was choosing gnu. Our gnu package was a third-party compile and I suspected it might be linked against different, incompatible libraries. So I selected the solaris libiconv, recompiled xerces and all of the dependent libraries, tried again, and it worked!

I drafted a brief report for shibboleth-users that summarized what I'd done. I explained that I had given up trying to step the daemon because "I only play a unix programmer on TV." One of the other folks on the list replied to the account of my solution, saying "Could have fooled me!" The lead developer also thanked me and asked for a bit more detailed info so that he could adjust the documentation to help people avoid the problem in the future. I'm always happy when I can find ways to pay my dues to the Free Software community.

During much of the Romney campaign, I was reminded of the Saturday Night Live sketch The Guy Who Plays Mr. Belvedere Fan Club where they have a vote to see whether they should kill him. After the vote, Tom Hanks as Chairman says, "The Nays have it. He lives. But the vote shouldn't have been that close." This sums up how I feel about the election. We won, but it shouldn't have been that close.

Rachel Maddow had by far the best elocution on the election:

if the Republican party, and the conservative movement, and the conservative media is stuck in a vacuum sealed, door locked, spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good, and denying the factual, lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived, as a nation, of the constructive debate between competing, feasible ideas about real problems.

This is not to say that I've been entirely pleased with Obama either. Under Obama, the march to destroy education has continued apace. Transparency about security and foreign policy has not improved. Our use of flying death-robots has grown. But all of these things would probably have been even worse under Romney. But maybe the next four years will be different.

For her Distinguished Faculty lecture, Jane Fountain spoke about how the state (ie, the governmental institutions) has adopted and adapted to internet technologies. She began with some quotes to show how far off people have generally been with respect to predictions about technological change, both in terms of excessive optimism and pessimism, provided some definitions regarding technology and the state, and provided a broad overview of how the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations have approached internet change.

Her central point was that technology had not produced a "revolution" in government. The first forays into technology were driven by the idea that certain segments of the population, like students, could visit a portal and get information from across many agencies of the government. This ran afoul of the fact that budgets and oversight are managed by agency and cross-agency initiatives tended to produce infighting and turf-protecting. Subsequent efforts were to standardize implementations of IT and document how purchases were related to goals. This led to recognition of common needs across agencies and the development of portals like grants.gov and benefits.gov.

She ended with a very abbreviated summary of how other governments, like Venezuala, are using technology less for public information than propaganda. Or China, that pays people to engage in social media in support of the central structures. Her take was that the tension persists between the duality of technology providing states with more increasing ability for control and individuals with tools for personal freedom and expression.

I asked her about the increasing corporatization of the Internet:

In Cluetrain Manifesto, the authors cite the decentralized structure of the internet, that put the smarts in the endpoints and left the middle to only pass packets, as being central in producing the transformative character of the resulting changes. A phone company would never have built a network that way: the put the smarts in the middle and left the users with just a dumb terminal. As corporate interests take over the internet and technology, and increasingly model it on centralized control that limits which apps you can use and which protocols are allowed, do you see the further innovation of the internet having as much potential for transformation?

Short answer: no. The "wild west" days of the internet revolution are coming to an end as entrenched interests find ways to extract rents and we'll be less likely to see revolutionary changes going forward.

Someone else asked a great question about the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements, and how technology played a role in those. Her fundamental response was that although technology provided many ways for people to organize for protesting and disrupting institutions, it did not provide an easy path toward building the kinds of institutions that you need for stable, democratic governance. It's easy to tear things down, but its much harder to build.

I guess, I'm still a bit more hopeful. The Free Software and open culture movements have come a long way in 20 years. She began with a great quote by John Perry Barlow

With the development of the Internet...we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back farther.

which she used as an example of hyperbole about the impact of the internet. But I still believe that's closer to the truth than not. A kid today with a smart phone has access to more and better information than the President of the United States did 20 years ago. We've still only begun to see where that takes us.

I've been using Twitter Pull for a while to provide a block with recent posts from my twitter feed. It's worked almost seamlessly, although a few times I've noticed that the block was empty. I took a few minutes today to track down what the problem was.

It turns out that that the error was making too many connections to twitter:

Could not retrieve data from Twitter. The error message received was: Rate limit exceeded. Clients may not make more than 150 requests per hour..This site may be subject to rate limiting. For more information, see:http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Rate-limiting

I'm not sure exactly what twitter is tracking -- perhaps the number of the connections from that particular dreamhost server. Supposedly the twitter_pull module is supposed to cache for 20 minutes. Even so, I could see failed requests associated with page loads. My blog isn't really all that popular, but looking at the logs, I realized that spam robots and infected machines are constantly trying to register, log in, and look at pages that don't exist. I had never created custom pages for reporting errors, so I did that and then configured the twitter_pull block to not appear on those pages. That should reduce the number of requests at least somewhat, so I've done my good deed for the day.

I've been disappointed to hear that the campus is being pressured to switch back to Blackboard from Moodle. I was contacted by an associate dean to explain why we shouldn't switch. I chatted with him for a bit and then drafted this message as a followup this morning:

Moodle is designed to support innovative pedagogy. Blackboard has been designed to be marketed to administrators and offers a very traditional, top-down, teacher-centered perspective on education. Moodle has been designed by a community of innovative educators that have been dissatisfied with traditional offerings. Moodle supports a much broader range of student-centered pedagogical styles. It is exactly these kinds of innovative approaches that the campus needs and that our faculty are demanding.

Using Free Software (*see below) represents an investment in the campus. The money that would otherwise be provided to a vendor can be invested in more and better staff that can install and support a Free Software product. These staff are then available to the campus and represent a higher-level of expertise that the campus can call upon to solve problems and tailor solutions to our enterprise.

Using Free Software enables the campus to participate in a community of innovation. Vendors often make it prohibitively expensive to build any kind of custom solution on top of their platform. By using a product that can be understood, modified, and extended, our staff can provide functionality that meets our needs better than a vendor that must conform to general market demands. Furthermore, the solutions that we build can be shared with a community of people that are also innovating and sharing their solutions.

Furthermore, using Free Software empowers our staff to actually fix problems. Vendors are notoriously poor at addressing technical shortcomings of software products. Staff that can solve problems locally enables us to directly address our own concerns and prioritize how they get fixed.

Finally, there are great potential synergies between Moodle and Drupal. The campus has already adopted Drupal as a content management system. Moodle is based on the same underlying software foundation (the "LAMP" stack of Linux, Apache, Mysql, and PHP) and the staff that are supporting one can "talk the same language" as the ones supporting the other. Much of the expertise developed for supporting one platform is applicable for supporting the other. Going forward, this synergy will make it easier to build solutions for the campus that require articulation between the two platforms.

I've copied Sigrid Schmalzer from History who shared with me her enthusiastic email supporting Moodle. I hope together we can build a persuasive case that the campus should continue to embrace Moodle and not be thrown back to using a commercial vendor for a learning-management solution.

*In much of this, I refer to "Free Software" which has a very specific definition which may be important to understand for the purpose of some of my argument, e.g.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

or

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Note that "Free Software" does not mean "freeware" or "open source software", which are different things.

I hope we can organize a successful campaign to keep Moodle. It would be really depressing to be forced back to using Blackboard again.