Bierfaristo Blog

There's been a lot of angst over Apple swapping their 30-pin connector for a new smaller connector. It's hard to know what the right thing to do is, but the pre-existing system always seemed stupid to me and the new one little or no better. Proprietary connectors should always be avoided.

I avoided getting a device that had one of those stupid iPod connectors, but did eventually get one, only to find that, although it worked for my iPod nano, it wouldn't charge my iPod Touch. I also noticed when I rented a Hyundai, it had an "iPod connect" mode to let you play music, but it wouldn't work with my iPhone (or my iPod nano). It just reinforced for me that these kinds of proprietary systems are always a mistake. Always.

Of course, my Samsung tablet isn't any better. It has a very similar port to the 30pin iPhone connector, but they're not interchangeable. Morons. You want to shake these people: JUST USE STANDARD PORTS! Sigh...

Today, I was nominated to stand for the rules committee of the faculty senate. Several people have pointed out that the Rules Committee avoids having unbiased elections: they usually appoint people to empty seats and put forward a slate with only a single candidate and, although they allow nominations from the floor, these candidates never win. In spite of that, I agreed to stand and wrote a brief statement:

I'd like to thank Max for nominating me and for his kind words.

This is my third term as faculty senator, although I've served the faculty senate in various capacities for 16 years -- since I first arrived at the University. I've served on many faculty senate committees and councils -- too numerous to name -- and chaired several as well.

I'm particularly interested in serving on the rules committee exactly now due to several current issues where I believe my expertise could bear on important decisions the campus needs to make.

The chancellor has identified the need to document the value of a face-to-face education. I co-chaired the committee where the Biology Department developed and adopted learning goals for the major. These learning goals been influential to pedagogy in the department and a model for other departments across campus. I have long advocated this approach as the foundation of a grass-roots assessment strategy that could document to external constituencies the value of a UMass education. I believe we must move in this direction before a top down approach is imposed upon us.

Furthermore, as a science educator, instructional technologist, and internet strategist, I'm familiar with the technologies and approaches being used to develop MOOCs and have insight into their strengths and limitations.

I have also been a champion of the campus' growing use of Free Software where we have adopted first Drupal and now Moodle for building our networked infrastructure. A key facet of this approach is having the intelligence (that is, the people) to adapt the resources to our needs embedded on our campus, rather than in some vendor that is all too often unresponsive to our needs.

I am also a non-tenure-system faculty member and am interested in ensuring that the academic rights and freedoms of all UMass faculty are protected. The current events surrounding Barbara Madeloni remind us that attention to this principle is both important and necessary.

Finally, as many of you know, I'm committed to open and transparent faculty governance. I hope you'll give me the opportunity to serve the faculty on the rules committee.

Thank you.

Unsurprisingly, I didn't win. The faculty senate actually has as many administrators as it does faculty. I think I'll propose a change to the bylaws in which we change the name to "Administrators/Faculty Senate".

It's a mixed blessing to not win. I would very much like to advocate for these particular issues, which few other people on campus really care about or even understand. But I have plenty to do with my time.

Last year, I led a class at North Star where the kids and I built a computer. We talked about the computing needs of North Star and decided that a server/router could improve the environment there. At first, there was some skepticism on the part of the North Star staff and we were in a holding pattern for several months after we'd built the computer. But as they realized the limitations of their existing network, they came around and asked us to install our server. There wasn't time for me to finish it in the spring, but yesterday evening, I put the server into service. And today, North Star used the server their students built to provide their networking for the first time.

It's just a simple gnu/linux box running Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS. But I'm hopeful that soon they'll become addicted to the kinds of cool things that a simple linux box can do for you. I'm looking forward to bringing up a cadre of students to perform the tasks of sysadmins.

But first, I should probably get some good backups.

For years, I've played StarCraft with my brother Phil. We played StarCraft and then Broodwar and, more recently StarCraft II. Early on, we experimented with options and discovered that we really most enjoyed just playing as a team against the computer. Playing against each other -- or against other teams of people -- is just too stressful.

Today, we played a few games against the computer and kept getting beaten. I realized that we were playing on a map that has obstacles that prevent you from getting rushed (attacked) at the very beginning and that the computer opponent was using that opportunity to expand resource gathering and was able to get way ahead of us. Phil suggested using the variant of the map that doesn't have the obstacles to rushing. I suggested that he set up the game and made him team leader.

Suddenly, the game was starting. "What happened? Who are the ops?" I asked. "Sorry -- they're people," he replied. He had inadvertently set us up to play against other humans!

Our opponents were protoss and terran. The protoss op sent a probe into our area to canon rush me. He created photon canons near my base. Luckily, as zerg, I had started building units that could destroy the photon canons and his attempt to achieve early victory failed. I destroyed the canons and the pylons, which probably set him pretty far behind.

The terran opponent was more skilled. He started building a huge force of battlecruisers. When Philip and I attacked the terran expansions, he sent the battlecruisers out and wiped out our force. Once I saw that he was building battlecruisers, I increased my air defenses and started making corrupters -- the zerg unit for air-to-air combat.

The protoss opponent attacked individually and was easily repelled. At that point, we pressed our advantage and attacked the protoss expansion and killed it, but were pushed back when we tried to attack the nearby terran expansion. But soon, we had rebuilt a large force and wiped out the other terran expansions. At the last terran expansion, the main confrontation occurred: a huge force of battlecruisers opposed by hydralisks, corrupters, and Phil's void-rays. The battle was decisive: in just a few moments, the battlecruisers were destroyed and we were left in command of the field. After a few moments, the opponents surrendered.

It was fun to win. Phil and I are pretty good at coordinated teamwork. We're too conservative to ever be top-tier StarCraft players, but we're pretty good. At the same time, it's TOO STRESSFUL to play against human beings. It's a lot more fun to play against the computer. We decided that maybe when we're older, we'll try playing against human being again. Maybe in 10 years or so. Maybe.

Today was the MSP retreat where, at lunch, we were scheduled to meet the new chancellor. We were encouraged to come up with questions to ask him after lunch. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the scheduling and the chancellor was unable to come. Here is the question I was planning to ask him.

The question I want to ask is essentially the same question I asked the last chancellor when he had first arrived and the question is as relevant now as it was then. When I first arrived, there were relatively few non-tenure system faculty. As the number has increased, the university has made an increasing distinction between tenure-system and non-tenure-system faculty. To many of us, it feels as though the non-tenure-system faculty are being systematically discriminated against and disenfranchised. I have been here for 16 years. My non-tenure-system colleagues and I have dedicated our lives to making the University the best it can be. And yet, it feels to me, that the University is increasingly holding us at arm's length and saying, "You don't really count. You aren't really worthy." So my question is, do you think this is the appropriate direction for the university? Should non-tenure-system faculty be considered full members of the university community or should they be systematically discriminated against and disempowered by the administration?

If you're wondering, our previous chancellor was unapologetic about the fact that non-tenure-system faculty were not really full members of the university community and shouldn't expect to be treated as such.

There have been calls for shared calendaring in Biology, and other groups that we support, for several years. For my own use, I had set up WebDAV on a server at home to manage my own calendars and, when asked, I helped the technical staff implement the same thing in the department. But it didn't work particularly well. We didn't have a central authentication system, so it had to use one-off http basic authentication. And WebDAV just didn't work very well for the purpose. Occasionally, people's calendars would vanish and would need to be restored.

The campus eventually went with Exchange Server from Microsoft. I haven't used Exchange myself, but everyone I talk to seems to hate it. Partly, this seems to be because you have to integrate it with your email and, so you can't keep using your existing email address, email client, etc.

There are a variety of Free Software shared calendar packages, including one called DAViCal that looked pretty good, but none were an ideal fit for our environment: they all required prerequisites we didn't have in place. And shared calendaring was a low-enough priority that it rarely got the focus it needed to get solved.

Finally, this summer, the stars aligned and we got everything we needed in place. We had put in place central authentication, moved to a locally-built Apache and PHP that could support everything we needed, and got Postgres updated to the version needed so that we could install DAViCal.

DAViCal seems totally stable. It integrates almost seamlessly with iPhone and iCal (although it depends a bit on the version -- delegation doesn't work at all with versions prior to Slow Neopard and is still only incompletely supported in the latest versions). It seems to work fine with Mozilla Lightning, although you have to configure everything manually with URLs, unlike the delegation system provided by Apple. I haven't tried other clients yet. But we still have a lot to learn about the system.

My biggest disappointment was discovering that there was no free client for Android. There is one that's only a few dollars, but I don't actually need to have my calendar on my tablet, so I'm having a hard time justifying the expense. And, WTF? Why should I have to buy a third-party package to use CalDAV on Android? It's bizarre to me that it's not already supported.

It must be nice to live in a fairy tale world where some simple idea, like "freedom" just fixes everything. In the sunshiny world of "Sheldon Richman", the economic bailout of 2008 was just politicians making it seem like they weren't doing nothing. I don't know about you, but if our economic system had ground to a halt, it would have inconvenienced me.

What would economic collapse have meant? How about your debit cards and credit cards not working… How about gas stations not being able to get supplies of fuel… How about grocery stores not being able to pay for shipments of food… How long could you go without needing to buy something, before life got really uncomfortable.

Luckily, because we have government, the economy is not purely a zero-sum game. The government *can* create money when the system starts to freeze up. When the "free market" collapsed, the government was able, through swift action, to keep most of it afloat, so that, although there was a huge dislocation, the whole sucker didn't just come down.

Alisa and I spent the morning in Shelburne Falls, after dropping Daniel and a friend off at a local camp for an overnight adventure. We had a lovely time strolling through the town, wandering through artists' shops, and looking at the glacial potholes. We looked for a place to have a cup of coffee, but weren't especially attracted to any of the places in town. We stopped at the Shelburne Falls Coffee Roaster on the way back, but I didn't like that either. So we ended up just going to the People's Pint for lunch instead.

The People's Pint is a wonderful place. I don't go there very often, because I rarely have a reason to go to Greenfield, but since they sponsored the "Pedal2Pints" bicycle tour, I've been making excuses to go. Alisa hadn't been before, but was pleased with the service and the food.

They had a new IPA: Zeus IPA. I tried it, but found it too flowery. So for my second glass, I got the Pied Piper IPA: A fine, workmanlike glass of beer.

Alisa got a flight of the different ciders to try. Cider. Blech.

After lunch, I used my time productively to nap and read: getting over a cold is hard work.

When I met Kalle in New York, they were just getting over some kind of stomach flu and I really worried that Daniel and I would get just as we left on our various adventures. We traveled by train to Michigan, spent a week and visited the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Then I rubbed shoulders with a hundred people in Virginia while giving a talk. Then we passed through Miami on our way to St. Croix and spent two weeks on island there. But I stayed healthy -- until we got back. Then, within a week of getting home, I came down with a cold.

This has been a pretty nasty cold. A sore throat, runny nose -- the works. This morning, it felt like the mucus had gelled and had moved down into my lungs. By the time I got to work, I was losing my voice and by noon, I could barely croak. So I came home.

Better now, though, than when school starts. With any luck, I'll shake this cold in a few days and then be in good shape when the students come back. Then I can get another one. :-/

For a couple of years, I've thought it would be useful to have a video documenting the research I've been doing with Buzz in St. Croix. This year, I decided to create the video as my project during the time I was there. I used my little point-and-shoot camera, a Canon Powershot SD780is, for all of the filming.

I've done a few short videos before, but this was the most ambitious film project I've tried to do. It has a number of minor flaws, but is good enough for my purposes.

On the morning we left, we showed it to Mike Evans, the refuge manager at Sandy Point, before posting it publicly. I mainly wanted to be sure it didn't show anything he'd be concerned about. He was quite pleased with the video and had several helpful suggestions.

Buzz wanted to re-record a few of the bits of narration that weren't perfect. Last night, I spliced them in, retimed everything one last time, and uploaded it to the youtubes. It hasn't exactly gone viral: 3 views as of this morning. But I'm sure that will all change once I post it on my blog. :-)