Bierfaristo Blog

Kaj jen Esperanta versio

Two weeks ago, I got a phone call. Daniel asked me to speak with a UMass police officer who questioned me about whether I knew where Daniel was. I indicated that, although I didn't know exactly where Daniel was, it was reasonable for him to be on the UMass campus and that I assumed he was staying out of trouble. Daniel and his friend arrived home after a short while and indicated that they'd been patted down by the police. We had some reservations about the legality of that, but rather than lodging a complaint, Alisa sent a note to the UMass police chief and asked if there could be a meeting where the police could explain their actions. On Tuesday, two officers came to North Star.

There were 15 or 20 students and parents waiting when the officers arrived. The meeting was initially frosty, but the students warmed to the officers and the was a good and honest give-and-take. The police explained that their primary goal when meeting a pre-college student on the UMass campus was to make sure that the student was safe. After some reservations, the audience largely accepted their story and asked a range of questions.

Several of the questions were really rather offensive. Students questioned the honesty of officers and whether they wouldn't lie about confiscating drugs to steal them for themselves. The officers were patient and made a convincing case that police officers are just regular people who are occasionally put in awkward circumstances and try to manage things to keep themselves safe first and foremost.

At the conclusion of the meeting, Catherine had the most insightful comment. She pointed out that both teenagers and police officers tend to be misunderstood and have poor reputations. It was really valuable for the police officers to win over the students and convince them that they could be allies and, at worst, to recognize that the officers needed to assure their own safety. At the same time, I though the students acquitted themselves well and learned a lot about how to defuse tense situations with the police -- the whole thing was a win-win for both sides.

I've been trying to avoid wheat and carbohydrates, so when I saw this article I decided I could do that, but could make it in a bowl without crust. I made my own sauce and added chunks of pepperoni, some lebanon bologna, and bacon, covered with mozzarella and parmesan cheeses. I added mushrooms and black olives to two of them. They turned out great! A little oily, perhaps, but really delicious.

The "Build a Computer" class has begun to shift gears with the new semester. We finished building the computer last semester and are now trying to actually use it. In the first class meeting in January, we tried to use installers I had made on the mac in my office -- they didn't work. In the intervening week, I built new installers using a linux box and found that there was a step that the Mac directions don't include, where you install something in the bookblocks of the device. That was consistent with the failure mode we were seeing, where the device was visible in the BIOS but did not appear bootable. Unfortunately, there was a holiday and then the next class period was on the first day of the new semester and I felt like I needed to skip North Star to be in my office for people with first-day problems. But I sent the installers with Daniel so that he and the others could try them out. They called me a couple of times with questions, but succeeded in finishing the installation and named their new server "polaris".

This week, we built accounts for everyone on polaris. We updated the groups file and then tested to make sure that everyone could log in and could become root. Then we tried to set up networking.

My general plan has been that eventually the server could become the router and firewall, plugged directly into the cable modem. We're continuing with that possibility in mind. For the meantime, however, the server will reside behind the wireless basestation and so we wanted to set up wireless networking. It took some reading of man pages and a bit of googling, but eventually we got everything in /etc/network/interfaces, stopped and started networking, and we were able to ping out. We ran apt-get update and then were able to install tinymux.

My plan is to have them set up tinymux as their first service: something fun. And then move to other services. I'm looking forward to next week.

Recently, Apple signed a deal with textbook publishers to get textbooks delivered electronically via iPads. As with the App store, Apple will take a cut of everything sold through the iBooks interface. Many people are excited about the possibility of having new "interactive" textbooks that use the capabilities of the new interface. I am not.

Almost all of the "interactive" features designed by textbook publishers encourage students to engage in tasks individually, working by themselves. This is the wrong direction. We need ways to stimulate people to work together. Students should be challenged with questions that are too hard to solve by themselves, on their own. More importantly, students should be put in the position of figuring out for themselves what they need to know and then given access to all the information in the world to solve it, not just a book. In short, I question that we need textbooks filled with answers. Instead, we need to help the students ask the right questions.

This is antithetical to the current educational paradigm, where content is doled out to students in bite-sized chunks. Real learning isn't like that at all. Real learning is when you discover that half of what you've been told is wrong. Or that there's another side to the issue. Or that the world doesn't neatly fit into categories. Real learning is when you set out to learn one thing and you discover something else. Real learning is when it matters to you. Apple's new plan won't move us in this direction at all -- it's just the same old dogfood in a new can.

Apple, of course, is doing this mostly to make money. At the same time, they are working hard to put the genie of the Internet back into the bottle. People see it as ironic that the the company that did the infamous 1984 advertisement has become such a force for platform domination and compliance. If they have their way, you won't need a web browser: there will be an app for that. Which you had to pay for. And they'll get their cut.

Eight years ago, I set up a text-based adventure game with my older son called "Muppyville". He was in fourth grade. We showed it to all the kids in his class for one class session and then he and a handful of his friends played it for months.

There was a little boy who was fascinated by the potential of Muppyville to exert power over the other children. He created places in the game that he could lead unwary people into where they would be trapped and he could taunt them and then leave them stuck there. He eventually figured out that he could change his "name" to "1imako", which looked a lot like the username name I used "limako" (the first character is a a one instead of an "L"). And then he would pretend to be me to other kids but then insult them and use obscenities -- among other things. I gave him a couple of chances to straighten up, but eventually I had to block his access and tell him he would have to have his parents contact me if he wanted access again. He was understandably reluctant to do that.

Fast forward to 2011: According to my son, this boy got an administrative password to "Powerschool" -- the database that the school uses to maintain records -- and subtly adjusted a few of his own test grades to change his grade from a B+ to an A. And he got caught! Reportedly, he was suspended and all of the colleges and universities he had applied to were notified of his academic dishonesty.

Some people just never learn...

Ekde la okazaĵoj de la somero, mi apenaŭ ion faras per Esperanto. Mi ne plu instruas Esperanton. Mi ne plu estas retpaĝestro de E-USA. Mi ne fariĝis komitatano de UEA. Mi ne plu blogas Esperante. Mi ne plu legas Esperanto revuo, nek Usona Esperantisto, nek Literatura Foiro -- mi ne plu legas revuon kiu ne ofertas retfluon. Nia loka grupo plimapli disfalis. Preskaŭ la nura afero kiun mi daŭre faras estas verki hajkojn. Same kiam mi estis doktora studento, mi ankoraŭ dediĉas almenaŭ kelkajn minutojn tage por pripensi Esperante kaj kapti momenton en poezio.

Esperanto-USA nenion faris dum la aŭtuno. Nia nova prezidanto tute ne gvidas. Li unufoje, iom mallerte provis puŝi la organizaĵon kaj, kiam ĝi ne agrable respondis, li ĵetis la manojn en la aeron kaj forfajfis la tuton. Nenio okazas.

Ĉu mi entute kabeos? Nu, verŝajne ne. Mi re-membriĝis al E-USA kaj UEA. Mi donacis iom da mono por subteni la Novjorkan Oficejon de UEA. Mi verŝajne partoprenos la Landan Kongreson. Sed mi malmulte plu interesiĝas pri aktivismo. Post kelkaj monatoj for de la movado, mi havas alian perspektivon. Ne mankas al mi la bataloj, la plendoj, kaj la senĉesa disputado. Mi uzas la tempon por laboro kaj familio -- kaj aliaj hobioj -- kaj tio estas vere kontentiga.

We pulled off another successful Western Mass Drupal Camp. We watched the weather with some angst and agonized over whether to exercise our snow date -- They had been predicting up to 6 inches of snow. But in the end, it looked like the snow would mostly happen while the camp was going on and be finished in time to have the roads clear by the time people left, so we decided to push ahead with the camp on schedule. We ended up only getting around 3 inches and, although it probably depressed attendance a bit, we still had a substantial turnout and the camp felt very successful.

Last year, as we got close to the camp, there was angst over the organization (or lack of organization). I think many of the organizers had worried that they would get sucked into becoming responsible for everything, so we had all circumscribed our participation to particular things: I just did the venue and tried to put on blinkers with respect to everything else. But, amazingly, it all came together and just worked. This year, we had the same experience without the angst. We learned a lot from last year and the organization of this year's camp showed it: it was almost seamless and quite low stress. Still, we had all been very busy over the past few days getting all the details nailed down.

I attended three sessions. Two were very practical ("CSS and Drupal" and "Drupal Multisites") while the last was more intangible ("Shaping Drupal"). The practical ones were well attended -- packed, even. They were great and I learned something in both of them. The last didn't draw a large crowd (although I thought it was among the most important of the sessions at the camp: benjamin melançon led a discussion asking how do we maintain the Drupal community to keep the project moving forward? Drupal has been wildly successful, but principally due to people leveraging what the community has already built. And although Drupal use has skyrocketed, the growth of the Drupal development community hasn't kept pace. He didn't offer answers -- he just asked the question, although he did point to a handful of projects where people are actively trying to build the development community and help people move from just using Drupal to supporting it. I'm glad to see the question being asked.

I spent a good bit of my time trying to foster and organize the informal side of the Camp. Last year, we had reserved the Computer Resource Center (CRC) as a "Birds of a Feather" space, but it went almost unused. This year, I tried to organize a "showcase bazaar" and "genius bar" and get people to sign up. The "showcase bazaar" didn't attract anyone, but the genius bar went much better. There were almost constantly two or three people coming in with questions and experienced developers helping them actually work on stuff. I helped someone fix and update their instance of Drush and got a nice comment on twitter. (Note: I'm really not a drush wizard -- It was just old-time unix hacking: she had an alias in her .bash_profile that was invoking a different version of drush than the one on her $PATH, but it puzzled me for a few minutes until I figured that out.) It was really fun to watch over the shoulders of people fixing other problems as well. I learned as much or more doing that than I did in the formal sessions. We still need to find more ways to make the informal sessions work more effectively.

One challenge is where the CRC is located. I was involved in the design of the ISB and I advocated for having the CRC located adjacent to the cafe space on the atrium: it was the single thing I wanted most in the design of the building. My goal was for there to be a seamless flow from a completely informal space (the cafe), to the more formal CRC, to the most formal attached computer classrooms. This would enable people to hang out in the cafe and, when they thought of something they wanted to work on, to move into the CRC. Instead (probably due to my low status), they stuck the CRC off in a corner of the building on the third floor: you practically can't get any farther from the cafe space than that. This means that people hanging out in the cafe, decide to just work there, since it's too far to get to the CRC. Every time I visit the ISB, I have a little pang, because I'm reminded of all of the things we wanted, advocated for, and worked on (like the problem-solving auditorium, the team-based classrooms, ubiquitous wired networking etc) that didn't make it into the final design of the building or were otherwise thwarted. It doesn't help that everyone always talks about how wonderful the building is. It is a wonderful building -- one of the nicest on campus, but it still reminds me most of my failure in leadership.

At the end of the day, I walked around and locked up all the rooms, I pulled down our signs and erased the blackboards. We got the tables put away and cleaned up the trash (mostly). And then I went home. I decided to skip the after-party -- I was exhausted. I sat with Tom in the car for a long time talking about what a strange place the University is and how, in spite of its flaws, it's a wonderful place to be doing Drupal.

In October, I started reading The Tempering of Men. I had a hard time getting past the first page and realized that it reminded me of something. I asked Daniel if it reminded him of anything. He read the first page and picked up on it immediately, saying "Oh my God! It's the Shadow War of the Night Dragons The names! The names!" I was a bit teasy about it on twitter and should probably apologize because...

In the end, I pushed through the first few pages, got drawn into the rest, and found I could really enjoy it. (Although, as Daniel says, it is sort of like gay werewolf porn.) It has lots of good stuff, but was very confusing at first because it assumed you'd already know which are the people, which are the wolves, what their genders are, and that there's going to be a lot of gay sex -- none of which you might reasonably be expected to know when you first pick the book up from the shelf.

Recently, I got around to reading the first book: A Companion to Wolves. It too has a strong element of gay werewolf porn, but was much better at the beginning of drawing the reader into the narrative. On page 62, though, is this wonderful paragraph, which is definitely one of my favorite paragraphs ever:

Although Isolfr knew it was stupid, he was hurt by Glaedir's eagerness. Glaedir's brother Eyjolfr was Randulfr's lover, Glaedir one of the sires of Ingrun's litter, and it seemed wrong that he and Glaedir should move against Grimolfr and Skald, when neither Randulfr nor Ingrun would dream of doing such a thing.

The names! The names! :-)

I've enjoyed reading Errol Morris' columns in the NYT, so when I saw he'd written a new book, Seeing is Believing, I checked it out of the library. Each of the sections explores a controversial photo from history and fills in the backstory of why the photograph became controversial and explores each as a basis for discussing the question of photographic authenticity.

People find photographs compelling and convincing -- yet, at the same time, understand intuitively that photographs can be misleading. Photographs can be staged or altered. And even a photograph that reflects a truth on the ground, can say as much by what it excludes as what it shows.

In each scenario, Morris explores the psychology of a documentary photographer and, in one case, interviews the photographer directly. In every case, the narrative gave me a lot of insight into how photographers operate and how the constraints have changed over time. Worth reading.