I have made it a “public” blog on naver (Korean web portal) platform, now, which increases its accessibility for students and their parents, since it is within the cultural firewall that surrounds the Korean internet.
[UPDATE: This is all quite out-of-date. The website, jaredway.com, is still active but much transformed – since around 2018 it’s been my personal “identiy” site: stuff like my resume, a summary of interests, etc. But the “blog” I created for my work-related postings, in Korea, on the Korean platform, is still there! That is: https://blog.naver.com/jaredway]
Add to this the fact that Adobe still (years later) doesn’t seem to know what to do in multilingual O/S environments. I get the same question-marky stuff that I screenshotted in that old blog post with respect to Java. I’m not even on the same computer. See below for an Adobe screenshot from just the other day. It’s perhaps the case that this is more a problem of the way I choose to configure my computer as opposed to the update software, per se – but why is it only US-based software companies (e.g. Oracle [Java] or Adobe) that have this problem?
Frankly, Adobe’s update strategy has always seemed one of the most bizarre, broken software undertakings I’ve ever experienced. I’m glad to see that even a leading light such as Mr XKCD sees the same thing.
This is the world's first (oldest) webpage. It's at CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee created the WWW protocols and httpsd web server in 1990-91. That makes the below a 22-year-old website. Interesting.
I think it's cool they still have it up and available – I'm not sure to what extent it retains its original form, but based on appearances it matches closely with my recollection of what the internet (er… "world wide web") looked like in the very early years.
I'm pretty sure my first experience with WWW was at the University of Minnesota libraries, which were already running the locally developed gopher protocols (which was an early alternate version of www, basically) for their online library catalog in 1993, and they were experimenting with https in the same vein. I distinctly recall seeing "websites" that looked exactly like the above – all white with black text and blue links, zero or quite minimal graphics.
I wrote and published my first website in 1995, in raw html using a text editor, as a first-year graduate student at University of Pennsylvania – I used the now defunct geocities hosting site. I was publishing syllabi and supplementary materials for my Spanish classes that I taught there at that time. I called it "macondonet" after García Márquez's fictional town, Macondo.
I wish I still had the code for those early pages – it would be fun to keep them live somewhere as a sort of nostalgia trip. I was lucky in that I was attending early-adopting institutions at the time the internet was first emerging, and thus I got to be an early adopter, too. I think it's ironic that all these years later, as a teacher, I'm "lower tech" than I was at that time.
My desktop computer crashed: hard crash, the kind of crash that requires a reinstalled operating system. I still have zero idea why this happened, either.
I didn't particularly enjoy solving this problem on my day off. But I thought I handled it pretty well – given that the system "restore" program that I got to run on my desktop was in Korean!
And in fact, I can take some further pride in the fact that, because of my now deep-seated backup habits, I lost exactly one week's worth of stuff. Nothing more – no lost novels, this time, no lost photography archives or lost masses of scanned pictures or lost music collections. Basically nothing lost – one week's worth of notes for a story, about half a page, that I had started and probably never would have finished, anyway, and a few photos, half of which are already included in this blog anyway. Everything else was backed up on spare hard drives or my server.
So for that, I feel grateful. But not so much for the lost day. I hate computers.
It’s always amazing to hear from former students. I received the following email from a former student, the other day.
Dear teacher Jared Way
Hello, my name is ___ and I am a high school student now in Korea.
Why I decided to send this message to you is to express my thankfulness to you.
I was an elementary school student maybe 5 years ago, and I still
remember that you have taught me english in academy for quite long time.
Why I still remember you is because (maybe I’m not sure if you will remember me) of the story thay you have told us.
One day you told me that in America, about 70% use Windows as an
personal OS, but in Korea almost 99.99% use Windows just as monopoly.
And you told us about another operating system called ‘Linux’.
I was curious, and I searched over the internet to install Linux on my
computer, but it was too hard for me. So I asked you what kind of Linux I
have to install, and you told me that Ubuntu will be fine. And also
you’ve kindly print some installation manual to me and explained how it
will works, and how to install.
After I have succeeded to install Ubuntu on my computer as a multi-boot,
I still remember that you told other teachers thay I’m really good at
computer! And I also remember thay I have asked some Greek words to you
because i was also interested im Greek language.
Anyway, you gave me an worthy experience to Ubuntu as young, and from that on, I’ve tried to use Ubuntu everyday.
So,,,, now I’m now in “Daegu Science High School”, a school for students
talented in Science, and mathematics, of course still use Ubuntu in my
laptop : )
Because I have experienced Ubuntu when I was young, I could learn many
computer knowledge and my information science teacher in school asked me
to make an lecture resources about Ubuntu and Linux. Also my
information science report on first semester was “Usage of Ubuntu as an
operating system in science high school, and reaserch the relativity
between Android” which I got highest grade, and help me to get ‘A’ in
total.
So, I was always thankful to you to give such a great experience but
cannot,,, but I thought that i must do, and found your homepage and now
writing this long letter.
So, thanks for reading this long long letter, and I hope we could talk each other more by letter or phone in advance 🙂
So thank you teacher Jared, and I’ll wait for your reply~
26 January, 2013
I was very flattered. Daegu Science High School is very prestigious, too. I sometimes see my sharing these kinds of messages here in my blog as seeming overly self-centered or self-promotional, but it’s one of the reasons I like teaching – that knowledge, that comes back, sometimes years later, that I’ve maybe made a difference in someone’s life. The email has some irony, as my own work with Ubuntu Linux ended not long after having apparently evangelized this student – I gave up on Linux, for the most part, in 2009 – it was too difficult to get Linux to behave in its interactions with typical walled-garden Korean internet, for one thing (e.g. Korea’s ActiveX addiction). But the smart phone / Android world created by Samsung is changing this, finally (and fast). Perhaps if I was using Linux, now, I’d have less frustration.
Unrelatedly, here is a picture from walking to work yesterday, from near the same spot where I took the [broken link! FIXME]mist/rain picture the other day.
The thing about computer programming languages is that they're all weird subsets of English, basically (BASICally?).
This was always both interesting and disturbing to me, as a linguist. I have been fascinated by the idea of possible alternatives to that Engish hegemony. Finally, someone is doing something about it – not that it will go anywhere. Some guy is making a programming language based on Arabic, called قلب [qlb i.e. qalab? = heart, core] – here's an article about it at The Reg.
This pleases me both as a linguist and as a former computer nerd. I wish this project the best of luck.
If you have studied computer science, you know what a Turing Machine is. It's not something that's useful, as a machine – it's a theoretical construct that enables us to think about what it's possible to do with computers. So the idea of implementing and building an actual Turing Machine is a bit strange. All the better, then, to build one out of Legos.
I am no longer a programmer. My skillset has rusted to such a degree that it is no longer useful. But I still occasionally follow the field, broadly speaking. There is much writing, over at The Reg, that can make me laugh on a regular basis. But this bit… wow. A sample, at length (brimming over with inside jokes and strange, nerdly, programmer-humor):
Zany adventures with Zarco and Marco
And the users of Delphi had become old with the passage of years, and had taken to sensible shoes, and elasticated jeans, and cosy Saturdayevenings in with BBC4.
For their grizzled pates did sparkle in the morning sunshine, like the surface of that glittery sandstone stuff that one sometimes notices in rocks by the seaside.
Yet still the users of Delphi turned out Windows code that was not so dusty, and demanded no runtime, and could fetch its backside off the disk and be begging for input before certain alternatives could so much as put up a 'Please wait' dialog.
And if a few users of Delphi had turned their hands to writing JavaScript-that-is-the-assembly-language-of-the-internet, then most had not followed these filthy traitors into the perverse ways of the curly bracket.
For it is well-known that JavaScript is the most perverse of all the perverse curly-bracket languages, that causes its users to cry Wat! and despair.
That little thing at the "Wat!" link is hilarious, too. Really. Trust me.
I had returned to college. I was at the University of Minnesota, but the campus was so radically changed I couldn’t find my way around. The library was a stunning architectural marvel (which can’t be said for any of the U of M libraries I actually spent so much time in). I had to go into a dormitory that resembled Holworthy Hall from my summer at Harvard (1982). I was on a campus tour with my coworkers from Karma. They were making snarky, insulting comments about the university, most of which I felt sympathetic with.
And then I was trying to do some homework for a computer class. I was trying to get linux command lines to work. I’m not sure I really did that while in university – if I did, it would have been VAX/VMS, not linux or unix. But these were definitely linux command lines, because I kept pulling up ‘man’ pages to try to get the flags right.
And that was the rest of the dream. I mean, a really long dream, that mostly consisted of me trying and re-trying variations on command lines to do some kind of compile on a LISP program I was trying to run (well, that part was like my time at the U of M, anyway).
Why am I being revisited by this depressing stuff?
Last night I had one of my increasingly infrequent "coding nightmares" – dreams that consist mostly of a sort of montage of SQL programming code, where I haven't got a clue what's going on. While I acknowledge that, if it became financially necessary for me to return to programming, I would, I find it less and less appealing the longer I spend away from it.
;; John McCarthy, creator of the LISP programming language ;; at MIT in the 1950s, passed away last weekend.
;; LISP is the coolest programming language in the universe. ;; This blog post (minus the picture) is a program:
;; it can be run at caltech’s tinylisp
I was installing some Java add-on on my computer and walked through a series of text/approval windows that appeared like the one below.
Obviously, Java needs to work out some language-compatibility issues. This isn’t that uncommon with software in Korea – but it seems to arise mostly in the context of computers with “language-identity ambiguity syndrome” (LIAS), where user selected some strange middle ground between only-Korean and only-English (or some other language). Such as my computer.
Meanwhile, I wonder if the Java add-on will work? I have no idea – I just kind of clicked the most likely buttons, based on experience with other such install windows. Who knows?
“Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.” – Steve Jobs
Once upon a time, I was a huge fanboy of Apple Corp in its first incarnation (see left) – my uncle’s Apple ][, which entered our household when I was still in junior high in the late 70’s, was my first and most excellent exposure to computers, both as tool for writing and for learning programming. Not to mention killing vast amounts of time with games like space invaders.
Frankly, I’ve always felt that Apple Corp in its second incarnation, post-Jobs-exile, was less thrilling or impressive. I found the latter-day, closed-garden design philosophy personally repugnant (I think this is the open-source programming geek, in me), and I felt the products were over-priced and excessively hyped. More marketing than engineering, basically. I have so far managed to get past 10% of the new century without owning or interacting with an Apple product.
Nevertheless, I believe that Steve Jobs was undoubtedly a Thomas Edison type figure for our age. His passing is premature.
I had some computer problems over the weekend. Or rather, on Friday… I experienced the notorious blue-screen-of-death on my little Asus EeePC netbook, which runs Windows 7. It’s the first time I had one on this machine – I had, in fact, come to believe that Microsoft had done away with the infamous crash-o-matic indicator with the new operating system, because I’d never seen it before. But lo, there it was.
This made me worried. I managed to recover the little netbook, but I felt a dilemma. I rely on having a computer a lot. More than just for going online – in fact, I spend a lot of time on my netbook off line, and I’m pretty OK with having to cope with lack of internet at home, as I learned the hard way during my struggles with internetlessness in Yeonggwang last year (although obviously I ranted about it quite a bit). I do writing on my computer. Not good writing. Not writing-to-be-happy about, but it’s a compulsive exercise.
Until last year, I’ve always had two computers. Well, not always, but at least in the most recent milennium. The idea being, that if I had a crash, I’d go to the backup. Well, last year, my “main” laptop, an old Sony Vaio that I bought the month before coming to Korea in 2007, suffered an ignoble retirement. It has 3 operating systems installed on it – Windows Vista, Ubuntu Linux, and Windows Server 2003. I dropped it, and I guess I scrambled the Vista boot sector somehow. I can still boot it up, even now, but using Linux is virtually useless for surfing the Korean internet (although that’s changing rapidly, with the unexpected – to me – success of the iPhone and iPad and the various Android-running clones of those products, because Android is, after all, just Linux). The linux boot has got some other minor issues, too, involving the Korean-language input thingy, which I’ve been too lazy to resolve. The Server 2003 boot still works (and I use it when I’m searching for some old file I’ve misplaced, sometimes), but it never played well with the graphics card in the laptop, with the consequence being that it is only capable of presenting a bare-bones 800×600 half-size window on the already non-huge laptop screen. The upshot of all this, I consider the old “main” laptop to be dead.
So my backup computer, since my hiatus in the US in the fall of 2009, has been this $295 Asus netbook that I bought at Best Buy with a gift certificate. It became my new main computer. It’s very low-grade, but perfectly adequate for my writing and for doing things on the internet, if rather pokey running multiple applications, etc. I had to abandon my computer games habit, but that’s hardly been detrimental, in most respects.
Anyway, getting the blue screen of death, last Friday, set me to thinking… if this netbook fails, I’ll be in a world of hurt. I’ll be able to boot up “old main” if I’m desperate to write something, but it’s hardly convenient, and I can forget comfortably surfing the internet. And besides, I’ve been missing having a computer that can have more than 2 windows open at the same time without slowing to a crawl.
So Saturday morning, I tromped off to Costco and spent 800 bucks. I bought a desktop. Which seems ridiculous, but I’ve considered that one of the main things I do recreationally with my computer, these days, is watch movies or TV serious, and my netbooks 7 inch screen is pretty pathetic, that way. Those 24 inch flat screen monitors looked tempting. So basically I bought a fancy screen with a cheapo Jooyontech (a Korean discount brand) desktop PC attached to it.
I decided to make my life difficult for myself. Not on purpose, exactly: I somehow managed to click just the wrong set of initial choices on the “first boot up” of the Windows 7 Home Premium K (for Korea) operating system, such that the operating system knows I prefer English, but nevertheless refuses to use it with me about 80% of the time. As if that even makes sense. Haha. Let’s just say the remainder of the configuration process involved a lot of recourse to the dictionary. And I’m the proud owner of a semi-bilingual computer.
I decided that, well, wow, I had a desktop with an actual graphics chip set and a big screen, I should put a fun game on it. I have always had an inordinate and unhealthy love for the game called Civilization, in its various incarnations. I went to buy it and try to download it – only to be disallowed from buying by the download store thing (called Steam). I felt annoyed. I hate it when online vendors discriminate against me because of my IP address. They’re telling me they don’t want my money. Well, my reaction to being told by a product vendor that they don’t want my money is to not give them my money. It took me about 20 minutes to torrent and install Civilization 4 (not the latest version, but what do I care? I like the old version just fine) on the new machine. No money required. The internet’s like that, right? Probably, it’s a bit stupid of me to tell everyone this on a blog, but I feel pretty safe from the copyright police, because of the aforementioned discriminated-against IP address. Korean copyright police only care about Korean content.
Well, I played Civilization for part of Sunday, and then, in a long-unfelt rush of self-disgust at wasting such a vast amount of time on a virtual empire, I went on a walk. Such was my weekend. The picture below shows the new computer. It represents a certain degree of investment in my intention to stay in Korea, doesn’t it? I suppose if I end up leaving, I’ll sell it or give it away to a lucky friend.
What I’m listening to right now.
David Bowie, “Changes.”
The video someone made for it in the youtube, above, is clever, too. It’s an appropriate way to ring in the new computer, though Bowie always makes me think of freshman year at Macalaster College in St Paul. Life has changes.
I opened a help-desk ticket with my blog host (TypePad) just now. Normally, I wouldn't publicize it, but the specific problem is intriguingly humorous. It's exactly the sort of computer error that an itinerant epistemologist such as myself deserves. Here's the ticket as currently stands (slightly redacted). I'll post updates on this blog post – I'm betting something vaguely Kafkaesque will unfold – but who knows?
On Nov 28, 2010 10:37 AM, you (caveatdumptruck) said:
A friend of mine tried to post a comment to my blog, and says he received the error message "Sorry, we can not accept your idea". This is a pretty weird error message. Is Typepad doing semantic analysis of comments to determine philosophical viability? I hope not.
I trust that my friend isn't making this up.
Can you please tell me if your code, somewhere, is programmed to output such an error message? If so, could you please explain what sort of context such an uninformative error message might be acceptable? Or alternately, recognize some kind of easter egg or deny the existence of such program code?
Thank you ~jared
NOTA Here is a copy, pasted after the "======", of my facebook conversation with my friend, in which he told me about the error. It also summarizes some steps I took to try to replicate the problem.
======= Tony – hi Jared, tried to post a response on your blog and received the message, "Sorry, we can not accept your idea". Sadly, I wasted a half hour on it 🙁
o Jared Way – Damn! I hate that kind of thing. I will try to investigate: my best guess – the blog host has some kind of length-limitation on comments, and doesn't have a very user-friendly response to overly long ones.
I will also post your comment to… my blog host's help forum. That's a very strange wording for an error message – did it really say "cannot accept your idea"? How does it know what your idea was? Definitely weird.
o Tony – Yes, that was the message. Sorry to be the bringer of bad news
o Jared Way – Argh. Well, I think I ruled out the "length-limitation" idea – I posted a cut-n-paste of a 20 page article as a test comment and it went thru fine.
I tried making mistakes with the "captcha" and that didn't give that error, either.
I will see if my blog host has anything to say. Not optimistic, however.
o Jared Way – One more error test: I pasted a vast document of nonsense and URLs (simulated spam) into a comment box. No complaint – with the correct catcha, it didn't error out. The blog host simply ignored the whole thing. Typical "black hole" database consistency error.
I've commented before about South Korea's stunning loyalty to Microsoft – that company's 90-something-% market-share is the highest of anywhere in the world, I believe. And I think I've noted before that it's driven been by one major thing: early adoption of internet-banking and online secure-transaction tools, under the aegis of extensive government mandates regarding middleware and security features, that coincidently relied on Microsoft's proprietary ActiveX technology.
Mozilla has recently taken the time to post an excellent blog entry on the subject of South Korea's "Monoculture" vis-a-vis browsers and operating systems (and no wonder, being Microsoft's most successful competitor in the browser market). They provide a good summary of the issues, and implicitly explain why iPhone and Android will fail in South Korea, despite their huge cachet and positive brand images.
Given that Samsung recently announced they were going to try joining the crowded field of smartphone OS design, with their "Bada" product (I think that's what it's called – I'm writing from memory on this), I wonder if this will change? Or will Samsung go ahead and pay some kind of royalty to MS in order to license and use ActiveX and/or internet explorer, in exchange for being able to exploit the current monoculture to protect and enhance their potential for suceess in their home market and suppress their most innovative potential competitors (e.g. Google, Apple, RIM)? Hmm… I bet there's some kind of dealing going on, there. I wonder how many shares in tech chaebol Bill Gates owns? He should own a lot.
One thing I did before leaving the US, is that I broke down and spent a rather large sum of money on Rosetta Stone language learning software, for Korean. I had a couple of reasons.
Firstly, of course, there is my desperation to somehow get better with Korean, and therefore a willingness to try new and different things, and spend money doing them.
Secondly, however, was that as linguist, I've been wondering what, exactly, they were doing that allowed them to believe themselves a premium seller of language-learning tools, for that's the way they market themselves. Are they really that good? I wonder. There is so much in the way of really bad materials for language learning, devoid of any apparent familiarity with linguistic theory, often replete with errors and folk-judgements about things like sound change or grammaticality.
I've managed to work through the first 3 lessons of the first unit of my Rosetta Software Korean Level 1. Here are my thoughts.
As software, it's extremely well designed. Attractive, easy to figure out, intuitive, just as they claim. My primary complaint with the interface is the speech-recognition tool… I got lots of answers "wrong" as I worked through it because it simply doesn't seem to "hear" me. And it seems a little bit buggy in the way it handles not being able to "hear" you, leaping along and going "bing," "bing," (error, error) without giving you time to try again. Also, A few times, I became frustrated with a new type of exercise and the lack of instructions on how to do it, but ultimately I recognize that this is part of the "method" being used: they want the user to solve each exercise, each section, as a little puzzle, and be engaged at a more-than-analytical level in using the language.
As far as awareness of linguistic theory, I'm less impressed. They make the same sorts of grammaticality judgements as so many horrible "beginning Korean" texts, and I'm not sure the focus on the highly stilted, fully inflected forms of the nouns is going to lead me to any kind of communicative efficacy, down the road. Actual Koreans speaking actual Korean almost never use the kinds of singular-plural inflections they're teaching here, at least in my experience, for example. I'll try to keep an open mind.
The single most frustrating thing is the speaking exercises. Not just because of the wonky speech-recognition problems I described above, but because they give you little hangeul prompts for words to pronounce, but they aren't really useful at all — because they're not explaining or displaying or in anyway accommodating the extensive and overwhelming processes of sound change and syllable liaison that operate within Korean words and phrases. I can figure out what they want me to do, because I have a degree in linguistcs and several years of effort behind me in sounding out Korean hangeul, but I think that if I was a typical, linguistically naive language learner, my simple, heartfelt reaction would be: WTF!
I'm sure they have a couple lessons in the introductory part, where they're teaching you hangeul (which I didn't work through) — but honestly, exposure to the sound change and liaison rules is not the same as internalizing them — the software needs to hammer these rules home in these speaking exercises. I've seen plenty of beginning Korean texts that will provide two "spellings" for each word: a standard spelling and then a "sounded out" spelling that explicitly reflects the sound change and liaison rules in operation. If the software did this in its presentation of speaking exercises, I think it would be a lot more transparent. As it is, you hear a pronunciation and read the hanguel on the screen and wonder if the person narrating is looking at the same thing you are.
Lastly, I really think I'd have struggled immensely with making heads or tails of this software, if I hadn't brought with me the extensive background and previous effort in trying to learn the language. I've already been exposed to much of the vocabulary, and all of the grammatical concepts being covered, on and off over the last couple of years, and most importantly, I'm comfortable with the Korean writing system and can recognize syllables at a glance. And with all that, I'm getting only 85% correct on most of these units. How frustrated would I be if I was coming at it "cold"? I'd be giving up, is my guess, and muttering "impossible!"
So, that's my review based on about 6 hours of hard work with Rosetta. I'll stick with it, if only because for me, it's very helpful with vocabulary. But was it worth 400 bucks? A tentative NO.
I've seen two news items that seem to me to be defining moments in the open-source software industry. First, Microsoft is apparently contibuting to the Linux kernal, obviously therefore conforming with the GPL. Everyone loves the irony, but my only thought is that it signals Microsoft's undeniable adaptability. They may suck at the internet, but they're still kings in the world of actual, meaningful giant software projects (hey, even kings can sometimes still make dogs like Vista, but they've made plenty of products I definitely respect, most notably SQL Server and the .NET framework). The other item that I thought was mildly interesting was that Red Hat, the biggest Linux distribution company out there, has now been added to the S&P500. I wish I hadn't sold my stock.
While surfing around looking for something else, I finally have figured out why I have to use MS Internet Explorer when visiting most Korean-based or Korean-designed websites: ActiveX. That's an internet technology that's not web-standard, and that only works in the Microsoft universe (microverse?), but which is apparently nearly universal in Korean website design.
Despite being at least a little bit computer savvy (although my expertise was mostly in "back end" stuff relating to databases), I confess I never knew that ActiveX was restricted to Microsoftland. So… well… you learn something every day, right?
Here's the blog where I found it described fairly well, although it's also rather depressing, since it claims Google's Chrome browser will support ActiveX, which I have not found to be the case. Maybe they're still working on it.
I like Kang's observation that Google is having a tougher time working with the Korean government than with the Chinese government. I've speculated, before, that supposedly democratic and highly westernized South Korea may in fact be more protectionist and xenophobic in some respects than China, but without having spent time in China, I won't make any assertions. It seems there's evidence out there to support the idea, though. And the way the government here "runs" the internet is one of them.
When I check under XP, my computer is running about 300 threads at idle (that is, no programs running). Does an O/S really need that many threads? When I boot under Windows Server 2003, I find 500 threads at idle. And when it's running under Vista, the number is almost 800 threads.
Obviously, Vista works a lot harder to do the same amount of nothing. No wonder my laptop crashes sometimes when I ask it to boot to Vista… it's saying "please, no, I'm tired!" Just like when I ask my students to do more homework?
A few months back, I said goodbye to Ubuntu. But now I'm reconsidering. Vista is getting on my nerves, again. Nevertheless, I had a major insight, yesterday, at work, as I was trying to do something (anything!) constructive with the new install of Microsoft Office 2007 (or some recent year). It doesn't help, obviously, that I'm stuck with the Korean language version at work, and that it doesn't let you switch to English. But why is it that every time Microsoft upgrades something, they change all the keyboard shortcuts? Do they think that no one uses them? I really despise relying on my mouse to get things done, and since I'm working with the Korean version, figuring out the keyboard shortcuts basically boils down to randomly pressing keys and collecting data on what it does.
Oh, so, what was I talking about? My major insight… I prefer teaching to working with computers for one very simple reason: computers always make me feel stupid, and kids at least sometimes make me feel smart. There's nothing complicated about that.
I've been contemplating Oracle's proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems. As an erstwhile programmer, I'm concerned about Oracle's ability to be faithful to Sun's many relatively "open" software infrastructure undertakings: the Java programming language, OpenOffice, and, most importantly, MySQL, which has been a direct competitor of Oracle's core database products.
I don't trust Oracle to stay committed to any of these product lines. The best case scenario would involve them spinning them off, somehow, but if I'm guessing correctly, it was for these "periferal" lines-of-business that Oracle decided to take on Sun in the first place — the hardware line that most analysts view as the central part of Sun's business is both shrinking, and uninteresting to Larry Ellison's empire-building schemes.
As a shareholder (I own a tiny number of shares in each company), I'm more sanguine. It means I don't have to fear a bankruptcy by Sun (which seemed possible, especially after the failed IBM bid), and I can therefore recover at least some of my invested value in that company. And Oracle has a good record of profitably absorbing other businesses.
Oracle will struggle more with Sun than many of its previous acquisitions, due not least to that hardware business, but I expect there's a very good chance they will figure out how to make money from the whole deal, eventually. Oracle is stunningly good at manipulating their long-term revenue streams and cross-selling products.
After all, it was my experience as an IT worker of a major Oracle customer that convinced me they were a good stock to own – those people sell some of the most well-marketed vaporware in the world of ERP applications. And I don't really mean vaporware negatively – all major ERP systems are basically vaporware at the moment of sale: those kinds of million-dollar sales are little more than a handshake that says, "we will build what you need."
When I worked at Paradise Corporation (a pseudonym), in the National Accounts Department (within the broader realm of Sales & Marketing) with my boss’s permission, I constructed a database server which I used to download and manipulate a complete “copy” of the official corporate data warehouse. The server was not a powerful machine, and a full ETL (extract, transform, load) of the previous week’s data took all weekend (more than 24 hours). But I kept adding more hard-drives, because the size of the dataset was so large. Ultimately, the server had 9 200GB hard drives, meaning it was approaching 2 terabytes. There were only 6 slots for hard drives, however, so I attached the additional drives using duct tape to the inside of the case. I was very proud of the jury-rigged contraption.
The server became known as the “stealth server,” and employees from the IT department would sometimes come by my cubicle simply to admire (and express alarm) at my handiwork. I deployed a business-intelligence website called, alternately, the report-o-matic or NADA (a cynical backronym of my own creation, meaning National Accounts Data Analysis), which ran on one of my two desktops and linked to the stealth server for its source data. Linking directly to the data warehouse was not an option, because the dimensional data there was of the wrong “granularity,” which is why I’d built the copy in the first place. I was “flattening” the dimensions substantially, and then re-normalizing to the “correct” granularity to be able to support invoice reporting for certain finicky National Accounts customers. I was reminded of my beloved stealth server recently by an April Fool’s blog posting at CNET news. The picture (click thru for the CNET article) is not unlike my stealth server, and I felt both alarmed and proud of the fact that my stealth server’s secret twin was working hard for google. But of course, no real corporation would rely on such jury-rigged hardware for mission-critical data support functions. Right?
To Paradise’s credit, the report-o-matic is now hosted on proper hardware, and most of the “back-end” has been rewritten by “guys in India.” But last I heard, the website was still presenting data for the National Accounts team, much as I’d designed it.
I recently learned, much to my shock, that a former close colleague of mine passed away last year. Tyler and I worked together at HealthSmart in 2005-2006, in Long Beach and mostly at the Pharmacies division in Newport Beach.
I've mentioned Tyler twice in this blog (which is pretty notable, considering how little I was blogging during the time he and I were close colleagues). First, in April of 2006, I didn't give his name, but only wrote of him obliquely:
… the future is scary.
So I guess this is one of those flexion-points, where I might decide to step away from my current future, and toward another. But a friend (a colleague) made an observation to me the evening before the interview – really, also, an observation OF me. He pointed out (and somehow had figured this out despite missing major portions of my biography) that I was a serial quitter.
And maybe I should get over that?
The hardest future to adopt, in other words, is the one currently coming at you. Alternate futures are easier, perhaps. Am I destined to always be a refugee in my own alternate futures, in exile from my own alternate pasts?
Hidden behind this mention, but evident in it, is the fact that, during that short time (about 6 months? Maybe almost a year), Tyler was essentially my best friend. We worked together on an almost daily basis. We had connected at a visceral level, with our curmudgeonly personalities. And he was more than a little bit of a mentor to me, in things technical, while I know he was fascinated with my never-ending tales in the vein of "…at that time, I was working as a … " Which is to say, my dilettantism. Really, he influenced me a great deal.
The other mention was in August of 2007, right before I left for Korea. I was "catching up" with the abandoned coworkers of past jobs, and we had lunch at the Inka Grill in Costa Mesa, a place which I shall always associate with "lunch with Tyler." Especially now.
I made several efforts to get back in touch with him since coming to Korea. Not really concerted efforts, though. And now, I've learned, he died at some point last year, so perhaps my efforts were already "too late." I knew he'd had some health issues, and he was definitely quite a bit older than I am… he was a Vietnam vet, after all. Still…
I will remember him as a good teacher, at least, of technical things. A man of extraordinary insight into human character, if somewhat impatient and cynical, himself. Generous to a fault with those whom he respected, and downright ornery with those whom he didn't. Not a talented manager, but highly organized and capable of lots of innovative thoughts. From personal experience, an indispensable person to have on your side during a difficult business meeting, and a great person to have on your team when trying to meet an impossible deadline. Thanks, Tyler. I miss you.
If you look back to around 15 months ago in my blog entries, you'd conclude that Linux triumphed on my desktop, and I never looked back. Yet, last night I logged onto my Linux partition and noted it had been 60 days since my last use of my Linux install. I've been living in a Windows-only world (Vista on my laptop, XP-Korean at work).
Does that mean I love Windows? I've always felt OK about XP (which is basically a desktop version of Server 2000/2003), but not a day goes by when I don't mutter "F@##$% Vista" to myself under my breath. Vista’s Windows Explorer (File Manager app) still crashes sometimes for no apparent reason, on an almost weekly basis, for example. So why am I not only tolerating Vista on my laptop, but basically committing to it exclusively, now? I have three main reasons.
First, there is the problem of language support. Once I started taking my efforts to learn Korean seriously, I found myself having to use Ubuntu Linux's clunky CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) support. It's an add-on. There are several choices of add-on, but all are terribly integrated to the desktop, and all are completely incompatible with several of the applications I wanted to use. I couldn't figure out how to name files in Korean unicode, and switching between western (US), western (Spanish) and Korean keyboards seemed unreliable and inconsistent, if not downright difficult. With at least one application (the game Second Life, Linux version), when I would run the CJK Input engine alongside it, it would lead to a full-blown system crash. No forum seemed to offer a more reliable alternative to the input engines I found and tried. In comparison, Microsoft's CJK language support is well-integrated to the operating system, and once I discovered that my right-hand ALT key could function as my Hangeul/Roman switch (since my laptop has a made-for-US keyboard that doesn't have that special Hangeul switch key to the right of the SPACE bar, the way that Korean keyboards do), I was very happy. Of course, even Microsoft's language support is sometimes weird: despite now being in service pack who-knows-what, every time Vista pops up that little "please authorize me to scratch my butt" warning, the language bar unlocks from the toolbar, parks itself somewhere near the top of the screen and floats out to foreground for half a second. That's buggy-looking, the sort of thing you'd think some developer at MS would have noticed before it even got into beta, not to mention two years after going live. I doubt it impacts functionality, but it's downright unprofessional-looking from a design/aesthetics standpoint. Overall, though, at least language support is fully integrated and relatively painless, if not always aesthetically pleasing.
Second, there is the issue of media files and media players. I could never find a media player and media organizer in Ubuntu that worked seemlessly with the materials I had: my Samsung MP3 player, my 35GB of music files, my downloaded Korean TV shows and movies. Each media player I tried would end up doing something strange. Once, one of the players (I forget which) placed all the music files onto my MP3 player with gobbledygook names (probably some freaky interaction with a few of my Korean unicode-named music files). Another time, I swear another player corrupted a set of 16 episodes of a TV show I'd spent weeks downloading. I also frequently got frustrated with visiting internet radio sites, where I would allegedly lack the proper codec, etc., to be able to play the stream I was trying to play. Many online streams are optimized for Windows and Mac environments, and seem to forget the Linux user out there. In any event, I now alternate between Realplayer and Windows Media Player when using Vista, with zero problems. Both work fine in the Vista environment.
Lastly, there has been the problem of the fact that Korean internet websites are often incompatible with Firefox (and Opera, to the extent I experimented with that). This is not, strictly speaking, Ubuntu or Firefox's fault, obviously. South Korea, more than any other nation on Planet Earth, is married to Microsoft at the hip. Microsoft has a 98% market share here, which is by far the highest in the world. Most Korean-national websites are written in non-ISO-compliant extensions to HTML (especially Flash and Silverlight) that seem to work only in Internet Explorer. I didn't ask for this type of environment, but I must accept the reality of it: that if I want to spend time on Korean websites (and in some cases, such as work-related tasks, I MUST spend time on Korean websites), I have no choice but to be using IE. And that pushes me into Vista, too.
Some people have said, for these compatibility issues, why don’t I use WINE (a Windows emulator for Linux) to encapsulate the problematic programs so that I can continue to run a Linux desktop? This is possible, although it doesn’t solve problem number one: lack of integrated language support. But furthermore, at least in my limited experimentation, WINE encapsulation is slow. And clunky. Ultimately, it seemed more trouble that it was worth, relative to possible benefits. It leads to a pyrrhic victory over Microsoft, at best.
So, sadly, the vista from here is murky. Ubuntu has a lot to accomplish before I can feel comfortable adopting it as my primary OS, as much as I would like to. My plan for this weekend is to delete my Linux partition, so as to be able to use the extra gigabytes this will free up. Ubuntu, it's been good to know ya.
I've been feeling down today. Not sure why. It could have to do with the spring equinox. I almost always seem to get down at the equinoxes, both fall and spring versions. I don't know why, but I've been noticing it long enough that I think it's a real pattern. Maybe it's a weird variant of that seasonal affective disorder some people struggle with.
So I don't have much to say.
Funny / Interesting quote: "Technology has the shelf life of a banana." – Scott McNealy (founder of Sun Microsystems)
Relatedly, Sun may be swallowed up by IBM, soon. Apparently a deal is in the works, if it passes due diligence and the antitrust regulators.
Really? Check this out: “In many ways, Windows Vista has become the Richard Nixon of operating systems: controversial, scandalous, perhaps unfairly vilified at times, but ultimately reviled by many.” – at ChannelWeb.
Hahahaha. Cry. Cry. Etc. Truth is stranger than fiction. And true metaphors are stranger than fictional ones?
Alternately, in the spirit of the just-passed V-day, consider this: “Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites who never meet.” – Andy Warhol. Indeed, my life is profoundly, inexcusably exciting.
The attitude barometer, episode 4:
* Number of times I’ve opened my resignation letter and edited it: 1
* Barrier-surpassing moments of Korean-language usage (outside of work only): 1
* Spirit-destroying moments of Korean-language communication breakdown (outside of work only): 2
* Number of students that have said something to the effect of “teacher, you’re so funny” while fighting off an apoplectic fit of giggles: 2
* Number of times I’ve told someone that I am “much happier than when I was in L.A.”: 0
* Number of times I really meant it (as opposed to the “fake it till I make it” approach I’m fond of): 0
* Days I was late to work this week: 1
* Total number of minutes I was late, minus total number of minutes I showed up early: 15
recent soundtrack:
Last Alliance (JPop with a sanitized grunge flavor)
KoRn (pure anger from Bakersfield)
Bob Dylan
Elis Regina
Queens of the Stone Age
I remain subscribed to certain SQL-Server programming e-newsletters and suchlike. Most of the time, I have no idea why. I never look at them. But today… I saw something that made me think, “gee, I wish I’d known how to do that, back then!” The idea of automating Excel from inside a SQL-Server stored procedure. Oh well… is late knowledge better than never knowing? I’m not sure it is. Then again, it could be that this sort of thing wasn’t really possible, back when I made the hacks that pulled this off (in 2002-2004). Advances in the technology and the platform, and all that. Meanwhile… as far as I know, those hacks are still an active part of keeping the National Accounts department at Paradise Corp in business.
The picture is entirely random and unrelated. Cup Ramyeon, anyone?
Suddenly, it's winter. The high temperature today was around zero (32F) with strong winds. The golden leaves on the trees have all dropped to the ground in a very short span. And a snow flurry is forcast for the morning – I'm skeptical, as forecast snow rarely seems to actually materialize in this part of the world. But we shall see.
I stayed at work until 1am last night, entering grades into the really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really bad computer database system that LBridge uses. Note that it is really bad, in my opinion. What a monumental waste of time. Jeez. I could build a better database system. And I'm not really a very good applications designer. And by the way I'm not volunteering.
I got an email from a former coworker at ARAMARK. The CIO, my erstwhile nemesis, is finally gone. And the giant multi-million-dollar project that I participated (at a low level) in the initial stages of, "customer connect initiative" or CCI, is dead. After millions of dollars, and who-knows-how-many promises from vendors such as Oracle, the thing is… dead. Failed? I don't know the details, but I'm capable of imagining how it all turned out. I wonder if that means they're still using my infamous "reportomatic" to track national accounts? Should I be flattered or dismayed that such a poorly built piece of software is still in use?
