Udderings http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ en Copyright 2008 Wed, 19 Mar 2008 20:32:00 -0600 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification "Linked" Errors "Linked" Errors.  It's simple enough that you should understand within 30 seconds of looking at the HTML.  If you don't, then you have to read my rambling.)

Error messages are something that have to happen in almost every application.  Even if you follow the Robustness Principle, and allow liberal input (why can't people's usernames contain spaces, or semicolons?  I don't see a good reason why they shouldn't...), sometimes you are forced to present errors.  I love many javascript implementations that let you know if your two password fields are agreeing or if you've entered a valid email address and use color coding to let you know of that interactively.  However, ultimately you have to validate all that input server side and let the user know if there were still errors ("Someone else already has the username 'I love ;s', please choose another").

There are many pages on which these errors are put next to the field they apply to.  I sometimes have trouble finding these error messages, so I decided a long time, that I should put my error messages at the top of the page.  This usually works well, but as forms become more complicated, associating the error message with a specific field can become difficult.

As exhibit A, I present the 2006 SLADM Registration page.  This was a monster with way too many fields and may have presented the largest design challenge in my life.  I was never completely satisfied with how I packed all those fields in and it was a huge balancing act between having it work in Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.  A total of 46 inputs in the form, 22 for each person + 2 that applied to the pair of people.  Some would say the number of fields should be reduced, but they were all needed for either legal or sponsorship reasons, so that isn't a possibility.  I thought about moving error messages closer to what they applied to, but the large number of fields makes the problem of searching a page for the error message even more difficult and the layout probably would have fallen apart if you tried to force an error message in somewhere.

My solution at the time was to work on my copywriting skills.  Well written error messages could direct (smart Washington University) students to correct their errors.  However, I knew from experience watching people that still didn't work.

Eighteen months after the fact, my brain came up with the solution.  It is a ridiculously simple design pattern I've never seen on the internet, which I'm naming "Linked" Errors.  Yes, the word linked is in quotation marks.  Because it's not really a link.  It's a label.

<div id="errors">Your <label for="email">E-mail Address</label> must belong to an educational institution or the US Government</div>
For those of you not in the know, clicking on the text inside the label, will cause the user to be taken to the input with the id in the for attribute.  In this case, clicking on E-mail Address will take you to the input that has an id of email.  You then use CSS to make it look like a link.  For example:

#errors label {
   color:blue;
   text-decoration:underline;
   cursor:pointer;
}

After some basic testing, browsers seem to implement the :hover pseudo-class on labels, but don't implement :active.  They also don't have any idea of this having a tabindex so that one can force tabbing to the "link" or an accesskey.  I'm sure you could code these concepts in Javascript, but that's outside the scope of this simple example.  Now it's time for to see the end product:

See "Linked" Errors in action

So, now you might have looked at the HTML and you might have a major criticism.  How can an input have two labels?  Will this cause problems?  I don't know.  In practice, good copywriting would tell me to make the text in both the labels the same, and that might alleviate certain problems I can imagine in my head.  But really, I want to emphasize that I don't know.  If you have examples where this would cause problems, I'd love to hear about them because this is something I plan to incorporate into everything I build in the future.
]]> http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ designpattern css Wed, 19 Mar 2008 20:32:00 -0600 Guns and Bullets There's a question at the end of this entry, so if you don't want to read it, please still answer the question.

Since last April, a number of my friends from Virginia Tech have commented on guns and their beliefs about flaws in the gun laws.  I don't really disagree with them about closing things like the gun show loophole and so on.  One thing has struck me though.  It seems the majority of people I know have never touched a gun.  This came back on my mind when Tammy said one of her students presented her with the first bullet she had ever seen.

I'm just wondering how different my childhood was.  In my house, we didn't have a gun until I was 13, and then it was just a handgun taken out of my deceased grandmother's house.  However, the majority of my extended family was of the breed that keeps a rifle over the front door to grab when trouble is brewing out in the yard.  Growing up, my father shot regularly in NRA competitions.  I guess I did have a cap gun, and actually had a friend's mom who refused to let him play at my house because she didn't want him exposed to guns as a toy.

My personal background involves shooting archery at Congressional and shooting skeet at Bull Run Regional Shooting Center.  I also regularly went to people's farms to shoot into huge rock walls.  I had a family friend who had a shooting range in his basement in Falls Church.  The police were regularly called about gunshots and would just ignore it when his address was given.  When I went to the Olympics in Atlanta, I spent a couple days attending the shooting events and marveling at the bows and guns.  Even after all the times I spent enjoying shooting in my childhood, I haven't gone shooting since high school.  Even when I considered going to the archery range in Forest Park, I never did.  (I think I would have gone there if I ever could have found info on it from the Forest Park website, instead I never had the motivation to walk to that side of the park and ask how much it cost and get details).  Spending a lot of time in shooting sports (that weren't hunting) made me into someone who doesn't really view guns as violent.  Someone can throw a rock and kill someone, or they can throw it and skip it across a river.  Some people shoot guns and use them to kill people, while others shoot them and blow up clay ducks or make little holes in paper.  Of course, in some ways that comparison is silly.  Guns probably kill more people, and many more people worry about getting shot than having a rock thrown at them.  And nobody makes rocks, while someone has to make a gun.  But, having a gun to me isn't about self defense, it's about blowing off steam through a relaxing sport.

As a side note on the not doing stuff in college, I don't think I ever went camping in college despite camping at least two weekends a month in high school and living in a tent for the whole summer before college.  I don't know what happened to me.

So, all of this together is really a question about how different my childhood was.  Did you have a gun in your house?  Have you ever shot a gun?  If so, shot gun, rifle, or hand gun?  Touched a gun?  Had a box of bullets?  Had a cap gun?
]]> http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ Fri, 29 Feb 2008 22:48:00 -0600 "Exurbs" and the Falls Church City Center an article in The Atlantic.  I disagree with what many are saying about people wanting to live in cities.  I believe people are looking for a new type of suburb, which I will call the "town".  I can't really think of good examples of towns in Saint Louis, except maybe contrasting the Loop and downtown Saint Louis.  For Silicon Valley, I would say downtown Mountain View vs. San Francisco, but the problem is that SF and the Valley are very two-way commuter while most suburbs are classified as one-way commuter.  But, I can think of dozens of examples in the DC Metropolitan area.   In fact, the article gets into this, describing what I call a town as lifestyle centers.  And the "granddaddy of all lifestyle centers" is in Northern VA, specifically Reston Town Center (opened in 1990).  Since its opening, dozens of communities of this sort have opened, and I had dozens who lived in places like Kingstowne.  Notice they all describe themselves as towns.  People want to live in towns.  In Virginia, I would say a lot of this urge came from the desire to live in the Town of Vienna or Old Town Alexandria, both of which predate any of this stuff.  As a corollary, people looking for towns go where they can find what is most similar.  Many cities are trying to add the features of towns to draw in population.

So, what describes a town?
  • walkable, but not so walkable it prevents driving
  • there are apartments, but it's easy to find nearby single family homes
  • single family homes have yards on all 4 sides of the house, there likely are no townhouses to fill a gap in between apartment and home, despite them having town in their name.  Townhouses are crowded suburbia, not what anyone desires.
  • has a downtown shopping district
  • has a small bus system, but probably no trains
  • has either a miniature golf course or an ice rink
  • probably has a man-made lake with trails
  • has parades
  • has features designed not for economic stimulation, but to get people to live there (this will be key in talking about Falls Church later)
Now, much of that may sound like suburbia, but it really isn't the way suburbia turned out.  It instead turned into urban sprawl where people commute to Winchester into DC and are miserable or they live in houses all crammed next to each other and it takes 15 minutes to get to the grocery store because traffic is awful.  A town takes the city, puts it in your backyard, but lets you still have a single family house with a nice lawn.

So, towns are a solution to this problem of people moving out of your little suburb.  What do you do?  You build a city center of course.  As described in the Washington Post article, Falls Church Turns to the Future, my hometown of Falls Church has been trying to do that for the last 8 years.  Lots of things in the article make me laugh.  Like the quotes by the planning commission's feeling that the project "felt rushed" when developers have been modifying plans for 8 years.  The Falls Church Planning Commission has a long-time reputation of being anti-building, so much so that to find an example, I went to the Falls Church News Press and just digged up the oldest issue in the archive.  Like all issues, there's an editorial criticizing the commission for being anti-development.

In examining this project, it is important to see how it differs from what the article in the Atlantic describes and it is much closer to my description of a town.  Despite what the city council and developers claim about economic stimulation, this is not prime real estate for building businesses that would bring in money.  Those locations would be the East and West Falls Church Metro stations, which are both outside of walking distance.  This is quite different from a town center like Rosslyn that is based on spanning two closely located Metro stops (so much so that they describe themselves as the "Rosslyn-Ballston Metro corridor".  So, if it isn't about economic stimulus, what is it about?  It's about making people want to live in Falls Church.  Families want to live in cities where they can walk to do their shopping, but they also want to live in the suburbs where their kids have a big enough lawn that they can let the dog run around outside without a leash.  Cities have always tried to provide this with public parks, and in more recent years with dog parks that have leash-free zones and adding similar amenities of suburbs. (Big example in Boston is gardens where city residents can plant vegetables.  The green space in front of my building is about the same size as my apartment, nothings going to grow there).

So, what I hope this shows is that both suburbs and cities are both trying to head toward this concept I call "town" that is a happy medium of the two.  When people fled the cities, they didn't realize how much they were going to miss some of the benefits.  However, they are too addicted to the suburbs to give up certain amenities.  The return to cities has not been driven by a dislike for suburbs, but by cities providing many of these amenities.  In addition to those I mentioned, a huge part of this has been cleaning up pollution in cities.  You no longer need to be in a suburb to have clean air.  Newly built suburbs are designing themselves to be towns, or what The Atlantic calls "Lifestyle Centers".  Meanwhile, established suburbs, like Falls Church, are trying to build themselves City Centers that will provide them with the same feeling.
]]> http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:18:00 -0600 Control Room Control Room
Due to to recently viewing Jehane Noujaim's TEDTalk, I decided to get her DVD from the Boston Public Library. Based primarily on happenings at Al Jazeera and CentCom, it adeptly explores the days leading up to the war in Iraq from the Arab and journalistic perspective.  I enjoyed the film not because it really provided me with any new information, but reminded me of the things I knew 3-4 years ago, but had forgotten.

Anyways, I'd recommend getting to your library and checking the DVD out.
]]> http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ Sat, 16 Feb 2008 09:48:00 -0600 Changing What We Teach
That sentence sounds quite awkward, so let's give an example.  You probably think there are 5 senses:
  1. Sight
  2. Sound
  3. Smell
  4. Taste
  5. Touch
But based on what is taught in most physiology courses, you would be wrong.  We have at least four more:
  1. Pain
  2. Position
  3. Temperature
  4. Balance
Generally, we don't teach our kids these senses, even though some of them are among the coolest in the human body.  Who would have ever guessed little hairs in our ears play such a significant role in us not falling down all the time?  And while the first five are fairly orthogonal to each other, except for smell and taste, when we add the next 4, a lot of the interactions between the senses and how we perceive the world begin to be built up.  Like, why does pain go away when we rub the area that hurts?  (of course, the traditional 5 sense do mix in some people, in what is referred to as synesthesia)

The Sixth Sense (Collector's Edition Series)But I'm getting away from my original point, which was how does us having more than five senses impact culture?  Well, obviously we can't talk about a "sixth sense" any more if we teach our kids that we have 9 senses.  Is there a way we can transition to talking about a "tenth sense"?  I doubt it.  This is an example from science because I'm familiar with that, but the same things are very true of many things about history.  Many of the stories about the early Americas and the beginning of Thanksgiving are just plain wrong.  Yet, we continue to teach fables before crushing them later on in life with the truth.  Or at least that's what I'm told, it's been a long time since I was in elementary school.

More things in science to talk about.  Do they still teach the five kingdoms of life?  Or are we doing the 3 domains everywhere now?  That doesn't seem like it would be too hard to correct, but I learned 5 kingdoms until high school, which was a full 9 years after the change was proposed by Carl Woese, and even then it was taught as a controversial change.  It was only controversial in that some very vocal people didn't like it, and as usual the vocal disagreeement had to be heard for a balanced presentation.  It didn't matter that the biology of cellular membranes and flagella fully backed up the 16srRNA data it was based on.  Then there's the fact that Pluto is no longer a planet.  When will that change in curricula (or has it already)?  And why did Pluto losing planet status make so much news, but noone was told about these 4 extra senses?  I think it has to do with the fact you can't point to something physical like the nose or eye or tongue or ear and say, "That is responsible for your sense of position."  Without something physical, it's much harder to explain.  It's also harder to explain how the "skin", which was previously only responsible for touch, is now simultaneously taking care of pain and part of temperature.  And why those aren't actually part of touch.  You "touch" something to know it's cold, right?  So isn't that touch? (no, nice try...)

Basically, I'm just curious whether the amount our culture depends on a scientific misconception affects it's propagation.  Will the loss of Pluto affect the Greek God and Mickey Mouse's dog?
]]> http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:37:00 -0600 Indexed Book! IndexedOne of my favorite "blogs" is Indexed.  Apparently, there is now a book.  Me want now.  You should get as excited as me.  And subscribed to the RSS feed for indexed.  You'll love it, trust me.
]]> http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:46:56 -0600 Yamino! Pathway).

The problem is, my browser of choice is Camino, which unlike Firefox, does not have search plugins.  And like all Mozilla products, it comes with Google by default.  So, I wanted my Yahoo! search.  So, after months, I got around to fixing my problem.

Yamino.pngSo, this is what it looks like.  Beautiful.  I should add Flickr and del.icio.us to it as well. (They're added now)  I added all the services I could find from search.yahoo.com, so if there's more you think should be added, let me know.  It's fairly easy to delete choices once the file is downloaded, so I'm aiming to add as many as possible with the idea that it's easier to customize via deletion than adding.

So, how do you install this?
  1. Download the .plist file from http://static.cowsandmilk.net/yamino/SearchURLList.plist
  2. If you want to remove some of the options, open the file with the Property List Editor (should open with this by default) and delete the ones you don't want.  You can also change the PreferredSearchEngine if you like.
  3. Move SearchURLList.plist to ~/Application Support/Camino
  4. Restart Camino
  5. You're done
So, I have Yahoo! Search in my life and you can too.
]]> http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ yahoo camino Sat, 08 Dec 2007 15:25:00 -0600 comparecommands DNA & Protein Sequence Analysis, I've been playing with Perl.  On this visit to the language, I started looking at the Benchmark module, which I think makes pretty output for benchmarking perl code.

I've got this way in perl to make output I like, how do I use it to answer questions I have about programs not written in perl?  Enter comparecommands , a simple script that compares shell commands using Benchmark.


#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Benchmark qw(:all);

#first argument is how many times the functions are run
my $count = shift @ARGV;

#$test will contain dynamically generated code for comparing the commands
#open up cmpthese
my $test = "cmpthese($count, { ";
#add the anonymous functions to run the command in the shell
$test .= "'$_' => sub { system '$_' }, " for @ARGV;
#close cmpthese
$test .= '});';

#run the dynamically generated code
eval $test;
The first argument is the number of times to run the 2 commands, and then the rest of the arguments are a list of commands to compare.  For example, comparecommands 1000 "php foo.php" "python bar.py" .  Hey, that's amazing, we get pretty output saying which was faster. The obvious question in my mind after writing this was whether I could have done this in PHP, say using PEAR's Benchmark module.  Well, yes, I could have, but it would not have been nearly as simple.  Perl's anonymous functions just make dynamically increasing the number of compared commands easy.

If you have two pieces of code you want to compare that are both in PHP, it probably is better to just throw together a benchmark using the PEAR module, but when you want to compare code in two different languages, I think this code is useful.  If someone wants to clue me in on more useful ways of doing benchmarking cross-language, hopefully you know where to find me.
]]> http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ perl Sat, 24 Nov 2007 00:35:00 -0600 Ron Paul is Right about the Department of Education I just put that out as a disclaimer that I think is actually irrelevant to what is going in this post, but I thought someone might criticize me if I didn't come out with that up front.

So, moving on to the important bits.

In Ron Paul's talk at Google, he says one of the first departments he would eliminate is the Department of Education.  One Googler asks if eliminating the Department of Education would hurt the education of poor children and not provide a fair chance to all children.  He also presents a scenario where a rich state/locale decides the private schools are adequate and eliminates the public schools.  The Googler makes several assumptions that I refuse to accept:
  1. Local governments in poor areas are unable to fund their schools and/or manage public schools
  2. The solution to all underperforming school districts is the same as it can be mandated from the national level
  3. Private schools are the mainstay of the wealthy and driven by accepting wealthy in order to have lots of money
While I disagree with much of libertarianism, I must agree with Ron Paul on the Department of Education as I have only observed bad consequences as it has become more powerful.  In fact, I would argue that even certain state level education laws in Virginia have hurt public schools at the local level, but less severely.  I also would like to argue against point three by examining a level of education where private schools are much more prominent, that of the universities and how they have performed in regards to the poor along with some ways that private institutions are driving forward the education of the poor at a young age.

Exhibit 1: Fairfax County Public Schools vs. the Department of Education
Most of my knowledge of this has come from the Washington Post's coverage, so my feelings may be influenced by theirs, but the fact that they set up a special page for this indicates how much this is a big deal.  Fairfax County has over 100 languages spoken exclusively in the homes of children (where exclusive means the parents speak no English).  For this reason, their website is in seven different languages in addition to English.  Due to this unique situation, one of Fairfax County's high schools, Jeb Stuart, was featured in the September 2001 issue of National Geographic.

Recently, Fairfax County has been fighting how No Child Left Behind measures literacy for non-native speakers of English.  Before No Child Left Behind, literacy progress for students was measured as improvement over the year before.  Under No Child Left Behind, literacy is measured as a definite point at different grade levels.  If a student moves to the US at age 14, never having heard English, and not even literate in his native language, no longer is it sufficient progress to get them to grade 1 level by the end of freshman year, grade 4 by sophomore year, grade 7 by junior year, grade 10 by senior year.  You would have failed this student under No Child Left Behind, but far exceeded any reasonable person's expectations for your educational system.

In April, this came to a head when Fairfax County bluffed saying that they would not perform the tests required under No Child Left Behind.  They gave in because of the $17 million bounty they would lose if they didn't do the new tests.  And noone pays attention to the results.  All the parents of children at Fairfax County schools know they are excellent and understand why their school is viewed as "failing" in the eyes of the Federal Government.  So, is No Child Left Behind at all useful for Fairfax County?  No.  Some people would argue that Fairfax County is the exception to the rule, but I'm sure there's plenty of other school districts where the Federal Government defining their goals impacts how the students are being educated in a negative way.  In Fairfax, they luckily are smart enough to know the federal government's goals are silly and are happy to define their educational goals as they see fits the local situation.  Now imagine a school district that is actually underserving its population.  If there was no federal involvement, they would examine their system and create priorities and self-examine to find the problems in their system.  But since there's a federal government, they may just be willing to accept the federal government's criteria for success and follow their recommendations rather than doing self-examination.  This runs counter to my own experience of solving problems.  The first step in solving a problem is clearly defining the problem from your local perspective and finding the root of that problem.  Often this first step is where the creativity happens and ideas for solutions emerge.  Without self-management and assessment, that first step never occurs and the creative solutions to problems never emerge.

Exhibit 2: Ivy Leagues vs. Public Education on costs
Your family makes $35,000/year and you just got into a state school and Yale, which is cheaper to attend?  Believe it or not, the private school, Yale, would probably be cheaper.  So would Harvard.  And many other private schools.  If your family income is under $45,000 a year, your expected parental contribution at Yale is $0.  So, what happened to private schools being for the rich?  I believe that assumption came from the fact that these schools tend to let in children of alumni and alumni tend to go on to be successful and rich.  And because rich people who have smart children give them money so they can fund the children who aren't as rich, but are also smart, to come and get an education as well.  But these schools are need-blind, so that means your financial situation is not considered in admission.  Not that going to a school in a rich neighborhood with a good reputation wouldn't be considered as a plus over attending one that isn't so stellar, this discrimination correlated to need likely still occurs.  But the key is, a private education isn't reserved for the rich and wealthy and need has been almost completely negated from attending a great university.  Of course, you still have to get the education before college that can get you in, which is where this next exhibit comes into play.

Exhibit 3: Bring Me a Book
When I was working at Yahoo, for Yahoo! for Good day, I volunteered at the Bring Me A Book Foundation.  It was quite an interesting experience because they have a warehouse in Mountain View, which is not cheap.  In fact, nothing about their operation was cheap.  But that isn't surprising because their goal was to bring "High Quality Children's Books" to children in need of reading programs.  High quality in both how the book was written and illustrated, but also in the set of books sent into a situation and in the physical quality and durability of the book.  These books aren't meant to affect one or two kids, but whole communities for years to come.

So, what impact can this have?  A huge factor in success in life is the ability to read when entering kindergarten.  Most low-income areas don't have age-appropriate books for children.  The goal of Bring Me a Book is to use the wealth of Silicon Valley to place age and culture-appropriate books into low-income areas along with encouraging reading aloud.  They even have programs for teaching people how to read aloud and encouraging non-native english speakers to use the opportunity to improve their English skills along with reading aloud to their children (or audio tapes are included with the books to help in this learning).  The ability to read isn't the only thing impacted by reading aloud, creativity is cultivated in the young mind by stimulating stories, so even making up stories to go along with picture books is encouraged among these parents.

I'm not going to pretend like Bring Me A Book is the definitive solution to education problems in poor areas, but its proof that the goal of the wealthy isn't to hold down poor students, instead they believe in improving education for all children and Bring Me A Book is a great example of this.
]]> http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ Mon, 22 Oct 2007 22:20:00 -0600 Sexism in AP Article? BostonNOW off the floor as I tend to do.  Since I like scandal, I immediately turned to the lead article on teachers and sexual harassment.  It provided the scandal factor I needed for the day, I was quite satisfied.

But there was something that bothered me tremendously.  In an inset to the article (present at end of article online), it says, "Nine out of 10 of those abusive educators were male."  Now, this is nice to know, but the article has three examples of sexual harassment by teachers and they were all female.  What was the deal?  Well, the byline says Associated Press, so it's time go visit their copy.  The AP's story doesn't have the nine out of 10 fact, so it really makes it seem like a bunch of female teachers are taking advantage of our students...
]]> http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ Mon, 22 Oct 2007 21:24:44 -0600 Random Perl of the Day Edit (12-8-07): I realized like the day after I did this that there is a killall command that does the same thing but better.  This was still a good learning excercise.

So, there may be a better way to do this, but I often lack the UNIX foo I should posess, so....

There are times when I need to kill synergy on my mac laptop.  Namely, I'm not home and remote desktop/vnc into one of the computers at home.  When I do this and run off the edge of the screen, it sometimes run onto the mac laptop and synergy gets really confused.

So, the traditional way of doing this would be:
  1. run ps -U username | grep synergyc
  2. see what the processid is and kill processid
So, 2 step process would normally be semi-acceptable.  But this can become a lot of steps if there's more than one synergy client process sitting around.  Or really, what if I want to kill some other process, like say Microsoft's latest version of Remote Desktop Connection which currently has 18 copies running, which makes this a 19 step cleanup job.

So, I've been learning Perl because I'm taking DNA and Protein Sequence Analysis which is a field where Perl dominates.  So, let's just write a perl script that takes a list of programs and kills them all for us...

#! /usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my @processids;

foreach (@ARGV) {
        foreach (`ps -U cowsandmilk | grep "$_"`) {
                # You must ignore processes spawned by this script
                # They're done by the time we get to kill and then kill
                # gives errors...
                if (! (/grep/) ) {
                        #processid is first element of list produced by split
                        my ($processid) = split;
                        push @processids, $processid;
                }
        }
}

exec "kill @processids";


So, now I just type killprocess "Remote Desktop" and all those extra processes disappear.  One step instead of 19.  Sounds great to me.
]]> http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ Mon, 22 Oct 2007 21:10:00 -0600 Reasons to Have a Vertical Screen There are a number of advantages:
Vertical Monitor
  1. Much easier to read papers from journals full screen
  2. Much easier to navigate my iTunes library
  3. Don't know if this has had any impact because I haven't written much code lately, but it is reported that bugginess of code spikes when a section of code exceeds the size of your screen.  Obviously, my screen can now hold much more code.
  4. I'm much more stringent about code lengths in code
  5. Much easier to read/scan long email messages and not miss anything.
  6. My laptop fits on my desk much easier now
What are the bad things?
  1. Can't watch movies very easily in this orientation
So, 6 pluses, 1 minus.  I think its a winner
]]> http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ computer Sat, 29 Sep 2007 09:25:00 -0600 On Being Open With Code
Many people contrasted it to open source where all your code is open, but that's an old discussion.

So a new discussion, contrast it to Leah Culver, who posts bits of Pownce's code online and discusses changes and asks for advice. I think that's hot.  I don't know why I wrote this post, other than to say that I like Leah Culver's attitude about her code.

Other than that, in 8 days, I stop pretending I'm a web programmer and start being a PhD student in Biomedical Engineering.
]]> http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ Tue, 21 Aug 2007 19:51:07 -0600 What is Bad About MIT Ram Sasisekharan asked me what I thought was bad about MIT from spending a summer there.  I stammered out some stupid answer because I really wasn't there to talk about my own thoughts and was taken aback for a second.  I knew there was a better answer than what I gave though because I was spending a lot of my weekend trying to figure out a reason why I would go to MIT instead of Boston University.  I had visited BU the weekend before and they had blown me away in both their faculty and facilities and they seemed to have a great atmosphere.  The thing is, I had an amazing time working at MIT and I think the question was a bit unfair because no organization of that size has something inherently "bad" about it, especially when different labs are given lots of independence and so much of your experience there is isolated to just your lab and your local interactions.

It took me a few weeks to actually step back and see what my answer should have been.

On the first day of my summer at MIT, the students in my program sat down in a room and a bunch of grad students, postdocs, and professors came through and presented us with possible summer projects.  We then chose our top 3 and they went through and matched us up with our choices.  This was actually one of my favorite things about MIT and if I ever run an account that is funding summer students, I probably will do this if its possible.

So, what does this have to do with something at MIT being bad?  The problem is that this was necessary.  In the same department (Biological Engineering), there was another group of summer researchers who instead were assigned to labs.  When some of them showed up in their labs, their supervisors had completely forgotten they had a summer student and some of them ended up having awful experiences.  At most schools, free undergrads are a precious commodity.  At MIT they aren't and it led to a disregard for these students who were all very smart and among the best at their schools.

So, that first day just wasn't about giving me choice, it was erected as a barrier to obtaining a student that the supervisor must be willing to give a presentation and talk to students in order to get one.  And that is bad.  It made the difference between me having one of the most interesting summers of my life and students feeling like they might as well have gotten an internship where they were fetching coffee all day.
]]> http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ MIT research Sat, 04 Aug 2007 15:27:44 -0600 Only Admit Those Who Can Be a Success... "He was sometimes accused of caving in to anti-Semitism for refusing to admit many Jewish students (his rationale being that nobody would hire them when they completed their degrees),..."
-passage on Solomon Lefschetz in A Beautiful Mind
Wow, I'm not completely sure how to respond to this.  Solomon Lefschetz wasn't an anti-Semite by any means, in fact he was Jewish (which doesn't prevent anti-Semitism, but its a strong determent).  In investing in people, giving them your time, you want them to be successful when they leave.  If the Princeton mathematics  department produced brilliant students, but the outside world refused to recognize the student's talents because they were Jewish, what good would that bring the department?

Looking back, its hard to imagine departments not hiring a professor because they were Jewish, but anti-semitism was widespread.  It quite clearly hurt institutions though as Birkhoff's anti-semitism at Harvard is widely credited with the rise of Princeton in Mathematics and is the reason why Einstein ended up at the Institute for Advanced Studies.

So, what should we learn from this?  There are smart people out there.  If you choose to admit or hire the smartest people you can find, you'll be in good shape.  They will probably be a diverse group, but for one problem.

The problem is "oppression" (I use quotes because I think that word is too strong, but the thesaurus isn't helping me right now).  If I would get into Princeton, but didn't because I'm Jewish, following getting my PhD, I am not going to be in as good a shape as having gone to Princeton and had lunch time discussions every day with the future shining lights of the mathematics community.  Now I am behind because of discrimination.  Now, if I face a nondiscriminatory competition for a professorship, I am behind those who would have been my equals.  And here is where we hit affirmative action and I get myself stuck in a loop.  Why?  Because I have two candidates outside who started out on equal footing and one is now ahead of the other and for no reason other than a third party's decision.  Or I have two candidates where one started out ahead, but now they are equal because of a third party's actions.  Or there might not be a third party, it might just be situational.  Person A went to an elementary school where the teacher never prepared a lesson plan and couldn't answer student's questions.  Person B went to an elementary where her kindergarten teacher had  Ph.D in elementary school education.  Before you claim that's ridiculous, both those situations are present at schools within 15 minutes of my house in VA.

There is a need for some form of action to correct this.  I'm not sure moving admissions very far away from being unbiased to your background is the correct action though.  So, instead I'll list things that I view as promising towards closing the gap and then some things that I find interesting.

Promising:
  1. Teach for America and similar programs.  For those not familiar, recent graduates of top colleges and universities go into classrooms and teach in underprivileged communities who tend to be behind in school.  These aren't just any old graduates, they are typically among the best in terms of leadership and dedication towards tasks.  I tend to see a large portion of the problem in certain schools as being that the teachers have failed.  When you put in dedicated teachers, amazing things happen.  And just to force my point, I'm sure many people know about the stereotypical professor with horrible classes because he just cares about his research and not teaching.  Noone learns anything in his class while people learn in the class of the professor who cares and excites the class.  I believe TFA makes great strides in these classrooms because it brings in people who care.  One TFA teacher I'm good friends with had a student tell her that she was the first teacher who had ever cared about them.  And this was in 10th grade.  I've also heard good things from teachers where the students they have were in a TFA class the year before.  Its very encouraging.
  2. Programs to teach/encourage parents to "read" to their children.  This may seem like a weird one and it will be hard to explain.  I've recently had contact with some charities that are involved in getting books into the hands of children.  One of the most important indicators of success in school is whether a child was read to at an early age.  But in my first sentence, I put read in quotes.  Why?  One of the big problems in some communities is the parents don't know how to read or can't read English.  There are a few approaches, the most traditional of which is adult education to teach them how to read simultaneously as the parent is reading to the child, so the reading is enforcing the parent and the child's ability to read.  For those who can only read another language, reading to your child in Spanish is just as beneficial as reading in English.  But if language isn't what matters, what is coming out of reading?  A good children's book is designed to stimulate the imagination and has great illustrations.  The real point is creativity and the ability to ask questions and formulate ideas about possible answers (aka hypothesize).  So, a parent can make up their own story to go along with the pictures and be just as successful asking questions before turning the page and creating an exciting story.  I wish I could point you to papers saying that this is true, but I'm not speaking from any academic expertise on my part, just what those people who have tried it have told me.

Interesting:
  1. Single sex classrooms.  I went to a high school that was part of a K-12 school where middle school math and science were single sex with the idea that girls would be more likely to end up in math and science if they weren't being crowded out by the boys.  Then the other subjects were taught co-ed so students actually had interaction with the opposite sex as they entered the horny portion of their lives.   I never experienced it, so I have no personal opinions and people in my school seemed to have mixed feelings looking back.  I can see what to solve the socioeconomic gap (as both my "promising"s try to do and my other "interesting"), but I have no clue when it comes to the gender gap.  I think computers might end up being the solution as they provide a fairly gender neutral interface at first glance.  Unfortunately, the gender ratios in computer science tend to prove me wrong.  Maybe chemical engineering is the answer, that has a great ratio of male:female.  Or I guess, biomedical engineering is the highest percentage female, followed by chemical engineering (Quick reference: Whitaker News 2001, and I know at Wash U the percentage female has increased much more in both those disciplines over the last 6 years, and I think both departments graduated more females than males in undergrad this year.
  2. Donorschoose.org is a website for funding innovative projects proposed by teachers whose school districts can't afford these not very expensive high impact ideas.  I put it under interesting because it requires teachers who are motivated.  I've heard about this site mostly from TFA people (despite the fact that I work at the company who made the site, it wasn't their idea and they don't run it though).  There are motivated teachers out there who aren't TFA who I think it will be an amazing boost to.  When I want to do something, but can't get backing to make it happen, its frustrating.  Its happened to me a couple times and I get depressed and just don't do anything despite initially having a large amount of drive to go forward.  I think this happens to a lot of teachers.  They get driven down by lack of support.  Donorschoose gives the opportunity for this support and I think it will eliminate some burnout among teachers in lower income schools.
This is in no way a complete survey of what I could try to get into on this subject, but its a nice start.  If I ever revisit this, maybe we can get into person X who lives in a country where there's no clean water and how this hinders education.  And maybe I'll try to hit the gender gap and/or the racial gap, both of which I view as a function of lack of role models in these areas (if one ignores the socioeconomic component of the racial gap) and whether having minority professors to act as role models to the next generation can be a justification for affirmative action.
]]> http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ http://mt.cowsandmilk.net/udderings/ A Beautiful Mind academia affirmative action discrimination Donorschoose single sex classrooms Teach for America Wed, 01 Aug 2007 23:38:45 -0600