Running in Kenya

This past December (2012) I had the chance to travel back to Kenya and while I was there I ran. I was in Nairobi for most of the time, in Langata/Karen.

Nairobi is at 5,889 ft above sea level, compared to Toronto which is 246 ft near the Lake Ontario shore to about 686 ft near York University. And because it's near the equator, at such high altitude, the temperatures are almost perfect. It can get cold during June/July where the temperatures can drop to 10 C, but the hottest season is December to March and the temperatures only get to the mid twenties.

When I got there, December 18, it was raining heavily every night. Since there are no sidewalks in Karen, the shoulder of the road (where I ran) was muddy and completely impassable. So for the first two weeks, I didn't run much. The first time I went out, I finally felt the impact of altitude running. In Toronto, I was running 12 to 14 k every morning, easily. Pushed up to 17 and 20 k weekends. The first time I stepped out of the gate of my home, my legs felt heavy and after a minute, I was already breathing heavily.

Driveway from the house to the gate

But as you can see from the picture above, the land was very green, the air crisp and clean (at least in the morning).

Outside the gate, it was running on dirt. The ground is packed murram soil with stones littered everywhere. I had to watch my step very carefully lest I land badly and twist an ankle.

Once off the murram road, I was able to run on asphalt and then a sidewalk heading towards the busy Langata road.

And then a left onto Langata road...

As you can see running on Langata road is risky business. In Kenya, cars keep on the left side of the road, so running on the left shoulder means that the cars are coming up behind you. Fortunately, there's so much traffic and there are a number of speed bumps that the cars don't race. The only problem might be the matatus which pull over on the shoulder to pick up, and let off, passengers.

Occasionally, I had to switch to the right side of the road to avoid the Masai grazing their cows. This is Karen road, heading towards Bogani.

Past the Karen Blixen Coffee Gardens.

Past the Karen Club.

Karen road is a quiet road, though the shoulder is very narrow and on this particular stretch, the cars really speed.

I fell once, not on this particular visit, on this stretch of Bogani. I'd forgotten about the rocks!

Back onto sidewalks! This is about the 9 k mark... about 2 k left. It's about here that I walked so many times. Worn out, wheezing. It was definitely the altitude though my legs felt very heavy.

So that's the route... a 11 k loop around Karen.

That run taught me a lot about distance running. As difficult as it was, and as confused as I was because I found it difficult to keep a steady pace, I found that there's no shame in stopping and walking for a bit. By my last week, I was comfortably running that 11 (11.26) k route. Slowly, and not pushing too hard.

The result is that my Toronto runs have become pure joy. In fact, I've stepped up my morning run from 12 k to 14.5 k. And, it's an easy 14.5 k. I don't work too hard. I just keep a very slow, but steady pace. Real tortoise style.

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This Cloud Ain't New!

I'm always amazed how IT can repeatedly coin terms to make old things seem new. And it's difficult to explain it to the non-technical person that the cloud is simply just another confusing word that even IT people don't agree on.

Well, here's my two cents on the whole thing.

A long, long time ago, there was the mainframe. And IT looked upon the mainframe and said we can manage all services in a central location, distribute dumb terminals to the users, ease end-user support, bill according to usage and hence buy powerful CPU's for the mainframe. And it was good.

Then came the PC which was cheap and IT declared, the PC has lots of processing power for the average user and can off-load some of the workload from the mainframe so let us deploy the PC with client software, distributed via CD's and DVD's and train the end-user to be self sufficient and we will ease the stress on the mainframe.

And so it was done. Led by Microsoft and IBM and HP and Dell that the PC flourished and there was a proliferation of software in the land and the users did so consume of the software and it became bloated and full of bugs and the end-user turned to IT and wailed and there was much gnashing of teeth and sadness in user-land.

And IT got together in pub-land and did consume much mead, reminiscing of the good old days of mainframe when they did control the storage, and the software, and the processing power. On the sixth, or sixteenth, pitcher did one of them declare; why not make use of the Internet? It is much loved by the end-user who spends most of his time on-line using the PC but we must disguise it, rename it, call it something else. And when the pub did close, and the lights were turned on for IT to leave did one network administrator look upon the light bulb and declare, I have seen the light. We can use the symbol for the Internet in describing this new, old technology.

And thus the Cloud was born. And IT was much happier and rejoiced in their finding and they told the marketing team to sell the cloud as the new technology to ease the woes of the end-user.

But there was a faction in IT that did not buy this story and they declared to tell the end-user that they were being sold lemons, not oranges. But this rogue faction was defeated for after another evening in pub-land, IT declared that there could be many versions of the Cloud. Business could have the public Cloud accessible via the Internet, or they could have the private Cloud sitting in their server rooms. And the rogue IT faction was confused and the public Cloud marketing group fell upon them and consumed them and they became ill and soon everyone was speaking in tongues.

And VMware and Microsoft and Citrix and HP and IBM and all the other large system vendors looked upon the land and saw the confusion and they were glad.

The Millennium Bug

This isn't really about the Millennium Bug, or the Y2K problem, per se, but about computer programming and software development. I became interested in computer programming in university. Back then, it was just a way to solve small problems. Nothing big. Just a program here and there to solve a personal problem. I used other software to write my software. C compilers to create my programs. Word processors, spreadsheets and so on. And even when I started writing programs for other people, they were always simple tools. The actual logic in the software took a short time to write. Most of the effort was spent writing user interface code, exception handling, help and additional code to protect the program from misuse and to protect the user from themselves.

That was the world of top-down, procedural programming. A program had an entry point and followed a pre-determined path. Some of the issues, or side effects, that were exploitable were few. Software was not that complex. It occurred to me that there were limitations from the machine. Having delved into assembly language, I knew that specific things were fixed. The processor had a specific number of registers and that you could only perform a limited set of operations. That data moved along a bus that had a specific width, 8-bit when I started, and seemingly simple operations, like addition, took a number of operations. As long as requirements were not complicated, writing software was a pleasure and it wasn't too hard.

But still, it never occurred to me, not until I entered the world of business application programming, that software development was very short sighted in its view of the future. Even though we knew that software spent most of its life in maintenance, so we were told, it didn't look as though that's how it was built. But that, in fact, is the case. When businesses need to solve particular problems, they build a tool for that problem. If later, the problem changes, they try to patch the software instead of building a new one. And this patching too is a problem. It's incredible how much software that we use today was written many years ago with limited scope. There was no way we could have anticipated what the world would look like ten years into the future to plan for it, less alone twenty.

So what was wrong with this Millennium Bug? Well, someone decided that dates needed to be stored in computer systems, and back then, programmers were using punch cards to write programs. To save space on the card, and ultimately in the computer, they decided that two digits were enough. This shouldn't have been a problem until date calculations were involved. Storing dates as two-digits would have been fine, if it was storage alone. However, once date calculations were involved, the problem of the myopic two digit storage reared its head.

But the seriousness of the problem was seriously exaggerated.

So why are business applications notoriously badly written? Is it a lack of specifications? Is it a lack of expertise? Is it a lack of planning and thinking about more than the immediate problem? There's a bit of each of these elements, but not really. I believe we're still writing software applications the same way we were writing them twenty years ago. But the problem has been exacerbated by the ease at which its possible to write computer software. The tools make it so easy to write software that anyone can do it. Software development experience is no longer required to build software and as such, most software is built without software development expertise. The growth of fourth-generation programming languages, English-like syntax for querying databases, user-interface pre-built objects and development frameworks has moved software development from the hands of computer nerds directly into the arena of the hobbyists and into the savvy business person. It's no longer necessary to hire a professional to build that database package. A few dollars invested in Microsoft Access and you have a platform to build software.

It is said that 90% of the world's buildings are built without Architects. Clearly the large structures require Architects, Engineers and other professionals. However, the remaining 90% that we live in are built without Architects. And that's fine. Building knowledge has become a general commodity. The tools and the materials have become standard. There's a way to build a wall, to put in a kitchen, to open up a patio. Later on, if you want to renovate your basement, add a bathroom, a bar and extend the lighting, it's easy to see what's been done and continue on. Software development is starting to look like this. The development tools are there for anyone to pick up and start coding. There are materials, or objects, that you can purchase so that you don't have to spend a lot of time actually coming up with algorithms. The algorithm is the basic building block of the application. Everything else isn't really necessary.

Here's a technology example. It used to take a long time to build a website. A lot of time and expertise. Specialised knowledge of Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) was required to build even the simplest page. It wasn't as easy as starting your word processing package and typing away. Today's content managers do not need to know any HTML at all. There are software packages which do all the layout work for you. But that's not all. The technology to set up websites is now available at the click of a button. Should you choose not to install anything, you can purchase web presence for less than five dollars a month! The problem of maintaining a website isn't a technical problem any longer. It's a content maintenance issue. Keeping the content fresh for your visitors.

The problems that are plaguing software development have crept into the world of website development. It's like the Millennium Bug of simply putting together a solution without stressing too much about the maintenance issue. But I understand that in this world of limited budgets trying to make development flexible could be seen as a waste of resources. But there is a balance. With the frameworks that are available, there's no reason not to invest in learning how to use them properly and developing software that fits within the limitations of the framework. Whether it's a commercial framework or an open source one. Each framework comes with its own limitations. No solution does everything for everyone and even though you can achieve most of your goals with 80% of the frameworks out there you shouldn't think that you can do everything the same way with all of them.

As long as the framework is well designed, well thought out and well supported. And as long as business developers learn how to use the particular framework, without taking short-cuts. And as long as modular development is kept truly modular. Then perhaps a similar Millennium Bug won't happen again. And I'm not talking about a date problem. That's been covered. But all this nonsense about narrowly defining interfaces and specifications. Hard-coding things so rigidly and making data requirements so fixed that a maintenance fix ripples through the entire system. Those things won't happen.

Is Microsoft Office that expensive?

I just read in The Register that Australia is cutting it's costs for Microsoft Office. What wasn't so clear in that article was whether or not this cost saving was just a newly negotiated deal with Microsoft, or that they were not going to purchase as many licenses as they had in the past.

The article was short and scarce on detail, but it got me thinking. Microsoft has these large deals with government. They make a ton of money from these enterprise licenses. You can imagine 300,000 seats at even $100 per seat that's a cool $30 million. And I'm sure the deal isn't that sweet. Why, everyone else is buying Office professional for at least $400 (if not more).

John Sheridan is Australia's CTO (I didn't know they had one) and the article says that he doesn't see Open Source as a way of cutting the spending on software costs. I agree with him on that point. Upgrading 300,000 seats of Open Office would not be pretty. Upgrading 300,000 seats of Ubuntu wouldn't be good either. But at a national level, there is some space for Open Source. Open Source does afford some freedom that isn't in the Microsoft commercial world.

Open Source has been traditionally thought to be synonymous with anti-Microsoft. That isn't true any more. A lot of Open Source software is available on Windows as it is on the Linux and Mac platforms. In fact, the quality of the Windows version sometimes is better than their Linux and Mac versions. What has plagued Microsoft has been this insistence on backward compatibility. I'm still able to run a lot of my old 32-bit applications. Not just the recently old (say circa 2008), but software that was around in early 2000 (and even before). Some of those old utilities still seem to work fine.

I'm often disappointed with Microsoft Windows, and Windows 8 is quite disappointing. Other than a better tablet experience, there's no advantage to upgrading to Windows 8. None whatsoever. Office 12 seems to be nicer, but most people working with Office need a keyboard and won't be swiping their text. I found a very nice utility called Start8 which brings back the old Windows 7 desktop, including all the menus. I couldn't do without it. Why upgrade? In my opinion, there's no need to. I can only imagine trying to upgrade a few hundred people from Windows 7 to Windows 8, let alone a few hundred thousand.

Everyone has the ability to teach

We don't know it all. There's always time to learn something new. Your elders, parents, teachers don't always know it all. You can always teach them. Children especially are excellent teachers. They remind us of a carefree innocence that we've forgotten. The joy of life. Pure kindness without asking for anything in return.

My son teaches me everyday, not by saying much, but by being very quiet. Quite frankly, I don't know where he got his character from. He seems like a world unto itself yet participating, on the side. He is the coolest kid I know. Very comfortable and sure. I was never that way at that age. Even though I was a bit more independent, moving out to college on my own, I still don't think I portrayed the self assurance and confidence that he has. This is something that can be transferred into a very usable life skill. I wonder sometimes if he realises this. The confident assurance that he has. And he is blessed too. Healthy and strong, things I perhaps took for granted at his age, which I don't now. I'm very much aware of the passage of time, the rigidity of the knees, the diminishing vision and the difficulty of getting up from a chair. It's a battle nobody wins, eventually gravity will have its way and the laws of physics will hold.

And it's from him, my son, that I understand that you don't have to wait for age to make you into a sage. You can declare yourself a sage, right now, and begin to live a driven by you. I've met older people, in their fifties, sixties, still waiting for the wisdom that comes with age. It's a Kenyan thing to respect your elders. The west has since lost it, but in Kenya, you still respect someone who's older than you are. This automatic respect comes from a place where you believe that this older person has something to teach. They have something of value which they can transfer to you simply based on the fact that they've been alive longer than you. They've seen things. Walked the planet and found out things and if you are patient, and respectful, then this information, this knowledge that can only come with time can be transferred to you. So that you don't make the same mistakes. So that history does not repeat itself. But it's not entirely true. Some people become sages before their tenth birthday and some never attain it even past their seventieth. It was George Carlin who once said that respect should not be automatic, it should be earned. This is when he was talking about automatically respecting your parents. Yes, in some extreme cases, some parents, who are abusive, do not deserve automatic respect. But that's extreme. On the whole, respect to elders, to parents, to children to the entire humanity should be automatic. Innocent until proven guilty. Respect first, and then when you find out that the person does not deserve it, withdraw it later.

I live in the world of public transit. I remember a time when the only time I interacted with strangers was in the supermarket. Or the movie theatre. Perhaps also in the restaurant. But my car was my mode of transportation.

Now I ride the Toronto Transit buses and trains. I interact with people, not directly, but by being in the same space. Sharing space. I'm amazed when I look at people and try to imagine what's going on. Do they have the same fears, ambitions and other issues like I do? What are they facing right now? When they look at me, what do they see? Like me do they want me to stay away, not approach them? I'm in transit and I don't want to be bothered. I don't want you to talk to me since I'm busy in my own space.

I realise that we're all trying to make it.

We're all struggling to find a solution. To make sense of the world around us. To make something of this existence. We're all guessing and in this guessing we come up with solutions which seem to explain the world around us. And we package this into a philosophy of life and we then sell it. Sometimes not consciously, but we subconsciously sell it to our family, our husbands and wives, our children, the people we interact with. If you want to be successful, this is how you should think and look at things. If you don't look at things this way, then you won't be able to make sense of life and you will be living a wasted life. We sell it as the way to be, if you want to be successful.

And that's the question that's interested me most. This issue of making it. Of being a success, because, honestly, there are some people who don't care about the type of success that seems important to others. Why would you become a monk? Why waste your life in prayer and meditation? For what? What do you get out of it? Is the actual practise a soothing and calming way to live? Because, it really can't be a means to an end. It can't, simply can't. Which happens to be my main problem with organised religion. Suffer here, on this planet, for rewards to come later. Yes, it's that simple. Perhaps one day I'll blog about it, but today isn't that day.

Some people are influential. They seem to be confident in what they're doing and drive change. They say it is so, and are rarely challenged that it may not be so. They don't have to be old and wise, they can be in their early teens. They have a focus on what they want and they think that what they want is probably the same thing that others want. In some cases, it matters not what others want as long as they get what they want. Forging onwards, relentlessly. On the flip side, there are those who watch too much. Care too much about public opinion, about the opinion of their parents, their spouses, their children, their bosses and so they move a lot slower. They add, into every decision, elements of what they think others might think. I remember a saying, it goes something like, it's not what others think about us that makes us inactive, its what we think others think of us.

How true.

I started this post by saying that everyone has the ability to teach. It's been a rambling back and forth, trying to explain a mixture, confusedly knotted, unordered mess of thoughts really pointing to the notion that there's a lesson everywhere you look. The world doesn't revolve around you, or me, and it certainly doesn't revolve around your boss, your peers, your spouse, parents or children. It just is. And you pick and choose and learn. It doesn't matter that that child has only been on the planet for ten years, and you've been around for forty. There's a ten year experience that might be worth a nugget for you, if you just open up and look.

Maybe one day I'll unravel what I've mangled in this post, but for now it seems OK.

Conduct unbecomming

I'm on both sides of the fence on this one. Did you hear about the CRA (that's Canada Revenue Agency for those of you who aren't being fleeced by the Canadian tax authorities) employee who was terminated for creating a game?

In short the story goes like this. David S. Gallant worked at the CRA's call centre developed a game called I get this call everyday supposedly a parody on his day job. Though the CRA isn't mentioned in the game, many of the reports make that connection (after all, nobody should be asking for your Social Insurance Number other than the tax agencies. I haven't played the game but its an interaction between a call centre agent (you) and a fictitious caller. Your role is to obtain some information from this caller who seems rather dense. You win if you can get the caller to agree to call you back.

The reason I said that I'm on the fence of this one is, in this particular case, I really can't see the reason for the dismissal. But say, I owned a car showroom and I had a number of car salespeople working for me and, suppose, one of the salesmen wrote a game making fun of the interaction between car buyers (my customers) and my business. Car salesmen are easy to make fun of but I may take some offence and approach the salesperson to see if they're really that unhappy with their job. Of course, this is their opinion and they have a right to it. It's what they do outside the employment which I pay them for. But on the other hand, people will associate that person with my particular showroom and they may add a connection to infer that the game simulates the interaction that may happen at my establishment. And so, I may terminate them.

But the CRA is a government agency. We all make fun of them. They run an established monopoly. There's absolutely no way that that particular game would make them any more unpopular. They're not in the business to win customer loyalty. Nobody has any option but to deal with them. And, in addition to that, we're not idiots. We'll see the parody in the game and move on. Perhaps it's true that the agency's customer service shop runs like that, and perhaps not. I've interacted with them and found them extremely helpful and polite. In the game they're shown to have the patience of Job, and I would agree with that too. Do they have some customers who are somewhat slow? I'm sure they do as they also have customers who are very sharp. And we wouldn't expect every customer service agent in a call centre to love every call. Nobody (perhaps a few do) loves every single minute of their job. There are highs and lows and perhaps there's nothing wrong making a parody of the lows. That's how comedians work, by seeing the odd situations and expanding on them.

I wish David well. Just like Ahmed Al-Khabaz who was expelled from Dawson College after finding a security flaw in one of the applications. He has received offers to continue his schooling and better still, find a job after graduating. Hopefully this opens a lot of doors (don't know which ones) for David.

See:
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/01/30/revenue_canada_worker_fired_for_his_online_customer_service_game.html

Plagiarism

A couple of things, worthy of discussion have happened over the past couple of months. The first is an extreme case of accused plagiarism in the place you'd expect it, but not to this extent. Quite recently Chris Spence, the director of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), was accused of plagiarism. This is simply wrong on too many fronts, but what makes this wrong is the fact that this person is a champion of education. A champion of education. If this was a writer, say like Alex Haley, we could shrug our collective shoulders and move on. But this guy is looked up to by a small, but impressionable, population. If he was a president, we wouldn't even think twice about it. And oh, by the way, Alex Haley did admit that he copied [Alex Haley's Plagiarism], or used as a source text from Harold Courlander's book, The African.

Martin Luther King also plagiarised.  In his case it was his doctorate from Boston University [Martin Luther King Jnr's Plagiarism]. This took a committee of scholars to research this. They had nothing better to do. In any case, issues of plagiarism at a university are fraught with issues given that most doctorate dissertations include a bibliography that's even larger than the thesis itself. If there wasn't any copying at the university then there'd be no doctorate degrees to give out.

But I'm digressing, my issue is with Mr. Spence of the TDSB. I can forgive a couple of digressions, but after I read the proof of the extent to which he plagiarised, then it blew me away. In fact, I was almost coming to the conclusion that perhaps there's nothing original that this man has said. It's a lot of copying. Check out this article from the Toronto Star and you'll see what I mean. There's no doubt that this was copied. But he doesn't stop there. He goes too far. For anyone who watches TED TV, you may be familiar with Sir. Ken Robinson and may have even seen this YouTube/TED speech titled, Schools Kill Creativity. It's a brilliantly composed plea to open up and diversify teaching. In any case, there's a very funny story that Sir. Ken Robinson tells during the speech. It's about a little girl sitting at the back of the class. The six year-old girl was in a drawing lesson, at the back, drawing and the teacher said that this little girl hardly paid attention but in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated and went over to her and asked her what she was drawing. The girl replied "I'm drawing a picture of God." And the teacher said, "but nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl replied, "they will in a minute!" When Sir. Ken Robinson tells the story, he starts by admitting that he's retelling a story. He says, "I heard a great story recently, I love telling it..."and then goes on to relate the story. He doesn't tell us who told him the story, or where he heard it, but it's obvious that he isn't taking claim for the story. Well, guess what. Apparently (since I wasn't there) Chris Spence has also told the story claiming that it's something that he witnessed, and did. That he was the one actually in the classroom and approached the student.

This is really sad because the legacy that he wanted to leave, the legacy that he could have left, a legacy that was so within his reach, is not the legacy that he will leave. Maybe many won't take it as seriously as I am and only his greatness will be remembered, those he touched will simply ignore the egregious acts as I have forgiven Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr., but the extensive cheating in many of our heroes, those we look up to (and don't get me started with sports heroes) has eroded my confidence, or trust, in anything that I hear from anyone in any position.

Why?

This is easy to understand. We all want to be seen as heroes, as intelligent, to the public and its easier to take something from someone that's smart than come up with something original. There's a fear of being wrong. Sir. Ken Robinson (who I quote often) says the following, "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original." So this need to look great in front of others is completely opposite to looking bad which is what you'd look like if you were wrong. So, to save yourself from being wrong, try very, very hard to look right.

This isn't like standing on the shoulders of giants. According to Wikipedia, a source that should be investigated before being totally relied on, that phrase is first attributed to Bernard of Chartres. The meaning is clear. That you can use the works of great people to achieve even greater things. Sir Isaac Newton apparently also used a similar phrase in a letter to Robert Hooke in 1676, he said, If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants. So looking at the work of other people and using it to become better isn't bad. It isn't plagiarism. The world is bigger and full of people with ideas. In 2012 the planet passed the 7 billion population mark. Everyone's creating and producing. The entire notion of the first to do something is questionable. Like I used to question if Livingstone discovered the source of the Nile. I suppose at some point it's possible to have absorbed so much information from childhood that separating what is an original idea from what is simply a translation from another source can be difficult. On snippets or fragments of ideas. But not entire PhD dissertations, or entire publications. Word for word.

Consequences

Major egregious acts of plagiarism like Chris Spence's should have major repercussions. I'm not going to judge him here, that's not my job. I'm done with him, he's been exposed and the various interested parties who own the rights to the original material from which he copied may, or may not, go after him. Even when that happens, the issue of punishment, repayment, or whatever, may be a very difficult one. In Alex Haley's case, he settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. Did the public realise that the book had drawn heavily from a source? Did they realise how much? I doubt it perhaps since I didn't hear about the plagiarism till this particular case regarding Chris Spence. It couldn't have had a material impact. It seems from everything that I've read that Chris Spence really took education seriously. He had a huge impact on the kids he met in the schools he visited. He focussed on trying to teach, even though it was at no cost. If my child was going to his school, being taught by him, coached by him and looking up to him. Then perhaps I'd think differently about how the system should treat him. I think it's OK to try and fool me, but please, leave the children alone!

See: http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/01/10/chris_spence_suspected_plagiarism_found_in_articles_speeches_dissertation.html
and: http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/01/11/you-cant-be-the-director-of-education-and-plagiarizing-apparent-serial-plagiarist-resigns-as-head-of-school-board/