Oracle of ONE1

If it has seemed a little quiet from me of late, its because I have spent the last week or so working with the American Red Cross on the disaster response to the floods in Milwaukee. Basically, I have been running back and forth to the shelter (which still has 20+ residents) and then doing paperwork and management tasks in between.

Once that is done, I knock off as many of my daily tasks as I can. Usually, that means I am running a little behind on my daily task list (who isn’t?). So for my clients, a big thank you for your patience in any delays in addressing your tickets. For my family a big thank you for dealing with my earlier than normal wake up hours and very unruly schedule. To my friends, I’ll catch up with you next week.

Today I embark on writing a series of articles that lay out some of my thoughts on literacy. First, some background.

Meaning of literacy

I am using the term literacy to encompass a wide range of ideas on learning, education, workplace skills, soft skills, computer skills, and general increase in knowledge and skills. I will focus mainly on adult literacy but will also include some thoughts on children.

What gives me the authority?

I have been involved in adult literacy education for nearly 15 years but I am not a professional educator. I started tutoring adults with Milwaukee Achiever Literacy Services in 1996.  In 2004, I joined their board of directors and then was Board Chairman from 2006-2010.

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As an avid reader and a IT professional, I am often asked my opinion on digital books. Yes, I do have an opinion but it is sometimes complicated.

The idea of digital books on an electronic reader is great but the books are often encumbered and the electronic readers are not even close to the ideal. Will we ever get there? I think eventually the readers will approach the ideal but I am not as certain about the digital content.

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“You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. . . .

I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.”

— Richard Feynman

I think that sums it up quite well.

“Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgements can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.” — Richard Feynman

Every now and then, I recommit myself to actually writing something on a regular basis. Ideally, I would like to post once every two weeks. Sometimes this gets hard, especially when real life interrupts. Some upcoming posts to look forward to include:

1. Discussion of recent State of Wisconsin bills proposed by a joint legislative committee I participated on.
2. Various aspects of a Case Management web application I am working on in cakePHP.
3. Discussion of a Twitter application, I am developing.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a broadly written, extensive and secretly negotiated agreement currently being worked on by the US, European Community, Japan, and others. The stated goal of ACTA is to create a new standard of intellectual property enforcement beyond the existing standards and to increase international cooperation, including the sharing of information between signatory countries’ law enforcement agencies. Negotiations are expected to continue for much of 2009.

Based upon documents that have been leaked into the public domain, ACTA is expected to cover for more than just counterfeit products. In fact, one of the focuses seems to be upon copyright and intellectual property to the point of targeting “Internet distribution and information technology”. This is definitely something that should be publicly negotiated to involve the full range of philosophies on these issues.

Instead, it seems we need to be concerned about our privacy rights and civil liberties. The original hope of negotiation supporters was to seal the deal in 2008. Fortunately that has not happened. Now your opinion about the benefits or drawbacks of such a treaty may differ than mine. In fact, I urge you to look into the details and make up your own mind.

Oh, wait. You can’t. AND THAT IS THE POINT!

Please urge your elected representative to push for transparency on this issue.

References:

• http://www.eff.org/cases/eff-and-public-knowledge-v-ustr
• http://www.eff.org/issues/acta
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement

The smell of fresh ground coffee — ahh
a break between calls,
short conversations,
looking toward the coming day.
All deserve a sigh.

Too many sighs to share,
too many reasons to sigh.

Exasperated sighs
of errant child,
a drivers’ mistake
and mis-sent email.
The sigh finds relief.

And pleasure speaks;
joy in bed,
a friendly hug,
the team wins.
Multifaceted sighs abound.

Consider please,
your own repertoire of sighs.

Inspired by a barista.

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with Chief Holton of the Milwaukee Fire Department. He noted that they were close to having under 10 fire fatalities for 2008. It had been a few years since that mark was reached. Chief Holton was a little concerned that the fatalities would rise over the last 2 weeks of the year. The holidays are a dangerous time for fires.

Well, there were many fires and a few notable fires over the Christmas – New Years week. The fatality count did not rise. Great! Every fatality has an impact on the family and community. See the JSOnline article.

Since coming to office, Doug Holton has worked hard to push information to the public on fire safety. Additionally, he has worked to increase the safety of his firefighters. It seems he has succeeded in both of these efforts.

Visit the Milwaukee Fire Department web site.

From an ASCE email newsletter.

“It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously.”
–Peter Ustinov, British actor and writer

“When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened.”
–Alexander Graham Bell, American inventor

“In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”
–Theodore Roosevelt, 26th president of the U.S.

“The most successful people are those who are good at Plan B.”
–James Yorke, mathematics and physics professor

“Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.”
–Jonathan Kozol, American nonfiction writer and educator

“Most companies don’t exercise patience during the hiring process. There is no development system that is going to compensate for making a bad hire.”
–Eric Foss, CEO of Pepsi Bottling

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”
–Mahatma Gandhi, Indian political leader

“Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.”
–Marian Wright Edelman, children’s activist

“The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children.”
–Clarence Darrow, American lawyer

A very good summary of information from SANS Institute.

The Ten Dumbest Things People Do to Mess Up Their Computers

1. Plug into the Wall without Surge Protection
2. Surf the Internet without a Hardware Firewall and a Software Firewall
3. Turn off the Antivirus Because It Slows Down Your System
4. Install and Uninstall Lots of Programs, Especially Freeware
5. Keep Your Hard Drive Full and Fragmented
6. Open All Email Attachments
7. Click on Everything
8. Believe that Macs Don’t Get Viruses
9. Use Easy, Quick passwords
10. Don’t Bother with Backups

Now I’m certain that somebody will deliver a comedic version of this list but the ten items listed here are things to make certain YOU do not do.

Last week, I was working on updating some old PHP code from 1999 and 2000. Now this is working code in PHP4 but was not quite up to todays standards. As an example it used the PHP code start tag of <? instead of the much better <?php. Also needed to make certain that all of my variables were declared and that no global or unsanitized variables were used. Overall not a big deal just a good use for grep or sed.

A WinXP laptop is my where I write most of my code and the files are then uploaded to a FreeBSD server. I do not and have never owned a Mac. Usually for this type of action, I would run grep or sed on my FreeBSD server but instead decided to try Windows Grep. I ran Windows Grep with the proper regular expressions and voila, my PHP start tags were updated. Next, the files were uploaded to a new server for testing. ERRORS, errors everywhere.

About half of the updated files were kicking out errors or failing completely. The failed files were rather random and the code looked just fine in the editor. What was going on?

Comments not recognized by PHP

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