Do schools still need computer labs?

I was sad to hear (on TWiT episode #188, via Ars Technica), that the University of Virginia has decided to dismantle their student computer labs. Apparently there’s not much of a need for them now that just about every incoming freshman has a laptop.

I have lots of fond memories of my college’s computer labs. As a Computer Information Systems major, I spent a lot of time the various departmental labs: the VAX lab, the word processing lab, the UNIX lab, the programming lab, the multimedia lab, etc. Even once I finally had my own IBM-compatible PC (my freshman year I still had my Atari 800XL), I still spent a lot of time in the lab. It was a community … a place where you could go to work on assignments, get help from other people, or give assistance to others. Some nights, when the “homework” was done I would spend time playing multi-user games like Galactic Trader on the local VAX, or any of the various MUDs on the internet (like AmberMUSH or the one hosted on the Cleveland Freenet … man, those were some serious time sinks for me back then). I even ran my own MUD on the university VAX for a while, a heavily customized version of Monster, written in Pascal.

Later on in my college years I actually worked in the various school computer labs as a lab monitor. I’d have to help the engineering majors with their FORTRAN programs, or the comp-sci majors with their Ada, or C, or COBOL homework, or the math students with their SAS assignments … I encountered a wide variety of people and problems in those labs. And I enjoyed every minute of it.

So it’s sad for me to see that social part of computing starting to disappear. I’m sure not all schools will follow UVa, but I’ll bet this is the start of a trend. Like the UVa post says:

Lab software usage statistics from 2008 reveal that out of a total of 651,900 hours spent using software in the ITC-provisioned public computing labs, 95% of the time (over 619,500 hours), students were running commodity or free programs such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Acrobat Reader, or Microsoft Office. All of these software programs come pre-loaded on student laptops or are available at low or no cost to UVa students.

In contrast, just 5% of the time spent running software in ITC-provisioned public labs was devoted to specialized packages such as MatLab, Eclipse, Mathcad, or SPSS.

It’s hard to argue with statistics like that.

Unfortunate warranty timing

My wife’s 2007 Toyota Camry Hybrid starting having problems with the radio and CD changer this week. It was doing strange things like trying to switch discs when you were changing the radio station, or randomly ejecting CDs.

It occurred to me this morning, out of the blue, that this would probably be covered under the car’s warranty. So we look it up in the documentation and it’s the standard 36 months or 36,000 miles. We check the car’s mileage: 35,993! And the Toyota dealership is 9 miles away! šŸ˜®

My wife calls the dealership and explains the situation, asking if we bring in the car first thing tomorrow morning, will they honor the warranty even if the car shows 36,002 because the probem started before the 36k mark? Nope!

Arrgh! šŸ˜” If I had thought of the warranty angle before we drove to Disney yesterday we would have had some buffer mileage to work with to get this fixed. Oh well!

Flower and Garden Festival at Epcot

We had friends from out of town visiting over Thanksgiving last year who wanted to take their kids to Walt Disney World so we ended up getting Florida resident seasonal passes. We’d never been over to Disney in March (usually my March weekends involve Spring Training baseball) so we had never been to the Flower and Garden Festival at Epcot.

We had a totally free day yesterday, so we drove over to use our passes and spend a few hours at the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow to check out the festival and have a nice family day together.

We couldn’t have asked for more perfect weather: it was nice and breezy, lots of clouds, and temps in the mid-80s, just fantastic. My daughter rode Test Track for the first time and loved it. We also rode Soarin’ which is one of our favorites. The flower, topiary, and plant displays were colorful and plentiful.

My daughter especially enjoyed the butterfly garden and also the tea plant displays in London.


Good times … a perfect little day trip. We even heard the sonic boom as the space shuttle landed over on the coast.

WIJFR: Little Brother

Seventeen-year-old techno-geek ā€œw1n5t0nā€ (aka Marcus) bypasses the schoolā€™s gait-recognition system by placing pebbles in his shoes, chats secretly with friends on his IMParanoid messaging program, and routinely evades school security with his laptop, cell, WifFnder, and ingenuity. While skipping school, Marcus is caught near the site of a terrorist attack on San Francisco and held by the Department of Homeland Security for six days of intensive interrogation. After his release, he vows to use his skills to fight back against an increasingly frightening system of surveillance.

I always keep something to read on my Treo for those times I have a few spare minutes and need something to do (shopping with the wife, stuck in traffic, etc.). The latest book I was e-reading (and just finished) was Cory Doctorow’s “Little Brother.” While touted as a “young adult/teen” novel I think it’s a good read for anyone with an interest in technology, security, privacy, and the role of the government in those areas in these post 9-11 times.

If you want to read a bit more about Doctorow and “Little Brother” check out this Guardian article from last year.

I just put Cory’s short story collection “A Place So Foreign and Eight More” on my Treo so I’ll have some more to read going forward.

WIJFR: The Gripping Hand

25 years have passed since humanity quarantined the mysterious aliens known as Moties within the confines of their own solar system. They have spent a quarter century analyzing and agonizing over the deadly threat posed by the only aliens mankind has ever encountered, doomed by millions of years of evolution to an inescapable fate. For the Moties must breed– or die. And now the fragile wall separating them and the galaxy beyond is beginning to crumble.

On my flight to Phoenix last week I finally polished off the last hundred pages of Larry Niven’s and Jerry Pournelle’s “The Gripping Hand.” Written about 20 years afterĀ “The Mote in God’s Eye,”Ā the sequel picks up the story of Kevin Renner, Horace Bury, Rod and Sally Blaine, and, of course, the Moties.

It’s been 25 years since the Empire established the Crazy Eddie blockade fleet to prevent the Moties from escaping out of their home system. The aliens have tried different methods of getting through the blockade, but none have succeeded. Bury and Renner, who have been working as undercover agents for Naval Intelligence, think they’ve discovered evidence that the Moties might have found a way out. Bury, who is frightened of Moties and what they represent (due to his experience in the first book), demands to survey the Crazy Eddie fleet to ensure it continues to be effective. What if the Moties have found another way out of their system? Can the Empire possibly hope to contain them?

The first half of the book goes very fast, and since I had just finished the first novel a few months ago, it was easy for me to slip back into that universe of characters and locations. It’s a, pardon the pun, gripping first half of the story. Once the characters (and I don’t think this is a spoiler) get back into the Mote system, however, it becomes a confusing mess of names, characters, and factions: Medina, East India, Crimean Tartars, the Khanate … the list goes on. Whereas the first book dealt only with the Moties on Mote Prime (the main planet), “Gripping Hand” involves all of the different asteroid civilizations … and there are a lot of them to keep straight.

Overall I enjoyed the book mainly because I liked being back with the characters from the first novel and seeing what they were like 25 years after their first expedition to the Mote. But like “Publishers Weekly” said, “Gripping Hand” is an “adequate but inconsequential sequel.”

Galleon 2.5.5 is out

The new version of Galleon has been officially released. Here are the release notes (items in bold are my own personal contributions):

  • added java parameter to favor IPv4 (should eliminate the need for disabling IPv6 on linux installs)
  • added runlevel 2 to linux Makefile (for distros that use update-rc.d)
  • fixed Movies app so it works again (2570997, 2604157, 2604159)
  • Cleaned up some incorrect error messages in JmDNS code
  • Removed auto-subdirectory publish, the bug in TiVo-side software is fixed
  • various minor ToGo fixes and enhancements:
    • corrected space remaining calculation
    • added blue ball icon to identify Suggestions
    • properly display recording quality, added [HD], DIGITAL, and UNKNOWN types
    • fixed channel/station display issue
    • show copy-protected recordings (to be consistent with TiVo Desktop and other Now Playing List applications); identify with lock icon
    • fixed display of Length statistic on main Now Playing screen
  • Updated GoBack announcements to TiVos to use Bonjour, eliminating the repackaging and use of TiVo Beacon service on Windows

Spring Training 2009: Day Four

We got up really early (3:45am AZ time) this morning to head back to the Phoenix airport since my brother’s flight was departing at 6:10am. After seeing him off through security in Terminal 3, I took the shuttle over to Terminal 4 to check my bag for my own flight home.

When it was finally time to board, the place was packed. There were flights heading out to Puerto Vallarta, Cancun, and Tampa all about the same time, and all of them were oversold. It was a tempting offer to give up my seat on the Tampa flight: two nights’ hotel accomodations (since the next flight they could book you on was Tuesday!), a free roundtrip ticket, and a first class seat on that Tuesday flight to Tampa. Too bad I have to go back to work tomorrow, so I did not give up my ticket. šŸ™

The flight home was uneventful, and I slept most of the way. It’s hard to believe its all over … what a great time we had in Arizona over the past three days. I’m exhausted.

Spring Training 2009: Day Three

We wanted to get to the park early today so we got up and went over to Native New Yorker hoping for a good breakfast. Unfortunately, unlike the actual city that never sleeps, the restaurantĀ  didn’t open until lunchtime. So we headed north to Surprise (yes, that’s a city) to check out the Texas Rangers/Kansas City Royals training facility, hoping to find a local breakfast place along the way.

So we kept driving saying “we’ll grab something at the next place” and soon we were back in Goodyear and hungry. Based on our good experience yesterday, we went back to the Paradise Bakery before driving to the ballpark.

I have a pattern of not being on time for baseball games so this was the first time that not only was I on time, I was there before the park opened! We arrived at the Goodyear Ballpark just after 10am and went into the Team Shop to pick up some souvenier t-shirts. This way we were able to put our purchases back in the car as we had a nice close parking spot. The gates opened at 11 and we hung out watching them ready the field for the game. My brother also got some of the Indians players to sign a baseball. Bob Feller was also in attendance.

The game was shaping up to be a good one, with the Indians ahead 3-1 going into the 8th inning, but then everything broke down and the Dodgers scored 5 runs in the 8th and 9th innings, winning the game 4-6. This was the first sellout at the Goodyear Ballpark, with 10,749 attending! It was the longest game we had been to while we’ve been out here as well, at 3 hours and 15 minutes.

On the way back to the hotel we swung past Camelback Ranch, the new home of the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Chicago White Sox that is also celebrating its inaugural season. A lot of these new parks in the Cactus League are shared by two teams, something you don’t really see in the Grapefruit League stadiums back home.

We drove back to the hotel to clean up and relax a bit before heading out to dinner. It being our last night in Arizona, and wanting to celebrate our first trip to the Cactus League, we went to Rustler’s Rooste in the hills of Tempe, a local cowboy steakhouse complete with a live bull, live country western music, and really good food (“beef and brew with a view”).

We had to wait just over an hour (even with call-ahead seating!) but it was worth it. The steaks were fantastic and the atmosphere was as western as you could get. No, we did not try the rattlesnake. šŸ˜®

We got home late and need to get up in about 5 hours to get to the airport for our flights home. It went by fast, but it was a blast …

Spring Training 2009: Day Two

This morning we had breakfast at the Paradise Bakery and Cafe and then drove over to Camelback Mountain. We hiked up the Cholla Trail and saw some spectacular views of Scottsdale and the surrounding areas.

We didn’t make it all the way to the summit, but stopped at trail marker #17 before heading back down (we weren’t really prepared for hiking: no water, I was wearing sandals, etc.).

From Camelback we drove directly to Goodyear and the brand new Goodyear Ballpark, the new Cactus League home of the Cleveland Indians (soon to be joined next year by the Cincinnati Reds). The new stadium is very nice (compared to the slowly deteriorating old Chain of Lakes Park back in Winterhaven) and the nearby training facilities look impressive.

It was a close game, but the Tribe beat the Oakland A’s 7-6 (and during the game, the Dayton Flyers beat the West Virginia Mountaineers 68-60 in the first round of the NCAA tournament! They move on to play Kansas on Sunday. Go Flyers!).

After a brief respite back at the hotel, we drove up AZ-101 again and took some photos in the Peoria Sports Complex, spring home of the Seattle Mariners and San Diego Padres.

Needing something healthy to eat, we had dinner at Souper Salad near the Arrowhead Towne Center and then it was back to hotel. We retired for the evening after a dip in the pool (brr!) and the spa (ahh!).