- F00Fbug parentThis is not my beautiful website.
- Great article! I taught full-time for a while and progressed to program coordinator and eventually department chair. I hated the bureaucracy and ended up leaving. I hang on as an adjunct and still teach one or two sections a semester. My favorite is an intro to programming class using Python - I love to see the lightbulb come on when it all falls into place. That's usually a couple of students out of 25.
I don't get why students don't come to office hours - hardly anyone ever does. I see it as a critical part of my job as service to the students. Some of them are just flailing, yet they don't reach out.
I miss teaching in person. Since Covid, all my classes have been online. I would follow the lecture material, but would also demonstrate important aspects of each topic as we went through them and encouraged the students to do the same on their laptops.
My biggest challenge are these online learning platforms. We use ZyBooks. There are two components, the "book" part where the student reads and the programming part where they write some code. The second part sucks. It's not real programming; it's a padded cell where the student writes code and provides any input. The output is automatically evaluated pass/fail. The student has no interaction with the operating system or interpreter and in my opinion, it loses something without that context. They could have an extra CR/LF in the output and they'd fail the assignment. In the real world, who cares? The problems are often absurd; asking for things that nobody would ever encounter.
My final rant is student-focused. I get a lot of emails like, "I'm trying this and here's a screenshot of my code and I get this error message and I can't figure it out." Somedays I want so badly to tell them that if they pasted the contents of their email into google instead of sending it as an email, the solution would be one of the first three results!!!
- I want one of these but don't have that kind of money to spend on a toy. There's always this:
- I spent 15 years managing a VMware-centric data center. I ran the free version at home for at least 5 years. When I ran out of vCPUs on my free license I switched to Proxmox and the migration was almost painless. This new tool should help even more.
For most vanilla hosting, you could get away with Proxmox and be just fine. I've been running it for at least 5 years in my basement and haven't had a single hiccup. I bet a lot of VMware customers will be jumping ship when their licenses expire.
- I remember working on a project to put scantron machines in every public school in DC back in the 80s. We built the interface from the scantron machine to the DECmate II (a micro-PDP-8, if I remember correctly); async io in assembler... I learned a lot on that part of the project. Then we wrote the scanning software to allow lots of teachers to scan their tests in at the end of the day. Next we built a network over dial-up phone lines to allow the DECmates to upload their daily scans to a VAX (using Kermit, I think). Finally we built the tools to load all of the daily scans into a database and do all kinds of analysis and reporting. All pre-internet -- good times!
I remember learning a lot about the scantron forms and realized that if you made a black box at a certain place, that form would be interpreted as the answer key and would screw up a whole pile of scanning!
- That was my first exposure to Linux in 1995. I remember downloading 30-something floppy disks over a painfully slow T1. I deployed our company's sendmail email server a few months later, running on an old PC. In 2006 I switched to Linux as my daily driver and if I need windows these days, it runs as a VM.
- I use this a couple of times a year when I crank up my Pandas version of TOPS-20 (http://panda.trailing-edge.com/). Now that VMS is ported to x86 I may use it more!
- For vanilla applications PySimpleGUI is so easy to use: https://www.pysimplegui.org/en/latest/
Personally, if I'm writing software that needs to talk to a human I'll just build a web interface instead of a GUI.
- My parents had Encyclopedia Britannica and I'm convinced that was a huge benefit to me that I'm still realizing today. I was born in 1965 and can remember even in elementary school any time I had a question my parents couldn't answer we'd look it up in the EB. Pretty soon I was habituated to just go there on my own and look up anything. When bored I'd pull out a random volume and just flip through it looking for anything that caught my eye.
I'm sure that was no small expense for my parents, but it really was an investment in us kids!
It's wonderful having access to all that and more on your phone, but there was something special about that long row of brown volumes. I was always excited when the annual supplement came; my brother and I would flip through it to see what new knowledge had been discovered!
- While the author bemoans the increasing use of adjunct faculty, there is an issue (that I may have not spotted as I was speed-reading!): Where I teach, only a certain percentage of sections can be taught by adjuncts; routinely exceeding this number would cause us to loose program accreditation from our accrediting institution. The scrutiny was not trivial! So for at least some institutions deploying adjuncts has a limit.
I started as an NTT instructor, then program coordinator, and was interim department chair. With each step came more course releases and more administrative work; I was pretty unhappy by the end. Now I'm an adjunct and teach one class per semester. As the author mentioned, it doesn't pay but it funds my hobbies and I really enjoy the teaching part!
- Your first point is really the issue. NOAA extrapolates catch information into overall health of the species and uses that to issue permits, set quotas, and adjust fishing seasons. Not only did I help build some of the ship-board systems, I built a ton of data analysis tools on the back-end for NOAA.
Red Snapper in the Gulf of Mexico is a good example. NOAA will tell you we're devastating the species (boat captains would not agree!) and they adjust quotas and season start/stop dates based on catch info to help balance the business of fishing and the health of the species. It's a tough job because the captains are often at odds with the scientists.
It could be possible to sanitize the data and remove the position information, but they kind of need some general location to do some of the science.
- Yeah... not AIS, but NOAA defined VMS (Vessel Monitoring Systems). Not only does it report position, but allows captains to send in their reporting data while at sea, in an electronic format that they could ingest directly into their systems. They also allow "email" and some weather reporting.
I led the development of one of these systems from a software standpoint: https://thoriumvms.com/
They're not cheap -- $2K or $3K depending on options and $40ish/month for service. We were reselling Iridium service as the underlying transport.
Looks like the bottom just fell out of this business -- glad I'm not relying that for my paycheck anymore!
- I'd really love to have one of these (real or PiDP), but you can have all the fun in the browser from here:
- Dell 720R running Proxmox.
various VMs and containers:
pfSense pihole Plex Homeassistant Subsonic (music server) virtual desktops for various purposes (keeps things isolated) syncthing (to move backups offsite) guacamole ephemeral VMs for testing/learning ~25Tb of storage in various RAID configurations for media and backups
- Tims Vermeer
- Callcentric provides a bunch of features for a great price. I ported over my two landlines over 10 years ago and love it. When my mom moved to a new state, I ported her number first so she could keep that number in her new place.
If you're actively managing a large number of users and devices, I had great luck with OnSIP. They're not the cheapest game in town, but their management interface is top notch. They were always innovating and the architecture they disclosed was impressive; very focused on HA and performance.
- Polycom phones are really great... I deployed VOIP for my employer some years ago and put in about 40 Polycom devices in 4 states. They're not cheap, but full featured and very well made.
You could also get an ATA (https://www.amazon.com/Grandstream-HT801-Single-Port-Telepho...) and plug a traditional phone into it. I used one of these at home for a long time. Just realized it's still plugged in an running and I threw out my last analog phone over a year ago!!!
- I've been in the same boat. Around 2012 or 2013 I put BTRFS on my DIY NAS/media server. For some reason, totally unprovoked the array just went belly up with no warning or logs. I tried and tried without success and couldn't recover it. Fortunately I had good, recent backups and restored to ext4+LVM and I'm still there 10 years later.
BTRFS sounded cool with all it's new features, but the reality is that ext4+LVM does absolutely everything I need and it's never given me any issues.
I'm sure BTRFS is much more robust these days, but I'm still gun shy!
- We keep all of our pictures on an external USB hard drive. At least once a month or after a large addition of pictures I back it up to my NAS ~30TB in the basement using rsync. That backup gets sent a few hundred miles away to a server (really, just an ancient, headless desktop running Debian tucked under a family member's desk!) with a large HD (12TB) via Syncthing. Syncthing is set to be one-way, pushing changes from my backup to the remote server only.
- Have a look at Loguru:
- Not GPS - the locations are derived from measuring doppler shift over a handful of messages. If you know where the spacecraft is, you can derive the location of the transmitter. On a good day you can get 100-400m accuracy. Not close to GPS, but good enough for tracking animals. I managed the North American data center for www.argos-system.org for many years.
- Not much, but the design of these things is incredible. I spent 20 years managing the operations for the ground processing of this data in North America. We worked closely with the transmitter manufacturers to certify them for use with the system (https://www.argos-system.org).
Microwave Telemetry builds the smallest ones: https://www.microwavetelemetry.com/solar_ptts The design and manufacture of these devices is incredible. The guy behind the company is an incredible engineer (and a nice guy)!
- I guess that's true to a point, but Boyd was singularly focused on ACM, maybe even obsessed with it. Which is understandable given his background.
I guess it's fortunate that technology continued to advance to the point where the F-16 finally does have improved RADAR and BVR (Block 20 and onward).
But, yeah, they had tunnel vision about the mission.