Armando Fox » fox

Summer Reading

fox — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 07:05:15 +0000

I always look forward to this time of year, even though it’s inevitably a sprint to get to it. I’m preparing for our annual 2-week family vacation in Cancun (with some diving in Cozumel thrown in), the one vacation per year on which I don’t bring my laptop. What I do bring is lots to read — for me it’s a deep garbage collection and intellectual replenishment. It’s not unusual for me to finish 8 to 12 books during the two weeks. So I invest a fair amount of time researching what to read and loading up my Kindle—since I bought it about 3 years ago, my policy is not to bring any paper books or documents on a leisure trip.

Here’s what’s on the Kindle for this trip:

Nonfiction – history: I grew up in New York and have always been fascinated with its history. So I’ll be reading 97 Orchard, about five families who occupied the tenement building at that address on New York’s Lower East Side, which has since been turned into the Tenement Museum. The book focuses on how immigrants who otherwise plunged into assimilating themselves into American culture retained their native cooking for comfort and identity, and includes authentic period recipes that might have been prepared by those families. I’ll also be reading Twilight at the World of Tomorrow, a dramatization of the people and events that led to (and through) the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow Park, which until then had been an ash dump, and the juxtaposition of the culture and attempted optimism of the Fair against the gloom of the Depression and the uncertainy of the brewing Second World War (during the Fair’s 18 months, several countries’ pavilions closed down as those countries were occupied by the Nazis).

More Nonfiction – evolutionary psychology: I have always enjoyed evolutionary neuropsychology when written for the popular press in books like Music, The Brain & Ecstasy (and its lighterweight cousin This Is Your Brain on Music) and the work of philosopher Dan Dennett. I recently finished (on the recommendation of a colleague) What Science Offers the Humanities, a repudiation of the current “standard social science model” prevalent in the humanities according to which humans’ mental development can only be discussed and evaluated in terms of culture and nurture and not in any biological terms, which are taken to be arbitrary and without defensible basis. The book makes a compelling argument against that stance, and I’ll be reading Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, which seems to take the argument further. In a similar but lighter spirit, I’ll be reading How We Decide (recommended by my sister-in-law and others) and maybe Nudge (the one about making better decisions, not the one about God something-or-other).

More nonfiction – American societal and cultural studies: I’m considering The Collapse of Complex Societies (which seems from the sample to be more tightly written than Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, which I found disappointingly hard to follow after the incredibly well written Guns, Germs & Steel), and Bowling Alone, a book about how community organizations across America are dying (more specifically, their members are dying, and new younger ones aren’t signing up) and the resulting loss of social capital—as someone who helps run a community theater that relies heavily on volunteers, this seems relevant. (Update: Bowling Alone was written in 2001; evidently the same author, Robert Putnam, came out with a book last year called Better Together: Restoring the American Community. We’ll see if I like the original enough to read the sequel.)

Fiction: I’ve been rereading (for about the 3rd time now) Foucault’s Pendulum, the granddaddy of all conspiracy novels, which is to Dan Brown as the works of Tolkien are to the Harry Potter books. If I don’t finish my dog-eared paperback before leaving, I’ll have to download it.

Besides the historico-conspiracy genre, which used to be reliably good until Dan Brown’s success spawned a myriad of “me too” books, I’ve always liked hard SF, and recently discovered Charles Stross and Richard K. Morgan. I’m not as enthusiastic about Stross’s “Laundry Files” series as his previous work, but nonetheless I’ll be giving The Fuller Memorandum a whirl. I also found a number of titles for under a dollar in the Kindle Store that sounded like they might at least be promising as hard SF, including David Derrico’s Right Ascension and various intriguing-sounding novellas by Christian Cantrell. Hey, for under a dollar each, I’ll give them a try! Maybe the next Isaac Asimov, Connie Willis or Arthur C. Clarke will get her/his start this way… Also in the “try it for under a buck” category, I’m also checking out Ancient Awakening by Matthew Bryan Laube, who’s been compared to H.P. Lovecraft in reader reviews.

Geek Fiction: Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet is a based-on-true-stories account of the underground economy around denial-of-service and similar attacks, the latest frontier for organized crime. The beginning grabbed me, so I’ll be reading that. I got that recommendation from the Bookworm column in ;login, the monthly magazine of the USENIX Association, which also recommended The Myths of Security, which seemed really half-baked based on the intro and largely a marketing piece for McAfee.

Nonfiction: I have a strong interest in medieval history, and a somewhat weaker interest in classical history, so I’m checking out Susan Wise Bauer’s History of the Medieval World and History of the Ancient World. I haven’t committed to buying them yet, but based on the samples, they are dense, no-nonsense “here’s what happened” narratives — perhaps not of huge interest to an historian who knows the periods well, but maybe suitable for a nonexpert like me who needs a good big-picture overview to contextualize the more detailed works, like Jean de Joinville’s first-person commentary Chronicles of the Crusades, which has been in the public domain for hundreds of years and is also going with me.

Speaking of the public domain, I’m also bringing William Lewis Manly’s classic travel journal Death Valley in ‘49 (I’m almost through my second rereading), the complete works of Mark Twain (I like to jump around), and probably the complete works of Shakespeare.

It’s a lot of fun to load up for a trip like this. Those of you family members who have Kindle devices registered to my account…maybe you’ll enjoy the above, in addition to the 60 or so books I’ve already purchased.

See you in Cancun!

Why Borders and other big-book retail bookstores are fcuked

fox — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:53:14 +0000

Argh.

So I wanted to buy a specific title for a friend (The Soul of a New Machine, in fact) who would be in town in just 2 days. Not wanting to pay 2-day Amazon shipping, I went online to Borders and “reserved” the book at a local Borders outlet.

When I went to pickup the book, there was nobody at the customer service desk. While waiting for someone to show up there, I went over to the Search terminal to see if they had a copy of the DVD Triumph of the Nerds. Searching for ‘triumph of the nerds’ returned over 13,000 hits (even when narrowed to Movies & TV). Searching for the whole phrase returned 0 hits. When the customer service person finally arrived (I had to go to the cashier and ask to have someone sent there), and told me that the book I had reserved would be at the cashier station, I asked him to help me with the search. He tried without success and asked me whether I was sure the item was still available for sale. (It is.) I then asked if he could direct me to the section where I might find other books on the history of computers and technology. He needed an example title to answer the question, so I suggested Insanely Great. He did some unsuccessful searches and asked me whether I was sure the item was still available for sale. (It’s in its second printing.)

I went home and ordered all the items from Amazon. I’ll have to wait a couple days to get them, but (a) the search function found every item as a top hit on the first search attempt, and (b) I am paying less, even without considering sales tax.

Borders is fcuked, and probably so are the other big box stores. From now on it’s my neighborhood independent bookstore when possible, and Amazon otherwise.

Bay Area Transit Can and Should be Cheaper

fox — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:21:22 +0000

As my colleagues know, I’m a constant advocate for the use of public transportation. While public transit in the Bay Area is the second-best on the West Coast (after Portland, OR; though admittedly, it’s a short list), many improvements are still necessary, especially given the recession and recent severe service cuts across all agencies. Here’s how I think a lot of money could be saved and service improved overall.

Stop offering toll discounts for Fastrak or carpools. Amazingly, when we try to make driving cheaper, more people will drive, despite the fact it kills 40,000 people a year. (Hey, people smoke too.) Raise tolls, and use the money to subsidize public transit. And yes, it is a subsidy. Every metropolitan transportation system in the world is subsidized. So are fire departments, but most people don’t think that’s a problem.
Consolidate all the agencies, or at least the ones serving the metropolitan core of the Bay Area (BART, Muni, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, and maybe VTA). No doubt that will result in a big wasteful bureaucracy, but right now we have 9 big wasteful bureaucracies that are territorial, petty, and don’t talk to each other, each of which has its own website, its own phone info line (which can’t help you if your trip involves transfers), sometimes its own police force, and God knows what else.
Get rid of all fare media. About 15 years after the UK and Hong Kong, the Bay Area finally has an all-in-one fare medium (ClipperCard), at no small expense. It is refillable automatically or manually, by cash or with credit cards or employer transit checks, online or at Walgreens or at automated refill machines, and it understands special fares like senior and youth passes. There’s no reason to keep other fare media.
Make transfers painless. Having a single fare medium helps, but they also need to adjust fares so that transfers are cheap (sorry, 25 cents off a $2.00 fare doesn’t count) and coordinate schedules around common trips.
Get rid of 511 Transit and the 511 Trip Planner. Google Maps for transit does a better job, especially when combined with NextBus. (I don’t know if GMaps scraped NextBus, but it should.)
Put “next bus” or “next train” monitoring at every bus stop and train station. This is the 21st century and there’s metro-area 3G wireless throughout the Bay Area.

A good first programming language, revisited

fox — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 19:52:18 +0000

I’m of the “BASIC generation” and like David Brin I bellyache about there not being a good first language for kids to feel the empowerment I felt each time I could say “Look, I made the computer do something cool!”

A colleague recently asked if I had any thoughts on what would be “a good first programming language” for a precocious 9-year-old who was very much into computers and wanted to learn programming, giving me an excuse to agonize about this again.

The executive summary of my current opinion is probably “Scratch if you want training wheels, Python otherwise”, but if this sort of thing interests you, read on.

My colleague’s question gave me an excuse to wring my hands about it some more, and even talk to some other people about it seriously, including Colleen Lewis, a Berkeley computer scientist and educator whose opinion I respect tremendously on such matters, and a bunch of smart colleagues from industry who attended the recent RAD Lab retreat.

We concluded that there’s a handful of absolutely fundamental concepts that are (a) common to the vast majority of programming paradigms/languages and (b) not “natural” in the sense that they have no obvious analog in non-programming-based activities and simply have to be internalized:

variables and assignment
manipulating collections of elements (arrays exist even in languages that don’t support user-defined data structures)
conditional evaluation
control flow
iteration
subprograms (i.e., procedural abstraction)

(I’ve deliberately omitted OO; while really important, it’s not fundamental in that there’s lots of programs you can write without it.)

Beyond focusing on absorbing those concepts, a “good first language” should make the young programmer feel empowered at being able to do stuff, gradually stripping away the “mystique” of how computers do the cool things they do.

Hence my concerns about Scratch, a popular GUI-based programming environment designed for teaching that we are starting to use at Berkeley for the intro-level CS class. Colleen reassured me that it’s possible to write non-toy programs in Scratch once you ditch the GUI, that it supports constructs like lambda expressions that let you teach important concepts like closures, and that students who complete the new intro course also understand things like objects and class inheritance and are more than ready to tackle any programming language. My concern is that the Scratch GUI environment is so amazingly rich and polished that it might diminish the sense of empowerment—even if you write a cool program, there’s still just too much magic between your program and the machine. The nice thing about Scratch is that it’s widely used in education so (I assume) there’s lots of freely-available supplementary materials to go with the software. (Wearing my “productivity programming” hat, I’d say Scratch is almost too productive because so much is happening beyond the code you wrote.)

The alternative seems to be Python, probably the closest thing to BASIC these days (albeit a much better language, of course). And in fact I found a pretty good book—Hello World: Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners—co-authored by a programmer and his young son and written in a kid-friendly yet noncondescending way. The downside is that while Python is a pretty nice language, like all languages it has a few quirky notations, idiosyncrasies, arbitrary-seeming behaviors, etc. While the book goes out of its way to clarify these only as much as needed, their presence might detract from a learning experience…but then, to be fair, the same was true of BASIC way back when, and probably those of us who glamorize learning it have selective amnesia about getting bitten by those idiosyncrasies and learning to work around them.

So maybe my current recommendation is: for a gentle introduction with training wheels and rubber bumpers, Scratch; for something a little more hardcore that you won’t outgrow (Python is used for lots of real programs) but comes complete with real-life idiosyncracies, Python with the above book.

The good news is that while neither is “built in” to today’s PCs like BASIC used to be, they’re both open source free downloads.

Ideas from anyone who’s actually helped their kids learn to program? (I have no kids, only a toucan, and it’s unlikely she’ll learn to program anytime soon.)

Playback Twitter feeds (with icons!) on Apple //e!

fox — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 22:24:55 +0000

From my colleague Matt Welsh (who writes the Volatile & Decentralized blog)…

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/04/26/found-footage-twitter-on-an-apple-iie-kind-of/

…now if only it had an actual Ethernet card and was crawling the actual Twitter site!…

Things I still find charming about the original “Star Trek”T

fox — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 06:57:04 +0000

In a mood of indulgence doubtless fueled by pizza and wine and small-batch bourbon, I used AppleTV’s unimpeachable user interface tonight to download and watch a couple of episodes of the original Star Trek. (Sure, it’s $1.99 per episode for something that is still broadcast on my cheap analog cable, but they’re delivered in digitally-remastered form, the sound is awesome, and I can start watching in about a minute—all unlike TiVo/Amazon wretched, indefensibly bad video-on-demand from TiVo DVR2’s).

The old Star Trek episodes are wonderful morality tales. And hey, it’s not their fault that special effects in the late 60’s weren’t very advanced, and the effects budget per episode was apparently about $50.

I smile at the cheesy effects and appreciate the storyline, but I can’t help but enumerate a few effects things that particularly tickle me as a computer scientist. I’m blogging these so that someone blogging in 2020 can smile at my comments, and all while giving the original Star Trek the largest possible credit for couching great stories in something that the 60’s thought the future would look like (remember, the final Star Trek episodes were taped a full 2 years before the moon landing):

The analog dials on the ship’s computers
Computers with AI-complete speech recognition, but synthesized voices that sound terrible
Computers that actually emit smoke when they fail
Audio communications that fail as analog radio would (analog static and high-Q artifacts, not digital dropouts)
Video that fails by getting snow or loss of analog sync (I still can’t believe people used to do all this with analog signals. That is some studly engineering.)
“Video” displays that are clearly posters
Mechanical switches for controlling electronic devices, including the transporter and the “computer”
Mechanical printer noises (ie, dot matrix and band printers)
The presence of physical books rather than ebooksat various official proceedings
Ship’s avionics that fail by bursting into flame, yet are apparently repairable at the board or component level

Note that a great many of these effects were actually accurate when viewed from the standpoint of the first computers in spaceflight—see Computers In Spaceflight: The NASA Experience for a most excellent overview and retrospective.

New RAD Lab papers

fox — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:06:12 +0000

We continue to make progress on applying machine learning to problems in deploying and operating datacenter-scale systems…

Peter Bodik’s paper on “Fingerprinting the Datacenter” (joint work with Moises Goldszmidt at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley and Dawn Woodard at Cornell) was accepted to EuroSys 2010, where I’ll also be giving a tutorial on Web 2.0 applications;
Wei Xu presented an online version of his work on data mining of console logs (joint with Ling Huang at Intel Research Berkeley) at ICDM 2009 last month;
Dr. Archana Ganapathi filed her PhD dissertation (yay!!) and just had a paper accepted to the Self-Managing Database Systems workshop (SMDB 2010) on statistics-driven workload modeling for cloud jobs like Hadoop (joint work with Yanpei Chen)
The RAD Lab will be featured in the VMware GoVirtual webzine later this month, stay tuned!

…and of course we are planning submissions to SOCC and WebApps as well. See the students’ pages or my project pages for more details!

TiVo vs. AppleTV for Video on Demand

fox — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 04:59:24 +0000

I’ve had a a TiVo Series 2 for years. Its user experience for selecting, recording and watching TV shows left everything else in the dust. So when TiVo teamed up with Amazon a year or two ago to offer video-on-demand movies and TV shows via TiVo, I had high hopes.

These were quickly dashed. The Amazon VoD UI embedded in TiVo is unresponsive, clumsy, cumbersome and unpleasant—everything the TiVo UI itself is not. When one chooses “Video on Demand” from the TiVo menu, one arrives at a menu screen featuring something like 8 different VoD vendors whose delivery medium is TiVo. Never mind the fact that as a movie watcher, I could give a flying fork whether “Jaman Movies and Shorts” or “Disney Video” or “Blockbuster” or “Amazon Video on Demand” supplies the title I want to watch; as a customer, I’m focused on content, not content vendors.

Yet amazingly, not only is the TiVo UI organized by something as meaningless as vendor, but each of the vendor submenus takes you to a different, yet uniformly awful, user interface. Here are some misfeatures common to all of them:

Each button press on the TiVo remote has a UI response time between 700 and 1500ms. Yes, that’s right, it can take more than a second to get any visual or auditory feedback that your button-press actually did anything. This is far above the established thresholds for perceptual causality (~100ms). In contrast, when using the “native” TiVo UI, it feels snappy and responsive.
Each VoD source has a different menu-driven UI for search, “top titles”, browse by genre, etc. The user has a simple goal: “I want to find (or browse) movies.” Yet each submenu has a different structure, for no defensible reason. As a user, what do I care which of the vendors is providing the content?
The GUI is not only entirely textual, it is designed in such a way that less than 50% of the already-scarce screen real estate is actually devoted to browsing. The rest is devoted to TiVo templated elements and blather from the VoD vendor about how thrilled I should be that I had the wisdom to select them.

The UI is, in short, astonishingly bad. It is all the more frustrating because this truly awful UI, which makes me want to hurl the remote at the screen, emanates from the same device that gave us the effortlessly superior TiVo UI.

What happened?

Bottom line: when it comes to video on demand, TiVo has provided an unresponsive, inconsistent, confusing and non-thought-out GUI in which various competing vendors of VoD media fight for your eyeballs with unattractive, unintuitive, arbitrarily-different GUIs that violate every basic GUI tenet, including those to which the original TiVo GUI hews so faithfully and well. In contrast, AppleTV, for all its bashing, has a nicely-thought-out, consistent, aesthetically appealing GUI that does the one thing you want to do: find the damn movie easily, and start watching it as soon as possible. The search interface is fast and responsive; the user experience is,well, Apple; and you can usually start watching movies within 1-2 minutes of clicking “Buy”. (The last time I used Amazon VoD on TiVo to watch a 30-minute TV sitcom episode, I had to wait 20 minutes before I could start watching, even though my TiVo enjoys access to exactly the same broadband network as my AppleTV. How is 20 minutes “video on demand”? I could have made a trip to the local video store and been back in less time than that.)

Shame on you, TiVo. DVR hardware is commodity; what had set you apart was your UI. As you continue to add vendors to your hideous VoD user experience, you will start running out of feet in which to shoot yourselves.

I’d like to disabuse early-career grad students of certain misconceptions…

fox — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:47:45 +0000

You are rarely the best judge of the most important material or best presentation strategy for your talk. Corollary: Give one or more practice talks.
Writing is much harder than you think. Corollary 1: You are not that great a writer. Corollary 2: If you don’t have a solid draft 1-2 weeks before the conference deadline, you’re starting with 2 strikes.
80% or more of submitted papers are rejected. Corollary: You need feedback from colleagues and outsiders to improve your paper. A poor way to get feedback is to submit the paper, wait 6 months, and get a rejection with cryptic reviews. A better way is left as an exercise to the reader. (Thanks to Mike Franklin for this particular way of looking at the “get feedback” issue.)
When you write up your work, remember that nobody cares what you did but only why it advances the state of the art. Edit accordingly. Corollary: edit an outline and paragraph map before you start writing. It’s much easier to rearrange/eliminate at this level than at the prose level.
The reviewer has 20 other papers waiting to be reviewed and is looking for a reason to set yours aside and move on. Corollary: your job is to ensure no such opening is provided—whether by unsupported statements, poor writing, rambling style, etc.
Your goal is not that your work gets the approval of your advisor, but the approval of the research community, as represented by the (usually anonymous) reviewers who will be evaluating your paper. Your advisor can bring her/his experience to bear and give you advice (hence “advisor”) on how to maximize the likelihood of this, but don’t mislead yourself into thinking that your goal should be to please your advisor. If the community is pleased with your work, chances are excellent your advisor will be too. Corollary: Get lots of feedback on a paper from people other than your advisor—i.e., people representative of the reviewers who’ll evaluate it—before submitting it.

E-filing your PhD thesis? Why not file your VM as well?

fox — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:18:09 +0000

UC Berkeley has finally started accepting electronic (PDF) thesis filing. The trees thank them. I remember, though, that shortly after I filed my (hardcopy) thesis, I quickly lost the ability to even regenerate the PDF from LaTeX sources: I didn’t have the right packages, some figures didn’t get tarred up properly, etc etc. And as far as trying to run the sizable chunks of software that I and others built and reported on…fuhggedaboudit.

But hey, with disk space being free now, if I was graduating now I would also “file” a copy of the VM images used to format my thesis and run the experiments. Some of my students are doing cloud computing research so some of their VM’s are already being stored as Amazon AMI’s, but why not snapshot a VM image of their laptop as well? We’d be one step closer to truly reproducible results in CS research.