Redhat Sale Evokes Painful Memories

It has been a dozen years since I got a diskless lab created for an engineering college, with a Linux server, of course. It was not just to save money as we used the surplus to set up a multi-media lab of Macs.

The result was a depressing failure. I have consistently had problems with bosses. I can't sell an idea to even my wife much less to anyone else :) Actually, doubts make me doubt myself. I have no real idea of what the future will be! And I have been "that way since 1956"

Within a year, I was no longer handling the department. The new head added disks to the diskless workstations. The Linux server continued to work but only as a mail server. The reason was the future prospects for the students. The market is for Windows. Who needs open source engineers. And, of course, the Macs were not allowed to be used for exploring multi-media as that was not a part of the syllabus.

All this came back to me with the news of IBM buying Redhat for more money than I can imagine.

I need to see A Wonderful Life again, may be many many times :)

Education, Testing, Memories

I came across Testing the Chinese Way from several sources. It is hard to avoid personal memories. I went to a public school in the US and my recollections are of weekly tests. I did not like schools (an understatement) but it was not because of tests.

I left the US at the age of 25 but have continued to have a fondness for their educational system - or what existed 35 years ago.

I suffered from self-inflicted tortures in school. I did not need tests to tell me that I was bloody awful in gym. I recall once I actually caught a flier and my team and the batter were amazed! (No team picked me. I was inflicted on one of the teams.) My mind wandered so much that I could never focus long enough to concentrate on where the ball went! If that was meant to build team spirit, it miserably failed me and not because of tests.

Frequent tests were like deadlines - I knew I had understood. But to make sure that I did well in tests, I was able to revise and review. Repetition is a must for absorbing knowledge so that it becomes a part of us and we do not need to memorize it.

Problem from my perspective is not testing but what we test. I probably started to appreciate psychology and philosophy after a test. In a psychology class, we were given an aptitude test. It did not surprise me that my interests matched those who did well in physics, chemistry and maths. It also came as no surprise that my interests did not match policemen or military personnel. But what did surprise me were two peaks for psychology and philosophy! It surprised me that I did not have to like biology to enjoy and appreciate psychology.

I am more inclined to favour good tests (or if one is allergic to the word, challenges). In fact, I would be inclined to believe that good challenges can be a very plausible substitute for good teachers. That is one of the reasons I like the OLPC project.

Discovering Stuff one Likes

I didn't realize that I liked 'literature' until a college friend suggested I read Albert Camus' The Outsider. He also suggested Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. I discovered that I had a liking for European modern classics. Had he not made that suggestion, I would have missed a lot.

The other 'discovery' was by casual browsing - I do not know why I was attracted to Ian McEwan's First Love, Last Rites. It had just been published and I knew nothing about the author. But these were among the most memorable and weirdest stories I have ever read. I have continued to enjoy most of what McEwan has written, particularly, Enduring Love, Saturday and Atonement.

I find casual browsing very hard now. There is too many chaos in book stores. It is hard to find one rack which is likely to have books which fit my brain.

So, a recent 'discovery' was thanks to Amazon. I looked at the books bought by people who bought Ian McEwan's novels and found Kazuo Ishiguro's When We were Orphans and The Remains of the Day. It is amazing how he plays with human memories.

Last but not least, I 'discovered' Python by reading Eric Raymond's article, Why Python?

But I still don't know why I chose one recommendation and not another. Did I try others but remember only the ones which worked?