Simiya

Posted by: Peter | January 1, 2010

My Millennium Development Goals

The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) for 2015 aim to halve poverty and hunger, school the world’s children, arrest disease, provide gender equality, spare mothers and their infants from untimely deaths, save the environment and forge global partnerships in the pursuit of development.

The 2009 MDG report notes many successes. The poverty target seems achievable. Between 2000 and 2007 worldwide enrolment in primary education increased from 83% to 88% with Asia and Africa showing double digit growth. Deaths of children under five declined by an estimated 28% from 1990 to 2007. There has also been a 97% reduction in ozone layer depleting substances.

Challenges abound. The global financial crisis has had a grim impact. Hunger in developing regions rose in 2008. The estimated global unemployment rate in 2009 could reach 7.0% for men and 7.4% for women. These numbers may reveal new economic hurdles to gender equality. Disproportionate successes in eastern Asia contrast against more modest gains in the poorer regions of Africa. Increasing commodity prices threaten the availability of food and also weakens governments’ ability, policies and resolve to reduce their impact on the poor. The need to revitalize public health and educational efforts was also identified.

With such a broad scope there is bound to be debate. There are those, like Amir Attaran of the University of Ottawa, who consider the goals to be sometimes immeasurable. On the other hand some view the MDGs as being an inspirational vision of the future. Top level participation in global policy isn’t the LEAD program’s goal. Its focus would be in targeted national initiatives such as the distribution of HIV retroviral treatments, Bangladesh’s IMCI projects, Mali’s “Struggle Against Poverty” program and support for Brazil’s Bolsa Familia program, with an aim to increase their chances of success.

As you can see, I would like to expand my currently lacking altruism to a new area of my life. Do I have the skills to be of value. I have neither a PhD nor other tertiary education in economics or developmental sciences. Even so, I feel I can actively and effectively participate with an NGO in aiding in the achievement of the MDGs.

For example, my public sector career began while working on the program to computerize the Government of Jamaica’s revenue collection process and while stationed in Panama, I worked for the Government of Trinidad and Tobago in promoting trade between that country and Latin America.

The importance of training, mobilization, promotion, governmental partnerships and public relations in public health was made very clear to me when I participated in diabetes educator programs as a Caribbean region health care sales and marketing professional.

I truly enjoy my current job as a global program manager at Google because of the human element. Technology is so often viewed as the cure, but it is the people and the processes they use that get the job done. The challenge on which I now thrive is in understanding the paradox of managing without authority, influencing through trust and commonality, determining how divergent needs can lead to common goals, and knowing the respectful importance of a handshake.

These skills developed over a 20 years have taught me to be adaptable, lead by example, implement effectively and be open to mutual learning for greater human understanding . This is the value I bring to achieve the MDGs. I hope there is an NGO out there that is willing to hear more. It is time for me to actively participate in volunteer efforts.

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Posted in Everything Else

Posted by: Peter | December 1, 2009

Why I Wrote the “Linux Quick Fix Notebook”

During the dot com implosion that started in 2001, I was working for a managed web hosting company whose customer base evaporated with the unrealistic euphoria of the Internet. For over two and a half years we were faced with quarterly layoffs till my team of 20 was reduced to a pair of traumatized professionals.

I had been hired for my network engineering skills but I clearly needed to demonstrate additional value to the accountants to maintain any hope of remaining on the payroll. With restricted budgets, the free Linux operating system was becoming the choice of our new startup clients and knowledge of its functionality was viewed as a significant advantage. So I decided to buy a second hand PC and turned it into a small laboratory to learn more. I also set up a small website dedicated to art from my native Caribbean. Websites were cool and the web hosting company I used made it so easy with their GUI web interface.

One day at work I overheard some friends saying that they were hosting their websites from home using their DSL line. There was no GUI, but they made it seem easy. They convinced me to buy a second hand PC, get Linux and move Simiya literally “in-house” to save $10 per month.

Of course extending my UNIX skills to Linux wasn’t so easy. I generally found a majority of Linux resources on the web to be too detailed, too vague or just inaccurate. There were many excellent articles on specific topics, but they were usually part of a general interest publication, and information on related topics on the same site was sometimes hard to find.

There just wasn’t a site out there for intermediate Linux home users who wanted to get their feet wet in web hosting, nor did there seem to be any similar sites targeting the poor IT people who are told to “get Linux working by tomorrow”.

After a few months I decided that no one should have to repeat my pain and I added some technical pages to the art site. Soon, Linux Home Networking was born.

The first technical page I wrote was about configuring wireless networking for Linux mainly because my wife didn’t like the server in the bedroom. I got it all set up, but somehow everything remained under the bed until one Autumn morning when the ancient computer began to grumble very loudly. Based on the rattling noises from the hard disk I thought it was going to explode. The web server logs showed that the site had been found by Google and apparently hundreds of people per day were having the same problem.

Soon the Linux site expanded to about three dozen tutorials, each targeting the topics of the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) exam which I was eventually planning to take. The interest in the site expanded till it was receiving about 10,000 visits a day and I decided to move the server to a real data center. To cover this additional cost I started selling 600 page PDF versions of the site with content much more detailed than any of the RHCE books I had used as references.

I wanted to convert the PDFs into a real book and decided to approach all the publishers at LinuxWorld San Francisco to see whether they were interested. Armed with my web statistics and a few sample search engine for pertinent key words like “linux iptables” where the site featured prominently I arrived at my appointments made three weeks in advance to make my pitch. Prentice Hall eventually published the book as the Linux Quick Fix Notebook which has received very encouraging reviews.

I have some advice for authors. Technical books age, and I have found that keeping PDFs up to date is much faster and easier to do. It took 3 months to edit and format the book, and another 4 months to get it printed and distributed. With PDFs, modifications are instantaneous in comparison, and it is very easy to distribute an updated version of the PDF to all your readers. Make forums a part of your book’s website as you can use the questions found there to make quick updates.

I am now toying with the idea of using a similar approach to write a novel about a ficticious Caribbean island. I wrote the story 10 years ago, but never had the will to publish it till now. This time I’ll make each chapter a blog entry and see what the readership reaction will be. I’ll alter the story according to suggestions of the commentators, and who knows, maybe I’ll write another real book on a vastly different topic that appeals much less to the geek in me.

The Alice in Wonderland Online Backup Disaster

My latest literary project is reading Alice in Wonderland in Spanish. I had been disappointed by the fact that most of the recent Latin novels I had been reading centered around “putas”, so I decided that something more uplifting was required. Little did I know that the Cheshire Cat and modern technology live in similar fantasy worlds.

After losing my files in a mysterious incident involving my 13 year old son and an aging computer that I was using as a file server, I decided to search for a really kid proof solution. After restoring my data from DVDs to a modern, but cheap $100 NAS appliance I began looking for an automatic online backup solution.

I quickly realized that no one offers consumer backup products allow NAS backups, so I found myself having to sync data between my NAS and a sub-directory on my laptop, using Microsoft’s SyncToy as Plan A. Though SyncToy not automatic, it is free, quick, easy and requires no plastic disks. That was good enough for me.

Plan B involved searching for software that would backup this sub-directory to the cloud. I did some research and chose mozy.com as it offered free backups up to 2GB of storage for free and unlimited storage for $4.95 per month. I decided to test it one evening after work. The software downloaded and installed easily, but then as night fell, this demonic code turned into Dracula and began to suck the life out of my laptop. Whenever I opened up the client from the task bar, or started browsing through its big menu buttons Windows would freeze while oddly maintaining low CPU and memory utilization. Mozy paralyzed all my other applications while it chugged along looking for fresh blood to add to its archives. Like a true vampire, it had a single mission in life, not listening to reason. When I told it not to backup the system files suggested in its default settings it would fiendishly reselect them. It took 4 days to back up 5GB. After the backup completed I went looking through the client’s menu options to see if there were any interesting features and it would have to pause an think after each click, not a second or two, sometimes up to a minute or more, especially if you were selecting files to add to the backup set. Then the laptop froze completely, and I left it for half a day to haunt windows while it stalked potential prey. I eventually had to pull the plug and then had to live through a blue screen of death and an automatic registry fix before it would boot up properly.

Disappointed, I tried the Quicken online backup service as I use their personal finance product. The website portal was very spartan, only having two links on the main menu, a button for credit card information and another to upgrade your service. This was a warning I should have paid more attention to as you will see later. The software was nice and fast for my initial test run using the basic 100MB service at $9.99 per year, but then I decided to increase my backup to the $149.99 for 10GB option. First, after paying, the client didn’t register the updated service status and the website’s limited options would only allow me to upgrade to a level at which I should have been already without telling me where I was. I then noticed that the web portal URL was a sub domain of backup.com and I went to that site, logged in with my Quicken credentials and saw from their much better portal that I had the 10GB service. So I downloaded their client to see whether it would work and recognize the new 10GB option, it did and the client was spiffier. Then the problems began. Just selecting more than 1024 MB, or 1GB would make client crash. I uninstalled and the Quicken client would crash too.

So the following morning I call Backup.com, which is a subsidiary of Symantec, to tell them my plight. They responded promptly but told me I had to talk to Quicken Online Backup directly and gave me their number which I phoned. According to the robotic answering machine, Quicken’s operators were all busy and it would be best to use their website to get service. The robot then hung up without even saying “good bye”. I then used the website, I had to wait 10 minutes to online chat with a representative, but when the countdown timer reached 3 seconds, and stayed that way for about 2 minutes, I tried email which promised a 24 hour turnaround. I then tried the phone option, in which you had to give your number and they would call back in an hour. I did all this before going to work, so I received the surprisingly quick email response an hour later telling me that I would have to clear my browser cookies to get the client to work. I don’t understand why the fat client, not a web client would rely on a browser cookie, but Quicken’s accounting software would do some strange things like that, so it is not entirely surprising. I quickly realized I would have to wait till I got home to test at which point I start looking at what Symantec had to offer. For $45 a year I could backup 25GB! With that revelation fresh in mind I suddenly get the customer service phone call. They apologized for the delay, but told me that I had to be in front of my PC to fix the problem. Remember, the email response had given me a repair option and I had uploaded the same screen shot to the phone support web menu and now they couldn’t help me. I canceled the service.

Symantec’s Norton Online Backup installed easily, and it runs a little webserver behind the scenes that is only accessible from your laptop not the Internet. (For the techies, it runs on localhost 127.0.0.1) When you click on the client. it pops up a web browser page that references data on your little webserver and from the Symantec too. This was problematic for me too. I click on the client icon in the task bar and when Internet Explorer loads the client complains that I have to have IE6 or higher, and I am running IE8. Then Firefox, running the noscript plugin, recognizes that my computer shouldn’t be running a webserver, even if it is not accessible from the web and gets a coronary, but fortunately allows me the option to ignore the craziness for this particular scenario.

After all this, the backup is working well. The first backup of 5GB took about 30 hours and the incremental updates since then have been speedy.

Alice found things becoming curiouser and curiouser, and so did I.

My Second Language

I started learning Spanish in high school in the Caribbean but didn’t pay much attention to it as I found the sciences more interesting. Being surrounded by Spanish speaking countries, the language seemed to be something that would come in useful eventually, even if I didn’t quite know how.

After five years of half-hearted attention I stopped only to restart 10 years later when I saw an opportunity to visit Mexico as part of my MBA program. I found a student on campus who was willing to teach for two hours a week, and after about six months I was ready to get lost in Monterrey. I felt quite proud of my fearlessness to display my linguistic ignorance and left Mexico inspired to continue on my own.

Over the years I have had innumerable classes in which I have met an endless stream of people from varying backgrounds. Each were like me, struggling to find something to do that was new, interesting and completely unrelated to their daily lives.

Thanks to my interest in the language I can now read novels and watch films in Spanish as a hobby. I still have regular classes but they are are more conversational than strict lessons on grammar.

The question I keep asking myself is how has this has really helped me on a daily basis. There were the friendships, the better understanding of new cultures and their points of view, the relaxation of immersing myself in a different frame of mind but there was something else that was lingering in my subconscious mind that I couldn’t pinpoint until recently.

Spanish has undoubtedly helped me with my English. Not with vocabulary nor grammar as you may think. Speaking with a limited pool of words forces you to be more creative with your expression while also being more concise. This has helped me immeasurably in my home and work life. The skill was especially put to good use when writing my book. It has improved my interpretation of body language as so often many misunderstood words can be pieced together with a motion or tilt of the head. It has also made me more fearless in asking for clarifications and improved my subtle tenacity in asking for what I want.

My second language has opened many new windows in my life and this has been a good thing. I highly recommend learning another language and am now learning Portuguese to prove that I practice what I preach.

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Posted in Everything Else

Posted by: Peter | September 1, 2009

Using Skype for Personal Spanish Lessons with a Private Tutor

I have found that Spanish has made travel more feasible and enjoyable. The knowledge has greatly increased the number of holiday destinations which I can visit without fear of being lost. Travel, not just for recreation but business and education too. I have worked and studied in both European and Latin American countries because of this ability. As you can see there are very tangible benefits that include improving your employment potential, improving your chances of being accepted into college or graduate school and expanding your opportunities to study abroad.

Spanish has expanded my global understanding significantly. I can view the world from a different perspective and recognize the world’s perspective of me, my community and country. Surprisingly, it has helped me understand myself and culture in unexpected ways. Explaining the nuances between the various English speaking Caribbean islands can be challenging enough in my native tongue, and in Spanish, it is even more apparent, and yet equally enjoyable. I now have a greater appreciation of international literature, music, and film and use every reasonable opportunity to learn even more.

I am certain that it has also improved my English skills, but I am not sure how, and finally it has also allowed me to make make many lifelong friends.

So as you can see Spanish is an important part of my life, but my busy schedule often makes it difficult for me to practice. Sadly in my case love isn’t good enough and I need regular sessions to remind you to practice.

Yes practice is the most important thing about learning a language and doing it often is best. Reading provides the vocabulary and grammar, but writing, listening and speaking provides the fluency. They provide the fleetness of the mind which is so necessary in conversation.

I continue to have regular classes. I chat with a Latin friend of mine every Sunday, and on other days I have regular classes provided by a personal Spanish tutor at PersonalSpanish.net, an online school based in Nicaragua. The prices are reasonable and the tutors have been professional. I found them by accident after searching through Craigslist for private Spanish tutors in my area. Most were charging between $30 and $40 per hour which is quite expensive, so I began looking for online courses that were cheaper. I soon realized that the people with the most flexible schedules were those not in my timezone, and the cheapest ones were based outside the USA. So I took a chance and have been pleasantly surprised. In reality I just chat with my tutor, as my fluency is quite good, but I have seen some of the course materials and they are good. Depending on the number of sessions you want, prices vary from $12 to $7 per class.

We are now planning the next family vacation to Central America with our excess airline miles. We started this trend in 2007 with a very enjoyable trip to central Mexico and we are all looking forward to the next visit to the region. Maybe we’ll even stop in Nicaragua on the way.