Get your own Free Home PageThursday, May 23, 2002 12:43:21 AM At the BALUG meeting this week Jim Hickstein gave a presentation on IMAP versus POP3 and what his company is doing to satisfy a niche market. Jim's company, IMAP Partners, caters to a knowledgeable, self-sufficient clientele, one which most internet service providers (ISPs) would classify as "troublemakers." Most ISPs provide a POP3 service for subscribers, through which mail can be received. Mail user agents (MUAs) have an option not to delete mail as it is downloaded from the ISP server, but the general model is for an MUA to get in, get mail, and get out as quickly as possible. If the mail has not been deleted, then the MUA will download the mail again on the next login. There is no accounting method to tell what has been read and not downloaded, and the MUA typically must download entire messages. One primary objective of the ISP is to keep the responsibility of disk storage on the client instead of the provider. Contrast this model with IMAP, where serializing information is included with the mail stored on the server, and where multiple accesses of the mail can be made by multiple clients on multiple computers. Clients in this case may be different users (real people) using different MUAs, or they may be one user using different MUAs. The typical single-user model is a traveler who is in sales or in sales engineering. The user may be connecting to the ISP with a laptop computer, a hand-held device, or a desktop, and may use all three in different contexts. To a user like this, the idea that the mail will be downloaded onto one of these devices and will become inaccessible to the others may be unattractive. An IMAP server can keep the mail on the server and just note that it has been read, waiting for a command from any MUA to delete the original file. MUAs can, instead of ordering the server to delete the mail, download all or even part (as defined primarily by MIME parts), of the mail for further reference. The download is a nondestructive copy, so the other MUAs can still read any or all of the mail. Jim's company provides mail hosting services, including IMAP and storage of mail on the server. Jim expects customers to be able to manage their own mail domains, and therefore provides minimal, if any, support to them. The servers are mail server appliances designed and sold by Mirapoint. The servers are truly intended to be appliances, with no consideration of the operating system, with pure drop-in compatible, plug-and-play installation. To me this is a novel concept, and a real niche strategy. Footnote: In the interest of reliability, Jim is currently looking for companies outside the U.S. who are willing to provide a secondary server for his DNS domain.
Wednesday, May 22, 2002 10:14:03 PM Quote of the day, as seen in Dave Touretzky's pages: As long as I am mayor of this city [Jersey City, New Jersey] the great industries are secure. We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, That man is a Red, that man is a Communist. You never hear a real American talk like that. -- Frank "I am the law" Hague (1896-1956)
Monday, May 13, 2002 11:13:10 PM Cisco turned a profit this quarter. Cisco turned a profit last quarter! Cisco is turning better year-to-date revenue than it did two years ago! What does this mean? Cisco is a big company. It means businesses are buying more routers and switches than they did two years ago. It means that there is a lot of spending on internet infrastructure equipment. That's in addition to all the second-hand gear liquidated through eBay. Routers and switches are used to hook up servers, firewalls, and internal networks. What does that mean to us? There is a lot of new equipment going into businesses, probably large businesses, and it all has to be installed and maintained. That means there is tremendous hidden pressure building up right now to hire system and network administrators. Expect to see an increase in job postings any day now! If you ask the right people, maybe you can get into one of those jobs before it's posted!
Sunday, May 12, 2002 2:51:02 AM Did you know that 80% of all programmers in the United States are white men? In the May issue of The Commonwealth is a transcript of a panel discussion on "Women in Computing" held on January 29 this year. In it, Jane Margolis described her longitudinal study of the social and academic challenges to bringing diversity to the computer science curriculum at Carnegie Mellon University from 1995 to 1999. While organizations like the IEEE have traditionally blamed the scarcity of female and minority computer professionals on deficiencies in elementary and secondary education, the study found that even women who entered the program were encouraged by differences in their social orientation, by the attitudes of the professors, and by the structure of the curriculum, to quit computer science and to seek satisfaction elsewhere. This should be an eye-opener for academic institutions, and a call to disseminate information on the mechanisms of adult learning. Not only do instructors at college-level institutions need to understand diversity, they also need to make a concerted effort to reach their students in ways the students can appreciate. In order for this to happen, the instructors also need to appreciate their students. I'm not talking about smiling at each student and telling him or her you're glad to see them in the classroom or the laboratory. I'm talking about learning what motivates each student, understanding the learning style of each student, and changing your course to match. I'm talking about tailoring the course to the student, instead of expecting the student to cope with the course. That is the new direction that Carnegie Mellon University took, and it would be a good direction for colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay Area. After all, the Bay Area has one of the most diverse populations in the world, and the State of California supports the tenet that every resident has a right to pursue a higher education. Technology industries, the largest industries in America, have a strong presence in the Bay Area, and a strong stake (believe it or not) in educating the local population. Yet Carnegie Mellon is moving into the Bay Area to fill a perceived market niche opportunity in computer science! Surprise, surprise! I recently took a look at students' comments about their instructors and courses on teacherreviews.com. I was interested in students' opinions on the City College of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, and the University of San Francisco. The site does a very interesting thing -- it gives each school a grade. Here, then, are some grades: Carnegie Mellon University A- University of California, Santa Cruz B+ City College of San Francisco B University of San Francisco B University of California, Berkeley B San Francisco State University B- Stanford University B- What is going on here? The site, of course, is not about academic excellence. It is about customer satisfaction. Now, I am pretty satisfied with all the schools on the list, but it appears that the students in the Bay Area are a little less satisfied than I. Why do you suppose the students at Carnegie Mellon are more satisfied? My guess is we're looking at the Westinghouse Effect. Management and psychology students the world over are taught the story of the Westinghouse study. The company wanted to know what level of lighting would yield optimum production. The researchers increased the light level, and production went up. The researchers lowered the light level, and production went up again! It turned out the reason production kept going up was not the light level, it was the perception of the employees that management was interested in them! Yes, it's a well-known fact that the primary factor for success in any endeavor, commercial or academic, is interest! And there are two primary factors that will spark interest in students. First, the instructor has to be interested in the subject. Second, the instructor has to be interested in the students. In sales, this is a natural for establishing rapport, and every salesperson knows that rapport is the key to making a sale. "Oh," an instructor might say. "I am not a salesperson. I am an academic. My role is simply to present the information." Actually, the instructor is a salesperson. It doesn't matter whether the material in the course is basic or advanced. It doesn't matter whether the instructor hands out a lot of tough homework assignments or lets students skate through for an easy A. Some students will shout "yay" and other students will shout "boo," regardless of the strategy. But when the instructor achieves rapport with the students, and the students trust the instructor and know the instructor is interested in their success, they will go to the ends of the earth to please that instructor. And they will find the material fascinating. And they will succeed. It is a universal obligation of postsecondary educators to get off their duffs, to learn how people learn, and to sell their subjects. That is their responsibility to their schools, to their states, and to their industries. When we fascinate each student with the subjects that fascinate us, when we encourage every student to succeed, not only through our words but also through our deeds, when we understand our students and they understand us, we will never have to worry about our jobs moving overseas, we will never have to worry about a decline in our standard of living, we will never have to worry about enrollment levels. So get with it! Don't stand around telling the next generation they are the hope of the nation. Our teachers told that to us! We are the hope of the nation! Do it now!
Thursday, May 09, 2002 1:35:16 AM As I took my class through a full day of training in vi, the visual editor for Unix, an article from the past rang in my head. "You are making Unix too complicated for the average user," the journalist said. "Average users are being scared away by the obscure nonsense you teach, like vi." I thought about this. There are other text editors available for Unix and Linux. ed is on all Unix systems, but it's even more arcane than vi. emacs is a little friendlier, but you have to download it from the web to get it on some systems. pico is nice, but just try to find it. Sun has textedit, the MIT X project wrote xedit, and there are various editors on Linux like Kedit, Kwrite, and Kword. But all of these require the X Window System to be installed and running before they can even display a file. If you're trying to install Linux on an arbitrary piece of hardware that just emerged from a dusty closet, you know your chances of getting the X Window System running on the first try are about nil. And if you are working with a "server" that is just a little 4u drawer in a cabinet full of the things, there's nothing to display the X Window System interface on there, either. If you're sitting in an operations center in San Jose, and you've telephoned an enterprise system in New Zealand, and you're waiting for a hardware tech "out there" to actually get the 2400 bps modem on the enterprise system working so you can get a login prompt across the Pacific Ocean, then a window is something you stare out of while you sip your coffee. Mouse? Don't make me laugh! So, my class of system administrators is not a group of average business users. They're headed back to the IT glass houses as soon as they graduate, and they need to know vi. I'll take a day to show them how it works. But wait, there's another group of people that are traditionally taught vi. Web developers. "Ha!" I thought, as I started designing the course. "They'll be developing with tools like FrontPage, Robohelp, and DreamWeaver. They won't need vi. They can just write their pages on the Macintosh and use ftp, the file transfer protocol, to put them up on their servers." Then I looked at the entire web developer curriculum and got the big picture. I saw what they would tackle before they graduated. They'd be writing scripts in Perl. They'd be writing Java server pages. Oops. My personal experience with development for a remote server, or a server that's different from the little box sitting on my desk, is that it's best done out there, on the remote server. And the usual interface isn't an X Window System, in spite of all the marketing efforts of Hummingbird, MicroImages, and the like. The main drawback of having a full X Window System interface is one of speed. The huge data rate needed to support it is well beyond that 2400 bps phone connection to New Zealand. So, it looks like my class of web developers is going to need vi, too. Oh, maybe I forgot something when I took that journalist's chastisement to heart. My students are anything but "average users." They are technical staff, using technical power tools. And in the final analysis, we find that vi is a power tool. That 12-speed gear shift on an 18-wheeler is a bit much for the average driver, too.
Saturday, May 04, 2002 1:14:06 PM It's time to welcome eight new students to the SFSU CEL Unix/C/C++ Programming Certificate program. These students have chosen to take an intensive program over the next eight weeks, adding to their skills in ways they otherwise would not be able to over the next few years. To some, it may appear to be a high-risk proposition, as the last two years have not been kind to high-tech industries. Of course, the most spectacular news of the week has been the announcement of a 6% unemployment rate in April for the U.S. This rate, "the worst since August 1994," was aggravated by "a big jump in the number of people (565,000) looking for work" as the economy actually increased by 43,000 jobs! In a well-written, balanced article, Sam Zuckerman of the S.F. Chronicle tells us that these people are most likely drawn back into the labor force by improving conditions, who may have left to go to school or to travel. Students at S.F. State are probably less concerned with current job conditions than with future conditions, and Sam points out that "temporary employment added 66,000 jobs during April. ... renewed growth in temporary jobs signals that employers need more hands, but aren't yet confident enough to take on permanent workers." This could be good news for current students, who will have another two months to watch the shifts in business trends. Alumni, especially recent graduates, can take heart in knowing that hiring has turned the corner in some companies, that there are more inquiries than we have seen in the past several years, and that recent graduates are reporting that they have been hired! We have the recent case of Addamark, who is hiring and expanding, and who moved into the Multimedia Gulch even as other dot-coms were heading for the hills. To put things in perspective, I looked back on my own resume to see what I was doing in August, 1994. It turns out I was working as an agency temporary employee, completely out of contract, in technical support at Silicon Graphics. At the time the company was growing at a healthy rate, with all the usual growing pains, and there was not a single comment in the press looking upon a 6% unemployment rate as anything to wring our hands over. At the same time I was working a moonlight contract with Accuray, providing a simple and reliable data backup regime while they searched for a qualified Unix system administrator. My career has continued to grow since then, through small companies and large, with very few gaps in employment. Let's turn our attention to some other economic indicators to get a better idea where we're going. The Business Week figures of the week for May 13 show a "strong gain" in the production index for the week ending April 20th. (In case you're wondering about the May 13 date, Business Week postdates its magazines. I already have mine; you'll be able to pick up one at Safeway next Friday.) In this week's Business Outlook column, the magazine notes that capital spending on IT infrastructure is on the rise again, that general business purchasing is holding ground in positive territory, and that employees' compensation is increasing at an accelerating pace. All of these indicators point to good times ahead and today. As the economy picks up, what assurance do the students at the SFSU CEL have that they are studying the right discipline? What makes Unix/C/C++ programming more promising than accounting, or even bartending? Business Week has an indicator for that, too. In the May 6 issue they listed the 2002 entry-level salary offers for various college degrees: DEGREE 2002 OFFER CHANGE FROM 2001 COMPUTER SCIENCE $50,352 -3.6% ENGINEERING $48,251 -2.0% ACCOUNTING $40,293 +3.2% BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION $35,209 -7.1% LIBERAL ARTS $28,667 -5.6% Data: National Association of Colleges & Employers In the traditional supply-versus-demand model of economics, this clearly indicates that computer science is the skill set most in demand today. I am sure that today's programming students will enjoy a better future.
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