Chris also introduced us (I’m wiping the dust off of what little I know/remember) to the suite of development tools that we will be using for the start of the deep dive on Wednesday, git commands and some other relevant scripting commands. I was just able to follow the barest thread of what he was doing. I understood conceptually, but I have no experience with the details/specifics–a condition I am trying to remedy today and tomorrow.

BUT when I went to setup my MacBook, I realized that the fact that my Tiger OS is no longer supported was going to be a significant barrier to doing development on that machine. We are going to hack on an old Firefox bug. None of the tools support Tiger at this point. So Chris got a server online at Seneca (College) where I could work remotely. However, when I got home, I remembered that I had a netbook for which I was ready to do an install of an Ubuntu stack called Easypeasy. Got Easypeasy installed, but then could not get the new OS to talk to the wireless–likely a driver issue, and that was as far as I got. By that point it was nearly 10PM and I was thrashed. So I’m up early today (Wednesday) and I’m hoping to be working on my environment this morning. I’m going to cart my new Linux machine with me to see if I can find a gearhead at the CSI (Center for Innovation) to get me talking to the internets. : ))

What followed was fascinating, not the least of which because Chris seemed to be answering all questions that I have been wondering about since I became involved in Open Source. He discussed the range and distinctions between OS licences (of which there are over a hundred approved by the Open Source Initiative)by marking out the ends and the middle of the spectrum.

Chris then went on to lay out the time line of events that led up to and included Open Source in far greater detail than I had previously ever seen it done. When he was finished, he brought up the issue of CS academic programs recently having problems recruiting and retaining new students and that one explanation for this seemed to be because the current crop of new undergraduates are the first to have no experience with programmable devices, computers with command lines having disappeared nearly 20 years ago. He then went on to talk about raspberrypi, an effort from the UK to develop an inexpensive ($25) programmable device that would bring back that ability to tinker in a computing device that inspired the current CS establishment some two and three and four decades ago.

All in all, a fascinating day.

My father’s name was Harvey Marsden Shein, and in hindsight he was as geeky a dad as one could imagine. As an undergraduate he studied Philosophy and Mathematics at Cornell. In the military he was assigned to be a JAG. When he was discharged, his first job was doing work on nuclear physics at Bell Labs. But what was perhaps most unusual for a man of his considerable talents was his personal interest in other people. He loved people, to talk to them and hear their stories. He paid attention. My mother, Elva, likes to tell the story of the evening she decided that he was “the one.” They were on a date in downtown Boston, walking on their way to an eatery where they had a reservation. Suddenly my father noticed something, stopped and taking my mother’s hand asked her to follow him across the street. Looking up and down the street in a confused manner stood an old woman in a housecoat with a scarf tied around her hair. My father asked her if she needed help. She responded that she could not find her way home. After a few moments he was able to determine that she was indeed lost and was able to get the phone number for a relative from her. He then led her through the revolving door of Copley Plaza—much to the raised eyebrows of the doorman there—called her relative and waited with her until they arrived to pick her up. This was typical dad. Utterly capable in some ways, utterly not in others.

Being an extraordinary listener, my father had all kinds of friends and acquaintances. I suppose that figured into why he decided to become a psychiatrist—despite the fact that psychiatrists in the 1960′s really were able to do fuck-all for their patients beyond house, restrain, sedate and electroshock them. But I like to think that he was good with the rather poor tools available to him. My dad worked very hard, and was really quite driven. When he passed away suddenly from hepatitis in 1974, he was an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, and Director of Residency at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. On top of that he founded and ran his own neuroscience lab in a basement of one of the buildings at McLean, and he saw a full load of patients at the hospital. So when we had one-on-one time together, it was a big deal.

Like many brilliant folks, my dad was really horrible at doing anything manual. He could cook nothing beyond boiling an egg or making a tuna-fish sandwich. It was many years later that I realized why restaurants figured so large in our family time. Because he could cook nothing, he knew all the best places to eat in Boston: Elsie’s Delicatessen in Harvard Square, Simeone’s Italian-American Restaurant in Central Square, and Ken’s Restaurant in Cooper Square—to name a few.

Likewise my father could do little more mechanically than screw in a light bulb–I have no idea how he managed in his lab. So when we were together, instead of fixing a car or building a go kart, we would talk about “ideas,” about science and philosophy. So from an early age, I became familiar with concepts and ideas that were utterly alien to my peers: inertia, parthogenesis, apogee and perigee, metallic bonding, protons, antimatter, black holes, displacement, and philology. These were my father’s mental toys and tools, and as a young boy, they became mine as well.

I was eleven years old when my father died. It was in July, and unbeknownst to me, I was mere weeks away from puberty. After the initial shock I was profoundly sad and lonely for the better part of the next decade. There was simply no one who could step in and fill the void my father left—in no small part because what my father and I had had together really was rare and special. My school grades were poor that year, and I had little interest in school or much else. I spent every dime on candy, and to my mother’s horror, racked up thirteen cavities at my next dental visit.

But as sad as I was, I did, however, continue to go to Boy Scouts. In the spring of the following year, our Boy Scout Council had a guest speaker come and do a show for us—a nationally syndicated science-education performer whose stage name was Mister Wizard, (Don Herbert). Mr Wizard had been quite popular in the 1950′s, had had a national television show for fourteen years, and had been hired by the Council to be the guest speaker at the Boy Scout Banquet.

I remember the show was great fun: Mister Wizard did not disappoint, and I was utterly enraptured. Standing on stage Mister Wizard began showing me the things my father and I had only talked about. I remember crackling VanDeGraaf generators, objects seeming to roll uphill, and demonstrations of electromagnets and magnetism. The entertainer went smoothly from one demonstration to another explaining the science behind each spectacle. Then at one point Mister Wizard revealed what looked like an overlarge hair-blower pointed at the ceiling. He turned it on, and produced a large rubber ball from a box on stage. Carefully, the science-man held the ball above the stream of air, and let it go. Instead of blowing away or falling to the stage, the ball hung there in midair, quiveringly defying gravity. The hall full of boys “ooohed” and “ahhed” at the sight of it.

As the ball hung there, Mister Wizard turned and addressed us: “Does anyone know why this ball is hanging there in the air?”

For a moment the audience was silent, but I knew the answer.

As if unbidden, I found myself on my feet wildly waving my hands in the air. My friends sitting in our row of wooden fold-up chairs looked at me like I had lost my mind. I think someone–an adult even– told me to sit down.

“Bernouli’s Principle!” I shouted at him.

His head jerked around to look at me, his expression thunderstruck. The room was silent except for the whirr of the blower.

Hesitating as if he had been struck by a fish instead of an answer, he finally replied, “You’re right.”

A second later he asked, “How did you know that?”

“My father taught me,” I replied–I had asked my father once how airplane wings worked, and my dad’s explanation had included Bernouli’s Principles.

“Is he here?” he asked.

Not sure what to say, I said, “No, he’s not around.” I may have had tears on my cheeks at that moment.

“Well, I’ve been posing that question to audiences for fifteen years, and you are the first person to answer it. Your father must be a remarkable man.”

“I think so sir.” I said.

“Do you think you can explain Bernouli’s Principle to us?” he asked.

“Basically the movement of the air around the ball creates vortices that push it from behind and counteract some of the force applied to its face.”

“That’s right! The air forms little whirlpools that hold it aloft. Fifteen years I’ve been asking that question, and no one has ever answered it before. Audience let’s have a round of applause for—what’s your name son?”

“David Shein!” I replied.

“Let’s hear it for David Shein!” he said, and the auditorium full of uniformed and badged boys applauded, me. It was both a weird and very good feeling.

For boys in the 1960′s and 70′s, science was still an interest reserved for nerds and egg-heads. Geeks were not cool—they were targets for derision and abuse.  In this climate I had always been instinctively cagey about sharing what I learned from my dad because very few of my friends could relate at all. When my father died, I felt like a complete weirdo, and I often wished that we could have had more “normal” conversations, like about football, or fishing, or girls. After his death, I had no one to talk about “ideas” with anymore. No one seemed to understand or care about the very things that had been at the center of my relationship with my father. So Mister Wizard was a big deal for me. That little acknowledgment, that round of applause, in the banquet hall of Temple BethEl made my father and our mutual interest in science, cool—not weirdos or geeks, but cool. And though I was still profoundly sad and lonely, at least I knew then that we were not weird.

Among the many differences between working in the OS community and environment and working in a traditional commercial software environment, perhaps the most fundamental, important, and complex difference is how IP is treated and managed.  Anyone who has spent time looking at a FOSS or Open Source license such as the GPL knows how differently IP is regarded in this setting–indeed these differences form the basis upon which the entire collaborative social model of the Open Source Community is based.

At a glance the Obama STEM Videogame Challenge would seem to be a perfect fit for students laboring in this course, and the prizes offered by the Challenge are substantial: $25K-$50k.  Our students are working to produce educational humanitarian software for students in need.  Some Challenge categories are almost identically delineated.  In one categore the Challenge even specifies that math oriented educational software should target students in the K-4th grade range–most of our students are producing educational software to fit a 4th grade math curriculum.

There is even an award category for students working in groups of four–which is most common sized working group in the source.

The problem that arises, however, is that we have already asked our students to jump onto pre-existing projects.  We did this in the hope of “clearing the decks” so to speak, to in effect give the thumbs-up or down to unfinished projects that had been created by prior groups of students in the course.  In fact most of the projects originated in the course’s three prior sessions are unfinished.  For a course using a traditional copyright IP model, older projects like this would be utterly dead, unless the originators had stuck with them and ushered them to completion on their own time.  But in the OS world, this need not be the case at all.  To have any chance of success at all in the OS community a software project must be at the very least both public and well documented.  Why?  Because everyone in the community, or almost everyone, is a volunteer whose only pay is the chance to work on something they find engaging and exciting.  Proprietary secrets are neither.  All of the pre-existing projects created for this course were managed with the idea that the project might be worked on, or indeed completed, by people other than its originators.  The bar for documentation, both within and without the code itself, has been set high, and has in most cases been met.  These projects have been designed to be picked up by others–that is the Open Source way.

But if a group of four of our students work on a pre-existing project, that was itself created by a different four students, was that software then created by a group of four students, or eight?  Suppose our students work on a new project, the concept for which was called for by a representative in the distribution field.  Does that person constitute a fifth person in the group?  Will the STEM Challenge allow entries with Open Source licenses?  If so which kinds?

According to our schedule, my students are supposed to make their final software project decisions tomorrow and start preliminary planning this weekend.  The course’s creator, Professor Stephen Jacobs, has written to STEM requesting clarification on these issues, but we have no idea when we will receive a response.  In the meantime the class and I now have a fascinating discussion ahead of us as to the exact nature of OS IP–with very real-world consequences–or should I say “Fabulous Prizes?!!”  I’m not sure yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

Problem #1 I needed an engineer to sign off on my design and certify that the structure will indeed add energy to my house.

Problem #2 A couple more chickens showed up, and I realized that I would need a larger coop.

Problem #3 I’ve always wanted a shed to hold my mower and garden tools and shit.  The greenhouse would have just taunted me.

A fourth reason to do the coop in lieu of greenhouse is that I realized that I had never framed a new structure.  I’ve done a LOT of carpentry, including building new walls and rooms in my house.   Okay, forget I said that.   “Uh, no I haven’t Mr. City of Rochester.”

At any rate I felt as though I needed a dry run to develop these skills before I actually add to my house itself.  Ergo: Coop 2.0., or perhaps more accurately, CoopShed I.  I’m all about freedom, if you can’t tell by now.  So I started work on CoopShed 1.o so that I could fuck up aspects of it with relative impunity.  I mean how much are the chix and the shovels going to bitch if the studs are not strictly plumb.

So I started this in the end of July, planning to use entirely recycled lumber.  Then, realizing that I would need to work on my foundational skills for the greenhouse, so I did footings for CoopShed.  Yes, footings for a coop.  Overkill perhaps (ya think?!), but now I know how they work, and I can do them perfectly for the greenhouse next summer.

CoopShed. is about 8′ by 5′ overall dimensions.  The human entrance is on one of the short walls–a 36″ door.  That leads to a storage room 5′ by 4′ deep in which I will store my tools, lawnmower, and food for the chix.  From this room I will also get access to the nesting boxes of the chix in the other half of the CoopShed.  So I will be able to feed them and collect eggs from this room.

One other facet of this design that I should mention is that most of the south facing wall will be windows, and so the shed will have considerable solar heat gain.  I am hoping that it will stay relatively balmy most of the winter.  This will both make the chicken happy and make it less likely that their water will freeze.   I could run the calculations to see how well the shed will do, but part of me likes the idea of not knowing, and I want to just see how it does as is.  My chix did just fine last winter, and CoopShed will be–at the very least–warmer.

I suppose also that I should backtrack a bit and mention a second important reason why I needed to build this new coop.  Coop 1.0, which I built in June of 2009, is a tractor coop.  Wonderful invention, the tractor coop.  You never need to clean up the bottom of it because it has no bottom.  You just move it around the yard and let the chix poop on the ground and eat the grass.  The problem with the tractor coop is that–speaking from experience now–it is clearly a snow-free design.  When there is a foot or two of snow on the ground, and one has to dig out the feed, and break the crust off the water dish, one thinks: “This is not fun (i.e. it SUCKS!)  Why would one build a coop like this?”  The answer, I discovered, was that I found the basic design on the internet–where it is summer all year ’round.

So, a little older and wiser, I am now building CoopShed.  Which will hold five chickens, with perhaps capacity for a couple more, and which will be the answer to all of my chicken keeping dreams.  At any rate I’ll let ya know how it goes.

So as you can see I have the framing nearly done.  I have to do the floor.  I have no idea which is commonly done in what order.  I did my walls first, and I am putting up the roof joists now.  When I get those done, I will do the floor.

I’ve found that it is immensely satisfying to build a stand-alone structure by one’s self.  Immensely.  Here you have this place; that you have made; that you could take shelter in with your chickens–should the apocalypse arrive.  Of course you would be roasted alive with your fowl.  But the idea that here is a place you could sleep at night–that you made!  For me that feels like a big deal.  If the apocalypse does come and I’m out in some national forest with my family trying to figure out how to survive at least I have some idea of how to make a shack that we could all survive in.

Should I really be thinking about this?  I think a lot of people are thinking about this.

Here I go, about to dive into the significance of my chicken coop, coopdeconstruction as it were.  The long and short of it is that I don’t want things in my life that bear little or no responsibility to me.  What the heck does that mean?  It means I don’t want stuff that I can’t fix or that I don’t have a significant relationship to.  That’s kind of a weird to say.  Having a relationship with stuff.  For me that means if I didn’t make it, I understand it well enough that I can fix it or possibly alter it to suit my uses if I wanted to.  So what’s wrong with things one can’t alter or fix?  Well nothing, if they never break, or if they perfectly suit your needs.  But what happens when I rely on something that I don’t have a significant relationship with?  Well, what happens when you rely on a total stranger?  Answer: anything.  The most common descriptor for technology that you cannot fix or alter is “black box” technology, and black-box-tech is bad mojo–especially if you have come to rely on it.   The ink printer that clogs, the extortionist cell phone plan, copy protection schemes, the legal system, all of these are things that attempt to reduce or exclude your direct participation, and yet they are things that in many cases we find ourselves utterly reliant upon.  Have you heard this line: “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, you suffer.”  It’s the same peril that one undergoes when relying on a stranger.  You might get lucky and be just fine, but more likely the stranger’s desires will be divergent from yours and you will find yourself powerless in an untenable situation.

I’m quite weary of that.

My chickens, my coop, my desire to know how to build and/or fix all things that significantly affect my life–this, this is my expression of freedom, no, my assertion of freedom.  For all of the black box manipulations from which our culture is made: to the fake food, to better living through chemistry, to prescription drugs, to BPA’s, to commercial software with secret source code, I say, “Fuck off!”  These are merely high-tech modalities of what is essentially tyranny, and I will not cotton to these narcissistic manipulations anymore.

If you need me, I’ll be outside working on my coop.

Resentful of these gits who try to pawn little tech “secrets” online,  instead I Googled: “Revive Nicad Batteries.” “Voom!” I find a bunch of how-to’s.

The best appears to be this one on You Tube: 

This fellow uses an arc welder to do the job, which seems like a bit of overkill to me.  The one caveat about the video is that he does not specify how many amps he uses. If you do use an arc welder, I would keep the amps very low.  But it’s academic to me, since I sold my arc-welder a few years ago.  Instead I have a trusty 12 volt automotive battery charger that should do the job.  I find the polarity of the terminals on the battery, throw on some goggles and insulated gloves, fire up the charger and a few sparky taps later plug the formerly dead battery into the drill and “VROOM!”  Not only does it work, but the battery drives the drill as when it was new.

Then I remember that I still had the drill which had been replaced by the Ridgid–a nearly 18-year-old Skil “Warrior” (9.6 volts). It was still on my tool shelf, both rechargeable batteries long dead.  “Worth a shot,” I thought.  Hooked a battery up to my auto battery charger, spark, spark, spark.  Plugged it into the drill and “VROOM!”  It works again.  I had not run this drill for at least five years.  I now have two fully functional cordless power drills, each with two rechargeable batteries.  I am beside myself with glee.

The science behind this is apparently fairly straightforward.  Cadmium crystals, called “dendrites,” build up on the surface of the plates inside the battery and stifle the flow of current.  An electrical surge apparently really does cause the crystals to be shaken loose.

We use a ton of rechargeable batteries in our house, and they seem to get weak after about six months to a year of use.  I’m going to start zapping ours with the auto battery charger.  I’m a little sick about the rechargeable ni-cad batteries and devices I’ve tossed over the years.

I now have two power drills.  Bliss!

The new makes me anxious.  Specifically new things, even more specifically–physically big new things.  I do not trust the new as I do the old.  Intellectually I’m extremely progressive, but in the physical realm I generally find wisdom in the way things have been done, not in the ways that some ad agency would have me do them.  Our kitchen stove is a 1928 Barstow that I bought disassembled at a yard sale and put back together.  It’s made of enameled steel and cast iron; it’s on legs.  As seductive as new things can be,  I’ve found that I regret it every time I forget my conservative judgment and buy junk, or what is later revealed to be junk.  I want things that last; that I can fix myself, things that are worth fixing–a high bar for “new” in this country.

My fiberglass door meets the bar.  Part of me wonders what I should do with the old door.  Chestnut is like oak-lite; though it looks like oak, it lacks oak’s strength.  Chestnut is splintery, and weak–at least 103 year old chestnut is.  I cannot recycle the wood in the door to any useful purpose.  It does not carve well, nor is it structurally useful.  So I could burn it in the fire pit in the back yard–hopefully there is not much or any lead in the paint.  Seems like an undignified end for a centennial fixture.

All of the doors and all of the baseboards and trim in this house are made of chestnut.  In 1907 chestnut trees were cheap because they were all dying:

“Infection of Asian chestnut trees with the chestnut blight fungus was discovered on Long Island in 1904. The blight appears to have been introduced from either China or Japan.^{[citation needed]} Japanese and some Chinese chestnut trees show some resistance to infection by C. parasitica: they may be infected, but the fungus does not usually kill them. Within 40 years the near-4 billion-strong American chestnut population in Northern America was devastated^[2] ” –Wikipedia “Chestnut Blight”

My mother recently gave me the dining room set that had belonged to my great grandparents, purchased in the first decade of the 20th Century.  I had thought they were oak, but no, they are chestnut too.  Chestnut looks a lot like oak but it is lighter weight and has broad cross-grain inclusions that show up in quarter-sawn pieces.  My wife’s sideboard, given to her by her mother–chestnut as well.  My favorite chair, nicknamed “The Electric Chair,” is also chestnut.  I love these venerable objects, for their own beauty, for their connection to history, for their service in my life.  I will mourn the door a little.

So the chestnut door goes to the dump.  That rickety, noisy, old door is replaced by the new, by the solid, by the quiet, by the superior.  It is a door that I can imagine lasting for the next hundred years.  One that I can fix if need be.

1.  A concise description of the project/goals you are trying to accomplish.

2.  A description of the specific nature of how you are stuck.

3.  How long you have been working on the project, how often, and how much time you plan to dedicate to it ongoing.  (this information is included to help the potential helpers decide whether to help you.

4.  How you can be contacted, email, IRC (including when you are reachable, with time zone).

5.  What else?

Now having said that, I am making progress in communication, which is after all the point.  Got my Wiki started; got my blog here connected to the POSSE planet.  So I’m stylin’ in a manner of speaking.  Basically I’m getting the communications end going, but not so much the packaging/code pipeline stuff.  I understand the latter in abstract, but I’m not anything like close to feeling like I can manage the actual operations.

To make matters worse I had to leave POSSE early to get my kids home from school, so I’m now looking at new deliverables for this evening which all involve packaging.  The only “non-coding” option seems to be to make a Fedora remix–again something which I understand in abstract, but which I lack depth of understanding to execute.  So, I’m going to try to go as far as I can, following the instructions I have, and put this post up on the planet with the hope that some kind soul can offer me some answers to the following questions:

Okay, thanks to Gary in POSSE, I know understand that I don’t have to create the remix solo, but merely have to select one of the projects that I’d like to work on and write about it here.  Easy enough.  PHEW!  See now my Open Source communications links are working.  I hooked up with Gary on the Teachingopensource channel on IRC.  WOOT!

So now my thought is to stick with the Fedora Remix so that I can see how the various elements of an operating system work together.  I have no clear idea which elements are core/essential and which others might be considered optional.  I have never thought of an OS in terms of components.  I am in fact still wrapping my head around the day to day of working with software that is not based on magic, black boxes.  I do not think this way about automobiles or just about anything else.  Everywhere else in my life I pop the hood and apply common sense.  I fix just about everything in my life from cars and motorcycles, to masonry (building & repointing brick & stone) and sewing (fixing shirts, making sails for my RC boats), I pride myself on being able to at least know how to fix just about everything.  I never thought I’d ever consider this approach to computing.  It’s been just too daunting.  Too large a knowledge base to learn, too frustrating to just hack around in. I wrote HTML web pages for awhile and tried to maintain a concurrent database back end, but I loathed the work because I felt like I was working in an utter vacuum.  When I was stuck, I was really stuck.  I had no one to ask for help, or to answer my questions.

So this is different.

I still do not like the feeling of being stuck, but that is ameliorated somewhat by the less unpleasant feeling of going to ask for help.  It is no small irony that I take comfort in the existence of the latter unpleasantness.  Access to expertise, to help, makes me think–for the first time–that I could actually get into working with software “under the hood.”

It’s a weird feeling.  It’s as if I’ve been told that I could talk to trees if I wanted to.