Computer Literacy for Experts

The title sounds self-contradictory. An expert should be literate, so should not need Computer Literacy education, right? Perhaps you can help me come up with better terms.

In the sumer of 2008, I taught a course to a group of outstanding computer science students at ITESO, Guadalajara. The topics I covered included:

1. The tabbing and extensible browser Firefox. Extensions.
2. Google family of software, such as Gmail, Groups, Doc and Spreadsheet, PicasaWeb, Blogger, etc.
   
3. Server-side and Client-side web authoring.
4. Emacs.
5. Python programming.
6. Functional Programming.

These topics were selected to instantly empower the students. At the same time, they present fundamental concepts of:

1. extensible software such as Firefox and Emacs
2. client/server technology
3. publishing and collaboration
4. procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming

I called this special course Computer Literacy for Experts.

Make photos available at high resolution

Here is an amazing picture of 830 Anti-Ma rally. It is rather small at 400 x 243 and 48K. I wish a very high resolution version is available on the web, but I have not found one. With this entry, I am calling for photographers to make their high resolution pictures available by publishing albums using software such as PicasaWeb or PyAlbum.

Here are stamp-sized pictures from 809 Anti-Ma rally: http://albums.tomoro.net/Jerome/809/index4.html
At this thumbnail size, you cannot see much detail. Now, click on the third picture from the top row, and you get a low resolution picture at http://albums.tomoro.net/Jerome/809/html/IMG_1320.html. Do you recognize this celebrity at this resolution? Most don't. Finally, if you cilck on the lower half of this picture, you get the full resolution picture at http://albums.tomoro.net/Jerome/809/html/IMG_1320_f.html.
At this size: 3888x2592, 12.8MB, any Taiwanese will recognize her.

Don't email pictures, publish albums instead

To share more than one or two pictures, it is easier to publish an album than to use email. For publishing photo albums, I recommend Google's PicasaWeb, whose use requires no computer expertise and using which albums can be published in a matter of minutes by unsophisticated users. There are many highly usable album software that make it easy to automate album creation such as making it easy to annotate pictures, arrange them in different orders or hierarchies, etc. I have been using Python-based PyAlbum.

Since the amazing 830 Anti-Ma rally, I received tons of 830 pictures through emails. One batch was unreadable by most recipients because the pictures had been uuencoded and few knows what to do with them. I uudecoded the files and created a PicasaWeb album at http://picasaweb.google.com/lubyliao/830. For another 830 album created using PyAlbum, see http://albums.tomoro.net/Jerome/830.

Resetting/Changing Mac Password

Among the many computers that John owns is a MacBookPro that sits on his bookshelves gathering dust. "Why are you wasting such a beautiful piece of machinery?", I asked. John was embarrassed: "I forgot my password, tried so many different combinations, but none worked."

I searched google, found this article: Mac OS X Password Recovery | Elliot Lee and did the following as instructed:

1. reboot while pressing Cmd-S
2. type the following commands at prompt:
   

   /sbin/fsck -y
   /sbin/mount -uw /
   /sbin/SystemStarter

This unfortunately did not work. SystemStarter never returned on this Mac OS X 10.5.x machine and did not respond to ctl-C or ctl-Z. But it turned out that I could change John's password with just two commands:

/sbin/mount -uw /
/usr/bin/passwd john

Here, john was John's username.

What Price Computer Illiteracy?

When traveling, I frequently run into sub-optimally working computer systems that

1. waste people's time, day in and day out
2. are awfully under-utilized
   

A typical example is a computer with a powerful Intel Pentium 4 CPU, yet absolutely inadequate internal memory (such as 512 MB), or harddrive space (such as 20 GB). Another example: in a family of many computers, with a DSL conection, both wired and wreless Internet access and a very high-end HP network color printer, the printer was connected to a desktop computer using a USB port, instead of directly connected to the network and used as a network printer. Why? Because the owner or the installer did not know any better.

When I upgraded the Pentium 4 system to two Gigabytes of memory costing less than $45, the speed improvement was immediate. In the second scenario, when the printer was properly installed as a network printer and all household computers were set up once to use the printer, all compuers started to print conveniently to the network printer. The owners are left wondering how they had suffered for years from snail-like slow speed and from the great inconveniences with printing.

Why you should use Firefox

For two reasons:

1. It is a tabbing browser. Everybody should be using a tabbing browser, which enables one to display n web pages simultaneously using n tabs in one single browser window. In contrast, for a non-tabbing browser such as old IE, this opens up n browser windows cluttering your precious desktop space. This used to be reason enough to use Firefox, but no longer. Firefox makes it necessary for any browser to be a tabbing browser to survive in the market place.
2. The most important reason to use Firefox is that it is extensible. There are many extensions or add-ons that you can install on your copy of Firefox to add functionalities to it. For myself, all of my client computers run Firefox with different sets of add-ons installed. The intersection includes:
   
• Answers
• Clipmarks
  
• FEBE
  
• Firebug
• iMacros
  
• Live HTTP Header
• WebMail Notifier
  

Microsoft owns Taiwan

It is widely known that Microsoft owns Taiwan. Here is a news that says that Microsoft has over 98 percent of market share in Taiwan. How frightening is this?

1. More than 98% of computers in Government offices, schools, companies, and families pay hefty sums to Microsoft for software licenses. This adds up to monies that boggles the mind.
2. Even more frightening is the fact that many Taiwanese simply identify computing with Microsoft technologies. In many universities, for example Tamkang University (淡江大學), the distinction between computer science and Microsoft technologies becomes unclear: computer education is Microsoft software training.

What to do?

1. Use better and free software such as Linux distributions and Google family of programs (Doc & Spreadsheets, Calendar, Picasaweb, ...)
2. Teach fundamental Computing principles. Refrain from software training of particular vendors.