sdziallas talks

A Kid in the Candy Store

2010-11-19T05:03:56Z

"Well hello there..." says the JetBlue screen welcoming me on board to my flight to Chicago. That was three days ago. Now I'm sitting in a hotel room in Champaign, after the wrap-up of the Engineer of the Future 3.0 conference at the University of Illinois (this was actually a few days ago -- there'll be an article about the talk Mel and I gave soon). But really, when did I blog the last time? Has been quite calm here over the past month. What happened?

"500 Days of Summer" -- picture by gtall1 taken from Flickr, licensed under a CC-BY license.

Reminds me of one of my favorite movies, 500 Days of Summer. Summer, the girl, explains to Tom, the boy, what happened in her previous relationships: life.

"Olin sunset" -- picture by Sean Munson taken from Flickr, licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Now I'm not breaking up with anybody, but life has just been incredibly busy in the past months. First things first. Olin. My school. The place I fought to get to and finally ended up at. It's tough. It's a tough place. Incredibly tough. People don't necessarily understand the workload that comes with being at a place like Olin. In one of our classes, Modeling and Simulation, we're working on projects that get eventually turned into poster presentations. For my second project, I worked with my partner on a model for a passive solar house. It might be worth noting that this requires the knowledge of thermodynamics, which is usually an entire class at other schools. We picked up the stuff we needed on our own -- in two weeks.

One of the things that I've been trying to work on lately is awareness. Coming from three years of open source experience into academia, people don't necessarily see what the open source way can do for them. Some of the frustration I felt over the past weeks was that the feeling that the work overload coming from this place I wanted to be at was preventing me from doing the things I actually wanted to do and cared about. I felt overwhelmed.

On the side of less amusing things, I've also been hit significantly by RSI I over the past weeks. I felt stronger pain a couple weeks ago in my hands and wrists; things got worse and worse since then and my neck, shoulders and legs are affected (this post is brought to you by language recognition software). I'm trying to treat this as good as I can: upgraded to ergonomic mouse and keyboard and went to see a therapist and eventually a rolfer.

I'm nowhere near out of all this. Worse came to worse and it pulled me down altogether quite a bit. Now I'm writing this with an eye on the upcoming break. It feels like it might go upwards again. Soon.

"IPC Boogie 2009, diving after Wayne" -- picture by divemasterking2000 taken from Flickr, licensed under a CC-BY license.

On Saturday, Mel and I went with Heidi Ellis from Western New England College and a couple of her students to the GNOME Summit at MIT. That being their first hackathon, we both served as tour guides, poking them towards talking with people and asking questions. Sometimes, the easy things are the hard ones.

A couple of days later, Mel picked me up at Olin and we went to talk at Western New England College about the challenges of release engineering. After exposing the students to Etherpad (which they immediately picked up), I talked about the way distributions are built and how dependency chains are related to that. We explained package managers by assuming that we want to install Firefox:

Sebastian says: "Heidi, please install Firefox!"
Heidi goes, looks into her database, notices that Firefox needs a couple of other libraries which aren't present on the system - like Mel.
Heidi checks whether Mel satisfies Firefox' dependency and comes back, asking whether the installation of Mel is okay.
Sebastian agrees.
Heidi installs Mel first, then Firefox.

Talking with Heidi later, we noticed that the students actually were excited: they didn't fall asleep during class - but found that there was something else out there, that there was more.

On Wednesday, Heidi came out to Olin. I had set up meetings with a number of faculty and Mel and I showed her the campus.

"Untitled" -- picture by Melissa Audrey taken from Flickr, licensed under a CC-BY license.

At Friday before both Mel and I flew out to Illinois, we stopped by an European store in Boston. It was a tiny store, but it had all the things I recognized from home -- like chocolate. There I was: a kid in the candy store.

"Dandelion Fireworks-PHOTO 183-The halfway mark" -- picture by aussiegall taken from Flickr, licensed under a CC-BY license.

Dear Intarwebz: Can Haz Teh Data?

2010-09-12T04:23:01Z

So, as some of you my know, I'm as a couple of days ago a freshman at Olin College in Boston. One of the classes I'm taking there is called Modelling and Control of the Physical World, or ModSim for short. It's a great class. Actually, the professor who wrote Think Python, an open source text book on learning Python, is teaching it.

We've just been given our first project. As part of that, we're working in teams of two. My project concerns the development of primary education in developing countries (there's a project description out here, look at the first case).

We've already been looking at the Education Policy and Data Center's website; however, I was hoping to find further data. We are looking at a variety of countries right now, as we're writing our own project description. Notable examples include Nepal and Pakistan.

We are looking for data that would help us model "the demographics of primary education in developing countries, and the challenges associated with achieving universal primary education by 2015." So statistics on schooling numbers, population and age ranges, drop out and graduation rates, ratio of funds spent on education, pupil/teacher ratio and that sort of thing would be very helpful.

Note that this is a little time-sensitive. We don't have to finish our project until October, but we have close interim deadlines coming up - so if somebody runs into some data over the weekend, this would be greatly appreciated!

Also let me know how you would like to be cited in my project so that I can properly credit and thank you for helping me find data!

Thank you, folks.

2010-07-04T10:35:09Z

I'm going to Olin. It's the place I want to go to. I didn't imagine this to happen, but apparently, sometimes everything in the universe aligns and a lot of magic happens.

A close friend of mine once said, that sometimes, no matter how many more words one strings together, one can't get any closer to the true sentiment. He's right. So thank you, folks, for being there and making this happen. This is totally awesome.

Why I like Olin...

2010-03-25T22:25:18Z

This is the school I want to go to: http://olin.edu/

When I arrived on campus in December, I met Colin, who was the student who had replied immediately to my post to the Olin OLPC mailing list a month before. "Oh, it's cool you're doing Sugar on a Stick - want to meet up when you're around?" So I talked Colin and some other folks in the OLPC chapter about SoaS and open source and education.

The people there are generally really, really open - they throw questions at you, they are interested in what you're doing.

It's a small place. You run across the same people all over again - "Oh, hi! What are you doing?" "We're doing this cool project!" "Let me see!" People are hilariously busy over there. I don't know how this is at other colleges, but you can walk into the Academic Center at midnight and work on projects... when I went to bed, at 1 or 2 AM, it was "Wait, you're already going to bed? We're just starting to work!"

In the evening, there was something I'd never heard of before, "Professors Storytelling." Everybody sat down in the dorms; one professor had his kids read a Dutch book for children and was translating that into English. Another professor told the story about how he met his wife when she bailed him out of jail for a college prank. It's like a huge family sitting together and talking about all this stuff they have been doing when they were young.

It's hard to put it in words.

Fast forward three months to Candidates' Weekend, the final step in the Olin admissions process. This weekend is not about your academic abilities, but rather about the cultural fit. You find yourself talking a lot to students and professors, exploring Olin, while everybody is out there, trying to figure out how you'd do at Olin. My friend Greg DeKoenigsberg accompanied me on this trip. When we got there, a couple of students I had been talking to before in December came by and went "Oh, hi! You're back! Good to see you! What have you been up to?"

And this is where Sebastian thinks "this place is it" again.

I went to the entrepreneurship session, where a student named Matt Ritter was giving a presentation on how FAIL belongs in your time at Olin and how FAILING and learning from all this FAIL is a good experience. FAIL FASTER. (http://blogs.olin.edu/pgp/2010/03/taking-a-leave-of-absence-loa-from-olin--matts-story.html)

Greg and I went to the robotics lab. There were girls building some robots to be able to crawl and walk on a surface like Mars. "You want to control him?" they asked, and they pushed the XBox controller into Greg's hands. We started a conversation on how they had trouble putting all the code chunks on the robot because LabView compiled all these libraries together until the program couldn't execute any more...

We did student-led projects under hilarious time pressure, with strange materials and arbitrary limitations and requirements - some way of transporting water... almost all teams failed epically, constructions collapsed even before the organization started - FAIL FASTER!

I was talking to Allen Downey, a professor there. He wrote an open source textbook called "How To Think Like A Java Programmer," and then someone took his textbook and applied it for a different language (Python). "Yeah, this was Jeff Elkner," said Allen, and Greg and I jumped around and went "Jeff Elkner! We know him!" The world is pretty small. We talked about getting students more into open source projects and having them actually do something during the time they were studying.

When we were talking about the different majors you could take at Olin - you could do electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and a different number of concentrations like computing, bioengineering... you could also design your own concentration. And Greg and I looked at each other and went "OPEN SOURCE!"

And that is what I want to do there.

College News & Funding Pondering

2010-03-22T11:52:41Z

Dear Lazyweb,

Olin wants me. And so does Allegheny. Both are wonderful places, but college education is still incredibly expensive. So if you're aware of anything in this regard that applies to international students, please holler.