Category — blog

After reading a recent post from Ian Lamont over at Harvard Extended, I’d like to talk a little bit about how Harvard Extension students are perceived by the rest of the school.

By far, the predominant way that HES is used is as an adjunct to further study somewhere else or to add incremental knowledge rather than to serve as a complete program of study. Most students who take classes at HES either already have undergraduate degrees from somewhere else and are getting themselves ready to enter a graduate program or are trying to round out a gap in their education to serve some particular function. In either case, a degree from HES isn’t the goal.

The upshot from this is that HES students are all painted with the same brush by the other parts of the university: part-timers who are not doing serious academic work and are not committed to their studies in the same way that someone who applies for admission and maintains a full-time course of study within the university. A nasty side-effect of this is a certain feeling by others that it’s OK to consider HES students as “fair game” for insults and derision from those that are.

One example is the almost casual way that Alexandra A. Petri uses HES students as a punch line to make a point concerning the strange course selections that make up the Core at Harvard College:

This emphasis not on a common base of reference but a common set of “approaches” leaves Harvard students seeking to fulfill the Core with the choice between rigorous introductory courses geared towards prospective concentrators and unbelievably abstruse Core classes about topics like Boll Weevils in 1680s Holland. Few survey courses remain that offer a comprehensive view for students not planning to pursue further studies in given subjects. This phenomenon has the bizarre result that, often, only concentrators can put their knowledge in context. Most non-concentrators are marooned on islands of specific knowledge in a sea of ignorance, along with one or two other non-concentrators and someone from the Extension School who is starting to smell funny.

I’m sure that Alexandra thought she was being funny with that little quip. Sadly, Alexandra isn’t the exception when it comes to opinions about HES at the College. There is precious little knowledge of the programs available to HES students and how favorably they compare to the traditional programs available at Harvard.

I suppose that doing a better job with getting the message out about HES would help somewhat but that will only take us so far. As long as the administration abets the negative stereotypes that are allowed to circulate about HES, things will stay the same. A large part of the Harvard “brand” is the perception that it’s the ultimate educational credential. Whether or not this really is the case is almost immaterial. Students at the College seem to suffer almost universally from the delusion that they are among the “chosen.” To believe otherwise would be to admit that they were duped into paying a premium price for an education that is only marginally better than a comparable state school education. It’s only natural to engage in a bit of elitist daydreaming.  John Kenneth Galbraith wrote “The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great — a little understood thing.”

Fortunately, those of us who actually have a little experience with how far an educational credential can take you know otherwise. Somehow I managed to build a career that included several Fortune 500 companies and an assortment of international assignments with nary a degree to my name. What served me well was a certain drive to succeed and a willingness to learn from experience. Those qualities aren’t unique to residents of the Ivy League. A good dose of maturity doesn’t hurt either.

Which brings us back to Alexandra. Her byline quotes her as a member of the class of 2010. If we stick with some reasonable assumptions about her age, she’s likely to be all of 20 years old. As such, she’s barely old enough to realize how insignificant her perspectives are at this stage of life. Her writing reflects a narcissism that few adults can indulge in without finding themselves spending more than a few lonely nights wondering why people aren’t more enamored of their “wit.”

Far more troubling is the effect that the ill-formed opinions of 20-somethings have on people who are trying to decide how and where they should try to complete a degree. If you’re considering completing a degree at HES, remember that you’ll be sitting in front of the same professors and doing the same work as the College students. That’s what counts.

But drop me line if you happen to sit next to Alexandra in any of those classes. I want to know if she smells any better than I do. If her columns are any guide, the answer is “probably not.”

I’m planning on going to New York City in a few weeks to attend a cryptography conference but while I’m there I plan on visiting Columbia University to investigate the distance-ed engineering program office for the Columbia Video Network.

I’ve mentioned it before but it’s looking more and more like a great option for me. The program is rigorous, bears no difference in coursework with the on-campus program, and can be completed completely off-campus. As I’ve come to this realization, I started to look deeper at the classes that I might sign up for.

That’s when I saw that some of the most notable people in the Internet’s history were teaching classes offered by CVN. One in particular bears mentioning: Steven Bellovin.

Prof. Belovin is co-teaching a class called COMS W4180: Network Security and it looks like it might be an excellent example of a class that offers a world-class professor to a wide Internet based audience. Prof. Bellovin had a front row seat for the development of the Internet and is probably at least partly responsible for many of the protocols and mechanisms that we use today. As a grad student, he invented USENET, probably the first and most widely used means of distributing information across the Internet even today. He also wrote the famous “Firewall” book published by O’Reilly that I used to understand and configure them. It’s going to be exciting having the opportunity to take his class. I’m certain that he can offer a lot of context to the problems of security on networks.

This brings up another point: you should figure out what you want to study in graduate school and go to the school where that is being studied. I live close to several world-class universities but only one of them is doing anything remotely connected to network security or cryptography. A couple of others are focusing on other topics like bioinformatics or wireless networks. Most of the rest don’t even have a computer science program of note. Having faculty support for a particular area of study is important and if you are all by yourself studying some field, the chances that you’ll waste your time on unproductive areas of research goes up tremendously.

Since I don’t have the luxury of attending a traditional program, I’m more constrained than others in the choices of programs that I can pursue. It’s a lucky break that there are programs out there that will cater to my choice of field but still permit me to maintain full-time employment.

I recently decided to install Linux on a Panasonic Toughbook CF-28.  In case you aren’t familiar with this particular piece of hardware, it’s essentially a laptop that thinks it’s a tank.  It’s heavy, slow, and super sturdy.  When you close the lid on this thing, it sounds like you’re slamming shut the door to a prison cell.  Supposedly, you can drop this thing on a concrete floor and it’ll still work just fine.  The laptop in a cop car is likely to be a Toughbook.   My particular model has a rubberized keyboard which will resist spills.  (Just the thing for that trip to the desert!)

Anyhow, my machine (obtained from eBay) did NOT have a CD-ROM drive, only a floppy.  This is quite a problem if you need to install software.  I could have returned to the eBay well once more but it seems that CF-28 CD-ROM drives are quite the prize.  Undeterred, I decided to try another avenue of installing software sans CD.

It turns out that Fedora 8 offers a package called cobbler.   With this package, you can support clients that boot over the network.  Since Fedora doesn’t offer floppy installs anymore, I tried this route.  I set up one of my local machines to serve as the bootserver that would respond to requests for netboot images and had at it.

Fast forward several hours of making PXE bootdisks, importing a Fedora 8 DVD distribution and then going through the whole install process with the Toughbook and I had a working install of Fedora 8.  Except that X would not start.  Since one of the applications I needed positively relied on X to work, I needed to fix this problem.  I tried system-config-display, hand editting the xorg.conf file, and then going through the xorg.0.log to find the problem.   Nothing worked.  I decided to try another approach.

I pulled the drive from the laptop containing the Fedora 8 install and installed a blank drive.  Then I visited the debian.org site, downloaded the floppy boot images, and used them to bootstrap an install using a repository on the Internet for the files.  About an hour later, I had Debian installed on the machine, X was configured and working properly, and it even gave me the option to set up the drive with a LUKS encrypted partition.  Easy.  So Debian it is.

Of course, the big question is why Fedora (which uses the X.org distribution as well) didn’t detect and set up the configuration as well as Debian did.  I could always just copy the xorg.conf from the Debian install to the Fedora one and see if it all works.  In the end, I might decide to do that.  But why?  So far I have a working machine with a high security encrypted drive as well.  Why mess with a working platform?

Hats off to the Debian folks.  You got it right on the first try.  No muss, no fuss.  Just a solid distribution.

One of the better explanations of the P vs. NP problem.

I’ve been looking at the whole Ruby on Rails thing as the foundation for a kind of web application I was thinking of.  Right now, it’s purely a personal thing.  I’m doubtful that it has any commercial potential.  Nevertheless, it’s still a good way to get familiar with the whole process of getting the right libraries and compilers installed.  Its even more interesting when you try and use some of the more modern development tools for managing a project.

I’ve been playing around with Ruby on Rails, Eclipse, and Subversion lately.  I’m planning on posting a HOWTO in case anyone is interested.  As it turns out, getting a MacBook Pro set up as a development platform using some of the more interesting tools isn’t as straightforward as it seems.

Stay tuned.

I’ve been thinking about web applications recently and one thing is for certain: if you want to develop a web app, there is no shortage of opinions about the best way to do it.

I was turned to thinking of web apps by a Steve Yegge post concerning code bloat. The post isn’t specifically about web apps per se but touches on the programming language flavor of the month: Ruby and it’s signature preparation Ruby on Rails (RoR).

Flavor of the month is probably too strong a phrase. It appears that Ruby and RoR have been around for a little while now and are actually solving real problems for real people. That’s good news. Probably the best indicator that the RoR crowd is onto something is the effort to replicate their web app framework into other languages. They say that imitation is the best compliment.

So I’ve decided to investigate what the hubbub is all about. If the fanboys are right, then there might actually be something here worth learning. It’s often true that there are many ways to skin a cat, but all things being equal, the approach that achieves cat sans skin is what most people end up doing.

I’ve considered taking CSCI E-75 (Building Dynamic Websites) in the past but could never fit it into my schedule. That class focuses on using the traditional tried-and-true LAMP stack for developing applications. There’s nothing wrong with that. If anything, thats preferable to learning a single framework since the skills used in constructing a web application from discrete components is valuable for the insight you get into how things work under the hood in just about all frameworks.

Of course, the flip side to that is that no-one uses discrete components anymore unless they really need to. The whole point of a framework is to solve the common problems once and then do targeted customizations where needed. That’s why no sane individual writes blogging software anymore. You get a copy of Wordpress and move on to the writing part.

I think that’s where RoR is probably a winner. The complaints about RoR are mainly concerned with scalability and speed. Nobody seems too concerned with either of these problems to abandon their efforts yet. It’s kind of taken on faith that more attention to these problems will yield improvements once the pain level gets too high. That’s the way it is with all new technologies. The same criticisms were leveled at Java by C++ programmers (and still are) when it was new. Most of those problems have evaporated as implementations have improved.

I’ve installed the code on my machine and purchased a book to thumb through. With any luck, I’ll have an app up and running before too long. It’s all about the pain level though. If it’s harder to do the simple things, you’ll hear about it. I’m looking forward to making progress and getting things done.

That’s why computer science is cool. You end up getting to play with really cool stuff. And it’s always fresh.

It seems like there are a lot of people that have distinct opinions about CS education today. The more I look, the more I find articles written by other prominent computer scientists on what they see as really key deficiencies in CS curricula. One of the more interesting and entertaining posts comes from a Google employee. In this long and humorous post, Steve Yegge talks about compilers and why they are key to understanding the discipline of CS:

The first reason Compiler Construction is such an important CS course is that it brings together, in a very concrete way, almost everything you learned before you took the course.

You can’t fully understand how compilers work without knowing machine architecture, because compilers emit machine code. It’s more than just instructions; compilers need to understand how the underlying machine actually operates in order to translate your source code efficiently.

Incidentally, “machines” are just about anything that can do computations. Perl is a machine. Your OS is a machine. Emacs is a machine. If you could prove your washing machine is Turing complete, then you could write a compiler that executes C code on it.

But you knew that already.

You can’t understand how modern compilers work without knowing how Operating Systems work, because no self-respecting machine these days runs without an operating system. The OS interface forms part of the target machine. Sure, you can find people working on five- to ten-year mainframe projects that ultimately run no faster than a PC from Costco, and they may dispense with the operating system due to time constraints, plus the fact that they have a worldwide market of one customer. But for most of us, the OS is part of the machine.

You won’t understand how compilers work unless you’ve taken a theory of computation course. The theory of computation reads like part one of chapter 1 of a compilers book. You need all of it.

I’m taking CSCI E-207 (Introduction to Formal Systems and Computation) as the very last course in my program at Harvard Extension. Given that the orientation of the school with respect to CS coursework is clearly biased towards [Read more →]

I’ve been busy with finals this past week so the posting has been light. Now that I’m all done with the Fall semester I’d like to bring up a particular area of concern about the computer science classes at Harvard Extension: there are no classes that focus on functional programming.

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Over at Harvard Extended, Ian posted about a problem that is particularly acute at the Extension School: lack of student community.

If there is one thing that is particularly difficult about being a HES student, it has to be the sense that you are all alone in tackling some of these difficult classes.  My first semester, I was required to be on-campus to take a couple of clases because they were required and did not have on-line sections available.  In general, there are about 5 times more classes available as on-campus classes than as distance classes.  Since I actually live in Washington, DC, I had to commute weekly to Cambridge to attend class.

In the evening, I would dutifully sit for class along with the other students.  Of course, there was little socializing between us.  We simply didn’t have the time.  With one class at 5:30 and another at 7:30, most people would be done with classes by 9:30.  At that hour, most people are thinking about heading home to make dinner rather than hang out on campus to socialize.

This makes sense.  Most people attending HES have day jobs.  Many have families as well.  The free time that college students have in the evenings and weekends to make friends with classmates and socialize simply isn’t there for HES students.  As a result, there is less of a feeling that you are a part of the college than, say, the College students.  At the College, most students live in the dorms and are carefully matched with others to stimulate interesting dialogue with others.  There is a deliberate effort to create community from a group of people that might have widely different backgrounds.

At HES, there is none of this.  There are a few HESA events every now and then, but they are poorly attended and not much use for learning about your fellow students.  Probably the best oppportunity I had to meet my fellow ALB candidates was EXPOs.  With a small class size, there was at least a bit of an opportunity to get to know a few others.

I’ve suggested in the past that there should be a greater effort on the part of the HES administration to bind the students together.  One suggestion that I had was to have us all join a cohort based on our ALB admit year.  Since we all proceed towards the degree at different rates, this seems like a sensible manner of connecting everyone.  In as much as people have to take EXPOs to apply for the ALB, that might be another mechanism for joining people together.  Nothing builds community like shared experiences, particularly difficult ones.

I’m probably going to graduate on 2009 without knowing a single person at HES.  That’s a bit sad.  I’ll have friends and family there but it’s not the same as graduating with classmates.  Only someone who has shared your struggle can truly understand what it means to get to that day.  I’m hoping that between now and then, I’ll make a few more friends at HES to share graduation with.

That would be nice.

I’m thrilled.

My Field of Study application has been approved which means that when I am awarded the ALB, I’ll have a Computer Science “field of study” noted on my transcripts. Yay! Also, one of my previous professors has agreed to provide support to my effort to complete a Bachelor’s thesis (called a Reading and Research project). This is all good news.

One of the weird things about HES (and Harvard in general) is that undergraduate degrees don’t have majors per se, but concentrations. Harvard College has a long list of undergraduate concentrations:

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