A Perspective on Africa

This weekend I am returning to Johannesburg for my fourth visit of 2008. Hopefully, this time will be no different than in the past, but one wonders what might be different with the recent and on-going xenophobic violence. I generally don’t blog about politics (particularly when it’s politics outside the US), and I won’t pretend to really comprehend what’s happening in South Africa right now, but I will say that it’s a real shame.

From my superficial perspective, South Africa appears to be a country that’s really trying to change, embrace diversity and elevate the entire population. The people are genuine and friendly and the outlook is bright.

So before going all alarmist, consider that the situation there, now, is not unlike other recent incidents of this nature elsewhere when troubles were initiated by a relatively small group of individuals attempting to push their agenda through vigilante means:

• 1992: Los Angeles Riots following the Rodney King verdict which, inexplicably, included racially motivated attacks on Korean immigrants
• 2005: France Civil Unrest following the deaths of two teenage immigrants in a poor Paris suburb which included violence in poor, ethnic neighborhoods across France

While the reasons and back story for these incidents are different, they have the common thread of the people taking matters into their own hands when the government fails to recognize and diffuse tensions. This is the challenge of an open, democratic society.

For the uninitiated, the thinking on the current South African unrest is probably: “Eh. Typical. This is Africa, right?” To those that know better, this is an often unfortunate consequence of progress. If you look at the 250 year time line of America as it made it’s way from a racially divided, colonial economy up until today, you will find a history marked by violence every step of the way. In the beginning, Europeans must have viewed America as a wild, violent country (some still do, I suppose) much like Americans often view the developing world today.

Tagging South Africa specifically, and Africa in general, as an uncivilized, dangerous place is over-simplifying the situation. Recognize the colonial era for the super-majority of African nations ended within the last 100 years. As recently as 1914, only Ethiopia and Liberia were sovereign nations, with independence coming for over 80% of Africa since 1960.

From my perspective, Africa as a whole seems to be doing as well, or better than, America did in its first 50 years of independence. Infrastructure is going in all over the continent; the economies are vibrant and growing quickly; the people are energetic. And despite all the obstacles of poverty, disease, weak education systems and volatile political systems, Africans are figuring it out and doing so very quickly.

I love living in America and I’m proud to be an American, but we should should look, listen and learn before speaking. If you have the opportunity, I encourage you to visit and experience the region for yourself as it will be enlightening, I guarantee it.

End of soap box speech. I’m already planning my next post and I assure my miniscule readership that it will be a bit more lighthearted. Thanks for indulging a rare diatribe on my part.

BolderBOULDER08

BolderBOULDER 2008 has come and gone in the race’s 30th anniversary addition. I once again competed, but unlike 2007, this year I ran my own race just to see what would happen and achieved a much faster result. In fact, I was only 37 seconds slower than 2002. I guess this means I’ll have to do it again next year and see if I can pull off a PR.

I didn’t train particularly hard this time around, averaging only about 11 to 13 miles per week over the past 3 months plus a few Saturday morning pick-up soccer matches. I did “cram” the last week before the race, cranking up the distance to near 20 miles and slipping in a couple sessions in the pool, but not sure if the final week’s push helped or hurt me. Still, I exceeded my expectation of a 5:00 min / km average pace, so I’m good with that. Citizen’s Race winner? 31 year old Clint Wells in 30:52. Maybe next year will be mine? (yeah, right.)

As in the past, the course was packed with goofballs, families, first time racers, old warhorses and everything else in between. The spectator side show was entertaining once again and the race organization was brilliant. Even the weather was to my liking, with an overcast 60ºF topped off by a few sprinkles around 9:00am.

Congratulations, BolderBOULDER, on another year in the record books.

Dave’s BolderBOULDER Race History
(I seem to be re-setting the trend in the right direction.)

Year	Bib Number	Last Name	First Name	Official Time	Age
2001	MM518	Fuller	David	00:54:25	30
2002	GG348	Fuller	David	00:47:31	31
2007	HD396	Fuller	David	01:03:02	36
2008	HB022	Fuller	David	00:48:06	37

Happy 48th Birthday to the LASER

I receive a range of e-newsletters each week, most of them techie / telecom related. This morning’s IDG Connect included a mention that on today’s date in 1960, Theodore Maiman operated the first optical laser in Malibu, California. For a person like me who’s spent his career in telecom, the laser is a serious achievement.

Along with the integrated circuit, the laser is perhaps the most important technical development of the 20th century for the industry. Optical electronics (sometimes called optronics) are the key component for high capacity fiber optic telecom networks. It wasn’t until optical networks came into wide use that packet-based technologies such as ATM (late 1980s) and IP (late 1990s) exploded. Without the laser, the economics of bandwidth would still be hamstrung by 19th century inventions such as copper telephony cables and radio.

So, if you’re going to happy hour today after work, be sure to celebrate Dr. Maiman and the others that came before him (“standing on the shoulders of giants”, etc) for their contributions to our high speed society. Whether or not you like what high speed communications have done for us or to us, I can’t imagine going back to where we were 10 years ago. Trust me: I still use dial-up speeds when I do work in emerging markets and it literally sucks the life out of me. (Luckily, it won’t remain like this for too much longer, but I’ll save that for another post in the not-so-distant future.)

Virtual Machining

I’ve been experimenting lately with virtualization software because I’d like to have a Linux laptop, but I’m not brave enough to abandon Windows (that sure sounds like a sad state of affairs, eh?). I first looked at VMware Workstation, but this product continues to be sold at a high premium over the alternatives. Even though all the reviews I’ve found say this product is best, I can’t justify the cost as science project.

After VMware, I looked at Parallels Workstation. It’s less than 1/3 the cost of VMware’s product and you can take it for a spin before buying. So I did. Parallels installed quite easily and after downloading the latest x86 .iso file from Ubuntu, I was ready to create a virtual machine. The documentation for the software is pretty good and after a bit of trial an error I was able to get a VM built with Ubuntu running inside it. Very nice. Then I hit a snag: the VM couldn’t access the external network interfaces. Not much using having an OS that can’t “see” the world outside my PC. After a couple hours of Googling and scouring Parallels’ forums, I couldn’t find a solution. I tried a half dozen different combinations of Windows Vista and Parallels Workstation configurations, but still no joy. Eventually, I described my problem on Parallels’ support forum under a posting by someone experiencing the same issue. I also sent in an e-mail to Parallels. The silence was deafening. After a few hours, the guy that owned the post I tagged my issue to came back and said he gave up on Parallels. He suggested I give VirtualBox a try.

After waiting a couple more days, I too abandoned Parallels and went for VirtualBox which is an open source project that originated in Germany and had its first public release in Jan’07. A year later in Feb’08, the creator of VirtualBox, innotek GmbH, was acquired by Sun Microsystems. As with Parallels, I found VirtualBox a breeze to install. In addition, building a VM was very straight forward since the VM configuration GUI has a lot in common with Parallels. And the host OS network interfaces were accessible by the guest OS (i.e. I could surf the Internet from inside the VM). Much better.

The biggest problem was screen resolution. The default for Ubuntu seems to be either 800×600 or 640×480, either of which results in the VM consuming a fraction of available real estate on my 13″ laptop LCD. The typical fix for an Ubuntu problem like this is to tweak /etc/X11/xorg.conf via one of a couple different methods (e.g. hand edit with vi or gedit, dpkg-reconfigure, etc.). I tried these, but whenever I then went to Screen Resolution and changed to a higher resolution, the screen would freak out. More reading, more Googling and I learned about a bunch of VirtualBox add-ons called Guest Additions. I found the instructions and installed Guest Additions. Then I tried the xorg.conf tweak again, but with the same annoying blurring screen results.

Frustrated, I gave up for a few days. When I came back, I had resigned myself to the dinky screen. Then I noticed under the “Machine” pull down menu in the frame surrounding my running VM that there was an option called “Auto-resize Guest Display”.

I didn’t recall this being there before I installed Guest Additions, but it sure sounded promising. I clicked the Windows “expand” button in the upper right of the frame, then selected “Auto-resize Guest Display”. Voilà! The resolution for Ubuntu automatically changed inside the VM and expanded to take up all the space in the frame. Very nice. Now I have a 1128×762 display that perfectly fills the screen between the Vista Sidebar and Taskbar. Sweetness.

If you want to do a little experimenting with Linux, but don’t have a spare PC or you want to avoid the dual boot headache, give VirtualBox a try. Who knows if Sun Microsystems will leave it open source, so you may want to try it sooner rather than later.

CanoScan 8800F

The latest gadget in my geek arsenal is a Canon CanoScan 8800F film and negative scanner. If your family is like mine, there was probably at least one shutterbug. In my case, it was my father Dennis. He was always lugging around his Pentax 35mm SLR snapping shots of family, friends and whatever else was in the way. Slides were his favorite film development format; he’s easily got a couple thousand slides in his basement.

With a family reunion coming up this 4th of July (hosted by yours truly), Julie and I thought it might be a good time to start converting celluloid to bits. So we shopped around and ended up choosing this model after reading rave reviews. Who had the best deal? Surprise!… Amazon.com. We placed our order and a couple days later it showed up at my front door.

I should have photographed the un-boxing because it came with an array of adapters for various film types and a bunch of software including a licensed copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 (I know… that’s one version old, but it was free so who’s complaining).

After 30 minutes and a couple CD-ROMs of installation activities, I was ready for a test drive. I found the instructions straight forward and the scanner really easy to use. This particular scanner has a special lid with a light in it so the film is back lit when scanned and it seems to help a lot as I was impressed by the quality of the scanned images, even at the lowest res 300 dpi.

For instance, the one on the left of my grandparents Fred and Dottie was taken Christmas 1970. While a little dark, it was shot indoors without a strobe. I have done no color correction or touch up; this is how it came off the scanner… not bad IMHO. Some others that were taken outdoors are really fantastic.

The only thing flaky is the ArcSoft PhotoStudio 5.5 software that’s used to drive the scanner. It likes to crash about every other batch of slides (the scanner can do 4 slides at a time). Other than that, pretty slick and fast.

I’ve been working my way through a couple carousels of slides I took in high school and a handful of slides from another collection. The mother lode of my Dad’s collection is a future endeavor. I’m thinking some old photos might inspire some blog posts down the road, so keep an eye out for them.

If you’re in the market for a film scanner, you might want to give this one a try.