Happy Birthday, Michael Faraday!

Today is the birthday of physicist and chemist Michael Faraday, born in Newington Butts, England in 1791. The Writer's Almanac says of him:

"He had almost no formal schooling, but he taught himself by reading books about chemistry and physics while he worked as a bookbinder's errand boy. Young Faraday got the chance to go and hear four lectures by the famous physicist Humphry Davy. Later, Davy hired him as his assistant.

"Eventually, he became one of the greatest scientists of his era, even though he never learned the complex mathematics that many people considered a necessary context for science. He made huge breakthroughs in the field of electromagnetism — he discovered magneto-electric induction, the law of electro-chemical decomposition, the magnetization of light, and diamagnetism; and he discovered benzene."

This seems like an appropriate day to repeat one of my favorite stories from Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor, in which Michael Faraday plays an important role.

Jones had died and gone to heaven and, as a reward for a most exemplary life, was given the grand tour. To his amazement he found that heaven was made up of many sectors, each utterly different.

He passed though the Jewish heaven where millions of people in prayer shawls sang exultantly before the Ark of the Covenant. Then there was the Catholic heaven filled with organ music and incense, where an eternal mass was celebrated in a star-high, skywide cathedral.

"Oh," said the archangelic guide, "we're ecumenical here; we have something for every taste. After all, a good man is a good man and deserves his reward whatever little difference in ritual may exist. Over there is the Moslem heaven with its houris; yonder the Buddhist heaven of contemplation and nirvana. And here -- here is rather a little curiosity."

They crossed a bridge of the firmament and entered into a scene of whitewashed simplicity in which a relatively small number of men and women were singing hymns.

The guide tiptoed past and whispered, "This is a small sect of Christians called Sandemanians. There were only a few thousand altogether. The great scientist Michael Faraday was one. You can see him there."

"Fascinating," whispered Jones. "But tell me, why are we whispering?"

"Because they mustn't hear us. They think they're the only ones here."

Happy Labor Day, from me and Billy Bragg

Internet Safety

Here is most of the source material for two of the Internet Safety talks that I've given on Thursday nights. I love Leo Notenboom's articles and don't mind admitting that I shamelessly stole from him.

The first part is on keeping your computer safe on the Internet. You Mac users don't have to worry about malware as much as we PC users, but viruses can still find their way to a Mac via a Word document or Excel spreadsheet with embedded macros (small chunks of code).

http://ask-leo.com/internet_safety_how_do_i_keep_my_computer_safe_on_the_internet.html

The second part is on how to read a URL and figure out where it's really taking you.

http://ask-leo.com/how_do_i_know_that_this_web_address_is_safe.html

Get creative with your network name

http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/weekend-competition-wi-fi-network-names/

Water under the bridge, and toolkits

I don't have my own toolkit at work. If I need a screwdriver, I borrow a big one from the custodian's toolkit. All the computers are either so old that they have honking big thumbscrews holding them together, or so new that they just pop and slide apart without any tools. So Tuesday when one of our "live-in" patrons, bless his heart, spilled his water bottle on a laptop, I didn't even have a single baby Phillips head to open it up with.

As soon as I got to the scene of the accident, I unplugged the power cord and the mouse, turned it over, and started shaking out as much water as I could. (Meanwhile the patron decamped and was not seen again that day, nor all of Wednesday.) Still keeping it upside-down, I used paper towels to try to wick out as much water as I could. Then I used a can of air to try to blow out more water. Finally I slid out the battery, which is removable without tools, and saw that it was dry, so I had reason to think that the disk drive, CD-ROM, and memory module were probably dry, too. If I'd had a hairdryer, this would have been the point at which I would have used it to try to dry up the last of the water. I left the laptop lying face down overnight.

Wednesday morning I came in with my own computer toolkit and removed the hard drive and CD-ROM. The hard drive felt vaguely damp, but not really wet. I replaced everything, turned it over, turned it on, and everything seemed normal. And if it hadn't been? Well, it's old as laptops go. Replacements are dirt cheap on eBay. Still, you don't like to lose a useful, working machine for something so preventable. Oh, well. It could have been worse. It could have been coffee or cola.

A year from now I won't remember what I did yesterday

At most every interview I've gone to in the last five years, I've been asked the same question: tell us an example of a problem you had to solve, and how you solved it. I'm always hard-pressed to answer this question, not because of a dearth of examples, but because of an overabundance. Solving problems is what I do on a daily basis, when I'm not actually trying to get ahead of the curve and forestall problems before they happen. Someone comes to me with what they think is a technical problem, I analyze it, I make a test plan for narrowing down the possible causes, I identify the cause and formulate a solution, I implement the solution, and I move on to the next problem. There's not always time allocated to documenting the problem and the solution, but I will frequently outline them on the staff wiki, so that someday when I'm not in the office, someone else can find my note and reproduce the solution for another patron. A good day is when all the problems get solved. A really good day is when everything goes smoothly because of something I did three months ago to prevent problems.

Yesterday was the first type of day. Before noon, I had:

• Helped a patron print out a form he needed to apply for a job with the USPS.

The form is delivered to the applicant as an ASPX file, and the Windows XP laptop he was using did not have an application to open it. I only know about aspx as "active server page," a type of Web page, and I was surprised to find that Internet Explorer couldn't open it. Neither could Firefox. A quick Web search turned up the fact that a PDF reader will open it. Again, I was puzzled as to why the laptop wouldn't open it, but I directed the patron to email the form to a library account, opened it on my computer, printed it out, and gave it to him. Short-term problem solved. Long-term, I made sure the laptop had the latest version of Adobe Reader. I've been using Foxit Reader myself, but just in case there are any incompatibilities, I offer Adobe Reader on the public PCs.

• Charged a co-worker's MP3 player.

Last year I gave each of my co-workers an MP3 player from the stash I had accumulated by becoming a devoted follower of Woot.com. One of my co-workers called to say that her Sansa Fuze wasn't charging anymore. A quick search of the Web told me that the problem could be the battery--bad, since it's not replaceable. I have had a couple of dozen of this brand of player pass through my hands, all refurbished units, and I've only had to return one of them. The problem could also be the USB mode. I could see how that would inhibit the transferring of files, but didn't see what it could have to do with charging.

I took it to my desk to observe its behavior. The charging icon acted like it was charging for about a minute, then went quiet. When it was unplugged from the USB cord, the player showed the "low battery" message and shut down. I have the same player, so I tried my known-good cord to see if that was the problem. No difference. A closer look at the player revealed that one bottom corner of the case, the end where the USB cord/charger cable plugs in, was loose. I snapped it shut and tried again, but no change.

Finally I decided to try changing the USB mode. There are three choices: MSC (Mass Storage Class), MTP (Media Transfer Protocol), and Auto Detect. The player is set to Auto Detect by default. I changed it to MSC and plugged it back in to my computer. This time the "what do you want to do with this device that I've detected?" Windows dialog box popped up, and I realized that I had overlooked the fact that it hadn't popped up the other times. So something is different with the way the computer now views the player. Sure enough, it started charging normally and didn't stop until it was finished.

Nothing about the player had changed. My co-worker has been using it for months now. But last week I replaced the computer at the public desk where she usually works. The new computer runs Windows XP, as did the old computer, but it's all new hardware; the old computer was at least 4 years old, possibly more. I still don't understand the details of USB 2.0, and I couldn't explain the difference between MSC and MTP in technical terms. I may dig into it again in more detail at a later date. But right now I know enough to get the job done. That's the idea I was trying to get across to my computer-illiterate patron late yesterday afternoon--learn what you need to know to do what you need to get done, and leave the gory details for later.

• There was a third thing, and I've already forgotten what it was.

See what I mean?

How does a cellphone work?

I wish I'd had a voice recorder going on the last patron of the day: "What's an application?" "Why do they always explain complicated computer terms with more computer terms?" "What does 'Reload current page' mean?" "How do I get back to Google?" "What's 'word processing'?" "How can I get rid of the ads on a webpage?" (She found a dating service ad to be offensive.) She says she needs to learn enough to be employable, but she keeps getting bogged down in minutiae. I wonder if she can use a telephone or drive a car without being paralyzed by the realization that she can't explain how they work?

Then to find out, after 45 minutes of this, that she's not even a patron and can't check out the "Teach Yourself Visually" book I gave her. I showed her how she can type her question in the Google search box--exactly as she would ask it to me--and get some useful results. Yes, the results use words that are also not self-evident. What to do? Go back to the Google search box. Keep doing this until some of it starts to sink in. Just as in mathematics there are axioms that we don't have to prove, we each need to reach a point in the "how?" questions that we don't really need to answer right away in order to achieve useful results.

She threatened promised to come back Monday for Computer Tutor Drop-In time with some specific questions. We'll see.

#headwall