Evil Home Stereo

Well, I’m back from half a year in South Africa. Study abroad at the NMMU. Stuff I learned? Not much for my actual course computer engineering. Some rather dry but probably not unimportant stuff on information security (ISO 17799 anybody?) and a really interesting module on computational intelligence (hey, I finally understood how the old genetic algorithm and the new perceptron used by SpamAssassin work).

Apart from that? The IT department is well equipped but the level of knowledge is quite a few years behind. This is supported by the students’ attitude not to challenge anything the lecturer says, even if it is blatantly wrong. And an infrastructure which seemingly not only sponsored but bought out by Microsoft. I don’t want to question their general decisions about their IT infrastructure (well, I actually do, but not now). However, by not offering the students any hands-on experience with alternative systems and concepts prior to their master program they do them a great disservice.

I experienced a web design course where other browsers than the Internet Explorer weren’t even mentioned, let alone the existence of CSS bugs. A system administrator who asked me whether I had Norton installed on my Linux notebook. And a honours student who looked for WinZip on a Linux box to untar a file.

Well, what did I learn then? A lot of stuff between the lines, kind of meta information

Like the point that Web 2.0 doesn’t work very well in World 0.3 aka Third World. (I have actually difficulties counting South Africa to the Third World, cf. HDI; but especially white South African people seem to have a morbid preference for that term.) Shared wireless with high packet loss and traffic capped connections are the main enemies. A maximum speed of 512 kbps at high prizes is another one.

A friend told me that GMail automatically switches to a limited interface if it detects a slow connection. Definitely a good idea, a lot of the services I tried just didn’t work.

Or that mobile application, foremost services like MXit, boom in countries where broadband is expensive but everybody and his dog has a mobile phone. (Siderant: Hey mabber, nice that you optimized your site for the iPhone but downloading the software with Opera Mini or even an OpenWave browser like the one on the S65 doesn’t work.)

That Twitter can be useful. Namely to keep your worried family up-to-date when they are afraid that you might be eaten by something unmentionable. Except for Mozambique where you can’t send international SMS.

And finally: All this plus meeting people who have nothing (from our POV) but still live happily changed the way I see our way of living under pressure and hunting the latest gadget quite a lot.