Bit Rot

14 March 2009 Dan McGarry

People want to treat data like a thing. They assume that if you buy some storage, and you put your bits in it, it’s more or less like a safe deposit box – as long as the thing looks okay from the outside, there’s no problem. Just pop the key in when you want to, and – hey presto – the data springs out, pristine and ready.

Would that it were so.

Data is dangerously fragile and ephemeral. It’s a not-entirely-accidental collection of electrical charges that manage to emerge in some useful order… most of the time. But shift just a few of those bits around, or drop a couple on the floor, and the whole construct become no more intelligible than line noise on a telephone wire.

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

It’s happened again.

The life of a technology professional can sometimes feel like that of a doctor. You’re introduced to someone, and the moment you tell them your metier, their eyes take on a particular look and they say, “You know, I’ve been having this problem recently….” Immediately, the conversation becomes a diagnostic session.

I suppose everyone a lawyer meets has a court case pending, too.

So there I am, sitting down at a local cafe with a book and my morning coffee, and someone collars me with a request. “You need to write about CD Rot,” She says with a wry, knowing smile. Immediately, I put the book away. This is going to take some time.

(Before I go on, let me say that I actually enjoy these little conversations. If I didn’t, I would never have lasted as long as I have in IT. Heaven knows I wouldn’t be writing this column.)

Affliction

14 March 2009 Dan McGarry

Something I find truly galling in Port Vila is seeing chronic, preventable conditions exacerbating the larger health threats and creating a largely un-measured drag on the national economy. The number of people suffering from boils, skin ulcers and other opportunistic infections is startlingly high. When I visit my adoptive family during the warmer months, inevitably at least one of them is so afflicted. More often than not though, most of them are.

The fevers, pain and loss of sleep brought on by these have cost more than a few days lost to illness. But equally important is their impact on the quality of life.

These afflictions are largely unheard of among those who don’t wander much into Vila’s residential neighbourhoods. That’s because they don’t have to cope with lack of sanitation, dirt floors, mud, overcrowding, inadequate or non-existent drainage, lack of proper screens and countless other shortcomings that the average resident copes with daily.

A note for online readers: As I write this, I am recovering from a systemic fungus infection that covered my entire body with a damnably itchy red rash severe enough that my physician spontaneously exclaimed in surprise when he saw it. Pockets lighter by over twelve thousand vatu (about USD 120), I am now burdened with three different medications and six more weeks of treatment before I have any assurance it won’t recur. My friend Ruth informs me that her entire community is rife with the same condition. I do not, however, have enough money to treat even one of them. They’ll have to content themselves with rubbing their bodies down with bush limes, not a pleasant undertaking, to say the least.

At the same time, my brother’s daughter (and my namesake) has only just recovered from a nasty infestation of boils all over her forehead. I can’t describe the poor child’s misery. Her father has been kept from work for over a week now with one of these nasty putrescences in his armpit. It’s so painful that he’s been walking around with his hand permanently poised against his hip like a lawn jockey. The elderly man he’s hired to look after the family kava bar has one foot rendered nearly useless by chronic infection, and his eldest boy has a permanently misshapen thigh bone, fractured by a subcutaneous abscess that was never properly diagnosed or treated.

The list goes on.

Remediating problems like these is not simply a medical issue. The causes are environmental and infrastructural in nature. There is currently little awareness – and no comprehensive statistical measurement – of the extent of the damage to society by afflictions that are simply not tolerated in developed areas. I say ‘areas’ because such problems are utterly unknown in the wealthier parts of town.

So now you know what motivated me to write the following in this week’s Weekender edition of the Vanuatu Daily Post….

Let any man who thinks humanity resides at the apex of evolution come and live in the tropics for a year or two. It won’t take long for him to realise that in warmer countries, the average human being is nothing more than an elaborately conceived buffet for a multitude of creatures too small to see.

God may love all creatures great and small, but sometimes I’m tempted to believe he likes the small ones better. I could recite a laundry list of different little creatures I’ve played host to in my years here. From tiny viruses, bacteria and single-celled plasmids to fungi and molds on up the chain to mites, ticks and worms, insects without number… I give myself the willies just thinking about them.

I suspect it’s no accident that ‘paradise’ and ‘parasite’ are so easy to mix up on the page.

Pidgin Poetics

7 March 2009 Dan McGarry

Bislama is more than the sum of its words. People ignore this lesson at their peril. A poor Bislama speaker may be forgiven, but a poor listener suffers more than they know.

More than once, I’ve had to pull some well-meaning soul aside and explain that they can’t get another meeting with some functionary because they didn’t pay any attention to what they were told at the last one. Often enough, they’ll angrily retort that nothing important was said.

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

I have a terrible confession to make: When I was young, working towards a degree in English Literature, I not only studied poetry, I wrote it too.

Now that I’ve got that dirty little secret out of the way, I can talk a little about one of the enduring delights of living in Vanuatu: The poetry of the language.

In literature and linguistics, pidgin tongues usually come across as the simple country cousin of ‘proper’ languages. That may be, but too many people seem to think that ‘simple’ and ‘stupid’ are synonymous. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Counterpoint

1 March 2009 Dan McGarry

Picture Kalori, a young man of rank and potential in the 1970s, watching his fathers become isolated and shifted out of power, while young, foreign-educated firebrands radioed political speeches from hiding places in the bush only a few kilometres from his nasara.

The young lawyer who preached, Castro-like, over the bush radio is now President of Vanuatu. Chief Kalori remains in his village, very much the injured lion. He is quick to reprove the country’s founders, men he – not entirely without reason – considered under-educated and ill-prepared for the demands of ruling a newborn nation.

While Kalori is alive, there will be another view of Independence: not undesirable, but in the 1980s untimely and rash. He feels that everything that has transpired since then, the venality, pettiness, lack of political coherence or cohesion… all of this can be laid at the feet of some brash young men who lacked the education and the wisdom to take a more patient tack.

Chief Kalori The problem with having 850 words a week is that I can only say one thing at a time.

Yesterday I wrote about the need for the development of a coherent and unifying political philosophy in Vanuatu. Today, I feel I should explain why the development of such a vision is a difficult – not to say intractable – problem.

This is Chief Kalori of Clem’s Hill. One of the young turks in Efate’s francophone population at the time of the Independence movement of the 1970s, he presided over a community responsive to the French argument for a go-slow approach. As members of a large, distinct minority, they felt they had every reason to fear being overwhelmed and shouted down by the largely Anglican/Presbyterian leadership of the Independence movement.

The French at the time were much more conservative in their approach to Independence. They are presently the last colonial power in the region that hasn’t utterly divested itself of the trappings of overt rule. In the 1970s, the French quietly and not-so-subtly provided assistance to anti-Independence political parties (eventually united under the familiar mantle of the Union des Parties Modérées, or UMP) and supported rebellions on Santo and Tanna.

Melanesian Socialism

28 February 2009 Dan McGarry

Vanuatu’s political leaders may espouse all that is best in traditional Vanuatu values, and without a doubt many of them are committed to a course of reconciliation between formal western models of governance and the un-codified body of kastom philosophy and practice. But few have managed to express a vision as simple and as clear as Melanesian Socialism.

I think it’s high time that Vanuatu took another look at Walter Lini’s vision.

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

Ten years ago last week, Father Walter Hadye Lini succumbed to illness. His passing was a milestone marking the end of the first ascent of Vanuatu politics.

Walter Lini was the first – though not the only – Vanuatu politician to elaborate the unique political philosophy of Melanesian Socialism. The term, loaded as it was with unwelcome overtones for capitalist nations, was nonetheless an apt description of the conjunction of traditional Vanuatu values with progressive western politics.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography clarifies:

“There is little evidence… that he used socialism in the common sense of its meaning; rather, he was attracted by its emphasis on communal action and social responsibility, which seemed much more in tune with traditional Melanesian values.”

There isn’t a politician alive today who doesn’t pay tribute to kastom. Many of them take the role of the traditional chief to heart, integrating it into everything they do. One political observer once remarked to me that Ham Lini Vanuaroroa was the very epitome of the Pentecost chief, and though some outside commentators were quick to criticise his quiet, unassuming approach to governing, his own people wouldn’t have it any other way.

I think it’s high time that Vanuatu took another look at Walter Lini’s vision.

Don't Plan On It

23 February 2009 Dan McGarry

What does this (in)famous ‘V’ Factor look like? It is the best laid plans of expats and investors going awfully awry. It’s the sum of the gecko eggs in the computer case, the centipede in the sandal and the rats in the wiring. It’s the axiom that, of a truck, some fuel and a driver, you can have any two at a time. It’s the two-day-late SMS that says, “I’m waiting. Where are you?”

It’s the always-empty service desk, police who don’t patrol, the teacher who’s later than his students, the meeting that’s always one short of quorum, but never the same one. It’s the marvelously, magically receding deadline, beckoning like the endless sunset on a westbound plane.

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

Recently, I’ve come across references to a phenomenon some expats have wryly termed the ‘V’ factor. Apparently there is some magic variable Vanuatu inserts into every equation that reduces our ability to calculate a sensible output to zero.

As emblematic phrases go, the ‘V’ factor ranks somewhere between Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and those inane office posters warning you that ‘you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.’

Joseph Heller penned his famous novel in an attempt to characterise the crushing, often deadly banality of bureaucratic systems. His initially humourous tone peels away layer by layer until death, disappearance and the destruction of innocence leave the surviving characters with few illusions about humanity’s true nature.

Compared to this tour de force of gallows humour, a silly-looking poster tacked onto a corkboard seems innocuous, to say the least, little more than an ineffectual, protesting squeak from a mouse in a maze.

The ‘V’ factor isn’t so harmless. Rather than explain (Catch 22-style) Vanuatu’s unique environment, it substitutes dismissive hand-waving (often accompanied by another beer) for any serious desire to adapt to the reality of the situation. In essence, it’s a quick and easy way of exculpating oneself, of refusing to be implicated in the petty, small-world inefficiencies that define Vanuatu.

The ‘V’ factor is the final excuse of someone who wants into the show, but doesn’t want to pay for the ticket.

Two If By Sea…

20 February 2009 Dan McGarry

Vanuatu has done well by satellite in the past, and the new VSAT technologies available today are great, but we should not limit our options. Direct investment in a fibre-optic link may not be an option for the government, but it’s reached the point where private sector and institutional funding can take up the slack. Costs will be lower, megabit for megabit, than any other alternative.

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

This week, I’m going to channel the spirit Paul Revere and try to determine where the next invasion is coming from.

The invasion, of course, is the Internet, and the question is: Will we use satellite-based services to meet our needs, or an international fibre-optic cable link, or both?

First, I need to make something clear. Last week’s column looked at the fundamental issues behind financing a fibre-optic cable link to the outside world. It appears to have come across as pessimistic to some because it laid out some considerable challenges and risks.

My contention was never that fibre is a bad option. On the contrary. There are risks inherent to all projects on such a scale and I wanted to make them clear. But my point was only that the traditional role of government as underwriter or guarantor of major infrastructure projects is beyond Vanuatu’s capabilities. There’s nothing stopping us from finding other backers, though.

Last week at an ITU-sponsored conference for Pacific ministers, the World Bank presented a report on the feasibility of fibre-optic cable links throughout the region. The picture it paints is of a timely and fundamentally important opportunity for island nations, and for Vanuatu in particular.

Again With the Micro-Payments

16 February 2009 Dan McGarry

Rex Sorgatz posted a quick and dirty re-think of how micro-payments could be made to work in a present-day web-browsing scenario. Again, I question the premise of the problem micro-payment purports to solve.

My fundamental objection to online payment is that most people won’t pay for something of unknown value. Speaking for myself (and a few others I know), the moment a website starts putting obstacles between me and the content I want to access, it’s easier for me to move on than it is to leap whatever interface hurdles are barring my path.

That’s because:

I refuse to buy something sight unseen. In the material world, I can at least take a look at the package and compare with a few competing products before I pull out my wallet. On the Web, I can’t really know whether something is worthwhile until I’ve had a look. For a bit of writing of less than 5000 words, that means I need to see most – if not all – of it before I decide what it’s worth to me. For a short video, that means all of it. (The mere idea of a trailer for a 15 minute video makes me shudder.)
The whole point of micro-payment is that the amount is ‘throw-away’ money. Increments so small that we don’t even have to think about it. Forcing someone through the UI equivalent of a toll booth creates an impediment that’s out of scale with the benefit.
As I mentioned before: Online payment is not really payment, it’s reward. So much comes free with the price of admission (i.e. an Internet connection) that the only way we can assess the value of content is in the context of a gift economy. Think of it as a pay-as-you-exit performance, or busking, if you like. Modulo a few stingy, poorly socialised freeloaders, anyone who really enjoyed the show will happily toss a few coins into the hat. But not before they’ve seen the show.

To sum up: It’s best to leave interface and program flow issues alone until we’ve established the proper intellectual framework. Conceptualising a rewards system generates very diffierent results than a payment system. Given that reward and payment systems are both easily circumvented, the only thing we can rely on is the visitor’s goodwill. Place a little box at the exit, allow people to click right past it if they want, and you’ll never have any complaints about access to data.

More to the point, everyone who gives, gives gladly. This is more than just a moral point. The importance of goodwill from one’s website visitors cannot be understated. Remember: karma comes first, reward later, when it comes to online success. In fact, karma is the primary reward. Cash is just a symbolic representation of the goodwill people feel toward you.

P.S. If we’re honest with ourselves, we can accept that others’ failure to give us money is not an interface failure, nor is it a failure in their judgement. For better or for worse, if people aren’t willing to give money of their free will, then the failing is ours, not theirs.

I suspect that some manifestation of the Endowment Effect underlies most efforts to control access to online content. It’s irrational in the online context, but it’s human nonetheless to say, “I worked hard to produce this. I have a right to be paid for it.”

Those of us who have more or less grown up online have fewer reservations about the benefits of sharing content without precondition, and I suspect such expectations will become the norm for at least a significant subset of society before too very long.

Boom or Bust?

13 February 2009 Dan McGarry

The economic benefits of a fiber-optic connection to the outside world cannot be overstated. But it’s got to be seen as a labour of love. The benefits to be derived from the operation of the cable itself might never be great. If it’s not managed properly, the cost of failure could be high indeed. That said, the knock-on benefits to the community are numerous.

Call center services for European customers, online education, interactive tourism resources (video feed from the Nangol, anyone?), live video lectures from universities overseas, online consultations by medical specialists, offshore financial transaction processing… the list goes on and on. All of this becomes possible if we improve our basic infrastructure.

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

We need fiber, and we need it soon.

No, I’m not talking about changing the nation’s diet. I’m talking about fiber-optic cable. Made of very long strands of glass fiber, this kind of cable has the unique ability to allow light to turn corners. This means that we can shoot tiny laser pulses into one end of it and have them emerge intact from the other end, even if it’s thousands of kilometers away.

The result? Fast, very high-capacity communications become possible. In laboratory experiments, researchers have achieved rates of up to 14 trillion bits of data per second. Current commercial implementations don’t go nearly that fast, but even a single thread of fiber a few millimeters wide can carry billions of bits every second. Just a few strands would be enough to increase Vanuatu’s total available bandwidth to a large multiple of its current capacity.

So what’s the catch? Why haven’t we invested in a fiber connection yet? Fiji has it, and so does New Caledonia. Why not Vanuatu?