Data.Driven()

Marcos and Arusha, top of Kili

I recently had the opportunity to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Meru with my friend Anne and his dad. For Kilimanjaro, we hiked the Machame route, know also as the Whisky route. The hike took six days, and we successfully reached the summit! I want to share some thoughts about the experience here with regards to equipment, the mountains, Tanzania and human matters. However, before I get to that, I thought of some general rules for climbing Kilimanjaro.

Three General Rules

1. Don’t skimp on equipment: buying cheap equipment will likely come back and bite you hard. Equipment is intended to keep you alive, so if you value your health, then get good equipment (see my equipment list below).
2. The mountain will try to kill you: ok, this is a little over dramatic, but if you pretend it is, you will have much more fun. The mountain does, in fact, kill a lot of people per year. According to Wikipedia, nearly 35 people die on average on the mountain per annum (around 15 tourist, 20 porters).
3. Always carry your wet weather gear with your because nothing dries on the mountain: Kili is a massive mountain surrounded by tropical rainforest. It creates it’s own weather system, which is extremely unpredictable. Expect rain, snow, high winds and blistering hot sun – all in one day! Despite all the crazy weather, there is a general pattern however: nights and mornings are usually clear and quite cold, particularly the higher you get. As the day heats up, the forests below releases moisture and soon you will find yourself in cloud. By mid afternoon it will likely be raining. When it rains, you need to have your wet weather gear handy. Don’t be an idiot and leave it in your backpack, as it is unlikely you will see your porter throughout the day. You and your equipment will get wet. But how wet you get is up to you. If you don’t protect your backpack and your sleeping bag gets wet, you risk pneumonia or worst. If your boots get wet, you risk blisters and infection. Also, you need to be prepared to drink 3-4 of water liters a day to keep hydrated. And, on the final ascend, protect your water from the cold (which can be extreme, we had at least -10c to -15c). If exposed, your water will freeze or you will end up drinking extremely cold water, which will cool your body temperature and make you feel unwell.
4. “Polé Polé,” is the key: Polé Polé means something like “slowly slowly”, which is the key to getting up the mountain (but seems to be a way of life in Tanzania). If you go too quickly, you will quickly be overcome with altitude sickness and you’ll find yourself with you head between your legs vomiting up your lunch and with a massive altitude headache. Not nice. Quite a few keen hikers found themselves in this predicament and promptly had to turn back. Also, don’t let anyone rush you. Go at your own pace, particularly as you get closer to the summit. People experience hallucinations as they get closer to 5000 meters. One of the groups we were with started seeing hands on their shoulders and the felling they were being followed by people that were not there… perhaps Kili is haunted by the hundreds of people that have died there over the years; Alas, as an atheist, I’m not allowed to believe in such things
5. Don’t be an asshole, your are there as a team. Porters are not your slaves! Just because you pay the tour company to provide you with porters, it does not mean you should not help them carry things. Remember, porters get paid to what basically amounts to less then US$5 per days. The first day is the hardest for everyone, so do everyone a favor and carry your own pack up the mountain. If you see a porter struggling to carry food, then help them! don’t just stand there like an asshole saying “oh! they should not carry so much stuff! that is really sad.” If it starts raining, don’t be an asshole and just stand there while the porters get wet. Help them put up the tent. Help them with the dishes. Help them with whatever you can. And give them a good tip (see end of this post for tipping info)

What we paid

We went with a company called Victoria Tours. The team they assigned to use were ok for Mt. Meru and excellent for Kilimanjaro. More on that later. We paid US$4000 for both walks for 3 people, excluding tips for porters and guides (which totaled around 10%). The money also paid for 3 nights accommodation at a 1 star hotel (they cost about TZ$15,000 per night). We stayed at the Mt. Meru House, where Victoria Tour’s office is located.

Mt. Meru

Mt Meru

I strongly recommend you hike Mt. Meru before you hike Kilimanjaro.

Not only is Mt. Meru more challenging than kili, it also offers a great opportunity to see wildlife (particularly on day 1 – we saw all the usual suspects: giraffes, zebra, buffalo, gnus, baboons, etc. which you don’t see on Kili), get fit and acclimatized, and provides some amazing views of Kilimanjaro, which just makes you want to climb it more.

Equipment for Kilimanjaro

Prior to going on the trip, I spent a lot of time trying to find the appropriate equipment to take. I spent nearly 1000 Euros (AU$2000) on new equipment, which complimented some old equipment I had. If you are considering getting into hiking, you probably need close to 2000 Euros worth of equipment (see list below). Yes! hiking equipment is expensive, but there is a good reason for that: it’s purpose is to keep you alive in extreme conditions. This is not so relevant on Kilimajaro, where you are usually hiking with a lot of people; but more so if you are planning to hike at other locations alone (as I sometimes like to do).

If you intend to climb Kilimanjaro, tour companies will tell you that they will provide you with the equipment you need. DON’T USE THEIR EQUIPMENT, IT’S MOSTLY CRAP! You SHOULD take your own equipment. The equipment that the companies in Tanzania have are mostly unsuitable for Kilimanjaro and will likely fail you. By fail, I mean, for instance, that any water proof jacket they give you will not be water proof or the tent they give you will leak, etc.

Equipment (MUST take, and by MUST I mean MUST in the RFC2119 sense!)

• day pack (~20-35 liter backpack)
• Plastic (or synthetic) pack cover for day pack and for backpack.
• 1 set of thermal underwear (top & bottom)
• 1 sleeping bag (rating 0 C or four seasons)
• 1 silk liner for sleeping bag
• 1 warm jersey/sweater
• 1 sleeping mat
• 1 pair of track suit top & bottom (for sleeping)
• 1 light towel
• 1 polar fleece/down vest
• 2 pair of light loose fitting cordura nylon (quick dry) trousers
• 1 waterproof jacket and pants
• 1 short sleeves shirt (quick drying synthetic material, no cotton – you will wear this for 3 days!)
• 1 long sleeves shirt (quick drying synthetic material, no cotton – you will wear this for 3 days!)
• 4-6 pairs of good quality hiking socks
• 1 t-shirt (spare, cotton ok)
• 1 pair of hiking boots (waterproof/goretex)
• 1 pair of sneakers (or sandals)
• 1 pair of warm heavy weight gloves/mittens
• 1 pair of gaiters
• 1 pair of light weight gloves (inner gloves)
• 1 pair of cycling gloves
• 1 bandana (good for first day, and when it gets hot)
• 1 wide brim hat
• 1 pair of sunglasses
• 1 balaclava
• 1 wool hat
• 1 warm scarf
• 2 x 1.5 litres water bottles or camel bag (4 liters)
• 1 head lamp (plus spare batteries & bulb)
• 1 pair of walking poles
• 1 pocket swiss army knife (or better)
• 1 travel pillow (optional)
• 1 small first aid kit (it is unlikely that your guide will carry a first aid kit)
• 1 toiletries bag (what to put in it is below!)
• 3 Large black garbage bags
• 8 small plastic bags

In toiletries bag you MUST bring:

• antibacterial soap
• antiseptic cream
• deodorant (roll on)
• sunscreen (35+, but 50+ preferred as you get burned really easily at high altitude)
• anti-fungal talc powder (for feet and to stop any crotch-rot)
• 12 imodium tables (Liperamide HCI BP 2mg) – diarrhea pills
• Malaria pills
• Moleskin (or some kind of blister protection)
• Insect repellent (only for first day)
• Leukoplast – Natural rubber adhesive medical tape (2.5cm x 5meters)
• toothpaste/toothbrush/dental floss
• water purification tablets
• antibiotics (if you have trouble getting them from your GP, just get ‘em in Tanzania at any pharmacy; they are happy to sell you anything there! )
• 40 panadol/aspirin/ibuprofen (even if you don’t need them, there is always someone who does!)

Equipment you MAY want to bring

Purely Optional

• mobile phone – There is reception on the whole mountain. Txt your love ones and let them know your progress and that you are OK.
• mp3 player – loaded with music and audio books: like all hiking, it is a good time to do some soul searching and pondering while listening to your favorite tunes. It’s also a great time to get in some reading. My favorite book to listen to on walks is Neil Stepherson’s Snowcrash. The book made new sense to me in Tanzania: where the rules of the society and commerce are governed by monetary corruption and turbo capitalism, which has led to widespread poverty as a result of IMF/World bank imposed deregulation and the selling off of state assets to foreign interests. Essentially, Tanzania has no industry so the general economy seems to be made of up of people just selling little bits of food, clothing, and daily necessities to each other. In a lot of ways,
• gps – always fun to know how high you are, especially if you don’t take drugs.

Some useful suggestions for when you are hiking

• Wear two pairs of socks all the time: this will stop you from getting blisters.
• Always wear pants: shorts suck.
• Always wear your gaiters: this will stop little stones and sticks getting into your boots. It will also protect your if it suddenly starts to rain or snow.
• Clean your water bottles every few days as they may become septic (you will know this because they will smell bad). If bottles become septic, it’s your fault. Don’t blame your porters. Your mouth is full of bacteria and other nasty stuff, which, if you are not careful, will contaminate your bottle and can make you sick.

Tipping on the walks

Tip 10% of what your group paid. But at the same time, if you can, give a little more. Unemployment rate in Tanzania is over 60%. In the areas that supply the porters it can be as high as 80% unemployment. Remember, these poor dudes get about US$5 a day to carry all your shit up the mountain. That’s what most westerners on the mountain make in like 20 minutes of work per day. The least you can do is honestly ask your self, “how much would they have to pay me to carry my own stuff up the mountain?”. Ask yourself that on the last day, when you are up above 4000 meters and then you will get a sense of how hard-core being a porter or a guide is.

Having mentioned tipping, I really hate tipping. I think that Tanzanian companies should just include the tip into the price and standardize their prices and compete on features, etc. I think the whole way Tanzania’s do business is really fucking backwards and really fucking stupid (I have no kinder words for it). All the bullshit about not having standardized prices reinforces the corruption in the society. All the bargaining for everything is an absolute waste of time and seem to be motivated by infantile greed. I’m sure it can be shown to be universally detrimental to the economy as a whole.

Exercise, Rant, Travel, hiking hiking, Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, Travel

A while a go (September 2007), I asked some sales guy from Microsoft what the penetration rate of Siverlight was compared to Flash. I asked him in front of a large audience (a) because I was really interested, and (b) because I felt like being a bit of a smart-ass as I guessed it would be really really low. The sales guy seemed quite unimpressed by my question and refused to give me a straight answer, but he had promised to give away a Microsoft prize for each question (I got a crappy ugly Silverlight hoodie, which I promptly returned to one of their marketing chicks).

Anyway, I just read an article that stated MS has released Silverlight 2 beta and that people are installing Silverlight,

And over the last several months Microsoft has seen an increase in the number of Silverlight downloads, Guthrie said, and users have been downloading Silverlight to the tune of 1.5 million downloads a day… In comparison, however, in a recent interview with Adobe Systems’ chief technology officer, Kevin Lynch, Lynch said Adobe’s Flash is downloaded up to 12 million times a day

I’m still unsure as to what percentage of browsers now run Silverlight, but does not yet seem to be making as much of an impact as good ol’ Flash.

Rant

According to the IE Blog:

Now, IE8 will show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly (using the http header/meta tag approach described here).

That’s great news. However, the fact that they are keeping the meta switch is a bit disappointing. They should really dump that altogether.

Rant evil, IE8, Microsoft

The best thing I read today:

• HTML5 published by w3c!

The most stupidest thing I’ve read in years (and made it known!):

• Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8

I share Anne van Kesteren’s view on the matter, and everyone else who is against this. This is a really really stupid idea on Microsoft’s part.

Rant

I’ve been doing my fair share of traveling lately. I went to the W3C TPAC in Boston, which was great, and I just got back from vacation in Tropical North Queensland (Port Douglas) a few days ago. I went whitewater rafting, and snorkeling in the (sadly dying)  Great Barrier Reef, got to swim with a turtle, and some sharks.

While I was in Boston for the TPAC, I bought myself an IPod touch and a Nokia N95. The first thing I did when I got my iPod was to jail break it. I have to say, the iPod touch is simply awesome… however, I wont go into a rant because I don’t want to expose myself too much as an Apple fanboy:) The first thing that struck me as I was navigating the list of apps to install on the jail broken iPhone was the availability of the Apache Web Server and PHP. When I saw that, I instantly thought “OMG! this changes everything: I am a server!”. Sure enough, I installed them and they worked. I got my friends from Australia to log onto my IPod – very cool! It was only a few weeks later that I heard that Nokia was also going to release a phone with Apache, PHP, and MySQL (APM) which I’m keen to try out on my N95. I think this is a significant development while we wait for the standardization and eventual implementation of HTML5 (which will provide similar functionality).

Putting aside all security and privacy concerns for a minute, I think the idea of everyone now being a web server is a very exciting and disruptive innovation. Imagine a widgets ecosystem that intertwines phones and desktops and integrate ideas from social networking and the unique aspects of the mobile in a single container (widgets).

I don’t know what Nokia is going to do with their APM phones (and I am sure that Apple Iphone/IPod and Google Android will both feature web servers really soon), but here is a simple future scenario: I buy a new phone with the APM capability. When I connect the phone to the internet, people can access the phone via its IP address (which kinda sucks, but fixable… more on this later). Pre-installed with the phone is a widget engine, which allows the user to either manually install widgets or use pre-installed widgets. The widget engine provides an admin interface, accessible only via, say, “http://widgetengine/” or something, which allows me to add/customize/remove widgets. Widgets in this contexts are little PHP apps, packaged to conform with the widgets 1.0 spec. Lets says the default widget that ships with the phone is a Nokia-build one that shows some info about the phone, and generates a photo gallery of the pictures stored on the device.  Although impressive, is not really of much use to me because everyone I care about is on Facebook ( or some OpenSocial network).

Given that the phone has a widget engine that runs on top of the server, a developer could create a Facebook widget that gathers all the phone numbers and details from my facebook friends list and packages them into a widgets. When the widget is installed, all those phone numbers and details get stored into the MySQL database. I can then ask the widget to either SMS or simply message, via Facebook, all the preferred contacts to let them know that my phone server is up. Better still, the widget, via PHP, can monitor the phone to see when it is assigned an IP address, and automatically connect to Facebook to let my contacts know that I am online. From there, my contacts can check out, for example, photos that I have just taken on my phone or other things the widget may allow viewers to do.

The things that I would want to share as a user (my profile: things that define me publicly as an individual and associate me as part of a group) and some simple app ideas:

• My location (exact (gps) or derived (eg. brisbane) or abstract (eg. the office))
  • Apps: Where am I now? Where I’ve been (recently, travelling, etc)? What exercise path did I take (and times, calories burnt)?
• My pictures (sortable, in sets, searchable)
  • Apps: my picture gallery; my picture gallery and with pictures taken from similar location (eg. mix locally stored pictures with flickr)
• My music (what I’ve got on my device, what I am listening to right now)
  • App: my music and music people around me are listening to?
• My details (maybe my social wants and needs. link to my blog online)
  • App: a dating widget? Syndication of my blog combined with my locally stored pictures?

The effect of these apps is very interesting because it means that I can bypass services such as flickr, or I can integrate both flickr and my phone. I can also merge the means of communication with my contacts, via SMS or the web.

These applications require additional infrastructure to connect me to other users:

• Global peer-to-peer infrastructure: when my phone connects to the internet, I want my contacts to know about it!
• Local peer-to-peer infrastructure: when my phone connects to the internet in this place, let those near me know: eg, for playing location-based games, or other multiplayer games; or, for example, for letting people know at this place that I’ve arrived.

This also requires a place where phone widgets are distributed by developers and scrutinized by the community for security and quality.

The future looks pretty nice if AMP enabled phones and services take off…. and if the security and privacy issues are handled with care.

HTML, Rant, Widgets

This New York Times article seems to suggest that Google has the potential to threaten Microsoft’s software reign by undermining it in the “cloud computing” space (web apps). Although the numbers don’t add up (yet), Google has the potential to steal a significant part of Microsoft’s market share in the Office space in the future by creating great web-based software. This will eventually weaken Microsoft’s because of its inability to adapt/compete due to its archaic software development/release cycle. If Microsoft implements HTML5 in all its awesomeness, will it leave itself more vulnerable to companies developing software for the web? Or, as the dominant browser vendor, will Microsoft be able to adapt many of it’s products to run on HTML5 before the rest of the industry can respond… I guess it depends, to some degree, on how much market share other browser vendors can steal from Internet Explorer. Hixie is right, this may just be “a good position for the industry to be in.”

Rant

The hard drive in my laptop decided it had had enough today and decided to crash (with only two days before I depart to Boston for a W3C meeting!). Luckly I was able to recover all my PhD stuff and work I had been doing today on Widgets. I’m currently in the process of reformatting my drive with Windows XP. I was able to recover almost everything using BartPE, which creates a cd-bootable stripped down version of Windows. BartPE is very useful as it allows you to map network drives. To get my data, I just copied all the stuff that I could onto one of our development servers. It took me about 2 hours, as BartPE kept crashing trying to copy files.

Tomorrow I’ll have to waste time reinstalling all my apps and testing the system to see if it is stable enough to take to the US… otherwise, it’s “off to the shop” to for a new hard-drive  If all else fails, my girlfriend has offered to lend me her new MacBook which I will happily take over my PC any day :)

Update: went to get a new 160GB hard drive, but once I started reinstalling Windows the installer kept crashing with IRQL_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL (new  BSoD error, which I had not seen before). Did a google search and all evidence pointed to either that the RAM or CPU was overheating. One of the IT guys here at QUT ran a memory tester and we discovered that it was infact one of the RAM chips that was fried. Sucks, as I only bought the new RAM  about  one week ago . Anyway, all seems semi-stable now… currently reinstalling Windows XP. I made a 40Gig partition to install Windows Vista  so I can agian play with SideBar Gadgets. I previously unistalled Vista because I found it so shockingly bad to use and unstable.

Rant, Work

Yesterday I started writing a paper for WWW2008 about widgets (and given the highly competitive nature of the WWW conferences, I doubt it will be accepted). Anyway, the conference mandates that citations conform to ACM’s referencing style (eg. smith [1] says, “bla bla”), which is not currently supported by Microsoft Word. My immediate thought was, “Right! Word’s style files are just (OO)XML so it should just be a simple matter of changing some angled brackets to create the ACM style!”. My plan was to base the ACM style on the already supported ISO 690 style, which is similar except it uses parenthesis “(1)” instead of brackets “[1]“. So I went into MS Word’s program file directory, and located the bibliographical styles. To my shock, the reference style file was an impenetrable XSLT file (7093 lines long and completely uncommented!). I spent about 20 minutes trying to work out what the hell the file was doing… but eventually I gave up . I compared ISO 690 XSLT style file to the ACM Bibtex sytle file. The bibtex style file is only around 1700 lines long, and nicely commented I might add.

Rant, User Experience

Yay! the W3C has canned the work on the Declarative Format for Applications and User Interfaces (DFAUI), putting an end to something that had no way of ever finishing. Of course, you probably have never heard of the DFAUI because the WAF WG never published any documents about it. The idea was to standardized an XML language similar to XAML or Openlaszlo…. but instead, what the WAF-WG got was an input from Nexaweb called XAL. Anyway, the people that were supposed to be editing the document never got very far, and as far as I am concerned, the work they produced was of fairly low quality (that’s not to say my work doesn’t suck!).

These are my random thought on how I think the DFAUI should have been standardized…and why it failed….

Read more…

Rant, W3C, WAF-WG

If you are thinking of installing Vista, don’t! It is easily the biggest waste of time and money ever. Their campaign should really focus on the “Wow! now that’s total crap” factor. Easily the most counter productivepiece of software I have ever used. After using it for 6 months I swear I was about to throw my laptop against the wall. I don’t usually experience frustration with software, but Windows Vista just goes too far. It’s slow, even with all the glitz turned off, and nothing works properly: could not print as the spooler service would constantly crash on start-up, explorer.exe constantly crashed, slow, slow, system freezes, more slowness, would not come back from sleep mode, argh I get angry just thinking about it!!!

I instead reverted back to WindowsXP (which we have now dubbed “the workhorse”). Out of frustration I also installed Ubuntu, hoping to free myself from Microsoft… alas, Linux still has a few years to go. The world is rosey again

Rant, User Experience