David Dehghan's blog

During the past 1.5 years that I have been working for Microsoft India Development Center I have had the opportunity to visit India and China a number of times. Each time I go there on a business trip I try to visit some schools over the weekends and interacted with students.

In January of 2006 on a flight from Singapore to India I came up with the idea for PlanetChild and I couldn't wait long enough for the plane to land so I could start implementing it. Since then I have spent a lot of time talking to people and refining the idea. Now it is finally at a stage that I can start to talk about it broadly.

What is PlanetChild? It is an international non profit organization aimed at improving teaching methods and practices in developing countries and at making them more effective. It is very much influenced by http://path.org/. PATH develops programs that have huge return on investment in the heath care sector. For example they have invented a new syringe that once used it can not be reused and therefore it effectively stops spread of diseases cased by multiple usage of vaccine syringes.

I put this organization together to find like minded people and collaborate with them to develop and implement targeted programs to help kids learn better and faster. If you are interested in helping in any way send me an email.

The first program of Planet Child is Development Through Drawing. I will write more about it soon.

If you want to write a blog about Planet Child please use the link below to include a random child drawing with your post:

<A href="http://www.planetchild.org"><IMG src="http://www.planetchild.org/RandomImage.ashx?Size=M" align=left></A>

This is a 3 part story on how I spent a night on the street in Seattle as an experiment to better understand the life of homeless people that I pass by every day: 

Part 1: What it means to be homeless, a personal experience
Part 2: My notes from the night I was homeless
Part 3: What I learned from being homeless

Part 2: My notes from the night I was homeless

These are the notes that I wrote down on paper while I was sleeping on the park bench. I knew even before I started that the kind of problems that I would run into would be completely different than the ones that I originally thought of. In fact, that was the case; the issues that I was mostly worried about never materialized.

But fist my notes from that night:

[About 2:00AM]
I can't not find a cardboard box in the recycling bin outside of my house. The bin is  usually full of boxes every single day that I pass by it, but not tonight of course.  Well, I can live without it for now.  I should  just go the park and se what happens.

[About 2:10AM]
I am sitting on a bench in a small park by Seattle Pike Place market. (Here is a picture of it from above).  There is no one around except the occasional taxi cabs that drive by. It was freezing cold a few hours a go but now that a misty fog has covered the air it is not very cold anymore. Still, I can see my breath in the air. I am sleeping under a rain shelter in the park. This is the only covered place in the park.

[About 3:00 AM]
A homeless guy came by circled around and is now sitting on the bench about 20 meters away from me. Maybe I should go talk to him...but I am just getting comfortable and I am too lazy to get out of the sleeping bag. OK, if he comes any closer I will just talk to him without having to get out of my sleeping bag.

[About 4:00AM]
No one else is around. So far it has been pretty uneventful.

I was thinking that I would be socializing with people. I had already made up my story: "I am a student from Canada traveling around in the US. I have just arrived in Seattle a couple of hours a go. I am going to find a job to finance the rest of my trip."

This should convince anyone that I have no cash on me. But I guess being homeless can be pretty lonely. No one really talks to you.

[About 5:00AM]
The constant sound of cars going by is  very loud. I can't sleep with this much noise. The tiers make noise as they go over the steel joints of the elevated road, which is Highway 99, on the other side of the park.  I can also hear the cargo trains going by. The rail road tracks are about 1 mile away. But I can still hear the screeching noise as the steel wheels grind over the steel rails. I can even hear this  in my bedroom but because of the double sided window the sound is very much dampened.

[About 5:30AM]
The bench under my sleeping bed is very hard. I keep shifting around but every position is uncomfortable.  I am actually not cold yet. I am wearing too many layers of clouding.

One homeless person just passed by me. He was talking to someone else.  But my head was completely inside the sleeping bag so I could not really see them.

[About 6:00AM]
The vendors at the public market have started to show up. They are making more noise as they unload their boxes and drag them on the ground to their designated stall in the market. More noise. Man I can't sleep at all with all this noise.

I am actually cold now. It is getting windy and because I don't put any cardboard boxes around and on top of me the wind is getting into my sleeping bag. It was a rookie mistake to not look harder for card board boxes. It would have made a big difference.

[About 6:15]
Ok. I am just too cold and can't sleep with all this noise. Experiment is over. I am going home.

The sun has not come up yet. On the way back home I didn’t see anyone on the street

[About 6:30]
It is nice to be home. I never appriciate my warm bed this much.

This is a 3 part story on how I spent a night on the street in Seattle as an experiment to better understand the life of homeless people that I pass by every day: 

Part 1: What it means to be homeless, a personal experience
Part 2: My notes from the night I was homeless
Part 3: What I learned from being homeless

Part 1: What it means to be homeless, a personal experience

As I walking to our Microsoft Christmas party I passed by a homeless shelter that is in between my house and the Seattle Center where the Christmas party was being held at. I thought to myself I should come at stay at this shelter for one night to experience what it would mean to be homeless. Then I read the notices on the door saying that in order to stay there at night you have to register in them morning before 7:00AM. So sleeping on the street was my only option if I wanted to do this tonight.

It is a pretty cold night tonight, there is a light frost on the street which makes it a bit slippery but I am still determined to do this.

The contrast between a posh Christmas party and sleeping on the street will be memorable. I have seen absolute poverty in India and China before and I have been somewhat hardened by it. When I look at homeless people in Seattle I feel much less sympathetic because I compare them to homeless people in India and China who beside a rag around them have nothing. No shoes, no pants, no backpack, no sleeping bag, no jacket. They simply have nothing. They are very malnourished and skinny to the bones. It is very hard for me to see that level of poverty.

Poverty and suffering from it is very relative. I don’t doubt that homeless people in Seattle in Toronto are suffering. When they compare themselves to people that see everyday driving by in their car or going into their apartments they see the contrast with their life and it makes them feel poor. But what if you could take the same person to India where they would see that they are very rich indeed compared to the other homeless people around them. They would see that they are relatively well off. They would appreciate their shoes, pants, and not suffering from chronic hunger and malnutrition. Now, would that person feel less pain for being homeless after coming back to Seattle or Toronto? Would they feel blessed to have as much as they do?

Every winter in Toronto a few dozen homeless people freeze to death. I tend to believe that there are shelter beds that left empty every night meanwhile some homeless people refuse to use those beds because they can’t put up with the rules and regulations that they have to abide by. They rather be sleeping on the street and being free but cold instead of sleeping the shelter and being warm but having to put up with curfew time, light out time, no drinking and not doing drugs. So they end up sleeping on the street in winter nights when it gets to -30 degrees Celsius and they freeze to death by the sunrise.

At least homeless people in Seattle don’t have to worry about freezing to death at night. I wonder if they think about that problem.

I don’t think sleeping one night on the street with sweat pants and sleeping bags will give me the same experience as being homeless. But it is one step in the direction of me to putting myself in someone else’s shoes and viewing the world from their point of view.

As I was walking back from Christmas party to my house at around 1:30 AM I consciously thought about what I was wearing.

• My suite and tie, which I wear probably only once a year, = $200
• Shoes = 80$
• Camera that I took with me to Christmas party = $2000
• Money in my wallet (I almost never carry cash with me) = $0
• Multiple credit cards = priceless (well, that is a luxury that only a couple of percent of people in the world can afford)

As I am mentally preparing myself for the long night on the street this is what I am thinking of wearing and taking with me.

• Jeans and long johns and sweater = $100
• Cash = $20
• Driver License, in case I get hassled by the police
• Pen and paper, to write down blogs
• Sleeping bag
• Cardboard boxes out of the recycling bin, to put me sleeping bag over

As I was walking to my house I kept looking and thinking about where I could sleep. I can’t sleep in someone’s door step. I would probably get kicked out immediately or in the morning. I also don’t want to risk getting arrested for trespassing. There is a small park by my house where some homeless people and Mexican immigrants hang out. I probably can stay there without being bothered by police or homeowners.

My next problem is getting robbed. I discussed with Jana on where I should put my shoes as we were walking home. I don’t want to take them off and put them beside me because it might get stolen. But I also don’t want to put them in my sleeping bag and get it dirty. So I am going to take them off and put my feet and the sleeping bag over them.  Cool, the first problem of being homeless, solved!

I really hope that I don’t robbed or arrested. Beside that I can’t think of any other problem that I would run into.

It is already 2:00AM and I am sure all the homeless people are already sleeping so all I need to do is to find an empty park bench and camp out. I am pretty determined to stay out until sunrise. I will write more after I come back.

There is extensive documentation on Mediawiki on how to shorten the urls from www.yoursite.com/index.php?title=testpage to www.yoursite.com/testpage. After a few hours of research I was able to do just that on my Windows Server 2003 and IIS. It is probably wise to follow the URL pattern of wikipedia exactly so that in future software updates of Mediawiki your site will not break your site accidentally. The more customization you do to your site the more likely is that the development team on Mediawiki will not be testing your specific settings and will not be taking your modifications in mind as they write new code. So it will be safer to mimic wikipedia url pattern: www.yoursite.com/wiki/articlename

I have put this text on MSWiki so that it can evolve: http://mswiki.com/wiki/Short_URLs_for_better_search_engine_ranking

Step by step guide

1. URL Rewite
• Install URL rewite for IIS
• Download the zip file and unpack it somewhere on your server outside of wwwroot
• Give Network Service account write privileges to above directory.
• Configure the ISAPI ini file like below. Debug 1 will cause debug output to be written which will help you troubleshoot problems. Reload 5 means that the ini file will be reloaded at every 5 url redirection. This saves you from resrtting IIS every time you change this file.

Debug 1
Reload 5
#Browse LOT
RewriteRule ^/wiki/(.*) /index.php?title=$1

• On the command prompt type iisreset +<enter>. Your re-director should be working now. Test it by navigating to www.yoursite/wiki/Main_Page.

2. Mediawiki settings
• Modify MediaWiki localsettings.php to look like below. This will cause internal links on the page to also be shortened

$wgScriptPath     = "";
$wgScript           = "$wgScriptPath/index.php";
$wgRedirectScript   = "$wgScriptPath/redirect.php";
$wgArticlePath      = "/wiki/$1"

• 'Security Step' If everything is working now then revoke the write permission from Network Service where you saved your ISAPI filter. Then change the ISAPI ini to look like this

Debug 0
Reload 5000
#Browse LOT
RewriteRule ^/wiki/(.*) /index.php?title=$1

• Some pages on your site will be cached by PHP or IIS and will still have the old style URLs. But eventually, with time or with editing of pages, the files in cache will be replaced.
• The old style URL will be present for non existing pages. I think this is a bug in MediaWiki software. Even wikipedia has this problem.

The interview on C-span.

Some interesting points that I can very much relate to based on my experiences with http://www.wsuswiki.com and http://www.mswiki.com

Contributors to Wikipedia:

• 3000 authors that contribute more that 100 edits a month.
• There are set of even more active users that make 1000s of edits a month which bar far, contribute the majority of the content on the site.
• Wikipedia is ranked 40th on Alexa.

Who are the authors:

• Smart friendly people with targeted knowledge. He really emphasized the idea of being a social person and enjoying collaboration with other people to create new content.
• People who feel great for contributing to a great cause of documenting the human knowledge.

A good move by amazon. They have created a wiki page for each of the items in their catalog. Research has shown that anything mentioned by independent sources about an item will increase customer confidence in that item. Even if the comment is negative.

Items with user comments on Amazon simply sell more. Many people read negative comments about a product or a vendor and simply dismiss it because they don't relate to the author. So if you can get people to say something about your product, anything really, it will increase your sales.

Customer comments are one way, wiki is another. They are complimentary.

I was hanging out at the Amsterdam airport and suddenly I ran into Abhishek and 2 of his teammates. They way on their way to Redmond to participate in the customer advisory panel on RFID.

It was nice to hear that RFID project was moving along nicely.

I wonder when we get RFIDs at retail stores. Walmart scaled back on their implementation of mandating RFID tags on all the goods received by them largely because the suppliers were not ready for an overhaul of their inventory management system.

In the long run RFIDs will be everywhere but it might take a few more years.

Last time I bloged about the Shower in Narita airport a few people asked about the exact detail whereabouts. I will keep a list of these little oasis so you can break up your 20hr flight nicely.

• Tokyo - Narita: 5$ showers for 30 min. The place is incredibly clean and has lots of hot water. You can get in and out in about 30 min. You also can hang out in their lounge for a while and rest of comfortable couches.
• Amsterdam - I have heard there are showers here but have not personally found them. However there is nice quite lounge with big leather sofas close to the first aid station on the second floor. Highly recommended if the sound of snoring passengers doesn't bother you.
• Singapore - By far it is the best airport on earth. They have a movie theater and mini hotel and showers. If you have a semi long transit you can take a bus tour of the city. Since they don’t let you out of the bus you don’t need visa. If you are more ambitious you can arrange your flight to have 20 hr layover. Then go downtown and do some shopping and then to Santosa beach and relax and finally go clubbing and get back to the air port just in time for your flight. ;-) that is what I did once. Since you travel by subway the schedule is very predictable and you don’t risk missing your flight.
  

One the biggest drivers of user contribution to Wikipedia is clear mission statement they have. I have actually not read it and I am writing this blog in a airplane, but as a user and contributor to Wikipedia I have somehow got the message.

"Create a comprehensive and accurate free encyclopedia in 10 years."

Why Wikipedia has 10K+ active contributors?

Passionate contributors: They feel that they are participating in something that outlast their lives. When you add something there you are reasonable assured that it will outlive you. It is a way making history.

Large pool of authors: Everyone is a an expert. Everyone has something they are good at and want to pass that along. As individuals they may not be so smart but as a collective they are a genius.

Low barrier to entry to the author pool: The wiki collects and aggregates micro contribution for every users: In a successful and well maintained wiki you, as a contributor add what you can. You can forget about spelling grammar or style, if you have content and what to add it you can just dump it in. There will be others who clean it up and format it. If you are not an expert in a subject then you can contribute by simply formatting and editing. Just consuming the content is also a form of contribution. Page view statistics help authors focus their effort on a subset of content.

I was just listening to Tim OReilly's talk at MySQL conference. Here some cool sites he mentioned.

• Google Map Craig's list   http://www.housingmaps.com/
• New visualization model Baby name: http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html

• Use a license that maximizes content use. Give copyrights of the content back to the user.
• Promote your active users to roles of greater and greater responsibility. Make them administrators, content police, editors, spellcheckers etc.
• Create a space where all users can add value. Extract value form everyone: your readers, technical experts and language experts and the silent majority.
• Design for participation.  Simple interface, easy to use.
• Don't enforce social norms with software .
• Help the community define and evolve rules of cooperation.

One sad thing is that here in Beijing I can’t find any Windows Mobile smartphone. Nokia and Samsung are everywhere ;-(  

I got a China Mobile SIM card and unfortunately I see some ‘••••••’ on the home page of my phone. I also received some SMS messages from Chinese government to say that I should not go to the protests in Tiananmen square next week. But I couldn’t read them because I have English OS installed on my phone.

It is really interesting to see that SMS is an official method of government propaganda.

OK, Off to Tiananmen square. Maybe you can see me on TV. I will be guy directing the tanks to line up so I can fit them in my picture frame. ;-)

This months issue of The Economist has a special report on crud oil prices. I have been reading it veraciously in the past few hours in the plane to Tokyo.

Back in 1998 crude oil prices declined to near all time low of $10 per barrel. Since then the crude price has gone up steadily and in 2005 it has been sustained at $40+ level. IDC released a report just recently saying that this summer or in the near future it could easily reach $100 per barrel.

I believe oil price will have a profound impact on the global economy. I have tried to learn more about this subject and I will try to summarize my learning into an article soon.

The Oil and Gas index is the best performing index funds this year. I bought some about a month ago near its 52 weeks high. It is somewhat risky but I am pretty confident that we have not yet seen the worst of high oil prices. Any disruption in the oil supply from Iraq or Saudi Arabia will likely be followed by a sharp increase in the oil price. Since the oil production is already at its highest level it can’t absorb any anomaly in either production or consumption. I am still not sure how long I want to hold on to this index fund; I am thinking at least until end of summer.

I have not gone anywhere special on vacation for a long time so I finally decided to stop by China for a personal trip before I head out to India to meet my team at Microsoft India Development center.

I am flying from Seattle to Tokyo to Hong Kong to Beijing. Then will take a train From Beijing to Shanghai and then fly back to Hong Kong. From there I will go to Mumbi and finally to Hyderabad. I have been to Beijing before but not to Hong Kong and Shanghai.

I am going to write more travel logs in my personal blog.

But since I am incredibly cheap when it comes to buying software, I kept looking for a free version of the same thing. Eventually I found a good alternative: http://www.publicradiofan.com which is a really cool service. It is a database 100s of radio stations and radio shows and it can tell you who is playing your favorite show and it gives you a link to its streaming content.

I may give in and pay the $39 yearly fee for the RadioTime. Their site UI was pretty simple to use and offline recording sound irresistible.

Other interesting links I came a cross:

• Daily TV show listings in XML format
• MythTV an open source TiVO like program.