Volkshochschule: to go or not to go, that is the question

Yesterday, I bought the newest catalogue from the Volkshochschule (VHS)—literally, something like "people's university" or "public university"; an organisation providing further education for adults, typically in the evenings, in a variety of subjects.

I was interested in taking up a language course again, as I hadn't done since I was a teenager.

Hamburg offers a fairly wide selection, certainly larger than that in Elmshorn or Pinneberg (the nearest larger towns to where I used to live) and easily larger than Tornesch (whose VHS selection was really small). This made it really difficult to choose.

My top three languages were Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese—Chinese sounds interesting and I'd like to learn it properly; on the other hand, Spanish may be more useful. And taking Japanese again might be good to brush up the skills I had already learned in several years at the Volkshochschule back then.

Then there was the question of which kind of class to take: many languages offered at least (a) the "regular" classes, (b) "plus" classes which go at the same speed but have more classes in the semester (either by going on when the others have finished, having two classes per week instead of one, or adding classes on a weekend at the beginning of the course), and (c) classes for fast learners "who are prepared to work on their own between classes; participants should know at least one other foreign language already and be familiar with grammatical terms such as 'verb' and 'adjective'".

I imagine the "fast learner" classes might be best, since I consider myself a fast learner and wouldn't like to be stuck in a class that proceeds too slowly. Also, I'm not a complete beginner in any of the languages, though I never formally studied Chinese or Spanish, and I fear that what little I know might make it hard for me not to be a smart-aleck and use structures we haven't already learned and wouldn't for another six months. Whereas if things move more quickly, we'd learn them sooner :)

But then I thought: waitaminute. Starting a class in September might not be the best idea in the world. Once the baby is there, who knows how much time you have?

And I went, "*sigh* you're probably right". Oh well. So the "learning languages at the VHS" idea (which Stella tells me I've had for years but have never done anything about) goes on the back burner again for at least another half year. Maybe in February, when the next semester starts.

(The costs are also pretty high: on the order of € 80–150 depending on the number of lessons. And that's for one semester, or half a year!)

A Quality of Service rant

Occasionally I read about Quality of Service provisions which can be used, for example, to ensure that video data transmitted across networks is treated with priority so that frames do not get dropped during videoconferencing.

This strikes me as very Wrong.

What we used to have is that there were networks and there were clients on these networks, which used more or less bandwidth depending on the application. Some communications across the networks needed to have minimal lag time, while with others, it was less critical (for example, for file transfers, I'd say that it's typically not significant whether a given packet arrives a tenth of a second later or exactly "on time" compared to other packets).

Then came along applications such as video streaming. These typically needed large bandwidths; they also typically wanted minimal lag and minimal data loss.

Then what happens? Not only is this newcomer tolerated, but they're actually rewarded for their bandwidth-guzzling, time-sensitive nature!

Essentially, it seems that QoS is telling such applications, "It's perfectly fine for you to use up much of the bandwidth previously shared by many other applications, and we'll even let you through more quickly than existing, more polite and bandwidth-conscious applications!"

It's not my fault that Alice wants to videoconference with Bob rather than, saying calling him on the phone or sending him (plain-text) email; I don't quite see why my data packets should suddenly be demoted to second-class citizens just because she things that real-time video streaming should be preferred and this preference "enforced" with QoS.

In my mind, their packets should have no more priority than mine, and should compete equally and fairly for bandwidth; preferably, they'd even be throttled to ensure that they do not take up an excessive amount of bandwidth and to reduce the slowdown that other applications suffer.

Or am I grossly misunderstanding something about QoS?

The things you learn, part 1287

Today, I found out that Unix will let you execute zero-length files; presumably, it treats them as shell scripts which do nothing and return 0.

I found that after a Perl script I had written for a cow orker started producing logfile errors about how files are open when they aren't, after they had reinstalled the system; turned out that /sbin/fuser, which I was using to check whether a file was open (and which returns 0 if they're open, non-0 if they're not) was suddenly only 0 bytes big. (And /usr/sbin/lsof, which I could have also used, was also 0 bytes.)

Bizarre.