Leftmost Blog

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm willing to take responsibility for the amount of time I've spent in college and the number of credits I've ended up with. But the lengths I've had to go to even to appeal my financial aid eligibility border on the ludicrous.

On Saturday of last week, I received a letter saying that I'm no longer eligible for financial aid due to the number of attempted credits I currently have. Enclosed were two forms for appeal, one for a two-semester plan and one for "more than two semesters". The second of these has a strict four-semester cap. Unfortunately, it's not that simple for me.

As I'd bet all of my five readers know, I was recently accepted for a full-year exchange to University College Cork in Ireland. I intend on studying the Irish language and its history there, as part of my long term goal of focusing on Irish (and general Celtic) linguistics. However, the scheduling of linguistics courses is such that I need to be here for three semesters following the exchange at a bare minimum. No amount of summer or wintersession courses can prevent this. I've got a five semester graduation plan and an adamantly four semester form.

On Monday, I went to the financial aid desk and explained my situation. They had me set up an appointment for the next day with someone who sits on the committee that approves or denies applications. To summarize the appointment: I was told that more than likely I would have to drop the exchange to have my appeal go through and that I should be careful with what I submit with the form, since the committee would likely simply toss it if I had "more than a page" explaining my circumstances. And that the form would have to be in by Thursday (today) at noon, though the committee does not meet until next Friday.

I spent a few hours that day and a few more that evening putting together the four semesters I was to put on the form and trying to put together a concise but thorough explanation of my situation. This includes one semester for which I was given a medical withdrawal but whose credits are still counting toward my attempted credit limit. I'm also told that it's likely that I'll wind up with a referral to Disability Services for Students, since I mention that I've been seeing at the health center regarding ADHD. (Fortuitously, I had an appointment scheduled for this morning with said doctor and he said he would have no problem with giving DSS a formal diagnosis if it comes to that.)

The appeal form also requires the signatures of my academic advisor and someone from the registrar's office. I went first to the registrar's office, was given a signature and notes were made that indeed I did require the general ed classes that I wrote down. I was told this all that I would need from them. I went to see the academic advisor and learned that the previous undergrad advisor for the English department had quit and since been replaced. The person I spoke to, to my great surprise, actually seemed to care about whether I would succeed and whether the plan I had was sufficient or not.

When I went in today to submit the form, I was told that the registrar's office had to circle one of APPROVED or DENIED regarding my graduation plan. I went back, spoke to the same person I spoke to yesterday and was told that they were in fact the person I needed to speak to but that they couldn't approve or deny my plan. At this point, someone else in the office suggested we call the person with whom I'd first had an appointment. As they picked up the phone, however, the person from the financial aid desk came in and the person from the registrar's office cleared up their position and my form was taken. I was told that if something is in fact wrong with the form, I'll receive a call in the near future. As I left, the person from financial aid said to me, "Thanks for jumping through the hoops."

This last sentence says a great deal about the process. Had the previous English undergrad advisor not left, the entire process would have resembled a conveyor belt with a series of rubber stamps, varying only slightly in form. It seems to me to be an endurance contest, a measure of just how badly a student wants to bury themselves in debt for the sake of their education.

It doesn't matter that I've only had financial aid for the last three semesters. It doesn't matter that, in those semesters in which I've actually received grades, I've gone from having wildly disparate marks and a 2.2 GPA to being a straight A student (with one A- that I still feel I didn't deserve *bitter*) with a 2.9 GPA. It doesn't matter that I've been accepted to one of the most competitive exchanges offered on campus. It doesn't matter that I just received a scholarship from the Math department for demonstrating my problem-solving abilities. It probably doesn't even matter that I had approval from the university's Medical Services director to withdraw for medical reasons one semester. What matters is that some numbers have gotten too high and I have to submit my 27b stroke 6 and fight an uphill battle to finish my degree.

Earlier today, Barack Obama spoke here in Missoula, Montana. To me, this was pretty exciting. In the time that I've been conscious of such things, Montana hasn't been a particularly important stop on the campaign trail. We don't have much clout in terms of delegates nor in the Electoral College. So having even one presidential candidate stop by is, for me, a big deal. (Hillary Clinton will also speak here tomorrow. Having both candidates come I think demonstrates just how close things are.)

Myself and a couple friends showed up outside the Adams Center on campus at about six in the morning with warm clothing (or approximations thereof), mugs of coffee and hours of Trivial Pursuit under our belts. It was still dark and quite cold but we got there while the line was still pretty short. Friendboss Tom Fite of tomfite.com took a photograph of the line some time later. The buildings in the picture are the equivalent of three or four blocks away from the Adams Center. Missoula turned out in force for this. The people immediately behind us in line drove down from Whitefish, a couple hour drive to arrive there at six. I'm willing to bet the excitement at having Missoula be a real stop on the trail was not contained to myself.

Seating was somewhat disorganized, but we managed to snag some seats that (though fairly high up) weren't too far from Obama's platform. Better, they were real seats (not bleachers) and were padded. After standing in line in the cold, this was very welcome. To the extent that I caught myself nodding off a couple times during the wait. The two hours between seating and speaking went by rather quickly. Shortly before ten, they started sending out the various campaign staffers for their speeches. I didn't find anything particularly notable in any of them.

At around ten, Mayor John Engen came out and gave a brief speech. Unsurprisingly, he seemed pretty thrilled to have Obama here. His speech was pretty amusing, fairly informal despite the circumstances. One reason I think John Engen is a good representative for the sort of town Missoula wants to be. Nowhere else have I seen someone with mid-back dreadlocks wearing formal business dress. Following him, the state head of Students for Barack Obama gave a brief speech and then out came Mr. Obama himself.

I'm not sure I could or would want to give a full play-by-play of the speech but I can certainly give impressions. The first thing I noticed was that the lectern that stood there for everyone else's speech was immediately pulled down and he came up with a microphone. The only notecards he had the entire time were some brief acknowledgements at the very beginning. He spoke for about an hour and the whole time walked around on his platform with only a hand-held microphone. Though I'm sure he's given many similar speeches in many other places, I still liked his lack of notes. It certainly gave the impression that he actually believes what he's saying and that he's speaking to the audience instead of speaking where an audience happens to be. Overall, he seemed very sincere about what he was saying. Sometimes I wondered. At the beginning of the speech he said that the surrounding area was beautiful country and that he'd like to come back and learn how to fly fish. This is the sort of thing I hear at the beginning of every concert that comes through. It'd be great if he meant it but it seems a bit too much like something I've heard too many times before. I'd as soon he leave it off if he doesn't truly mean it.

Obama's discussion of his platform was, I'd say, almost entirely in line with what I'd like to see in a candidate. Not only that, I felt he did a very good job of demonstrating that he knew the sources of problems rather than simply knowing there were problems that needed to be fixed. I would have preferred a few more specifics on plans for fixing said problems but I understand that an hour isn't enough time to give a full, detailed run-down of one's platform and specific plans for addressing it. A few times he did give specifics but a couple of these I thought seemed a bit out of reach. He spoke of a $4000 a year tuition rebate for all students. I think this was tempered by a statement about it being related to community service, but regardless this is a lot of money and it has to come from somewhere. I also wonder how much success he'd have with his desire to cut taxes for everyone making less than $75,000 and eliminate taxes on Social Security for seniors making under $50,000. He certainly has good ideas but I suppose I just worry about making them happen.

Though a friend of mine expressed general disappointment at Obama's unwillingness to tout something more like socialized healthcare, I have to say that I think Obama's plan is fairly realistic and much more likely to see the light of day in the current US political climate. I think it's a step in the right direction and almost certainly a necessary one. I was quite happy with the attention he gave to the educational system and to the fundamental flaws with the current setup. He did talk also about increasing wages for teachers, something I think is especially important here in Montana where we pay teachers less than almost any other state in the nation.

I suppose it's sort of a small criterion in the grand scheme of things, but the final thing that I found particularly impressive was his sense of humor. He joked a bit about his campaign and about himself (to paraphrase, a black man with a funny name and big ears). I think it did a better job than any rhetoric of showing that he's a person as well as a candidate. He's also aware that he's not perfect. Why can't more political candidates figure that out?

As Linux spreads, it is necessary to bring it into line with the current standards for internationalization. Arguably the most important of these is Unicode, the standard which allows for representation of virtually all modern languages in plain text. It is important for Linux to support Unicode well, and the console is a core part of a Linux system.

I've recently been experimenting with implementing Unicode normalization, largely for learning purposes. In testing my code, I came across a problem with discrepancies in display and lower-level handling of UTF-8 sequences containing combining characters, such as <U+1E0C, U+0307>. Sequences would appear as one glyph per character, rather than one glyph per combining sequence. However, backspacing or moving through the text in question would throw off the display of the cursor and the characters. Backspacing through the example above would delete both characters together, but remove only the glyph for U+0307. Seemingly, the shell was handling combining sequences as single characters, but those sequences were being displayed (and treated) as multiple characters.

I filed a bug with bash and it turns out that the problem comes partially from gnome-terminal, the emulator that I use. (Incidentally, the problem is also present in Xfce's terminal emulator.) To handle Unicode with bash properly, it should display the characters as composed sequences. zsh did not have this problem, as it treats each character in a sequence as separate. xterm properly composes the characters and thus has no problems with this particular issue.

This isn't quite the end of the problem, however. Applications usually handle this sequences as separate characters, though they display them as one. Thus, backspacing through the above example would delete first U+0307 and then U+1E0C. This is especially important in certain scripts where a combining sequence can contain three or more individual characters, and deleting full sequences could grow to be quite an inconvenience.

Further, insisting on display of composed sequences could create spacing problems in some scripts, such as Tibetan. With this script, one will often come across characters that, when properly composed, become quite tall. This would mandate that all proper console rendering would need to deal with vertical character spacing in strange and possibly unpredictable ways. Indic scripts or scripts like New Tai Lue, where logical and visual order do not necessarily match, would also have to be handled.

The best option, perhaps, is for community members to gather and discuss the direction of Unicode text on the console. How much support for complex scripts should there be? Will terminals need to be able to do visual reordering for Indic scripts? Will vertical character stacks be supported? Will consoles need to be able to render RTL as well? The terminals we use are relatively simple, and I think many would see this simplicity as a virtue. Full support for Unicode rendering would greatly increase the required complexity, but the current support is mixed and inconsistent at best. I believe it to be imperative that some sort of consensus be reached as to how best to support Unicode and the potential it offers to Linux around the world.