Why Food for the Hungry runs Ubuntu

Rick Richter is CIO of Food for the Hungry. In this interview Rick explains why his organization is moving all of its computers to Ubuntu.

Ethiopian farmer Ato Admasu

Ethiopian farmer Ato Admasu. Photo credit Food for the Hungry.

John: Tell me a little about Food for the Hungry and what you do there.

Rick: Food for the Hungry is a Christian relief and development organization. We go in to relief situations—maybe there has been a natural disaster or war—and provide life-sustaining needs: food, shelter, whatever the need may be. For example, the recent earthquake in Haiti. But the other part of what we do is the sustained, long-term development on the community level. The idea is to work with leaders and churches to better take care of themselves rather than relying on outside organizations for support.

I’m the CIO. I’m in charge of the information and technology for the organization. We’re in 25 countries. I have staff all over the world, about 25 people. There are about 12 who work directly for global IT, mostly in Phoenix, and the rest in various countries. There are also people who work directly for local offices, for example in Kenya, that coordinate with global IT. We’re responsible for about 900 computers.

John: You and I were talking the other day about your organization’s project to move all its computers over to Ubuntu.

Rick: We started an informal process to convert to Ubuntu two and a half years ago. It started when my son went to Bangladesh. He spent the summer there and converted some of their computers to Ubuntu. At first we didn’t have full management support for the process. They don’t really understand it and it scares them.

There were individual country directors interested in the project and I talked it up. There’s some independence in the organization to make those kind of decisions. Now, for the first time, we have full support of management for the conversion on a wide scale. I’m going to Cambodia next week. Right now they’re all running Windows but before I leave they’ll be running Ubuntu. In Asia we probably have about 80% of our computers on Ubuntu. We don’t have big offices in Asia. Our bigger offices are in Africa and they’re a little slower to adopt. Until now, a lot of it depended on whether the local country director was ready to change.

We found it was important for a number of reasons. One is security. Linux is not as vulnerable to viruses. We have so many places where entire computer systems have been totally crippled because of viruses. A lot of networks are very primitive, so the network is basically a thumb drive between offices in a country. A thumb drive is the best way to transmit viruses you can find.

We’ve also found in the last few years anti-virus software has become less and less effective. Three or four years ago, if you had up-to-date anti-virus software you wouldn’t get a virus. These days, you still get them. Some of our staff have other jobs within FH besides their IT responsibilities and may not have a lot of IT experience. As a result, staff often do not have the time to pro-actively manage IT.

Another issue is maintainability. Windows computers don’t run as well over time. With Ubuntu, when we come back to a computer two years later it’s in as good a shape as we left it.

Linux requires much less hardware to run than Windows. We have eight- or nine-year-old computers at a lot of our sites that will no longer run or barely run Windows.

John: So saving money on software licenses is a benefit, but not the main consideration.

Rick: Saving money on licenses is important, but it’s not the driving force. We’re a non-profit and we have a contract with Microsoft where we get pretty good prices.

Another reason for moving to Ubuntu is that in some countries it is very difficult to legally obtain licenses. Sometimes it’s next to impossible. You can’t buy legal Microsoft licenses in some places, or if you can, the price is outrageous. So many legalities and so many weird hoops you have to jump through.

As a Christian organization we need to set a good example and make sure all our licenses are legal. We want to be clear and up-front about our software. Ubuntu eliminates that problem.

John: What experience have you had retraining your IT people to support Linux?

Rick: We have IT professionals and we have people who are much less skilled. Most of the IT people who do the support have really bought into it. They’re excited about it and they’re pushing it. Those who do support in the field who have had less exposure, some of them have bought into it, some have not as much. It requires time. It requires dedication. It also required commitment from their management.

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Twin prime conjecture and the Pentium division bug

Twin primes are pairs of primes that differ by 2. For example, 3 and 5 are twin primes, as are 17 and 19. Importantly, so are 824633702441 and 824633702443. More on that in a minute.

No one knows whether there is a largest pair of twin primes. The twin prime conjecture says that there are infinitely many pairs of twin primes, but the conjecture has not been proven.

Now suppose we take the reciprocals of the twin primes and add them up.

\left(\frac{1}{3} + \frac{1}{5}\right) + \left(\frac{1}{5} + \frac{1}{7}\right) + \left(\frac{1}{11} + \frac{1}{13}\right) + \cdots

If there were only finitely many twin primes, the sum would have finitely many terms and hence a finite sum. But the sum might converge even though it has infinitely many terms. On the other hand, if we could show that the sum diverges, we’d have a proof of the twin prime conjecture. Viggo Brun showed that the sum does converge. Its sum, known as Brun’s constant, is a little more than 1.9.

In 1994, Thomas Nicely was studying Brun’s constant when he found that his computer incorrectly computed 1/824633702441 beyond the eighth significant figure. Nicely had discovered the infamous Pentium division bug.

Intel responded by saying the division errors were inconsequential. Intel was absolutely correct, but the public couldn’t understand that. They only knew that the chips were “wrong.”

The error was estimated to occur once in every 9 billion divisions. (I doubt any large program has ever been written that is as bug-free as the buggy Pentium chips.) And when an error did occur, the result was not entirely wrong, only less accurate than usual. The public only understood that sometimes the answers were “wrong.” Most people do not understand that floating point arithmetic is nearly always “wrong” in the sense of being less than perfectly accurate.

At first Intel said it would only replace the chips for people who could show they were effected by the bug, i.e. almost nobody. Eventually Intel gave in to pressure and replaced the chips. The episode cost Intel half a billion dollars.

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Mac has gotten harder to use, Windows easier

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Toward the end of the talk, around 55 minutes in, Raskin compares Mac and Windows.

The Mac has gotten harder to use over the years. In fact, Windows has gotten easier. Now I can move back and forth, I can hardly notice the difference. Mac is just epsilon easier to use.

Raskin complains that software bloat has outpaced Moore’s Law, a contention that was verified here.

Jef Raskin. Photo by his son Aza.

Jef Raskin. Photo by his son Aza.

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Integrating two software systems is usually more like performing a heart transplant than snapping together LEGO blocks. It can be done—if there’s a close enough match and the people doing it have enough skill—but the pieces don’t fit together trivially. And failure may not be immediately obvious; it may take a while to see signs of rejection.

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Keyboard shortcuts for Mac, Linux, and Windows

As many of you know, I have a Twitter account @SansMouse that posts one Windows keyboard shortcut per day. I’m starting to experiment with adding Mac and Linux keyboard shortcuts as well. For Linux, I’ll stick to Ubuntu with the default GNOME window manager.

SansMouse will continue to post one Windows shortcut each weekday. I’ll add a #windows hash tag to these, and I’ll also start adding #mac and #ubuntu tags to tips that also work on these platforms. Over time I’ll add some tips specific to Mac and Ubuntu.

Ben Jaffe had a Twitter account @commandtab for Mac keyboard shortcuts. Ben has stopped posting to that account but he has said I could reuse his content, so I plan to fold his tweets into SansMouse.

Update (15 February 2011): Windows and Ubuntu shortcuts are quite similar, but Mac is too different. I’ve decided to drop Mac shortcuts.

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On today’s episode of Strongly Connected Components Samuel Hansen called up the Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk, as well as Senior Scientist in the MRC Biostatistics Unit, David Spiegelhalter. They discussed the true meaning of risk, the importance of the Bayesian Method, how to get a lot of citations, and even a bit about the bookies.

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