Is My Child's Montessori a Real Montessori?

My son starts preschooling next week. I am not much worried about his education as he already
1. Recognizes vowels in Tamil
2. Can count up to ten
3. Can add up numbers using his fingers for counting
4. Knows colours
5. Draws basic shapes
6. Colours inside shapes
7. Knows some rhymes
8. Can tell meaningful stories (can even make up one for you)
9. Asks a lot of questions
etc..
I think the above may be well enough for a child of 3.6 years.

We , my family including my parents, didn't leave some basics such as learning alphabets solely at his teacher's hands. Even if he doesn't even learn a single word from the preschool, it is fine with me as he already knows what a child should know academically. Instead, I expect him to learn morality, how to cope up with others, how to accept both success and failure equally, socializing with others etc at the preschool.

There are a lot of preschools, often called montessories - appropriately or not - in our area, but I was picky in one since I find that the teachers there are kind, somewhat broadminded, and have a sound religious background.

I met brother-in-law uncle today, who is a principal of a secondary school, and his wife runs a nursery for more than six year. He told me that they have purchased a complete study pack spending around 400,000 LKR which guides a child from 3 years to 14. Having not spending that much, I was thinking why they could not get some free materials from the internet and print them out in good quality themselves which would have costed much less than the amount they had spent. Thought of trying it out myself.

Did some searching online and found that keywords homeschooling, preschool, and montessori bring more relevant contents. And, being new to montessori method, just read some article here and there but came across something very important; how to check whether the preschool my son is going to attend provide montessori education or not. The following are the criteria I came across from The American Montessori Society

• mixed-aged classes, in which older children serve as role models and helpers;

• a full array of developmentally appropriate Montessori learning materials;

• teachers with credentials from a Montessori teacher education program;

• adherence to the Montessori instructional approach, with teachers serving as guides rather than givers of information.

Getting curious on evaluating my son's preschool with the above criteria. Whether they follow montessori or not is not going to change my decision on whether my son will study there or not. But, the online research gave me some inspiration to try some montessori concept on my son.

Need to learn some more and try it out.

Anti-Islam Movie Contradicts Youtube's Community Guidelines

Google, if wishes, has all the reasons to remove the anti-Islam movie which creates a big fuzz these days. Such removal will not be the first time, as Google has already removed such offending clips when it came to holocaust denial. It had also removed numerous videos posted during Gaza Invasion, as the videos contained dead bodies claimed to be killed by Israeli soldiers.
Term:

YouTube is not a shock site. Don't post gross-out videos of accidents, dead bodies or similar things intended to shock or disgust.

Try the following link and see for yourself.
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7FBB27616F4428B7

The anti-Islam movie is in clear contradiction to the following Google Community Guidelines, but still resides there safe and sound in youtube, enjoying the popularity.
1. Hate Speech
Term:

We encourage free speech and defend everyone's right to express unpopular points of view. But we don't permit hate speech (speech which attacks or demeans a group based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, and sexual orientation/gender identity).

In the same page Hate Speech is defined as:

"Hate speech" refers to content that promotes hatred against members of a protected group. For instance, racist or sexist content may be considered hate speech. Sometimes there is a fine line between what is and what is not considered hate speech. For instance, it is generally okay to criticize a nation, but not okay to make insulting generalizations about people of a particular nationality

2. Harassment
Term:

Things like predatory behavior, stalking, threats, harassment, intimidation, invading privacy, revealing other people’s personal information, and inciting others to commit violent acts or to violate the Terms of Use are taken very seriously. Anyone caught doing these things may be permanently banned from YouTube.

In the same page Harassment is defined as:

It comes down to respect. YouTube is all about sharing and interacting with the community in respectful ways. If you're not sure whether a video or comment you've made crosses the line, follow a simple rule of thumb: if you wouldn't say it to someone's face, don't say it on YouTube. And if you're looking to attack, harass, demean, or impersonate others, go elsewhere.

Sri Lanka's Rating Based on Media Freedom For the Past Ten Years

I was just going through the rating of countries according to media freedom from Reporters Without Borders'.
What caught my eyes is that we (Sri Lankans) are just one step better than Somalia, and rated 163rd of 179 countries.
I then started comparing the ratings given to us during the past ten years. The results below.

2002 - 51
2003 - 89
2004 - 110
2005 - 115
2006 - 141
2007 - 156
2008 - 165
2009 - 162
2010 - 158
2011/12 - 163

Numbers speak. No comments from me.

Controversial Anti-Islam Movie and Controversial Reaction

I was just going through the news on the new controversial movie (Innocence of Muslims). Given that it is a low budget film, directed by a pornographic film director, and the producer/financier is a fraudster, I would say anyone can clearly see the purpose of the film.
It has more to do with making huge profit with small investment, more than religious hatred or freedom of speech. I would say the people behind the video clip have achieved their targets already.
I am glad that Libya has appologized for what happened, and takes actions to protect law and order.

I saw a quite interesting statement in Al-Jazeera, which I find strikingly true.

The unrestrained anger against a YouTube clip has even led to outrage among some Syrian activists, with one tweeting that "the only thing that seems to mobilise the Arab street is a movie, a cartoon or an insult, but not the pool of blood in Syria".

Nokia, Qt and future of KDE

I had blogged about what would happen to Nokia, Qt and KDE almost an year back when they started signalling to go behind Windows mobile.

I think many of my predictions are coming true, or have a chance of becoming true as there is a fuzz on forking Qt and Nokia loosing interest in Qt.

I just read an article on dot.kde stressing how important is it to keep Qt open and free. I don't see a bright future for Nokia. No innovation, and so many strategical mistakes these days.

Good Bye, Nokia!

Syria - Starting to Explode

As Kofi Annan put it, “'Syria is not Libya, it will not implode, it will explode beyond its borders."


Syria's current crisis is not just about revolution against repressive ruling elite. It also has religious and sectarian sentiments which send strong messages to its neighbouring countries. A bit of background about the country will help to understand the situation clearly.

From its independence in 1946, Syria was desperately in need of stability. It faced many coups and counter-coups, and had 20 cabinets just between 1946 to 1956 and multiple versions of constitution. The Assad family rose to power with the 1970 Syrian Corrective Revolution. Immediately after which Hafez-Al-Assad, the current president's father, established Alawite rule of the country by offering high ranking positions to his loyalists, and close family members. This brought immediate stability and set the ground for development and progress. 

Although the above revolution had its positive effects, Alawites, the current ruling elites, represent just 12% of the population. This allowed Alawites to enjoy benefits out of proportion, which could also be interpreted, inevitably, as marginalization of Sunnis who represent 74% of the population. 


There are several Shi'ite sects which co-exist in harmony with Sunni communities. But, unfortunately, Alawites may not be one of them. Most of the Alawite belief is kept in secret and they don't pray in mosques. They consider pillars of Islam as symbols, rather than duties. They are considered as Pagans by early Imams such as Imam Ibn Kathir. This naturally places a historical mistrust between the local Sunnis and Alawites. 


Even though Bashar-Al-Assad tries to over come this by emphasizing he is Baath Socialist, secular, and married to a Sunni wife, it is not so convincing when Alawites enjoy the government's favour. He even tried building mosques for Alawites, praying in mosques in public, and making Alawites act more like Sunnis. But, the sectarian division is more historical and deep rooted, and marginalization of Sunnis is too much to be overcome by such actions. 


The mistrust of locals, and the craving for absolute power left both Assads, the father and the son, with no option but to rule the country with an iron fist. Any slight action against the regime, whether peaceful or not, is not tolerated. The regime has been very notorious for suppressing its own people. According to Wikipedia

On the other hand, he also drew criticism for repression of his own people, in particular for ordering the 1982 Hama massacre, which has been described as "the single deadliest act by any Arab government against people in the modern Middle East"; as well as others such as the April 1981 Hama massacre, the Tadmor Prison massacre, the Siege of Aleppo, Tel al-Zaatar massacre and the October 13 massacre.^[6][7] Additionally, Human Rights groups have detailed thousands of extrajudicial executions he committed against opponents of his regime.^[8]

So, the current state of conflict has dimensions such as 

1. A totalitarian regime which favours a small circle and marginalize the rest
2. A Shi'ite sect suppressing Sunni Muslims

It is hard to judge the current revolution as it has a complex mixture of the both above elements. When oppressed Sunnis raise against Alawites, chantings such as "The Christians to Beirut, the Alawites to the grave" are common. These sentiments made many Alawites to think that Assad's fall will lead to a sectarian genocide. This made more and more Alawites to side with the regime, which in turn makes the revolution more and more sectarian. The involvement, and the massive financial and weaponry support the current regime receives from Iran, and the deployment of Hezbollah forces on the ground along with the government add fuel to the sectarianism.

On the other hand, "Free Syrian Army" Syrian is a proof that the crisis is more about dictatorship rather than sectarianism. Syrian military leadership had issued orders to shoot disobeying soldiers who refuse to shoot at unarmed civilians. Such defectors, including high ranking officers, who sidelined with the civilians have come together and formed Free Syrian Army. Free Syrian Army is made up of both Alawites and Sunnis. This puts revolutionaries of Sunnis and Alawites together against an oppressive regime and in the same plate.

This uprising also draws other countries such as Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi in to the picture as regional and neighbouring powers. 

Around 30,000 refugees have camped near the Turkish border, and Turkey is already providing a base for Free Syrian Army... Hezbollah is already on the ground with Assad... Jordan is giving shelter to refugees... Saudi is providing arms for revolutionaries...


The Syrian issue seems to be spreading to the other countries day by day, rather than settling. Yes, Kofi Annan is correct. “'Syria is not Libya, it will not implode, it will explode beyond its borders."

Migrating From Selenium 1.0 to 2 - an Alternative to waitForPageToLoad()

We have been developing a selenium 1.0 based automation suite and an important decision we had to take recently was to support modern browsers. Modern in the sense, Firefox 3.6 is not any more modern, and so is Firefox 10.0.
This forced us to upgrade our suite to Selenium 2.0. Because of the way the suite is designed, upgrading the entire suite is just a matter of rewriting a single class, and ideally it should work.  All went fine, until we came up with the waitForPageToLoad() function of Selenium 1.0, which does not have an equivalent counterpart in Selenium 2.0.
Two recommended solutions to this issue in the official selenium documentation were

1. Wait for an element instead of a page load - This doesn't work because this requires a major rework. We need to find all wait statements, and decide what to wait for. There are instances where clicking on a button may lead to different pages based on the other choices made in the page. This makes this solution more complex.
2. Wait for certain amount of time if an element is not found - This is simple, and we tried it out. It creates a lot of unnecessary waiting for every elements, even when the test case expects the element to be not present. Eg: assertFalse($selenium->isElementPresent("ElementID"));  takes 30 seconds (default timeout) to pass. The suite which originally ran at 1.5 hours, took more than 5 hours to complete.

The current solution we are trying out, may be the final one that we would settle for, is none of the above two. We implemented waitForPageToLoad() as waiting for document.readyState status to become "complete".

$state = $session->execute(array( 'script' => 'return window.document.readyState', 'args' => array(), ));
if ($state == "complete" || $timedOut ){
return;
}

So far the results are positive. I hope this tip would help anyone migrating from selenium 1.0 to 2.