- Julie Learns to Program — blog from our own Julie Steele as she learns her first programming language. The point is: it’s in me. I wasn’t sure that is was, and now I know—it is. And what, exactly, is “it”? It is the bug. It is the combination of native curiosity and stubbornness that made me play around with the code and take some wild guesses instead of running straight to Google (or choosing to stay within the bounds of the exercise). That might sound like a small thing, but I know it is not. I was determined to make the program do what I wanted it to do, I came up with a few guesses as to how to do that, and I kept trying different things until I succeeded (and then I felt thrilled). As much as I have to learn, I know now that I really am hooked. And that I’ll get there.
- underscore.js — new Javascript library of functional programming primitives (map, each, inject, etc.). (via Simon Willison)
- WWW::Mechanize::Firefox — Perl module to control Firefox, using the same interface as the WWW::Mechanize web robot module. (via straup on Delicious)
- Anatomy of SSDs — teeth-rattlingly technical Linux Magazine article explaining the different types of SSDs (Solid State Disks–imagine a hard drive made of rapid-access Flash memory). Artur Bergman told me that installing an SSD drive in his MacBook Pro gave the greatest performance increase of any computer upgrade he’d performed since he went from no computer to one.
"learning" entries
Working Together to Create a National Learning Community
National Lab Day is a National Barn-Raising for hands-on learning. Using the internet and social computing technologies, with the support of the White House, and the business and scientific communities, National Lab Day reaches out to the education community, providing a tool set that brings context, community, and passion to education, and that has the potential to transform our educational system into a true learning community.
Four short links: 29 October 2009
Learning Programming, Functional Javascript, Controlling Firefox, Kicking Ass (with SSDs)
Four Short Links: 20 Apr 2009
Camp, visualization, mistakes, and a wireless power meter hack:
- Toorcamp — two day hacker camp in a Titan-1 missile silo. The coolest venue evar? I think so.
- The Allosphere (TED) — JoAnn Kuchera-Morin demos the Allosphere, a planetarium-like sound-and-light visualization environment for scientific data. (via Lorrie Lejeune)
- The Mistake Bank — The Mistake Bank is a place to share stories of mistakes people have made in their lives and careers. Reminds me of the fail sessions at Foo Camp that Joshua Schachter leads.
- Tweet-a-Watt (Lady Ada) — add an XBee card to a Kill-a-Watt power meter to be able to read the current power load from afar.
Ask… no, wait… TELL Tim
A few weeks ago, I was chatting with Tim. He mentioned that he'd recently taken his first ride on a Jet Ski. Several torturous minutes later, he got off, still alive and capable of detecting faint signals. But his back was suffering… badly.
Did you read the book from that movie?
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that media is changing the way books are viewed. In fact, video – and YouTube in particular – has already changed how books are sold. Most big fiction releases are heralded by short “book trailers” that give an almost movie-like feel to the contents of the book.
But in a recent article published by the Christian Science Monitor, I was surprised to see that there’s an even more notable link between movies and the sale of books.