FOB

Here's some boilerplate to insert in your HTML next time you feel compelled to mention Web 2.0^® in a document. Have fun!

Web 2.0<small><sup><a
href="http://fob.po8.org/web20"
>&reg;</a></sup></small>

OSCON is over. It was fun, but it's a relief to get past it and back to life also…

Way too sleepy to blog much tonight, but wanted to at least capture some basic OSCON notes for later…

I don't know where the day went. I went to OSCON today to help out at the PSAS display, I was somewhat nervous since there was mostly a display of hardware of whose language I'm not fluent in. It was a good learning experience and I'm pretty sure I convinced several people to come to next week's Introductory PSAS meeting. I chatted with Ian a bit, I think it would nice at some point for me to learn about hardware. My extent of doing hardware was at the first little startup I worked for in Silicon Valley which went public a little over a year and a half ago and now supplies map info to mapquest. I learned how to solder and desolder from a colleague (even though I was doing software), and managed enough to fix my old beat up VCR (swapped the switches). I do like figuring out what part of devices don't work, taking them apart (carefully, theres always a trick), ordering replacement parts and successfully fixing them (been able to do that with a number of things, quite proud of myself actually that I can repair stuff on my own). Its quite cute too that my youngest daughter likes to do the same; she's quick to jump at fixing things when they break and seems to have a natural ability and desire to "figure it out".

Wow. Got up at 5:30 today, for complicated personal reasons having to do with getting things done before OSCON. Got our PSU booth set up, then went to the morning keynotes…

The first couple of days of OSCON are mostly tutorials. I didn't have time to attend any of these this year; my friends who did gave them mixed reviews as usual. OSCON proper kicked off tonight as usual…

I'd recently talked to friends about what AMD might do to compete with Intel's graphics offerings. Never did we realize that ATI might just be willing to be bought. Wow…

Sorry about missing the last couple of days of blog entries: the big FOB site upgrade took all of my spare blogging around time.

I'm also unhappy to report that I haven't been in bed by 11:15 once this week. I need to rethink my plan, I guess; I'll give it another week's try first starting tomorrow, although OSCON undoubtedly will fail to be of assistance here.

A friend of mine is thinking about getting his 10 year-old son started with a programming language. I recommended Scheme as a good functional language with decent references (e.g. "The Little Schemer." and "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Languages" -- more for the "teacher" than the student in this case).

This friend has stumbled across MIT's open courseware (6.001) using the Scheme platform. Is he stretching to consider these materials?

Any comments from our esteemed colleagues, steeped in the art of computing pedagogy? More than anything, I'd like to convince my friend that combinatorics is the key to success with programming, but I think getting computers to do anything would be reward in itself for the curious 10 year-old.

Now, when is Nickle coming out with its own intro computing text, presumably Nickles and Dimes?

OK, I'm now quite enjoying The Order of the Stick.

The first couple of times I tried it, I just couldn't get past the art. It's so…sticky. But as I read more webcomics, I think my art-style tolerance may be growing. Further, the writing is quite good, and I find the genre highly amusing.

I guess OotS joins my webcomics list. Now if I just had a better tool to read it, I'd be happy.