Here’s to dreaming big and doing it

Gerard Marull Paretas, Sergi Saballs Vila, Marta­ Gasull Morcillo and Jaume Puigmiquel, teenage students from IES La Bisbal in Spanish Catalonia, led by their teacher, Jordi Fanals Oriol, tie a Canon Powershot to a weather ballon and send it to the edge of space.

dailymail.co.uk: Students tie £56 camera to balloon and send it to edge of space to capture stunning images of Earth

telegraph.co.uk: Teens capture images of space with £56 camera and balloon

Boing Boing: Teens send balloon into space, get aerial photos of Earth

Flickr set: set on Flickr

Scratch is fun

Emma and me played around with Scratch the other day. It really does live up to its billing as a Lego-like environment to write programs in (especially where simple animations are concerned).

You might think that introducing a 3 year old to programming is a bit overboard – but this is just another set of Lego bricks.

Which is perfect.

Related links:

Scratch: imagine, program, share.

Wired: Scratch Lowers Resistance to Programming

Emacs links for Sunday March 15th, 2008

I used Emacs org-mode to compose my first college report. These first two links delve into some of the techniques I used.

Marios Braindump: Using Emacs Org-mode to Draft Papers

emacs-orgmode: [Orgmode] Example of thesis in org-mode and LaTeX

Xah’s Emacs Tutorial and Xah’s Lisp Tutorial – Fantastic.

Programming links for Sunday, March 15h, 2008

YouTube: Google Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git

code zen: On Technology, User Experience and the need for Creative Technologists

Joel Spolsky: How to be a program manager

Explanations to common Java exceptions – who said Java programmers didn’t have a sense of humor.

IndexOutOfBoundsException – You have put your index finger in an unacceptable place. Reposition it and try again.

Okay, maybe not.

Emacs links for today

Emacs Screencast (Ruby developer shows why he likes Emacs)

Xah’s Emacs Lisp Tutorial – I’m following this myself. Some great bits in there for the Lisp/Emacs newbie.

Publiushing Org-mode files to HTML – nice setup to publish a directory of org-mode files.

Hacker News thread: Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what’s your setup?

Programming Links for February 22, 2009

Kimberly Blessing: The Seventh Grade: So when I keep hearing about this crucial sixth/seventh grade time period for young girls, I can’t help but think back to my own experience around these grades. I didn’t lose interest in computers (or science or math) in seventh grade, but I was certainly separated from them. As time went on, I had less time to pursue those interests myself, and in some cases I was discouraged from pursuing them.

codeartisan: Websites are also RESTFul Web Services: if you design a RESTful web site it is also a RESTful web API.

code zen: Announcing EspressoReader (alpha): A desktop client for Google Reader: I am excited to finally announce the alpha release of EspressoReader. EspressoReader, in its current incarnation, is a desktop app for Google Reader.

Props to my co-workers in the first three reads (and a download – go forth and try out EspressoReader!), now on with more…

defmacro: The Nature of Lisp (absolutely a must read – this piece has influenced me on a project and will probably have a growing effect on my work down the line).

Code Monkeyism: Scrum is not about engineering practices: Scrum is not about engineering practices, it’s about management.

zack’s home page blog: One month with Emacs and counting – Part 1 – the Debian Vim package maintainer moves to.. Emacs!

The Daily WTF: Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To:Obviously, a lot of us – me included – enjoy writing code. But should we?

Honda: The Power of Dreams – Failure: The Secret of Success – a terrific must see video.

The Fishbowl: The DOM Stigma: Java is a strongly and statically typed language with a Smalltalk-style object model. Javascript is a loosely and dynamically typed language with a prototype-based object model. Force them to share an apartment and you’ve got an instant sitcom.

pyDanny: Naming conventions thoughts for Pinax and Django (they are using Django at NASA!)

Adam Bien: A Good Architecture Is All About Probability – Or It Is Sufficient To Be Good Enough: Many J2EE architectures were entirely exaggereted. The were intended for all, even very uncertain, cases. The result were many, dead, layers with lot of transformations and indirections. This introduced additional complexity and obfuscated the actual business logic and missed the point. The problem were generic, stereotypical architectures, which were developed once and applied to every possible use case. Even a guestbook was developed with at least 15 layers :-). So keep it small, keep it simple, and focus on the essential cabatilities of your application.

Aaron Swartz: Non-Hierarchical Management: Most guides on management are written for big bosses at big companies, not people starting something new who want their team to be as effective as possible. (Hi, startup founders!) So herewith, a guide to effective non-hierarchical management.

Fast Company: They Write the Right Stuff: And that’s the point: the shuttle process is so extreme, the drive for perfection is so focused, that it reveals what’s required to achieve relentless execution. The most important things the shuttle group does — carefully planning the software in advance, writing no code until the design is complete, making no changes without supporting blueprints, keeping a completely accurate record of the code — are not expensive. The process isn’t even rocket science. Its standard practice in almost every engineering discipline except software engineering. Plastered on a conference room wall, an informal slogan of the on-board shuttle group captures the essence of keeping focused on the process: “The sooner you fall behind, the more time you will have to catch up.”

nextthing.org: Fun With HTTP Headers

Morethanseven: Example of using XMPP on App Engine (via IMified)

digital inspiration: Single Google Query uses 1000 Machines in 0.2 seconds

Tech President: Why the White House’s Embrace of Drupal Matters

There’s a paradox at work – Social Software and Media links for Thursday

Clay Shirky: Help, the Price of Information Has Fallen, and It Can’t Get Up

The interesting thing about this piece, written way back in 1995, is that it leaves wide open the concept of information.

Just what is information? People instinctively grasp for “facts” as their definition. But in computing, we think otherwise. Can music be described as information – sure can. Opinions? Yep. Visual arts? Certainly. Video. Yes, even video. Anything that can be described in ones and zeroes can be thought of as information that can be transmitted and shared on a network.

Well, what about advertising? Yes, that too.

Jeneane Sussum: The Value of Words: These. People. Are. Lying. To. You. And. Themselves.

There is a paradox at work here. As the cost of generating and transmitting information decreases, more of it becomes available, thus increasing the need for better filters.

Advertising, Newspapers, and Libraries were the premier filters of the pre-Internet age.

So were the ‘big 3’ TV stations, radio conglomerates, record companies, book stores and magazine stands for that matter.

Search engines, blogs, social networks, and smart aggregators are those of the now.

How the practices of the old evolve in the infrastructure of the new, how new disciplines arise to meet the needs of today and tomorrow, will determine how informed, or how uninformed, we will be as a society.

Other interesting links for today:

P’unk Avenue Window: What should a modern library be?

reddit: Young Deer hit by google map VAN. Caught on street view.

keithhopper.com: A Brief History of Hyperlocal News

Fanboy.com:
Social Media “Experts” are the Cancer of Twitter (and Must Be Stopped)

MediaPost: Yelp Reviews Spawn At Least Five Lawsuits

Epicenter: eMusic Says Data Supports Long Tail Theory

Epicenter: Want Proof OpenID Can Succeed? Just Scroll Down

ComputerWorld: What the Web knows about you

Some inspiration from a co-worker

Scott Westerman: If you will it, it is no dream:

I tell the people I serve to start from the premise that all things are possible. Work backwards from there. Charles Kettering’s wise counsel that “Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future,” was never more true.

Here’s hoping that more of my geek friends can develop that outlook.