Cold Front Blog

Moving day....

2010-02-13T20:31:00.000-07:00

Feels good to clean house once in a while and start fresh....

Alice: the flexible tool for teaching programming.

2009-11-07T09:48:00.003-07:00

This last Tuesday the Skyline High School was the featured school in the Colorado In Sync Expo in Longmont.

As you can see, there were four of the best MESA Intro to Programming students there to show off their skills to anyone who was interested.

Skyline is undergoing an interesting transformation as it is being remodeled and re-vamped to provide more resources and space for the schools two independant initiatives for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and VPA (Visual and Performing Arts).

Right from the start I knew that the STEM and VPA spheres would overlap. In fact, if I had to poll my programming students and Computer Club members, I'd say they'd be split about 50-50 between choosing STEM or VPA if they had to choose just one. Luckily, Computer Science at Skyline has been able to walk that fine line between science and art. Because the Comp Sci department is not funded by outside interests (like many CS programs that exist in the business departments of other schools), the department has had the freedom to make choices based soley on the interests of the students involved. For this reason, Open Source applications are used exclusively, including Python, Java, BlueJ, GIMP, Oregano, and, of course, Alice.

This year has been quite a year already in the Intro to Programming classes. When students are allowed to freely explore ideas, some unexpected uses of applications can be discovered. This is very apparent in how Skyline is using the Alice environment to extend computer science beyond the usual territory of learning to program. When you look at Alice creations examples online, you see that they tend to ... well ... look like Alice programs. This Fall, however, many of the creations I'm seeing are making me say things like, "You did THAT in Alice?!"

After corresponding with the Alice team at Carnegie Mellon University, I've decided to showcase these creative ideas and send them to Don Slater, from the core Alice team. Haven't decided yet where to post these for the public to see, but when I do (and I'll ask Don for advice on this), I'll put a link here. Hopefully you too will say, "Wow...that's done with Alice?!"

Of course this is just confirmation that Alice all along has been a great tool for teaching programming and comp sci. I think most people never really push a tool to it's limits, finding new ways to use that tool to create beautiful and expressive works of science AND art.

A new beginning ... of sorts

2009-08-25T18:30:00.002-06:00

I can't say how many times I've sat down and thought about writing a blog entry this past Summer.

I guess it was a gut check of sorts: what do you really care about? Many times I wondered. I mean, there's just so many things I feel like blogging about from time to time. You know, things like open source software alternatives, computer science education, an occasional book or movie review--all of that.

And yet, none of it seemed to matter this past Summer. I felt like I was barely hanging on, or sort of floating through life. Being a strict skeptic, I had long denied many of the things that were suddenly seeming to be necessary in my life. Things like faith and hope. I started to wonder: is this how it happens? Is this when a person officially becomes old and senile?

Well, I went and got help. Admitting that I just didn't care much about 90% of the things in this world (make that 98%), I reached out and asked the tough questions, like what my purpose in life was--you know, that kind of stuff. Well, nothing changed quickly, but over time and with a lot of work, I started to care again. I decided that, yeah, I suppose I had a pretty good career and life and it was worth pushing on.

This sounds melodramatic, and it was. As logical as I try to be, I've always been pretty emotional, and I had to admit that last school year was the most difficult year of my life. Throughout my teaching career I had seldom used sick days. Suddenly I was drinking a little more and having trouble getting up in the morning. Having emergency surgery was bad enough, but admitting that the painkillers sent me into an even deeper depression--well, that part sucked. All of that was small stuff, though, compared to losing my dog in February. She was so happy and so obviously wanted to live on, that it just killed me inside to admit that she was suffering balance and nervous system degradation to the point where she was crashing into things and sliding along the walls whenever she wanted to move on her own. Holding her still and seeing that she still was coherent and loved her life--I can't get past that somehow. I had no religious revelation. In fact, I felt the opposite: life is cold and hard and impersonal and things happen at chance. It simply wasn't fair. I felt like an angry child who was robbed of the things he loved the most.

Suddenly fighting to promote Linux and open source alternatives seemed, well, unimportant. Convincing the College Board that Python would be much better than Java for AP Computer Science--who cares? My former adversaries seemed no so different from me. We're all just people and we all have to accept the undeniable truth: life is cruel.

But...then it happened. Things started to improve. Therapy told me to simplify my life. When writing down projects that I was committed to, I came up with almost 20 that were just things that I was volunteering for. Somewhere in all of that I had a family and career, and yet I was spending a LOT of time working on side projects.

So I got another dog. Adopted her from a local shelter. She's absolutely wonderful and her effect on me was sudden and strong and very positive. I learned to spend time taking her to play fetch and leave the other stuff behind. I no longer had to be a programmer, educator, advocate, lobbyist--I just had to be her owner and make sure that her life now would be much better than the year she spent as a stray. She had hit the jackpot with me, and that felt good.

So this update may be a goodbye to blogging. The good news is that I'm having a great school year, loving my classes, and I've cut off all alcohol, caffeine and crap food. I've lost 30 pounds and feel pretty good. I get up early and take my dog out to play before I go to school to teach calculus. Somehow, it all fits.

And changes are happening at my district. Suddenly our district tech department seems to be on our side and are opening up a lot of policies that were very restrictive in the past. Also, free and open source software seems to be doing quite well with our without me as an advocate. Now I just use the software in my classes and others want to do likewise. Oh, and my students last year absolutely kicked butt on the AP exam. Having all students pass is a rare diamond in a year that was a large pile of coal.

I still read a lot of blogs and cheer on the young blogging teachers out there. We have a tough job and don't get much pay for what we do. Although I'm not much of a believer, if there is a heaven, I figure teachers have a good shot at being let in. I am working hard with my students and we're making a difference. We're partnering up with two local human societies and a local hospice care center to start a program that takes old electronics stuff and we repair what we can, recycle what we can, and use the rest to create new and cool gadgets and junkbots that teach students about robotics in a way I really like.

I may give a link to that project, for those interested. Otherwise, I'll probably just ignore this blog for a while longer and maybe let it die off. Maybe. I'm not sure, and right now it's time to take my dog out to play frisbee. :-)

Sometimes They Come Back

2009-03-17T18:41:00.003-06:00

So I'm working through a great Python book by Andy Harris, and I'm running a little orbit simulator.

You can the original orbit that my space ship was in (the oval shape that fits on the screen). I hit the thruster a bit too much and altered the orbit (the oval that goes OFF the screen). My ship seemed lost in space and time, as I started to think about Kepler's brilliant 2nd law. In short, if my ship was to return, it would be a while.

Python, however, deals well with really large numbers. If your program requires them, Python will supply them. Printing a googol in Python is no problemo. So I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

My wife came in and asked me to help her move some furniture in our guest bedroom. Later, I came back and the orbit was complete: my ship had returned home. Sometimes they come back.

Pygame for Flocking Behavior Simulation

2009-03-15T08:52:00.003-06:00

Back in the 80s, Craig Reynolds did some great work on simulating the flocking behavior of birds on a computer. I've always been fascinated by his results, as they look so much like a real flock of birds.

Since then there have been numerous implementations of his approach.

While programming Alice with a student recently, we came up with a way to simulate fish swimming in schools. Our method was nowhere near as complicated as flocking boids, but it was quite effective nonetheless. It merely involved random movement with boundary checking: get too far away from the "center" and the fish decided to head back towards the "center". Of course the "center" here may be a physical location, or the average location of the fish.

To study this in more detail, I decided to use Pygame, a module for Python. Pygame makes writing little graphical simulations a piece of cake. Add to it the functionality of Numpy or Scipy and you have a very powerful environment for scientific simulations.

My Ping Pong Problem

2009-03-10T20:03:00.002-06:00

While writing up some new and original logic problems for the PyWhip site, I came up with this one, which kept several teachers in our math department (and a student) entertained during lunch:

Imagine that we have some ping pong tables and need to have them "sealed" before the next round of competition. It takes one worker 10 minutes per table to get it properly sealed and cleaned up. It takes two workers 5 minutes per table, as they can each work on a half. Only two workers can work on a table at one time, though, so three workers also would take 5 minutes on one table. All we care about in this problem is how long it takes for the work crew to be done with the table "resealing" job so we can get the next round of a tournament started.

Your job:

Write a function that accepts two parameters (numberOfWorkers , numberOfTables) and have it return the total number of minutes it will take for the work crew to get the job done.

PyWhip and Javabat ?!

2009-03-07T07:44:00.004-07:00

If you are a member of Edu-Sig (the Python in Education group), you may have heard talk recently about creating a Python alternative to JavaBat, a tool used by almost every AP Computer Science teacher on the planet.

JavaBat is almost universally loved and used by high school APCS teachers. Students can sign up easily and then start solving the 250+ challenges they are presented with, ranging from simple String manipulations to hard core recursion methods.

One of the difficult aspects of Java is that it never was designed as a nice language to quickly write up some code and let it run. Old farts will talk about the golden days of BASIC, but Python is really a great language for Computer Science education. Javabat helps by letting students write simple methods (functions) without the need to enclose everything in a Java class with public static void main (String[] args) . In short, it let's students and teachers focus on the login involved in a particular method--which is a good thing. Teachers can track student progress, browse their code, etc.

So the reality is that Javabat is one of the most used tools for teachers of AP Computer Science. I have yet to meet a teacher of APCS in my state that does not use Javabat.
If Python is to ever gain a foothold in secondary school CS education, having a Python alternative to Javabat is a very good idea.

Right now it's just beginning, but if you want to contribut to PyWhip, head on over to edu-sig or contact me on how to get involved. Since I haven't really asked the two main contributers for permission to put there contact info here, I'll leave their names out of this, but they're doing a great job on this so far.

Thank You! BlueJ and Greenfoot open up.

2009-03-06T16:43:00.002-07:00

I just stumbled across this announcement about BlueJ and Greenfoot going open source. These are two applications used by many teachers of AP Computer Science classes. In the past they were always "free" as in free beer, but the source code was not available. Opening up their code can only help spread the use of these two wonderful programs.

Many times in the past I've contacted Ubuntu users in the Ubuntu forums for help on issues with BlueJ and Greenfoot. The response has always been a bit reserved--show us the code and maybe we can help. This change of policy will immediately build acceptance from a very talented group of developers and programmers.

Also, it's just plain fun to read the source code. Michael Kolling and John Rosenberg have written code with much better documentation than you will usually find. Here's just one example:

/**
* Java 1.4 & prior version of trinary "? :" operator. See JLS 2nd ed.
* section 15.25.
*
* @throws RecognitionException
* @throws SemanticException
*/
private JavaType questionOperator14(AST node) throws RecognitionException, SemanticException
{
AST trueAlt = node.getFirstChild().getNextSibling();
AST falseAlt = trueAlt.getNextSibling();
ExprValue trueAltEv = getExpressionType(trueAlt);
ExprValue falseAltEv = getExpressionType(falseAlt);
JavaType trueAltType = trueAltEv.getType();
JavaType falseAltType = falseAltEv.getType();

That was interesting. This comment here was also fun to find:

/**
* Find the Wireless Toolkit. In Windows we search all the filesystem roots.
* In other systems (Linux, that is) we search the directories in the
* initializer list of array 'roots' listed below.
*/

I've got a lot of reading to do, it seems.... :-)

The Day it Rained Forever

2009-02-14T17:26:00.003-07:00

The Public Library just had a book sale and I was lucky enough to find a nice hard-cover copy of The Stories of Ray Bradbury. The 100 stories in here will nicely complement my copy of a more recent Bradbury anthology of 100 stories--none of them are duplicated.

I've been in a lull. Although I have been quite productive teaching-wise, my life has been dominated lately by the difficulties my boxer dog is having. She's 10 years old and shows the symptoms of geriatric vestibular syndrome. Although her mind is still there, she lacks to coordination now to feed herself. I've been feeding her by hand, though, as it's the least I can do. She really has been a great dog--albeit a somewhat high-maintenance one. :-) She went through a difficult spell last Spring and fully recovered. We're hoping she can do so again, although this time the symptoms are much more severe. When I was a kid I used to absolutely dread the extreme emptiness you experience when you lose a pet. Not much has changed, really. Many things just don't matter as much all of a sudden, and you feel as if you're floating through life.

Alice 2.2 Video Export Test

2009-02-05T09:35:00.004-07:00

Just seeing if this works. Recently we upgraded to Alice 2.2 in my Intro to Programming classes and we are now testing out the cool features 2.2 has that 2.0 did not. Exporting videos is one of them.

Scratch on Ubuntu

2009-01-28T18:18:00.002-07:00

Today I had a personal visit from Bud the Teacher. We had a few things to discuss about our upcoming district tech fair, but as usual we soon were talking about big ideas and all sorts of stuff that we would like to see reach fruition.

Bud mentioned the possibility of using Scratch with some of our district Gifted and Talented student. Bud didn't even start by saying, "have you heard of Scratch?" No, by now he knows that if it deals with teaching programming and/or is open source, I probably have looked into it. I told Bud I would be happy to help teach Scratch to any interested teachers, possibly this upcoming June.

When I got home, I fired up my Ubuntu laptop, opened the command line and typed "scratch". I got the cold and impersonal Linux response of "command not found" and realized that I had NOT installed Scratch on my current Ubuntu version (8.10). I did recall, however, installing it on Ubuntu 8.04 and having it work great. A quick visit to this page had me up and running, scratching my way along in a neat little world of click and drag logic. I remember the days when Linux versions were a ton of work. That's changing, though, and more and more great apps for teachers are fully supported on Linux, with Ubuntu being the most common choice.

Gotta go. My Scratch is rusty....

Oh, and if you're like me, you'll want the source code. Happy {code} reading.

Raygun Gothic: The Future That Wasn't

2009-01-18T15:56:00.003-07:00

Today I went for my first long bike ride of the year. It's day one of our school's voluntary "wellness challenge", and I'm looking forward to getting in shape.

The weather was very windy, but warm, almost warm enough for me to be wearing the t-shirt and shorts I had on. While biking, I listened to my iPod play the first episode of the old time radio series X Minus One. It was a great example of retro futurism, as the episode (from the mid 1950s) described the "future" in the 1980s.

Now, if you were a kid of the 80s like me, you won't recognise the 1980s in the old radio episode. That's because it was the future that did not occur, the future from the forgivably short-sighted minds of 1950s writers and producers.

As I was riding along, I got to wondering: what's the term for that style? Steampunk has it's own look, as does Cyberpunk. I found myself wishing I could Google it right then and there on my bike just to put an official term to it. Now, after looking it up, I find there are really two terms: retro futurism and raygun gothic (from Wikipedia):

Raygun Gothic is a catchall term for a visual style that incorporates various aspects of the Googie, Streamline Moderne and Art Deco architectural styles when applied to retro-futuristic science fiction environments. Academic Lance Olsen has characterised Raygun Gothic as "a tomorrow that never was".

I first came across this term when William Gibson coined it in his excellent short story, "The Gernsback Continuum." That was the first time I really thought long and hard about the concept of retro futurism. I mean, of course I had always watched The Jetsons and a host of other old science fiction shows. When I first watched them I still thought they were presenting a plausible (all-white, sexist, and safe) version of what the future could be. In time, though, you notice that the "future" of those old shows looks more like our own past--albeit with big shiny fins and slidewalks.

Great examples of Raygun Gothic are all around us. The Fallout 3 video game is 100% raygun gothic. The TV series LOST is also almost entirely raygun gothic. Heck, even this great video on Youtube is Raygun Gothic, as it tried to imagine the world of 1999 way back in 1967.

The thing is, though, that every story about the future to come is doomed to become another case of retro futurism. When I was reading cyberpunk in the late 80s, it sure looked cool and exciting. Now it looks a lot like ... well ... the late 80s. :-)

[Note: All the episodes of X Minus One are now in the public domain. You can find them at the Internet Archive for free.]

[Note number two: The difference between the term retro futurism and raygun gothic is this: raygun gothic is a particular type of retro futurism that features a future that was envisioned by the (male) writers and producers of the 1950s: automobiles with big fins, blonds ubber people, rayguns, etc. Stempunk, therefore, is also a form of retro futurism.]

Why Teachers Don't Share More Often.

2009-01-18T09:40:00.003-07:00

One thing that drives me nuts is watching money be wasted. Pretty much every institution finds ways to spend money unnecessarily, but schools are often quite proficient at this skill.

What makes this even more frustrating is that teachers are by nature one of the most sharing and willing to contribute group of people I've known. Teachers create things every day that they'd be willing to share with others. If only someone would coordinate this resource and bring a true community to fruition!

Sadly, it seldom happens. I blame proprietary formats and money-hungry businesses. Teachers have been slammed for so long by the copyright zealots of the textbook publishing industry that they simply are unaware that there can be an open alternative to the way they do their jobs. Certainly within individual schools and districts there may be a large amount of sharing going on. By this I do not mean illegal sharing. Instead, I'm talking about the plethora of lesson plans, activities, and strategies that teachers create and use in their classroom. Most teachers would love to share their creations and utilise the creations of other teachers. This occurs whenever teachers get together at a workshop--they exchange email addresses and promise to send each other their creations.

Many times, though, they feel guilty doing this, or feel that it is too good to be true to be able to "steal" from other teachers. [They use that term, "stealing"! when they should be saying "sharing."] Where does this come from? Maybe from the fact that any time teachers attend a workshop sponsored by major textbook publishers, they are given complimentary copies of what often appear to be wonderful resources. As soon as they open up the book to make a few copies to share in class, though, they see the strict copyright warnings printed on every page. This is so common that they believe it is typical of teachers sharing resources: there's always a cost.

But, there isn't always a cost. Most of the resources that teachers share are not photocopied from copyrighted materials--they're quizes, plans and activities that teachers created by themselves. They should be able to enter these items into the vast network of teachers and create a free and open community of resources for any teacher to contribute to and to use.

There's one problem, though: proprietary formats. If teachers continue to use closed software like Geometer's Sketchpad, we remain slaves to the format. This is changing slowly, however, as there is no longer a stigma attached to writing pdf files or importing doc files into OpenOffice. Geometry teachers could use several of the free and open source alternatives to Geometer's Sketchpad, but few do. Why? Because the textbook publishers are like crack dealers. They know by now how to "give" (although you really don't get any rights to what you're given) teachers a free copy of their software. They also know how to make district tech departments feel like adopting their software will make their lives very easy.

So the district buys a site license to Geometer's Sketchpad and they're all set. Notice the students were never mentioned in this process? That was intentional. They are NOT factored into this process at all. Instead, decisions are made that lock students into having to use expensive software that they have no access to outside of class. Students would have access to all of the open source alternatives at home.

My district has done quite a dance with proprietary software. In the past it was acceptable to pay for access to, say, MacSchool, as it was pretty reliable and did what we wanted it to do. Since then, though, we have used expensive software that was terrible, and freeware (NOT open source) that was generally despised by all involved. Next year we switch to Infinite Campus, which I believe is a good thing. In the meantime, though, we have a semester where teachers are allowed to use whatever they want for a grading program. Really. Whatever we want. Some will no doubt just use the traditional red gradebook and only use computers for reporting final grades. Others will try to find an old copy of Making the Grade or something similar lying around.

I decided to Google "open source grading program teachers" and found Open Grade. It's simple and (dare I say) elegant. I did the Linux make, build, install and now have a pretty cool grading program with few features, but even less annoyances. It works. I can print out student or class reports into text files and fit a lot of info on one page. Also, since it's open source, you can get to the source code (in Perl) and alter the way it works.

We're lucky, as educators, that there are people like Ben Crowell, who created Open Grade. Some may scratch their heads and say, "but why would someone do that and share it for free?" I would say, however, that behavior like that is the rule, not the exception, in higher education, and I have hundreds of examples to prove that point. Here's a couple:

Jason R Briggs has written an excellent Python book for teaching Python to kids.
Dick Baldwin shares a ton of his own work for the Alice programming environment.
Allen Downey has been sharing his Java and Python books for years.
Moodle and Wordpress are used by many teachers, most of which can't believe they're free.

I just wish we had a more efficient way of sharing all these homegrown education resources....

Leaving on a jet plane

2009-01-04T17:13:00.002-07:00

Tomorrow is the first day of the Spring semester. While my students are filing into my classroom, I'll be on a jet flying to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh for a one-day workshop on Alice 3.0, which I'll be using in my Intro to Programming class this semester.

My students will be official bug reporters for Alice 3.0, a scary and yet exciting job for us. I'm also hoping to put a word in for Linux support while I'm there. Wish I was better at tweaking Java in Linux, so I could help out more. :-(

Spent most of today packing up and storing away my NES and SNES game collection. Had to make more room for some recent book acquisitions....

When worlds collide....

2009-01-01T15:29:00.003-07:00

My online identity is pretty diverse. Each different facet seems to interact with a large web or sphere of somewhat similar individuals. What surprises me, though, is how little the various spheres tend to interact with the other spheres.

For instance, I see very little overlap between these three spheres: math teachers, programmers, and technology in education experts. All three of those spheres accept me and allow me to contribute and ask questions--and yet I know very few individuals that exist in even two of those three spheres.

For instance, take a look at this recent post about a probability question on a programming blog. The immense number of comments arguing one solution over another reminded me of the Monty Hall problem, which is taught in IMP 3 Math. In fact, there's almost nothing in those comments (other than the occasional coded "solution" to the problem) that would tell you that these are primarily programmers--not math teachers--arguing their view of the problem.

I found the comments amusing. I haven't necessarily found that being a natural at math makes a student a natural at programming--although I must say that almost all of my best programmers are very good at math. I've done research on a correlation between language acquisition aptitude and programming ability, but the results, of course, were unclear. What I do know, though, is that very few programmers (aside from a few Linquistics experts) ever think much about language acquisition.

Let the fun begin:

Let's say, hypothetically speaking, you met someone who told you they had two children, and one of them is a girl. What are the odds that person has a boy and a girl?

Superpowers

2008-12-28T09:42:00.003-07:00

This vacation I've been reading Superpowers by David J. Schwartz.

I picked this book up as an impulse buy, and here's why:

First of all, it's a novel about college students in Madison, WI. Since I spent a large slice of my college career there, all the locales mentioned in this book are easily remembered. When the characters go to the SERF, I remember myself going to the SERF.

However, you don't need to know Madison to enjoy this book. The concept alone is enough to merit a read: ordinary people wake up one morning transformed into beings with superpowers. You won't find a cliche supervillain subplot here--mostly this is about what would happen if an ordinary person suddenly had extraordinary powers.

The five powers themselves make for a great conversation piece: which of the five would you choose if you could pick one of them for yourself.

1. Speed. The ability to run 20 miles in a couple minutes. When you run, objects in the world seem to be standing still, so dodging bullets isn't out of the question. Running to a nearby state is not a problem.

2. Flight. No wings necessary. The ability to soar through the sky.

3. Invisibility. Can be turned on and off at will.

4. Super strength and near invulnerability. Think of the powers of the Thing, except you still look normal.

5. Telepathy. Not just able to read the minds of those nearby, but also the ability to scan an internet-like web of thoughts.

Which would you choose?

Schwartz does a good job on this novel. It doesn't surprise me that he has a large selections of comic and science fiction/fantasy reviews that he has documented from a former blog and also a current blog. If you enjoy reading reviews, give them a try.

Object-Oriented Programming Example

2008-12-23T15:21:00.002-07:00

My Java programming project is going a bit slow, but I have many excuses. The one I like to use in OOP (Object-Oriented Programming) is "well, I'm still working on some design issues before I start writing all the code."

So I'm converting Football Strategy, the old Avalon Hill game into a modern Java version, complete with opposing coach AI. OOP will allow me to extend the coach class through time, making better and better opponents for humans to face.

But that all comes later. Since I give my AP Computer Science students the whole year for their project, I too have a lot of time to develop this application. Recently I've been hitting my head against the wall trying to come up with a system for encoding play results that include all the relavent information in one result. For instance, a result of 723 may have used the 7 as a play-type indicator (say, "complete pass play that went out of bounds"), and the 23 might have been the net yardage. On the suggestion of one of my students, however, I have decided to encode all the play results as String objects. Perhaps something like "15cpno023" for complete pass no fumble out of bounds and 23 yards, with the play taking 15 seconds. I don't know, I'm not there yet.

The point of using an OOP approach, however, is to allow you to think of things as actual objects. What better way to do that then open up the Football Strategy game box and see what objects in the game may lend themselves to objects in Java. One that clearly lends itself to being a Java class is the scoreboard. Before OOP, making a football simulation would have been a long and tedious process, as the data would just be flying around the program, jumping from function to function. With OOP, though, you get to break things up and decide where the data lives. In the case of a footballScoreboard class, you can easily think of the data fields (homeScore, awayScore, down, yardsToGo, fieldPosition, etc) and the various behaviors (incrementDown, incrementHomeScore, etc). What was so nice about this, though, was that there is an actual object in the real world that is so familiar to anyone who has ever been a football fan. Ask some football fans at random to draw a football scoreboard and a lot of them would draw something like this post's image.

Coming from a procedural programming background, OOP was a bit strange at first. Now I can't imagine programming relatively large projects without it.

Ubuntu Gets Even Better

2008-12-22T09:44:00.003-07:00

Joey Stanford's recent post about Ubuntu Ethos came at a perfect time for me.

Last night I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.10: Intrepid Ibex. I had avoided switching to the new Ubuntu version simply because I had a lot of things set up on my laptop that I use for teaching math and teaching programming classes.

After copying most of my home folder files to an external hard drive (I love the Western Digital Passport series), I did the install from the live cd.

After install, I did the usual updates and installed all the Linux applications I use for programming: things like Eclipse, Geany, IDLE for Python, Comix for reading comic books, and so on. I also installed the Sun Java 6 JDK using the package manager. After a nice little test of HelloWorld.java, I got the latest versions of BlueJ and Greenfoot and installed them.

Now this is where things were different than in the past. Back in the days of Feisty Fawn, I had to mess around a lot with the xorg.conf file and set some class paths for Java. I always considered these steps to be necessary evils and a small price to pay for a great, free alternatives to MS Windows.

This time, however, I didn't have to do any of those steps. None. Everything worked correctly right away. I even was able to turn off tapping on the touchpad without having to do anything on the command line.

I like the command line. In fact, I use it quite a bit. The point here, though, is that you really don't have to use it anymore. That's a good thing for helping spread Ubuntu. If you have ever considered Linux, but were intimidated for one reason or another, now is the time. The Ubuntu community can help you with the switch.

If you're a math or computer science teacher, you'll be amazed at how Ubuntu can help you with your job.

Java for the Holidays

2008-12-20T17:52:00.002-07:00

I've blogged about Cay Horstmann before. In the world of Java books there is no shortage of "so-so" tomes that "kind of" teach you the language. Then there are a few truly great books that are several levels above the rest. One is Head First Java, but that book is in need of a rewrite soon. The other great Java book is Core Java Vol 1: Fundamentals by Cay Horstmann and Gary Cornell.

What makes a great programming book? For me, the author must get to the heart of the language. Mark Lutz and Wesley Chun have written truly "Pythonic" books about the Python language. Their books are miles ahead of many of the other books on Python programming, which seem sloppy and inefficient.

Horstmann's Core Java is a great book. So I finally went to Borders and bought my own copy. I worked through the first 138 pages today (as review) and can't wait to revisit the chapters on Swing GUI development. If you really want to understand Java, try this book.

Teachers who read this books will have a big advantage in teaching Java, no matter what textbook they have officially adopted for their class.

When Zombies Walk the Earth

2008-12-08T07:53:00.003-07:00

Found this anthology of zombie fiction in Borders last week. Started reading "Meathouse Man" by George R. R. Martin and found it to be quite good, in a very disturbing way. I put the book back and went on my way.

Then I read the two latest issues of The Walking Dead and realized that zombies have been quite prominent in my film, fiction, and music choices lately.

What makes this such a successful subgenre? I don't know. Maybe it's got something to do with zombies traditionally being dumb and slow. I know there have been variations on this, but I still prefer the mindless wandering version over all the rest.

I think these stories work because the rules are so simple. Add on the fact that most of these take place in a post-apocalypse setting and you know have two for the price of one in horror and science fiction subgenres. Maybe it works best on people who like rainy days. Zombie stories make us thankful for what we have.

I went back to Borders yesterday and bought the anthology. The cover alone was worth the price.

Creating a school website

2008-12-03T18:02:00.004-07:00

Being in charge of a school's computer science department has several perks. I get to help shape our curriculum. I get to hang out with some of the brightest students at our school. I get to occasionally play video games and call it "research."

All of those perks are great, but being the department chair also brings great responsibility. Were I just a mere computer science "teacher", I would not feel so inclined to take on the task of implementing our new website for our STEM Initiative. But now that I'm chair, hell, it's the least I can do!

Actually, I'm joking a bit here. The fact is, I was always interested in helping to bring our new STEM website to fruition. I just knew how messy large websites can become.

Thankfully, there's Joomla.

Joomla is a content management system that allows one to create and maintain an active website. It's open source, and free. You can see the current version of my Joomla STEM and VPA site here, but it's still under construction. Still, Joomla has made it easy to do what used to be a chore when I'd write HTML and CSS from scratch...

Those were the days.

Surprise Birthday Party

2008-11-30T12:01:00.002-07:00

Yesterday I took part in a real surprise birthday party (You can see my profile in the photo, not sure what I was looking at offstage to the left...).

This was one of those parties where you get a bunch of friends and family together and you all hide in the dark and wait for the unsuspecting party (this time it was Cjturt) to arrive. Then you all yell and turn on the lights: "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!"

Turned out to be a lot of fun.

I've published a set of photos for the party. If you're family, email me for the access info. If you're not family, feel free anyway to see my public albums at my photo page which runs on the open source Zen Photo program.

Traffic Jams for no reason at all

2008-11-28T10:29:00.003-07:00

If you've driven through a major traffic area like I25 south of Denver, you know what it's like to get in a jam. You come upon red taillights and suddenly you're stopping and going in little spurts that can take over an hour if you're unlucky.

Sometimes you find out why. You see a crash scene and a bunch of emergency workers. Or a lane that's closed for construction.

At other times, though, you have no idea what caused the backup. I had long had a theory that there really was no major cause: all it takes is for one person to get to close to the vehicle in front of her and she taps her brakes. Then my wife says, "hey, they're stopping up there." So I slow down a little, as does the guy behind me. Apparently that's all it takes.

When I saw this article and video I found it fascinating. Watch the video clip. All they do is have a bunch of cars driving around a big racetrack circle. Doesn't take long before someone hits their brakes and send a wave back behind them. When it's on a circle it's even cooler, as the wave comes back to get you again.

Can you tell I did some commuting this Thanksgiving break?

Eraserhead

2008-11-26T14:47:00.004-07:00

Want to hear a funny one? For years I avoided watching David Lynch's Eraserhead because I thought it would be too ... normal.

Let me explain. I really started to notice Lynch back in the early 90s, when I was watching Twin Peaks and thinking it was the best thing on TV since St. Elsewhere. Since then there have been the great movies like Blue Velvet and Mullholland Drive. I even went to see Fire Walk With Me the day it debuted.

So, why did I avoid Eraserhead? Two reasons. First of all, I'm not that into black and white movies, although that's a very minor reason. The main reason was that I thought it would just be a simple drama. I had watched The Elephant Man and assumed that Lynch was just getting stranger as time went by.

Boy was I wrong.

Last night when I watched Eraserhead for the first time, it felt like it could have been filmed yesterday. In fact, it almost makes more sense to watch it now, I would think, than to have seen it back in 1977. Now, when we see the small woman performing on the stage insided Henry's radiator, it almost seems natural. The ligthing effects were almost exactly the same as the scene in the Roadhouse on Twin Peaks when Cooper sees the Giant.

By now I "get it" when I watch a Lynch movie. Things make sense because they're consistent throughout his entire career. What used to elicit a response of WTF!? now seems ... normal.

What a great movie.

Designing a high school computer science curriculum

2008-11-25T18:12:00.005-07:00

For years I have run a computer programming club at different schools. From the days of QBasic on IBM 486s to Java and Python on duo core laptops--well, I've been there.

I would teach math during the day and then the fun would start after school, when the programming students would stop by to program and/or just hang out.

This year, however, is different: 75% of my time is spent teaching programming classes. Sure I still have the programming club, but now I don't have to wait until the school day is over before I get to work with students creating cool programs--it's part of the curriculum now.

Our school is working on becoming a Science Technology Engineering and Math magnet school. The funding is finally starting to appear, so now the real planning is starting to take place. We'll be adding a lot of classes for our STEM program, including more computer science classes. Because I'm pretty much the entire CS department, I get to work on designing a high school computer science curriculum for our STEM program.

I plan on getting help with this. I have some contacts at the CU Boulder CS department that I hope to work with. I'll also be in touch with the Alice team from Carnegie Mellon, as we're about to pilot Alice 3.0 at our school. Also, there are recommendations from the CSTA that I'll be using.

At the same time, though, I'm trying hard to see what I can come up with on my own. May as well enjoy this freedom of choice while it lasts. Maybe there are possibilities here that have never been attempted, or thought of. So when I was asked to come up with a list of possible computer science classes to offer, I spent a lot of time brainstorming.

Here are some of my rambling thoughts:

A class in video game creation would be cool (using Pygame or Greenfoot?).
AP Computer Science will remain in our curriculum.
A class in programming that could directly support our math department would be cool. Maybe something on Algorithms and discrete math problems.
A class on Web design would be nice (XHTML, CSS + PHP + JavaScript?).
The Intro class with Alice should remain the first class in our curriculum.
A class that focuses heavily on digital media could complement our Visual and Performing Arts academy.
A class that combines linguistics and programming would be interesting....

I will also need to train more teachers for teaching these classes. Most of the teachers that are possibilities have no experience with Object Oriented Programming, so I think some professional development there may be necessary....

Mike in the Corner

2008-11-23T20:54:00.004-07:00

If you saw this for the first time with the lights out, I guarantee it scared the crap out of you....

Converting a Classic

2008-11-15T13:55:00.003-07:00

In my AP Computer Science class, one student has been working overtime on a pet project of his that deals with cryptography. Watching his project evolve over time made me assign a project (of their choosing) to all my students. Not wanting to be left out, I decided to join in with my own Java case study project: converting the 1972 Avalon Hill game Football Strategy to a computer version.

Football Strategy was a great game. Luck played a very small role in the game and both teams were equal and ... generic. The game was not like most football simulations like the Statis Pro games or even Paydirt, which attempted to reproduce the results of a real NFL season, statistically basing it on the real NFL results. No, Paydirt ignored that and instead based the game entirely on your playcalling and your opponnent's playcalling, resolving each play by cross referencing your choices on an ingenius 10 by 22 matrix. If you thought your opponent would call a long pass, you could call the appropriate defense to stop him cold. However, if he suspeced you would call that defence, he may instead call something like an End Run and bite off a big chunk of yards. So...do you stick to the long pass defence or switch to a spread defense--or choose something else entirely? That's what made the game so fun.

Without an opponent, though, Football Strategy was a real bore. For solitaire play I prefered Paydirt. In fact, I'm still finding on the net some old text files I wrote describing the AI solo play system I developed for Paydirt. Yes, I was a lonely boy.... :-)

Anyway, the goal is to write up a good version of Football Strategy in Java. The focus on OOP will allow me to develop the game through time, having the AI Coaches evolve to get better and better. That would have been nearly impossible in the past, when Football Strategy was just a paper and dice game.

Zombie reclining in the school gym!

2008-11-06T19:57:00.003-07:00

That has got to be one of my strangest blog post titles ever, but look at the picture. That was created by a student of mine today in my Intro to Programming Class. We've completed the 9 week Python curriculum and are now enjoying programming with Alice, a great tool for teaching the concepts of programming.

Having already learned loops, functions, and decision structures in Python, it has been a breeze to watch them dive into Alice. Although I do like the suggested curriculum for the Alice software, I have modified it somewhat. Here's how:

A while back--actually several years ago--I started writing math quizzes that had four problems on them. Those four problems corresponded to the four levels of proficiency that we used on the Colorado CSAP exam: 1=Unsatisfactory, 2=Partially Proficient, 3=Proficient, and 4=Advanced. There's really no point to link those to a traditional grading scale, but if you did, it could roughly translate to 1=D, 2=C, 3=B, and 4=A.

So my four math problems on the quiz were chosen with those proficiency levels in mind. The level three problem was one that if they could solve it I would consider them to be proficient in the task at hand. Level 1 problems were so easy that if a student missed them I'd know we had real problems. If a student could get to level 2 but not 3, I'd know we were getting close to our goal and I'd have to work more with those students. Of course the level 4 questions were usually pretty tough--challenging enough for those few students that can quickly complete the first three levels. [I hate to have my brightest students bored--they need to be pushed, too!]

Anyway, I've using a similar approach in my programming classes. Whether it be Python, Java, or Alice, you can go far by creating a set of four programming challenges--one for each level of the proficiency scale. For instance, our first group of challenges in Alice were simply designed to get students familiar with the positioning of objects in the 3D world of Alice. Here's what I came up with:

Level 1: Character Pyramid: make a pyramid of characters in Alice so that the characters are properly placed, with their feet on the shoulders of the people below them. [I showed them an example of this.]

Level 2: Salute! Make a character look as if he or she is giving a proper military salute. The more real it looks, the better. [Again, I showed an example for this one.]

Level 3: Shoot out at the So So Saloon. Using the Sheriff and Cowboy characters from the Old West folder, set up a scene that looks as cool as you can. Your goal is to make the scene look like a real action scene, not stiff characters in a primitive video game. If you don't like the western theme here, go ahead and choose your own scenario--a pillow fight on the moon, for instance!

Level 4: Sitting at the Table. Position at least three characters sitting as naturally as possible at a table, seated in chairs. The more you can make them look like real people, the better.

Now, that was their assignment. Nearly every group of students reached level 4, and had a lot of fun getting there. There were questions--plenty of questions. Some I answered by showing a mini lesson to the whole class (for the setVehicle, orientTo, and drop dummy object methods, for instance). These mini lessons were short, though, and often demonstrated with the help of students. As much as possible I try to let students learn from doing, and then have them help each other with their challenges.

What has worked so well with this approach, is that I actually have time to walk around and visit with pairs of students as they program--which allows me a little extra time to work with my English Language Learners. So far my ELL students have soared with this approach, and my energy level has never been higher.

Website Updated!

2008-11-02T09:44:00.003-07:00

I must be getting better, as my productivity has just increased. This morning I got some grading done and revamped my teaching website. I had a lot of help from fonrus, one of my students. Fonrus has good taste in HTML and design, so things I do usually look a lot better with the fonrus touch--like they're actually from this millenium, not 1996.

I think what really helped me get going this morning was that one of my AP Java students shared the source code for a basic cryptography application he has created. You can see the application here, which is pretty nice. Nothing makes a teacher prouder than to see his students making contributions to the world of programming. Now hopefully other students will view the code and maybe get ideas for their own Java GUI applications--or ways to improve the code as it is. The code used is very basic cryptography, but last year another student wrote a nifty RSA encryption approach in Python that could easily be used with this application. At any rate, I now have more material for discussion during our next AP Computer Science class. :-)

One of the things I did this morning when working on my website was to install Zen Photo for managing my digital photos online. Zen Photo is a nice and streamlined open source application that will allow me and my students to easily share our digital creations. You can go straight to my gallery here.

Thanks to all the kind emails, messages and cards that people have given me the last week. You've helped me recover and I'll be back in the classroom in a day or two--I'm almost ready.

Final Fantasy as Therapy

2008-10-29T12:19:00.003-06:00

I seem to have found the perfect game for passing time while recovering from surgery: Final Fantasy. The turn-based combat means I can doze off and the game will still be waiting for me when I wake up :-). There's no intense button mashing--which I'd be really bad at right about now.

You can see me on the screenshot there. I'm the thief who tends to get slain a lot in battle. On the other hand, I'm great at running away from battles, and if I escape, the whole party of four escapes, for some strange reason only known to video game designers.

Alice 3.0

2008-10-29T11:19:00.004-06:00

Well as I sit here at home recovering, I just got a great email that will work wonders for getting me back on my feet again: our school has a chance to pilot the 3.0 version of Alice next semester!

This is a great opportunity for our students and for the small but growing Computer Science department I am working on building. The nice part is that my classes will have a fairly high level of ELL/Latino students.

Maybe I'll recreate my ER experience in Alice. Now that would be pretty funny.

The ER at 3 am.

2008-10-28T10:57:00.004-06:00

Note: After several years of attacks, I finally had my gall stones diagnosed and removed. Went to the ER this last Friday night (Saturday morning) at 2:30--in agony. They removed my gall bladder later that morning and I'm now recovering. I have only praise for the professionalism and level of care that I received. Modern medicine is spectacular. Laparoscopy sure beat the old days, when they used to split you open like a baked potato....

I had great plans to write all about my recent gall bladder removal surgery. I wanted to write all about the great staff that treated me, how interesting the ER can be at 3 am, and other details that would have been a nice exercise in descriptive prose.

Instead, I'm bummed out and feeling like crap. I'm taking the week off from school and normally that would appear to be a great opportunity to get caught up on some planning and programming. Nope. I've been pretty ineffective so far, struggling just to write one test for my AP Computer Science class.

I thought keeping up with my classes would be easier, seeing as I can do a lot of the planning online from home. What I underestimated, however, was how fatigued I'd be mentally. What a bummer, dude. :-(

Hopefully in a couple days or so I'll be writing about all the work I'm getting done.

Postscript: Back to the title of this post. There seemed to be two types of ER patients at 3 am. There were those like me that were there because of something out of our control. Then there was the usual assortment of those that made poor choices and got themselves to the ER for one reason or another: drugs, drunk, in a fight...etc.

A Visit from America's Choice

2008-10-20T17:25:00.002-06:00

Today I had a visit from some of the people working for America's Choice. They came in to my 7th period IMP2A class and observed for a little while. Immediately after they moved on my students were full of questions:

"Who were those people?"
"Are they watching you or are they watching us?"
"What were they doing?"
"Do you know them?"

I explained as well as I could: our school is NOT doing as well as it could. America's Choice is going to help us become a better, more successful school, and that they (my students) deserved a better school.

Now in the past I've criticized those that leave the classroom and become consultants. Still, when it comes down to it, today we had our entire math department together talking about student achievement. That doesn't happen every day--and I believe it should.

Although our meeting with AC was relatively short, one thing they pointed out was that with our student demographics (high ELL, high number of free and reduced lunch, high minority), we'd do best to focus on the 90 minutes during class when we have the students in our room, rather than fighting the homework battle and dwelling on things we CAN'T control. That was refreshing for me to hear.

I've spent my entire career at schools like my current school. At one point in the past I had reached the conclusion that I could raise test scores by focusing my energy entirely on my classes. At one point I even gave up on the headache of homework--partly due to the fact that I myself hated homework when I was a student. I stopped wasting energy trying to police the homework situation--and I had a lot of research evidence that said it was okay to do so [and I'm well aware that someone can find a lot of evidence FOR homework]. Still, my students did well during that period, and they seemed ... well, happier.

Currently I do assign homework--and it's a struggle. I go along with my department, though, being the good soldier that I am :-) Still, I can't help but welcome the beginning of this discussion at our school.

What would be cool would be to put it all on the line and base teachers' pay on their students' achievement, measured by a fair and accurate test. How different would our methods of instruction be if that was the rule? Teachers are darn influential on the lives of their students, and perhaps it's a bit too easy to just coast along, rather than pushing ourselves to constantly improve.

Doesn't help that we don't earn much, though....

I recently found these articles here to be really helpful. They're a little dated, but still very relevant.

Not Your Best Moment, Bocephus....

2008-10-15T18:56:00.004-06:00

I just heard about Hank Williams Jr. singing praise for both McCain and Palin yesterday.

I had to read all about it. At first I thought, well, maybe he just made an appearance and showed some support. Nope, he kind of made a fool of himself. Which is too bad, really, as I must admit I like a lot of his music. Since I heard "Dixie on my Mind" back in 1980, I've been a Bocephus fan. I own more than 30 of his albums in various forms, ranging from vinyl to cds. Some of my favorite songs are Hank Jr. songs.

Now at times Hank has seemed like a big dummy of sorts, like when that mugshot was taken, but I try not to be a jerk and judge other people. Mostly, I like to give them the benefit of the doubt. I have students of all types in my classroom and I've never been accused of being unfair to them, whether they are Black, Hispanic, poor, athiests, overtly religious, or...well, fans of hickish-sounding music. So I'd look past Hank's negative aspects and enjoy him for being one of the best entertainers of our time.

But today I was pretty dissappointed. That song is just plain dumb. I've probably bought more of his albums than 95% of his "fans", my parents went and saw him perform live, and now he blasts me because I don't support a political platform that has just resulted in eight years of embarassment for our country. I looked past his flaws in the past and will again, I'm sure. However, I edited my Google profile when I realized that I had him listed in my favorite music category. I like a lot of music, after all. So I deleted Hank Jr. and put in another one of my favorite musicians: Thelonious Monk. Monk's music is friggin' awesome.

[Update Oct 17th: After watching the videos on Youtube of this incident, it appears almost comical and not nearly as mean-spirited as the lyrics are read by themselves. Besides--no one really thinks Hank is going to decide the election. It's probably even debatable whether this was a positive incident for the McCain campaign or not. Kind of like having Ozzy endorse you, I guess. Do you really want his endorsement?]

My Three Name Tags

2008-10-04T19:36:00.003-06:00

I've now been teaching long enough at my school to have accumulated three name tags--all different in their job titles.

Although all are for teaching roles, one is for MATH, one COMPUTER SCIENCE, and one is for ELL (English Language Learners--formerly called ESL).

Each one of those name tags is special to me, and I still wear them all--not at once, though.

Teaching computer science is the most recent role of the three. Still, my background teaching math is clearly on display when I have students writing code. Recently we've been having fun with the classic number theory problem "Getting Down to One." Also, my programming classes have a large number of ELL students in them. My graduate research was specifically aimed at teaching ELL students to learn programming languages. During the research, though, I was able to calmly calculate and plan various tactics and strategies for supporting ELL students in my programming classes.

That was the plan. Now, the reality is a little different.

Even though I have filled quite a toolbox of ELL techniques through the years, I'm still amazed at how challenging it can be to shelter instruction properly for ELL students to have the same chance at success as mainstream students.

Case in point: Mayra (not her real name). Mayra's English level is clearly lower than her peers. She's at level 2 in our school, which means she's just starting to use conversational English at a basic level. Her academic English level, however, is much lower. Still, she has a great attitude and never complains.

Still, it ain't easy. Python is one of the easiest languages to learn, and yet syntax errors are so much more numerous for Mayra and my other ELL students. Then, Mayra had a little bad luck of sorts. Although she had virtually the same code as the students next to her (they were programming in pairs), Mayra's code wouldn't run. It was driving her nuts and I couldn't figure out the problem either, as all her code looked fine. Then, I realized that she must have named her program the same name as a built-in module in Python that she was importing in the code itself. This makes Python import the program itself, rather than the module she was trying to import. A simple change of name for the program fixed the problem, but it was unfortunate that it had to happen to Mayra, when syntactical errors are tough enough without a little bad luck thrown in.

Teaching ELL students at the high school level can be really tough. As much as you love the students, you realize that they are somewhat caught between worlds. Their literacy skills in both English and their native language (usually Spanish in our school) are often low. Their thinking skills may be advanced, but literacy problems often trip them up. They have so much to say, they just have a tougher time saying it.

So I guess in many ways I'm most proud of my ELL teacher name tag. I may not feel successful as often with my ELL students, but that's only because the challenge is so much more difficult. The successes we do share, we share in our hearts and our minds.

[This post's image is a GIMP original.]

Tube Worms on the Ocean Floor

2008-09-28T17:26:00.002-06:00

Had a lot of school work to do this weekend. Nonetheless, I still got to play with the GIMP a little and make some desktop backgrounds. I've been working on a certain technique I came up with almost at random, combining gradients, iWarp, and the Cubism effect. It produces things that look like tube worms embedded in the ocean floor. Click on the image for more detail.

Topic shift: If you like Old Time Radio, head on over to the Internet Archive and browse the collection of thousands of old radio shows available in a variety of formats (including mp3s). Some of the series on there are simply wonderful, like Dimension X or The Creaking Door.

Programming Turtles to Paint in good taste

2008-09-25T18:39:00.003-06:00

My Intro to Programming classes are finally getting to be a lot of fun. Having learned the basic tools of functional programming (control flow, types, functions...), my students can finally reap the rewards using the turtle module that's included in Python--and learn some OOP at the same time.

Teaching students to program turtles goes way back, but for me it never gets old. The image shows what a turtle can do when it moves to a random location, puts down it's pen tip and draws a somewhat randomly colored circle. I say somewhat because the parameters are tweaked in ways to prevent total random ugliness that comes from choosing colors totally randomly. Here, you see some beautiful shades of blue and purple blending together.

It hasn't been all that easy in my first semester teaching Python to students new to programming. My ELL students really struggled with syntax errors. Now, however, all my students have some of the basic tools of programming. Now it's time to let 'em go and be creative. At this point it's fun to write 3 or 4 sample programs and then watch as the students copy them, run them, and then start to alter them. When I learned to program I never had a teacher give me code to alter. Not sure why. Seems like a natural form of communication between teacher and student. It's fun to put comments in code like:

## Okay, try messing around with these variable settings
## and see what you can come up with. If you find
## something cool, share it with others!

Scorching Through the School Year

2008-09-21T05:26:00.003-06:00

This year is my busiest ever. Of course that means that the year is flying by at a speed approaching a Subaru WRX sizzling a rally course. [I was playing Colin McRae 2005 last night with CJTurt--hence todays blog theme].

Yesterday I worked all morning developing a scoring guide to use for students to grade themselves on their AP Java programs. I'm trying to use JUnit testing, but I'm not quite there yet. I also wrote a test study guide and worked on the chapter 2 test for the Java Software Solutions book.

But all of that work was just for one class. I still have IMP planning to do, and I need to write a test for my Intro to Programming class.

I only have three preps. So why am I so busy? Well, two of them are classes that I'm teaching for the first time ever, and the Intro to Programming class is my own creation, mostly. I'm also using technology like never before, so I have to keep class web sites up to date, answer emails, post student work, etc. In time this will make me more efficient--and I must admit that I'm doing more pre-class work this year, so my classes are going much smoother than in the past. Still...busy, busy, busy.

Okay, back to work. It's before 6 a.m. on a Sunday and I'm the only one up. Prime time to get some work done.

The Rise of Ubuntu

2008-09-20T09:19:00.003-06:00

Next weekend is the Ubucon in Boulder. Had to miss last years Ubucon, but I won't miss this one.

What an exciting year it has been on the grassroots level. Last year I had two or three students that decided to try Ubuntu and ended up staying with it as their main OS. This year, however, the growth is phenomenal. I've installed at least 15 copies of Hardy Heron that are being used by students to blog and to write programs for my various programming classes. Whereas last year I felt the need to show others what Ubuntu can do, this year I have more and more students coming to me telling me that they already have Ubuntu running at home.

Besides these students--those that take the Linux plunge--there are huge numbers of students abandoning MS Office and running Open Office or Google Docs instead. Also, the GIMP is really being used by a lot of students.

Our computer club meeting this week was awesome. Fonrus presented Beatesthesia, a cool open source java project for music mixing and visualizations. Then, Kaerulynn did two presentations on the GIMP and Terragen.

A Strange Sense of Foreboding

2008-09-16T18:35:00.003-06:00

Today I had a two hour annual meeting for the mentoring program that I'm part of here in our district. If you are a teacher, consider being a mentor to a new teacher. Not just to help out the newcomer, but also to help keep your own teaching fresh. I'm always surprised by how much mentoring (and that's with me as the mentor) makes me reflect about my own teaching.

When asked to pick one word that described my day today, I chose "foreboding." Why? Well, teaching is tough enough as it is, but this week is especially brutal. Tonight was the 2-hour mentor training, and tomorrow I have parent/teacher conferences from 2:45 until 8:00 pm. Now, both the mentor training and the conferences are good experiences and I enjoy them. Still, to lose two nights in a row has an effect on a guy. So today when I'd get done with a class or be sitting at my desk and feeling good--well, something in me always snuck up to say, "don't feel too good--it's hellweek."

Foreboding. It's why Saturdays were always so much cheerier than Sundays when you were a kid. It wasn't just the cartoons. It was because Sunday meant Monday was coming.

Sunday Morning Java: Cold-Brewed.

2008-09-14T09:19:00.003-06:00

Got an email from my Mom this week along the lines of "still waiting for the cold-brewed coffee recipe..."

I will never use our auto-drip coffee maker again--nor any other hot-brew method. The coffee produced in this cold-brew way seems to taste so much better, and it's not a lot of work. Here's how:

First, you need a large container, like a one-gallon jar. I like glass but plastic seems to work fine. Fill that container with 12 or so cups of room temperature water. Now float three cups of ground coffee on the top (see the photo).

Now leave it sit for several hours. I tend to make mine early in the morning and let it sit for 12 hours. Overnight would be perfect. You may be tempted to shake it up, but I don't think that's necessary--the grounds tend to slowly fall down one by one to the bottom over time. This gives every ground a good chance to let off its flavor. If I look at it after several hours and don't see much of it falling, though, I give it a shake to mix it. I tend to shake it a few times before straining it, also. Not sure if it helps or not.

Now, when you're ready to harvest the coffee, you'll need some kind of filter. You could, at this point, simply pour the mixture into a drip coffee filter over a coffee pot. I use a steel mesh coffee filter and a funnel I bought in the automotive department at Wal-Mart. I pour the mixture into the filter sitting in the funnel and let it drain into an empty glass jug. I get about three quarts of "coffee concentrate" from this process. It will look like very thick, black coffee. I store it in the fridge for a week, using it when I want. Here's how to enjoy it:

For Hot Coffee: Fill a mug one fourth to one third full with the concentrate. Boil water in a teapot and top off the mug with the boiling water, leaving a little room for milk or cream.

For Cold Coffee: Mix one part concentrate with one part cold water, adding ice cubes.

For Kathy's Favorite: Put several ice cubes in a large mug. Pour some coffee concentrate in, filling the glass about one third full. Now add chocolate milk to fill the mug two thirds full. Add a little skim milk and stir. This makes the absolutely best tasting iced mocha you'll ever have--trust me.

A few notes:

1. For best results you can use distilled or spring water. I don't, though, and it still tastes great.

2. Even cheap coffee will taste better this way than expensive coffee that is scalded in an automatic drip pot that is allowed to heat the coffee after it is brewed. Some say the coffee produced this way has less acid.

3. If you grind the coffee yourself, you can grind it a little coarser than usual. Or not.

Special thanks to David Adamson, who mentioned cold-brew coffee to me one afternoon in a little cafe in Pittsburgh. Thanks, Dave! You sure know your Java (both types).

Sunday Morning Java

2008-09-07T10:09:00.005-06:00

Spent this morning drinking java and programming Java.

BlueJ and Greenfoot are great student IDEs for programming Java. Traditionally I would just use a good text editor (Geany is my favorite) and then compile from the command line. These IDEs, however, make it a lot easier in many ways to write simple Java programs. At first I had a real aversion to BlueJ, but I've become more comfortable with it over time.

The other java--as in the coffee--is the real delight. I learned how to cold brew coffee a while back and can't believe how much better it tastes. I'm no coffee snob--I just wondered why our coffee always came out bitter and tasting a lot worse than a cup you buy at Borders or Starbucks. Give me some time and I'll post my method here, along with photos of the process. If you like a good cup of coffee (and I do drink mine hot--even though it's cold-brewed) you'll have to give it a try.

Labor Day Weekend

2008-09-01T20:33:00.003-06:00

Yes that's the Sneetch converter machine from the Doctor Seuss book. I'm using that image on a presentation for chapter 3 of Think Python, which is all about function calls in Python.

Had a busy Labor Day weekend. In fact, I'm tired. Vacations can be so ... rushed. We were visiting family and friends in Colorado Springs. Necrophagist was playing at the Black Sheep, but we had seen them in Denver less than a year ago with Cannibal Corpse, so I passed. Five Finger Death Punch will be at the Black Sheep for two shows in late September. I may go. Springs has long had a better metal scene than even Denver has, IMO.

Joe Haldeman is working on the Obama campaign. Haldeman has long been one of my favorite science fiction writers, and his online journal is always fun to read. While in Springs I picked up a copy of Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson. It's a bit intimidating at 900 + trade paperback pages--and we know I'm a relatively slow reader--but I've heard it's quite good. It was fun to open it up at random and come upon some PERL source code in there.

Checked up on CJTurt, who switched to Ubuntu a while back. Not only is he not having any real problems with Linux, he's also gone and installed Limewire on his own. I tend to go to the command line a lot, but Ubuntu has made living with Linux so easy that you can really almost forget it's there. Heck, I often use it now by choice, passing up on some GUI application just for old time's sake. Anyway, I ramble. The cool part was that CJTurt's wife has had enough of watching him happily surf the net using Firefox on Ubuntu, while her identical laptop slugged along with IE running on Windows and suffering from, well, something (viruses, spyware, bloat). By the time I left, her laptop had been properly Ubuntu-ized. Installing Hardy Heron has become a very easy process that takes under an hour. I just wish my friend Jim had more luck installing Ubuntu on his ASUS EEE PC.

Didn't get all my schoolwork done, which stinks. I've heard English teachers propose that they alone should be given a half-time employee to help them grade all their papers. Many people have the view that teaching math and computer science means I just have to correct multiple choice exams or have some fancy computer grader. Well, try teaching IMP math and a constructivist approach to teaching programming. Sheesh.

Haven't talked to my parents in days. Unforgivable. Gotta write to them tonight. I remember the Labor Day a couple years ago when they came out here and helped us re-shingle our house. That was a massive job. They'll be coming out soon. I'll take a rare day off of school to visit with them.

All-Day Training

2008-08-28T19:03:00.003-06:00

The image (a bit lame, I know) is the first page in a presentation I just made for my students in my IMP2A math class, for tomorrows review of the homework on counterexamples. I thought it was a funny joke at the time, but now after working on this presentation for 20 minutes it seems a bit old.

I spent the day today with a fellow ELL teacher (Oakley Rocks) getting trained on the Interactive Whiteboard software from Promethean. I got home wanting to work more and create a few things to use tomorrow in class. That may seem like a lot of work, but in reality it isn't.

The presentation I just made states several conjectures about geometric figures, like "if two polygons have their corresponding angles equal, then the polygons are similar." Students then have to, in groups, go up to the board and state whether that conjecture is TRUE or FALSE. Then, if they think it's false, they have to draw a counterexample that proves it false. If they believe it's true, they need to state why.

Took me about 20 minutes to make the presentation, and it's the first I've ever made (although I have done a lot of stuff like this using Open Office, so I'm not a total noob). Twenty minutes is hardly anything compared to what I'll get out of this in class. When you get students up at the board using the straight line tools and grid background to draw geometric counterexamples--well, let's just say it sure beats pencil and paper. The buy-in by the students is incredible compared to before, when a group would maybe make a poster or draw on the chalk board.

After creating the original, I saved it. Then, I make two copies of it for each of my IMP2 classes. That way I can save the student drawings and responses right on the presentation, export it in a variety of formats, and post it on the web that same day. Now THAT is cool.

For those of you that are regulars in the edublogosperical universe, you may find it interesting to know that Bud the Teacher did the training. You can't have Bud. He's at OUR district and we won't let him leave.

Just in Time!

2008-08-27T17:06:00.003-06:00

Some teachers may resist change and not like learning something new, especially new technology. Not me, man. Despite my rant about Promethean not supporting Linux yet, I have seen the future, and it's pretty cool.

The wall panel on my Promethean board malfunctioned shortly after I started to use it. However, our ITS department was quick to respond and the panel was replaced earlier today. I had to find our school tech contact to have her update the Promethean drivers (I don't have the proper access rights), and a few fellow Interactive Whiteboard Teachers (IWTs, I guess) also helped out.

The result: Back to School Night starts in less than an hour, and I will be able to wow my students' parents with the IWB. It really is an impressive tool when it's running correctly. In fact, having to step back to a normal projector (with no interactive element) was downright depressing.

Tomorrow I'll attend an entire day of training on the IWB. I hate to miss school and would prefer the training be after school or on a weekend. I have to miss teaching my AP Computer Science class, which is my favorite class :-(

Freddie and Me

2008-08-25T17:48:00.003-06:00

I'm a sucker for graphic novels.

Something about the immense amount of work that goes into making them means I just can not resist them. My favorite graphic novels are those that are blatantly honest and biographical in nature.

Freddie and Me is a prime example. Mike Dawson tells his life story through a filtered lens that sees the world in terms of the rock group Queen. Childhood memories are told in reference to Queen. Some memories are even rewritten with Queen in them. Everywhere throughout this book you can see the influence of Queen on an impressionable fan.

And yet, I recommend this book to people who couldn't care less about Queen. Really. Read this to laugh and enjoy Mike's funny childhood. Mike moves from England to the U.S. and experiences some culture shock. He finds friends where he can and never loses his overtly optimistic view of life. This book made me feel good. Mike is just darn likable.

On the other hand, if you are a Queen fan, this book can only make you nod your head as you read it. You know how it feels to think Queen is THE GREATEST BAND IN THE WORLD (or at least in the top ten).

Oil Change Saturday

2008-08-23T19:10:00.005-06:00

Sometimes it's nice to leave the high tech world behind and get your hands dirty. That's what I did today, changing the oil in both of my Toyota vehicles. To be honest, there was something downright soothing about working on something so simple and basic and ... uncomplicated. You drain the oil, replace the filter, replace the drain plug, and put in the new oil. Not too much to go wrong there.

In my classes this week, it was a bit different. Having finally bit the bullet and decided to just use the Windows XP laptop ("lil crappy") with the Promethean board, I had a rather disturbing result. For about 15 minutes it was pretty nice. I was showing my students the web pages I had created as resources for them (on Firefox, of course--can't stand IE), when suddenly a student said, "hey, Mr. G, that looks like a disco over there!" She was referring to the wall interface for the Promethean board, which has a series of push buttons for selecting combinations of input sources and other parameters. All the buttons on the panel were rapidly flashing. It DID look like a disco floor. Then, it all went black. My Promethean board blinked out and ... well, hasn't been back since. Sure was nice to use during its 15 minutes of fame, though. I wonder if this happens with Smart Boards.

Meanwhile, all the free and open source software was finally installed in our computer lab. Of course I would have done this a year ago, but I don't have the right install privileges--something that drives me nuts every day of my teaching career. The software was installed, and it was even checked to make sure it worked. The only problem was this: when students tried to use it, they didn't have the proper security clearance for sections of the hard drive that the software had to use. Half of the eight applications installed simply won't run for students. Kind of hard to teach AP Computer Science when your students have to do all their Java compiling at home.... :-(

Ah well, at least Python is working.

Migrant Blog About to Launch

2008-08-19T16:52:00.004-06:00

With thanks to the AILF and MESA, who are helping with funding, I'm almost ready to launch what I believe will be a major undertaking--we're about a week or two away.

Using Wordpress and Dreamhost, I've set up a blog for migrant students and other English Language Learners to tell their stories. Right now the working title is Lost in Translation, but the students will be able to change that and also change the look and layout of the blog. It's their blog. You can find the blog here, but it will soon change greatly when the students take over.

The funding so far has been used to purchase two Acer Apire One netbooks that the students can use for their writing. These are ultra-portable little laptops (yet the keyboard is 95% the size of a regualr laptop keyboard) that run on Linux and are very easy to use for web applications. Once you hack them a little, it's easy to modify them even more for your student needs, opening access to many open source software packages that are not enabled by default.

So far I have five students committed to this project, and each one of them alone could write a spectacular blog about their lives. I will get more students in time, but I'm also limiting it to students that will be dedicated to the blog. I'm going to try to get more laptops, also, and also revamp some older laptops with Ubuntu.

I envision the blog being about the individual students' lives. They can write what they want to, but the focus is on telling their stories--what matters to them. Each entry will be tagged with their "name", so that a reader can filter out all the blog posts by that particular student and read just their story. Although I do have several prompts, I'm going to let this one evolve on it's own a bit and we'll see what happens. Part of the fun will be watching the data from Google Analytics as more and more readers are found. I'm leaving it up to the students to promote the blog after it's launched.

If you have suggestions or comments, please leave them here, as I will pass them on to the students.

Report from the Trenches.

2008-08-18T17:03:00.005-06:00

Today was the first day of school. I have a full teaching schedule, which is something to wear with pride.

One of my major annoyances with the education field is that too many good teachers leave the battlefront right in the middle of the war.

This can happen in several ways. They can become professional mentors and help new teachers do do their new job. They can become consultants of types, traveling around and basically telling other teachers how to do their jobs. Or, they become administrators and enforce that teachers actually do their jobs--or something like that. :-)

The point is: they leave the classroom. The second they do, they are no longer on the front line, and their impact on students immediately is diminished. I know, we try to justify these moves, saying things like, "but this way she can help other teachers improve their classes and, in turn, help a lot of students." I think that's pretty much a load of crap.

The minute they leave the responsibilities of the classroom, their impact on the lives of students takes a huge nosedive. Something changes in their heads. They become one of "them" and not one of "us". They've left the front. They've been discharged. They've become brass.

My father retired a teacher, which is really amazing, as he's now the Village President in my hometown and seems to do well in the administrative role. He never considered leaving the classroom prematurely, however, nor will I.

Today I had three full 90 minute blocks of programming classes. That was 75 students or so--my numbers will no doubt increase to 90 by mid semester. Not all of them are easy students to teach. Not all of them are really thrilled to be in my class (yet). But, they are all MY STUDENTS. Those who leave the classroom behind can't say that anymore.

Teachers, if you are worth your weight in gold--like any excellent teacher is--please stay in the classroom. Your students need you.

We're waiting, Promethean...we're waiting....

2008-08-13T19:12:00.005-06:00

This year I was awarded an Interactive Whiteboard made by Promethean. Sounds great, huh?

Not so fast.

Promethean is a for-profit company. Their products run on either Windows or Macs, but not Linux. The Linux community is frustrated by this, especially since Promethean has supposedly been on the verge of releasing a Linux version for several years now. Here, I'll show you what I mean....

Back in 2004 Promethean announced they were working on a Linux version. These rumors continued for a while, but with little detail.

This is what Stephen Walder blogged about in October of 2007:

"It's been almost a year now since Promethean revealed that they're working on Linux drivers for their range of ActivBoards and still no news of when and if it's to be released to the public."

Then, in January of this year, ACTIV employee Stuart Collins wrote this in a forum:

"Well I'm posting this from Ubuntu, which is on my main work laptop. So that should tell you that yes, we're taking Linux seriously. From what I've seen of the software so far it's looking good."

Wonderful, Stuart. It's now friggin' August and the best I've ever heard is "we're working on it!" Then you hear the usual excuses: there are far too many different distributions of Linux to work on, we want it to work on all of them.

Do you really think any Slackware users are going to applaud you for including them in the great world of interactive whiteboards? Or how about Yellow Dog--be nice to run Promethean through a PS3! Will it run on Damn Small Linux or Puppy? Will you have support for the Khmer language?

Here's a hint for Promethean: Just go to Distrowatch and pick some of the top distros. Hell, even Stuart has been charmed by Ubuntu, so pick Ubuntu. Pick Debian. Pick something like, say, Mepis or Fedora or Open Suse. Or just pick any two of those. If you get your software to run on them, I'll install one of them.

Okay.

So I begin the school year with two laptops. Old Faithful, running Ubuntu Linux, which I use for EVERYTHING, and Little Crappy, a Dell running Windows XP that ... well ... I don't use. However, Little Crappy is the only choice I have for my Promethean board software.

To be honest, I'll probably just connect Old Faithful most of the time and use the whole setup as a glorified projector.

The sad part about this, though, is that Promethean is too wrapped up in its proprietary ways to realize that there is a community of Linux users that could help them to actually develop the Linux version. But Promethean won't budge. Smartboards have Linux support.

I think askvictor made the best statement about Promethean:

"With all due respect, I've heard it before, and it'll be too late by then. You've been saying 'real soon now' for well over a year... If the linux driver that is supposed to be in development actually exists, release it now and let us linux geeks play with it... Linux development works very differently to windows and mac development (at this stage anyway) - many linux users are OK with drivers or apps that don't quite work perfectly all the time - it doesn't give a bad impression of your product. What does give a bad impression of your product is not releasing anything (driver/specs/etc)."

Amen.

P.S. If you really explore all the links in this post, you get an A.

The Joys of a nice Programming Environment

2008-08-12T13:49:00.004-06:00

If you click on the image for this post you can see a full size screenshot taking by me while programming today.

One thing that strikes me about programming is how important it is for the student to feel comfortable in their programming environment.

This was made very clear to me when I attended the AP Java workshop at Carnegie Mellon a few weeks ago. I left my Ubuntu laptop at home and used Macs exclusively that week. The first day I was feeling shell-shocked trying to code there. Things that I never think about were so hard to figure out. I use multiple desktops on Ubuntu and can quickly jump from my IDE to Firefox if I need to look something up. Of course I have Amarok playing in the meantime.

Now, all of that is absolutely easily done on a Mac--it just takes a while to get used to the new environment. By the end of the week at CMU I had developed a new like for Macs and I kind of miss using one at times. I've never really liked the Windows environment for programming, although I'm sure some people do.

The point is: students need time to adjust to the environment you use in class. This is even more true when you are using IDEs that students are not familiar with--like Eclipse.

NOTE:

The program I'm writing there on the screenshot is one of the programs from Think Python: An Introduction to Software Design by Allen B. Downey. If you have not read any of Allen's books on programming, check it out. Think Python is the main textbook for my Introduction to Programming class.

Student Artwork

2008-08-12T10:24:00.004-06:00

The image you see here was just sent to me by one of my students. One thing I love about digital art is how free it allows the artist to be. I can see great variations in my own creations, and yet none of them look anything like this image. You never know what you'll get when you let students go with the flow. This image is by a student codenamed "Cloudy".

I came out of the DIY movement of the 80s. I think we have the means to create our own art and music and writings like never before.

The Ruins by Scott Smith

2008-08-09T17:42:00.003-06:00

I really wanted to LOVE this book. I wanted to be totally engrossed in a fast-moving story of terror and dread in rural Mexico. This one had all the makings of a great read. Five twenty-somethings decide to take a detour in their Mexican vacation and wind up outside a creepy Mayan village, on some old mining site that seems to be hiding more than a few secrets.

Smith writes in a very straightforward style, although his paragraphs are a bit long and dialog just gets thrown into them. There are no chapters in this book, it just rolls along from start to finish. You get the feeling that you should just read the whole thing at once, and, more or less, I did.

What I like about this book is that it keeps moving forward. Although there are a few flashbacks, you really feel like you're reading the book in real-time. It reminded me of Stephen King's excellent short story The Raft. It had that oh-crap-we're-in-over-our-heads sense of dread that just built itself up steadily. The characters make some dangerous choices in the book, but none that seem all that dangerous at the time. Each next step seems...well, justified. Before too long, though, you know they are in a lot of danger.

To be honest, this will be the type of book that I'll grow to like more after reading it, as time goes on. You have to appreciate a modern suspense/horror novel that is not too cleverly plotted. If there's one thing that can quickly get me out of an interesting story, it's feeling that I'm being manipulated by a writer that feels the need to have a whole lotta plot twists. Smith doesn't do that, thankfully. This book is not predictable, the characters are interesting, and he doesn't blow the ending. The best part of the book, however, is the setting. That little hill back in Mayan country is pretty memorable.

I'll watch the movie, I guess, although I have my doubts that they're gonna get it right: for one thing, the hill looks too dry--where's all the vegetation?

I'm going to hide my main complaint in the comments, as it contains some spoilers and you may want to read this one.

Final grade: B- (but rising).

Emergent Properties

2008-08-07T11:40:00.003-06:00

I remember first learning about emergent properties from Elliott Sober at the University of Wisconsin. Of course back then the focus was on emergent properties in biological systems.

Like any great concept, however, it easily applies itself to other areas, like education. I've pretty much made a career out of harnessing the emergent properties of a classroom--those seemingly unpredictable results of 25+ students interacting as a group--let's call it the "personality of the class at hand."

Well, I'm learning a lot about emergent properties in web hosting. Taken apart, I feel like I can grasp PHP, MySQL, and an application like Moodle. Host all of them on a Debian Linux server and you'd think it was all black and white.

Enter emergent properties. Suddenly the web host's PHP configuration and Moodle decide that I can't upload files. Or rather, I can, but then I can't access them--which is not a good thing on a Moodle class page. :-( I'm trying to find the problem, but spending five hours on this has only made me want to just delete the whole mess and start over. At lease I've got Wordpress working correctly for the new migrant/ELL blog I'll be hosting.....

Baby, You're the Greatest!

2008-08-06T09:27:00.005-06:00

Spent most of this morning working on Alice. The image you see is from the classic FirstEncounter scene that is used in the Learning to Program with Alice book.

What's so cool about Alice is how advanced you can make your programs become. Rather than merely doing the scene as asked for in the text, I introduced for loops and turned the robots motion into a much more complex and realistic set of instructions. [He now lifts up his back middle leg, walks on his other four legs, then lowers the back middle leg down for support after walking.] That would not have been easy to do without Alice's awesome interface, which lets you click, drag, and drop various methods of the various objects. Oh, and I added the penguin just as a shout out to Tux.

Last year I used Alice while teaching the IMP Math unit All About Alice, which teaches students exponential functions. It was remarkably easy to have my students program the examples from the text into scenes using Alice, so that when Alice doubled here size ten times in a row, students got to see just how big that would make her.

Alice is a free gift from Carnegie Mellon University. If you haven't played around with it yet, give it a try.

Designing programs in Java

2008-08-05T08:29:00.003-06:00

I've done my fair share of complaining about Java, and I still believe that the AP Computer Science exam should be in Python--a more flexible language with cleaner syntax and the ability to use Object-Oriented design if appropriate.

Truth is, though, that Java has a special appeal to my obsessive compulsive tendencies. There's something cozy about sitting down to write a relatively simple Java program. With Python I'm tempted to just start writing--and the development time in Python really is super fast. With Java, though, you need to plan things out ahead of time a little more. Of course that's a good idea in Python, too, but it's not enforced in the way Java enforces program planning.

Since I only have a week or so before school starts, I'm practicing my chops and staying sharp by writing a few programs here and there. Today I decided to write a Java version of the classic Hi-Lo Guessing Game. Rather than just starting to code, however, I thought about the program in detail beforehand, and made a few design choices that would help make the program something I may use in my programming classes (as an example of design). Let me elaborate.

The basic Hi-Lo simply has one playing guessing a number between two set values, like one and one hundred. The other player guesses a number, like 42. The first player than says "Higher" or "Lower" depending on the secret number. You know the game.

What I came up with, however, were three classes to use in a program:

1. ComputerPlayer
2. HiLoGameEngine
3. StatsKeeper

Now, each of those classes will have specific attributes and methods that they are responsible for. Using a procedural approach it would just be the one program and the human user, with the program responsible for all three roles that I've delegated to individual classes. Why do this? Because it's good design. Suppose I want to improve the AI of the ComputerPlayer class. Rather than tweak that class, I can extend it with a CleverComputerPlayer class, or even a CheatingComputerPlayer class. The StatsKeeper class may be reused in another program in the future--in a tic tac toe game, for instance. You can see the possibilities of Object Oriented Design in the long run; software can be reused for other applications.

Bringing this into the classroom will be fun. One of the weaknesses in the AP Computer Science curriculum, I think, is that it focuses on solitaire coding. In reality, especially in open source, but also on development teams, a programmer needs to know how to work on a team.

By the way, in my program the computer and human players switch roles and compete in a series of games, with the StatsKeeper recording all the results.

Reflections on the 2008 AP Java Workshop at CMU

2008-08-03T13:49:00.003-06:00

Last night I flew home from the 2008 AP Java Workshop that I had been attending all last week at Carnegie Mellon University. Although I'm happy to be home, I'm also a little sad that the workshop is over. (Yes, I do appear in these pictures of the workshop--not sure why it's called a picnic, though.)

Leigh Ann Sudol ran a great workshop. In particular, I was interested in her views of women and minorities in computer science, as my programming classes have a large number of female and/or minority students.

Don Slater gave us some top secret looks at Alice 3.0, which was perhaps the highlight of the workshop for me. Alice is really a special program, and having EA come on board can only help make it even better. Although I would prefer Alice to be a full open source project, I think including the EA models from the Sims 2 game is probably a very good thing.

Randy Pausch passed away a couple days before the workshop, so CMU had a somewhat somber feeling throughout the workshop. He will be missed. I also got to meet Wanda Dann, another main member of the Alice team.

All the presenters at this year's workshop were excellent. I was especially amused by the humor and energy that Dave Feinberg brought to mix. The world needs more teachers like Dave.

Now the hard part: applying what I've learned. Our school is no modern technological wonder. I've already found out that adding 15 computers to my classroom is just not possible, according to the district electrician. That leaves me either using a mobile lab of laptops in my classes (hoping the batteries hold out), or taking my classes into a nearby computer lab that is anything but cutting edge. The irony here is that more and more the advances in open source are making it possible to reach students like my students, and yet there is always something that seems to hold them back, like when I asked to have Alice running for my students last year and it never happened.... :-( Teachers who use open source software must have their own installation privledges, something I don't have at all in my own classroom--except for on the IBM-donated MESA laptop that I have running Ubuntu.

On the brighter side, however, I have used Dreamhost and set up plenty of space for a new school web page and more than enough room to house all the STEM teacher's Moodle class pages. The computer programming club also has free use of my site for their own web page, along with any students in the club that want to host on my domain:

www.FutureSkyline.com

Not a commercial site, but EVERYONE thinks ".com" nowadays. Anyway, you can watch the site develop over time, if you'd like. Right now it's pretty sketchy.

In conclusion, it was a good week. I was especially ammused by the discussions I heard of two very deservedly hot topics: Python and Ubuntu. From the short time I got to talk to these other computer science teachers, I'm convinced that in almost every case a Python user is a Python fanatic, and an Ubuntu user is an Ubuntu fanatic. I heard of more students using Ubuntu than teachers using Ubuntu, but teachers are slow to change.

I also must say that I have a new level of respect for Macs, after using Macs exclusively the whole week. May have to get me one of those someday to complement all my Linux boxes.

Praise for Ubuntu from a Java Education Expert

2008-08-01T06:33:00.006-06:00

Cay Horstmann is almost a legend in the AP Computer Science field. While reading his blog recently, I came across this paragraph:

"Ubuntu is a great platform for software development. We covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time, and the students who used Ubuntu instead of Mac OS X or (gasp) Windows were way more productive. We particularly loved the feature where you type in a command (such as aclocal) and Ubuntu tells you to run sudo apt-get install automake if the command isn't yet installed. What could be better?"

The AP Java Workshop here at Carnegie Mellon is winding down. I got a sneak peak at the new version of Alice last night from Don Slater. I'm trying to get my school to be a pilot school for the upcoming version this next year.

Last one in the lab is me... :-(

2008-07-30T19:56:00.004-06:00

This AP Java workshop has been a lot of work and a lot of fun so far. I can only say positive things about the workshop. I mean, after teaching ten or so years and going through grad school, well, you go through your share of experiences that can at best be described as "so-so". Not this workshop.

About the worst thing here so far has been

My Java syntax
My Java API knowledge
My familiarity with all the various IDEs for teaching Java to students.

So tonight I stayed overtime, and it was time well spent. Python is much more natural for me to code, but I'm really learning some good habits here this week. So far the discussions of OOP have been very comprehensible for me--a heck of a lot better than they would have been back when I first encountered OOP.

Ate at a little cafe this evening. Pita bread with hummus , black bean soup, and iced coffee.

AP Java Workshop Report #1

2008-07-28T10:30:00.005-06:00

I'm in Pittsburgh!

Got in yesterday, flying from Mountain Time to Eastern Time, so of course last night at midnight I was wide awake. Getting up at 6:30 this morning was a bit tough. Tip: set alarm clock far a way from bed, so you have to climb a chair and desk to get to it.

The photo on the left is the Tower of Learning at nearby University of Pittsburgh. I have this thing about tall buildings--I always want to go to the top, by stairs if possible. That's on my list of things to do before leaving Pittsburgh.

Some notes from the AP Java Workshop.

1. Discussed the implications of the upcoming elimination of th e AP Computer Science AB class (APCS A will remain).

2. Covered three very cool applications for teaching Java (and one even has a Python version):
--Jeliot
--Jeroo
--Javabat

3. Had a sub for lunch. Maybe I should have one of those big sandwiches before I leave Pitt.

Chicken or the Egg--Algebra or Geometry?

2008-07-26T15:56:00.003-06:00

I'm going to do what a lot of edubloggers do: blog about other blogs.

Jackie from Continuities has started a good conversation on the order that we teach math in high school: must algebra come before geometry?

My gut reaction is: nope--we just do it that way because of tradition, and tradition is a dangerous thing to cling to. I guess it would be interesting to do a historical analysis of this issue.

I don't know why, but I'm always excited about change. If someone tells me tomorrow, "Hey, we're thinking of teaching Geometry before Algebra 1 at our school, would you like to come and try teaching with us?"--well, I'd probably sign up just for the experience.

Of course there are many types of change I don't like. If someone tells me tomorrow, "Hey, we're thinking of teaching 50 minute classes of about 30 students each class and we're gonna go with a good 'back to the basics' approach with either Saxon or Glencoe books, would you like to come and try teaching with us?"--well, I'd probably run the other way.

The change should at least hint of progress, whatever that is.

Tip: Taking your bookmarks with you

2008-07-26T15:38:00.004-06:00

Okay, so tomorrow morning I leave for CMU in Pittsburgh.

Haven't packed yet. Haven't decided whether or not to take my laptop. Since they have Mac labs where I'll be going, I'll miss Linux but at least I won't have to use Windows.

Anyway, to make sure I can access all my favorite web pages, I went into Firefox under Bookmarks/Organize Bookmarks/Import and Backup/ Export HTML and exported all my bookmarks into one handy HTML file. Then, I go to Google and upload it to my Google Docs account. Now, if I leave my beloved laptop behind, I'll at least be able to access all my bookmarks.

I probably should set up some remote login or something to get at all my files, but I'm just not that ambitious....

I'll try to report in from Pittsburgh on my Java workshop from time to time.

Summer crunch time.

2008-07-25T09:24:00.003-06:00

Yeah, I'm busy, but it's all good.

Yesterday I was awarded a grant from the American Immigration Law Foundation. I have a background of teaching math to English Language Learners (ELL), so I decided a migrant student blog project would be a cool thing. Basically migrant students at our school will be able to post about their experiences. Of course the grant proposal was much more detailed than that, but that's the main idea. I asked that the money be used for a Linux laptop, like the EEE PC. I'll try to find a student to be the maintainer of the blog, and that student will get to use the laptop 24-7 or close to it.

Also, I finally got off my butt and shelled out the moolah to register a domain name and have it hosted on the web. Our district has very strict rules regarding school web pages. I'll leave politics aside, but basically I spent the money to have complete control over web pages for my programming club and for my classes. I went with Dreamhost because they have a strong reputation in the Linux world, and that matters to me. They feature a big assortment of open source add-ons and support and run Debian Linux servers. I can now have blogs, forums, Moodle pages, all of that. Here's the domain name:

www.futureskyline.com

Pretty cool, huh? I was a little surprised that one was still available. You can visit that address, but it will take me and the computer club some time to get it all up and running....

...especially since I spend next week in Pittsburgh.

More about the power of a good book.

2008-07-24T17:08:00.003-06:00

My last post really was not about The Mist so much as it was about how incredible the act of reading is.

The picture for this post is about a memory implant, but I like to think of it as an interface between the brain and a computer.

You see, I've always thought early attempts at virtual reality were way too dorky. I mean, the goggles and gloves phase just did nothing to thrill me.

Nope, I wanted a simstim that I could plug right into my brain stem (and then plug the other end into a Quake video game or something). Maybe I'd be in one of those sensory deprivation tanks like in Altered States. Somehow I wanted the data going directly into my brain. Any tangle of wires and goggles or foamy gloves would just get in the way.

Well, today when I took a long bike ride in the 100 degree heat, it hit me: plain old reading is a closer, more intimate interface than any movie or video game could hope for. Really, the data just goes right from the page into your brain.

Or maybe the heat was just making me silly.

Book Versions vs. Movie Versions

2008-07-24T09:14:00.004-06:00

Reading is such an incredible thing.

Although reading may seem quite basic, the fact is that reading a good story is a much deeper experience than any high def TV and 5.1 surround sound can deliver.

How else can you explain why there are so few movies that turn out to be as good as or better than the prose version?

I believe there are examples where the movie turned out to be better than the book--I just can't remember any of them right now. However, it's all to easy to recall a great piece of prose turning into a pile of crap on the big screen.

Take The Mist, for example. That was one of Stephen King's best novellas. The entire experience of reading it was like watching a mind movie that featured almost total immersion. Then I rent the movie, turn out the lights, and make a serious attempt to enjoy it.

Right away things start going wrong. The characters don't react like real characters, something I don't recall from the book. No, there's something wrong with the logic of their interactions early on in this one. Here's a couple examples:

1. When the mist first arrives, a guy with a bloody nose runs into the supermarket and says terrible stuff's going on. Just from that, and apparently the mist itself, all the people in the supermarket are convinced they can not leave the store. WTF? At least tiptoe out a few feet into the mist, ready to rush back into the store if necessary. Don't just accept the fact that you're stuck inside, no matter what bloody nose guy says.

2. When Ben and a few of the locals try to convince Brent that there really are large creatures out in the fog, the resulting argument is--somehow completely wrong. Brent becomes paranoid and they keep trying to convince him, when they could just go back into the back room, grab a shovel, and bring out the friggin' tentacle appendage that they chopped off the monster. This is the equivalent of keeping the blinds closed and trying to convince your lover that it's stopped raining outside. Try opening the blinds and showing him/her!

Oh well. Some people prefer movies and never even read a book. Can't imagine living that way. The monsters in King's novella were much more convincing than the computer-generated denzians that were in the movie....

Going to Pittsburgh....

2008-07-24T08:36:00.008-06:00

I'll be going to Pittsburgh for a week of AP Computer Science training at Carnegie Melon University.

This could be a cool opportunity that would be very helpful in teaching my classes this next year. Or, if it blows....well, let's think positive!

I chose the CMU workshop because of the institution's strong reputation in computer science. They even run their own version of Linux there, and I'm hoping the workshop is Linux-friendly for people like me.

I'll have to bring along an Ubuntu laptop, and maybe a few Ubuntu live cds....

Also, recent talk on the APCS listserv shows a considerable amount of teachers using Visual Basic in introductory programming classes. They've gotta meet Python.

Not trying to force anything on anyone, or tell anyone what they should do. Just want to make them aware of the alternatives. Proprietary companies spend a lot of money on advertising. Open Source companies don't. That's one way they can remain free. It's pretty amazing how far some of the best OS applications have gotten largely by word of mouth (or word of blog).

Heck, I haven't even tried to convince my parents to switch to Ubuntu.

Humanity to others.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose

2008-07-22T20:14:00.005-06:00

The Exorcism of Emily Rose was one of those pleasant surprises. You know, you rent a movie and you think, "well, this will probably suck, but I'll give it a chance...."

It's increasingly difficult to know ahead of time what to expect from a modern horror movie. You can't go by the "critical acclaim" quotes on the DVD package.

Probably one of the best places to look is Rotten Tomatoes, but even then you may find a movie you really like that most critics panned--like this one, which only has a 44% rating.

Anyway, this is a good movie. Surprisingly good and very creepy. Don't watch it with a bunch of your friends on a sunny afternoon. Watch it in the dark and turn off the phone and the lights.

Summer Vacation with Dad

2008-07-20T11:35:00.006-06:00

I spent a week up in Wisconsin's Rusk county this summer, with my father. We were fishing lake Amacoy and staying at the Wonderspot resort.

The weather was wonderful. Highs were in the 70s, and the nights were cool. A cold front on our first day killed the fishing a bit, but by the end of the week we had caught plenty.

There were certainly some memorable experiences, and maybe someday I'll write them out:

--Dad's first step into the boat
--The day I got to "sleep in"
--getting hit on by a drunk woman at the bar (don't ask!)
--the dumpster filled with fish refuse
--the mayfly hatch and crappie feeding frenzy, mosquitoes included

Yep, it was a great trip. Rusk county is really an odd place, in ways. I mean there are beautiful lakes there like Amacoy that are not very busy--good fishing lakes, in other words (leave the jet-ski at home, please). It really was like taking a trip back in time. I had no internet access--nor did I miss it much. I read a lot. Played games. Told stories. Caught fish. Listened to the radio.

Speaking of the radio--I was amazed at how good the djs were on the local Ladysmith station that played just the right blend of old country--70s and 80s country, mostly. Anyway, the djs were spectacular! Nowadays I don't even listen to djs anymore, and I'd forgotton how nice it can be to have a good dj say a thing or two between songs. Bits of trivia. Weather info. Sports updates.

When I got back to Colorado, I did some searching and found the station (WLDY) online. Now I can listen to it over the net whenever I want to.

Problem Solved!

2008-07-19T19:17:00.005-06:00

I really want to move on to other topics soon, as there's a heck of a lot more to me than installing Linux on old computers.

On the other hand, I'd really like to have a lab of Linux computers for all my upcoming programming classes that I will be teaching, as Linux is IMO the best OS for development.

So I've been doing almost nothing else for the last couple days except inserting install cds and trying to get something to work. Was running into so many problems I thought maybe it was a hardware issue.

Perhaps it was. When I tried to install OpenSUSE, the only DVD I had, I was surprised when the whole process worked. I'm not a big fan of OpenSUSE, but it's WAY better than Windows for me, so I was relieved I'd have something I could use with my students.

Then I got to thinking--that's weird that the DVD worked when I was kinda suspecting a cd-rom drive failure in the works. Maybe, for some reason, DVD installs will work. I went to Borders and bought three current Linux magazines, each one having a DVD of various Linux stuff, including Ubuntu.

It worked. I've now got Ubuntu 7.10 up and running. Now for the rest of the old computers....

Back to blogging about other stuff now. Like cool magazines and books I'm reading.

Too many variables....

2008-07-19T10:32:00.004-06:00

Okay so getting Linux onto one of the older Dell Optiplex computers is tougher than I thought it would be.

I've installed various Linux distributions on various machines in the past, so I knew there could be complications. However, this time I'm suspecting the fault is in the hardware, which is tough to deal with.

I've already spent more than 12 hours working on this one Dell, trying all sorts of things and taking as many detailed notes as I think I should.

Both Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux ran fine on it, although they are not really meant to be installed--they serve a different purpose. All attempts at Ubuntu and Xubuntu, however, have failed. The only real desktop distro I got to install was OpenSUSE 10.3, which I may end up using. I was hoping to get a faster version to work, though--something like MEPIS Lite or Xubuntu, but I couldn't even get an XFCE version of Debian to install.

So what next? Well, more experimenting for a while. Too many variables. I'm starting to think the cd rom and the hard drive may have errors.

I'd rather be teaching. Or programming. Or turning water into wine.

[I'm too exhausted to put hot links in this post. Just google anything in here you want to know more about.....]

Little Engines that Still Can!

2008-07-17T14:17:00.006-06:00

Well, I'm back at it. Opening up old computers, cleaning them, adjusting them--basically giving them a few more years of life when they would otherwise be destined for a landfill.

This time the name of the game is Dell Optiplex GX240. There were millions of these made, it seems. They were not the sexiest computers around--they tended to be used for business applications more than for gaming.

However, my school received 15 of these recently from the Jared Polis Foundations Community Computer Connection program.

Technology is outdated all too quickly in our world, and these desktops are no exception. Look at their specs: 20 GB Hard Drive, 1.6 GHz processor, and 256 MB of RAM.

I turned one on today and it took a long time to boot up. The JPF puts a barebones form of Windows XP on these and then uses free open source applications for everything else. There is no Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop here. Instead, you have Open Office and GIMP. In fact, there's so much open source software on here it makes you wonder why they don't just put Linux on these instead of Windows.

Well, they do. Trouble is, however, you'll have a tough time finding a school to take in any computers that don't have Windows on them.

Which is too bad, really. Recent forms of Linux (especially the Ubuntu flavors) have made it possible to turn these old sluggish machines into sleek animals once again. Hell, even the 256 MB of RAM is enough for regular Ubuntu, not to mention Xubuntu, which can operate on even less.

I have one of these at home and will be experimenting on it this weekend--mostly deciding between Ubuntu and Xubuntu. I may be running a whole lab of these this year, so I need to choose the best OS for the job. One thing is clear, though: Windows has got to go.

What a waste of a good TV....

2008-07-16T12:26:00.008-06:00

I've seen a lot of people that have high definition televisions and their picture looks like crap. It's either cropped or it's a low def picture stretched out across the whole screen.

You haven't really seen a good high definition TV in action until you've seen a true HD channel received via an antenna.

Antenna? No one uses an antenna!

That's sad but true. Most people already have cable or satellite and just hook there nice HDTV up to it. The problem is that few people actually get it set up correctly and pay the extra money for the HD feed. Thus, their image looks like crap.

Even when watching DVDs you have to know what you're doing. Although their are HD Bluray players, an upconverting normal DVD player will give an amazing picture, but only if you configure the DVD player and the set correctly. For a couple days I watched a cropped picture until I found out how to set the DVD players aspect ratio to the correct 16:9 setting.

If you have a true HDTV, try hooking up a tv antenna to it. You can go to this site in order to find out what stations you may be able to receive. [Note: the site is very good and legitamate--just don't enter any of the non-required fields and you won't get any ads from them.] It does not have to be a fancy HDTV antenna--older antennas will work. Once you see a true HD image from a true HD over the air signal you won't believe how good it looks.

The image above is an outdoor UHF antenna that I've recently purchased to use for receiving HDTV signals over the air....

Must....write....some...code....

2008-07-15T12:15:00.005-06:00

Programmers suffer from writer's block just like prose writers.

Ever since my week of fishing with my father, my code production is almost zilch. Granted, it's summer and I'm a teacher, so I can just call it "recharging," but holy man, I need to get going here!

So last night, when I turned out the light after reading, instead of just falling asleep I ended up refining an idea I have for a Python program. I should write it in Java, just for the practice, but Python is just so much better suited for this type of scripting.

The idea itself comes from a strange recollection I had before I fell asleep. I remember once I was hanging out with the students in the programming club and we were talking about inventions we'd like to see reach fruition. I mentioned a long-time wish of mine: to be able to access your brain's memories like you can access a computer database. I told my students, "wouldn't it be fun to be able to say something like 'what song have I listened to more than any other song?' and then get the answer, with all the cool stats.

For instance, wouldn't it be cool to get the real answers to questions like:

1. How many Big Macs have I eaten in my life?
2. How many times have I said "please" in my life?
3. How many movies have I watched?
4. How many hours have I spent playing video games?
5. How many different students have I had in my classes?

Well, my idea for a program won't help answer questions like that, but it will help answer questions like:

1. What's my favorite Steely Dan song?
2. Which book of Richard Laymon's did I like the most?

You may think, "but you should know the answers to those questions," but I don't know if we really do. Or maybe the answers change over time.

Anyway, I'm going to write a Python program that will do this:

1. Parse a text file that contains a large list of items that all have something in common. All 80s songs, for instance, or Steely Dan songs, or Richard Laymon books.

2. Associate an ELO rating with each member of that list.

3. From time to time, ask the user to decide between two random items on the list. For instance: Which do you prefer: "Aja" or "Reelin' in the Years"?

4. Adjust the ELO ratings for each of the two items just compared.

5. Keep doing this until over time you can sort the entire list by descending value of ELO ratings and find out which Steely Dan song (for instance) you really prefer.

I know. Strange idea. That's what comes to someone during that special time right before you fall asleep.... :-)

Spaying and Neutering should be free.

2008-07-14T20:05:00.006-06:00

Today we took our little Hubbles (a yorkipoo) and got him neutered at a low-cost spay/neuter clinic near Fort Lupton. There are other alternatives all over Colorado for this.

I think it's funny that we live in such a strange county. The western side of Boulder county has Boulder, where some people will pay an arm and a leg to have their special pet pampered and fixed in comfort. Go east and cross into Weld county, though, and you see all these people taking animals in to be fixed in an RV trailer in a dusty parking lot.

Animals have all sorts of owners. I'm sure some of the pets that are fixed in the trailer have wonderful lives--like our Hubbles, for instance. In fact, none of the other pets brought into the low-cost clinic looked uncared for. Maybe that's the whole point: good owners will take their pets in to be fixed, whether they take them to the Taj Mahal or the RV trailer. It's the other pet owners we need to worry about.

If aliens did an anthropological study of U.S. culture, I'll bet they'd be pretty shocked at how inconsistent we are towards our pets. Some live like royalty. Others are abused and neglected.

Somehow, something like this should be a free service--and it almost is. I only wish that some of the money from those that choose to spend a thousand on their pampered pet could be redistributed to the less fortunate pets in our society--not to the owners, just to the pets.

[Note: we were a bit nervous about the low-cost alternative we opted for. However, we are quite impressed so far with their service. One nice thing is that, to keep costs down, you don't have to have your pet stay with them overnight. You have to take them in early in the morning and pick them up in the late afternoon. It's nice to have Hubbles here at home and comfortable as his groginess is wearing off.]

Who would play them in a movie?

2008-07-13T18:58:00.008-06:00

I've spent the last few days with my face buried in Joe R. Lansdale's Mucho Mojo book.

My wife always gives me a suspicious look when I use hyperbole and say something like, "now this is the best book I've read in five damn years!" Still, this time I mean it. This is one book that I will actually recommend to others to read, and that says a lot. You see, I'm a relatively slow reader. Always have been. Hell, I'm a prolific reader--just slow, like a big farm tractor pullin' a hay wagon down the highway and pissin' everyone off. So I don't really enjoy it much when someone tells me I "just have to read" a certain book. I think, well, if I have to read it that will keep me busy for a week or so. So I try not to tell people that they "have to" read anything.

But you have to read this book! It's that good.

Let's look at what makes this such a great book--and I'll do this without any real spoilers.

Setting. A poor black neighborhood in an East Texas town, with a crack house next door that seems to have evolved its own ecosystem.

Characters. Hap Collins, a crusty old Vietnam war protester and his sarcastic friend, Leonard Pine. These guys are classic. I read this book not knowing there are already five more "Hap and Leonard" books. I can see why. These characters are just too good to not use again and again.

Early in the book they attend a funeral. Having no good suits to wear, they go shopping at JC Penny. They get all dressed up and then ride in Leonard's big car, without air conditioning, through the humidity of East Texas. By the time they arrive they're all greasy and sweaty and cussing at each other about their lack of fashion sense. Really funny stuff.

Plot. This book would still be a classic on setting and character alone, but the plot is wonderfully suspensefull and also disturbing: someone is murdering children in this small town, wrapping them up in porno magazines and burrying them. Terrible. Sick. Nothing new here, as there are just too many disturbing thrillers out there, but this one beautifully walks that thin line that many novels must walk: only in the midst of true suffering can we appreciate true love and true friendship.

What a book.

[The title for this post comes from a comment by my wife. I was telling her some of the funny parts and reading a few quotes to her by Hap and Leonard. She asked me, "so who would you get to play them in a movie?" I won't answer that--as it would influence how you read the book--but it's a good question.]

Tomboy notes.

2008-07-10T21:20:00.006-06:00

A few days ago I wrote about not using my Moleskine journals anymore. Well, thanks to Joey Stanford, I now have found what I consider to be an incredible alternative: Tomboy notes.

Tomboy is a Gnome Linux application, so if you use Ubuntu Tomboy is installed by default. Because Tomboy is open source, you can of course get all the source code. Tomboy is a nice little application to start looking at if you're interested in helping write code for open source applications. But you don't have to be a programmer: there are other ways to contribute.

You can also see a list of other great Gnome applications.

As I've been thinking more and more of writing fiction lately--I now have to consider the effects of using something like Tomboy to plan with. Heck, I may even use it for my lesson plans....

Nature is cruel.

2008-07-10T09:09:00.003-06:00

Okay, this one bothers me.

Earlier this year a robin tried to make a nest above our security lights next to our main entrance. I discouraged her by temporarily taping a plastic bag up there and eventually she chose a pine tree that overhangs our (never-used) dog kennel. But the nest was made at a bad angle and when the wind blew you'd think it would fall out. Despite our trying to help stabilize the nest with a wooden support, the four baby robins in there ended up falling out, one after the next and my standard poodle killed them. I know, my dog isn't part of nature, per se, but the robin insisted in building in our yard rather than in the wooded open space that borders our property. I'm assuming she lost out some territorial battle and our yard was the best she could get.

For her second clutch of the season, the robin once again insisted on the security light location. This would not work, as it's two feet above our door and not a stable location. So, one rainy day she decided to build her nest above the southern drain pipe that leads from our roof gutter. It wasn't going to work. As soon as her nest got to a certain size, it would start falling off, bit by bit. So I went out in the rain and nailed up an impromptu wind shield and two supports for her. She watched me do it and seemed very pleased.

The only problem was the second set of chicks. We were out of town when they hatched and happy to see two of them when we returned. Soon, however, one of them fell out (or was pushed out) of the nest. We made sure our dogs didn't get it and put it back in the nest, as it was pretty immature. Nope. Ten minutes later it was out again. To make sure our dogs didn't get it, we put it over the fence into the open space woods behind our property. We don't know what happened to it.

That left one baby. I figured this was her last chance this year. For a week it seemed fine, although at times the chick did look like it was going to go jumping out of the nest prematurely. Overall, however, we were optimistic: this one might make it.

We found it dead in the yard this morning. Dammit.

The current stat of edublogging

2008-07-10T08:14:00.003-06:00

I don't know what to think of edublogs. I sure seem to have a love/hate relationship with them, though.

My online personality has many facets. I'm one person to the Digital Comic Preservation group--generally a very thankful and amazed supporter of their goals. On the Ubuntu forums I'm a source of information on what I know about Ubuntu and open source applications--especially as to how they can be used in an educational setting. The Ubuntu code of conduct pretty much assures that we all get along, even when arguing. On the Python in Education special interest group I'm also very polite and thankful for the expertise that is so freely shared. It's on the edublogger front, though, where I've pissed people off in the past.

Part of the problem is the rate of change in different spheres. Most facets of my internet personality hang out in areas where change happens quickly. If a problem comes up, it's dealt with and all are welcome to jump in and help solve it. This is true of the DCP and just about any gathering of programmers.

As some have noted, however, change in education takes a lot of time, and the edublogger community deals with this all the time.

Bud the Teacher is a busy man. My job puts me in contact with him personally at times, but I know him more from his online persona than I know him personally. Still, what I'm always amazed at is how downright polite he is online (and also in person).

Me? Well, I've posted comments here and there that have done more harm than good, and that wasn't my intention. I'm still trying to figure this whole edublogger thing out. My positions in other online communities of programmers and Linux users really didn't prepare me well for the edubloggersphere. I'm still trying to determine what the purpose is. I guess I'm a bit too task-oriented and want to tackle a problem. In the edublogosphere I'm not really sure what the current task is.

Theres always a lot of talking about the importance of collaborating and sharing (which reminds me a lot of open source development priciples)--and yet there has to be more than that. I also read a lot of posts about a certain web application or product that teachers are really happy with. I've noticed that more and more these are open source applications, although the edublogger often will make no mention of that in their post. That's where I usually jump in and say something like, "...and the nice thing is that this is an open source application, made possible by a lot of hard work and collaboration among programmers with a common philosophy..." But then I blow it and say something like, "...and it sure beats the proprietary crapwhere Dreamweaver that too many teachers still use only because their district chose to waste a ton of money..." See? I write those things all the time.

My solution? I guess I'll just pretend the Ubuntu Code of Conduct also applies in the edublogosphere--whatever that is.

Computer Software in the 1960s.

2008-07-08T19:18:00.007-06:00

Today I went with my wife to a number of thrift/junk/antiques stores and looked around for cool stuff.

My favorite find was a like-new copy of COMPUTER SOFTWARE: PROGRAMMING SYSTEMS FOR DIGITAL COMPUTERS, by Ivan Flores, copyright 1965.

Now this book is by no means rare--I think you could get it for almost nothing on many used book sites. Still--what a strange book to look at.

Computers in the early sixties were quite different than today's computers. For the heck of it I did some research on a typical computer during the early sixties.

The IBM 1401 was one of the first mass-produced computers to have no vacuum tubes--just the more modern transistors! It was the size of a large book case. It had a memory of 4 kilobytes. It cost, brace yourself, over one hundred thousand dollars.

Still, it would have been fun to try to make it play games.

Maybe I'll use this as the textbook this year for my Intro to Programming classes. :-)

So much to read....

2008-07-07T17:32:00.004-06:00

Blame my parents--both of them. My father is a retired English teacher who always took me to the library when I was a kid. My mother is a prolific reader who is always reading a book--always.

I learned to read before anyone else in my first grade class--thanks to Mom. I remember feeling like I was the king of the world when I was exempted out of the Dick and Jane books and got to go independently read dinosaur books! Dad gave me the best gift ever: a light on the headboard of my bed. Ever since, I've read in bed every night.

Anyway, it was with my mom in mind that I decided to read the first of the Kay Scarpetta novels by Patricia Cornwell: Postmortem. Yep, it's pretty darn good. Reminds me of the time I read Red Dragon by Thomas Harris and thought it was the greatest thing ever.

So good that it got me to thinking of all these great suspense/thriller series that I haven't read. Damn, there's just so much to read!

So I've been doing some research and have come up with 11 series that I think I'll read. Of course this will take a long time, as most of these series have more than 15 novels in them. Some of these I've already had a taste of, as I've read a few of these novels here and there without realizing they were part of a larger series of books. Anyway, the choices are overwhelming, but I think I'm going to work on these:

1. The Spenser novels by Robert B. Parker
2. The Alex Delaware novels by Jonathan Kellerman
3. The Kay Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell
4. The Jack Stapleton books by Robin Cook
5. The Prey series by John Sandford
6. The Myron Bolitar series by Harlan Coben
7. The Quincy/Rainie books by Lisa Gardner
8. The Women's Murder Club series from James Patterson
9. The Sunny Randall Novels by Robert B. Parker
10. The Jesse Stone books by Robert B. Parker
11. The Eve Duncan Series by Iris Johansen

Yes, that will keep me busy for a while. Especially since I have two other books currently waiting on my "read next" shelf:

Mucho Mojo by Joe R. Lansdale
Lifelines by CJ Lyons

Sheesh....

Tip: Easy Blog Backup

2008-07-06T19:09:00.003-06:00

From time to time I'll try to include a tip or two in this blog that may be useful to other people. Here's today's tip:

EASY BLOG BACKUP METHOD

Although I've used software to do complete backups of my blogs in the past, it got quite complicated, as each link was copied, along with the destination of most of the links, and they called three friends, and so on and so on....

For now what I do is configure my blog to show the last "n" posts on the main page, with "n" being any number up to 500. That way, it's all on one big page, even if it may take a minute to load.

Then, in Firefox, I go to "File/Save_Page_As" and choose "web page complete". This will save the entire page, including all the pictures.

Paper just doesn't cut it anymore....

2008-07-06T18:48:00.001-06:00

As much as I love Moleskine journals, I just can't seem to use them much anymore. I mean, pretty much all my life I have been very prolific in writing--poetry, stories, journal entries, articles, lesson plans, programs, etc. I just visited my parents and my mom gave me some of my old stories that I wrote while in high school. It was fun to read them again, as I could finally read them as a plain old reader, not the writer/reader that I usually am with something I produce. Nope, these suckers were so old I'd pretty much forgotten them.

Returning home, I figured I'd journal about my vacation. I got out my Moleskine journal and noticed that my last entry was in December of 2007! The one before that one: May of 2007! Obviously I don't keep up with my journal anymore.

Or do I? If you look back through my physical journal from the past few years you'll find a whole bunch of links (certainly not hyperlinks, however) that refer you to some other media. Things like, "for more info from this period in my life, go read my Linux Journals...."

I think it's time to just give up on writing in my Moleskine altogether. Feels all slow and sloppy, whereas I can type really fast. Maybe I'll save the whole thing as one big textfile somewhere....