Programming
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How Not To Get Things Done
→: How Not To Get Things DoneI have had a pretty appalling week in terms of the difference between what I wanted to achieve, and what I did achieve. Things outside my control: Re-aggravating shoulder injury. So much pain. Increased sleeping due to pain killers. Two trips to chiro (feeling a lot better now – finally). Car is broken and needs a bunch of…
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Getting Started With App Inventor
→: Getting Started With App InventorA colleague and I are running a workshop for high school teachers this week, and we plan to use App Inventor (which will now live at the MIT Media lab). So I had a play around with app inventor and it is so easy to get started. The beginner app is one where the kitty purrs…
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Why Programmers Lie To Get Dates
→: Why Programmers Lie To Get DatesSlides and commentary for the talk I gave at Ignite Waterloo, June 15th. Missing two slides – title slide and end slide (with my twitter handle and website on it). Ignite is a tough format – 5 minutes, 15 seconds a slide, the slides auto-advance. The *’s are where I expect the slide to change…
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Exploring a Conference Hashtag: Part 3
→: Exploring a Conference Hashtag: Part 3I wanted to explore temporal rhythms around the conference, for example to pick out more popular or particularly tweet-able sessions. Color scheme: Is directed at someone by starting with an @ Contains a mention (@) of someone else Contains a link Disappointingly, no patterns are immediately obvious here – it seems like tweeting was reasonably consistent throughout. I…
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Part 8: Who’s Talking About The Future of Newspapers?
→: Part 8: Who’s Talking About The Future of Newspapers?I’m working on a paper on topical communities, and as part of that I’ve come back to this dataset to explore the social network that emerges through @ mentions. To start with, I looked at the social network that emerges when we look at the people on the list. This network is pretty densely connected,…
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Simplicity and God Objects
→: Simplicity and God ObjectsThere’s an anti-pattern in Object Oriented programming called “God object” or “God class”. An pattern is a design to follow. An anti-pattern is something to avoid. A God class is a class that knows and/or does too much. Breaking a problem down into well-defined units of limited scope is part of writing good code that…
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Sunflower Layout in Processing
→: Sunflower Layout in ProcessingFor a while, I’ve been wanting to make something that explores color in photo sets. Reading Beautiful Visualization (Amazon), I came across the perfect way to arrange the elements. It imitates the layout of the sunflower seeds, “the most efficient and visually mesmerizing way of packing small elements into a large circle”. I decided to…
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Why I’m Not a Teacher
→: Why I’m Not a TeacherThere was a interesting post on the Computing Education blog about a month ago, suggesting that the best hope for CS education was to take existing teachers and train them to teach CS, rather than to try and get CS majors into teaching (you can find it here, there’s also good discussion in the comments).…
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Books to Read Before You Graduate: Design Patterns
→: Books to Read Before You Graduate: Design PatternsDesign Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software – I had to read and study this for a class, and then we played Design Pattern Poker, where we “played” the design patterns we had in order to solve a problem. Seemed like nonsense at first, but then I read the book. And saw solutions that I’d…