Posts by David Hood
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Just some observations for anyone teaching programming to young people.
When my 11 year old daughter needed to learn a computer language for analysing images for her science fair project, I taught her Python. You can get up and running with a basic understanding of the language in a couple of hours by tackling things in the order of:
-Data types (things you can work with): numbers, strings, files, lists
-Variables: store the stuff on the right in a container labelled with the name on the left
-Objects and methods: Hey_you.do_this(with_this)
-Decision making: Ifs and For loops
From that, and some guidance on the libraries to use, my daughter was able to write a data analysis script.
Pygame is a reasonably well regarded python library to build games from.
That said, regardless of language, the real issue is estimating the amount of effort required to develop something, and trying to break it into parts where some progress is being made.If it is an initial exposure to programming on a small scale item, I would actually suggest javascript in the web browser, because the GUI development is easy and most young people have an imbued familiarity with the way web pages work. Simple options for games are rather limited, though less so with HMTL5 to link to a rather interesting example I saw in the weekend (though doing this kind of stuff is still somewhat complicated):
Safari,Chrome,Opera, or Firefox link -
I can now exclusively reveal that I did not go to the cricket at all, and in not going to the cricket I did not have with me a nuclear weapon of mass destruction. Ground security completely failed to identify this potential threat. WHAT DOES THIS PORTEND FOR THE RUGBY WORLD CUP.
As I am sure that any real terrorists, carrying a real weapons of mass destruction, and actually going to the cricket, would have been treated similarly leniently, I am appalled. -
Sofie wrote: "Windywood"
Woodwind.
And now Iʻm imagining a giant flute that plays notes as the wind blows over it. Given it is on airport land, I wouldnʻt expect many complaints about the noise.
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Apropos of the public/private/anonymous internet thing. I was reading an article earlier today about deanonymising based on the perfectly reasonable idea that you can identify identities talking about the same topics in different communications media, and a strong enough similarity is evidence of being the same person.
It's still at the press release "promising new technology" stage though. -
The Christmas before last I gave all my near relatives (and a close friend) wind-up radio/torch/battery chargers for Christmas (not that I'd want to use the wind-up battery charger except under emergency conditions, there is a lot of winding to recharge an AA battery). I also gave my wife a AA battery cell-phone recharger. So we can recharge batteries in in the radio, and use them to recharge a cellphone. Because I bought on sale, from memory it was about $30 a radio, and about $8 for the cellphone recharger.
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"Iʻm too sexy for my caucus
too sexy for my caucus
so sexy itʻs raucous
Iʻm a PM you know what I mean
and I do my little turn in the Herald" -
As a coda to this thread, I was looking a my Flickr photo stats today, and saw that my protest logo (much earlier in the tread) had been found via a google search for:
city of sails auckland logo
as Flickr will show the refers for visits if you have a pro account.
Repeating the google search myself, I found that my protest logo ranks number 6 in the web search category, only one below the official Auckland City Council site.
This pleases me inordinately. -
2) My wife suggests you'd be paying for jugs, not glasses or bottles.
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the dominant disc format may not always be with us--something to do with the inadequacy of the glue holding the layers together.
Best estimates (ones that seem to have used a reasonably scientific methodology) give modern CDs/ DVDs you burn yourself 5 to 10 useable years, commercially pressed ones 50 to 100 years (assuming they are kept out of sunlight etc).
Delamination- problems with the bonding near the edge of a disk, can be more of a problem with cheaper disks.
Not that there will be machines to put them in 20 years from now. -
1) John Key would be optimistic for its future.
2 )That depends how optimistic you are.
3) A novelty desk ornament
4) A similar thing to the TV ad that asks if you have been Fiji'd recently
5) Pay attention to the swinging watch. You are getting sleepy. When you wake up you will have no memory of last weeks legislation.