Planet
Clutter-box2dmm bindings updated to 0.12.1
I submitted a patch to Gnome bugzilla last night that updates the clutter-box2d C++ bindings so that they build against the current git master version of clutter-box2d. The patch is a little of a mess. However, this morning, I think the patch is a little less of a mess than I thought last night. Mainly because I managed to do the following on the train into work
Simply build one of the examples in the clutter-box2dmm folder.
I now have Fedora 15 & 16 packages for cluttermm, clutter-box2d and will have clutter-box2dmm later today. I’ll push these clutter-box2d* packages upstream to Fedora later, but I won’t hold my breath to see them approved. The approval process is a little unwieldy.
Teaching Webcraft / Audience | Who are your learners?
The second task for the Teaching webcraft course is about making up profiles for people we're hoping to help. The couple of biographies that follow do not cover it all, but should still be a fair sample :-)
* * *
Jessie is a high school student, and although she thinks about it often, what she wants to do after her final year still very much depends on what catches her interest the most any given week. She navigates the web effortlessly, and hangs out online in all the social networks her friends are into. She never really considered programming as something she could learn, but when presented with the opportunity to join an intro course she thinks maybe there she'll learn enough code to be able to personalise her blog, and make it look unique and more interactive.
This course will teach Jessie how to create her first program, and that programming is more similar to puzzle solving than inputting number in Excel to do sums like in the ICT class. Perhaps something worth exploring further...
*
Jon is working hard at his PhD thesis in social sciences. He has a lot of statistics to parse and go through every day, results of experiments to reproduce before building on them and so on. He has a dozen of Excel spreadsheets set up with insane macros that save him a lot of time, but still wastes many hours manually inputting data taken from websites or articles. He's hoping learning to program will enable him to spend less time on drudge work and more time exploring the interesting questions.
This course will teach Jon how to automate more of his experimental work, and in the process make him realise there are other areas where some scripting would make writing his dissertation more efficient.
*
Paula doesn't consider herself a power user, but she knows the keyboard shortcuts for every application she uses, is familiar with the file system layout of her computer (and learnt what a file system is) thanks to a couple of misadventures clicking on interesting looking icons, and is known to her friends and colleagues as the go-to person whenever a computer misbehaves. Though she doesn't plan on making a career out of it, she is curious to gain an understanding of what's under the hood of all these applications she uses.
This course will teach Paula the fundamental steps and "bricks" that every program is made of, and help her understand why bugs happen and what makes them difficult to eradicate. Maybe putting together a short script to randomly assign secret Santas for the next Christ Kindle wouldn't be too hard, though...
Tagged with: education, P2PU: Teaching webcraft, teaching"Stop SOPA Ireland" banner for non-WordPress users
If you’ve visted my site recently, you’ll have noticed the banner for Stop SOPA Ireland. There’s a banner you can use if your site runs on WordPress, but if, like me, you use something else, you’re out of luck.
<style type="text/css" media="screen"> #sopa_menubar { display: block; width: 100%; background: black; overflow: hidden; padding: 0.75ex 0; } #sopa_menubar ul, #sopa_menubar li { margin: 0; padding: 0; list-style: none; } #sopa_menubar a { color: silver; text-decoration: none; float: right; margin: 0 2ex; display: block; padding: 0.5ex 0; } #sopa_menubar li.sopa_title { float: left; margin: 0 2ex; padding: 0.5ex 0; } #sopa_menubar a.sopa_sign { background: #5F9B3F no-repeat; border-radius: 20px; color: white; padding: 0.5ex 3ex; box-shadow: inset 0 0 0 1px RGBA(0, 0, 0, 0.3), inset 0 0 0 2px RGBA(255, 255, 255, 0.2); background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #74b74a 0%, #5f9b3f 100%); background-image: linear-gradient(top, #74b74a 0%, #5f9b3f 100%); } #sopa_menubar a.sopa_sign strong { text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px RGBA(0, 0, 0, 0.5); } </style> <div id="sopa_menubar"> <ul> <li class="sopa_title"><strong>I SUPPORT STOP SOPA IRELAND!</strong></li> <li><a class="sopa_sign" href="http://stopsopaireland.com/"><strong>Sign the petition</strong></a></li> <li><a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stop-sopa-ireland/">Download the menubar</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.tjmcintyre.com/2012/01/irelands-sopa-faq.html">FAQ</a></li> </ul> </div>Throw that in the top of your page under the <head> tag, and you should be good to go.
It’s not perfect, and your pre-existing CSS rules may interfere with it, but, with luck it should work just fine.
FOSDEM 2012
Brussels Hotels, Belgium | Venere.com
Keeping this here for future reference for the next time I go to FOSDEM. This time around, I’m staying at Scandic Grand Place, which was recommended to me by a trustworthy source, and I’m told it has decent Wi-Fi to boot!
Six analysis and probability diagrams
Diagrams summarising the relationships in analysis and probability. The ones on distributions and conjugate priors are probably the most immediately useful to me, but there’s lot of good things there.
Luppp: Settling into Github
The "manual" for Luppp will be constructed slowly in the Wiki part of github:
https://github.com/harryhaaren/Luppp/wiki
It currently contains some info on how to download & build:
http://wiki.github.com/harryhaaren/Luppp/downloading-building-installing
as well as a basic overview of what does what in the GUI:
https://github.com/harryhaaren/Luppp/wiki/Interface-Overview
Also new: A master "progress" widget that shows time into your 4 bars, or time till the next "4th queue" process, ie: Event quantization.
Read "When it goes from red to green, your Scene will change."
Fancy GUI suggestions welcomed, I don't really know how to spice this one up yet...
Hopefully in the next couple of days I can update it some more, and fix a couple of critical bugs that really hinder the use of scenes. More news soon!
Documentation for RFC authors
- RFC Style Guide
- RFC 2223: Instructions for RFC Authors, and its draft replacement
- RFC 2629: Writing I-Ds and RFCs using XML
- RFC 5741: RFC Streams, Headers, and Boilerplates
- xml2rfc, a tool for converting document written in RFC 2629 markup to various formats.
DCHK- and IRIS-related links
- RFC 3981: IRIS: The Internet Registry Information Service (IRIS) Core Protocol
- RFC 2982: IRIS: A Domain Registry (dreg) Type for the Internet Registry Information Service
- RFC 4992: XML Pipelining with Chunks for the Internet Registry Information Service
- RFC 4993: A Lightweight UDP Transfer Protocol for the Internet Registry Information Service
- RFC 5144: A Domain Availability Check (DCHK) Registry Type for the Internet Registry Information Service (IRIS)
Teaching Webcraft / Compare your practices to IES report's recommendations
I'm taking an online course at the P2P University, on "How to teach webcraft and programming to free-range students" taught by Greg Wilson.
Looking at the initial comments on the course it's possible I misunderstood what "free-range students" means ; from the course description I took it to mean teaching in various non-traditional settings, but it might actually be specifically about online learning (?). It's fine, the general concepts of "what is good teaching", "how people learn" and how to encourage independent learning will be helpful anyway. :)
First taskOur first task is to take a look at the IES (Institution of Educational Sciences) report on "Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning" (summarised in Greg's post here) and compare their recommendations to our own approach to teaching programming.
For the record, I teach sporadically in my own time, to small groups of 6 to 10 complete beginners, usually-but-not-always adults, in the local hackerspace.
Recommendation 1: Space learning over time.Arrange to review key elements of course content after a delay of several weeks to several months after initial presentation.
In a 5 or 6 weeks-long course, this can be difficult. However, most concepts do build on top on each other: once learnt, they will be used every week from then on. The later concepts could benefit from regular review, but by then the course is about finished unfortunately.
Recommendation 2: Interleave worked example solutions with problem-solving exercises.Have students alternate between reading already worked solutions and trying to solve problems on their own.
From the 2nd session of the course, I start by showing a short, working program to the class and ask them to think about what it could be doing, (trying to) figure out as a group what could be its purpose. This sounds more like review though, as it reuses the previous concepts. The report also reads that alternating working examples + exercises is hugely important. "Worked example solutions" should go into much more details than what I've been doing as well (showing intermediate steps, rather than only the final solution).
Recommendation 3: Combine graphics with verbal descriptions.Combine graphical presentations (e.g., graphs, figures) that illustrate key processes and procedures with verbal descriptions.
I can't say that I'm really doing this. I'm projecting code, sometimes working out solutions in front of the class but this isn't particularly graphical. I'm not sure how to do this either. It actually reminds me of the approach to learning that Sean O'Leary mentioned in his talk on differentiated learning at the Reimagining Learning conference, where he told us about adding visual cues to quizzes and concepts to help dyslexic learners and students with a more visual approach. Although useful, this doesn't exactly match the IES report recommendation which advocates making sure the graphical element is directly relevant to the concept being taught.
Recommendation 4: Connect and integrate abstract and concrete representations of concepts.Connect and integrate abstract representations of a concept with concrete representations of the same concept.
The report explains that students gain an understanding faster when using concrete examples, but then don't know how to transfer the knowledge to new problems ; while students who learn the concept abstractly struggle more initially but are then more flexible with the knowledge. The report advocates mixing up both, which I'm not doing or not doing well as my students tend to have trouble reusing previous concepts to break down more intricate problems on their own.
Recommendation 5: Use quizzing to promote learning.Use quizzing with active retrieval of information at all phases of the learning process to exploit the ability of retrieval directly to facilitate long-lasting memory traces.
5a. Use pre-questions to introduce a new topic. I don't do this. I wonder if "previewing" an unknown programming concept would help learning, or increase confusion. It'd definitely need to solve a concrete problem, ideally that we encountered in the previous session.
5b. Use quizzes to re-expose students to key content. I don't do this either. (Actually, reading on the report, presenting small programs and asking students to figure out what it does may be considered a quiz, as it encourages them to retrieve previously learnt material). It's interesting, and I wonder how to apply it to teaching practical programming while keeping the questions short and meaningful (maybe tiny programs with missing bits, with a multiple choice as to what to fill the blank with?)
Recommendation 6: Help students allocate study time efficiently.Assist students in identifying what material they know well, and what needs further study, by teaching children how to judge what they have learned.
6a. Teach students how to use delayed judgements of learning to identify content that needs further study. I'm not doing this, except perhaps brutally when giving exercises that a student doesn't know how to solve.
6b. Use tests and quizzes to identify content that needs to be learned. This advises giving a quiz, written or oral, could be done as a game, right after presenting new material, so students can assess what they actually do remember. I don't do this. Considering most of my students don't make the time for homework or studying at home, I don't know if this would be very effective on its own. Or perhaps it would highlight that they do need to study outside of the class and encourage them to do so...
Recommendation 7: Ask deep explanatory questions.Use instructional prompts that encourage students to pose and answer “deep-level” questions on course material. These questions enable students to respond with explanations and supports deep understanding of taught material.
I do a tiny bit of this when I introduce a new concept or explain what an existing program does, but not very deeply, nor involving the class enough (it can be tough generating discussion!). Some of the suggestions include having students think aloud, then comment and build on each other's understanding.
Tagged with: education, P2PU: Teaching webcraft, teachingLuppp : Source opened, but still pre-alpha!
With recent changes in the world of live looping software I've decided to open my private repo of Luppp.
The Luppp project has been one of my main occupations over the last couple of years, and I've tought myself C++ programming while working on it. Its a live looping instrument with similar features to the well known software Ableton Live, and more recently Bitwig studio. I feel the live workflow available with such programs is something the Linux Audio community would also benefit from, and hence it will be released under the GPL license, version 3.
Its current state is that most "basic" functionality is in place: Loading, playing back & recording of loops works, effects can be added to these audio streams, and later they are mixed. A basic config file is used to store information about loops, and hence Luppp can make more informed decisions how to use loops.
This is pre-alpha software, as not all features to fullfill alpha state are implemented. On the other side, most features currently available are quite stable (on my local machine anyway :)
I would like to announce that I will continue to work on the Luppp project myself, but that I do also welcome input / testing / help from other developers. I am aware that there are some basic enough flaws in the program in its current state, however these are also the primary items on my TODO list.
Remember its pre-alpha, please keep that in mind :)
Git source repo: https://github.com/harryhaaren/Luppp
ZIP of master branch: https://github.com/harryhaaren/Luppp/zipball/master
If you're intrested in working on Luppp, have a feature request, have ideas, time, or want to build Luppp a website, feel free to get in contact!!
Cheers, -Harry
Mandatory screenshot (note your GTK theme will influence its looks, this is on the todo! ):
C64anabalt
Canabalt for the C64. I was wondering how feasible this would be, and my guesses were pretty accurate: sacrifice smooth scrolling at lower speeds and ditch parallax. Otherwise, it’s near perfect! My only complaint is that I know it’s possible for the SID to do a more faithful rendition of the, admittedly bloody good, rendition in the conversion.
Update (2012-01-14): Listening to it again, I think I know why it’s not quite right. It sounds like it’s using just two channels, which would explain why it’s not quite as faithful as it might be. Crushing that much into two channels is far from trivial!
Olly Betts: The Art of Writing Small Programs - OSDC 2011
And here’s the talk’s site too, with slides and the like.
Ubuntu Ireland LoCo 2011 year end roundup….As I saw it
One thing we suffer from in the Irish Loco is a severe lack of regular bloggers who find the time to blog about our activities. I resolved to do more on this is 2011 but, alas, I failed miserably. Hopefully 2012 will be better (both here AND on others blogs!!). As I’ve said before I am one of the least geeky member of the Irish Loco. I am just A.N. Other user of Ubuntu who partakes in the social aspects of the Irish LoCo’s activities and whatever advocacy effort that entails.
As 2011 fades away I thought I’d recall our activities from the past year just so my memories of these won’t also fade. Of course all these details can be found by viewing the Ubuntu Ireland LoCo Team Portal Page, Mailing List Archive and the Team Reports Wiki Page but I thought I’d like to review the past year, to remind myself of what was achieved, and while doing so I thought it would form the basis of a potentially interesting blog post!
So here we go……….
Ubuntu Hours were frequent in both Dublin and Limerick throughout the year but in both cities attendance dwindled and attempts were made in the latter half of the year to revitalise our approach to these. Broadly, we looked at changing the venues types for our Ubuntu Hours, we thought about mixing it up a bit like heading for a café instead of a pub. We also latched on to the idea of varying the days of the week on which Ubuntu Hours would be held.
Back at the end of bitterly cold January we hosted a bowling event in Dublin which was alot of fun. My young son got an ‘assisted’ double at the start of game 2, a fete that was captured in this picture. Also in January some members of our LoCo produced their first podcast. Unfortunately, after only a couple of episodes, time constraints halted their podcasting activities at least for the time being.
On the 2nd of April we hosted two Ubuntu Global Jam events, one in Dublin and one in Limerick. This was the first time we had a second venue participating in the Global Jam in Ireland! As always these events built on past experience. Personally, on this occasion I focussed on learning how to test Natty Narwahl, the latest iteration of Ubuntu, on my hardware. Pictures of these Irish Jams can be found here (for the Dublin Jam) an here (for the Limerick one). The Limerick Ubuntu Global Jam event featured the snazzy new Ubuntu LoCo Banner and Tablecloth (thanks go out to Canonical for providing these). Also in April, at the very end of the month, Ubuntu Ireland hosted a Natty Narwhal Release Party!! This one was held on Thursday the 28th of April. The date was chosen specifically to fulfill two criteria:
1) To have a release part on the actual date of release!
2) We wanted to see if holding the release party on a weekday evening would facilitate more potential revellers.
Ultimately we had a fun but poorly attended party. A couple of pictures of the event can be seen here. Apparently midweek release parties don’t sit well with the Irish psychi.
In May Ubuntu Ireland was confronted with the looming Reapproval Process. We held a face to face and IRC meeting to formulate our our approact to this reapproval process and to assign tasks for the completion of the application. In June we were reapproved. A picture of two members who participated in this meeting, and my enthuastic views on our successful reapproval application, can be found in an earlier post here. June 2011 was arguably the busiest month thus far for out Loco. On top of our successful reapproval we also hosted a Geeknic in Limerick during the lunch hour of 3DCamp, the first Ubuntu Ireland Geeknic to take place outside Dublin (read an earlier post here) as well as a fin meet and greet event with canonical employees at the very end of June (you can read a bit more about that here).
The second and final Geeknic of the year was held in August, back in Dublin’s Stephens Green. Historically speaking, Stephens Green was also the location for our first geeknic which was the second geeknic ever!!! (if you fancy a blast from the past take a look here). While the sun shone yet again the turnout at this geeknic was low (some pictures here). Perhaps we should return to the cooler, potentially wetter months of May and September for 2012.
On the 4th of September, for the first time ever Ubuntu Ireland hosted 3 Global Jam events spread across Ireland in Galway, Limerick and Dublin. The Makerspaces/Hackerspaces in these cities made these events possible and the thanks of our Loco community goes out to these, namely 091labs, Milklabs and TOG. In fact TOG has very kindly hosted many of our Global Jam events in the past.
In September we did not hold our montly IRC Team meeting due to poor attendance, but hey! that just proves that these LoCos are fluid entities, dependent of volunteer participation. Apart from September we held monthly IRC meetings every month in 2011.
October saw us celebrate the release of Ubuntu 11:10 Oneiric Ocelot. We returned to weekend partying for this release. The party was held on Saturday the 15th of October 2011. In honour of the Ocelot, the troops went for a bite to eat in a Mexican themed restaurant in Dublin which was, of course, followed by the mandatory trip to a pub to close out the evening. I missed the restaurant due to work but hooked up with the party when it reached the Porterhouse in Temple Bar later on. For the first time ever I had a few drinks with the guys and I must say it was a great night. There was a good turnout for this party with many new faces. I took a few pictures an the Porterhouse and they can be seen here.
A Dublin Ubuntu Hour in October and a Limerick Ubuntu Hour in December closed out the year nicely. And that was 2011.
On reflection, I reckon that was quite a lot for a small LoCo like ours. We tried a few new things that didn’t always work, but still, they were worth trying. Some members of the LoCo participated in cross group collaborative activities also.
Hopefully 2012 will be just as good if not more so.
Ubuntu Ireland Meet and Greet with Canonical in Dublin. 6 months late with the write up!
I started writing this post many months ago but never pressed the ‘publish’ button. Very late posts will most likely become a feature of this blog. What can I say…
Anyway, for the 29th June 2011, Jeffrey Roe organised a fun get together between the Ubuntu Ireland LoCo and various members of the Canonical Team and Extended Ubuntu Community who were spending the week in Dublin on a sprint. While I was extremely excited about this event I arrived at it straight after a twelve hour working day which was not the best way to start a pub meetup. It was great fun meeting up with some familiar and some not so familiar Ubuntu Ireland folk as well as the amazing amount of energised Canonical people that turned up (This was by far the most registered for event on our LoCo Team Portal page not the mention the most star studded!!!)
I only got to talk with a few canonical people and they were great to chat to. Unfortunately, as I don’t live in Dublin, I wasn’t able to provide them with good information nuggets about Dublin. Regrettably, I had a very strict limit to my time in The Porterhouse (Cinderella syndrome) . As well as arriving there at the end of a 12 hour working day I had the unenviable prospect of dealing with a 12 hour shift the next day also! On top of that the need for a long commute home that night and again the following morning weighed heavy on my mind. All this prevented me from diving into the excellent atmosphere that was brewing at the Porterhouse. I managed to take just a few photos before I broke the battery housing on my daughters camera. The few pictures that I took can be found here. I do hope all the Canonical folks had a productive and fun time in Dublin.
"Three Cubes Colliding"
A cubic kite that’s part of part of an art installation. Here’s what the creator has to say:
It’s a trilogy! No actually the kite in this video is one of three kites which are now part of an installation at Castle Quay in Jersey. There are two large kites (like the one in the video) and a smaller kite. We filmed the smaller kite flying, but it didn’t make the final cut.
