jamesmallen

Yesterday I gave a presentation at the eTech Ohio conference titled “Practical Computer Science with Python.” For the past two years, I’ve been teaching computer science to upper schoolers at Hathaway Brown School in Shaker Heights, OH, and in the presentation I shared some of the reasons why I think Python is an excellent choice for a programming language in an Intro CS course.

I’ve uploaded the slides from the presentation for your convenience – next year, I’ll try to record any presentation(s) and put them online as well!

Slides: Practical Computer Science with Python (eTech 2010)

Links:

• Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (free textbook, great for intro CS courses)
• Python

I use Macs and I use Windows PCs. Sometimes I have a choice – sometimes I don’t. Overall, I’m definitely more of a fan of the general “Mac” user experience – focusing on making things “just work” with sensible defaults, and using as few clicks as possible to get things done.

On Macs, there is a wonderful program called The Unarchiver that “just works” for extracting ZIP files. It works very similar to the built-in unzipping functionality, but supports many more file formats. I love it – when I double-click on a compressed file, it expands it in the current folder, and it’s very smart about how to do that. If there’s only one file inside the compressed file, it puts it right in the current folder. If there’s more than one file, it puts it into an appropriately-named subfolder. Read the rest of this entry »

Another year, another blog post! If you’re not interested in reading backstory and just interested in getting MobiPocket DRM-protected books onto your Kindle, check out the Mobi2Kindle page at Google Code.

Not too long ago, I won an Amazon Kindle while attending the CS4HS workshop at CMU (Yay Google and other sponsors!). Perhaps not surprisingly, I fell in love with reading on it. I quickly looked for all the free e-books I could, discovering sites like MobileRead and FeedBooks, with their ultra-sweet Kindle-based book browsers (Click and download right on the Kindle? Awesome!). However, their selections of recent works are certainly… lacking. Only a few authors have really embraced free e-book distribution, and while I do love Cory Doctorow, my brain really craved more.

Read the rest of this entry »

Alas, I find myself having to do some work on a Windows machine. I also find myself needing some additional PEAR libraries that don’t come pre-installed as part of XAMPP. I found the below commands in a comment at http://www.tohir.co.za/2006/07/pear-on-xampp-windows.html, and have taken the liberty to “re-translate” them. These instructions will setup MDB2 and the MySQL MDB2 driver on your Windows XAMPP system.Open up a command prompt, and cd to your XAMPP PHP directory. Assuming XAMPP is on your C drive:

cd \xampp\php

go-pear

pear install MDB2

pear install pear/MDB2#mysql

I recently “refreshed” my Mac – I’d accumulated a fair amount of cruft in my attempts to install alternate versions of libraries, and decided that a fresh install of things would clear things up. I kept my wife’s user profile intact, since she hadn’t done anything funny in her user directories, but I decided to blow mine away and just put in the things I needed.

Being a web developer (if only part-time at the moment), I found myself having to remember how I went ahead and set up my testing environment so I could do rapid virtual host set-up, and I decided to write it down for posterity’s sake. This is just my own desired set-up – your own preferences may vary, but perhaps you’ll find this useful!

Read the rest of this entry »