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.

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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!

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I’ve been doing a significant amount of video work lately. This led to my recent purchase of Final Cut Express (It is so wonderful having a brother-in-law who’s an Apple Store employee), and with it many changes to my typical workflow. I’m used to using Sony’s Vegas Studio product for any editing that iMovie couldn’t handle, and while FCE shares many concepts, it also looks at them from a pretty different perspective.

My most recent project involves editing a slew footage of which I was not involved in shooting. One out of five cameras that were recording during the event (a musical) was shot using 12-bit audio. This is my first experience trying to use footage with 12-bit audio in FCE, and frankly, I’m not impressed.

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I use Subversion with my own, personal projects, and about a year ago I started using it to track changes on clients’ existing sites (No, I didn’t want THAT!). On my Windows dev machine, I used TortoiseSVN over an svn+ssh connection. While I don’t dislike the command line/terminal, I liked the filesystem integration of TortoiseSVN and the ability to see at a glance the status of various files.

For the Mac, there’s SCPlugin, which seems to offer similar functionality and Finder integration. Of course, there are a couple additional (and, in my opinion, poorly-documented) steps required to use SCPlugin with an svn+ssh connection. (Note: these steps worked for me on OS X 10.5, Leopard. YMMV)

1. Get SCPlugin from http://scplugin.tigris.org/ and install it. There is no need for a separate installation for SVN – SVN 1.4.4 appears to come pre-installed on Leopard.
2. Restart the Finder. I just opened up Force Quit (Command-Option-Escape) and chose to Relaunch Finder.app, but you can also just log out and log back in if Force Quit scares you.
3. Here’s the tricky part – you need to set up ssh to use key pair authentication as opposed to password authentication when you connect to your SSH server. Detailed instructions can be found here.
4. Now check something out using SCPlugin. In Leopard, this is done by right-clicking in the target directory in a Finder window, choosing “More,” “Subversion,” “Checkout,” and entering the repository URL and other information as necessary.

A little while ago, there was some hype on the interwebs about a “newer version” of Gmail coming. Well, it looks like that “newer version” might be here…

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As sort of a continuation to my post On Migrations, I thought I’d post about the first piece of replacement software that I’ve found.

It’s called Actiontastic, and it’s geared toward using the Getting Things Done approach to productivity/time management. I myself have not read David Allen’s book on the subject, but simply the description of using the software (supplemented by a Wikipedia article) has given me the basic gist of the approach.

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A variety of factors combined to cause my wife and I to decide to purchase a new computer about a month ago. After much deliberation, we decided to get a Mac. After about two seconds in our local Apple Store, I was convinced of getting a 24-inch iMac.As a web developer/freelance programmer/dabbler, the iMac seems amazingly ideal. We decided to wait until Leopard’s release date was announced, and ordered it earlier this week, so we should be receiving the new computer around Friday or so.
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UPDATE [2009-04-01]: As you are possibly aware, Semisecure Login has not functioned with a stock WordPress install since before version 2.5. Moggy has created a new plugin (called Semisecure Login Reimagined) which is available for download here. You can check out his blog post about it for more information. This page is being kept merely for historical purposes (I’m a bit of a packrat).

The Semisecure Login plugin for WordPress increases the security of the login process by using client-side MD5 encryption on the password when a user logs in. JavaScript is required to enable encryption. When JavaScript is not available, the password is transmitted in plaintext (as normal), but authentication still completes in this case.

It is most useful for situations where SSL is not available, but the administrator wishes to have some additional security measures in place without sacrificing convenience.

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And then Sony just had to go and make a hypocrite out of me.

I am a frequent reader of Digg (among other news sites). However, for the past few days the above Sony ad has been showing. It’s a Flash ad, meant to wow me the user with Sony’s brilliance. After the initial play-through, the ad pretty much stays at the above static image, with little flowery things following your mouse around if you mouseover it. Okay, that doesn’t really sound like such a bad ad. Only the thing was programmed to consume 100% of my CPU in the “finished” state!
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