HerdingChaos

Back in December Andrew expressed an interest in learning to program a computer. I did some googling and didn’t find much of anything related to kids programming. So I thought about what I used when I was his age. I used LOGO… so I loaded it up on his system and he played with it for a few days and then lost interest. I don’t blame him. When I was a kid the only other thing a computer could do was tell you that the command you typed was not recognized. He does like playing a rollercoaster builder program and a few other simulation type “games.” I always thought that someone should do something like the simulation games but with more of a focus on learning some programming concepts. That would make a great tool for teaching kids interested in learning computer programming.

Back in December my google-foo was just weak. The good folks at Carnegie Mellon University have this covered. Alice is a drag-n-drop object oriented based programming language with some built in tutoring. A friend at work pointed it out to me today and I played with it some tonight. I expect that Andrew is going to love it.

Andrew walked up to me yesterday and said, “Dad, can you teach me how to program a computer?” I was both excited and nervous at the same time. He is showing an interest in doing something that I do but at a very early age. I want to help him learn programming but more importantly I want/hope it is as fun for him as it is for me. That got me thinking about when I first started “programming” a computer and what exactly did I do?

It started back in the fourth grade. When our class had library time there were a few of us that got computer time. Myself and two others names were up for “computer time”. We shared an Apple II. It had LOGO.

I remembered telling that little triangle (that everyone else kept calling a turtle) to make squares, circles, and triangles.

A little Google-foo later and I had several good LOGO sites. He now has a LOGO interpretor loaded up and running on his computer. He and I worked on the basic commands for a while. He picked everything up pretty quick and it was not too long before he was thinking up cool names like loopy_circle for his procedures. Now he keeps running into the room and saying, “Dad, come look at what I did!”

We are down to the last 5G on the RAID server in the house. So I went to Fry’s today and picked up two spankin’ new SATA 160G drives and a new SATA controller.

I get home and diligently start work on the upgrade. We currently have two drives in there running RAID-1. This has worked quite well for us and I plan to just add these other drives and bring up another raid set also running RAID-1. I install the card and then realize there is no way I can get four drives into this case. What the was I thinking?

No big deal. I get another excuse to run to Fry’s and buy something. I need a new case. They have already closed for the night so I button up the case with the SATA controller installed, put the machine back in the server room, and flip it back on. I will add the drives when I have a proper case tomorrow.

Just to make sure it’s up I start pinging it from my mac. It doesn’t answer.

Kind of a PITA since I don’t have a monitor in the server room. I pick it up and move it in next to walter (my windows box). I steal walter’s keyboard mouse and monitor and boot up the server.

Hurm. Getting stuck at boot with a corrupted GRUB. Probably a problem with grub getting confused due to the new IDE controller.

I pop the IDE controller back out of the box. I will reinstall it and figure this all out when I get the new case.

Boot without the SATA controller. No dice. Still hung at GRUB.

Uhm… This is the RAID-1 server with everything important on it. Why will it not boot?

(more…)

Check out google code. Three really good projects open and licensed under BSD. Hopefully they will add more as time goes on.

I have a binary that works. I have the source code that built that binary. But I cannot build a binary from that source that will run without crashing. Oh and gdb is failing in strange ways on this box.

I love embedded programming.

I am working on a really cool project. And I just want to finish this prototype and get some performance numbers.  I am really confused as to how I got into this state. Hopefully I will resolve this quickly. 

Our online document control system at work recently added support for all the open office file and mime types. There was a discussion on an internal mailing list. I got this choice quote out of the thread.

“Personally, I keep a copy of open office around even though I read all MS Word docs in MS Word. It seems that a significant, but small, fraction of MS Word documents created by MS Word on MS Windows have defects in them such that MS Word crashes on load or fails to load. I have retrieved such docs from doc control. I find that if I open them in OpenOffice and then save them in MS Word format using OpenOffices SaveAs feature, MS Word on Windows can then open them without crashing. Hmm. Makes you wonder.”

So I guess maybe instead of “upgrading” to the latest version of office to get document compatibility, now you just need OO.

I love it when you have a massive sweeping architecture change that touches a ton of files and it passes your regression test the first time you run it. All while listening to “Shoehorn With Teeth” by TMBG.

http://store.pepper.com/pepper_pad/

Sometimes you just have one of those bugs… One of those bugs that takes you 4 days to figure out. Oh it didn’t actually take four days to think up a solution. First you piss away 2 and a half days trying to get the rest of the code base stable enough so that you can actually see your problem and not someone else’s bug. Then you have the day and a half of getting a test rig that will actually expose the problem in all the glory it deserves. And then you have the 3.45 minutes that it takes to fix it.

The good news is I squashed a bug that has been kicking my ass. I fixed the next bug on my list in the time it took to add one line and compile. I thought it would take me on through the night to find the second one.

You never know. That’s what I love about coding.