Paul Anderson's blog

A really neat talk by Andy Finnell at NSConference on using OpenCL to do realtime simulation of watercolour painting. Based on this paper.

My 12 year old nephew asked me …

“I was wondering if you knew any beginners computer scripting books.  I know absolutely nothing about scripting, I don’t have any programs for it or any idea how computer language  works or what to type in to make it do something.”

So, I asked people here in the School of Informatics. Thanks to everyone who replied. I received some surprisingly consistent responses:

Scratch – http://scratch.mit.edu/

This seems to be the “lightweight” favourite (9 votes). Graphical output & graphical composition of the source statements – so quick returns. Seems like a good starting point which might get someone interested in the idea of programming quickly without putting them off:

It’s point and click to stick blocks together, rather than edit-compile-run; though concurrent and reactive which makes things interesting too.

• Here’s the “getting started” – http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Support/Get_Started
• Turtle Art has a similar visual approach http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art

Python – http://docs.python.org/tut/tut.html

Seems to be the “language” favourite (10 votes):

“Snake Wrangling for Kids” is a printable electronic book, for children 8 years and older, who would like to learn computer programming. It covers the very basics of programming, and uses the Python 3 programming language to teach the concepts.” http://www.briggs.net.nz/log/writing/snake-wrangling-for-kids/

• The Windows version of the book is here: http://swfk.googlecode.com/files/swfk-win-0.7.7.zip
• This web page has some good pointers to interesting resources, with references for starting Python in particular: http://baheyeldin.com/technology/teaching-kids-programming.html

Some other quoted links:

• Invent your own computer games with Python – http://inventwithpython.com/
• Learning with Python – http://openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english2e/
• An Informal Introduction to Python – http://docs.python.org/tutorial/introduction.html
• IntroductoryBooks – http://wiki.python.org/moin/IntroductoryBooks

Mindstorms - http://mindstorms.lego.com/

An obvious choice which gives nice visible results if you buy the hardware (4 votes).

Probably for a younger age group – a programmable car with a pen:  http://www.tts-group.co.uk/Pro-Bot

Processing – http://processing.org/ (http://processing.org/learning/)

An interesting choice (2 votes):

“It’s a wrapper around Java that’s used by artists among others, so the introductory materials start simple.  Probably won’t teach good

practice, but it does seem to have some of the feel about it that I got when I was a kid learning BASIC on Sinclair and Acorn computers (i.e. you can be drawing stuff on the screen in a few minutes)”

“It’s canned Java — much easier than real Java but will take you there eventually if that’s where you want to go.  And you can do really quite neat things with very little effort”

Other Languages

A selection of other languages got one or two votes each …

• Perl (3 votes)
• Basic (2 votes)
• Javascript (2 votes)
• Tcl/Tk (1 vote)
• Logo (1 vote)
• C# (1 vote)

Notes from LISA Workshop on Virtual Infrastructures & Cloud Computing: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/group/lssconf/2009.html

CloudCamp is an unconference where attendees can exchange ideas, knowledge and information in a creative and supporting environment, advancing the current state of cloud computing and related technologies.

The annual LCFG Users Day will be held on Friday 20th November in room G.07 in the School of Informatics Forum. All users of LCFG and anyone interested in using LCFG are encouraged to attend. This is your chance to hear what has been happening, ask for help on anything tricky and generally get involved in the LCFG community.

We are looking for project proposals and comments on the new IDEA Lab. The “Informatics Development Experimentation & Applications Lab “is developing a new model for project development and proposal, based on open community appraisal and discussion. The initial funding is targeted at projects that will benefit Informatics research – either by enabling further research or technology transfer.

Kyrre Begnum & I are running a workshop on Virtual Infrastructures again this year at LISA. We are hoping to repeat last year’s success, with an emphasis this time on infrastructures for Cloud Computing.

The report on last year’s workshop is here.

Details of this year’s workshop are here (scroll down).

I’m looking for a Cocoa programmer for about 5 months to work on an interesting backup project. Mail me if you are interested or apply here.

Baltimore November 1–6, 2009

http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa09/

November 7-8, 2009, Baltimore MD

Started in 2007, ACM CHIMIT Symposium is the leading forum for discussing topics on IT management with a focus on people, business, and technology.  At CHIMIT, researchers and practitioners share issues, solutions, and research drawing upon fields such as human-computer interaction, human factors, computer systems, and management and service sciences to address cognitive, social, and technical issues in managing the increasing complexity of modern Information Technology (IT) systems.