Hackety Hack: Silverlight?

Hey, remember when I was talking about how the Xbox 360 is almost, just about, a killer platform for teaching coding to kids? Remember how I thought it was possibly just around the corner? There are interesting new twists in this saga this week...

Following the coat-tails of Silverlight 1.0 Beta, Microsoft has just released the first public alpha version of Silverlight 1.1. Crazy, huh? The big difference is the one I had been expecting for some time: Silverlight 1.1 includes a cross-platform Compact Framework-like mini-CLR. Here's the kicker of a huge surprise twist: Silverlight 1.1 also includes the first official alpha release of the Dynamic Language Runtime. IronPython (2.0), IronRuby, and Managed JScript are all going to be officially supported Silverlight languages.

First of all, I am curious as to how far away, then, DLR for the 360 is...

Second, with this announcement I think Silverlight becomes a potential killer platform for teaching coding skills with dynamic languages in the Hackety Hack vein: easily deployable via the web (small cross-platform toolkit [1]), powerful "real" languages, good young people-friendly sandboxing...

XAML isn't a bad alternative to XHTML, either.

I, Bilge Rat

State information, like waves in the ocean, tumbled and fell across the screen. Each mystical swell, full of arcane symbols, was more torpid than the last. The overall screen carried a weight of deep weather.

Just like when I had first started working for McRaven’s Crew, I was manning the bilge pumps. It was something of a bitch position within the group. Someone had to do it, but no one ever really felt like volunteering for it. I was doing it that day because I was the only one skilled in it enough to keep things from going all cross-eyed. It was a big day, and a big job, and each of us was pulling as much weight as we could.

Bilge pumping is, like other things piratical within these walls, a metaphor for a modern necessity of any large network job. The internet’s waters over the years have become incredibly choppy with junk and malicious traffic. For most people, their firewalls and other automatons are often more than adequate. But for those of us who need to work at lower levels, doing larger tasks, and with more powerful tools, it becomes necessary to have some sort of traffic control system and a real person with a strong mind in charge of that system. In the Captain’s Ship, this important, but dirty, job fell upon the day’s Bilge Rat, usually some new recruit. It’s hard to describe bilge pumping to someone who’s never done it before. It’s also a hard thing to learn, but it provides some great insight into the skills that the Captain calls The High Art. If a kid can’t handle the bilge, he isn’t fit to even clean our chum bucket.

When you are bilge pumping, you ...

Phrase of the Moment: My Marketing Efforts Will Dominate Your Face

From the Forums at GideonTech [1]:

Get the fuck off my back, my marketing efforts will dominate your face.

Hell of a sales pitch, huh? I think it might work in a humorous, ironic/sarcastic bent, but this is from the fingers of a scammer, Brad Burns, Zio Systems...

Hackety Hack: Do Code Back

Someone pointed me to my old acquaintance whytheluckystiff's Hackety Hack project. It's a colorful world of cute cartoon characters attempting to teach programming languages (Ruby in particular) to young-ish kids, aka absolutely total n00bs. In a way it's Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby: For Kids! The FREE As In Speech Interactive Edition, and it's built as an easy learning sandbox to help fight back against the issues brought up by (among others) David Brin in Why Johnny Can't Code. It provides fun tutorials wrapped around Ruby interactive sessions in an easy-to-download bundle that comes with some handy convenience libraries for doing "easy things easily" [1] such as very simple websites or playing MP3s or downloading random things from any of the many internets.

Ever since Why Johnny Can't Code I've felt like doing something like this for Python. whytheluckystiff is using Ruby here, because it is what he knows best right now, but has offered to help distribute bundles for other languages. I'm extremely tempted to help out with a Python bundle of Hackety Hack...

The Hackety Hack Manifesto brings me back to a few things I've been thinking about. XNA is a great step in the direction of making Xbox coding much more accessible to everyone. It doesn't work as great for playing around/fudging with things. An Xbox-version of Hackety Hack is just about possible with XNA with just a few pieces in place... The ugly one is that there is no HTML renderer yet available on the Xbox. Even if there was one, there might not be XNA-connected hooks into it. On the other hand, depending on how you want to do things, you could simplify the HTML to some further bare-bones XML description and build ...

Words in the Sky

The words were painted on the sky; a dream implanted in wafts of dark mingled light. To read them was to strain; to read them was to train your eyes from horizon to horizon until the jumbles of curves resolved themselves into words like fireworks for your brain. It took a mad man to let loose these hounds of war, but in an instant, an indomitable instance of thought, each person with access to the sky that day took them in and housed them for a while.

The mad man realized, just as I do now, that information will go where it can. Controlling information is like controlling thoughts, electricity, or weather; it can be done, but it requires dams, cages, and the combined work of many men.

I first met the mad man one evening during a lecture. The lecture wasn’t his, and the lecturer was quite steamed when the mad man took the floor from him, but it became his. Just as he would later fill the sky, his voice and mannerisms filled the floor. He had a glass of bourbon and coke in his hand, which alone was daring in this university setting, and with each mighty blast, each wall filling word, he would gesture and move. The patterns of his movements were sinuous and stuttered, graceful and yet hiccupped. The bourbon was a storm in its own turmoil, as each movement added to the complexity of the torpid swells inside.

Of all in attendance, I think that I alone was transfixed. Although, the others in the audience may as well have been deaf, or gone, because it felt like the only people in that auditorium that day were me and him, and he was talking directly to me. He had so much energy and charisma ...

Don't Grow Old

Don't Grow Old. It's a joke. Only not really. My maternal grandmother is a master of the deadpan delivery of sarcastic humor. She can make just about any funny sentence sound completely serious. She also seems to manage the reverse, something that I admire and respect and hope some day to master, she can make any completely serious statement sound funny. Don't Grow Old. It's a phrase stuck in my head, that she would use a standard part of so many stories. I've tried and continually failed to reproduce it, but she can say it with such humor that you can find it funny for a time. You can believe that mortality is a choice and that the pain and suffering and heart-ache caused by it can all just be laughed at. It's fun. Don't Grow Old.

My maternal grandmother broke her leg (including an ugly hairline fracture), but she's been doing well and my mother has been taking care of her and my grandfather just about every day for the last two weeks since the accident happened.

My paternal grandfather, around the same time, wound up in the Hospital for chest pains. He's had a few heart attacks and subsequent bypasses so everything about that was complicated. He returned home for Easter. He returned to hospital again for the same problem. In letting him off the blood thinners in an effort to try catherization and recheck his system to readjust his medications... today he suffered a massive hemmorage stroke. They are not expecting him to make it through the night.

My birthday was last week. My brother's birthday is in a few hours. I just had an awful week to cap a bad semester of combined stress+"senior fever ...

Nine Inch Nails: Year Zero

Rather cool, Nine Inch Nails' latest album is deeply entwined in a currently moving ARG... (By 42, no less.)

Deal or No Deal: The Experiment Results Paper

Be kind, this file is huge, please mirror it if you link it, digg it, slashdot it, whatever. (Gentle reminder, licensed Creative Commons by-nc-sa.)

Acceptable Compromise or Unacceptable Compromise: Examination of the role of the banker within the game show “Deal or No Deal” as an experiment for IE 563, Design of Experiments

Behold: The Sea of Chaos...

From Gaping Void [1]:

Such an inescapably fitting metaphor for so many things in life the image just spoke to me. For those that don't know, this week is the Pre-Finals Shit Storm of Chaos (4 classes, 4 days, 4 tests)... I'm looking forward to getting some fun in this weekend [2].

Films of the Moment: Grindhouse, Stranger than Fiction

A quick couple of reviews:

Grindhouse

Excellent. Quality films pretending to be bad films and ending up just quality. The "trailers" were all awesome. Rodriguez's film was spicier and funnier with a "deeper" plot (albeit easy to predict zombie film). Tarantino's Death Proof was... classic Tarantino. Death Proof felt a lot like a lost relative of Reservoir Dogs (excellent dialog with some great action thrown in the middle) with a little bit of Pulp Fiction thrown in (mostly as references). Tarantino's was better art and Rodriguez's was better pop-cinema. Ultimately hard to imagine a punchier peanut-butter-and-chocolate action film pairing. Some won't appreciate Death Proof as much as Planet Terror, but I have to say they end up being just about equal and opposite.

Stranger than Fiction

Excellent. The literary devices as literary device is a weird genre that actually speaks to me (yes, I own a copy of Adaptation), and its used quite well here. Will Ferrell's performance seems the most sincere, earnest, and unforced of any performance of his. Dustin Hoffman's character is hilarious and made me briefly consider switching to an English degree if I could take classes with his character. Maggie Gyllenhaal's performance was incredibly endearing. I'll save my commentary on what I thought of the plot for some other time, perhaps...

Deal or No Deal: Truly a Lottery

In case anyone cares: I just finished a 25-page paper in which I showed statistically that the banker has an impact on the results of a game of Deal or No Deal, but the contestants do not. I'll post a PDF or XPS of the paper tomorrow, perhaps. I primarily wasn't testing contestants, so it is possible that my random sampling of contestants was biased and there exists contestants for which there is a statistically significant difference and all of my participants just happened to be very equally matched. I'm a little doubtful, though.

Word 2007 is my bishie

Apologies for not finding a more suitable word than bishie. I blame the lateness of the hour. Also, I assure you that my love for Word 2007 is purely platonic and that the use of the word bishie serves here purely as hyperbole.

Anyway, Word 2007 just makes writing long-winded papers feel so much more exciting than it should be. I honestly have no idea why I've continued to work on this paper until 4 in the morning when I can certainly put it off until tomorrow or early next week. I'm hoping it isn't some new anti-procrastination feature I've never previously noticed on the product specs.

I've never felt more productive in Word than I do with the Ribbon. I've told many people (including the few I've met on the actual product teams) how much I love the Ribbon, but it just seems to continue to bear repeating.

This paper's tab of choice has been the References tab tonight. Adding citations and cross-references to headings, figures and tables are now way easier than writing them myself and I'm reaping all the benefits of them: auto-generated tables and easy refactoring (moving things around, renaming or recaptioning things). I'm doing the large majority of it entirely from the keyboard. The big sequence is Alt,SRF (References > Cross-Reference) and some very easy maneuvering through the resulting diagram. Second to that is possibly Alt,SCS (References > Citation > New Source).

I've gone ahead and included some nice formulas. I have to give huge kudos for the kinder, gentler Equation Editor. I'm one of the few people that has known about the Equation Editor for many versions now, and it's always seemed clunky. The new Ribbonified Equation Editor is gorgeous and extremely ...