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Today’s question is what language to use to teach programming to a bright young child? I’ve seen the question before with answers ranging from Java to VB to Squeak.

Slashdot has this MIT Media Lab Making Programming Fun For Kids. Not surprising that there are some strong opinions in the thread.

Looks like Scratch is based on Squeak which in turn is based on Smalltalk. Smalltalk sound about the right speed! I’ll have to look at both and see what I think.

Scratch is perfect for learning to program. I very much like the structuring of control, motion, sense, variable. The visual iconography of control structures wrapping statements is ingenious.

In a few hours we had a pong style game going. It is beautiful. Of course I can also see where some of the limits will occur. I don’t see any programmatic method of sprite creation or destruction.

I’d like to mount my Linux web directories on my Mac. SMB would seem appropriate.I think I have enabled SMB on linux, but I can not seem to get the finder to connect.smb://yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy which is not a valid address gets me nowhere.smb://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is valid and I can not connect because name or password is incorrect.smb://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/html where html is the share name also fails.SMBClient may be useful for debugging.Ok, it seems to be a firewall/selinux issue. When I turn those off I can connect.System Settings:Security Level:

1. Firewall Options: Disable
2. Enabled, Enforcing Current

Something broke. Ok, I needed smb://192.168.1.22/html in the dialog.

One of the most difficult data recovery tasks I’ve done in my career.

 Well that went pretty well. A good crowd of 30 of our engineers and a couple folks from management checking in.

The end result is here:

OpenMP Powerpoint Presentation

Reminder to self - prepare a 1 hour presentation on OpenMP. Compare OpenMP to other solutions.

Notes:
(from Intel Thread Building Blocks Book) “For instance, Intel’s Math Kernel Library
(MKL) and Integrated Performance Primitives (IPP) library are implemented
internally using OpenMP. You can freely link a program using Threading Building
Blocks with the Intel MKL or Intel IPP library.?

I am working on a site for Friends of Modern Architecture in Lincoln, which is expected to be low traffic but informational to those who need it. Who to have host it? This was a question I asked a few years ago for this very site. It has to be inexpensive, and I prefer Linux. Godaddy has some pretty nice Linux options at less than $8 per month.

Can I get secure FTP on my godaddy server? Hmmm, not that I can see.