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Teaching HTML with Hypertext Fiction

Continuing a project I worked on during Mozilla Service Week, I’ve been working on my curriculum for a workshop I will be teaching in Nov for the first time. The class is called Where the Wild Things Could Be… and will be through the 826 Seattle writing workshop. It will have about 8 students that are 11-14 years old. The goal is to teach HTML. Hypertext Fiction, like the Choose Your Own Adventure book series, is a narrative with multiple story paths and endings. The web is a natural medium for this type of story. I’m hoping that teaching kids how to write hypertext fiction is a natural way to teach them how to create HTML. A major impediment to learning the basics of HTML is all the web publishing cruft:

Text editors Files FTP Hostnames and Hosting

All of this crap is an accident of history and seems like a big stumbling block, before you get to the juicy stuff of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The approach I’m taking is to create a web application that paves over these four problems. The student will have create a short page name and then get an edit box. This gives them a body tag and let’s them create from there. Saving the page publishes it. Linking involves using the “short page name” of another page in your HTML code. This workshop is only 2 hours, so I will focus on teaching hypertext fiction basics and the following HTML tags: A, P, UL, and LI. Students will use Sticky Notes and a whiteboard to coordinate the story and page flow. I’ve looked around a little for a web application, but nothing is perfect, so I’ll probably write my own. R.Y.O.H is a clever new project, but doesn’t allow HTML coding and it’s quite a bit different than my wireframes. Wordpress is too distracting. Wikimedia is close but doesn’t allow HTML and I don’t want to just teach wiki markup. Do you know of a good hypertext fiction web tool? I’m creating the curriculum online. I’d love feedback. I’ll post and link to more materials as I create them. Steal my work. Improve it.

Gnuplot In Action hits the streets

Congratulations to my friend Philipp Janert on the release of his book Gnuplot In Action!

If you’ve ever wanted to use gnuplot, but were intimidated by the manpage…. Now’s you chance. gnuplot is super handy for wading through raw data and trying to find trends. There are lots of whiz bang JavaScript libraries like flot or Timeplot, but using them assumes you know what the heck your plotting. Typically you’ll have some data files and then you can use gnuplot interactively to visualize a data set and figure out what kind of graph would be the most appropriate way to present your data to others. gnuplot runs on all platform and can output to many different formats. It’s a very handy tool especially when used on a unix based OS where you can grep, cut, and sed your way to variation of data files very quickly and replot the new information.

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Getting too old for Specific Programming Languages

I think I am officially get old and grumpy. Yikes! A decade ago people told me that programmers only last a decade. Doh! In the last month, I’ve started, for the first time, being super annoyed with people who have an undying affinity for a specific PL or programming language community. I’ll pick on two languages, both of which I’ve used, enjoyed, and recommended:

Ruby Python

Asshole Ruby The recent SmutOnRails is just a highlight of a sad part of the Rails/Ruby community. I’ve built rails apps and recommended it for appropriate uses, but it’s despite the DHH air about it. I’ve really enjoyed Ruby and until 2009 wasn’t annoyed by the community. Okay, to balance the scale… Priggish Python I had lunch recently with a friend. He is starting a new project in Python… in spite of it’s community. Why? Because its the right tool for that specific project. We had a great lunch riffing on anti-Python memes and cataloging their faults. We also discussed the reasons why it the right tool for the job. This didn’t used to happen to me. I’ve never been so easily annoyed with communities before, but age has started to expose my nerves and make me less forgiving of the cavalier and "better than you" attitudes. Thoughtful individuals like _why who happen to use Ruby are way more interesting than the cult of Ruby or Pythonistas. I’ve been saying for years that when I find myself working within the Foo community, that I am not a "Foo programmer". I’m just a programmer. Often, this freaks people out, or they think I’m being a sad guy. No. Let’s have fun and create amazing things for everybody; leave the Fratboy assimilation attitude at the door. Quick Litmus test… if you constantly mention your favorite PL as a noun or a verb in daily conversation, then you’ve become a tool, by forgetting that your language is just a tool.

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Did Cheney order assassinations or is Seymour Hersh guilty of slander?

So this guy Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist for the New York Times, publicly dropped the A-bomb recently. He has publicly made an astounding accusation that former Vice President Dick Cheney ordered assassinations, in foreign countries, during his time in office. That in practice he had at his disposal “an executive assassination ring”. We’ve got a lot of problems to fix in this country… but among the many high priorities, none are higher than ensuring that proper government checks and balances are in place to detect and deal with unlawful activities of this magnitude. In the 21st century, this backwater imperialism cannot be tolerated. We must demand an investigation into such a serious accusation. If it’s false, it will clear Cheney’s name. Okay not really, but Hersh will be guilty of slander and will go to jail or whatever. If it is true, then we will show that no administration is above the law. I don’t doubt that previous presidents Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan… have had some shady dealings in the past, but if someone of Hersh’s stature had made this accusation of them, there would have been a uproar and an investigation. With Bush/Cheney it’s Meh. This is not okay. Our democracy shouldn’t be an occult out of control beast. Off and on throughout the short but colorful history of the US, we’ve scored high and low in this regard, but now that we understand our dependency on the rest of the planet, we must conduct business in the open in a transparent way. Let’s ensure our future freedom by cleaning up our recent, terrifying past. http://www.minnpost.com/ericblackblog/2009/03/11/7310/investigative_reporter_seymour_hersh_describes_executive_assassination_ring http://www.wcpn.org/index.php/WCPN/news/25389/

How do I update a “non auto-updating” subscription for Ubiquity? I have been subscribing with auto-updating for most Ubiquity commands, but i wrote a really simple command copy-page-title-gist that I didn’t see updating very often, so I didn’t set it to auto-update. Later I added some description, but I couldn’t figure out how refresh the command. I expected it to be at about:ubiquity > Your Commands and figured the feature wasn’t implemented yet. I figured wrong! On the about:ubiquity page if you scroll way down there is Subscribed Feeds. From here you can see updates in green.

A Foodlog of 2008 meals

Every year we make up funny new years resolutions. Last year, I was like “Take a picture of every meal in 2008″. Well I started taking them and Patty and I actually made it through the whole year with a snapshot of every meal!

The original size let’s you see all the fun, but is quite large. This image is a photographic mosaic made up of 1,638 photos. It was created with a program MozoDojo with the rule that every photo was used atleast once. You can see the original foodlog and some other mosaics I made in the process. I think this would be a good source for making the worlds most annoying jigsaw puzzle. We’re still taking pics of meals this year, but I feel like I can be less militant about it.

Time to donate to the global mind

Dropped some cash on what has become my memory bank.

If your not tapped out from supporting Obama and trying to stop Prop 8, flow some to the people’s pedia.

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Switching blogging software

I am in the process of switching from blogger to Wordpress. Let me know if you see any issues!

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Switching blogging software

I am in the process of switching from blogger to Wordpress. Let me know if you see any issues!

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