I just ran across another educational tool—Scratch—for teaching programming to kids. I love the idea behind these simplified programming environments because they make getting started very easy, show you results instantly, and remove all the frustration of setting up a programming environment. If you want to introduce your kids to programming, you might start with one of these. They’re all free and they all work on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Scratch

Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

Alice

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web.

Processing

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions.

I couldn’t find a good introductory video for this one. But the documentation and tutorial pages are top notch.

This listing of Magento event hooks was generated automatically from the source code. Please let me know if you find any errors or omissions.

This listing of Magento event hooks was generated automatically from the source code. Please let me know if you find any errors or omissions.

Ars Technica writes:

As of April, fewer than 6 out of 10 people use Internet Explorer. The browser trends that we’ve noted over the past several months are continuing with no sign of alteration: IE continues to slip, Firefox and Opera are fairly static, Safari is very slowly moving forward, and Chrome is pushing ahead at breakneck speeds. If we take a closer look at IE, though, we see that version 8 of Microsoft’s browser is actually growing faster than Chrome, but it’s still not enough to counter the overall decaying of IE. –Internet Explorer best at losing, gaining market share

In that article, they point out that the browser share on their site is much different than the average. So I took a look at BigHugeLabs stats to see how it compares:

BigHugeLabs browser market share April vs May 2010

Tynt.com is trying to enhance the internet by breaking copy and paste. Their Javascript silently modifies whatever you copy from a webpage so that they can “leverage this behavior into more traffic, higher search rank and more.” Good grief.

Gruber does a good job of explaining why this is bad (“It’s a bunch of user-hostile SEO bullshit”). I’ll just add that the Javascript from these companies slows down your web browser and then uses your computer to break basic internet functionality (copy/paste and hyperlinks) so that you can be “leveraged.” I hate it when business types say leverage when what they really mean is exploit.

It reminds me a lot of what Snap.com and others like them were/are doing with hyperlinks.

Fortunately, it’s easy to get back control. Modify your hosts file (/etc/hosts on Mac/Linux; uh, someplace else on Windows) and include the following lines:

127.0.0.1 tcr.tynt.com
127.0.0.1 spa.snap.com
127.0.0.1 shots.snap.com

The first line kills Tynt and the next two kill Snap. Their Javascript won’t load, you’ll never even know it was there, and you can carry on using the internet and your computer the way it was intended to be used.

If you are using either of these services on your own blog or website… please stop. It’s obnoxious.

Running an Apache server on Debian? Suddenly find you can’t access any files in /javascript? As part of a maintenance upgrade, somehow the javascript-common package was selected for me. It quietly installs a symlink javascript-common.conf in /etc/apache2/conf.d that globally aliases all /javascript URLs to /usr/share/javascript. Why? Who knows. I’m sure whoever did it meant well. The fix is to either remove javascript-common or just delete the conf.d symlink and restart Apache.

I keep flipping between Chrome and Firefox. I’m currently back on Chrome (the speed!). One of the things I love about Firefox is the ability to create application shortcuts (using the Prism plugin). The cool thing about those shortcuts is that each one had it’s own user profile. I have multiple Google accounts and it was a pain to log out and log in to each one individually throughout the day. Having these applications with their own profiles solved that problem for me. Now I could stay in my primary account all day in my browser and use the application shortcuts to check stuff in my other accounts without having to login again.

Google Chrome has a similar feature but by default it uses your primary user profile. Here’s what you do to make application shortcuts use an alternate profile:

1. Create your application shortcut
2. Edit it and add –user-data-dir=custom_profile_directory to the launch command

Where custom_profile_directory is a path to where you want the profile saved. Now that application shortcut will have its own cookies, saved passwords, browsing history, the works. You can use this parameter with Chrome when its in browser mode too. Handy if you’re doing web development and you need to be logged into one app as two different people.

I needed a shell script that runs every 5 minutes but I only wanted it to do something when a status changes. In this case, I wanted it to log some information to the system log but I didn’t want it to fill up the log with redundant entries. Here’s the pattern I came up with.

My true condition was checking the exit code of a command (e.g. $? -eq 0) but it could be anything. The key is that a temporary file (LOCKFILE) is created for one status and is deleted for the other status. This allows the script to keep track of state between runs. This script only differentiates between two statuses but it wouldn’t be difficult to adapt this to track changes between multiple states (store the current state in LOCKFILE).

Note, the way this is written, the true action will always be executed once after the system is booted.

#!/bin/sh

LOCKFILE=/var/lock/mylockfile
TAG=mytag

if [ some condition is true ]
then
    echo Status 1
    if [ ! -e $LOCKFILE ]
    then
        logger -t $TAG "Message for status 1"
        touch $LOCKFILE
    fi
else
    echo Status 2
    if [ -e $LOCKFILE ]
    then
        logger -t $TAG "Message for status 2"
        rm $LOCKFILE
    fi
fi

Uploading media to WordPress using the built-in Flash uploader has been broken on Ubuntu for a long time (Karmic 9.10 + Flash 10.0 r42). The problem seems to be in Flash itself since I can upload fine to the same blog from a Windows machine. But I just installed the Flash Plugin 10.1 beta 2 and the problem is gone! Thanks, Adobe! I don’t know when the official release is. You can get the beta at labs.adobe.com.

When I first jumped into Android development, I went in with a mindset for developing desktop applications. That was a mistake. I think I would have been able to wrap my head around it quicker if I’d thought of it more like web application development. In particular, Activities have to account for a certain amount of statelessness. And users never close or stop an Activity—they just start doing something else. It starts to make sense a lot quicker if you think of Activity classes as web pages.