Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Cool Camp
May 24, 2006

I took the kids and a kite to the East Ward School field yesterday evening. We have a small parafoil kite that’s very easy to handle. Just a little wind and even the little one was holding the reel himself. There was enough wind to get the kite aloft, but not quite enough to keep it very high in the air. Abby and Riley chased the dangling tail around the lot, and we all had a nice outing.

On the way back, I was thinking about camp. When I was younger, I went camping many times with my dad, with Scouts, and once on the Appalacian Trail from Pennsylvania, through West Virginia, Maryland and Virginia to Harper’s Ferry.

Maybe it’s just my perception of things, and I could be completely wrong on this account, but I don’t remember any of the “cool kids” from school doing anything like this. What did those kids do instead of camp?

ScummVM DS
May 22, 2006

Check out this page for info on how to run a ScummVM on your Nintendo DS. Day of the Tentacle and Zak McKracken, here I come! (Sadly, no support for Full Throttle, which requires too much memory.)

Teaching IDE
May 22, 2006

A recent thread on Slashdot asks, “Should students be taught with or without an IDE?” In programming, an Integrated Development Environment is basically a souped-up editor for writing code. The author of the question wonders whether students who are learning to program will benefit more from learning with or without the extra features that the IDE provides. I agree with most of the opinoins offered in the comments of the post, but obviously I have my own take on it.

My initial reaction is that teaching a language using an IDE is a bad idea, but I have certain reservations that I need to think out. Primarily, using an IDE is a bad idea since it doesn’t insist that students type out important syntax structures that are necessary for learning the language. If the IDE closes every function call with the proper parenthesis, and automatically inserts semicolons wherever they are required, students might not learn the necessary elements of the language to be able to do without the IDE. Perhaps this concept is not as important in C++ as it is in HTML.

May Philly WordPress Blogger Meetup
May 21, 2006

That Saturday we had our most recent WordPress meetup - the best turnout ever! This week there were a few new attendees along with some familiar faces.

David from TalkJunkie.com stopped by. His site is all about talk radio, specifically show schedules, which is even of personal interest to me. We talked a bit about how he can promote his site, which mostly focused on social networks like Digg and del.icio.us rather than trying to get listed in search engines, which would naturally evolve from that.