fun » Always Where

OSCON is good

I’ll have to write a longer post later, but I thought I’d just mention that OSCON is a great conference. Our presentation went well, and we’ve had a lot of great conversations with people about all kinds of things in the open source world.

More later… for now, it’s time to head out the door.

(Related, our parallel programming environment for the Arduino is now available on Ubuntu, Windows, and Mac. Hooray for packaging! And, I need someone to help me work through how to do proper source packages for some of the complexities I’m facing on the Fedora/Ubuntu side. Packaging compilers is not a lot of fun…)

boardbook hospital

Last night we had an episode of “Boardbook Hospital.” Honestly, I couldn’t come up with anything funny to say while working on a number of Matthew’s books. (I came up with a number of things that bombed, but really, book-repair is pretty spineless!)

Photo 56.jpg

We did have fun remembering the Muppet Show, though.

open your world

I’m a bit behind on a number of posts (as well as a few things in the Real World). I still need to post a few more pictures from the westward travel, for example. I came back and have been moving fast ever since getting students bootstrapped on summer research. I’ll have to point to their work in another post—I’m very excited about all of the projects they’re working on.

In the meantime, I can relate a bizarre experience I had while on my travels. While headed east, I was asked if I could give a talk as part of the opensource.com Open Your World forum. “That’s cool,” I thought, but I wasn’t about to cancel my travel. As it turns out, it was a webinar, and that meant I could “phone in” my talk.

Because I was traveling, I didn’t have time to give a presentation in my typical highly visual style. Instead, I had one content slide (an outline), which (given the travel) was about all I could put together. On the day of the talk series, I got up early (I was on mountain time), dialed in, and gave my talk. Personally, I thought it was a hoot, and was proud to have been included in the webinar series. Many thanks to John, Max, and the others at Red Hat who made it possible.

An overview post is up at opensource.com, and you can grab the audio from the series here. There were a number of great speakers, and I’m working on listening to the ones I missed.

allegheny students and open source

This semester, we’ve introduced 40 students to the Fedora project . By “introduced,” I mean they have been introduced as contributors.

I want to point out that for me as a member of the faculty this is 1. hard, 2. a massive leap of faith, and 3. very, very exciting.

And, it is all of those things for our students as well. They’re blogging over at act.ivism.org, and I’ve written an introductory piece about their project on opensource.com. If you want to check out what they’re writing (and leave them some encouraging notes on their blogs), that would be awesome.

Remember: these are first-year students in a Freshman Seminar who have not declared their course of study. Despite that, they’re diving into IRC, wikis, blogs, mailing lists, and sprints as they rapidly come up to speed on contributing to the Fedora project. I don’t think they have any idea just how big a jump this is for some people. And because they don’t know it’s a big jump, they’re just jumping.

Give em’ some props. (Or, leave the props here, and I’ll pass them on.)

OK Go

A colleague pointed me at this video by OK Go. I watched it through all the way, and have to admit: this is some amazing Rube Goldbergness.

Awesomeness.

act.ivism.org

I admit it, I picked up a funny domain name.

Allegheny College has a Freshman Seminar series where students engage in writing and speaking exercises that explore a subject in the context of the liberal arts. Darren Miller (Art faculty) and I linked our seminars (mine is titled Technology and Activism, his is Art and Activism) so that we would come together as a large group on a regular basis, while breaking apart into smaller sections for discussion and debate on related but different themes.

The role of openness plays a critical role in my course. Every text I required was Creative Commons licensed, and we will be talking about the Commons (as well as notions of openness in software) throughout the course. This is, in part, because contributing work to the Commons is a kind of activism. Further, we wanted to introduce our students to the tools that open communities use to communicate and enact change in the world. The first tool we introduced them to was the weblog.

I was surprised at how few students were familiar with weblogs. Clearly, an assumption on my part that all of my students today have at least five blogs and seventeen Twitter accounts. Who knew? So, there are now 40 new bloggers in the world. (They also learned what an RSS reader is.)

To do this, though, we didn’t use private blogs in Sakai. Instead, I set up a WordPress-mu instance, and created accounts for them. The best part?

http://act.ivism.org/

OK, so it’s cheeze. But it’s some damn good cheeze.

I have aggregated all of their blogs at

http://act.ivism.org/planet.xml

which is managed through the magic of rawdog.

I’ll write more later, but I’m leave with the teaser that I’m very excited about our tie-in that we managed with Mel Chua, one of my POSSE wranglers last summer, now member of the RH Community Architecture team. She’ll be visiting later this term, and we’re going to do some Great Awesome with the students. At least, that’s our intent. Forty students will be introduced to the goodness of Fedora, but not in the way that you’d expect…

as seen on xkcd

Natural Parenting

Yeah, that’s roughly how it works.

To be clear, #2 is not on the way. That is not what I’m saying.

But frames one, two, and three roughly capture our parenting experience so far.

it's alive!

Omer passed on this picture:

That is a concurrency.cc Arduino-compatible board fired up and ready to go. As you can see, the vias aren’t really lined up that well, which may account for some intermittent USB-to-serial weirdness that he is chasing down at the moment.

Awesome job, Omer! If all goes well, I think we’ll have around 40 to 50 students at Allegheny building their own computers next semester in courses I’m teaching or co-teaching, another handful at Kent, and who knows… perhaps I’ll find another place to bring these into my students’ experience next term.

I remain hopeful that our final boards will be purple, and that the ability to expressly direct parallel code for an affordable embedded platform like the Arduino will be of use to many. One step at a time, though: we need to get revisions done on our existing book chapters, write the next five we have outlined, get Windows and Linux distributions done… it seems like a lot, but we’ll get there.

I’ll have to write a longer reflection at some point, but the long and short is that I’m very excited to see our project coming together on multiple fronts for distribution: robust software, source-to-binary builds, hardware that showcases our tools, and a text that provides structure and guidance for non-programmers to get into hardware exploration one small step at a time. When you start a project like this, you want all of these things from the start… but sometimes, it takes lots of small steps, side explorations, and unsure starts to get you to where you want to go.

concurrency.cc boards are in

For years, my colleagues and I have been working on lightweight runtimes for parallel languages. To put our work in context, we’ve often targeted small robotics platforms like the LEGO Mindstorms for demonstrating the power of a parallel-safe language for real-time systems. This summer, we realized that the Arduino was a marvelous, open-source platform with an energetic community of developers and users, so we ported our language and tools to the Atmega328.

We have a Mac environment done, are working on Windows, and will have a Linux release by January. This, however, is quite exciting:

Omer (Vimeo, Twitter), a PhD student at the University of Kent and our resident hardware guru, did a modified Arduino design that includes more LEDs (along with a few other nice changes, like a mini-USB connector and a lower-profile power jack that will easily work with LiPoly batteries). The extra LEDs are important, because we wanted a board that made it easy to demonstrate the power of a parallel runtime right from the start without any additional/external components.

I’m especially excited about being able to buy these in bulk and sell them to students at cost for use in classes. Next semester, students in Programming Languages as well as my second-semester first-year seminar titled “Technology and Activism” will build and program their own computers. It will be awesome.

We currently have placeholder material up at concurrency.cc, but soon we’ll have binaries of all of the tools and documentation up that let you start writing parallel programs for your Arduino!

not for general consumption…

For some time, friends and I have been making a list of military pun names. Some of them are assigned to people already; some of them are not. Recently, we allowed royalty… we’ll see how that goes, though.

Taken

Major Disaster

General Knowledge

Colonel Panic

Private Parts

General Principle

Corporal Punishment

Seaman Stains

Free

General Consumption

Major Contribution

Major Corrections (or Major Revisions)

General Direction

General Discussion

Major Distraction

General Encouragement

General Enough

General Failure (as witnessed on a coffee machine)

General Fatigue

Major Growth

Dame High

General Ize (contributed by humph)

Colonel Package

General Practice

General Plan

General Protection Fault

General Readability

General Vicinity

Update 20090724

Major Highway

Update 20090726

General Issue