Daniel Von Fange

Learning programing with fairy tales..

Last week, my little sister asked me to show her how to program - she wanted to write her own random fairy tale generators. She learned quickly, and had the skills she wanted in about an hour.

I picked JavaScript as a good beginner language (it just beat Ruby - since with Javascript she could easily put her code on a web page and show others her work). We both opened up a shared document in SubEthaEdit, and activated web preview. As either of us typed, the final result of the JavaScipt program showed in the preview. It was a great way to teach, and to learn.

We ran though all kinds of things about variables, objects, and arrays. We used fairy tale variable names:

<script>

heroine = new Object()
heroine.name = "Cinderella"

prince = new Object()
prince.name = "Charming"
prince.sweetheart = heroine

document.write(prince.name + " looks at " + prince.sweetheart.name);
</script>

She has decide that camelCasing variable names is ugly, so she writes her variables LikeThis.

I did not show her functions, or control structures yet. When she wants to do something she can't do with her current knowledge, that will be the time to learn new things.

Restaurant Locator.

Sample application code for a Restaurant Locator done in Flex. (Flex has quite a lot of potential for use building web based enterprise application)

Subversion with flat files.

Looks like you can use Subversion with flat files.

Security hole.

Darn. OS X now has it's first Microsoft sized, blatant security hole. Best instructions keeping yourself safe are at Daring Fireball.

Now I've got to go "patch" my Mac friend's computers.

SubEthaEdit now with Regexs..

The ever cool SubEthaEdit now supports regexs for find/replace. This nice - I take advantage of regex powers in BBEdit.

R U Hiring.

Two thousand, three hundred graduates fill the area floor, while thousands of parents and friends fill the stands. Hand painted in white on one graduates black mortarboard - visible to the audience looking as he walked the stage - "R U HIRING"

Bandwidth disparity.

Sharing is important - we're all communication junkies. [But] We have an incredible bandwidth disparity (easy to take in, hard to give out); our devices have the reciprocal disparity (hard to take in, easy to give out) --Allen Kay, 1982

Wow.