Code is Mandatory

A bit of johny come lately to this stuff. Not sure what a Technorati Profile is, but will find out.

Well the first week has gone. One one hour lecture, two three hour labs and some extra curricular sweat to get things in hand.

One learning objective is to expose students to 3D space using a computer. Two teaching tools which we are using and which I find quite amazing are UnrealEd, the game editor for Unreal 2004 Tournament, and screencasting.

Much has been written about UnrealEd. Briefly, it lets you create a three dimensional space (i.e. rooms with objects in them) and then by clicking a button, you start the UT2004 game where you can explore and interact with this space you have just created.

Now how do 144 students learn to use this tool? Why they use the Video Training Modules (VTMs) from 3dbuzz.com. To quote directly from the site,

So, what are Video Training Modules? A VTM is a series of video training lessons that focus on specific topics. VTMs usually have 8 to 12 lessons and range anywhere from two to eight hours in total running time. They are not like your “standard” training videos; they are both entertaining and educational. Our VTMs offer some of the highest quality training available anywhere in the world, and most amazingly – they are FREE!

Basically the VTM or screencast of the UnrealEd that I have been using is a close up video of a computer screen showing the Unreal Editor being put through its paces with an ongoing, informative, commentry by a couple of dudes who really know their stuff. The following is a snapshot of the lessons for Module One for UnrealEd.

The beauty of the whole thing is that you can be running through the tutorial at the same time as working in UnrealEd. If you don’t understand a point in the commentary, simply rewind to play it again. Or you can pause the action, try it yourself, and then when you are ready, resume with the lecture. Bored with a particular topic? Fast forward over it.

One little gotcha with this approach? If you have thirty six students in a lab all trying to listen to their VTM’s at the same time, make sure that they all have headphones!!

It has been a while. Most blogs go though this hiatus, don’t they? But let’s get this pony back on track.

Since I last blogged, Visual SlickEdit for Mac OS X has been released. Being a long time user and fan of VSlick, I nearly wet my pants. At long last a real editor was being shipped for Mac OS X. No I don’t regard BBEdit, cute as it is, as a programmer’s editor.

Alas, my joy was short lived when the Out of the Box experience was anything but Apple like (or for that matter BBEdit like). The app was a frigging X Windows app and required X to be installed. Okay, installed X and then got VSlick up and running.

Next the key bindings out of the box were a bit of a pain. You know the usual fight between the ctrl and ⌘ keys. And the mnemonics.

They tease you by showing the underlined menu items, but there is no way to invoke the corresponding items. You have to go through and reassign the keys that are assigned to the menu items. Only then can you use the ⌘ key and the underlined letter.

The final pain in the ass is that although the VisualSlickEdit icon displays in the ⌘-tab task list, you can’t activate the application using it. Instead you have to pick the X application icon.

Being a fan of VMWare, I just signed up for the VMWare referral program. By agreeing to the conditions, which include “Consent to Receive E-mail Advertisements”, I received a referral code (VMRC-MARBER746). Anyone who uses this referral code, gets a 5% discount off any purchases they make at the VMWare store.

To get the 5% discount, all you have to do is enter the discount code when you go to pay.

We all know how much I rave about Launchbar. Well, there is a Windows equivalent, called AppRocket. Well, a sort of equivalent. It has a similar idea of learning and remembering shortcuts that run commands. But, it currently has some shortcomings.

• It requires the Dot Net Framework to be installed.
• It is useful for launching apps. However it is not that great at finding running instances of existing apps. So for example, if you launch FireBird by pressing alt-space and then keying in Fire, Firebird will launch. That’s dandy. However, switch to another app and then try getting back to Firebird using the same method. You end up with another instance of Firebird. Bah!
  
  Generally speaking Windows Apps don’t seem to return you to the currently running app if you launch it again. Exceptions to this are Photoshop and VSlick (which has the +new command line switch if you want to launch a new instance).
• It does not show a list of running apps as you can do in Launchbar.

However, it is still only Public Beta Two. So it could still be early days.

What a neat idea Richard has!

Using Mac OS X and a .Mac account, it is possible to organise your bookmarks and synchronise them between different Macs running Safari. However, as far as I know, you need to do this with Safari and you need a .Mac account.

Creating a link blog like Richard has done, suits those who browse at different places with different operating systems and browsers. From any box with a browser that is connected to the net, you can now persist your links so they are accessible elsewhere.

Lastly, separating the content and link blogs, gives better focus to each. I can now subscribe to the content blog to get the juice without having to trawl through zillions of short one liner links.

Want to manage a subscriptions to cartoons? Then dwlt.net - tapestry is your site. It has a bunch of RSS feeds for cartoons.

All you need is a RSS news reader. I use NetNewsWire. Then just drag the RSS Feed URL from dwlt.net | tapestry and Bob’s your uncle.

I was surprised at how many of the geek.nz domain names were taken on day two. Most of the languages (perl, c, sql) and obvious adjectives/articles (big, bad, the, a) have gone. However, ruby.geek.nz was still there when I last checked.

I chose pragmatic, as in the spirit of the pragmatic progammers.

Finally got around to setting up a blog using movabletype on a Linux hosting service.

Decided on movabletype because it is relatively open, it is done in Perl (with which I am familiar) and it also sits on top of a database. The real clincher was the user interface and the way that it handles mulitple weblogs and authors.

For the hosting services, I settled on mtvhosting to do the hosting as they offer great facilities at a reasonable price.