It's that time again. Advent of Code 2023. A new two part programming problem each day from now through December 25th. Since 2015 I've looked forward to the event, taken part, and posted at least a few write ups here on my blog. I figured this year would be the same. Of course, it does end up putting a crunch in my routine. Usually each morning I wake up, work out, usually a run unless the weather's bad, have my coffee, do the puzzle, read blogs and other content over breakfast and then I'm ready for the rest of my day.

Today we're finishing off our emoji project. This video covers two quick things. The first is how we can make the mode use either of our replacement methods - one that actually replaces the text with the emoji and the other that uses text properties to overlay the emoji without changing the text. This is done with a variable that we can set telling us which function to call. We used one named emoji-replace-by-insert.

While perusing Reddit this morning, waiting for the stuffing to bake, I came across this post. Apparently there was a todo at Berkeley involving a CS instructor. Specifically a grad student teaching their data structures course. You can link from the first post to the Berkeley subreddit post and can listen to the video if you want. It seems that this was the last day of class and the instructor decided to end class early, announce that he was going to share some of his own views so students should feel free to leave and then proceeded to give a very one sided diatribe on the Israel/Palestine situation and to say one sided is me being nice.

Another short one today. We're taking the code we already wrote and making a minor mode out of it. In Emacs, a minor mode is a set of functionality that you can turn on (or off) in a buffer (or globally). For example, the built in auto-fill-mode can be turned on in a buffer will automatically add newlines when your line gets "too long." You can see the modes that you currently have on using the describe-mode function, usually bound to C-h m.

A number of months ago, the K12 CS Ed community was abuzz. It seems that Coding Rooms - an online collaboration and coding platform was closing their free teacher tier. I was going to write about it then but didn't get to it. Some time later, I noticed some complaints about teacher throttling. Again, meant to write but it didn't happen; The other day though, there was another disturbance in the force as teachers started commiserating about Repl.

Today's a short 10 minute video as we continue to work on the emoji project. In the last episode we replaced text in the form :emoji-name: with the emoji. This time, we're doing it a little differently - we're going to overlay the text with the emoji. This way we see the emoji but the underlying text is still present. This is kind of like when programming in a language that supports lambda, in many editors you can type lambda but it appears as the symbol: λ (note that the previous symbol is not an emoji but was entered using the RFC1345 input method).

A couple of weeks ago a friend posted to Social media asking for a text book recommendation. As it happened, the one he had been using for his class was no longer going to be published. One of the replies was strongly against using printed text books stating that online resources are superior. I thought this was worth exploring. First thing worth discussing is cost. For public K12 students this generally isn't an issue.

I was born and bred in NYC. Went to public school and worked mostly in the public sector. I've lived my life among one of the most diverse populations in the world. As a Jew, I've also only lived in a communities pn which Jews, though a minority, are accepted and frequently assimilated. Throughout my life I've rarely faced antisemitism personally and feel that even in the greater USA, public occurrences of antisemitism have been relatively infrequent.

Here's the next part of our emoji project. In this video, we make the magic automatically happen. That is, when the user types an emoji in quotes - like 🐘, Emacs will automatically replace it with the emoji, 🐘. Now, mind you, the way we're doing it isn't the best way. In fact, after I posted the previous video, Micky Peterson linked to an article he wrote on using input methods to insert emoji.

Back from my trip and ready to continue the elisp series. Today we're starting our emoji project. When we're done we'll have a minor mode where we can type in something like 🐘 in a buffer and Emacs will replace it with the elephant emoji 🐘. That's part one. We'll then learn how to overlay the emoji over the text so that while it will appear as the emoji (🐘) the actual text of 🐘 will still be in the buffer and file if you save it.