Those laptops that my Hunter students were supposed to get have finally arrived. We're distributing them on Monday. Each student will have a Dell laptop running Ubuntu 16.04 for as long as they're in the program. This means we can finally start using the web as a way of displaying and sharing our projects. For this type of web development, I'm a big fan of using Flask. Flask is a Python microframework.

Saw this post the other day: Emacs is hurting Clojure and this response: Is Emacs Really HJard to Learn / Use. This called to mind those countless discussions about tools being user friendly. I'm frequently on the unpopular side of these discussions. Linux vs Windows vs Mac, Shell vs GUI, Emacs vs fill-in-the-blank-editor-or-IDE and on and on. Don't use Emacs, it isn't user friendly. Don't use Linux, it isn't user friendly.

Quick post to add to the recent command line fu I've been writing about. Douglas Peterson had another Whatever happened to post. This time on Logo. I wanted to reply, talk about NetLogo and link to some of my old NetLogo posts to help show how cool it is. Nikola supports tags, makes a nice tags page and for each tag, a nice page of all the links. Nikola has a plugin tags which lets you manage tags from the command line.

Over in the Facebook AP Computer Science Teachers group someone asked for thoughts on covering BASH scripting as a post AP topic. A number of us made suggestions. I linked to this old blog post. One group member said she asked around for similar suggestions and the response she got was "vi and awk." I wanted to jokingly respond "and after they suggested that they got into their time machine and went back to the 70's.

Repost This is a repost from March 2015. It didn't transfer when I rebooted the blog. Original Quick post on why I love the Unix command line. We're busy organizing CSTUY's first hackathon. It's going to be at SumAll, where we hold our weekly hacking sessions but while taking registration, we had a little program. The kids signed up on a Google doc but we all know the story – when people sign up for a free event, even one with free food and t-shirts, many don't show.

Quick post on why I love the Unix command line. We're busy organizing CSTUY's first hackathon. It's going to be at SumAll, where we hold our weekly hacking sessions but while taking registration, we had a little program. The kids signed up on a Google doc but we all know the story – when people sign up for a free event, even one with free food and t-shirts, many don't show.