Archive for April, 2004
MindStorms in the grass
Friday, April 30th, 2004My “Intro to Programming” kids attended a “Learning Day” event today. It was meant to give them (and other homeschoolers) an opportunity show off what they have been learning. It didn’t work out that way - the person that was supposed to let everyone into the build didn’t show. After waiting for a while, the dozen of so families that showed up choose to make the best of a bad situation and setup their displays and projects on the lawn. We managed to get some space on a concrete entryway so the ‘bots could run, but MindStorm’s classic roverbot doesn’t run well on rough surfaces and the linefollow code we created didn’t like the bright sunlight.
The good thing about kids is they don’t always know when to be disappointed. After messing with ‘bots for a while, a challenge was issued between my group and another group with a MindStorm (I’m not sure who threw down the gauntlet first ;-). An impromptu round of BattleBots ensued
Since we lost 1 round and tied three, I’m betting I can motivate the guys to work on their programming/engineering skills before the next time we play sumo-bots.
The lesson I learned today is that given the choice writing cool programs and writing cool programs that allow you to attack your opponent and destroy his ‘bot, any group of pre-teen boys will go with door number two every time!
BloGTK - testing one, two, three
Tuesday, April 27th, 2004I’ve decided it would be nice to do my blogging in something other than an html/javascript based editor. While this may really be a subconscious attempt on my part to void updating my blog, it’s not working, because it only took me a few minutes to find something and get it installed.
BloGTK is a simple Python/GTK editor that posts through MT xml-rpc interface. And it checks my spelling - whoopie!
I’ve added my Linux Counter emblem to my main page - I can’t believe I signed up almost 5 1/2 years ago (sept 98). I seem to remember it was one of the MeLUG guys that 1st pointed it out to me. Not that my memory is all that great, but I figure it couldn’t have been more than a year or so before that when I installed my 1st linux box. I think it was RedHat 4.2.
Testing 1, 2, 3
Friday, April 16th, 2004Trying to match my WebGUI theme to my MovableType theme is getting to be a bear…