Ramble

Being an Apple nerd I’ve been following what’s been going on at WWDC this year as usual, which includes listening to a slew of (often repetitive) podcasts from people who are actually there. John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame has done a live episode of The Talk Show there for a while, and so that was on my list. Now I run hot and cold on Gruber; when he’s in form he has some really good insights but lately I haven’t been that impressed by a lot of episodes of the podcast. So when the intro started and it sounded like more of the same I just about deleted the episode and moved on with my life until he introduced the special guest (complete with an “I shit you not…”) which was Phil Schiller. ...

One of the things which got me thinking about the previous post about teaching computing was a series of episodes of the Planet Money podcast. The series arc, which begins with Episode 621: When Luddites Attack, looks at automation and its effect on jobs, as well as historical and more contemporary reactions to it. It finishes with a piece of speculative fiction about what happens when there are no more jobs. Check it out. It’s pretty light going, with short episodes. ...

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about the identity of Computing as a subject. This has been brought on by a few factors, some recent, like a professional development day held by the local vocational training provider (South West Institute of Technology) where a local business council member looked at results of a survey of small business and the skills that they were after from young people coming from education and training. Of course I mostly paid attention to the technology skills, which were the same old song we’ve heard since I started teaching a decade ago: the Office suite, and not much else. ...

Every year TV news delights in informing everyone of the tragedies of deaths on our roads, adding to the tallies of state road death tolls and doing comparisons between states and years. I figured that holiday road tolls would be higher than usual, but figured I’d do some digging into the statistics to see just how much worse they were, state by state and compared to the year as a whole. ...

This year I changed my day job from working in a school where I took my beloved 13" MacBook Air in with me every day, to a school where we were provided with Microsoft Surface Pro 3s. Initially, I wasn’t too happy about this state of affairs since I’ve put together some great workflows in OS X that I still haven’t managed to replicate to my satisfaction in Windows, but this has mostly been alleviated by the fact that the Surface Pro 3 is a really nice machine when you get used to using the touch screen for all the important things and only use the still quite terrible trackpad for all the edge cases where the Windows UI still isn’t designed to be used well with fat fingers (or even the pen). ...

We were recently in Tasmania for a holiday and hired a car rather than relying on my dad to drive us everywhere, which meant that a lot of navigation was done via Google and Apple Maps (not sure if Apple Maps being rubbish is still a thing, but there was no appreciable difference between the two in a week’s worth of driving everywhere by GPS directions, with the exception of the roundabout stuff below, and Google completely failing at returning us to the airport, which was fine because our plane was delayed by almost two hours anyway). ...

The day after I go and look at writing an operator to mimic ‘in’ in Python, I read a blog post on undocumented Swift functions and come across the ‘contains’ function, which does pretty much that (although it doesn’t work quite the same way for dicts and for strings it only works for character elements, so I guess I like one consistent operator better). contains("happy", "a") // true contains([1: "A", 2:"B"].keys,2) // true contains([1,2,3,4,5,6],4) // true As you can see the dictionary context of the function doesn’t work without referring to the keys component of the dict. If you use a substring rather than a single character for the string context then you get an error since it doesn’t conform to the generic used to define the function. ...

Like a whole bunch of people I was quite interested to learn about Apple’s introduction of their new language Swift, at their WWDC event this year. I’ve been trying to come to terms with ObjectiveC for a couple of years now without much success and this seemed like a good opportunity to learn something new and at the same time finally get around to starting to write some iOS and potentially OSX software. ...

I got around to updating (I say update and I mean totally rewrite) my twitter script this weekend to clear out all the manual cruft that made it so painful to use when I first wrote it. I got a Twitter API key for it a while back so I didn’t have to depend on someone else’s search tool and can get mine to automatically store tweets via a cron and a SQLite database, and bolted on the really quite pretty pygal graphing library (seriously, go look, it’s super nice) so I don’t have to fiddle around with CSVs and Excel to make graphs. ...

(I’m going to prepend this with the premise that stuff like TeX has probably been able to do all this stuff for ages, but this is looking to do things in a more automated fashion.) Over the last couple of years I’ve been listening to more techy podcasts and it’s been interesting learning a bit about some of the tools which people use to get things done. A lot of it is productivity software which I just can’t use since I’m a fundamentally disorganised person, but there have been some interesting editors that have been promoted which has gotten me thinking about where that could go. ...