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dot-plan.txt
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dot-plan.txt
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2015-06-19 20:24:32 UTC
Here are a lot of words about some tech things that I've been playing with...
-- I want to know more about the whole Google Apps platform. It is possible to do very powerful things with Google Classroom. You can also do remarkable things in the Google Apps with JavaScript. I don't know much at all about this yet.
-- ChromeBooks and tablets. I would like for there to be functional courseware for the students on platforms that cost no more than $200. We had a student come up with only a (rather nice) Android tablet, but I could not get the Physics software set up for it.
I have an older ChromeBook picked out on eBay, but don't have the funds to purchase it at the moment. Last year, I helped a student get set up with a new ChromeBook, I played with it for a week.
It reminded me of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), particularly the boot loader. We had two of the first-generation OLPC devices for a few years, let the kids play with them, I played with it a lot. Eventually I set them up and sent them to a school in India.
-- Microsoft Windows 10 will be released on 29 June, and I have two small tablets here that I've been using to explore how Windows works as a tablet. These tablets are HP Stream 7 things, real full-Intel Windows, cost $69.
-- I am typing this on my iPad. As a platform, iOS continues to evolve towards a quite functional platform for general use. But it has some unexpected limitations. The next version of iOS, to be released in September, provides a new set of options to developers, it will let us use iPads more as computers. But that evolution is going to take another year at least.
-- I have been playing a bit with Raspberry Pi computers -- these little things cost $40 and plug into your TV or computer screen. They are intended for tech education and have lot of community support...
Last summer, I gave two of them, and a kid's programming textbook, to that guy who was running a school in Guatemala.
Raspberry Pi comes with a extraordinary collection of free software. In particular, I've been amazed with Stephen Wolfram and Mathematica, which he donated to run for free on Raspberry Pi. I maintained a developer license for Mathematica since 1995, when I purchased it for $5000. Really. Last year, considering my disability, they let me renew for $250, but I was not able to renew this year.
Mathematica is a system that can be very confusing and difficult to get started. I still don't know much about what it can do in real situations.
-- I'm (very slowly) reviewing a statistics textbook for first-year college or advanced high-school seniors, "Intro to Statistics with R"... It's a free system for analysis and visualization. I've considered porting the examples in the book to Mathematica. Would be a good exercise.
-- I'm trying to keep up with JavaScript, but it's impossible... Would you believe that I was one of the two first ever programmers in the universe to provide developer tech support JavaScript? Netscape, 1997.
-- I have 25 (!) years of experience as a developer and IT Guy for Macintosh NeXT, and OS X computers and networks. These days it is my favorite platform for any computing that is not in the server room...
-- I have about 15 years of work on developing Linux core systems, custom distributions, and simple Java web servers.
-- I've been a dilettante Microsoft developer since 1995, but my IT skills are completely obsolete, pre-dating Active Directory. More recently, I've been doodling with Microsoft Code and Visual Studio on Windows, Linux, and a Mac.
1995 - I was on the Microsoft campus in Redmond the day before the Windows 95 launch, visiting a friend. They were setting up for the Rolling Stones concert. Two months later, I delivered my first web application to a corporation (a big bank with a stagecoach logo).