Sleep Interrupted

An online friend of mine sent me this questionnaire that her three year old was given at nursery. I asked Ben the questions and here are his responses.

• What is your name ? Ben
• How old are you ? Umm, 6, no I’m 2 and 3 and I’m going to be 4 later on.
• Have you any brothers ? Yes, daddy is a brother.
• Have you any sisters ? Yes, Jessica is
• Have you any pets ? Tilly
• What is your favourite colour ? Red and yellow
• What is your favourite animal ? Donkey and a zebra
• What is your favourite food ? Pasta
• What is your ftavourite treat ? Chocolate
• What is your favourite toy ? Muumy or lego helicopter
• What is your favourite tv programme ? Bob the Builder
• What is your favourite football team ? David Beckham
• What is you favourite thing to do at the weekend ? Going on holiday in the caravan
• What do you want to be when you grow up ? A pilot
• Is there anything that you don’t like ? No

Louise and I have just finished watching the final episode of season two of Desperate Housewives. Enjoyable but the reason I mention it here is because we couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the truely blatant product placement by a certain car manufacturer who will remain nameless. Usually I’m fairly oblivious to this sort of thing but… wow. It left me expecting one of the characters to say, “I’d just like to take this opportunity to say how great the ride in my Pissan Nathfinder is!”.

Two entirely random links for you. Firstly, I learnt today from Marnenel that the Welsh for “microwave oven” is “popty ping” — literally “ping oven”! Secondly, the best USB drive conversion. Evar.

I finally installed Ubuntu’s latest version “Dapper” just before we went on holiday last week. I wiped the drive to get rid of any of the development software left over from my FFL days; no point wasting time upgrading that any more. It also meant loosing the Windows partition. This was no big loss, given that it had never been used since I created at Louise’s request. (I think if we do ever end up wanting to run Windows-based software again I’ll go down the virtualisation route with VMware or QEMU, or maybe try Wine.)

The installation was, as widely reported, a breeze (no pun intended). After booting from the CD, which took about 5 minutes, and answering half a dozen questions, the remainder of the installation was completed in just over 20 minutes. Bare in mind that this included most of the office “productivity” software and extras you’d have to install manually after a bare Windows installation. Very impressive; that’s at least twice as fast as the previous installation of Ubuntu I did from CD.

And then there’s the performance. They said it was faster and there weren’t lying. When I first upgraded to the previous version of Ubuntu my old 800MHz P3 box booted, logged in and started Firefox in 2 minutes 17 seconds. Yes, I really did measure it and keep a record; this is me, get over it. With my fresh Dapper install it does the same thing in 1 minute 35 seconds. Not bad! In fact, that’s the fastest it’s ever been under Linux. It’s worth noting that Windows XP managed the same thing in 38 seconds flat but that’s apples/oranges, at least to a certain extent.

Firefox users who want to keep up-to-date with the latest World Cup results may be interested in the Joga Companion extension. Given, it probably would be better as its own app — something that makes me yearn for tear-off tabs in Firefox — but it is well executed, convenient and provides a nice theme for your browser.

For a genuinely useful Firefox extension, users of multiple computers should check out Google Browser Sync. Just bear in mind that some or all of your personal browsing information will end up stored on Google’s servers, encrypted but still out of your physical control. I’m not saying this is intrinsically bad, just alerting you to the need to make your own judgement.

While we were away on holiday Ben came up with a couple of those impossible-to-field, small-child questions.

The holiday park we were staying at had entertainment in the early evening geared towards children. One night it was a cabaret act covering various pop songs, something that both Ben and Jessica became glued to. At one point some dry ice was pumped on to the stage and Ben immediately turned round and asked, “Why is there smoke coming in?” While we were scrambling for an explanation he noticed one of the singers had changed costume, “Why is the lady wearing sunglesses?”

So my questions is, how do you explain the concept of cool to a three year old?

• Long car journey: Check. More than five hours to Tenby, Wales.
• Frequent toilet stops: Check. One on the hard shoulder.
• Children excited about the new accomodation: Check. A three bedroom, static caravan.
• Trips to the beach: Check. Two.
• Ice creams: Check.
• Ice creams melting too fast in the sun: Check.
• Trip on a steam train: Check. Gwili Steam Railway.
• Visit to a farm: Check. Folly Farm.
• Children happy: Check.
• Parents more tired after the holiday than before: Check.

Today Jessica had her first full-blown tantrum. Maximum volume crying — not something we’ve been treated to much — for about 10 minutes. However, having learnt how to deal with this with Ben, we just ignored her until she came to us. I picked her up, she stopped crying almost immediately and was asleep in under a minute. Poor girl. If only it hadn’t taken us three months to work it out with Ben.

On the plus side her verbal skills are really starting to improve. Most of what she says is unintelligable but she has started saying Mummy, which comes out “muh-meh”. Unfortunately I’m labelled Mummy too, despite my best efforts.

It’s only just occurred to me that there’s a double entendre in “hard at work”. Are you hard at work? Phnarr phnarr! Sorry.

For a while I’ve been wondering how I would teach Ben or Jessica to program if they ever expressed an interest. (When I first wrote that sentence it only included Ben. Sigh.)

You see, when I started to learn about programming, home computers were really simple. They usually had one high-level language available, generally BASIC, so that’s what most people used to learn. I could switch on our trusty BBC Master — which would boot up in about 1 second — and type:

• 10 PRINT “Hello”
• 20 GOTO 10
• RUN

I would then marvel at what I’d achieved and change line 10 to the rudest word I could think of.

Today, there’s a wealth of options when it comes to programming but which one would give that immediate PRINT “Hello” sense of achievment?

Having read a couple of articles and posts on the subject of teaching programming, I’ve come round to the conclusion that a modern scripting language like Python or Ruby would be good. These allow you to do single-line programs just like the BASIC example above but have the advantage of scaling all the way up to the new hotness like Ruby on Rails.

What precipitated this post? Xbeeb! Old systems don’t die, they just get emulated. Maybe I’ll show those kids how we did it in my day…