Mailman 3 March 2009 - Edu-sig

From trees to text
by Edward Cherlin March 25, 2009

March 25, 2009

http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2009/03/orbital-motion-in-python-and-turtle… Orbital motion in Python and TurtleArt Intended to demonstrate two things, a) that programmable simulations are good ways for kids to learn physics and maths b) that the programmable block provides a way for kids to move from simple drag and drop programming to more complicated text based programming Tony's point is that the programmable block allows users to explore Python at any level they like, from a single function call up. This will be an essential part of my strategy for teaching CS and programming through Turtle Art. -- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. http://earthtreasury.net/ (Edward Mokurai Cherlin)

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Python and Ajax courses at Foothill College
by Elaine March 25, 2009

March 25, 2009

Foothill College is offering two courses of interest to web application software developers: Ajax and Python. These 11- week courses are held weekday evenings from April through June at the Middlefield campus in Palo Alto. If you would like to learn Application Software Development with Ajax, the course meets Wednesday evenings, 6:00 pm - 9:40 pm. The course is designed for students who are already familiar with some type of programming, and have introductory knowledge of JavaScript and html. For more information, go to: http://www.foothill.edu/schedule/schedule.php and choose Department: “COIN”, quarter: “Spring 2009”, and course number “71”. If you would like to learn Python, the course meets Monday evenings and is also designed for students who are familiar with some type of programming. We will use the textbook “Core Python” by Wesley Chun, and part of the work of the course will involve an authentic team project. For more information, go to: http://www.foothill.edu/schedule/schedule.php and choose Department: “CIS”, quarter: “Spring 2009”, and course number “68K”. If you would like to sign up for a class, please register beforehand by going to: http://www.foothill.fhda.edu/reg/index.php If you do not register ahead of time, the class you want may be cancelled! If you have questions, you can contact the instructor at: haightElaine(a)foothill.edu

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Fourth-grade math textbook project
by Edward Cherlin March 24, 2009

March 24, 2009

There is a fairly new mailing list, http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/fourthgrademath, discussing creation of a 4th-grade math book using the Sugar software for the OLPC XO as a base. You are invited if you are interested to contribute or even just to lurk. -- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. http://earthtreasury.net/ (Edward Mokurai Cherlin)

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Re: [Edu-sig] As We May Think: What will we automate?
by kirby urner March 24, 2009

March 24, 2009

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 2:38 AM, kirby urner <kirby.urner(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 12:42 AM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> OK, but I think we agree APL is a professional language that gets >> plenty of respect from the professional community. > > APL is on the boundary. It certainly gets no respect from C/C++ > programmers, and almost none in academia. Professional APL programmers > certainly exist, and are almost universally treated as "APL bigots". > Interesting. When I showed up at Princeton in 1976, they had APL terminals scattered around campus, including in the dorms (e.g. Princeton Inn, where I was freshman year, room mates with Dr. Sonnenfeld, now a "professor of lightning" at NM Tech, former disk drive engineer for Maxtor, coming from a relevant background in electron tunneling microscopy -- similar 'needle meets platen' concerns). Anyway, APL was clearly held in high esteem by the computer science gurus of that day, Iverson being something of a cult figure with IBM as you indicate. I read a lot of 360/370 manuals in my free time, always glad to indulge my curiosity in a well-endowed school -- what I was there for, after all. I programmed Battleship (call out coordinates, used to play with my sister in Italy) then read the APL code over the phone to my friend Glenn Baker at Brown, who later became a TV director/producer, heads the Cuban program at Center for Defense Info), probably one of the lower baud rates on record ("paren paren, box, arrow, x, paren, paren"...) but then APL does so much with so little -- a Dymaxion computer language for sure (smile). The guy was a genius, no question. J is just as weird. >>>> <rant> >>>> >>>> This is what I most disagreed with in Keith's remarks. I don't think >>>> all those centuries upon centuries of encoding our thinking in lexical >>>> constructs, grammars, is suddenly on the verge of evaporating in to >>>> some drag and drop cartoon-like haze. > > +1 > >>>> Rushing to shield children from the supposedly harmful effects of >>>> lexical coding, while on the other hand stressing reading books and >>>> imagining while so doing (i.e. not needing those pictures "as a >>>> crutch"), is to work at cross purposes in a self defeating pattern. > > Our idea is not shielding children permanently, but only in a certain > introductory phase. It is an advantage at the very beginning that you > cannot make a syntax error in Turtle Art. Then after you understand > program structure, variables, and such, we can introduce syntax. It's > what Edsger Dijkstra called "separation of concerns", which is > completely in opposition to "throwing the baby out with the > bathwater". > >>> I assume that this rant is directed at my Turtle Art proposal. > [snip] > >> Not really directed at Turtle Art proposal no. >> >> I think it's more I get this feeling when in the Squeak and Smalltalk >> world, that there's a backlash against lexical coding as that means >> typing (as in typewriter, keyboard) and little children aren't so good >> at that, ergo need like affirmative action where we use eye candy >> approaches, "friendly" peripherals, and let them conceptualize these >> "like programs" in a dream-like Disney-esque environment. > > Typing is a consideration. Syntax errors are a consideration. I don't > care about eye candy or Disney. Do you have a beef with Affirmative > Action? I have seen it done right and done wrong. I'm against doing it > wrong, but not against it itself. I think I'm trying for "right now realism" with students and wanting to minimize any "pie in the sky" aspects. When I was smaller, I heard adults always talking about the future we'd inherit, had a passing the buck flavor, not that I didn't want to inherit a future mind you (I did, still do), but there was always this wistful "could be doing" angle, whereas what was really happening was dismal and dreary (lots of carpet bombing for backdrop, is how I grew up -- people freaking out everywhere you looked, including in the Oval Office -- much better now). So right now, programming at an adult level, when not using a "game show" system like Alice, is very stark and austere. Syntax matters. It's still somewhat hard to do. A lot of these kids are coming from hours of TV, fast cuts and high bandwidth, experience school as a screeching horrific slowness as adults slam on the brakes and do this very low bandwidth thing in the front of the room called "teaching", which is so *not* like Bill Nye the Science guy, who runs ya through 10K bits worth of science in like 5 milliseconds, whereas this not-on-TV teacher is still saying "the". I don't want my students to think I'm trying to slow them down too much, encourage them to watch our geometry YouTubes, roll there own, but when it comes to computer programming, I don't want to indulge unrealistic fantasies of instant gratification, i.e. after 10 minutes at the keyboard, you'll be pumping out a movie like 'Shrek' or 'Cars' ("how about 10 hours?" they ask me). And yes, we're getting closer, if you're happy to work with canned characters you don't have to design yourself, and preset motions, in which case a Python API of sim.dothis(args) and sim.dothat(args) makes plenty of sense. I was able to program this movie in a few minutes, just using a few keystrokes: http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2009/02/regarding-objectifying.html Putting it another way, you could say my bias is to have zero interest in what we might be doing five years from now. I'm interested in education reforms we might institute within the next 24-48 hours. Rolling a projector into the room and starting to show Python, starting to teach "boring math" with these new tools, is within range of many a Portland classroom, not in five years, but tomorrow (except it's spring break, so yawn, not interesting). Here's from my blog from a few years back, just to give more of the outlook: """ An important point to emphasize with a new generation of computer-savvy student, wowed by eye candy, is that even if the graphics are glitzy, the source code behind them is still text-based. In other words, the programmer's world still looks more like free verse poetry than Saturday morning cartoons. One way to show this is to start with a VRML graphic, such as the 5-frequency icosasphere in the right window above, let students interact with it, using interface controls (Cortona's in this shot), then switch to the left window, where a scrolled session demonstrates a corresponding text-based API. What bridges left and right is a lot of scripting language, in this case Python. These scripts take user parameters and generate the underlying .wrl file (world file), which the VRML browser then processes and displays. Likewise, even where the effective use of such scripts is to valve electrons on a motherboard, in order to make state changes to a hard drive, the engineers who designed this mutiple layering of hardware and software used a lot of human-readable text in the process. We're still firmly anchored to what we most need: comprehensible readings (even if highly technical sometimes). The moral of the story is, contrary to outward appearances, the culture is not moving away from reading, i.e. the process of eye-balling text to extract meaning. The right brain is getting more of a workout, what with all the visual cortex stimulation, but so is the left. So the old balance between left and right is still recognizable. """ [ http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2005/01/text-drives-graphics.html ] > >> I skeptical of this tendency to over-romanticize the "child prodigy >> programmer" as if we should be spending big GNP on overcoming any need >> for a keyboard, > > Non sequitur. I'm interested in how early we can introduce programming > concepts to all children. First grade? Preschool, using iconic tiles? > But two-year-olds can learn to read and type, as demonstrated by Omar > Khayyam [sic] Moore in the 1960s. It doesn't have to be an either/or. > Somewhat a non sequitur I agree, but I do get these hand-wringing parents with some geekazoid for a kid, wondering if they should be sending him to "a special school" where presumably they have LCDs bolted to the bottom of bunk beds, computer camps where you can use your mouse to order a breakfast of champions. Like this 8 year old at Winterhaven (our geek hogwarts): he had his Thinkpad partitioned for five operating systems, had figured out how to host telnet and install putty on an NT box in the school, patching in over the subnet. 3rd grader. My attitude is kids this age deserve a normal childhood playing with friends, developing their own personal coordination skills. All in good time in other words. A child that self motivated will find ways to keep honing those skills, with encouragement, but now that we have the Internet, there's really no need for that "special skool". You can develop that Google Appengine from the comfort of your own bedroom, in collaboration with friends. >> so Johnny Neutron can just "program in his mind's >> eye". Similar to my rant against chip implants, trying to bypass eyes >> and fingers even when these are working OK. Even though this >> technology is still somewhat far off (in terms of the Hollywood >> versions) I think it sends the wrong message to even hype them as >> desirable, as if we'd all be happier if this were Wall*e world >> (everyone on their backs with a big gulp, thinking in Smalltalk). > > Wow, that's some real rubbish you're rubbising, ya. Yeah, but you'd be amazed how many people want $10 million so they can come up with the "interface of tomorrow" in which we cleverly bypass all that biological equipment that represents an astronomical R&D budget "because we can" (or think we can). Prosthetics are one thing, but suggesting we all cut off our arms to be outfitted with something made by Mattel -- why do this consciously? (i.e. lets bring those troops home). I think DARPA should send anything "borg like" to the shredder, i.e. that "soldier of tomorrow" scifi has just ruined a lot of engineering shops, turned CTOs into numbskulls. Put a big sign over the door: No Borg! Forget about it! Then maybe the grant proposals would improve? > >> You're not in that camp, or at least not with this project, is what I >> hear you saying. But that that brings up the question of what age >> range you're aiming at and do they know how to type. > > 2+, eventually. Maybe. We can teach them. > >> So again, I'm not a detractor w/r to Turtle Art, hope you won't think >> of me that way. If you're getting across tree structures, that's all >> to the better I'm thinking, because of the DOM and XML more generally. >> XML is a tree structure, in terms of nodes having children and not >> having more than one direct parent. > > XML is, to me, just LISP with named parentheses and nice pretty-printers. > >> In the old days, when we'd teach grammar, including Latin grammar >> (because it's hard, consistent, and detailed -- was the theory, this >> is before my time), students would visualize parsing, these parts of >> speech. > > I did lots of diagramming sentences as tree structures on paper and blackboard. > We also like networks, just as much as trees. A polyhedron is a network (topologically speaking, the way we teach 'em). We might start with Euler and those bridges, then trying to draw those houses with one pen stroke, not overtracing any line (remember that one? -- can't do a double-house). >> << SNIP >> >> >>>> I sense countervailing temperaments at work. Some people just feel >>>> better when there's this sense of a unified substrate, a primitive >>>> simple beginning. Others are less monotheistic in their proclivities >>>> and don't mind a more heterogeneous "toolbox" model. You get down to >>>> a bunch of very different things, working in complement. But there >>>> you have it: "everything is a thing" in basic English (a useful >>>> design pattern, even though ridiculously misleading). >>> >>> There are quite other motives at work. One set is that some people are >>> willing to take on a greater memory load than others. >>> >> >> I share your interest in using memory efficiently. It's just that I >> like where Python "begins" which is "in the middle" with hash table, >> array / list, class itself (a kind of data struct w/ behavior), >> already built, ready to rumba. Problem I have with Scheme, as a >> starter language, is you either need to import, or code from scratch, >> these kinds of data structures that aren't primitive, but can easily >> be built (again and again, seemingly endlessly). > > Other LISPs have arrays and suchlike. > Yeah, I'd like to watch a few DVDs on LISP, have good symbol animations taking me through it, like on ShowMeDo. I might code along with my laptop, or just do email watching from the corner of my eye. I've done some LISP, sure, but only for the hard fun of it. At Princeton, I was mostly too busy reading Wittgenstein, and logical languages that aren't designed to machine execute. >> I just get impatient with low level languages I think. I've usually >> had the luxury of high level objects, even as primitives. Call me >> spoiled in that way. > > There is a place for low-level languages like pure LISP and FORTH. > They make great language-building toolkits, if you need different > abstractions than the ones provided, and don't want to carry around > the baggage of Smalltalk when you don't need it all. > Absolutely there's a place. In talking about my own "impatience" I'm not trying to make a virtue out of holes in my skill set. I'm just recognizing my own mortality and limitations. I can't square dance either, at least not well. >> When it comes to teaching mathematics with Python, the high level >> works in my favor. I don't necessarily want to spend much time >> talking about chip internals, registers. This isn't computer science >> or electrical engineering. We want to spend most our time thinking >> about Polyhedra, Vectors etc. > > As in NumPy and SciPy, yes. But there are languages for chip people, > including AHPL, an APL dialect that compiles to wiring lists. Iverson > invented APL for describing computers, and co-wrote the paper giving a > complete, theoretically executable definition of the 360 architecture. > One of the first software emulators ever. > Yes, amazing what APL can express. >> Yes, these are expressed as Python objects, but no, we don't feel >> we're learning to become "professional programmers" as our goal here >> is to get clear on these Polyhedra and Vectors. That might be for >> theater work, plus something about airplanes. > > +1 > >>>>> "I invented Object-Oriented Programming, and C++ is not what I had in >>>>> mind."--Alan Kay > >> Yes, M has a niche market in health care (where it started, where it >> dies), but from what I've seen up close, the health care sector is >> paying a high price for keeping MUMPS alive well past its prime. >> There's maybe a difference between a "dead language" (e.g. FORTRAN, >> still the basis for lotsa libraries) and a "zombie langauge" (e.g. M). > > You may prefer OpenMRS from Partners in Health. > I'm thinking the legal medical record is maybe headed for a "schemaless" document storage such as CouchDB (Erlang) and/or Tokyo Cabinet and/or... whereas the research registries such as I deal with (clinical research records != legal medical records) will stay in SQL engines (registries far less amorphous, whereas the "generic medical record" is hellacious in any RDBMS approach -- so much could go wrong, need a table for everything). Reducing health care costs is all about government funding of FOSS-based solutions that remain FOSS, i.e. today hospitals are treated as cash cows by closed source vendors who hog all the MUMPS to themselves (just makes 'em mad cows). If hospitals got together the way we do it around FOSS, with stimulus from Uncle Sam or other government, they could start making some real headway. The main barrier is the public not understanding that FOSS sometimes means the best engineering money can't buy, and that "open source" doesn't mean "less security" (a very common misconception, whereas the opposite is much closer to true (if it's not open source, don't trust it with your life)). My proposal for CRRs is to just use a state of the art MVC like Django or Rails, why not? They already got web page designers with CSS skills. The IT department knows SQL. All they need to do is migrate the data and kiss MUMPS good bye (easier said than done, I realize, but its a 24-48 hour kind of thing to get started, so of interest at least). >> From interviews I've done, and from source code I've eyeballed, I'd >> say M seems a crazy-making language, not at all a pleasure to use, and >> in the hospital where I've seen it at work, it actually breaks in >> serious ways, the equivalent of a primary key getting corrupted. The >> product built around it is unwieldy and deficient. > > The original point of MUMPS was that doctors could program medical > informatics themselves. Apparently they are now discouraged from > learning the language and doing so. What happened is some doctors got started down this road, then professional coders took over as the code base got big and user needs multiplied, i.e. some of the best doctor-begun startups went commercial, at which point the docs get a pat on the back and computer scientists come in the run the place. We're back to square one in some ways, as a next generation of skilled heart surgeon eyeballs Python and thinks "hey, this ain't so hard" (SQL isn't either). But then they think: "but wait, I'm a doctor, trained to cure sick people -- I can appreciate and understand this stuff, but I think I'll let the hospital IT department work with outcomes research groups on actual implementation (I'll be welcome at meetings though, will give plenty of input, and isn't it cool that I really understand what they're talking about!)). > >> Along similar lines, I get frustrated with how SQL isn't really that >> hard, in a simple workaday sense, where you just want some simple >> joins, maybe based on views. Yet Microsoft Access layers it with eye >> candy while making the SQL itself rather thorny, hard to eyeball. > > QBE, a 2D visual system, is mathematically stronger than SQL. > I'll have to take a look. If it's a 24 hour type of thing... >> That's sort of the same thing I worry about with trying to give kids >> what appear to be training wheels on training wheels on training >> wheels -- these Dr. Seuss contraptions all designed to make up for the >> fact that maybe they're too young to be worrying about programming? > > Programming is one of the most powerful ideas around for making sense > of the world around you. Everything in human life is governed by some > complicated combination of rules and customs. Programming makes better > sense out of most of the rules, and some of the customs. When you > reach the limits of programming, you know something important about > what remains. > >> When you're still in a little body, the priority is maybe to get >> outside doing some real activities, not virtual ones. A lot of that >> empathetic conceptualization you'll want to draw on later, isn't >> developed just sitting in front of a computer all day. > > Not an either/or. Some time outside, some time in. > Right. Place when you're hiking around in the Columbia Gorge you might have a dodeca-cam on your back, streaming to the hard drive in your back pack. Back at the school, computers will stitch together those seamless Google Street type views, ready for the school intranet and web pages. We could do this within the next 48 hours, equipment-wise. The dodeca-cam company is just a few blocks from here. But oh yeah, it's spring break and I'm supposed to leave for Chicago in a few hours. >> Let's just say I'm leery of "contraptions" which insulate the "end >> user" from writing any code, and yet under the surface write reams and >> reams of the stuff, which at some point everyone ceases to fully >> understand... that's the opposite of "open source" in a way, as >> you're really just hiding the internals, keeping "end users" from >> really seeing behind the scenes... > > You can do that. We in Turtle Art and Smalltalk don't. > In Visual FoxPro, you don't see any reams of code i.e. the Form with the widgets exports all these pockets where you can put your code, but the Form itself stays a black box with a well defined API. You could think of it as C code. That's pretty much how it works in Python as well. You don't eyeball the actual code for the actual widget, written in C++. The widget has an API, is an object, and you use it as such (syntactically, it's an object, Python sharing Smalltalk's "everything is an object" way of thinking). A lot of Foxpro people besides me made the leap to Python awhile back. There's Dabo for example. I think a lot of it has to do with the Xbase "dot prompt" i.e. we've always worked in a shell, had that immediate APL-like interactivity. Python is friendly in that way. BASIC and Visual Basic are far less friendly. It's hard to use Microsoft Access in "shell mode" from a "prompt". This slows the learning curve. I don't think Python would have anything close to the visibility it has today, if it hadn't been for IDLE being included. That was the "main battery" for so many of us. >> Bottom line, I guess I worry about using electronics to pander to the >> imagination in ways that undervalue developing physical coordination >> skills. I see how television has done this. The younger they are, >> the more I want to add to the motor component (gross and fine motor >> skills). >> >> Again, this isn't directed against any of your projects. I'm just >> investigating my own biases for the record, keying off the fact that >> MUMPS is oppressive, and that too many of my coworkers have atrophied >> and/or undeveloped SQL and/or database skills because the so-called >> "computer professionals" have taken a "spoil the end user" approach, > > There is nothing in software that I detest more than developers > telling me what I want. I propose to create a roadmap that will allow > children to choose where to go without misleading them. Not the > Microsoft "Where do you want to go today?" bunk. > My paradigm "client" is a student bored by math class, thinking math will never be for me, and yet there's no opportunity to try the "object oriented" approach, even though computers with IDLE are just down the hall. Here's a future designing engineer, getting turned off, with a possible solution ridiculously proximal, yet not implemented. This same kid looking back, realizing what was kept from her, might think "criminal malpractice". Now of course it's true that it'll be possible to stay bored even with the switch to using a real computer language in math class. However, having done quite a few experiments in the field, I can say this is an definite upgrade in any case. We'll lose far fewer potential recruits if we take this route. I'm happy to work closely with teachers willing to do this today, with the kids we have now. If you're talking "in five years" I think that's a cop out, at least in Portland it is. Not meaning you personally, talking about school administrators here. >> which I regard as antithetical to FOSS. > > +1 > >> Also, on a more positive note, I think cartoon-like approaches >> designed to be instructive around particular concepts, are quite >> suitable for *adults* as well as kids. In other words, once you *can* >> do lexical programming and *do* have lots of physical coordination, >> *then* it's a good time to get a next level of training, with surreal >> cartoons (like manga) your imaginary friend (good way to learn some >> computer science). > > And I think that visual programming is good from the beginning. We shall see. > Not holding my breath though. It's time to stop waiting for any "end of the rainbow". Now is the time, not then. >> It's a lot about *sequence* (the way topics get ordered). Some of the >> stuff we aim at children we might do better adapting for adults. Lets >> have more Wii in senior centers, along with more FOSS (as we learned >> at the last OSCON, using FOSS to bridge grandchildren and grandparents >> is a good way to go).** > > We will have to test these various approaches, and adopt what works. > Yes. And we've been doing that. Fortunately, it's all running in parallel and doesn't bottleneck in one person. Workarounds are the name of the game, as for every person will to test something new, you have a lot more who just want to go through those motions (the same ones as yesterday), no matter how ill-advised. Kirby > -- > Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name > And Children are my nation. > The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. > http://earthtreasury.net/ (Edward Mokurai Cherlin) >

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As We May Think: What will we automate?
by kirby urner March 23, 2009

March 23, 2009

One of our Wanderers (think tank in Portland) wrote: """ I expect that teaching Python/Perl/Ruby/Java in the 2000s will be viewed with the same scorn in the 2030's. The problem with "flavor of the month" languages is that they are passe a month later, as better abstractions appear. Such evanescent ways of doing things are probably not the basis for life-long learning. << SNIP >> In the Wonderful World of the Future, most people will be actively creating active digital content with state and flow control, object abstraction, "programming" in the sense of producing automated stuff that accomplishes tasks. But it won't be text based. There may be a few Morlocks laboring down amongst the lines of code like you and I do. Working with "text code" will probably be considered "fundamental" and "connected with our roots", like animal-powered agriculture is now.... So take a look at "programming in schools" from the viewpoint of an adult in 2030, not a 2009 viewpoint, and heaven forbid from the viewpoint of the ancient times when you and I were trained. What do you wish you had been taught 40 years ago? What was fashionable but dated? Extrapolate that forwards, and try to guess what they will want, not what you and I consider important /now/. For extra points, try to guess what they should be teaching *their* kids, for use in the year 2060, and get started on the theoretical underpinnings of *that*. """ I'm wondering what people on this list think about this remark. I responded rather sharply at the time, as I think it's a common dodge, to avoid adding grist to the mill today, because of some hypothetical future wherein said "grist" will be obsolete. In the meantime, we continue teaching technical subjects as if the FOSS revolution never happened, I think imperiling its gains (sliding back into a pit of "deep silos" proprietary ignorance -- could happen). I've further registered my disagreement with the above model in my journal posting of this afternoon, but I'm guessing a wider variety of perspectives might be useful at this juncture. http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2009/03/noodling-and-doodling.html Kirby

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PyCon dinner, meeting
by Andrew Harrington March 22, 2009

March 22, 2009

For Pycon I posted dinner/meeting suggesting some time ago at the BoF site http://us.pycon.org/2009/openspace/EduSig/ I see no responses. It occurs to me that may be because I did not echo it here! - I have a reservation for 10 at Maria's Mexican Restaurant, Friday 6:45PM, 9440 W Foster Ave. Attenders for Friday dinner: Andy Harrington, ??? This is not to rule out an alternative! A show-stopping issue in the past was having a big group and trying to make an arrangement at the last minute on the weekend, so I planned ahead. We have done it Saturday night before, partly because we had nothing set up to clearly direct people to. I personally would prefer Friday night dinner and gathering afterward, and have more time to follow up with folks later. Maria's is about 600 yards south of the hotel - easy walking distance. Inexpensive restaurant, mixed reviews, but local! I guessed 10 people. Please add your name so I can get a better count, or suggest something different! The night and place can be changed, but I strongly suggest an advanced plan so we are not futzing around rather than sitting and enjoying our brief chance for each other's company. - I suggest we reserve Open Space at the conference site, starting about 8:30PM Friday, assuming a 6:45 local dinner. Andy -- Andrew N. Harrington Director of Academic Programs Computer Science Department Loyola University Chicago 512B Lewis Towers (office) Snail mail to Lewis Towers 416 820 North Michigan Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60611 http://www.cs.luc.edu/~anh Phone: 312-915-7982 Fax: 312-915-7998 gpd(a)cs.luc.edu for graduate administration upd(a)cs.luc.edu for undergrad administration aharrin(a)luc.edu as professor

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python4edu by animation -- best choice?
by Jurgis Pralgauskis March 19, 2009

March 19, 2009

Hello, You know, kids like effects, and if they can program effects, they like programming :) the good overview of tools is http://livingcode.org/2008/the-importance-of-visual-programming there I found a new (for me) tool Nodebox -- similar to processing.org - the output is much nicer than turtle, and can export SVG, PDF, PNG - the great idea for experimentation to have code window side to canvas. http://nodebox.net , it's primarily for Mac, but there are crossplatform varinats (though missing some functionallity) http://dev.nodebox.net/wiki/Qt http://tinkerhouse.net/shoebot/ (more like a branch.., has deb package) shoebot has more examples :) some examples need additional libraries, see http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/Library You can add your own library http://www.eriksmartt.com/blog/archives/747 ps.: foer me shoebot and qt variants needed sys.path.append('/path/to/nodebox/libs') in the module where ximport is defined nodebox-qt/nodebox/graphics/__init__.py or /usr/share/pyshared/shoebot/__init__.py (on ubuntu) ps.: does anybody know if jython works with processing.org? -- Jurgis Pralgauskis Don't worry, be happy and make things better ;) http://sagemath.visiems.lt

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tomorrow's gig (some notes)
by kirby urner March 17, 2009

March 17, 2009

Tomorrow's talk before an engineering audience, about Python in the back office, will feature the source code below to give the flavor of our high school curriculum, in Matsu District (AK) or Willapa Bay (WA) for the sake of realism. I'll also be discussing "manga code" for a FOSS project I'm involved with, manga code being like pseudo-code except it actually runs, so runtime gives more information than just looking at (paper printed?) code that doesn't actually run. I'm thinking of "manga" as in "storyboard" and/or "comic strip" i.e. runnable code that's somewhat a caricature or "cave painting" vis-a-vis the "real deal" (illustrative, demonstrative, used for show & tell purposes...). So the deal on RSA (as many of you know) is this: you don't have the problem of trying to sneak a private key to the other party, already compromising, as you probably expect her to acknowledge receipt, plus maybe the messenger photocopied it to sell on eBay. Public key supersedes in having the "phone number" N paired with a secret counterpart d saved with the same person (recipient) such that only messages encrypted with Alice's N will decode with Alice's d, and only Alice herself needs to have d (her computer needs to know it, might be encrypted somehow). d = inverse(e, phi(N)) where phi(N) = (p-1)(q-1) and N = p*q, the famous beginning of this algorithm, requires Euclid's Extended Algorithm (EEA). If m is message, c is ciphertext, e is exponent, then RSA.encrypt is like c = pow(m, e, N) and RSA.decrypt is like m = pow(c, d, N). That's what I'm testing below. If this were a math class with Java, a CS class or whatever, we might go: import java.math.BigInteger; import java.security.SecureRandom; import java.util.Random; /* */ public class MainClass { public static void main(String[] unused) { Random prng = new SecureRandom(); // self-seeding System.out.println(BigInteger.probablePrime(10, prng)); } } So in Jython then (just installed through Synaptic, painlessly, even if an older version i.e. 2.5b3 is just out 6 days ago).: Jython 2.2.1 on java1.6.0_07 Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import java.math.BigInteger as big >>> import java.security.SecureRandom >>> prng = java.security.SecureRandom() >>> big.probablePrime(1000, prng) 986024402532744041493470893465725154540167461230347296361 094920931610743969216973764051955623260076378742309845854 297301750831176718526148689979016653882056041932096046944 963620102533089175317598139585190865815470057233752762341 448040708612248660611811336839535064227491583786355872281 6236632070326659 That could be our p, then we'd need a q. But instead I go with a famous case of a German group cracking the challenge number RSA-640, think the realism there adds spice to the story, saves the module from going overboard with technicalia, like we can get into actually generating these suckers in another lesson plan why not. I've had my various cryptography pages at my web site for many years, Ian working with Whit (Sun CSO) on some others for sociality.tv seems like. I realize there's some irony in speaking so kindly of Python on St. Patty's day tomorrow but of course in my family we're glad to have Celtic lore alive and well, and besides there weren't any snakes before that so helluva job guy! Might make some fun skits ("did you get rid of the tigers too then?"). Note that in 2.6 you have both kinds of print, so if you want to train your fingers for the __future__, start using those parentheses eh? A point here is to advertise the superiority of *any* big-integer-capable setup over a calculator, even just one laptop with projector and Internet would be a huge step up, let kids share projecting, teach lightning talk format, explain how, in the major leagues, that 5 mins is taken quite seriously. I've also mentioned about "thunder talks" which roll out a little more slowly (the whole show is the "a [perfect] storm" (as in "to brainstorm")). Kirby """ Why calculators aren't as fun (unless yours has a bigger than usual screen maybe?): RSA-640 RSA-640 has 193 decimal digits. A cash prize of US$20,000 was offered by RSA Security for a successful factorization. On November 2, 2005, F. Bahr, M. Boehm, J. Franke and T. Kleinjung of the German Federal Office for Information Security announced that they had factorized the number using GNFS as follows: [19][20][21] RSA-640 = 31074182404900437213507500358885679300373460228427275457 20161948823206440518081504556346829671723286782437916272 83803341547107310850191954852900733772482278352574238645 4014691736602477652346609 RSA-640 = 16347336458092538484431338838650908598417836700330923121 81110852389333100104508151212118167511579 × 19008712816648221131268515739354139754718967899685154936 66638539088027103802104498957191261465571 The computation took 5 months on 80 2.2 GHz AMD Opteron CPUs. The slightly larger RSA-200 was factored in May 2005 by the same team. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA-640#RSA-640 """ N = int("31074182404900437213507500358885679300373460228427275457" +\ "20161948823206440518081504556346829671723286782437916272" +\ "83803341547107310850191954852900733772482278352574238645" +\ "4014691736602477652346609") p = int("16347336458092538484431338838650908598417836700330923121"+\ "81110852389333100104508151212118167511579") q = int("19008712816648221131268515739354139754718967899685154936"+\ "66638539088027103802104498957191261465571") totient = (p - 1) * (q - 1) """ These guys only work in a namespace with N, d already defined We're setting e = 7 to keep it simple Euler's Totient Theorem (cutting and pasting, adapting to Python)... This theorem is one of the important keys to the RSA algorithm: If GCD(T, R)== 1 and T < R, then pow (T, phi(R), R) == 1 Or, in words: If T and R are relatively prime, with T being the smaller number, then when we multiply T with itself phi(R) times and divide the result by R, the remainder will always be 1. """ from binascii import hexlify, unhexlify def mknum(phrase): return eval('0x'+hexlify(phrase)+'L') def mkphrase(num): return unhexlify(hex(num)[2:-1]) def gcd(a,b): """Return greatest common divisor using Euclid's Algorithm.""" while b: a, b = b, a % b return a def lcm(a,b): """ Return lowest common multiple.""" return (a*b)/gcd(a,b) def bingcd(a,b): """Extended version of Euclid's Algorithm (binary GCD) Returns (m,n,gcd) such that m*a + n*b = gcd(a,b)""" g,u,v = [b,a],[1,0],[0,1] while g[1]<>0: y = g[0]/g[1] g[0],g[1] = g[1],g[0]%g[1] u[0],u[1] = u[1],u[0] - y*u[1] v[0],v[1] = v[1],v[0] - y*v[1] m = v[0]%b gcd = (m*a)%b n = (gcd - m*a)/b return (m,n,gcd) def inverse(a,b): """If gcd(a,b)=1, then inverse(a,b)*a mod b = 1, otherwise, if gcd(a,b)!=1, return 0 Useful in RSA encryption, for finding d such that e*d mod totient(n) = 1""" inva,n,gcd = bingcd(a,b) return (gcd==1)*inva class Sender: def __init__(self, m): self.m = mknum(m) def encrypt(self): """RSA algorithm""" c = pow(self.m, 7, N) return c class Receiver: def __init__(self, c): self.c = c def decrypt(self): """RSA algorithm""" d = inverse(7, totient) m = pow(self.c, d, N) return mkphrase(m) def testing123(): print(p) print(q) print(p*q) print(N) print(N == p*q) d = inverse(7, totient) print(d) print(7*d % totient) def testingrsa(): bob = Sender("Able was I ere I saw Elba") c = bob.encrypt() alice = Receiver(c) m = alice.decrypt() print(m) if __name__ == "__main__": # testing123() testingrsa()

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Scratch pad nuttiness... (re generators)
by kirby urner March 17, 2009

March 17, 2009

So per the blog post below, I'm explaining the Python generator concept in terms of "kicking the can down the road" e.g. getting the next prime in some "just in time" trial by division regimen, per archived examples. http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2009/01/more-geometric-studies.html So then it occurs to me, would there by a way to do a kind of special names overloading such that __next__ (that which triggers the next cycling to yield) might be replaced with the word kick in some namespace, as in kick(o) instead of next(o) -- using Python 3.x syntax here i.e. not o.next(). What would a student try, if this were the challenge? Simple solution: >>> def kick(o): return next(o) >>> def f(): # could use a generator expression for i in range(10): yield i >>> type(f) # just a function so far <class 'function'> >>> o = f() >>> next(o) 0 >>> kick(o) 1 >>> kick(o) 2 >>> type(o) # a generator once instanced <class 'generator'> Another student might think different and try something like this: >>> o.__next__ <method-wrapper '__next__' of generator object at 0x8367edc> >>> o.kick = o.__next__ Traceback (most recent call last): File "<pyshell#51>", line 1, in <module> o.kick = o.__next__ AttributeError: 'generator' object has no attribute 'kick' "Dang, you can't give your generator object a random attribute it doesn't already have, write-protected in some way...." Note that the generator type is inappropriate as a base class for your own kind of user class. >>> class newgen (type(o)): kick = type(o).__next__ Traceback (most recent call last): File "<pyshell#10>", line 1, in <module> class newgen (type(o)): TypeError: type 'generator' is not an acceptable base type Oh well.... Kirby

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Robot vs. Robot vs. Robot
by kirby urner March 15, 2009

March 15, 2009

I'm upgrading to 2.6, 3.0.1 in the background, also need a newer VPython... Recent agit prop on Chipy (Chicago UG) included mention of "Logo robotics" which some will take to be a typo (did I mean Lego?), others will consider ambiguous as to whether "robot" means "virtual" or not, as in the case of a "Logo turtle" (a kind of robot, e.g. GvR http://gvr.sourceforge.net/ ) I'm reminded that in South Africa, a 'robot' is a traffic light (what we'd call it on Hawthorne Ave.), so you could say like "go straight, turn right at the next robot", a good classroom example for talking about "namespaces" and "name collisions" (the former being a solution to the latter). Here I'm deliberately colliding (mashing) "robot" as in "virtual avatar" and "robot" in the sense of floor-bound machine and/or Mars rover. Rough synonyms: doll, piece, sim ("dolls" also virtual these days, per http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2009/01/playing-with-dolls.html ). I think that's an appropriate move (to have "robot" also refer to virtual versions) because: (a) the API could be the same and (b) a "virtual" robot may be replaced with a real one at some point and (c) when Logo first came out, the "turtle" was a real robot, only became virtual later, here's a picture: http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2006/04/london-knowledge-lab.html I've been kicking it back and forth with Steve Holden, realize Guido also an admirer of MIT Scratch (as is Dethe) -- something more to agree on. I'm using one of the workshop handouts as a recruiting tool (dual purpose) and so sent a pointer around on Chipy. I'd like Chicago area teachers to know more about what we're up to in Portland: http://www.4dsolutions.net/presentations/py4t_notes.pdf OK, 3.0.1 is installed (used altinstall, using install for 2.6 i.e. that'll be my main one, however VPython 5, the one recommended, although technically a release candidate (and no stereo!), is compatible with 2.5 only, so I'm definitely keeping that one, if for no other reason). 2.6, done! Ubuntu 8.04 - the Hardy Heron - released in April 2008. http://vpython.org/contents/download_linux.html (on a scale of 1-10, I'd say compiling and installing this was 8 or 8.5 -- relative to say installing Python itself with is like 2 or 3 when you factor in needing zlib and stuff...). Kirby 4Dsolutions.net ISEPP @ Pycon2009

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