[Edu-sig] Many Laptops per Adult

[kirby urner]

Like with my Ubuntu Dell, I have MySQL which I access in a terminal
window (people call that non-GUI but of course the window itself is an
animation, even wiggles, has a frame rate (desktop is OpenGL)), then I
go > manage.py runserver or whatever it is and get the Django thing
going on 127.0.0.1:8000, after which we start poking around in Mathy,
my database of mvp mathematicians, very tiny so far, and not all
Latin-1 by any stretch of the imagination.

I have an Optoma projector, am trying to sell local schools (like
Cleveland and Grant) on the idea they need an in-house Django database
as a part of math class, student-designed and run, similar to the one
I'm showing.

Yes, that means teaching about regular expressions and DOM (document
object model) maybe instead of so much time on factoring polynomials,
repeating the same poopka year to year, degeniusing them, making them
think it's all way harder than it is (the first step towards having a
docile population, ready for Bud + NFL).

I took 'Idiocracy' to Vilnius that time, to explain our culture.
Here's the opening screen:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/1023081047/in/set-72157601248882665/
 (conference venue, Reval Hotel, Vilnius).

Speaking of Django, I'm running a Subversion version and still don't
see Microsoft SQL Server as an option, just flavors of Postgres,
MySQL, and Oracle.  Patrick leans strongly towards Oracle with an "all
you can eat" license.

Maybe some folks here have war stories about Django?  I posted this
query to my local group, but the only nibble so far is from Dylan, who
thinks my idea of doing all reports as PDFs is kinda stupid:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/portland/2009-January/000542.html

Kirby

Related reading @ Math Forum:
http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=1879421&tstart=0 (last
three paragraphs about Django), also mention Ian Benson again (someone
I met at the last Pycon, high up in UK curriculum writing, here's a
page on the guy):
http://tizard.stanford.edu/groups/sociality/wiki/d4276/Visiting_Professorship_(Kingston_University).html