[Edu-sig] update from Silicon Forest

[kirby urner]

Thank you Wes for all those excellent bookmarks, reminded me of when the
Web was little more than personal pages, by those knowing enough HTML to
hand code, and giving bookmarks (links) to other favorite places.

That's value added for sure. This was pre search engine of any real power,
so all the more so were these "sign posts" needed in Wild West days (W2 vs
WWW or W3 -- name collisions I'm sure, so create a namespace, would ya?).

Anyway,

http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2017/01/embedded-codester-apps.html

(interested for whom it doesn't work, and also notice the turtle only
sometimes draws the vertical bar to the hexagon (red), and per the penup
and pendown code, to my eyes never should).

... might be interesting to some educators here.

I'm showing off embedded Codester applications ("") written in an MIT
Scratch like environment, deliberately so. For continuity. Kids get started
in Scratch and transition to Codesters. The Python community oughta take
note, cuz Codesters is Python (3.x).

Windy day in PDX, I woke up respecting pilots (as in airplane pilots, but
of course shipping can be hazardous also, not forgetting about trucking...
huge pile up in California, like 50 vehicles... ). Speaking of trucking,
that's another area where FoxPro has shined, the language I used prior to
becoming a Python user (in spatial geometry mainly) and teacher (for
O'Reilly, for Saisoft, for Coding with Kids).

I'm sharing data about roller coasters in .csv format, comparing .csv to
.json as data exchange formats. I'm talking about my night class, for
adults, already deep into IT. Last night was "the API economy" (Apigee got
swallowed up by Google awhile back, I noticed that).  Front end: lots of
eye candy, HTML + CSS a high art. Back end: straight data in bulk,
wholesale, not really for human eyes though we like readability in
principle (XML, JSON -- all those (but then XML might have huge chunks of
munged binary data right, like base64? -- lots of "text" is just binary in
disguise let's be clear).

We use the csv reader object in the module by that name. I have them on
Anaconda, using 3.5 -- I can boot up 3.6 and showcase features without
asking them to have it locally.

Back to trucking, I'm thinking of a coder, even older than me, with an
extremely sharp intellect. I write about him in my blog here and there,
transportation engineer by training. He has some C kernel code that
optimizing routing better than the competition a lot of the time, around
which he's layered FoxPro (VFP), but then more and more Python over time.
Whatever I know of the trucking business is most likely through him.
Actually maybe I don't mention him by name. That's OK. Truckologists would
be able to zoom in. :-D

OK, back to my day. Codesters, then meetup with Steve Holden, former PSF
chairman and Pycon instigator (younger the EuroPython, that institution).
He's just breezing through PDX on a lark, not staying in my company, plus I
have to other guests to meet around the same time (from STL / St. Louis).
I'm hoping to have Steve on my closed circuit Python radio/TV show tomorrow
night. However he's off the hook in advance given the jet lag between PDX
and the UK. Quite noticeable, right?

Kirby
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