At the Perl conference, YAPC::NA, there will be a ninety minute question and answer session with Larry Wall.

Once in a while, my daughter asks me to teach her programming. We’ve done a number of little things together, including some Python, some Scratch, and other things. When I was trying to think of what I enjoyed doing with computers around that age, one of the things I remembered was drawing. We did turtle graphics with Logo in my school, and it was nice to get instant and visual feedback of what the program did. I thought this seemed like a fun idea.

Saturday, 4th day of the Frost Moon, 937

[ update: I added a bit of an update at the end, in which I find that my fundamental worries were wrong, because the system is less convenient than I hoped! So it goes. ☹ I decided to post this anyway, because the thoughts were worth thinking, so maybe somebody else will find them interesting to see. Or not. Who even reads this thing? ]

Friday, 3rd day of the Frost Moon, 937

In 2007, I wrote code to generate RTF that syntax highlights code, using Vim’s syntax highlighting. I wrote about it in an earlier post or two. After that, I didn’t think about it much, apart from fixing a couple things once in a while or running it once every year or so.

This guest entry written by Breno, Rago’s player, who deserves great praise for doing so!

I wrote a todo for 2014, which I probably stopped thinking about roughly two weeks after writing it. Here’s a summary:

I am a lousy record keeper. I actually played Planetfall quite a while ago. August, if my filesystem is to be trusted! The problem is that I played it pretty hard, and tried to get to the end, but eventually I gave up. I knew I wasn’t too far from the end, but I just didn’t have it in me to work my way to the end. It’s the same as with Starcross, actually! And, as with Starcross, I kept deluding myself with the idae that I’d really finish it, maybe by finding a walkthrough. I didn’t.

I decided quite a while ago that I’d use some of my American Express reward points to buy a next-generation console, eventually. Once the intervals between my compulsive price-checking and review-reading grew short enough, I placed an order. This Tuesday, I received: