While looking through a book on amazon, I was led to Peter Norvig's site, and to a short, interesting essay. At the bottom of that essay, it lists two languages I haven't run into before, Alice and Squeak. OK, I have sorta seen Squeak before, since I knew it was part of the One Laptop Per Child project, but that's about it. The OLPC is a pretty cool idea, and I'd kinda like to get one (and give one). But it's not much more than a toy until it supports Java... and I'd need it to support Java so that the kids could use it to play Runescape (i.e. use it as a toy!).

Teresa is also looking for a way to teach some kids programming as part of the robotics club she's mentoring. Perhaps one of these languages would work....

Some months ago, I first heard about a new magazine called Make. Well, the other night, we saw it on the shelf at Borders. It had a lot of cool stuff in it. For me, the most interesting article was about putting together a cheap satellite dish for free TV. For Teresa, it was how to build a windmill for generating electricity. Now we both have some summer projects. Since Teresa plans to watch the kids at home this summer, maybe they'll pitch in too!

In the first issue, there was an article on how to make a video stablizer for $14. If you've looked at my skiing videos, you probably think I need to build one!

Scott and Tim just can't stop playing/programming with Stagecast Creator. As a parent, you always need something that your kids really love. You need it so that you can threaten them with its removal. Programming is now the drug of choice. Removing it causes withdrawal symptoms. Threat of removal gets instant compliance.

Sarcasm aside, I'll have to post one of their games soon. The artwork could use some work, but the "tar monsters" and "ninja stars" seem to keep them happy.

Well, I read a paper the other day about teaching programming to elementary school kids, and it mentioned Stagecast Creator as one of the tools it looked at. It actually seems pretty similar to AgentSheets, but it's more polished, costs only $50, and has a 120 day free trial. The programming is more "by example" (you move things around by dragging them, rather than writing code).

The boys and I spent an hour each of the past two evenings going through the tutorials. They really like it, and the only frustration has been that the tutorials hold your hand so strongly that you can't experiment while you're playing with them. That may be a good thing.

This week Timmy, has really been bugging me to teach him to program. He wants to write a video game. Hmmm.... I guess I'd rather he spent his time writing video games than playing them!

One of his questions was how to create a window. Well, he got a bit of an introduction to Interface Builder. Now he wants to work on his program all the time!

Anyhow, I've been playing with AgentSheets a little. This is software by Alex Repenning that started out at CU back when I was there too. It looks pretty interesting, but only has a 10 day evaluation, and costs $100. That's really steep in my view. And honestly, it doesn't look much different than it did back in the early 90's. There's what looks to be a newer version for Windows, but nothing on the site says how it's different from the Mac version. Sigh....

The latest issue of Wired magazine has an article on the next version of LEGO Mindstorms (also see the nxtbot blog). I caught Tim reading it, so I did too. Looks very interesting, but they won't be coming out until August or so. That's a bummer. It would be really nice to have them for the beginning of summer since it's likely that the boys will be staying home a good deal of the time.

Of course, I should probably be talking to Steve Richards about all this. He's an old friend from RSI, and started a company called Acroname Inc. Time to invite him to lunch.

Teresa and I have been trying to figure out how to teach our kids programming. We spent last night's dinner talking to Scott and Tim about bits and bytes, storing characters, and binary arithmetic. The term "Unicode" even came up.

But we really don't know how to get things started.

Someone at work recently pointed me at James Gosling's blog. In an old post, he talks about BlueJ. Perhaps that's the right direction.

Also, back in grad school, there were a couple of projects going on that were geared towards kids. I need to go figure out what all that was again. (And see what's been happening since!)

No, I don't actually have any New Year's Resolutions. Should I? No, I don't think so.

But I am human, and I do have goals that change over time. I want to be healthier. And I want to play around in the new internet.

A few months ago, I found myself helping out on a secret project at work. No, I can't talk about it. There have been plenty of rumors about it out on the web. All I'll say is it's another geek tool. But it did inspire me to learn some new things. Much to Teresa's chagrin, I bought a new iMac G5. (A bit of a mistake as it turns out, but I still love the machine.) On it I've been playing with and learning about Web 2.0, and all that other stuff. I've started this blog. More interestingly (at least to me and perhaps people inside Apple), I've started an internal blog on what I'm working on now (which I also can't talk about). That blog is intended to be my modern replacement for an engineering notebook.

More things I want to learn about:
- More HTML/CSS/JavaScript (aka Ajax)
- Core Data
- Unit Testing (Not much to learn here. It's a matter of practice!)
- Ruby on Rails

But mostly I want to work a little harder at keeping up with what's going on technically in the world. Towards that end, I've started listening to a few podcasts. My favorite is probably This Week in Tech. I love to listen to John C. Dvorak piss and moan about how everything sucks.