This post has nothing to do with computer science, teaching, education, policy or any of the other typical Cestlaz topics. Natan wrote this last week and it really gave me a chuckle. I thought some of you might enjoy it so here it is: UPDATE Apparently, if you view this on mobile it asks if you want to download the story every time so I changed it from an inline iframe to a link:

I'm guessing my views on this aren't very popular -that's OK, every community needs a curmudgeon. A few years ago, I cautioned if we weren't careful, once the big players got involved, CS Ed would go the way of other disciplines, and not in a good way. It looks like indeed we're well on our way down that road. I've ranted before about things like non-profits, drop in and summer programs.

Like many of my fellow bloggers and tweeters, I generally keep this site clear of political issues with the exception of those that are directly related to education. Also, like many of my fellow bloggers and tweeters, this week has provided a reason to break with that tradition. Many people, including some friends, all more eloquent than I have already posted, tweeted, and Facebooked about the behavior of our President and government.

While I use emacs for all all sorts of things, one of the things I haven't done much is run shells from within emacs. I'm not sure why. I'm a command line wonk and adding command line goodness and emacs together seems like a natural. Maybe it's because back in the day I spent a lot of time on MS-DOS systems. You could get a reasonable Unixy facsimile using tools like the MKS toolkit and I like so many other young computer scientists wrote our own small shells when we learned C so I used that insted of command.

What essential topics should we teach in our intro courses? This seems to be a recurring topic recently. It can be an important topic but, unfortunately, too often, it seems that people have too myopic a view I remember thinking about this years ago when APCS moved from C++ to Java. Both languages have good and bad points both for practical and educational use. A big loss in the move to Java was memory management and the topics you could cover when memory issues arose.

A while ago I did a couple of videos on how I use org-capture (part 1, part 2). I didn't get into a big part of org-capture - how I use org-mode and capture to manage my calendar and todo lists. I was waiting to see if I liked my current setup - using org-gcal to sync with my Google Calendar for appointments while using my main org file for my todo list.

Over on Facebook, a friend commented on my last post. He commented on the rigor of BA vs BS degrees. The comment mentioned Physics and Math degrees but I thought Id follow up a bit on CS degrees. I took a quick look at three computer science programs - Cornell, UMich, and Queens College. Cornell because my daughter is there, UMich, my son, and Queens College because it's a CUNY college that offers both a BS and a BA in computer science.

I didn't know Hunter College had computer science. I heard that refrain more than once during my fall visits to high schools. Part of the reason for this is due to Hunter CS's low profile and small size in spite of its high quality. Part, though, was also because of some misconceptions about Computer Science programs. I'd hear things like "but they only offer a BA not a BS," or "but Hunter isn't an engineering school.

Today's video talks about using emacs Tramp mode. Tramp mode allows you to edit remote files using your local emacs. I usually do this over ssh. To edit a file on a machine www.cstuy.org I would first find-file using C-c C-f and then for the file name to open: /ssh:www.cstuy.org:/home/zamansky/sc/testfile this would open the file testfile in the absolute directory /home/zamansky/sc. If my username on the remote machine is different:

We're now at the end of my first semester at Hunter. The Spring term classes don't start until the end of January. I've got an assortment of projects to work on but some of the students should have a nice block of relatively free time. I wanted to share some recommendations on things to explore with a few student groups and thought it would be easier to write those recommendations down here once and then just share a link.