I haven't spoken much about the class I've been teaching this semester. It's an intro CS course - a programming heavy intro. I decided to use Python with a transition at the end to C++. The transition is to mirror Hunter's normal first CS course that ends with a C++ intro to prepare the students for next semester's CS course which is a more intense OOP class using C++ - the language we use in our core courses.

This old article has been reposted a few times in my circles over the past few weeks http://educationnext.org/facadeofexcellence/. It's from 2003 and complains about the lack of flexibility schools had back then with regard to hiring and salary. The article is old and out of date and the seniority system no longer holds for hiring but it does for lay offs. The salary scale from back then, though, is still in place.

Quick post today. The video goes over web-mode - my preferred weapon for html and all the goodies you embed in an html file. It's multi-modal so it acts sensibly regardless of wether you're editing html, css, javascript or even templates in a single file. Note: In the video, web-mode wasn't automatically inserting quotes. I had to set hte following variable to fix this: (setq web-mode-enable-auto-quoting t) Giving the final configuration I'm currently using:

Another quick hit today. This video is really setting the stage for hte next two, where I talk about org-mode capturing. Today, we're demoing the use of the emacs server and client. Back in the old days, emacs took a LOOONG time to load. A complex conviguration could take on the order of 10 to 20 seconds. This resulted in people loading emacs at the start of the day and leaving it up forever.

Today's video is a bit of a follow up on the last one as well as a few miscillaneous configuration. We got some comments on alternate ways to load a file if it exists - it's always cool to see how different people end up doing similar things. We then talk about three little configurations. Two I found out about reading Jon Sander's (jcs) blog Irreal. Jon's blog is a terrific source of emacs info - if you don't subscribe, you should.

Over on Facebook, my Alma Mater and long time employer, Stuyvesant High School seems to be making a big push to up it's Regeneron Science Talent Search game. For those of you who aren't familiar, that's the latest incarnation of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search from back in my day. It seems that Stuyvesant hasn't had that many semi finalists, finalists, and winners over the past few years and isn't happy about it.

Some of the videos I want to make are going to be much easier to do if I'm working in my own account where my whole file tree is available. It's also a little annoying changing between my full emacs config and the one I'm developing here. So, I decided to move to this config for my real config and as I make more videos move parts of my old configuration over to this new one.

This post points to the next three videos in the Flask series. The first covers setting up a droplet (virtual server) on DigitalOcean. The second, deploying a flask application using Green Unicorn, and the third, using sshfs to remotely mount your files from your DO box to your local machine and how to set up DNS using FreeDNS. To help you on your way with DigitalOcean, here are links to a few of their tutorials

I meant to cover these last time but decided not to so as to keep the videos to about 10 minutes each. First up this time round is iedit - a really cool mode that lets you select all the instances of the marked selection at the same time and edit them all at once. By default it's bound to C-l. For example, let's say you had the following code:

I spent this evening as a crit advisor for this semesters Project Studio. The class is basically a finishing class for their Masters students. The class forms teams that work with a "company champion" that acts an advisor to build a product. As a Crit Advisor, I, along with two other people from the tech industry have a give and take with three groups and hopefully we can provide useful feedback.