It's Halloween and for the first time in 21 years, I'm not at work in costume. It all began as a lark in October 1994: <div align="center"> <a href="/img/2013-10-31-halloween/groo.jpg" rel="lightbox"> <img width="30%" src="/img/2013-10-31-halloween/groo.jpg" class="" alt="" /> </a> </div> And grew from there. A partial list of characters include: Groo the Wanderer, Little Ceaser (Pizza Pizza) The Jolly Green Giant Homer Simpson (with my seniors as the rest of the cast) Duffman Hans and Franz (with Boris) The Hulk The Blues Brothers (with JonAlf) Dr.

If you know me you know that my morning reads include a visit over to avc.com, Today, Fred's post talked about development and progress, evolution, if you would, in the city. Although not directly related, it got me thinking about gentrification. To me, gentrification all too often seems to result in pushing out people and business that were there during the hard times. We don't need to force out long time residents that can no longer make rent - we need to uplift communities with pathways to towards greater economic opportunity.

I'm working on getting enough of my real configuration into this series so that I can dump my current one and use this one all them time and grow it back up an episode at a time. I think we're almost there. This time, we're looking at a few small packages that I use all the time. Highlight line Mode (global-hl-line-mode t) this turns on highlight line mode. It makes it easy to see the line the cursor's on.

This past weekend was Catskills Conf, one of my favorite events of the year. Last year, Devorah joined me and also enjoyed the show. If you know my wife, you know she's always knitting. Ok, not true, she's always knitting, spinning, weaving or performing some other form of fiber craft. I can't complain. That's how I ended up with my Kandinsky, Dust Puppy and Yoda sweaters and my awesome Kang and Kodos socks.

Waking up to a beautiful brisk morning at the Ashokan Center in the Hudson Valley. Last year, Devorah and I attended the first Catskillsconf, a tech conference in Olivebridge, NY. It was an amazing and unique experience. I can only describe it as Tech Conference meets Summer camp. Where else can you hear talks by people like Dennis Crowley and an alos hear the music of Mike and ruthy.

Second video in the Flask series. This one goes over installing Flask in a virtualenv and running a simple Flask application. Nothing much to say about this other then check out the video:

Those laptops that my Hunter students were supposed to get have finally arrived. We're distributing them on Monday. Each student will have a Dell laptop running Ubuntu 16.04 for as long as they're in the program. This means we can finally start using the web as a way of displaying and sharing our projects. For this type of web development, I'm a big fan of using Flask. Flask is a Python microframework.

If you use emacs, you should keep an eye on Jon Snader's blog, irreal.org. A few days he posted on Undo Tree - a package that extends Emacs's built in undo functionality. Basic emacs has undo, bound to C-/ or C-_ but that's about it. Undo tree, which you can set up with: (use-package undo-tree :ensure t :init (global-undo-tree-mode)) adds two key features. First is redo, which you get by adding the shift key to the undo keychords.

The discussion today over on AVC was Chromebooks in K12, a title I conveniently lifted. In the comments, I was asked my thoughts on chromebooks vs Linux on low end hardware so, here they are. Chromebooks are cheap, near instant on, and, if you're using Google Apps for education, little to no administration necessary. This is a HUGE win for schools. There are some issues. School WiFi, for example, is frequently insufficient which can be a problem for a device that's meant to be connected to the cloud.

I'm way behind on my Communications of the ACM. I generally only read them when I use my trainer in the mornings and with summer running and outside riding, I'm still on the December 2015 issue. This morning, I read a viewpoint by Jeremy Scott and Alan Bundy on a program in Scotland. If you're an ACM member, and if you're a CS practitioner, student, academic, or teacher you should be, you can read the piece for details.