Teaching through Programming

When I help tutor in the labs I do my best to get people to think beyond the Java syntax.

All the basic blocks of computing are in the labs, I/O, conditional logic, sorting, and basic data structures. It's all in the problem description. As I've heard several times, this is all about solving problems. To lookup names in a phone book requires at some kind of rudimentary data structure and a way of searching it. Introduce partial string match code and maybe regular expressions and it becomes useful as you don't have to remember the full name.

The flashes of insight people get when things start to work make me see why teaching is a rewarding profession. It may take several hours to wade though syntax problems if they are not used to the language, but eventually I can coax a working program out of students. By reducing the problem to something manageable, it can be reduced to patterns they have encountered before, like iterating over an array. There is something to be said for code examples, given the particular syntax of Java or any language. However, there does need to be said for understanding what code means in turns of generic instructions and algorithms. Rapid cut and paste and compile development results in a mess even if you kind of know what you are doing.

Many of the students in the introductory level are in for a requirement in science or engineering rather than a major. It is indeed a good exercise in problem solving and logic. I'm of the opinion that everyone should at some point wrestle with an unforgiving logical system such as a computer program. It tends to sharpen your analytical skills.

Posted at 11:08AM Nov 20, 2007 by jpmahowald in Java  |  Comments[0]

IcedTea

I've been following the evolution of Linux distros, particularly Red Hat ones. One thing they historically lack is a nice JRE. Sun's was not redistributable for the longest time, resulting in a confusion of instructions of how to install Java. When gcc gained Java capabilities through gcj, and classpath evolved as a decent class library, things looked good. But it wasn't mature. The generics branch and networking lagged in particular. Downloading torrents in Azureus wasn't fun, for example. jpackage.org attempted to come up with some packages, but sometimes just confused the matter, as you had to build them.

Enter OpenJDK. Well, something based on OpenJDK. IcedTea. IcedTea builds OpenJDK, replacing some parts with classpath. I'm not entirely sure what bits are replaced, but it's enough to satisfy Fedora's requirements for being free. So as a result on that distro in Fedora 8 I'll be able to "yum install java-plugin" and get a JRE complete with browser plugin. So much easier. I very much look forward to giving this simple solution to people wanting to install Java on Linux. Many thanks to all those that made it possible.

Posted at 11:41PM Oct 10, 2007 by jpmahowald in Java  |  Comments[2]

Cramer!

Was watching Mad Money when what do I see but the JAVA symbol. It came up in the lightning round and he was behind Sun, for the first time apparently. In general, he was rather bullish on the tech stocks, Cisco and Google both made the picks. Although Microsoft not so much.

I'm sure there are other places I could get financial picks from, but they're not nearly as... animated.

Posted at 09:50PM Sep 13, 2007 by jpmahowald in Sun  |  Comments[1]

Blackbox deployed to Scientific American

Well, not really. It did make the most recent issue, however, in an article entitled Datacenter in a Box. I was pleasantly surprised at SciAm doing some IT journalism. Historically I subscribe to it to keep up on research advances in a broad range of fields, from nanotechnology to cosmology.

The background and history is interesting. Clearly, since everything else gets shipped in a container, if you want to get a big computer somewhere, you stuff it in one of those boxes. But as you don't have to unpack it, it ends up being like a laptop, just plug it in. To a 600 amp circuit (far more than my house), 60 gallon per minute chilled water, and a large Internet pipe.

And from what I read the containers are actual repurposed containers. Good! That'll save a lot of metal. However you engineer the computers, though, they'll still suck large amounts of power. You could truck one over to a wind farm though! Yes I know of the electrical grid but lately it seems a major challenge to expanding the power grid is running the wires. All kinds of things are possible if you can just pick things up and move them.

And of course I can dream about what kind of use I would put one two if I had my own data center in a box. Probably set up several open source mirrors with some storage, and donate compute time to worthy causes like protien folding.

Posted at 09:29PM Jul 16, 2007 by jpmahowald in Sun  |  Comments[0]

OpenOffice.org Mac port

I get work done on my Mac, including working with word processing and spreadsheet documents. I'm not about to pay for Microsoft Office. I do wish I could get OpenOffice.org on Mac, so I can have a consistent office suite across Solaris, Linux, Windows, and Macintosh.

NeoOffice ports the interface to Java, and it works, but it seems almost a fork and not a port. It'd be nice if OpenOffice.org itself was Mac.

And it looks like there is. Sun's joining the OpenOffice.org Mac port effort. On first glance I wished they would work with the NeoOffice developers, but it seems there is also a license issue, of GPLed code back to OpenOffice LGPL. I hope there isn't much duplication of effort. In the end I really would like a functional and good looking suite for my use, and also for school. There are several Mac labs about campus that could use some open source software like OpenOffice.org.

Posted at 02:43PM May 05, 2007 by jpmahowald in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Solaris in VMware

Unfortunately I don't have a spare box lying around to install Solaris on. I'm particularly wary of using an installer I'm not familiar with on my data. It'd be nice if there was a way for me to run it virtualized.

And there is! VMware images are available to download. I suppose I could have made my own but I'm fine with just using the free player.

The edition I tried has the rather long name of Solaris Enterprise System Virtual Machine for VMware (Solaris Developer Express version) 4.0. Yikes. Really it's just build 50 something (I forget which exactly) already in a VMware format. Runs just fine with a Linux host, Fedora 6.

Posted at 05:45PM Apr 30, 2007 by jpmahowald in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[0]

Turn that bell off!

I get annoyed by terminal bells. On PC platform the beep from the internal speaker gets annoying fast. This happens especially as I scroll through output with my favorite pager less or edit with vi.

Fortunately I found an answer in the blogosphere: http://blogs.sun.com/vl/entry/turn_the_bell_off_on. There are several things to turn off.

Posted at 05:37PM Apr 30, 2007 by jpmahowald in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[0]

Java in Ubuntu

Looks like Ubuntu's working on incorporating Java technology into their software repositories. NetBeans too looks like. Yay!

I've considered Ubuntu to be good at marketing open source as easy. Their web site is well integrated and their operating system one disc. It is something you can give any computer user and they can pop in and try it. Solaris is not quite there yet in the ease of use.

If only we could have the best of all worlds, great technologies with awesome hardware support and ease of use. Until we live in such a utopia it's nice to know Java truly is cross platform and people are making it easy to get on all platforms.

Posted at 09:58AM Apr 20, 2007 by jpmahowald in Java  |  Comments[0]

Solaris vs. OpenSolaris

I finally got all the names of the releases straightened out for me thanks to the regulars on #opensolaris on irc.freenode.net. For me it is best summed up with the Fedora/Red Hat comparison:

OpenSolaris: Linux, Solaris Express: Fedora, Solaris 10: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Solaris releases contain the core operating system from OpenSolaris plus other good stuff. It's all free. You only can buy support contracts for Solaris 10, much like Fedora is community supported, it's RHEL you get support for. So if you just want to use Solaris, get Solaris 10, if you like latest and greatest, the Express release, if you want to hack on the core operating system. Although technically OpenSolaris isn't really a release, more of a few essential pieces and the community that is growing around them.

A good explanation of all the terms is here: http://whacked.net/2005/06/21/confused-so-was-i Took me a while to get used to them though.

Posted at 05:03PM Apr 14, 2007 by jpmahowald in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[6]

DTrace demo

Had a talk about DTrace yesterday with some members of the computer science club here. They were pretty receptive.

I'm glad most rooms around here have projectors. The slides made for a good prompt. It's difficult to remember all the Solaris features!

I've used Solaris a few times, and Linux and OS X before that. So a demo would be no problem. There only was a Windows box there, however. No problem, reboot into OpenSolaris Starter DVD and boot BeleniX. X never came up when I tried to start a desktop though. I think it is an earlier build, and the Intel drivers for the Dell machine weren't working. Oh well, boot into console. I use it all the time anyway, that's all I need. Conveniently the presentation setup had a splitter right out of the primary video card, so I had a monitor too.

51000 DTrace probes... that's a lot. I showed a brief example of only a couple of them. The scripts on the dtrace community site are great. (I never know how to capitalize dtrace. I'm going with lowercase as that's the command.) Some real practical commands for system administration.

And in response to the query that can dtrace be modded and customized, of course. The D language gives you the flexibility to script up your own scripts and probes.

Posted at 08:25PM Apr 13, 2007 by jpmahowald in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[0]

OpenSolaris build not free? Enter GSoC!

What!? You can't build OpenSolaris entirely from open source? But it's got open in the name!

Fortunately there is there are Summer of Code projects proposed to fix this.

I may add that most Linux distros, building on a GNU toolchain, have been built with an entirely open tool set for a while now. Good to see OpenSolaris going the same direction.

Posted at 05:47PM Mar 14, 2007 by jpmahowald in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[0]

Java history and NetBeans talk

We had Gregg Sporar and Charlie Hunt over recently to talk about Java. They were in the region while having a NetBeans technical session. A few people attended.

Got quite a bit of history on Java. Like, it was originally called Oak, the browser integration called HotJava, the rebranding as Java 2, all the way up to today. Java went on everything from mobile phones to enterprise servers. Due to the variety of environments, Java survived the swing from heavy applications to light applets and back again.

And a brief introduction to NetBeans, the development environment and platform entirely in Java. And a bunch of criticism about the main competition, Eclipse.

I'm not very familiar with either the NetBeans or Eclipse communities. I do know that there are commercial companies with an investment in the Eclipse community. Anybody who wants to can contribute in both communities. Normally I don't like precious developer attention divided into two opposing camps, but in this case I think the competition is healthy. New features in the upcoming NetBeans 6 will apparently include an improved Java editor inspired by the Eclipse editor. End result is two platforms to choose from.

Posted at 05:32PM Mar 14, 2007 by jpmahowald in Demos  |  Comments[0]

Snow!

It's snowing like crazy here in Minnesota!

I hope we get the foot or so they said we would get by the end of the week.

The only problem is how I am going to pull off the Solaris presentation with John Ruhoff today. The pizza will even be a bit late, and it only has to travel a few blocks. I hope lots of people can make it, we need people to hear about Solaris, and I can't eat all the pizza myself!

Posted at 11:20AM Mar 01, 2007 by jpmahowald in Demos  |  Comments[0]

First demo

Did my first demo a while ago. On desktop development with NetBeans.

It went OK. A few people showed up, which was something, although not as many as I'd hoped.

The demos were pretty cool. Matisse GUI editor was particularly well received, I could show them exactly how much code the were not writing.

I had some good discussion afterwards about the tool to use for beginning Java programmers. TextPad for Windows is used quite extensively. There is a certain advantage to using essentially a glorified text editor. It is simple, and with just basic Java compile scripts you get familiar with javac output. Of course, when you can handle the smaller projects graduating to NetBeans gives you lots of functionality.

Promoting these things is work, even with email.

Posted at 11:11PM Feb 20, 2007 by jpmahowald in Demos  |  Comments[0]

Collaboration looking promising

I just tried out NetBean's collaboration feature. Integrating it into the IDE is a great idea, as flipping between programs and an IM client or separate program is not productive. You spend all your time context switching.

I have not truly put it to the test yet, with two people logged in and seeing each other's changes.

In terms of code review this is huge. Integrated chat and code editing will really drive the paired programming concept.

It would be interesting to try this out when I tutor students with their Java labs. Normally I like to keep a hands off approach and describe verbally what they might try when their code doesn't work.

Posted at 02:20PM Jan 30, 2007 by jpmahowald in NetBeans  |  Comments[0]