September 2009

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szabgab: (Default)
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 06:37 pm
I seem to be totally distracted from any actual work I should do. I have plenty of project I need to make progress and I think I managed to write two small scripts.

For some time I have been thinking on a game that would be built on to teach children and grownup to program. Something based on the same idea as http://scratch.mit.edu/ but with a direct translation to a programming language.
Last week I started to play around with SDL_Perl ( http://sdl.perl.org/ ) and make some sample scripts but then I got stuck as suddenly I realized I'll have to implement such basic widgets as a directory browser widget. It might be a cool project but I am not sure I am ready for such an adventure. So two days ago I decided I try to see if I can draw anything using WxPerl but the documentation is lacking and I did not have an example on how to do things. With the level of distractions I have now it took me the whole day till I managed to write a sample script to drag an image around the window.

Anyway, it is done now and I am heading home.
szabgab: (Default)
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 05:47 am
A few weeks ago my son attended a summer day-camp where they played with various kinds of robots. If I understood him the most interesting was the LEGO Mindstorms and of course he wants me to buy one for him. The problem is that it is very expensive (280 USD in the US + shipping)
or I might be able to buy in a local store but then I am sure it will be around 400-500 USD.

Besides the programming environment runs only on Windows and on Mac and we run Linux at home and only have Windows in a VirtualBox.

So I was wondering if there are cheaper alternatives, at least till I see that he is serious in playing with those robots.