Archive - 2011
December 11th
How to Invite All your Friends to New Years' Eve
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/11/2011 - 14:38I want this New Years' Eve to be one to remember, so I've been thinking about how to invite all my friends to a giant New Years' Eve party. Currently, I have 2,226 friends on Facebook, so I need to do something special.
First, the little house we're renting just isn't big enough for 2,226 people to come to, even if they come at different times. So, I needed to find some other party worth going to and worth inviting all my friends.
The Community Health Center where I work is a lead sponsor of Middnight on Main, a large First Night style New Years' Eve event in Middletown, CT. There are a lot of great acts and events that will be there.
As the Social Media Manager for CHC, I'm helping get the word out on Facebook and and Facebook has been particularly interesting.
While there are many different events that will take place at Middnight on Main, we decided to create one large overarching event for the whole evening. The question becomes, how do we invite everyone.
I could go through and click on each friend, one after another, but with 2,226 friends, that would take a while. However, there are people who have written about how to invite all your friends at once. This blog post is one of the better descriptions of the process. I've tested it in Chrome and Safari and it has worked for me, with a few special things to note.
First, it is based on Javascript, so you need to make sure you have Javascript enabled when you do this. If you are using Chrome, you need to make sure that 'javascript:' is at the start of the address line before you hit enter, or that you've turned off searching from the address bar. Otherwise, it will search for that phrase out on the web, instead of selecting all your friends.
Also, as noted in the updates, be sure to scroll down to the end of your friends list before running the script. Otherwise, it will only get the first fifty to one hundred friends.
The next thing to note. Since this is an event in Connecticut, it probably doesn't make sense to invite many of my international friends. I did invite some while I was testing, and others because I figured they would do a good job of helping spread the word. However, I really wanted to target the invitation to all of my local friends.
This is really fairly simple if you've started playing with lists. I've not been all that impressed with lists, so far. However, if you go to invite friends and click on Search By Name, you get the ability to select people in various lists. When you have the list up, you can run the same Javascript to invite just the people in that list.
Since I haven't done a lot with lists, my lists aren't still all that great, but I used this to invite a bunch of people that I thought would be interested, and for some lists, adding a special message to target my invitation.
December 10th
Woodbridge Referendum: Sale of Public Land
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/10/2011 - 18:16On Tuesday, residents of Woodbridge will go to the polls to make an important decision. An editorial in the Milford-Orange Bulletin, in support of the deal, Toll Brothers is good deal for town, puts it this way:
Will they approve a plan to help pay for a major track of open space by selling a small portion, or will they opt to wait for a possible better offer that does not currently exist and potentially miss this chance to secure the future of the parcel?
They conclude,
When facing this major decision, Woodbridge voters should rest assured that their elected leaders have done their homework, put together a very good plan, and are presenting it to the town’s citizens for their approval. This makes the choice much easier: The Bulletin supports a Yes vote.
James Urbano, who Manta lists as owner of F & J Urbano CO Builders in Woodbridge, “private company which is listed under home builders”, and is listed on the town website as a member of the Conservation Commission has a letter in the Bulletin, Vote No on land sale, which starts off,
The Boards of Finance and Selectmen claim that “Woodbridge tax rates will climb significantly” if townspeople say “No” to Toll Bros. It’s unfortunate that town officials have resorted to scare tactics. The sale is not good for Woodbridge.
I have only made it to the special town meeting on the topic, and so my information is based on what was presented there. I also serve on the town’s Government Access Television commission and the commission has started sharing recordings of some town meetings on YouTube on the WGATV 79 YouTube Channel.
I encourage all the residents of Woodbridge to read both the Editorial in favor of the land sale and the letter in opposition to the land sale. I then encourage you to watch the videos of the town meetings. The meetings are long and are broken into segments to fit onto YouTube. Then, once you are informed about the issue, be sure to get to the Center on the 13th to vote.
December 9th
Free Computer Gifts for Kids
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 12/09/2011 - 19:53Brent Knowles has a blog post up, GIVING THE GIFT OF PROGRAMMING (OR: HOW DID YOU LEARN TO CODE?) in which he asks about how to get his nephew programming. I started to write a long response as a comment, but then decided it would be better as a blog post.
I was about ten years old when I learned to program. I used paper tape on a proprietary language called Focal, which was DECs equivalent to Basic. I ran this on a PDP-8. Later, I started programming on punch cards in Fortran and PL/I.
I have three daughters, and I've always told them they are free to play any computer game they could write. The older two, who are now 21 and 18 started in a couple different versions of Logo. I think Logo is a great language for kids ten and under to start on. For a free version, they used MSWLogo, which was a good start. At school, they used MicroWorlds from LCSI. It is a very nice implementation of Logo for schools. Later on, I introduced them to a little bit of Basic as well as to MOO programming.
MOOs, or Muds Object Oriented, were text based virtual worlds with a great object oriented design. I set up my own MOO which I encouraged them to create things in. What is great about MOOs is that they are like text based multiuser RPGs and the kids could program and then interact with the program and with friends in the Virtual Worlds.
If I were to go down a similar route today, I might consider having the kids start in OpenSim, which is an open source three dimensional virtual world, a little bit like World of Warcraft, but even more like Second Life, in that players can create their own objects and program them.
However, I've spent more time encouraging my youngest to learn variants of Smalltalk. In particular, I've loaded various versions of Squeak. These include Scratch, EToys and Croquet. I found EToys very similar to good old Logo and so I tend to encourage that. Croquet was an early attempt at a multi-user virtual world environment based on Squeak. It has now morphed into Open Cobalt, which I really haven't had time to experiment with.
So, depending on the age and interest, these days, I'd probably start with EToys and perhaps move to Open Cobalt. As an aside, I've managed to run Squeak on my N900 cellphone, which was a fun challenge.
Beyond that, I believe three dimensional modeling is becoming more and more important, so I'd recommend encouraging kids to play a little bit in Google SketchUp. There is a simple free version. For kids that really get into that, I'd encourage them to play with Blender.
I'd also encourage kids to explore GIMP, a free open source image manipulation program, similar to photoshop, and to explore audacity for audio editing.
If, on the other hand, the kid is more interested in web pages, I'd start off with a combination of PHP and CSS. You can do a lot of fun stuff in PHP and it can be fun for kids to see what you can do with it. CSS can help you make it look prettier. I've never warmed up all that much to javascript, but I'd consider that for subsequent topics, as well as MySQL. MySQL and PHP together can be very powerful and you can do a lot of neat things. MySQL also is a good way to start teaching data concepts.
So, that is my fairly quick but long set of suggestions.
December 8th
2011 Still Life
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 12/08/2011 - 21:34One of my writing themes for this year has been about living your life as if you were living the great American novel, or at least a collection of great American short stories. It reflects the medium I am most comfortable with, the written word. Yet I know others that are more comfortable with visual representations, or music, and there are times that I stare at the blank screen, trying to conjure words for things I just can’t find words for.
Recently, many sites are coming up with their retrospectives on 2011. I look through the images and videos. I listen to the music, and I wonder how to pull all of it together. I remember during the beginning of the Iraq war, people defending the war suggesting it would lead to an outbreak of democracy across the Middle East. As we prepare to leave Iraq, we can look back at the Arab Spring. What role did the Iraq war play in this?
I also remember climate change activists talking about who climate change would bring about food riots and more severe weather patterns. What role did food riots play in the Arab Spring? What role did climate change play in the rough weather we had in 2011?
Then, there were the people predicting the end of the world; if not this year, then the next. Looking at war and political unrest, at earthquakes and extreme weather, it is easy to wonder if these are signs of the end times.
As I look at the economic turmoil in Europe, and the failure of leaders in Europe, here in the United States in our Congress, and across the world to address growing income disparities, and the unrest that comes from economic woes, I have to wonder where we are headed. Is this another warning of the end times? Will the economic unrest grow and lead us to another World War? Will Internet based communications change the way we deal with these large issues?
I look back to art, to words, images, and music. 2011 Still Life. Yes, despite the predictions at the end of 2011, there is still life, and perhaps it could be represented in some sort of image.
Perhaps a Twenty First Century Guernica, with images of uprisings and tsunamis, of storms and of pepper spray. Perhaps as the year comes to an end, we need an image of honey badger taking out Father Time, and because no internet image is complete without it, we need kittens and double rainbows. So intense.
December 7th
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 12/07/2011 - 17:47
