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Monthly Archives: June 2008

Advice on writing teachpacks

Here is some advice on writing teachpacks for PLT’s DrScheme. About teachpacks: Teaching languages are small subsets of a full programming language. While such restrictions simplify error diagnosis and the construction of tools, they also make it impossible (or at least difficult) to write some interesting programs. To circumvent this restriction, it is possible to [...]

XO Critical Configuration 1

Until a recent trip, I hadn’t used the XO very hard, or configured it at all. Before heading out, I read Bill’s article and found some real gems that, along with my own preferences, make using the XO a much more pleasurable experience. They follow: Disable the terrible hot-corner feature Disable Alt-Tab to the Journal [...]

An image viewer for the XO

Feh is the only image viewer that is both easy to install and use on the XO. I never thought I would use the XO as an image viewer until I found how convenient it was to pass around to folks in lieu of a much larger laptop.

Conference Paper Word Templates

Back when my co-worker and I were preparing some white-papers (the research was the hard part), we decided to present them in “conference paper layout” initially. SIGPLAN provides some such templates for MS Word here. Alternately, here are some local copies: sigplanconf.dot sigplanconf-varsize.dot

OLPC XO OS build 703 changes

OLPC XO OS build 703 has at least two significant changes: The first is that it automatically suspend when closed, with this caveat: the system can’t suspend when the USB bus is in use by an external device (unless it’s a USB mass storage device and has been fully allowed to write any cached info [...]

S24 FORTHdrive

This article led me to IntellaSys, which offers this tiny little 24-core CPU that runs Forth code!

Typed Scheme

Typed Scheme is a typed dialect of PLT Scheme. It integrates with modules written in other PLT dialects, and provides a type system designed to support common Scheme idioms. Typed Scheme is a pretty neat language because it can can both use and be used by (untyped) Scheme code in PLT Scheme.

Updated: How to Learn Programming

See here

The XO was made for its creators

After using the OLPC XO heavily for the past three weeks for web browsing, pdf reading, and educational game playing (by my 5 year old nephew), I can’t help me get the feeling that the XO was made for its creators, and not for children. Now don’t get me wrong, I love the thing; but [...]

colorForth

colorForth is a redesign of [Forth] for the 21st century. It also draws upon a 20-year evolution of minimal instruction-set microprocessors. Now implemented on modern PCs, it runs stand-alone without an operating system. Applications are recompiled from source with a simple optimizing compiler. It is the child of Chuck Moore, the creator of Forth.