This is the second of my "Python Pals" short stories. They're designed to be solve-it-yourself puzzle stories to help kids learn the basics of programming. All feedback welcome! The Python Pals Write A Wrong Poppy's mother, Ada, was not happy. "I don't care about that," she shouted down the phone, "Why am I always the one who has to pick up the pieces?" She carried on ranting. Penny and Poppy were sat in the lounge. Even though the TV volume was quite high, they could still hear snatches…
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As part of the Parliament and Internet Conference, there was a panel discussion about 4G networks. These are my notes on the session. I've applied the Chatham House Rule - mostly because I can't remember who said what, rather than any backroom skulduggery. Any errors are mine and mine alone. Neither Vodafone nor EE have signed up to the Network Neutrality pledge. O2 have. (Disclaimer, I work for Telefonica, these thoughts are my own.) The Open Internet Code of Practice is the Government’s n…
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No one would have believed in the first years of the twenty-first century that the online world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences lesser than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various blogs they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a woman with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went twittering and facebooking over…
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As mentioned earlier, I've been inspired by the Byte Brothers to create a mystery story which kids have to solve using their l33t h4x0r skillz in Python. This is loosely based on The Byte Brothers Go to a Getaway, by Lois and Floyd McCoy. My well-thumbed copy was printed in 1984. I'm not sure when I got it, but I remember being around 8 or 9 when I first started writing programs in BASIC. Sadly, BASIC is as outdated as the Lascaux Cave Paintings, so I've written this in more friendly…
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I'm currently getting involved in the Coding For Kids scene. I'm setting up a workshop in my local library to teach kids programming - specifically, the MIT language Scratch. I've been left slightly dissatisfied with the unstructured nature of the Scratch teaching materials. While it's quite fun to teach a cat to dance - it doesn't seem to be building up to anything. I'm also working with AppsForGood - it's a project run in secondary schools which aims to get students to research, design, and …
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As we enter another NaBloPoMo - where I try to write a blog post each day in Novemeber - I thought I'd take a look back at how this blog has developed. On Friday, October 30, 2009, I switched on WordPress statistics so I could get a better idea of what was popular on my site. My average traffic back then was 80 visits per day. Not bad for a backwater blog. Since then, my writing has been getting better (I hope), my content has become more interesting, and I've had several stories which have…
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