Category: Links

Don’t tell me what your website’s name means

If your website’s name doesn’t make immediate sense, and you don’t have a good explanation for it, _please_ don’t tell me how you came up with it. Here are two websites with decently cool-sounding names, until you read why they chose these names:-

Asian tech news site [Penn Olson](http://www.penn-olson.com/about-us/):

> Starting the blog with just a few people was tough, so when we considered a name, we liked the idea of having some mythical partners to guide us on our journey. We created Penn-Olson, because blogging is essentially ‘penning ones thoughts’ and ‘Olson’ was a somewhat arbitrary addition, but it sounded (like) awesome.

I like what they do as a news site, but this paragraph just takes all the mystique from their name and throws it in the laundry.

[__Update__: Someone told me a few days later this para is gone. Good for them!]

Classifieds site [ST701](http://www.st701.com/aboutus.html):

> ST701 carries the initials of The Straits Times. The numbers “701” convey what the user will experience: 7 days a week search at the 01 place that matters.

The user will “experience” search _seven whole days a week_, guys!* At the _zero-one place that matters_! Thanks, ST701, now my forehead is sore from all that self-inflicted slapping.

Yes, this was written by someone who calls his company [Tinkertanker](http://tinkertanker.com). No, I’m not saying how we came up with that name. (Yes, that means we don’t have a good explanation for it.)

\* I guess that’s better than a [social media account](http://sg.news.yahoo.com/blogs/singaporescene/smrt-lot-more-learn-social-media-063406182.html) that, until recently, ran Mondays to Fridays, 9am-6pm, excluding public holidays.

The maker movement in education

An interview with Dale Dougherty, co-founder of O’Reilly Media and [MAKE magazine](http://makezine.com). Tim O’Reilly sums it up:

“When you see kids at Maker Faire suddenly turned on to science and math because they want to make things, when you see them dragging their parents around with eyes shining, you realize just how dull our education system has made some of the most exciting and interesting stuff in the world.

Dougherty explains in detail the promise of the maker movement in education (and government). Pretty inspiring.

CodeRunner

CodeRunner is a Mac app that lets you:

Edit and run code in AppleScript, C, C++, Java, JavaScript (Node.js), Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Shell or any other language you might have installed on your system.

This could be really useful for programming teachers — one of the big headaches we always have in the first lesson was making sure things were set up properly. There was a time we tried teaching C++, and found out that the computers’ permission settings disallowed running of _any_ shell programs, so we sang songs and dreamed of correcting missing semi-colons. Ah, fun times.

A story about a failed education web app

The story of someone spending a year building, selling and giving up on [Knack](http://knackforteachers.com/), an online grade book for teachers. Some interesting lessons learnt, including this part about why his app failed:

Teachers say they love tech. Some blog about it. They tweet about it in #edchat and #edtech. They even coin their own special tech terms. This is a farce. Talking about tech and being on _the Twitter_ make teachers look good to administrators and to the public. They can add “Technology Committee Member” to their resumes and congratulate themselves for being innovative. But using tech to do work requires a small minimum of effort and change, and any amount of these is too much for teachers.

Overly harsh, but true*. There’s a good debate about this on the [Hacker News thread](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3024147), where the writer clarifies what he meant in a comment: that he’d made a mistake assuming teachers would pay for a tool that they had to spend time acclimatising to.

\* I say this as a former “Technology Committee Member” and a current app developer.

By the way, tech posts are generally cross-posted to the [company blog](http://tinkertanker.tumblr.com), along with pictures and videos of us [doing stupid things](http://tinkertanker.tumblr.com/post/10272286361/tinkertanker-exercise-day).

If PHP Were British

Before:

switch ($variable) {
    case $option1:
        //Code here
        break;
    case $option2:
        //Code here
        break;
    default:
        //Code here
        break;
}

After:

what_about (£variable) {
    perhaps £possibility:
        //Code here
        splendid;
    perhaps £other_possibility:
        //Code here
        splendid;
    on_the_off_chance:
        //Code here
        splendid;
}

Chipper!

Fraser Speirs on 1-to-X computing

A supercomputer in every backpack:

We are already at a point where the ratio of professionals to computers is 1:2. A laptop and a smartphone are standard equipment in our society. With the advent of the tablet, we may be moving towards or beyond three computers per person. The fact of the matter, though, is that this ubiquity of computing devices is not reflected in most schools.

(There’s also a bit about how Stallman showed up to heckle him at his lecture. Wha?)