Screaming Penguin

Today is "Thank a Teacher Day." I can't agree more with "Education as the Silver Bullet," but I have that, and a larger rant stewing. But I want to thank a teacher today: Nancy Riley, my fourth grade teacher.

Ada Lovelace Day has come back around. This year I would like to draw your attention to someone who certainly had a big impact on my childhood and certainly the industry, if not Computer Science: Roberta Williams along with her husband, founded Sierra Online, and was a primary designer and programmer on a number of now classic games, not the least of which was King's Querst, which might be Sierra's signature title. These were the heady young days of the personal computer revolution. Ken and Roberta started producing games for the Apple II. Their frist game, "Mystery House" was a Christie-style murder mystery and was the first game to combine the play of a text adventure with graphics. It sold 11,000 copies and netted the couple a cool $300,000. While that might be a rounding error for the modern gaming industry, it was hugely successful for the time. Roberta went on to create TWENTY EIGHT more games over the next 24 years and established Sierra as one of the leading game developers in the world. She also posed as the titlular character on the cover of "Mixed-Up Mother Goose", below.

Somehow I missed the announcement yesterday but the Android source code has finally been released: http://source.android.com/. Guess they finally got all the French swear words out of the source ;). Now if they could just get all of the stupid damn leading "m"s for member vars (Hungarian notation crap), I might swear less when I work with it.

So this is mostly a Ga Tech joke, but it totally rules.

These people are friggin morons. (The question there is "What orbits the Earth?")

MathEclipse Wow. I talked with the developer of this a few times, back when it was actually Eclipse plugin focused and just starting to grow AJAX feelers. Now its GWT based and its pretty much cool as hell. Check out some 3D plots, yes it uses GWT in conjunction with an applet for the graphics, but man its nice.

This from News.com:

This fall, incoming freshmen at Virginia Polytechnic Institute's engineering school will be given tablet PCs--and will be required to use them in class, the school has announced. As part of a new partnership with Fujitsu Computer Systems and Microsoft, Virginia Tech will be using new Fujitsu LifeBook T4000 computers to change the way its engineering classes are taught, particularly at the introductory level, the school said. It will be amon

New software from NASA:

NASA FREE COMPUTER MODEL AVAILABLE TO CLASSROOMS A free NASA global climate model is available for high school and university desktop computers. The Educational Global Climate Model (EdGCM), available for both Windows and Mac platforms, incorporates a 3-D climate model developed at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), New York. It wraps complex computer modeling programs with a graphical interface familiar to most PC users. The climate model runs on a desktop computer to allow teachers and students to conduct experiments id