Month: December 2006

Florida executions halted after botched injection – CNN.com

The execution of a convicted killer took 34 minutes — twice as long as normal — because officials botched the insertion of the needles that delivered the lethal chemicals, a medical examiner said Friday.Gov. Jeb Bush responded to the findings by halting the signing of more death warrants until a commission he created to examine the state’s lethal injection process completes its final report by March 1.

Think Dubya would have let that stop him?  Maybe Jeb is adopted.  Or maybe Dubya is…

I had a couple people tell me that they intended to play around with Squeak after hearing about it, and at least one of them pronounced himself baffled.

I should clarify. I’m not messing with Squeak in general. Squeak in general is about ten dozen different things at once, mostly brilliant but in constant flux and poorly documented. One of those things is Etoys, which is the environment I was getting to know. It is a tiny part of Squeak, but it is by far the most accessible part of Squeak, and it is the part that has been most successful in being a programming/media arena available to children. Really, Etoys is not Squeak itself but something new made out of Squeak; regular Squeak programming does not involve dragging and dropping tiles!

There is a community of Etoys enthusiasts, mostly educators, headquartered at Squeakland, devoted entirely to the use of the Etoys part of Squeak. To make things easy, Squeaklanders have their own version of Squeak, which installs itself as a browser plugin, like Flash. They happily build their Etoys and share them and teach kids how to build them and all that stuff, without worrying bout the other 99% of Squeak that the hardcore smalltalk hackers play with.

The plugin is not just a player, though. It’s the whole programming environment. You can take the Etoy you’re playing with and change it around and do things with it and save a copy with your own changes, or share that new copy, or start a new etoy entirely.

I saved a copy of Goober to share, and put it on my server here, and I wanted to test it out with the browser plugin, and found out that there’s no version of the plugin made specifically for Intel macs, and you have to do some silly voodoo to make the ppc version work. Ugh. I went to Windows XP under Parallels and downloaded a copy of the browser plugin for Firefox on XP. It installed quickly & easily, and I tried to check out the goober file… and it got all errory and crashy. Turns out that what I built in the latest version of Squeak from Squeak.org isn’t really compatible with the version at squeakland.org. If I wanted something for squeakland I should have built it there.

That’s frustrating, and the fact that I can’t get an Intel mac native version of the Squeakland Etoys environment is doubly frustrating. So I’m throwing up my hands for the moment, till things change.

For an interesting, recent perspective on what EToys is all about, from Elder God Alan Kay himself, check out this recent post on the Squeakland mailing list.

Peace out.

BBC NEWS | Business | Are penalty charges bank robbery?:

Yes, they are, in the UK. It’s illegal there to charge more for a penalty/service fee than it actually costs the organization to perform the service. Like, you can’t charge 32 pounds to cover the cost of a bounced check when the highest number you can possibly document in terms of actual cost incurred to the bank is 4.50 pounds.

If this law were enacted in the U.S. it would destroy a huge sector of the American economy! A huge, evil sector. That would rock. So I’m thinking it won’t happen.

Last night I couldn’t help going back to Squeak to play with it after the kids were to bed. I decided to make a critter to play with. I drew a fat red spider with googly eyes and named it Goober.

One of the first things I made Goober do was run away. I gave him a wiggly, back-and-forth run, and I made it so that when he got to the edge of his box he’d make an almost complete turn. I set the run to start when the mouse hovered over him, and to stop when he hit the edge of his box.

It was cool… until I thoughtlessly closed the little scripting box that constituted Goober’s brain. It would be easy to get it back of course and keep programming him…….. if I could right-click on him.

I couldn’t, though. He was too fast. I spent minutes amazed that my own programming creation had escaped my power, trying to click on him and watching him get away. Every programmer has had a program run out of control, infinite loop, too-deep recursion, too-fast memory leak, whatever. It happens. But there was a uniquely personal quality to having programmed a little critter to try to get away from you and being unable to catch it because it could move faster than you could click the mouse on it.

Goober dragged a pen behind him so he left a record of his attempts to escape my right-click (screenshot).

IT’S ALIVE!!!

I eventually got it to stop somehow. I don’t even remember how. And I kept on programming. It was a lot of fun. But I’ve never had a programming experience quite so visceral as chasing Goober across the squeak screen as he evaded my every move. Very cool.

I think I’m starting to understand how to play with Squeak’s eToys environment. It helped to explore it with a five year old by my side.

In this environment, you give objects “scripts.” Scripts can contain primitive commands like “move forward 5” or “make a squeaking noise,” or tests like “Is ___ true? If so, __ if not __”, or even other scripts. Yep, it’s just like programming. Objects can tell if they’re overlapping other objects or other parts of their environment. Oh yeah — when I say “objects” I’m not just talking about abstract programming objects — one way to create a new object is to draw it with a pen. Another is to pull it out of a box, a box with rectangles and stars and other things. Once you’ve got an object you can give it a name and add scripts to it. Besides adding scripts you can manipulate it directly by grabbing it, dragging it around, resizing it, recoloring it, turning it sideways, whatever.

Oh, and the scripts — you can see them. They’re little boxes and you add commands to them not by typing, but by dragging little tiles onto the box. It’s amazingly easy.

A script can be “ticking,” which means it fires repeatedly until you stop it. It can also be stopped. Objects can turn their own or other objects’ scripts on or off.

By the time things started getting interesting, this is what was going on —

We had a little alien face made out of a little drawing my son had made with some eyes added to it. The alien had some scripts we’d written, like “crawl” which sent it forward slowly, and “move warble and turn” which sent it backwards a bit, made it turn, and made it make a warbling noise.

I at first had the idea of making a box which could clone the alien face, but I didn’t quite know how to do that… So I made a box which could tell if an alien was touching it, and turn blue if that was the case, and red if it wasn’t. OK, that was cool. But it was cooler when in addition to making it turn blue, it told the alien face to “move warble and turn.”

Now you could make the alien face crawl at the box, and when it hit, the box would flash blue and the alien would warble, turn, and back up — and then the crawl could keep going.

Then I made four copies of the box, and was happy to see they all had the same power of making the alien warble! I elongated them and made a cage out of them, and let the alien face bounce around inside back and forth. Twas cool. I made the alien face smaller so it didn’t hit so often, and could spend more time crawling, not constantly bouncing.

Before all this I’d drawn a little mouse and not done anything with it. I picked it up and started scripting it. First I called it “SketchMouse” but by this time my daughter had showed up and insisted it should be called “StickMouse,” so Stickmouse it was. I gave Stickmouse a script called “run” and made the stickmouse check to see if it was touching an alien, and if so, it would turn the StickMouse’s “run” script to “ticking” — and it would keep running until it wasn’t touching an alien anymore. I added a squeak to the mix; a mouse in Squeak should squeak!

Now the alien would run around bouncing off the walls, and when it happened to hit a mouse the mouse would squeak and wiggle out of the way.

Then I started cloning off a half dozen new Stickmice and let the fun begin!

What I took away from all this is that eToys isn’t about showing up with an idea of what you want to do and finding the tools to do it. It’s about building cool little things and seeing what happens when you tweak them and throw them at each other — seeing what emerges, that you would have never thought of before.

In retrospect I can also see much more effective ways I could have done things. First off, it was kind of silly to have all those paranoiac boxes waiting for an alien to show up so they could make it do a silly dance. Why couldn’t I just make the alien watch for boxes while it’s moving, and do its silly dance when it hits one? Then I’d have one entity “active” instead of a bunch of them.

Same thing with the mice — they were all watching out for that alien. Why couldn’t the alien have, say, triggered their “run away” script when it touched them, and then the “run away” script would itself have checked to see whether they’d escaped it and turned itself off when it was satisfied it had? Things like that.

And it’s all gloriously useless. It’s pure fun.