Eitan Suez's Home: Category Computers

Milestone: Maia's First Email

Eitan — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 08:33:00 -0600

I mark a milestone today: my six year old daughter Maia wrote me her first email message. So far she's using webmail. I think she's ready to step up to Evolution.

I need to do some thinking before introducing the next thing. I was thinking the shell is something everyone should know. But I'm increasingly convinced that our current situation of heterogeneous everything is kind of crazy. I want a homogeneous everything. Like my good friend Sam says: I have a lisp machine.

We have one language for talking to the computer in the shell. Yet we have another language for talking to the computer when we write programs. I don't want to be in a situation where today I tell her: this is how you get a directory listing: ls. And tomorrow I'll say: I lied, the way to do it in ruby is Dir.entries("/home/maia")..

Anyhow it wouldn't hurt for her to know the shell.

My Three Year Old, the Linux user

Eitan — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 10:53:00 -0600

Who said Linux was too hard? My 3-yr old son, Arik, has been running Ubuntu on his laptop since December. He's a very happy user. Every once in a while he'll ask me to help him figure out why something's not working right, but most of the time, he works alone.

He sits at his ubuntu desktop, and can launch a variety of games, including GCompris, SuperTux, Tux Racer, Tux Kart, Slune, and many others.

I'm particularly proud of these facts:

over a few weeks, he's gotten as good as me (actually in some ways better than me) at SuperTux. that's no mean feat.
he recently figured out Frozen-Bubble
he recently figured out SolarWolf, a most addictive and wonderful games, though difficult for really young people.
he's a whiz with the arrow keys
he doesn't know how to read but he's got the entire SuperTux menu hierarchy figured out. He can start a game, pick levels, pause a game, exit out of one level and go to another, picking out the correctly indexed option in the menu hierarchy
he can launch and quit apps all on his own
he loves Tux!

All this he's achieved by himself, with no help from me, and in a pretty short time.

Finally, when I ask him to practice his letters, he'll be considerate of me and launch GCompris's letter-identification game.

Too funny

eitan — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 14:17:10 -0600

I was curious to find out what other notebook computer manufacturers (besides apple) currently offer a notebook with the intel core duo chip.

So I go to Toshiba's web site, the notebook section, and there's a product search field where I can type in a search. I try "core duo" and nothing (nothing) comes up. Ok, how about "dual core." The reply I got:

did you mean "dual more"?

That's pretty pathetic. Nevertheless, it made me laugh outloud. I believe toshiba has two dual core processor offerings. But obfuscating access to information about these products is practically begging to lose to the competition.