Indian Chicken

OK, yes, I may occasionally be one of those people who takes pictures of their food. But only when it’s really awesome. Or when I cook it.

The Pastry Box Project | 18 April 2013, baked by Samantha Warren.

TweetDeck to be discontinued for Android, iPhone, and AIR on May 7th

I spent 2 hours this morning looking for a replacement, but haven’t found what I want yet. Nothing out there really replicates what TweetDeck does:

• I want to the option to post to Facebook and Twitter simultaneously, but also separately. (I don’t actually need my Facebook newsfeed in the client.)
• Desktop app. If I wanted to use Twitter in the bloody browser, I would do that.
• I want the post box to slide up from the bottom or down from the top, but not overlay the timeline.
• I want single column AND multi-column views.
• I want the app to take up as little horizontal space as possible: 250-300px wide in single column view is fine.
• Keep toolbars and column navigation buttons out of the way.
• Autocomplete for usernames.
• Retweet options.

I would add cross-platform to the list, but I don’t want to seem greedy. I work on a Mac, use Ubuntu at home, and sometimes I just have to boot into Windows. I would be happy to settle for a different app in each OS if it fulfilled all the other requirements above.

Someone, please tell me my perfect Twitter client is out there.

What’s cool about this group of kids is that they are self-selecting (yes, I see how this is also a short-coming, but it’s early days yet). ScriptEd is an after-school activity, rather than part of the normal curriculum, so they are really into learning how to code. They have stuck with it, through exams and SAT prep and baseball games.

This past weekend, ScriptEd had its first student hackathon. We had 11 students from 3 different schools and at least 12 volunteers (I lost track, since more people kept showing up over the course of the day) in addition to the regular teachers. We formed 6 teams, with 2 students and 2 volunteers each.

Our theme was CIRCLE, SQUARE, TRIANGLE.  We challenged the students to use their imaginations and create something awesome with these shapes — for example, students might decide to make the shapes bounce to the beat of a song, or have the shapes divide every time the user clicks on a shape.

The results were incredible. I was so impressed with what these kids came up with and were able to build with their rudimentary skills. It was really rewarding to see how excited they were to actually put their skills to use and build something they could show off.

Here are some of the projects our students came up with:

http://scriptednyc.github.io/Hackathon/harlemshake/shake.html

http://scriptednyc.github.io/Hackathon/colorblock/block.html

http://scriptednyc.github.io/Hackathon/memory/memory.html

http://scriptednyc.github.io/Hackathon/blackhole/hole.html

1. A sidebar widget that shows the 5  (or whatever) most recent commits by a user to any GitHub repo. Realized my commit messages are not useful, found a plugin to show a list of repos.

2. A sidebar widget that shows the 5 (or whatever) most recent public Gists by a user Found one.

3. A sidebar widget that shows 5 (or whatever) Meetup groups a user belongs to that are either the most active or have upcoming events.

I see this question asked on Reddit all the time, in various programming subreddits. The responses are not always kind, and there are  a lot of vague “Build something!” responses.  But I thought it would be helpful to compile the best ideas here.

PYTHON

Enkaybee: I always recommend Project Euler because it’s free and it presents some real challenges without any guidance. You have to think logically on top of knowing syntax. You have to write efficient code for many of them. Codecademy is the training wheels, Project Euler takes them off.

RojaB: Don’t you even feel prepared to contribute to open source projects like www.whatcanidoformozilla.com? Have you done API things (dunno what those are yet) for Python at codecademey?

After dealing with movers, cable guys, couch guys, wall building guys, and every other service guy imaginable, I had an idea for a side project for you. Also, this may exist already, haven’t looked yet. But it’s a site where you plug in what the service was, how much it cost, how long it took, how happy you were, variables like that, and it spits back out how much to tip the service guys. I don’t know if data like this even exists but it would be very HANDY (get it? ;) ) Just food for thought.

h/t Ezra

Problem: GrowNYC does not have an at-a-glance visualization of what farmers market are open and where they are.

Solutions: Calendar and map visualizations, to answer both “What’s open now” and “What’s open near me.”

Implementation: I’ve never worked with .ical files before, but I would imagine you could scrape the data off the GrowNYC site and run a script to format it to be added to Google Calendar or whatever. I’m more interested in the map visualization. I’ve done some work with KML and GIS before, so I know it would be possible to scrape the data off the site and build a map with different icons showing year-round, open and closed markets.

Sub-Problem: I know how to scrape a single page of data, but have no idea how to go about scraping a series of static pages.

Solution: Google that!

I would like to scrape the data into a Google Spreadsheet, this would enable a lot of versatility and less maintenance (maybe?). Then set the scraper up to run once a week or so to update the spreadsheet. Spreadsheet could easily be used as the basis for both maps and calendars of various types.

Data needed: Each market’s location, active days of the week and hours, special closed days?, location, special events occurring?.

List of markets

Each market then has a page of its own (which contains the data needed!) like so:

97th St Greenmarket

Technologies:
Probably could all be done with Python. Use Beautiful Soup for scraping? How to get scraping results into Google Spreadsheet then? Google Spreadsheets also has a scraping language, I think. Could try to figure that out.

</Stream of Consciousness>

Yes, this is actually the way I thought this through on the way to work this morning.

Computing for Data Analysis:

Dropping this for now. I know R is very useful for data analysis, but I’ve made it 3/4 through the course without really learning ANYTHING, even though I’m getting perfect scores on the quizzes and assignments. The class is just going too fast for me to grasp the concepts without devoting a lot more time than I have now. Note to self: Come back to R at some point.

Learn to Program: The Fundamentals:

This week was all about string operations: comparisons, substrings, len(), string methods, dir(str), indexing, slicing, and for loops over str. Also covered accumulators and IDLE’s debugger. Quiz was fairly easy, run things in IDLE, play with str.find. The assignment was fun and just hard enough to be interesting.

An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python:

Really good lectures. And the RPSLS exercise was fun. But I still don’t understand modulo. Especially with negative numbers.

Introduction to Statistics:

Although the accent is sometimes hard to understand, I’m really enjoying this one. Slow enough that I can follow, interesting examples.

The Mechanical MOOC: A Gentle Introduction to Python:

Got an email containing the first week’s worth of work on Monday. This MOOC is different from the others; instead of a self-contained curriculum, they have chosen parts of existing platforms. For example, this week we needed to read some sections from How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, watch a lecture from MIT’s Introduction to Computer Science, do some exercises in Codecademy’s Python course, and work through exercises from MIT’s A Gentle Introduction to Computer Science.

Some info about the platforms:

• The Mechanical MOOC and Codeacademy
• The Mechanical MOOC and OpenStudy
• The Mechanical MOOC and MIT OpenCourseware

I’ll be honest: I did the reading and watched the lectures and I did the Codecademy units, but I only looked over the other exercises. I’ve been working on learning Python for over a year, starting with Learn Python the Hard Way, and I’m taking two other Python classes, so I don’t feel the need to go through types and operators all over again this week.

So I’m turning off the FeedBurner plugin, which will break everyone’s RSS subscriptions. Good news! You can resubscribe using this feed: http://www.megantaylor.org/feed/.

My apologies for the inconvenience.