Posts from — March 2008

The new version of the InfoFez launches on April 7th… be there!

I was talking to my web programming seminar about regular expressions and made an allusion to the xkcd comic on that topic. Unfortunately, none of them had seen it, probably because none of them were familiar with xkcd.

Students should become familiar with the concepts and practice of the discipline, but also with the culture and in-jokes that will help them fit in when they get into industry or graduate school. I also like to get people to laugh in ways that are relevant to the subject material (yes, I use a lot of cheesy geek jokes — ask me to tell you my LISP joke sometime).

I asked the Twitter community what other geek cultural elements I should introduce the students to, and here are the answers:

• The comics: xkcd, Penny Arcade
• The cute things: Kitty Hell, Pink Tentacle, Cute Overload, icanhazcheezburger (which is also, apparently, a business)
• Current events: Fake Steve, The Onion, Fark
• The blogs: Boing Boing
• The IRC: bash.org
• The shopping: Think Geek, Jinx
• The field trip: ROFLcon (Who wants to go?)

This list is thanks to (in order of appearance) @mediacrisis, @rubaiyat, @techpickles, @mattgillooly, @hempstyle, and @inkedmn.

One of my friendly librarian colleagues in SL asked if I had a script to generate dialogs and allow users to select notecards handy. I didn’t, so I coded it up. It seems like it could be useful to others, so here you go:

This script is in LSL, for Second Life. Just copy and paste it into a script, throw a few notecards into the object, and you’ll be ready to go!

//  Notecard Selector
//  by Ann Enigma
//  This script presents users with a list of notecards in a dialog box, and allows them to select one
//  Note: The names of the notecards must be less than 24 characters long
 
// This script is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
// http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/
 
// configurable options
string message = "Which notecard would you like to read?"; // the message on the dialog box
integer command_channel = 616; // the channel on which to listen for commands (you probably won't need to change this)
 
// the script
list notecards;
 
default
{
     state_entry() {
          integer i = 0;
 
          // read the title of each notecard into a list
          for(i=0;i<llGetInventoryNumber(INVENTORY_NOTECARD);i++) {
          notecards = (notecards=[]) + notecards + [llGetInventoryName(INVENTORY_NOTECARD,i)];
          }
 
 
          llListen(command_channel, "", "", ""); // listen for a dialog button press
 
          }
 
     touch_start(integer total_number)
     {
          llDialog(llDetectedKey(0), message, notecards, command_channel); // present the dialog
     }
 
     listen(integer channel, string name, key id, string message) {
          if (llListFindList(notecards, (list)message) != -1) { // this is a valid notecard
          llGiveInventory(id, message); // give the user the notecard
     }
}
 
     changed(integer changed_bitfield) {
          // if the object's inventory changes, reset the script
          if (changed_bitfield == CHANGED_INVENTORY) {
               llResetScript();
          }
     }
}

I’m at SXSW, and I want an ability to see the latest Tweets from the group of Twitterers that I follow who are here in the area. I also have a limited number of text messages on my phone (1500, but still).

I coded up a quick app that allows you to great a group of twitterers and see their latest tweet on a mobile-friend page. Check it out.

Comments are welcome!