Kratos the furious demi-god, a man defined by violence and psychologically
jammed in that moment of aggressive self-belief right before a post-pub
headbutt, is a wilfully unpleasant protagonist indistinguishable,
dramatically speaking, from controlling a tightly balled fist through
ancient Greece. It goes without saying that it’s great to have him back.
I was downloading a lot of lecture notes to read through. The majority of these were put on Moodle in Powerpoint format. This is an awful thing to do. It was making me hate LibreOffice.
So I started converting them to pdf format to read with the excellent document viewer in Ubuntu 12.04 (which even has some vim-like keybindings). I found out a nice way of doing this at the command line at AskUbuntu (a great resource!).
Here’s a script I’ve been using to convert all the .ppt or .pptx files in a folder to pdf and remove the originals. This uses LibreOffice to do the heavy lifting but hides it.
I'd like to say a few words about traditional college grading. I'm sick of it. We're obsessed with grades because we're obsessed with data. And yet grading takes away all the fun from failing. And a huge part about education is about failing. Courage, according to Churchill, is the ability to go from one defeat to another without losing enthusiasm.
Some more links from the last couple of weeks. I have over 1000 unread in my feed so some of these are a bit old!
Really excited for this film as I loved Revolution OS
Real Programmers don’t use PASCAL: The easiest way to tell a Real Programmer from the crowd is by the programming language he (or she) uses. Real Programmers use FORTRAN. Quiche Eaters use PASCAL. Nicklaus Wirth, the designer of PASCAL, was once asked, “How do you pronounce your name?”. He replied “You can either call me by name, pronouncing it ‘Veert’, or call me by value, ‘Worth’.” One can tell immediately from this comment that Nicklaus Wirth is a Quiche Eater. The only parameter passing mechanism endorsed by Real Programmers is call-by-value-return, as implemented in the IBM/370 FORTRAN G and H compilers. Real programmers don’t need abstract concepts to get their jobs done: they are perfectly happy with a keypunch, a FORTRAN IV compiler, and a beer. Laughed out loud reading this. I guess you can replace FORTRAN and PASCAL with C and Ruby or something.