SNAP! (Build Your Own Blocks).

We’ve had great fun, and results, teaching kids to program with Scratch. Now, Berkeley has “an extended reimplementation of Scratch … that allows you to Build Your Own Blocks. It also features first class lists, first class procedures, and continuations. These added capabilities make it suitable for a serious introduction to computer science for high school or college students.”

I’ve only played with it a little – but getting started with Snap! is even easier than Scratch – because it’s browser-based (i.e. written in  Javascript  and designed to run in the browser).

You can try it right away and it’s worth it – even if you’re not a kid.

Food on the Table is hiring – I’m looking for a great developer to work with us.  Read more at We Are Growing! | Food on the Table Blog.

On the 28th, I’ll be MC’ing the Austin On Rails meeting - (Meeting: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 @ 7-9 PM).

There’ll be four talks:

• Technical Feedback Loops – Marcus Irven
• Product Feedback Loops – Ash Maurya
• Process Feedback Loop – (me)
• How My Community Saved My Life – Mando Escamilla

My talk will be a short version of my recent Lone Star Ruby Conf. talk “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please” or why I love continuous learning with continuous deployment. (video)

Check out the talks and hope to see you there!

Gotta love this…

Progress Trackers in Web Design: Examples and Best Practices – Smashing Magazine.

FYI – we have a google voice number for Food on the Table -and forward it to our SkypeIn number.  However, at some point we realized that it wasn’t working. No matter what we did, we could not get a call to go thrugh Google Voice to SkypeIn.

Fortunately, I found an answer we had Skype set so that it  would only”Receive Calls to my online number” from people in my contact list.

http://screencast.com/t/OTMwNzUyM

via Skype Will Not Verify Phone – Google Voice Help.

Now that 37signals centralized their user management, my existing Fluid-based campfire doesn’t work. Specifically, I can’t login because it keeps opening a new window in my regular browser to login, instead of completing the login within Fluid.

I googled for “can’t use campfire with fluid” and similar, and no luck.  A little more digging and I found reference to Making Fluid Ssbs Browse Only Pages You Want – fluidapp | Google Groups.

All I had to do was to add *launchpad.37signals.com* to my whitelist of URL’s to browse in Fluid and it worked.

I’m posting this here so the next person may have a shorter route to find the answer.

Here’s the steps to get nokogiri installed;

1. sudo apt-get update
2. sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev
3. sudo gem install nokogiri
4. sudo gem install racc
5. sudo gem install rexical
6. (at this point, when I tried “gem install how”, it complained I didn’t have RubyGems >= 1.3.1. which is required for “hoe”)
7. sudo gem install rubygems-update -v=1.3.4
8. sudo update_rubygems
9. sudo gem install hoe

via Mark Howe » Rails requires RubyGems >= 1.3.1 you have 1.2.0. Please `gem update –system` and try again..

Given I’ve installed sphinx

And I’ve used mac port for the install

When I run sphinx  indexer

Then it expects the mysql socket to be in /opt/local/var/run/mysql5/mysqld.sock

Given I’ve installed mysql

And I’ve used the binary from mysql

When I run mysqld

Then it use the mysql socket in /tmp/mysql.sock

To get sphinx indexer to use my installed version of mysql, I have to change make a change in the sphinx.conf file to tell sphinx indexer to use the mysql socket in /tmp/mysql.sock:

in some source …

{

sql_sock = /tmp/mysql.sock

…

}

Check  sphinx_docs [SphinxWiki] for reference.

Last day to vote for my SXSWi panel; please vote! “Lean Startups: Beyond the Hype, Successes, Failures & Techniques” http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/3884

Noticing that I haven’t received any new voicemails in over a week – and hearing rumors about problems with voicemail on the iPhone… I reset my iPhone and after a reboot – ta-da! Over a weeks worth of voicemails suddenly appear. Grrr. Never seen this before and I’ve had my 1st generation iPhone for a couple of years