tuxmaniac’s blog

Hola folks! The Ubuntu community has unleashed the Brainstorm page. It is a interface for people with any kind of thought to just add those as “ideas” and let the community brainstorm over them. We are already having about 2400 Ideas in just 5 days of its existence. Wow! Add your idea now.

As I was browsing through the ideas and some mailing list, a idea that just popped out of my head is that students can use the Ubuntu Brainstorm project as a platform for getting involved in Free and Open Source Software. What they have to do is just pick up an idea which they find interesting and start working on them. What more with Google announcing “Summer of Code 2008” edition, one can propose or develop on any of these ideas and go ahead implementing them. Whats really special about such an approach is that, you are picking up a “project” which the “community” has asked for, commented already. So there are better chances that you find more mentors who are willing to help, more users who are willing to test and ofcourse more chances of you becoming a “r0c|<$t4r" in the Free Software world.

What more?!! You can also help promote an Idea in your blogs and websites like I have done below. So.. what are you guys waiting for. Unleash the hell of ideas right *now* and students/developers pick your favourite idea *now*

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls…. GNUSim8085 has been named in the winners list of FOSS India awards. Announcement can be found here.

I happened to browse through my set of “list” emails and as usual was about to delete the LFY mail sent to some lists. But then something told me, “read” that mail. Opened the mail, and it spoke of FOSS India awards and some winners list. Then I scroll down the winners list to find this name “GNUSim8085″ on that. Now, where on planet earth did that come from???

GNUSim8085 was a project started by srid in his college days. He decided to orphan it at one point where Onkar and myself pitched in and took over the development and maintainance. I guess, its been one year now almost after we joined the project along with Srid and this is a big surprise. A welcome recognition and hope this triggers contribution from students to this project. We have a plethora of feature requests that has poured in suddenly. Students, grab this opportunity.

Recently, I have been reading the book “How to think like a Computer Scientist - Learning with Python“. Its a ebook published under GNU Free Documentation License and one can grab it here. This book, it seems, was based on a book written for teaching Java (!!! God knows how and why ). Python seems a better fit here as the author himself quotes in preface as follows.

Python greatly simplifies programming examples and makes important programming ideas easier to teach. The first example from the text illustrates this point. It is the traditional “hello,world” program, which in the C++ version of the book looks like this:
#include
void main()
{
cout << "Hello, world." << endl;
}
in the Python version it becomes:

print “Hello, World!”

Yet another point which the author makes which impressed me is the following..

There are thirteen paragraphs of explanation of “Hello, world!” in the C++ version; in the Python version, there are only two. More importantly, the missing eleven paragraphs do not deal with the “big ideas” in computer programming but with the minutia of C++ syntax. I found this same thing happening throughout the book. Whole paragraphs simply disappear from the Python version of the text because Python’s much clearer syntax renders them unnecessary.

Hence one can concentrate more on “programming concepts” rather that worrying too much on language syntax and confusing the students mind. Eventually the student will also learn to choose the language best suited for his work and learning a new language will not be difficult any longer as his programming concepts foundation is pretty strong. This methodology, if incorporated in our education system, will do wonders and India will soon erase its image as Software Consumers and create the image of “Creators of future products”. We will not rely any longer on “outsourced” jobs. We shall have our own markets.

This book begins with a simple “hello world” program and goes till explaining a few data structure concepts. A few algorithms are also discussed en-route. To cut things short - Just Amazing! Must read. Hats off to the author.