Month: May 2014

Code.org – Learn an hour of code

Maxim mentioned code.org to me a couple of times last week, but I didn’t have the time to check it out.  Today, however, he said that “Learn an hour of code” was his homework for the computer class.  That got me quite interested.  After all, I was exploring looking for an easy way to get him (and some other kids) into computer programming.  We’ve tried bits and pieces of online tutorials here and there, YouTube videos, and I’ve even took a swing at it myself – all for nothing.  It was all too boring and broad and it always required plenty of effort to get into.

code.org

And I’m happy to report – that’s where Code.org succeded.  These guys have found a way to explain things in a very simplistic manner, with immediate practical exercises, which utilize drag-n-drop instead of typing (even a seasoned programmer is rarely a touch typist in my experience), familiar surroundings of Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies games, and short, yet motivational explanations of core concepts by computer industry celebrities, like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.  There also a familiar gaming incentive to the experience, with badges and achievements, but those aren’t the core motivator.

We’ve spent about an hour with Maxim, going through tutorials and doing exercises.   So far, it was a perfect balance of fun and education.  But for me, it there was also another important aspect to this.  I could finally show to my son what I do at work (well, not exactly what I do, but close enough).  Explaining programming with words and showing bits of code and chunks of website never looked too appealing.  Now however he has a better idea.

And for the first time he is actually excited about programming.  So much in fact that I could barely get him to go to bed.  We had to make plans for tomorrow to continue to calm him down a bit.

Thanks code.org!  You guys have done an amazing job.  Keep it up!

Computers are *fast*!

Computers are *fast*!

So instead I used perf, which is a totally magical performance measurement tool for Linux. I needed to upgrade my kernel first, which was a bit nervewracking. But I did it! And it was beautiful. There are colours, and we got it to annotate the assembly code with performance statistics. Here’s what I ran to do it:

$ perf record ./bytesum_intrinsics The\ Newsroom\ S01E04.mp4
$ perf annotate --no-source

And here’s the result:

perf

The movdqa instructions have to do with accessing memory, and it spends 32% of its time on those instructions. So I think that means that it spends 32% of its time accessing RAM, and the other 68% of its time doing calculations. Super neat!

Cyprus Attorney General’s office to buy 600,000 EUR server

Cyprus Updates point out:

According to an article in today’s issue of Phileleftheros newspaper, the Attorney General’s office is planning to purchase a server which will cost more than 600,000 euro in order to analyse the thousands of documents relating to economic scandals. The purchase was proposed by a British expert on the field in order the “strengthen the investigation”.

Always according to the article, the ‘electronic brain’ will store 150000 documents sorted and coded for each suspect for quick retrieval. As any owner of a mid range laptop today will tell you 150000 files are nothing by today’s computer technology and could probably even be analysed by any decent smartphone.

The whole article sounds as if it came out of a late 1960′s newspaper. Even though it made it to the front page we still hope this it was a farce or result of journalistic error.