A123 May Seek Bankruptcy

A sad day for electric vehicle enthusiasts. At one time A123 was the contender for cheap and powerful batteries. Now, not so much.

A123 Systems Inc. (AONE), the maker of lithium-ion batteries for electric cars, said it may run out of cash to fund operations and may need to seek bankruptcy protection.

A123 expects to be in default under material debt agreements today, the Waltham, Massachusetts-based company said yesterday in a regulatory filing. A123 didn’t expect to be on time with an interest payment due yesterday on $143.8 million of notes expiring in 2016, or to make a payment due yesterday on $2.76 million in outstanding 6 percent notes, according to the filing.

Electric power is hard. (A semi-related topic for this blog, for those interested in embedded programming and especially transportation.)

Cognitive Surplus is Real, Waterfall Swing Edition

"Shown at the World Maker Faire in 2011, the device is a swing set capable of accommodating one or two people using it at a time. What makes it interesting, is that water comes out of the top support bar, forming a wall of water for the riders to pass through. This wall is then broken when the swing user flies through it making for a dry experience." Via Hack-A-Day.

Objective-C Overtakes C++

I was pretty harsh on C++ in my entry on that language. I even called it "crap," before saying "beginners should avoid the horror."

At one time that would have been heresy, but it seems to be trending toward conventional wisdom. As this I Programmer page shows, C++ has been overtaken by Objective-C.

Torvalds on “throw-away cheap”

Adafruit notices an interesting bit in a BBC interview with Linus Torvalds:

"The recent launch of the Raspberry Pi, running on Linux, has attracted a lot of attention. Are you hopeful it will inspire another generation of programmers who can contribute to the Linux kernel?"

"So I personally come from a “tinkering with computers” background, and yes, as a result I find things like Raspberry Pi to be an important thing: trying to make it possible for a wider group of people to tinker with computers and just playing around.

And making the computers cheap enough that you really can not only afford the hardware at a big scale, but perhaps more important, also “afford failure”.

By that I mean that I suspect a lot of them will go to kids who play with them a bit, but then decide that they just can’t care.

But that’s OK. If it’s cheap enough, you can afford to have a lot of “don’t cares” if then every once in a while you end up triggering even a fairly rare “do care” case.

So I actually think that if you make these kinds of platforms cheap enough – really “throw-away cheap” in a sense – the fact that you can be wasteful can be a good thing, if it means that you will reach a few kids you wouldn’t otherwise have reached."

I thought I'd repeat this here, because it is what this blog's method is about. I recommend "throw-away cheap" computers that are already in your closet or garage, but as I've mentioned, the Raspberry Pi works too.

That said ... a stick-to-it-ness helps. Don't give up too soon.

Study Groups

Here's a neat report, via Adafruit Blog:

Every week at a kitchen table in Brooklyn, coders Amit Pitaru and David Nolen host a salon/workshop called Kitchen Table Coders, bringing together a small group of people to discuss and study one subject at a time.

The photo looks very Community ;-)

Middle-aged borrowers piling on student debt

The full story is here.

It's interesting.  There are fields, of course, where formal education and debt are necessary.  And then there is computer programming, where Robert Speer, Eric Raymond, and I suggest you can learn for "free."  Well, at least for any of definition of "free" that includes a web connection and a spare PC.

I'm sure free-form learning on a web connected PC isn't for everyone, but I don't think the bar is that high.  You just need to think about your own learning plan, and then work at it patiently.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

Don't Forget Exercise

In the NY Times article How Exercise Benefits the Brain we learn that this oft-reported claim has been tied to a mechanism:

For some time, scientists have believed that BDNF helps explain why mental functioning appears to improve with exercise. However, they haven’t fully understood which parts of the brain are affected or how those effects influence thinking. The Irish study suggests that the increases in BDNF prompted by exercise may play a particular role in improving memory and recall.

So, alternate that butt-in-chair time with a little time on the trails.  Not only does it feel good, it improves learning.

Ruby Wins?

There is an interesting developer survey out, by BestVendor (hat tip David Strom). They do offer some caveats:

Let’s be clear that our sample selection is not representative of all developers. We pulled this data from 500+ early users of BestVendor who are developers. All work for companies with fewer than 100 employees, and the vast majority work in the startup-tech world. The fact that they signed up for the BestVendor beta suggests that they’re early adopters.

That said, the results are very interesting, and the most-loved tools do make a pretty good to-learn list for students of software development.

My first instinct was to look for "development language," which isn't there, but "framework" is, and we can deduce from that some languages information:

28% Ruby on Rails
11% Django
9% .Net
6% CodeIgniter
5% Spring

The first, Ruby on Rails, is a clear winner for the Ruby language.  Django is a Python framework.  The .Net would be mostly C#.  CodeIgniter is a PHP framework.  Finally, Spring is java.

It's really pretty amazing that in this pool the "most popular" programming language comes out 5th.  Not to mention that PHP, the "first language" recommended in my sidebar, comes out 4th.

Hmmm.  My meta-suggestion is that programmers keep one eye on which languages and technologies they love, and the other eye on where the market is heading.

Robert Speer Recommends a Similar Path

This post from December 16 came just as I was typing up my own recommendations:

How to get into Web Development with NO degree and NO debt

Robert emphasizes career building and jobs getting more than I.  Actually in the sidebar I don't talk about those at all.  My assumption was that as you make the climb through the LAMP stack you'd get the lay of the land, jobs-wise.

I'm 100% with Robert that the way to demonstrate skill is just that, to demonstrate skill.  If you create your own website, from scratch, and can describe your methods, you have a good presentation for any prospective employer.

People who just bolt together pieces they don't really understand will not fare so well.

(I plan a future post on the whole "badging" phenomenon.)

Top 10 Ed-Tech Trends

Audrey Watters at Hack Education has given her Top 10 Ed-Tech Trends of 2011. My favorites are the pairs which are in conflict:

Khan Academy (6) versus The Higher Education Bubble (8)

and

Open (9) versus The Business of Ed-Tech (10)

I'll side with Khan and Open. Indeed it seems that in any world with cognitive surplus, education should become easier, cheaper, and more common.  That's what my sidebar is all about.

Howard Lindzon writes ...

The smartest worriers are learning to code or marrying a developer.

It's an interesting article spanning venture capital, web dynamics, and the future of education.

It makes yesterday's effort, setting up the "Computer Programming" sidebar, seem worthwhile.

Hello World

I have been programming computers and have been on-line in various forms for the last 30 years.  I've watched on-line learning evolve.  Early programmers would fend for themselves, and share as they could.  Lately we've had break-out successes for more general audiences like Kahn Academy.

I find the evolution fascinating, and read sites like Hack Education with great interest.

There was one page at Hack Education that set me back though, it was this story on the state of learning for computer programming:

Codecademy and the Future of (Not) Learning to Code

Apparently, while there are many HOWOs and Tutorials on the web, students aren't finding a framework that puts them all together.  So, I took a couple days and typed one up.  It's there in the side-bar, in 12 (hard?) steps.  The first section describes my method:

0.  Learn Computer Programming

As I say, I offer just one approach, it may work for you.  Have fun.