Disqus - Latest Comments for abachman

Re: On the Recent Changes at Greater Baltimore Technology Council

abachman — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:12:14 -0000

It's the bigger vision I'd like to hear about.

I truly believe that there exists a place in the whole scheme for the GBTC. It's just not for me, it would be nice to hear more members of the GBTC hierarchy would admit to that. GBTC is not the best or only tool in the box, but it's a good tool for those who need it.

It's certainly not "the tech community" though a portion of its membership comes from the tech community, and it's not me.

Re: On the Recent Changes at Greater Baltimore Technology Council

abachman — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:09:25 -0000

That 2006 - 2009 period is the key. That was the time when a lot of folks making the biggest stink were starting their careers and finding community and GBTC was simply not present in the community we were building and discovering.

I've had the impression all along that they exist to do stuff for business owners, but the "technology community" is about 10 times larger then the "technology business owner" community. From the looks of it, the GBTC board is made of VP, Principal, Partner, President, and Owner titles. No developers, no designers, no engineers, no one on that list for me to identify with.

Re: Baltimore Election 2011: Lessons Learned

abachman — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 12:09:14 -0000

Two small questions:

1. Who was Adam Meister supporting? Because when he ran up to me at my polling place (at which, it turns out, I could not vote) and handed me a sheaf of flyers, they all had SRB and Jack Young's smiling full color photos on them.

2. Why Pugh behind Rolley and not Rolley behind Pugh? She had more support all along.

Re: Vim Tip: Fast (and Easy) Project Searching | Intridea Blog

abachman — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 12:37:45 -0000

Word.

I highly recommend checking out ack.vim: https://github.com/mileszs/...

I've added that to my .vim/bundle dir and added this to my .vimrc:

    map <leader>a :Ack<space>
    vmap <leader>a "ay:Ack<space><c-r>a<cr>

The first line lets me quickly open an empty search, handy if I want to limit it to a directory. The second line runs an ack search over the whole project with the currently selected text. Handier than tags when looking for a method because it'll show me the definition plus every place that I've used it. Results open in a quickfix window, which makes jumping to a matching file quick (duh).

Re: Indy Hall Cohousing | A Village Starts With A Home

abachman — Wed, 11 May 2011 16:39:09 -0000

Fantastic! A beautiful continuation of the work going on at Indy Hall. Christopher Alexander would be proud.

Re: On Risk

abachman — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 09:52:07 -0000

Ha! I'm with you 100% on dog, but I have to say I think being a parent has a bigger upside than being a governor.

Also as a web developer, often working on open source projects for a small service company, I have decided to sell my car and make a sandwich. Thus starting on track to become Baltimore's premiere vehicular food proprietor.

Re: Learning By Accident

abachman — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:34:21 -0000

I've always been interested in our country's approach to religion and how it conflicts with our approach to education. I think it's possible that 50 years from now, we'll see massive, state-run education in the same light that we see massive, state-run religion today.

The right to education is recognized as a human right (by the UN), but in the same breath they state that they mean "entitlement to free, compulsory primary education for all children", which sounds scary and not free-as-in-speech.

I'm clearly too far into an ideological mindset to completely divorce myself from the "why" of education. The "how" is hard, but will be interesting to ponder.

"If it would be wrong for the government to adopt an official religion, then, for the same reasons, it would be wrong for the government to adopt official education policies. The moral case for freedom of religion stands or falls with that for freedom of education. A society that champions freedom of religion but at the same time countenances state regulation of education has a great deal of explaining to do."

James R. Otteson - Freedom of Religion and Public Schooling http://www.freedomofeducati...

Re: How Education is Ruining Your Life

abachman — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:48:13 -0000

I can't recommend Ivan Illich's "Deschooling Society" enough (full text: http://www.preservenet.com/..., on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Desch....

It's the foundation for much of John Holt's and John Taylor Gatto's opinions on education and society. They tend towards "education is dangerous in any quantity", but are worth reading. I started with Holt's Teach Your Own (http://www.amazon.com/Teach... and Gatto's "The Seven Lesson School Teacher" (http://www.newciv.org/whole....

It also is at the root of the Network of Learning pattern in "A Pattern Language". I wrote a bit about this on my blog (http://blit.adambachman.org.... My current opinion is that the changes you're looking for won't happen in the large, but in the small.

I believe that an educational system that changes the way things work for everyone will look much the same as what we have now. Public education is industrialized, would it really be better if it was modernized? In your own observation of the changes associated with the progression to a post-industrial economy, you see that the logical endpoint of corporate-ism is Enron and Goldman Sachs. As long as we're trying to force education through the same mold (must: be large scale, work for everyone, maximize returns), the end result will be the same.

That's a big reason why I've pulled my kids out of it. I don't want them to get the Enron experience, which appears to be the best the system can offer.

In the words of John Holt, "My concern is not to improve “education” but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and let people shape themselves."

I don't want to spend my time education bashing, though. I don't want to base the decisions I make for my children on a negative, "we do what we do because of what we are not doing" doesn't make sense, long-term. Like I think you're saying, I'd rather be looking for better ways to bring my kids up to be fully functional, healthy, capable, smart, wise, happy adults. I happen to be looking to create my own systems and networks for that task, though, instead of looking to someone else to provide them for me.

That is, building on what is good and positive in the place where I am, I want to provide my kids (and any others that I can influence) with the opportunities and experiences that will best allow them to flourish, since the existing systems provided for that purpose (public and private education facilities) are grossly inadequate to the task.

(sorry if this is a re-post, disqus isn't showing me my original comment in context)

Re: make your own juggling clubs

abachman — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 09:23:21 -0000

First, thanks for doing the hard work and releasing it CC, I've had a lot of fun with my clubs and they've held up beautifully despite being thrown, dropped, stepped on, shoved in the spokes of a moving bike (all it needs is some new tape)....

I found the same thing about the thicker dowels, I was tempted to go with the 5/8" right off the bat, but they were all 30". I wrote this post after only a few months of juggling with clubs. I've been at it for the better part of a year now and don't have anything negative left to say. I still haven't used "real" clubs, so I couldn't say anything about how these compare, but I enjoy juggling with them and have the parts stocked up for another two or three sets.

I might try the washers trick, I'd like to see if I can just nudge the center of gravity towards the head (top?) and see how that works. I don't have the equipment to say exactly where the center of gravity is, but I can at least weigh them before and after and comment on feel. If I make any mods, I'll be sure to post it.

Re: Hacking Education

abachman — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 19:34:07 -0000

That's refreshing to hear from someone who's in the business. I am way to one edge of the homeschooling movement ("unschooling", officially), but I know the desire for curriculum is strong. You summed up the reasons well: 1) state requirements, 2) parental comfort level. The shift away from antiquated, static requirements-based education will hopefully weaken number 1, but number 2 will be an issue for another few generations after that. Change will continue, but until we reach utopia, I'll do right by my children as best I know how and encourage all I can reach to do likewise.

To be specific, what I'm most critical of is the K-12 system. Outside of that realm, personal choice is so much more influential in how learning is allowed to unfold. I, as an adult, can choose when, where and what I want to partake in, but we rarely extend that courtesy to children.

Good luck with Nixty, by the way, I will definitely be looking into it.

Re: Hacking Education

abachman — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 18:58:26 -0000

"I want to help take all of them down and build something better in its place. I am not a fan of home schooling, but I understand it's appeal. I do not think I can teach my kids better than others. But I do think my kids and my wife and I need more choice of who educates them."

You're putting homeschooling in a kind of funny box here. I have no intention of putting my children through one day of compulsory education, but that has nothing to do with a desire to teach them myself, or the any sort of belief that I (or my spouse) would make a better teacher. That's an all too common assumption, though. Homeschooling just has a bad marketing department.

On that note, I think you see where the desire comes from--escaping a broken system--but you're not giving credit to the options that become available when you take back the 8 hours x 200 days x 12 years that traditional education requires of children in this country. It's so much bigger than MIT OpenCourseware and Wikipedia. Those things are great resources, but whether we have them or not, the system is still broken, backwards, and inhumane.

I personally am most inspired by authors like John Taylor Gatto and John Holt, who would probably argue that what we need is not an improved, expanded, or reformed education system, but less or no education at all. The first chapter of Holt's Instead of Education lays it out pretty well (link to books.Google page): "My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and let people shape themselves."

The important effect that the information tools you bring up have on education is that they remove the need for it. Learning is not education, and education is not required for learning. People will realize that the institutions are not necessary. This is so much bigger than reform.

Re: Simple Permutations in Python and Ruby

abachman — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:50:42 -0000

> I'm a little curious about this bit :

permutations(li.select() {|n| n != element}) {|val| yield([element] << val)}

I think you've got the li.select() chunk. I'm passing the list that was given as input after removing element. The block following the function call is handed down to the next level. Since yield executes the block that was passed in, I'm asking the next level down to execute the block that was passed in to the current level. The block that's passed down internally is different than the block that's passed externally, so we're dealing with two possible behaviors for the yield call.

The recursive call passes a new block to the next level down containing a reference to the block that was passed in to the current level, so every level under the top level (level 0, below) passes a block containing the accumulator function ([element] << val). The internal yield call accumulates the "returned" values from the descendent calls (calls that are at deeper levels of recursion). It may be easier to think of the yield calls in the Ruby and Python versions as almost like return statements. In Ruby, instead of doing something with the returned value outside the function, we pass a block of code into the function that we want to execute every time the function "returns" (hits a yield statement).

Here's what the flow of the function looks like:
# level 0 => permutations([1,2,3]) {|n| puts n} element = 1 yield = {|n| print n} # level 1 ===> permutations([2,3]) {|val| yield#level0([1] << val} element = 2 yield = {|val| yield#level0([1] << val)} # level 2 =====> permutations([3]) {|val| yield#level1([2] << val)} call([2] << 3) return [2,3] # level 1 ===> (execute yield) call([1] << [2,3]) # BUG! # level 0 => (execute yield) call(print [1, [2, 3]]) # level 1 ===> (continue li.each loop) element = 3 yield {|val| yield#level0([1] << val)} # level 2 =====> permutations([2]) {|val| yield#level1([3] << val)} call([3] << 2) return [3,2] # level 1 ===> (execute yield) call([1] << [3,2]) # BUG! # level 0 => (execute yield) call(print [1, [3, 2]]) (continue li.each loop) element = 2 yield = {|n| print n} etc...

Wow, that may be a lot more confusing than helpful, but I managed to spot a bug, so it's worthwhile to me at least :|.

[a] << b appends `b` to the list containing a single element, `a`. The bug is that if `b` is a list, we end up with [1, [2, 3]]. You can change {|val| yield([element] << val)} to {|val| yield(([element] << val).flatten)} to fix that.

I hope I have helped a little bit. I at least hope I haven't driven you to despair. You could try looking for an algorithm that generates permutations iteratively, instead of recursively, and code that in Ruby. Then this recursive version might make more sense.

Re: Myers-Briggs Scores

abachman — Sun, 25 May 2008 21:13:38 -0000

Test comment on Disqus.