Techno Babble

Scratch is an application that makes the process of creating interactive stories, animations and games etc. as simple as dragging and dropping pre-defined program blocks/modules into order.

Scratch is aimed at children between the ages of 8 and 16 years old (but can be used by anyone). It was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group

http://llk.media.mit.edu/

at the MIT Media Lab

http://www.media.mit.edu/

in collaboration with the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, with financial support from the National Science Foundation, Intel Foundation, and MIT Media Lab research consortia.

Here’s a sample application I put together in about 30 minutes

In the left hand panel, you can see the palette of blocks which can be used. The next panel to the right contains a number of blocks which have been snapped together to create the program segment and the right-hand panel contains the running application.

Scratch is an easy-to-use application for developing programs and learning about programming concepts. It includes a community which users can join and share applications they have developed. It could have an appeal to a wider audience who have always wanted to learn how to program.

All the details are available at:

http://scratch.mit.edu/

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Some useful, if possibly dated, notes from a course at Stanford on C# and the .NET Framework

http://cs193n.stanford.edu/

The Microsoft Journal for Developers (MSDN Magazine) is available from

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/default.aspx

Also noticed Charles Petzold is venturing into 3D with his latest book. (He published his first book “Programming Windows” back in 1988)

http://www.charlespetzold.com/

3D Programming for Windows explores and elucidates the 3D graphics programming facilities of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) under Windows Vista and the .NET Framework 3.0.

http://www.charlespetzold.com/3D/index.html

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

The IBM Systems Journal (Volume 45, NUmber 1, 2006), although aimed at aspects of online game technology, nevertheless contains an interesting hint at the possible future direction of compiler technology which is being designed take advantage of the growth in processor complexity.

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj45-1.html

Using advanced compiler technology to exploit the performance of the Cell Broadband Engine architecture, describes the research that is progressing to optimise (compile) code written in a high-level language to fit a multi-processor (cell) architecture.

The prototype compiler innovatively takes advantage of and extends existing parallelization technology to enable partitioning and parallelization across multiple heterogeneous processing elements from within a single compilation process.

The implication is that the programmer will not have to worry too much about the machine architecture the application is aimed at relying instead on the compiler to produce code that is optimised for the hardware it will execute on (although the capability will still exist for lower-level dabbling if necessary).

Although at an early stage, it won’t be long before this approach is likely to be adapted to the mass market of application writers for the multi-core architectures from Intel and AMD.

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/451/eichenberger.html

(For those diehards there’s lots of detail about IBMs compiler research at Compiler Technology for Scalable Architectures

http://domino.research.ibm.com/…/cellcompiler.index.html)

Nick Benton and Gavin Bierman, scientists from Microsoft Research in Cambridge, have designed an experimental research language that extends C# with new features for writing concurrent programs. A compiler for the language, called Cω (C Omega), is available to the public.

An article talking about C Omega, by the authors, is available at Microsoft Research

http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=1271