Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Monthly Archives: October 2012

Tinkerbin

Yet another live-test service in the vein of JSFiddle and CodePen. Edit your HTML, CSS and JavaScript and test results live in the browser.

Tinkerbin

Fixing random disk errors with Ubuntu 12.04 Precise on XenServer — In Valid Logic

Recently upgraded one of my Xen VPS servers to Ubuntu 12.04 and ran into this problem (“blkfront: barrier: empty write xvda op failed”, disk would mount read-only). Fixed by booting to a rescue image, mounting the problematic /dev/xvda1 device, and editing the /mnt/etc/fstab to add the ‘barrier=0’ option.

Fixing random disk errors with Ubuntu 12.04 Precise on XenServer — In Valid Logic

Server is back up

Oct152012

Some handful of you that see this might have tried to visit the site over the past few days and found that my server was down. On Friday, Oct 12, I attempted to upgrade the operating system to Ubuntu 12.04. However, after the reboot into the new system, I started seeing filesystem errors, the root disk partition would only mount read-only, and my blog was giving the “white screen of death”. I spent what time … Continue reading →

Learnable Programming

Bret Victor, who wrote the piece that inspired Khan Academy CS, writes a beautiful piece on why KACS is not what he had in mind, and illustrates in detail what he really envisions.

It’s a great dissection of what an environment for learning programming *could* be. I like that he stresses that “programming is a way of thinking, not a rote skill”. I have seen so many examples of the latter — kids straight out of college who can write some code, but who don’t seem to have that “intuition” for how the code could be written better.

I wonder if there is some way anyone could do an analysis of programmers with “book learning” vs self-taught programmers who learned by exploration?

Learnable Programming