Stephenson, Command Lines, and Metaphors

Neal Stephenson writes:

"So an OS is a stack of metaphors and abstractions that stands between you and the telegrams, and embodying various tricks the programmer used to convert the information you're working with - be it images, e-mail messages, movies, or word-processing documents - into the necklaces of bytes that are the only things computers know how to work with" (Stephenson 18).

Look at the OS (operating system) and the GUI (graphical user interface) you're using right now. Can you find some metaphors or abstractions? Do share!

First Class

Good discussion, questions, and ideas on day one. While I don't expect folks "understand" much of what we started talking about, I do hope your interest is piqued.

Please post additional thoughts on the Wesch video as a comment to this post.

Got a Minute for BTmplates?

BTemplates has 60 pages of Blogger templates. For those unsatisfied with the basics provided by Blogger, and willing to take a few minutes to figure out how to upload a different template, BTemplates may be just the ticket.

Organized by categories, BTemplates helps you find what you want. And once your template is in Blogger, you can add your own customizations. (Don't be shy; give it a try. Be sure to post a comment with a link if you decide to upload a template.)

Aren't we talking about interfaces and operating systems? Check out the Retro MacOS theme (page 60, on the day I went to the site).

Books for Class (Amazon)

The books on order for the class are available in the campus bookstore, and there are a couple used copies of some of them. In a course like this one, it seems only fitting to consider places on the internet where course texts can be purchased.

Here are the books for class, a rough date when you'll NEED them, and the best (new/used) price available through Amazon (as of Friday, January 23).

• In the Beginning was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson (Required) - Needed Immediately - $8.50/$1.40
  
• Head First HTML, by Elizabeth Freeman & Eric Freeman (Required) - Needed by Week 3 - $26.39/$17.19
• Blogs, Wikis, MySpace, and More, by Terry Burrows (Recommended) - Helpful Immediately - $10.17/$8.74
• CSS: The Missing Manual, by David Sawyer McFarland (Recommended) - Helpful Almost Immediately - $23.09/$19.97
  

These books ordered new from Amazon are less than $70. Go used and the cost drops to less than $50. By only the required books, go used, and you're down for less than $20 in bound texts.

Do buy the Stephenson at the bookstore, unless you're going to order on January 27, with 2 day shipping. It's the cheapest book on the list, it's a good read, and we're starting the course with it.

Find better prices elsewhere? Share with a comment!

Label Cloud Implemented

I had been wanting to put a tag cloud on the course blog for a couple years. But Blogger doesn't have a cloud out of the box, and I never really took the time hunt down a custom-made widget. Then I found phydeaux3's Label Cloud javascript implementation. Three snips of code and Voila!

Laying the Foundation

I cleaned up the blog this afternoon. After thinking about a "look" for this year's course website, I settled on something based on a popular television drama. (It's too obvious, I'm sure.)

Instead of working in two different blog platforms for the 2009 course, we'll work solely in blogger for our individual and group blogging. We'll use this blog and the "team blog" feature to establish a group blog environment.

That's all for now.