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neilccbrown.bsky.social
@neilccbrown.bsky.social
86 followers 51 following 57 posts
Senior Research Fellow in Computing/Programming Education at King's College London, UK. Research and development of novice programming tools, including BlueJ, Greenfoot and Strype.
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neilccbrown.bsky.social
Finnish train options living up to the extra personal space stereotype: options include paying extra for single seat or paying extra to keep the seat beside you empty.
Screenshot of options to pay for empty seat next to you or single seat.
September 15, 2025 at 12:08 PM
neilccbrown.bsky.social
Travelled a long way to hear a talk from a guy down the road @milesberry.net
Miles Berry presenting a slide.
July 9, 2025 at 7:53 PM
neilccbrown.bsky.social
Can't even decide how to caption this about LA radio. Incredible.
Quote: "Timothy Olyphant is thinking about the Sex Pistols. "I was at an Arlo Guthrie show at UCLA last week," he says, rolling his eyes at the thought of the ancient singer of the hippy anthem Alice's Restaurant. "I just remember thinking, 'Man, if [former Pistols guitarist] Steve Jones was here he'd start booing,' and I really, really wanted to do the booing for him. Man, that show was a snore – I just didn't believe a word that came out of their mouths." Punk credentials firmly established, Olyphant sips his latte, which has a perfect heart sculpted into its milky surface. The Steve Jones connection isn't so odd. For years, the ex-Pistol had the lunchtime spot ("Jonesey's Jukebox") on LA radio station Indie 103.1. The show before that had Olyphant as its on-air, unpaid sports commentator. He walked in one morning to promote Deadwood, writer David Milch's savage and foul-mouthed reorientation of the classic TV western for HBO, and walked out having agreed to fill in for a while for an as-yet unhired presenter. He stayed for two years. "Yeah, I was sports – and David Lynch did weather." He's not kidding. "He only did the weather for the moment, right this second, not for the whole day. There was no forecast per se, just him calling in saying, 'This is what the weather's like outside right now.'""
July 1, 2025 at 1:06 PM
neilccbrown.bsky.social
Using AI to debug syntax escaping issues in generated Python and interestingly it sees a backslash where there is none because of the way I'm escaping invalid tokens that looks like classic backslashes unicode escapes.
AI chat log that says: But in your case, the problematic part is at the very end: ... not (___strype_invalid_u00fcu0040u0042u005c) 🚫 The Issue: \ at the End The last part of the identifier ends in: \u005c Which is the Unicode escape for the backslash character (\). So you're effectively writing: not (___strype_invalid_ü@B\) But a Python identifier cannot contain a literal backslash — neither in source code nor via a Unicode escape. That makes this token invalid.
May 21, 2025 at 7:46 AM
neilccbrown.bsky.social
Remain fascinated by Animal-Computer Interaction. Here I am making programming tools, and there they are making TV remote controls for dogs. dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
Header of the paper "Prototyping an Immersive Screen Interfaces for Dogs’ to Control Screens in Their Home"
February 6, 2025 at 11:05 AM
neilccbrown.bsky.social
Looking up stats about which countries are most active in Computing Education Research, found a useful SIGCSE paper but yikes to the UCD entry here...
February 5, 2025 at 12:17 PM
neilccbrown.bsky.social
Leo and I have been working on the ICER submission instructions (will go live tomorrow). Very pleased at the amount we've been able to delete with one tweak: changing from a word limit to a page limit. No more fiddly word counting!
Screenshot showing 1.5 pages of completely deleted text in Google Docs.
January 14, 2025 at 6:39 PM
neilccbrown.bsky.social
Finalising some details of Strype's new graphics mode; this is from a recent email, to file under "numbers are hard".
Quote: "I suspect the extra line of pixels thing might be related to an off-by-one, or at least there will be a problem like that. Currently the world bounds are -400, -300 to +400, +300 inclusive, making the world 801x601. I can't decide if that is the lesser crime compared to making it -399, -299 to +400, +300 and thus 800x600. Or we make it -399.5, -299.5 to 399.5, 299.5 which is technically fine but perhaps the worst option. Or go back in time and prevent the invention of zero -- might be the easiest option."
December 3, 2024 at 8:02 PM