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Luckily, I get to play with LEGOs for three hours a week without buying them..and they call it a "lab"  (for my Intro to Robotics class...I almost said I get to play with them for free but then I remembered tuition...)
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The Lego Robotics curriculum resources are fantastic. We've been working on it with my daughter and it's fun. They do a great job introducing both mechanical and programming elements. Well worth the investment.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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I LOVE Legos! I have approx. 30 lbs of them in a large bin, and about another 20 lbs in other storage containers. Yes, I have around 50 lbs of Legos.
Bob Dole The internet is a great way to get on the net.
 2.0.82.7292 SP6a
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Quote: Many who received their first LEGO set in the early 1990’s are now adults looking forward to buying a LEGO set for their first child or for themselves. When we are younger, we do not fully understand how money works. We do not realize that a large LEGO set can require hours of work to earn. We only know what we want. I would wager that it isn’t until our first jobs that we can fully appreciate the value of money. We all wanted the large sets as kids and we didn’t realize how hard our parents had to work for them.
Most of the big lego sets I got between ~8 and 12 years old I paid for myself from a 'job' that paid maybe 50c/hour on a good day (for the few years after that I spent most of my pocket money on shareware cds and used pc games). At the time my dad was an auto mechanic and hauled all the worn/broken parts for scrap. Most of it was just iron and went strait from the garage to the recycling center; but anything with copper/aluminum was set aside because the pure metals sold for ~10x the price for mixed. Anything I was able to tear apart was mine to sell at the higher rate.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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A good mentor relationship lasts long after your job at a single company. The relationship will change and grow over time. Your first job at a successful company will launch your career. A great mentor will help you stay on the fast track.
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130206181727-56725-the-importance-of-mentors-to-build-a-successful-career[^]
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream. Discover.
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Surface Pro is so good that it could drive Windows 8 adoption with enough force to make people reconsider Microsoft’s odd new OS. Microsoft bet the farm on a new paradigm and it needs a champion. Surface Pro is the right hardware for the job.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/05/microsoft-surface-pro-review/[^]
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream. Discover.
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It's not groundbreaking; one could always set up a SIP server over OpenVPN (wouldn't even cost anything with an OpenWRT or DD-WRT compatible router), and install an OpenVPN cliet and a SIP softphone app, or roll a softphone app using [insert kickass encryption library here] and SIP/SDP/SRTP compatible library like PJSIP[^]
Silent Circle just makes this technology available to mass consumption in a more convenient way, so I don't see any reason to ban it.
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Looking back on my life, three programming languages prepared me well for JavaScript (which has some challenging aspects)... What tools are you using to learn (or simplify) JavaScript programming?
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In HTML, there isn't just a single animation implementation (hey, that rhymes!) that you can use. You actually have three flavors of animation to choose from, and each one is specialized for certain kinds of tasks. Let's take a quick look at all three of them and see how they relate to the animation definition you saw in the previous section. Lights! Camera! DOM!
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Get serious about your shell scripting skills and maybe you can pull this one off. It’s a game of snake played in a BASH shell. It seems like a coding nightmare, but the final product turns out to be organized well enough for us to understand and took less than 250 lines of code. Check out the comments for more games written in Bash, Sed and other, um... nontraditional ways.
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There is a theory that there's no program that can written that can't be rewritten in 1000 lines or less of recursive self referential Bash script.
There's another theory that most of the several thousand apparently active developers of Bash are in fact trying to be the first to prove this and that is why no actual development of Bash ever gets done.
As each one finally realises that what they need to do is to rewrite Bash in less than 1000 lines of Bash script they are immediately consumed by a quantum singularity due to the universe protecting its own laws of causality. After all once Bash is written in Bash, GCC will not be far behind and very soon the entire universe will be reduced to a line of apparently random symbols and little flashing white bar.
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage."
Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)
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You're already using source control for managing your code, right? You might even be using your SCM as the central piece of your workflow, like we do at New Relic. In this article, we're not going to review the basics of source control management, regardless of which one you use. Let's just assume that you already know how to get around. What we are going to cover is how the pros use git. We'll take a look at some of the advanced features and workflows that you might not already be familiar with. Hopefully, you’ll walk away with your mouth agape at the sheer possibilities that git provides! The Git is strong with this one.
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Writing secure code begins long before the first loop is formed -- and is no easy task. To even approximate bulletproof code, architects, engineers, auditors, and managers must try to imagine everything that could go wrong with every aspect of the code. Although it's impossible to anticipate every nasty curve the attackers will throw, you have to do all you can to reduce your attack surface, plug holes, and guard against the fallout of a potential breach. This should be review, but how many of these tips did you *not* already know?
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I’m extraordinarily pleased to today announce Topaz, a project I started 10 months ago, to create a brand new implementation of the Ruby programming language (version 1.9.3). Topaz is written in Python on top of the RPython translation toolchain (the same one that powers PyPy). Its primary goals are simplicity and performance. Because Topaz builds on RPython, and thus much of the fantastic work of the PyPy developers, it comes out of the box with a high performance garbage collector, and a state of the art JIT (just-in-time) compiler. What does this mean? Out of the box Topaz is extremely fast. A Ruby clone, written in Python, based on a Ruby port... um, OK.
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There's clearly interest in a device that converges the tablet and notebook. ASUS saw some of the earliest success in this department with its Transformer line of Android tablets. Once the first Windows RT/8 designs started appearing, it became clear that everyone was aiming to deliver something that delivered the best of both worlds. Even listening to Intel's description of Haswell you can get a good idea for where part of the industry is headed: everyone is working towards delivering a platform/device that has the battery life and portability of a tablet, but with the performance and flexibility of a notebook PC. Apple has remained curiously quiet on this front, but I suspect that too will change in good time. Could Surface Pro possibly fare any better than Surface RT did last year? Surprisingly, yes.
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It's no secret why Dell's struggling so badly it just took a $2b loan from Microsoft and bought itself back from shareholders to become a private company: after more than a decade of effort, the company never figured out what consumers actually want beyond low prices, or why they might want it. You might laugh, but it's true — a look back at Dell's biggest attempts to crack the consumer market and compete with Apple over the past 10 years reveals an embarrassing series of missteps, mistakes, and flat-out bad software, culminating in a flurry of poorly-executed mobile devices in 2010 that sealed the company's fate. Optiplex: the gray box that launched a thousand TPS reports.
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A while ago, Google took its Street View cameras to the slopes and started documenting ski runs at a few select resorts. Today, Google is expanding its mapping options for skiers by adding 38 new run and lifts maps to Google Maps, including its apps for Android and iPhone. These include well-known ski resorts like Squaw Valley, Big Sky and Whistler Blackcomb. Downhill tracer.
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BitTorrent Inc. is working on an application called Sync that uses P2P technology to sync your files between your devices.... The announcement blog post is somewhat scarce on details, but here’s what I’ve been told by the company: Sync will enable direct synchronization between your machines without any cloud caching. File transfers will be protected via 256 bit AES encryption. There are native apps for Mac OS, Windows and Linux, as well as a native NAS integration. Not everyone wants their files in the cloud.
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There is nothing more frustrating for a web developer than spending hours at a time fixing a bug that should just work. Often I’ll get stuck in a programming state that feels like I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing, as if the language I’m using (CSS, PHP, whatever), is actually a foreign language.
What is the most bizarre language you have ever worked with?
Three sentences for getting success:
a) Know more than others.
b) Work more than others.
c) Expect less than others.
"William Shakespeare"
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Quote: Most modern programming languages do not consider white space characters (spaces, tabs and newlines) syntax, ignoring them, as if they weren’t there. We consider this to be a gross injustice to these perfectly friendly members of the character set. Should they be ignored, just because they are invisible? Whitespace is a language that seeks to redress the balance. Any non whitespace characters are ignored; only spaces, tabs and newlines are considered syntax.
WHY?!?!?
Bob Dole The internet is a great way to get on the net.
 2.0.82.7292 SP6a
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Brilliant!!
Here is why:
And that's all I have to say! In only 123 spaces!! 
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COBOL.
Come to think of it, they're all bizarre. What we need is a Plain En&^%$#&^$&*$786478.....
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VB and PHP are top of my list.
I have worked in several open source projects including MyBB and Drupal. But could never like PHP. It is just not 'fun'! Same goes for VB. I could never really fall in love with that.
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