Kid's Programming Language Reloaded: Phrogram

Less than a year ago I wrote a very short entry about KPL. Today I got an email from Jon Schwarz thanking me for the link and updating me on their progress. It is very impressive: they have made a fantastic playground for the programmers of tomorrow. I recommend that you take a look at the demo page for the new look language Phrogram.

What I liked about the demos that ship with Phrogram is the familiarity. Many of the programs I wrote (or tried to write) whilst learning to code are there: Conway's Life, 3D wireframe models, Mandelbrots, and mechanical simulators.

In my previous post I didn't express how important things like this are. When I was a child of the home-computer revolution, everybody I knew could write a "program" - even if just printed "Rupert is Cool!" on every screen in WH Smiths. This was because home computers not only came with a BASIC interpreter, but also booted up ready for programming. Times have changes and usability improvements have compromised access to programming languages. Phrogram and the KPL intitiative is an admirable (and effective) attempt to address this loss.

This matters for two reasons:

1. Industry needs good programmers, and the only way to get good is to practice.
   
2. Programming is a great pleasure; this is rarely understood by non-programmers.
   

David Brent's Microsoft training video

Hysterical spoof training video from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.

Valuable lessons for us here at Keima :-)

T-Mobile UMA Beta Program

Engadget has some insider information about T-Mobile's UMA program. UMA allows users to handover between the GSM network and a WiFi network. The beta program appears to include some sort of customized wireless router (with simplified encryption administration), but I assume commodity equipment (and possibly public hotspots, especially T-Mobile ones) would work just as well.

This is a smart move by T-Mobile. It embraces the risks that "free" WiFi VoIP pose to their business. The advantages to the user (over Skype on a PDA / smartphone for instance) are significant:

1. A single point-of-contact number.
   
2. Seamless roaming in and out of the house or hotspot.
   
3. Simple administration: simpler than buying Skype-in and Skype-out seperately and distributing an extra set of numbers to your contacts with special instructions.
   

The question is how do you charge for it: flat rate, per call, per second, etc... If you can get that right, you could mitigate the risk to revenue posed by WiFi VoIP and also get the customers themselves to fix local cover holes (and possibly those of their immediate neighbours).

A fascinating challenge to the traditional model of cellular planning.