How to teach computers to children

I think that one of the most important things that you can do for the Future of your children it is to explain them how to program.

In order to do this, there are 3 beautifully (and free tools) to use:
- Scratch (One of the first tools to use).
- App inventor (If you can develop simple Android applications).
- Makecode (If you want to develop something that executes on embedded hardware).

I like specially makecode because you can see your programs working on a real device, like Adafruit Circuit Playground Express.

This is a "cheap" card, where you can include different programs developed using blocks, that integrate sensors, and controls of leds.

To program this card, it is as easy as having a USB cable and a computer with Chrome to access to the development platform.

As an example of what you can do using this tools, it is shown on this short youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT0s8xmHxWA

Tools to manage projects

I have been using for a quite long time, a web based Project Management Tool. Some years ago, we started using kanban boards, and we choose to use Leankit, but this tool doesn´t fulfill all what we need.

After evaluating a lot of different tools (Asana, Wrike, Flow, Wunderlist, Active Collaboration, Proofhub, Genius Project), I finally selected Teamwork.

After some months using it, there I thinks that I like a lot:
- It is a easy to use tool (for the final user). This is important if you have a quite big team, and not all the people likes to use complex tools.
- You can have almost everything in the same tool (files, tasks, milestones).
- It can grow from 1 person teams to 100 people teams, with the same price level (the cost it is related to the number of projects, no to the number of users).

From my point of view, there is only one important feature missing: Helping to control how the projects are evolving, and when the project it is going to be finished. This is specially important on big projects. It´s true, you can create a gantt diagram, but gantt diagrams are it not very useful when you are developing software projects.

In this situation, to get valuable information, you need to export the data to Excel, and with some extra work, you can create things like a Burn Down Chart, that provides you a good estimate of the delivery date of the project.

IP CAMERA SETUP CIPCAMPTIWL

I bought this camera, but I was not able to set up the dindyns service. The camera worked, but I was not able to see the images from outside using the manufacturer url.

I spent a complete afternoon trying to figure was going gron, and the end, the problem was quite easy, I forgot to setup the DNS of the camera to the one of my wifi router.

To make the correct setup, you should write:

ipconfig /ALL

There, it will be shown the dns server address that is using your computer.

You have to write this information on the Network setup of the camera, because the camera it is not using DHCP.

The same happened to the e-mail, I was wondering what the problema was, but at the end was only that the camera was not able to resolve the url of the e-mail server.

Creating process on Barium Live

After our company decided to buy a license for using Barium Live, I have trying to implement the first processes on this tool. My experience it is: - The tool (Barium) it is a very powerful one. - The tools for sending e-mails and creating instances without being a Barium Live user expands greatly the processes that can be implemented using this tool. - The documentation of the wiki needs to be improved. I had some problems because the process that I want to implement needed to create a second document on some particular states, and I. Didnt know that the property Createdatend needed to be set up on the document to make sure that that once the stated it is left the document it is created. Other point it is that formal processes that we had on our Quality Manual were a lot simjpler that the one that we need to implement on the tool. I have neeeded more work to capture the real process than the one used to implement the process on the tool. I have also to see how the other people on the company feels about the tool, it is allways difficult to start using a new tool.

Samsung Galaxy Tab and Bluetooth Keyboard

I own a Samsung Galaxy Tab, one of the first versions (GT-P1000) with a firmware 2.2 (FROYO.BUJI4), and I like to carry this device when I´m travelling. But altought it is possible to do a lot of things with this device, it takes a lot of time to write long e-mails. So, I decided to buy a bluetooth keyboard. After visiting some electronics shop, I decided to buy a Microsoft Bluetooth keyboard.
There are a lot of keyboards compatible with Ipad, Iphone, etc., but this was the only that on the box was written that it can work with Android devices.
The keyboard works quite good, the only problem it is with the special simbols (á, é, etc.), but the performance when you have to write something it is a lot better.
Depending of the use of your table, this device can be also useful to you.

Barium Live and BPMN

In the last weeks, I have been evaluating a tool for managing process inside my company. You know, there are some repetitive tasks that in the old good days will be managed with a Printed page and moving this page from one person to another one.

I remember, as an example, the form that we used to hire someone new on the company (you have to go for the CEO to obtain his signature, and after this giving the page to the HR person...).

In the past years, we have implemented some of this functionality on the intranet, but this needs some software development, and it is difficult to change the processes once they are deployed. This is the reason why I have been looking for a tool that can help to develop or provide this solutions.

I have found two different solutions.
- One of them it is IBM Blueworks live: This seems to be a less formal tool, for companies with not very formal processes.
- The other one it is Barium Live. I will explain with more detail this solution.

Barium live it is a SAAS solution (you have everything on the web). This tool it is built around two paradigms:
- The process diagram.
- The forms related with the process.

You have a editor to describe the processes (something similar to Visio), and a editor to create the different forms that you are going to use on the process. With this tool, It is very easy to create a enrollment form, and describe the different steps that should follow the form to complete the Work flow.

From my point of view it can be a very useful tool for medium to big companies, where there are already some process with a defined work flow where it is needed to automate the different processes.

The tool has the possibility of sending e-mails when the forms reach some steps on the work flow, so it is easy to integrate this tool with your already existing infrastructure.

I will provide in an additional post my opinion for this tool, my first evaluation it is very good, but let´s see how the rest of the users inside my company feels once we start to use the tool inside the company.

Videos on windows 7 and Toshiba satellite computer

I have a problem with windows 7 and my brand new Toshiba satellite computer, when playing divx/xvid videos.

If I try to play them with Windows media player, the videos doesn´t reproduce smootly. It is something strange that seems to be related with the hard disk, because if you try to play two times the same video, sometimes the second time the video plays correctly.

I have updated the xvid/divx codec, installing ffdshow, but I have not been able to solve the problem.

I have been only able to obtain an acceptable result with the VLC player, and changing the cache size on the file input advanced option to a value of 10000 ms.

If this also happens to you, maybe you can give me a suggestion of what can I do.