Okeedohkee... so I got that Dell Inspiron E1505 I was talking about, ships with Ubuntu installed. I customized it to have the Nvidia 256M graphics card, plus 1G RAM, only 80 GB storage (so not too heavy, inexpensive but not cheap). Turns out Nvidia was a good choice, as you can just check a box in Restricted Driver Manager, apt-get beryl, and voila, that rotating cube of desktops, VPython on one face, slides on another... wiggly windows.
I've expanded my slides at http://www.4dsolutions.net/presentations/ connectingthedots.pdf adding in some of that grossology stuff I mentioned. The idea here is very simple, as I was just explaining to this philosopher in Seattle I know. Especially young kids have an interest in scatalogical content and feel relieved when they have permission, in an academic context, to indulge that interest. The vehicle is Mad Libs, a genre of fill in the blank stories, which you can just make up yourself. It's more just creative writing. But it's also a triple-quote segment of Python with $fill_in_the_blanks to be later populated from a Python dictionary (another segment provides promptings e.g. "Give me a verb please: " or whatever raw_input). That's all just a small part of the talk, although string.Template has a continuing role when we turn to more mathy forms of output, such as scene description language for POV-Ray or X3D. Which reminds me, I need to get an X3D plugin working, or find a standalone application. [ blub blub blub -- fills cup with water ] OK time to get back to my cube and resume chatting with fellow cube farmers. Kirby
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