Installing Windows 10 on my 5 month old HP Stream 11 was easy.I have no comments on that process. Visually two things stand out: windows are all white except for a very thin aqua blue margin and my slow laptop seems to run the UI faster. I don't know how much of the speed bump is making the code more efficient and how much is doing away with some animation effects. The desktop now seems like a mixture between Windows 7 and 8.1. The start menu is back and the bottom icon navigation bar is always visible along the bottom of the screen unless you put an application in full screen mode. Clicking the windows start menu in the lower left corner of the screen brings up a combo: classic looking menu on the left and the metro large icon interface like Windows 8.1 on the right side of the popup - but this popup only covers about 30% of the screen. It all seems a bit odd to me but I really like it - after using it for ten minutes (it took a little while to adjust to the new interface). I...

Even though I mostly use Java, Ruby, and Haskell, I have also been getting my head back into using Scala in my spare time. I took Martin Odersky's Functional Programming Principles in Scala class three years ago, and although I really enjoyed the class (he is a great lecturer!), I didn't much care for the tooling for Scala at that time. I ended up mostly using Clojure (with a little Haskell) for my day to day most used programming language. I experimented with Scala.js a while back and thought that it compared well with Clojurescript. Sweet to write client code in either Clojurescript or Scala.js but I think that sometimes it is faster to not have the extra complexity and the need to transpile and just use plain old Javascript. I took a class in Typescript this year and really liked it but with ES6 quickly becoming a standard some of the benefits of Typescript go away. This morning I was looking for an interesting template project using Scala for the backend and Scala.js ...

I have been very happy with using Chrome OS on my Toshiba Chromebook 2 but after often reading how easy it is to install Ubuntu I decided to give it a try. I used crouton (which runs Ubuntu along side Chrome OS) and decided to not install X11 to save space - important with just 16GB internal storage. I used: sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton -t cl-extra After installing Ubuntu I had about 10.5 GB of free local storage (remember, Chrome OS is also installed). After installing the gnu command line development tools, Ruby 2.1, Java 8, lein for Clojure development and several of my Ruby and Clojure projects I still have 7.5 GB of storage. I still want to install Haskell so I will have less space to work with. When developing web apps, you can test using the Chrome web browser since crouton runs Ubuntu right along side Chrome OS. For example, I was running a Sinatra app using port 4567 and could just hit the URL http://localhost:4567 on the Chrome browser in Chrome OS. Easy. I thought that ...

When I worked as a contractor at Google in 2013 I noticed that a lot of people were using Chromebooks. On my first orientation day I received a retina MacBook Pro, that was very nice, and I didn't immediately understand the preference of some people to use a Chromebook. Later I understood that a large amount of work performed at Google could be done in a Chrome web browser. They even had a very nice browser based IDE called Cider that was very great to use because it handled all programming languages and interfaced with Perforce source code control. My curiousity about Chromebooks has persisted. I am going to start teaching free classes at my local library in about two months on Internet secutity and privacy and I used this as an excuse to buy a Tosiba Chromebook 2. I had already bought earlier this year a little HP Stream 11 Windows 8.1 laptop using the same excuse :-) I will start out this "review" with a list of the good and not so good things about the Chromebook ...