June 29, 2011
Meet Scarlett. I found her for $20 at a thrift store. Taped to the front of her is a username and password, and the words "Lubuntu (not Windows)". Scarlett has 250 MB RAM, and a 400MHz processor. In other words, she has about the computing power of a modern smartphone. Perfect.Lubuntu means "Light Ubuntu", as you might guess. It is one of the thousands of derivatives of Linux, which comes from UNIX, which was developed by AT&T in the 60's. UNIX was engineered to be customizable. You could take things out here and add things there. Scarlett has just about everything taken out.
...including my favourite text editor, Emacs. Usually you can find Emacs in all Linux systems, but it's been removed from Scarlett to keep her lean. Emacs is important. Once you learn to do everything by keystroke, it's fast.
There's a problem. Emacs is about 50MB of code that has to be compiled yet, and Scarlett's compiler is gone. That costs 64MB, not counting the two missing dependencies.
- She is not on the internet. The packages have to be downloaded through 3GS onto my Android, and then transmitted via Bluetooth to my MacBook. From there they have to be burned to a CD and then transferred via sneakernet.
Jed will help Scarlett do what I bought her for: HTML5. Specifically, the canvas element, which is the black box you see below. This box is a 2d surface with coordinates, just like the earth has coordinates. It has an x and y value.
Type a two-digit X and Y: