Ada and Zangemann: Fancy reading your kids a book about FOSS? Free Software Foundation Europe president Matthias Kirshner's picture book Ada and Zangemann explains the concepts of FOSS to school kids… and managers, marketing people, and victims of Windows-induced Stockholm Syndrome. Ada and Zangemann Ada and Zangemann –Pic: CC-by-sa 3.0, Sandra Brandstätter We first clapped eyes on …
A lot of years ago I was working on a system which was having some tedious technical issues. They were tricky to get my technical head around, and almost impenetrable for the project manager...but they wanted to understand so that they could liaise effectively with the end customer.
We'd been around the block so many times, with much frustration on all sides, but the PM just wasn't getting the detail. As a last ditch effort, I wrote the whole thing in the style of "One day Janet and John decided to build a location tracking system. Can you install a GPS-capable device into a vehicle? John can. See the device get it's position from a satellite...." and so on. I formatted it in 12pt Comic Sans and emailed it over to the PM
(for context, this was around the time that Terry Wogan used to do the Janet & John skits during his morning show on Radio 2)
There was a longer period of silence than I was comfortable with, and I feared that I'd induced a major sense-of-humour-failure. I was a little wary when the PM came over to me, but all was good. They'd been incommunicado so long because they'd been laughing so hard and, thankfully, now completely understood what was going on
From the screenshots the author has done an AMAZING and often overlooked thing - putting black text on a background that can be read in low light.
My boy is 2 1/2 years old and we read a few books before bed time. We have the lights down low so that it prepares him for sleep, but it's so difficult to read some books when they put black text on dark blue backgrounds. It's hard enough in the daylight to read it, let alone in low light. The Peppa Pig books are a bastard for that.
This is a lovely idea though and I hope it won't be the last.
"explains the concepts of FOSS to school kids… and managers, marketing people, and victims of Windows-induced Stockholm Syndrome."
That sounds about right. Many years ago when we were first introducing computers into the lab the director ordered a few copies of a Ladybird book on computers for the section heads.
I particularly liked the bit where she was given a magic key that enabled her to unlock the fearsome Gates of Bill, then passed through the walled garden without partaking of the forbidden fruit, before meeting the Wizard of FOSS who taught her the mystical "Incantations of the Shell" that enabled her to slay the dragon sitting on a big pile of gold.
io_uring is getting more capable, and PREEMPT_RT is going mainstream The Register 
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