CNBC's "Explain This" makes KhanAcademy a Pioneer of the "HyperSchool"

Anybody think that CNBC has delivered the latest unanticipated Internet service that's a (revolutionary) turn for the better?

If you peruse my blog, you know I'm a big fan of khanacademy.org and Sail Khan's library of over 2,000 9-to-15 minutes classes. Perfect for the Web, for our rapid paced lifestyle and increasingly limited attention spans.

Why do I think this new features turns khanacademy into a new class of school I'm going to call "hyperschools"? Because it is the beginning of the destruction of our view of education as a silo where school is school and it happens during school. With "CNBC Explains", CNBC and Khan are showing that learning can be more spontaneous, more targeted, more convenient and more "in the moment."

The parallel is with hyperlinks themselves. They give the Web its ability to cross-wire information. Following hyperlinks, you can follow all kinds of trails of content (knowledge). Hyperschools, of which there is now only one -- khanacademy.org --, provide the same flexibility. Let me educate myself by attempting to read this interesting article about LIBOR (inter-bank trading rates) and I'll click on these "Explain This" icons as I see fit in order to more deeply understand what I'm reading (by following a quick 10 minute Khan class focused on specified, relevant topic (to the article).

Another metaphor is the Star Trek-like scenario of "I want to be expert enough to follow this article on Treasury Bonds, so I'll take a pill on everything I need to know to understand the article.

Hopefully, you get the idea. It feels like a subtle new B2B enhancement of a company's web site (CNBC to Khan)... but the more I thought about it, the more I like the feeling I got of yet more breaking of old barriers to education. Love it!

A more reasonable way to comment blocks of shell code...

I love using shell script for launching java and groovy apps because they're so good at setting the table in a way that keeps the application much simpler... especially when the shell script can handle common needs which is often the case for Operations-style functionality. Example shell script functionality includes

• determining if there's sufficient space on the file system,
• collecting files to process,
• configuring the environment (as in defining traps that clean up temp files and remove lock files when an app closes either naturally or via control-C interrupt, or re-directing I/O so that a control-C won't kill the process you're running).

Because operations-style applications suffer from out-of-site, out-of-mind syndrome, having a solid strategy with shell scripts that can manage and measure the operating environment, and scream bloody murder when things aren't right, makes them a worthy design component.

I've never liked "the fact" that to comment out a block of code in unix shell programming I had to insert # symbols in front of every line.

I found out over the weekend the ideal way to do it using a here document and the ":" operator, which is a no-op

# all this code inside this section document
# is now invisible to the shell interpreter
# Add to use a # anywhere.

And here's how to do the equivalent with a here document.

: <<STUFF_TO_PASS_TO_COLON
all this code inside this here document
is now invisible to the shell interpreter
Didn't have to use a # anywhere.
STUFF_TO_PASS_TO_COLON