Monthly Archives: November 2008

Big Dog

By david.humphrey | Published: November 30, 2008
We’ve been talking about robots for a while, the girls and me.  They were fascinated to know that a machine could put a car together, for example.  We built our first robot out of an old Kleenex box, some nails, popsicle sticks, and a paper plate. My oldest daughter wrote a program so it [...]
Posted in Digital Swag, family | Comments closed

Unexpected guests

By david.humphrey | Published: November 28, 2008
Today, as I made lunch for the girls, I noticed an interesting flock of birds in our conifers.  My wife had noticed them too while they were skiing.  I thought they looked like Pine Grosbeaks, but too small.  Upon closer inspection, I realized they were White Winged Crossbills!  I’ve seen them once before in winter [...]
Posted in Nature | Comments closed

nsString dave=fail;

By david.humphrey | Published: November 28, 2008
I’m going to have something to say in a little while about two of my favourite topics: coping and failure, and on the meaning and implications of each.  They are linked in important ways.  However, today I’m going to model some of what I’ll say then, and to do it my subject will be the [...]
Posted in CDOT, Idea Factory, Seneca | Comments closed

On teaching students how to blog

By david.humphrey | Published: November 24, 2008
Posted in Seneca | Comments closed

Chapter 41, “Moby Dick”

By david.humphrey | Published: November 23, 2008
Nor even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are those this day among them, who, though intelligent and courageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or [...]
Posted in Idea Factory | Comments closed

“Every stage is better than the one before”

By david.humphrey | Published: November 22, 2008
My mother-in-law often says this about parenting, and I’m learning that it’s so true.  It’s winter now, and not in the ‘calendar’ sense, but in the ‘we have so much snow’ sense.  My wife spent a lot of time this fall looking for used cross-country ski gear for our girls, and it has really paid [...]
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Parkour

By david.humphrey | Published: November 22, 2008
Tonight I somehow arrived at a site discussing Parkour.  I’d never heard of it before, at least not using this name, and was curious.  So I started to read, and click, and watch, and have my mind blown.  The best way to sum up what I found is to say simply this: what I cannot [...]
Posted in Idea Factory | Comments closed

Quality Time with Mercurial

By david.humphrey | Published: November 21, 2008
In an effort to fix my current failing workflow, I’m trying to really learn how to use Mecurial well.  My main problem is that I’m fixing a whole bunch of bugs that cluster in a set of files, and the changes are sometimes dependent, sometimes not.  I’ve had to resort to hand editing diffs and [...]
Posted in CDOT, Seneca | Comments closed

RFC2060

By david.humphrey | Published: November 21, 2008
When .NET first came out, I was looking for a way to learn it.  At the time, Peter McIntyre and I were writing a new course on ASP.NET (now INT422).  One of the assignments we used for a long time was a web-based email application, and it was a lot of fun.  To make it [...]
Posted in CDOT, Seneca | Comments closed

On JavaScript

By david.humphrey | Published: November 18, 2008
Last Thursday we were lucky to have my former student, Tom Aratyn, come and give a talk on JavaScript.  It was neat having Tom come to speak to this year’s crop of Seneca-Mozilla hackers, since he was literally the first student I had working on anything related to Mozilla.  Tom proved to me that students, [...]
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