Monthly Archives: March 2009

Fine print

I don’t get this new Microsoft ad: So Mac’s are too expensive. Well, they are really, really good machines, and worth it, but let’s accept this for the moment. So you want to save some cash, and buy a cheap computer. I get that. Doesn’t it make you mad, then, that you [...]
Posted in Come on!, Digital Swag | Comments closed

“HTML is not an output format. HTML is The Format.”

We’ve been having some discussion of late around how to move some courses on-line at Seneca, and this inevitably leads to one of my least favourite topics: IT infrastructure and content management systems.  The amount of inertia I see around making choices with regard to online content is incredible.  Our particular discussions have thankfully not [...]
Posted in CDOT, Seneca | Comments closed

Counting the cost

This week I was helping someone with some debugging work, and I was shocked to watch his workflow.  Here’s what it looked like: Working in a Windows shareware “editor,” (I use this term loosely) that asked us to buy the full version every few times we saved, we worked on a script that needed a bunch [...]
Posted in CDOT, Mozilla Education, Seneca | Comments closed

Vernacular

Earlier this week I was reflecting on the varied forms of discourse in which I’m engaged in any given day.  I spend a great deal of time communicating online, which means I do everything from idle babble like a teenage girl to highly technical Geekinese.  I write differently in my blog depending on whom I’m [...]
Posted in Digital Swag, Idea Factory | Comments closed

Mozilla and Creative Commons teach practical open education skills

I just got off the phone with Philipp Schmidt, talking about the upcoming on-line course being offered by Mozilla Education, ccLearn, and Peer 2 Peer University.  It’s going to be an excellent chance for educators thinking about open source, the open web, open licensing, and open pedagogy to meet and exchange ideas.  The six week [...]
Posted in CDOT, Mozilla, Mozilla Education, Seneca, Teaching Open Source | Comments closed

Mozilla and Education version 0.4: Projects, Resources, Mailing List

We continue to make good progress on Mozilla Education, and are hearing from more and more students and profs/teachers interested in being involved.  I met more students studying in India last week wanting to work on Mozilla than ever before: keep it coming! The new student-project bugzilla keyword that I blogged about earlier is being used, [...]
Posted in CDOT, Mozilla, Mozilla Education, Seneca, Teaching Open Source | Comments closed

Inevitable, but unforeseen

Robins (more than a dozen) Killdeer (at least 3) Meadowlark Turkey Vulture Single blade of green grass in a field of brown Mud I’m pleased to see you again, Spring, the girls, more so.
Posted in Nature | Comments closed

I <3 epicurious.com

“You like weekend cooking,” was what my wife told me the other day.  By that she means that I like to spend a lot of time preparing somewhat complex food, and it’s a very true assessment.  My secret, or one of them, is that I find great recipies on Epicurious.com.  Typically I have a few [...]
Posted in Food, family | Comments closed

JS Getter Lazy Init Pattern

In a recent comment on one of my patches, Mark made what I thought was a clever suggestion for how to do lazy initialization of a value via a js getter: >+ /// The user's profile dir, which we'll cache and use a lot for path clean-up >+ _profileDir: null, >+ >+ /// Spotlight won't index [...]
Posted in CDOT, Digital Swag, Mozilla Education, Seneca | Comments closed

Field Guides

Today my wife took our girls to a birthday party for one of their friends, and they took her a gift: her first field guide.  It was something they knew she wanted, after watching her reaction on seeing one for the first time at the library a while ago, and being totally and completely mesmerized.  [...]
Posted in Nature, family | Comments closed