Monthly Archives: April 2009

Yo dojo!

I spent some time this weekend learning and working with dojo.  I have been casting about for some time, hoping to find a suitable replacement for extjs in dxr.  In terms of the lib on a technical level, I liked working with extjs pretty well (I wrote about my first experiences here and here).  What [...]
Posted in CDOT, Mozilla, Mozilla Education, Seneca, Teaching Open Source | Comments closed

On accepting the role and playing the part

From Maclean’s interview with Gord Downie: Q: You are a showman of epic proportions, and yet offstage you are a very different person. Where do you go when you get up on stage? A: I surrender. I throw myself on the altar of song and I see my own personal musical life in fast flashes of faces [...]
Posted in Introversion | Comments closed

Faster builds, smaller footprint, zero functionality!

This is the story of the day I decided that it would be a good idea to get my static analysis builds to stop linking, since I only care about the dehydra output produced by gcc.  I hear lots of people complain about how hard it can be to get the build system working.  I’m [...]
Posted in CDOT, Mozilla, Mozilla Education, Seneca | Comments closed

Why is programming fun?

My wife has observed that my best days are filled with a healthy dose of programming.  I’ve found this to be true as well, even without her critical distance.  I know of few things like programming that allow me to lose myself in a task.  I can do it for hours and hours.  So I [...]
Posted in Idea Factory | Comments closed

Peer Review and absence as presence

This weekend we had to drive to Orillia, which took us across 89 on our way to the 400.  Whenever we go this route, I’m totally blown away when we hit Shelburne and drive through the wind farm there.  I think there’s a tendency in Ontario, especially in Toronto, to think of wind energy as [...]
Posted in Come on!, Idea Factory | Comments closed

Is Not

I have a few posts I want to write, and I’ve been walking around with them in my head for the past month.  One of them relates to the way I’ve come to read, specifically, the way I move from book to book, author to author and how this differs so much from the ways [...]
Posted in Idea Factory | Comments closed

Thought on Easter

“Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again.  No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father.” (John [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments closed

Something out of nothing

Tonight my very tired wife made a quite reasonable request: “can you make something sweet?” The answer to this question is always ‘yes,’ but sometimes it’s harder than others. Tonight, for example, was tricky because we have no eggs in the house (nor much else I’d need to really make something awesome). [...]
Posted in Food, family | Comments closed

Don’t call it the Internet if it’s just for the US

I’m sick of being told that content or services aren’t available to me “in my region.”  I don’t live in the dessert with camels carrying CDs between end-points of a Bedouin network.  I don’t live in the Antarctic where it would really be hard to get things shipped to me. Supposedly I live in a country [...]
Posted in Come on! | Comments closed

“Where did you get that output?”

One of the things I’m working on in my spare time is rewriting and extending DXR.  I’m adding more static analysis info to the data, adding a “document” style vs. “web app” interface, ripping out glimpse/MXR, making it easier to get at type info from the UI, and redoing the front-end in Python (so Andrew [...]
Posted in CDOT, Mozilla, Seneca | Comments closed