Monthly Archives: October 2009

Classified Ad

<humph> I need to find someone who will pay me to read and write and stay home <humph> that’s tricky <mhoye> Tough, yeah. In these tough economic times, you are someone desperately seeking the right candidate for a job that is almost impossible to fill.  No one trains for this job anymore.  No one seeks it out.  Finding [...]
Posted in Idea Factory | Comments closed

If you build it, they will build more

Next week our students’ first project release is due (0.1).  In the past few days I’ve had quite a few conversations with students working on their Processing.js work, and a lot of it is coming along nicely (Andor, for example, has been blogging and coding up a storm).  Al will be coming to Toronto in [...]
Posted in CDOT, Mozilla Education, Seneca, Teaching Open Source | Comments closed

Two thoughts from class

Today in class we were taking the skills and knowledge of the past few weeks and applying them.  The students have learned how to build Mozilla, how to work with the code, how to make changes and get those changes compiled back into the application, how to work with revision control and make patches, what [...]
Posted in CDOT, Mozilla Education, Seneca, Teaching Open Source | Comments closed

JavaScript regex and exec()

Every time I use JavaScript’s regular expressions I inevitably have to relearn something.  Today I am putting the finishing touches on a new web-based static analysis tool I’ll blog about later, and I needed to do something simple: given a dehydra JS object that has been pushed through SpiderMonkey’s uneval() function, I want to find [...]
Posted in CDOT, Mozilla Education, Seneca | Comments closed

Shared Milestones

What I love most about the web is its potential to connect me to my friends as they reflect and work through ideas that are also important to me.  Today, among so many other examples, the web gave me a picture of what it’s like to be a homeschooling dad.  I noticed Jason throw a [...]
Posted in family | Comments closed

Writing off Technical Debt

In the last month I’ve encountered the term Technical Debt a great many times.  If the term is unknown to you, consider it a sort of borrowing against your future (e.g., time in most cases, but also money to pay for employees’ time) in order to more quickly deliver something now (e.g., a software product).  [...]
Posted in CDOT, Idea Factory, Mozilla Education, Seneca, Teaching Open Source | Comments closed

Letters on the ground

Living in the country, one of the yearly jobs one has to do, which my city friends miss out on, is cleaning out a septic system filter.  It involves removing a man-hole sized cover, which is fastened with 8 three-inch screws.  Once open, you have to reach the length of your upper-body down into the [...]
Posted in Nature, Reading | Comments closed

“For all the details, please visit our website”

I’ve written before about my frustration with big media using the web as a supplemental mechanism for reusing content first delivered in a traditional format.  When the web is viewed as a table of contents or handout to your main presentation, you miss the entire point of what the web is all about.  Today I’m [...]
Posted in Come on!, Digital Swag, Food, family | Comments closed

Thanksgiving weekend, somewhere in Canada

The girls and I drove to the dump, with CBC on the radio.  Brent Bambury was interviewing Canadian Astronaut Julie Payette.  When it was our turn, and I had to turn the car off, we were all sad at the thought of having to miss the last few minutes.  But when I turned our radio [...]
Posted in family | Comments closed

In praise of the library

“The original is unfaithful to the translation.” –Jorge Luis Borges A post with this title could take me one of two ways, and tonight I’m going to follow it down the road paved with silicon.  I had a guy tell me this week that the holy grail of software is what he called “freedom from translation”  [...]
Posted in CDOT, Mozilla Education, Seneca, Teaching Open Source | Comments closed