Monthly Archives: November 2009

Salt

For lunch today I had pizza from on campus, and the crust was made with almost no salt.  It’s a common mistake I’ve made baking bread over the years.  I remember the first time I learned what salt does in bread.  I made this incredible Italian artisanal loaf that took many days.  When it was [...]
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Local

I had a moment of recognition this morning.  I was looking through Twitter and noticed Thomas Saunders saying something that caught my attention: twitter as the morning newspaper ( a good read with coffee ): http://bit.ly/1enCZg I smiled because without even clicking the link, I knew where it went.  I was right, and took a moment [...]
Posted in Idea Factory | Comments closed

// comments considered harmful

There’s an interesting paradox in teaching programming.  We (and by we I mean ‘they’) love to teach our students to use comments in code.  We (‘they’) deduct marks if they are missing, return work that isn’t fully commented, etc.  But!  I’m going to go on record as saying that comments are evil.  The reason that [...]
Posted in CDOT, Mozilla Education, Seneca, Teaching Open Source | Comments closed

“I want your love”

I watched some of the American Music Awards with my wife the other night.  Every once in a while I feel compelled to engage with the popular culture I typically dismiss.  I’m not sure if it is a kind of penance or a need to reaffirm what I already believe.  Whatever the reason, I came [...]
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circa 1994

I had an important realization the other night: I lived half my life in the time before the web, and became an adult exactly as the web began.  Put another way, I was taught how to read, think, and learn in the epoch of the book, and as soon as I was released into adulthood, [...]
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Morning Coffee, blogs, and XPCOM

The best part about this stage of the term in our Seneca Mozilla and Open Source development courses is that the students are really digging into some interesting work, and it makes my morning coffee and blog-reading an incredibly satisfying experience.  Here’s some of what I woke-up to today, and it’s inspired me (I need [...]
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The Essentialism of Materialism and Immaterialism

This week one of the phrases that has been occupying my mind is ‘do without.’  I met-up with Luke this past week and we discussed it at length.  He correctly identified my emphasis on the word do vs. without, and later wrote about it.  In his post he explored the apparent contradictions of a life [...]
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Encouragement

To my students working on Processing.js, I wanted to share a video that Ben Fry linked to on Twitter today (if you guys were all on Twitter this would be so much easier, btw).  You don’t have to be able to create things like this yourself: helping to enable the tools that are used to [...]
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Gamercamp, Nov 21

Blake mentioned on Twitter that Gamercamp is coming-up in Toronto on November 21.  It looks like a great event for our game dev students, and those working on 3D in the browser with C3DL, WebGL, and Processing.js.
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text-decoration: underline

An unfortunate side-effect of removing underlines from links on a web page is that one can easily miss side-by-side links.  Here’s an example from a blog I was reading today: How many links are there in that section?  One?  Two?  Three?  The answer is three, but just like with this image, you can’t tell by looking [...]
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