In recent days our CDOT Blog Planet has begun having issues. Chris was able to determine that we have many feed URLs that are no longer active. Today I wrote and ran a script to check all of the feeds in the list, and removed any that were not found,…
I've been lax in my blogging for the past number of months (apologies). I've had my head down in a project that's required all of my attention. On Friday we reached a major milestone, and I gave a demo of the work on the weekly Webmaker call. Afterward David Ascher…
Last week I finally made some time to rebuild my blog. The server it ran on died in the fall, and I haven't had the time to properly get it back up. From 2006 until the end of 2013, vocamus.net/dave ran on a WordPress instance hosted faithfully by…
One of the topics my daughters and two of their friends asked me to do this year in our home school is programming. They call it Code Club, and we have been learning HTML, JavaScript, CSS together. We've been using Thimble to make things like this visualization of Castles around…
I wrote previously about some work we're doing on a web file system like node.js' that sits atop modern browser data stores. Yesterday Alan came to my class and we brainstormed a solution for creating safe, shared web file systems. I wanted to write down some of the ideas,…
I've been spending too much time lately thinking about file systems. What started it was a casual conversation I had with Alan about work he was doing to implement a node.js style POSIX file system in JS on top of IndexedDB. At the same time I was writing about…
Mozilla has implemented and shipped the Web Audio API recently, and at the same time begun the work to remove the Audio Data API. I wanted to say something on the occasion of this transition, and what I learned about the web in making the Audio Data API. In 2009…
I've written previously about our goal and the work to localize all of Webmaker, the sites, tools, user content, metadata--all of it. I set a deadline for the team of the end of August for an en-US localization, and we hit that. We've been running and developing against a fully…
This week, among other topics, I'll be teaching my students about the Mozilla Manifesto. It's one of the places I need to start if I'm going to bring new people into the Mozilla project, as it helps to establish the principles that they will encounter in code review, irc, mailing…
You've no doubt seen Justin Jackson's excellent web site, Words. I loved it before I was half-way finished reading the whole way through. The idea is powerful. Words are powerful. The web is powerful. A few days later I saw Roman Schmitz riffing on the same idea with words.txt.…