Fall Teaching It's the start of a new semester, and once again I'm teaching the Open Source and Mozilla Development course at Seneca's Centre for Development of Open Technology. I love teaching this course for many reasons: it's different every time I do it and never boring; the students and…
Last week I allowed myself the guilty pleasure of reading nothing but spy novels while at the cottage. I had wanted to read a number of John le Carré's books, and loaded my Kindle for the trip. First, a word on Le Carré. I really love his writing. Here are…
Today we're releasing Processing.js 1.4.0. It's a good solid release, which Jon jokes we've been aging for 9 months in order to develop its full flavour. As we write in the that post, we're going to change our development process. In the past we've been tracking work…
tl;dr -- I love Twitter and I love git, and wouldn't it be nice if I could build the former on the latter? What follows is a flight of fancy for your Friday feed reading... Introduction I went on a bike trip with my family last weekend, and when…
My thinking often returns to tools. Whether philosophically or practically, the idea of the tool fascinates me. I first became aware of the question of tools through the writings of philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger, and Gadamer--tools, devices, equipment, the in-order-to, the ready-to-hand, the hammer vs. the hammering-hand. One of…
I'm spending almost all of my time these days on three Mozilla video projects: Popcorn.js, the Butter SDK, and the soon-to-be-beta Popcorn Maker tool. Yesterday, after weeks of bug fixing and reviews, we hit code freeze for the 0.5 release of Butter and Popcorn Maker (due out in…
Quite a while ago Apple did a 10.6 update which basically destroyed the rendering on my secondary monitor. Beside my 27" iMac I use a 24" Dell U2410 turned vertically. I like this orientation a lot for writing code or working through long pieces of text. And…
Here's an annoying little DOM'ism that stumped me last week (don't worry, there's a happy ending if you keep reading). In Popcorn Maker's UI I wanted to fix a few places where we have textboxes that contain data from json manifests. When you click on such a pre-populated textbox, it's…
Like many of my colleagues working in education, for whom the next few weeks are busy with grading students' assignments or exams, I'm currently marking projects from my Mozilla Development course at Seneca. I've been rereading student blogs and looking back at bugs, and started to see some common things…
For reasons I don't fully understand, I've spent a fair amount of my reading time over the past month educating myself on North Korea. During the past few years I've become aware of my ignorance about the issues surrounding the country and its people, and I don't think I'm alone.…