Yesterday I was frustrated.  I'm teaching my open source Mozilla courses, and I happened to look at our blog planet.  Right now we've got more than 30 students working on various open source projects, and to look at their blogs, you'd think they were all on holidays.  I view blogging…

It's Family Day in Ontario.  What's it like?  In the past hour, I've been asked the following questions by my daughters: What's strudel? What's reason? Can you play me some Blues?  I don't know why, but I like the Blues. Don't think for a minute you can be a dad…

I thought that the NYT's "multimedia" accompaniment to their article about the death of Georgian Luger, Nodar Kumaritashvili, was in bad taste.  The Huffington Post proves you can always go lower if you stretch: The dead slider's father said he hasn't seen the video of the fatal crash,…

Today Google announced that despite (or because of) the glacial pace of broadband rates in North America, it's going to show Ma Bell how it's done and do gigabit fibre to homes for what it calls a competitive rate. Imagine sitting in a rural health clinic, streaming three-dimensional medical imaging…

Yesterday I wrote about a short newspaper article from March 31, 1949.  While I was looking at it, I also took a moment to read the surrounding articles.  The article itself was actually reprinted as part of the "From Our Early Files" section, and one of a dozen…

I wrote a letter to my grandmother a little while ago.  I was partly reminded of the need for such writing by Luke, but also I had wanted to connect some of my current work with my past.  Yesterday my grandmother was here visiting, and she took me aside just…

I finished up some work today on the Processing.js automated test tools.  Previously I wrote a test harness to allow JavaScript based unit tests, as well as parser tests.  However, after watching some of my students struggle through bugs during the lead up to their 0.5 release, I…

There is another road.  It is, for the most part, hidden from view.  I have seen it only a few times, and always it has been those walking upon it that have made it appear to me. I saw it for the first time in a wicked snow storm, just…

I did a rewrite of the Processing.js test suite code to get around a bug Al hit on Linux.  In doing so, I hit another nasty bug that Ted eventually solved.  I needed to get an escaped version of JavaScript or Processing code loaded into the js shell via…

On the weekends I try to devote myself to as much time in the kitchen as I can, and to focus on attempting something I haven't tried before.  This past weekend, for reasons I'm not clear on myself, I was interested in flatbread.  I wanted to share a number of…