The Globe picked up a Canadian Press article today, whose title echos the favourite refrain of big media and other institutional onlookers of so called social media: "Students failing because of Twitter, texting."  In it the author cites some "solid evidence" for the demise of writing…

Today I finished-up my work writing automated tests for the Processing.js parser and a full unit test infrastructure.  It has been an interesting bit of work, and resulted in a lot of good info.  Today I imported Ben and Casey's sample code from their Processing books, and it was…

This is the story of my favourite kind of programming.  The kind of programming where you have a handful of existing tools, a bunch of data, and you need to make it all fit together somehow.  There's no neat-shrink-wrapped-sofware-download-it-from-the-web way to do it (none of this stuff was meant to…

There's a great post over at Mashable by San Francisco mayor, Gavin Newsom, on the city's new open source policy.  In it he discusses the democratic, fiscal, and technical advantages of open source.  He writes: One of the greatest technology changes of our times is the rise of open source…

I'm working with an ever growing group of web and Mozilla developers, along with some talented audiophiles, on a project to expose audio spectrum data to JavaScript from Firefox’s audio and video elements. Today we bring out the demo reel. Last time I wrote about our success getting the…

I heard an interesting interview today with a woman who was talking about the importance of transit poetry programs.  At one point she made the comment that she memorizes a poem every day, which took she and the host off on a tangent about memory and the value of having…

I'm working with a group of web and Mozilla developers, along with some talented audiophiles, on a project to expose audio spectrum data to JavaScript from Firefox’s audio and video elements. Today we teach the browser how to sing. Our experiments to expose audio data to JavaScript have really…

This has been one of the worst winters for birding I can remember.  A few weeks ago I was sure the issue must be related to my feeders being low.  I went out to fill them and found that they were all full, and waiting patiently in the cold for…

the most annoying thing about Canada: "Sorry, this product is not available in your country" --David Ascher I'm not going to let myself get all mad here by thinking or writing more about this issue.  Let's just say I couldn't agree with David more, and it drives me…

For the past month I've been working with some audiophile friends on a project to try and expose audio spectrum data to JavaScript from Firefox’s audio element.  Today I finally have something more than raw numbers to show off. When I last wrote about our experiments with the <…