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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

I'm reading papers right now, written by my students about their experiences attending open source talks at FSOSS.  Quite a few of them are thinking about the problem of the economics of open source, looking at business models and comparing them to closed source companies.  In the middle of this,…

Tomorrow will be the 14th day that my email has been broken.  I'm just going to call it now, because I'm done expecting it to get fixed.  Our IT department has bungled this so badly it has left my colleagues and me speechless.  There are official statements like this one,…