I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about 3D in the browser.  It's to the point that I have to blog about it, and try to get it out of my head and onto the web where it belongs.  Part of the reason I'm writing this tonight is…

Curtis Bartley has a fantastic post up describing his use and abuse of the C++ preprocessor: A few months back I got this wild idea that you could insert trace-logging code (not jit-tracing, that's something else) into more or less arbitrary C++ by redefining certain C++ keywords as macros. He…

I want to draw a distinction between two types of reading.  The first, what I'll call Reading Against, is a form of reading that reads a text against itself.  It explicitly contains the idea of disagreement, but also implies the reverse, that one might agree with the text, or that…

This story about William Kamkwamba, and how he built a windmill in his remote village using only pictures from a book at the library, is amazing (see also this great review on GOOD).  Watching this video brought tears to my eyes as I listened to him tell the story.  This…

The tree has dropped its leaves and stands empty.  A bird sitting in the topmost branch, swaying slightly with the wind, yellow against the gray, reminding the leaves to return and marking the spot, envisages a hope the extends beyond the coming cold of winter.…

It's Saturday, and while I put off cleaning up from making pancakes with my eldest daughter, I thought I'd share something with you.  I've posted in the past about the intense pleasure I find in reading certain types of writing--really, really good bad writing.  I've got two more pieces for…

When I teach open source development, the very first thing I do is get students blogging.  It's a trick I learned from Chris.  Last week we spent the entire week learning to use blogs, blog planets, wikis, irc, newsgroups, teleconferences, twitter, etc.  Why take so much time teaching students how…

I read the phrase "bearing witness" twice tonight.  It's a phrase that has been going through my mind for the past three weeks.  During this same period I've been spending a lot of time thinking about Open Data.  They're connected in important ways. I seem to encounter the…

Next week in our Open Source Mozilla Development class, the students will be building Firefox from source, and learning about the Mozilla build.  In preparation for it, I worked on a couple bugs today, to get back into shape after a summer of reading books instead of compiler warnings. Before…

James Shelley has been doing some interesting writing, trying to wrestle with the difference between thinking and learning within a pedagogical setting. I think he gets close ("...synergy of thinking"), but then distracts himself looking for a difference that isn't there, or that is so hard to see,…