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Nor even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are those this day among them, who, though intelligent and courageous enough in offering…

My mother-in-law often says this about parenting, and I'm learning that it's so true.  It's winter now, and not in the 'calendar' sense, but in the 'we have so much snow' sense.  My wife spent a lot of time this fall looking for used cross-country ski gear for our girls,…

Tonight I somehow arrived at a site discussing Parkour.  I'd never heard of it before, at least not using this name, and was curious.  So I started to read, and click, and watch, and have my mind blown.  The best way to sum up what I found is to say…

In an effort to fix my current failing workflow, I'm trying to really learn how to use Mecurial well.  My main problem is that I'm fixing a whole bunch of bugs that cluster in a set of files, and the changes are sometimes dependent, sometimes not.  I've had to resort…

When .NET first came out, I was looking for a way to learn it.  At the time, Peter McIntyre and I were writing a new course on ASP.NET (now INT422).  One of the assignments we used for a long time was a web-based email application, and it was a…

Last Thursday we were lucky to have my former student, Tom Aratyn, come and give a talk on JavaScript.  It was neat having Tom come to speak to this year's crop of Seneca-Mozilla hackers, since he was literally the first student I had working on anything related to Mozilla.  Tom…

I'm not usually a great fan of Gladwell's books, but tonight I happened upon this excerpt from his latest book, which asks the question of whether there is any such thing as a genius.  It's a fascinating read, and dovetails with a number of other conversations and philosophical ideas I've…

I've been fixing bugs all week as I gear-up for a new round of marking on the students' 0.2 releases.  It's been a welcome change hacking my email application (Thunderbird) instead of spending all day replying to mail inside it. Whenever I can I try to practice what I…

Here's a thought: why don't the buildbots report to Twitter?  If the mars lander can twitter, why can't the Mozilla tree?  It would be cool to have it report with some wit: "Um, John Smith, you totally broke the tree! [links]" Why not?…