Today, as I made pancakes for the girls ("...with chocolate chips please daddy!"), a bird alighting on the top of a white pine outside our greatroom window caught my eye.  "Why," I thought, "is a Gray Jay this far south?"  I stopped what I…

It's nearly FSOSS-eve, and I'm in the mood for telling a story.  One of our speakers this year is an FSOSS-alumni, Marcus Bornfreund, the project lead for Creative Commons Canada.  I first heard Marcus speak three years ago, when he gave the opening keynote at FSOSS.  It was the first…

In two days I get to watch a year's worth of work burst into life.  FSOSS, the open source event I help run, is happening on Thursday and Friday, and for the first time in some years, I'm actually getting to speak!  I'll be part of a panel on Teaching…

A quick note to let all you stragglers know that online registration for the Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) ends TODAY.  Tickets will be available at the door, but will cost you an additional $25.  Don't miss your chance to registered today and save.…

I was really happy to see that Apple recognizes homeschoolers for its educational pricing and other education programs.  I qualify as a professor anway, but it's good to know that they'd also accept us as homeschoolers too.  Nice!…

My students are getting ready to release their open source work for the first time, with a 0.1 release.  For many of them, it's the first time they've written something that wasn't canned or otherwise a toy project.  This is, we hope, something that matters to the community, something…

Reading about Disney's EULA on the Sleeping Beauty BlueRay, one thought comes to mind.  Don't watch it.  Don't buy it.  Don't put up with it.  We don't subject our kids to this stuff for multiple reasons.  I hear so many parents telling me, "it's Disney so it's OK for…

I was about to go to bed and I made the mistake of reading Luke's blog, and specifically his attempt to define a Philosophy of the Table.  I decided to forgo sleep for a while so that I could reflect on it before losing my train of thought, not least…

"Dave, I've written all these tests, and they fail.  Will you accept tests that fail for our 0.1 release?" What's going on here?  You've got someone who has written tests for a component (in this case, Colour Profiles), and he's found that the code is somehow broken.…

I was in a meeting last week where I was trying to describe what it means to work on something like Mozilla.  I often use the phrase, "working at scale," and one of my colleagues stopped me to ask just what that meant.  Explaining it without examples is…