This year's Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) is now accepting presentation proposals. In addition to the regular talks and and workshops at FSOSS, there will also be a 1-day Teaching Open Source Summit. If you're working in open source or open source education, consider submitting a talk proposal…
Three months ago Mozilla Education started a project to actively look for student projects. Each morning I get email from bugzilla with the list of newly added student-project bugs (I got 11 this morning). As I write this we have 61 potential projects. I'm hoping to have that hit 100…
This morning I read Luke's discussion of the threshold, and his use of a quotation from Heidegger (“The threshold is always stony...") put me in mind of something I had wanted to write this weekend. On Sunday my wife and I worked to finish some gardens around our house.…
I spend a lot of time thinking about what I call seeing. By seeing I mean a sort of intentionality of purpose that pays attention to what might be there. I distinguish it from similar modes of being--looking, finding, the parables of the pearl or lost coin. Where looking is…
This past Thursday and Friday I led a short workshop on getting started in Mozilla from a professor's point of view. I've put up the outline of what I presented, along with notes and links. You are welcome to improve and correct this, since I'll likely use it again. It…
I saw my first Nighthawk a few days ago. While the girls played in a garden after an event we went to as a family, I wandered under a large maple tree. I was looking for what might be there, and in this case, it was a roosting Nighthawk. I…
There is no tree in our forest that dies so completely each winter as the Tamarack. In winter they are skeletons, frozen vertically in the snow. And in spring there is nothing so shocking as the re-animation of these bones. I have to go and touch them with my fingers…
I've been thinking lately about Mark's posts on hybrid organizations (see one, two, three). Many of the things he's talking about in these posts overlap with ideas I have about education and institutions (cf esp. the writing of Ivan Illich). Today I find myself sandwiched between two Mozilla Education calls:…
Greg Wilson wrote to share the good news that their "CS-1 in Python" book, called "Practical Programming", is out and ready to buy. I've been spending a lot of time in Python lately, and I'm really enjoying it. I'm also impressed with how fast it is.…
Today I hit a major milestone in a project I've been working on for more than a year. My goal is to replace MXR with a version that includes static analysis data for the C++, IDL, and JS in the Mozilla tree. It's a project I don't know quite what…