Tonight my very tired wife made a quite reasonable request: "can you make something sweet?" The answer to this question is always 'yes,' but sometimes it's harder than others. Tonight, for example, was tricky because we have no eggs in the house (nor much else I'd need…
I'm sick of being told that content or services aren't available to me "in my region." I don't live in the dessert with camels carrying CDs between end-points of a Bedouin network. I don't live in the Antarctic where it would really be hard to get things shipped…
One of the things I'm working on in my spare time is rewriting and extending DXR. I'm adding more static analysis info to the data, adding a "document" style vs. "web app" interface, ripping out glimpse/MXR, making it easier to get at type info from…
I loved this talk by Jacek Utko about the potential of design to improve not only how something looks, but its content, the workflow, and the outlook of those participating in the creation. I don't get to work with designers much, and I can really feel the lack of it.…
I hate April 1st on the web, and all the stupid jokes that get taken to extreme. Last year I fell for the Moz guys saying they'd moved into the CN Tower, and I'm not getting taken in again this year. So today I was pleased to get sidetracked on…
I don't get this new Microsoft ad: So Mac's are too expensive. Well, they are really, really good machines, and worth it, but let's accept this for the moment. So you want to save some cash, and buy a cheap computer. I get that. Doesn't it make you mad, then,…
We've been having some discussion of late around how to move some courses on-line at Seneca, and this inevitably leads to one of my least favourite topics: IT infrastructure and content management systems. The amount of inertia I see around making choices with regard to online content is incredible. Our…
This week I was helping someone with some debugging work, and I was shocked to watch his workflow. Here's what it looked like: Working in a Windows shareware "editor," (I use this term loosely) that asked us to buy the full version every few times we saved, we…
Earlier this week I was reflecting on the varied forms of discourse in which I'm engaged in any given day. I spend a great deal of time communicating online, which means I do everything from idle babble like a teenage girl to highly technical Geekinese. I write differently in my…
I just got off the phone with Philipp Schmidt, talking about the upcoming on-line course being offered by Mozilla Education, ccLearn, and Peer 2 Peer University. It's going to be an excellent chance for educators thinking about open source, the open web, open licensing, and open pedagogy to meet and…