Author archives: Mike

Spent Friday and Saturday on the presentation for Ontario Linux Fest. Went well, about 17.5 solid hours of talking, much of that talking loudly. As a result I've got a really gravelly voice right now. Lots of developer interest, challenge now is to turn that interest into actual developers :) .

However, I really, really, ...

U of T has an interesting technology. Rochelle spearheaded the development of what is basically a "blog based" engine for collaboration, discussion and the like. Every student, professor and TA has a personal blog and are automatically and/or manually enrolled in "groups" such as their faculty, their individual classes, projects, administrative groups and the like. ...

Imagine we had a whole (large) university's worth of Undergrad, Masters and PhD candidates in everything from Computer Science, Engineering, Education, History and Medicine, Art and Design (and hundreds more). Imagine that we could ask them to look into research topics in order to solve X, Y, or Z problem, combining resources from multiple departments, ...

This was the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in Canada. Had the family over on Sunday (yay!), worked on Saturday, but today was just for relaxing. Went through my OpenGL folder (well, the last 100 or so messages) and fixed a couple of small bugs. I want to release a 3.0.0b1 this week, so if you have ...

From about 2pm through to just now I've been up and running. Meeting with a new client, picking up the B2 machine, meeting with a volunteer project manager for the OLPC, trying to re-recruit a sub-contractor for various projects, then off to see a friend play at Free Times (a cafe).

The B2's screen was ...

Sitting here working I find myself reflecting on the fact that messy jobs are never "finished." By messy I mean jobs that are complex and multi-faceted and have no particular "right solution". In contrast, the clean jobs, the ones where you just need to solve a problem and know that you have the correct answer, ...

Someone mentioned yesterday an old "truism" that you have to choose any two of "work, family and friends". I know you don't have to, but it takes a bit more time-management than I've been applying lately.

So, I finally got the "get a calendar and todo list started" task off the todo list. Started off ...

Three of our house guests (a father, young daughter, and pregnant mother) were to have headed home this afternoon. They wound late due to various delays getting out and navigating Friday rush-hour traffic and got to the airport just over an hour before their flight.

Obviously that's a bit late. It often takes 20 or ...

We're going to visit some of our oldest family friends today, way out on Wolfe Island (near Kingston, Ontario). We're told the islands are gorgeous. Probably no time for a boat tour, but at least we should be able to see some trees (Ilir loves trees).

I'm thinking we should also try to get to ...

Building a machine on the side out of the broken laptop for my brother in law, decided to go with Kubuntu (which Soni uses on her laptop) instead of Gentoo, as he doesn't have a connection to the internet, and doesn't have any interest in learning how to administer linux boxes (also, not sure the ...