I like animals, and I’ve been told that I’m good with them. I’d like to think that’s due to a mix of empathy and respect that I’ve developed over the years.
It occurred to me the other day that my favorite online services treat me like I imagine my pets like to be treated.
Wherein I rant at medium length about functional literacy and language competency in knowledge work and information technology.
Continue reading
I want to add some team-based features to django-badger. I was hoping that someone had already built a reusable app to do most of the work for me. This happens quite a lot when I’m working with Django. Unfortunately, I haven’t quite found what I’m looking for yet. Consider this blog post either the product of my thinking out loud toward a rough spec, or a long-winded lazyweb search query.
KumaScript turned one year old back at the end of January, and I’m sad to say no one celebrated its birthday – not even me. I’m pretty sure very few people outside of the core team at the Mozilla Developer Network even know what KumaScript is. So, I guess it’s about time I do something about that.
Remember when I posted about gaming from the Orchard House couch? The key part was figuring out how to get a laptop-quality LCD monitor working in the living room, preferably attached to my trusty IKEA DAVE. Well, despite my best attempts at ruining my materials and tools, I managed to get it built!
I’ve contributed code to a number of projects, often as a drive-by bug fix in a GitHub pull request. And, usually, I’ll try to do as the Romans do and follow the local naming and coding conventions. But, sometimes, I’ll fall back to my personal conventions and get dinged in the code review.
I like playing video games; it’s one of my favorite things in life. I also like hanging out with my wife; she’s my favorite person in the world. This is a post about ensuring these two things can happen together. This is also a post where I played with SketchUp for the first time.
Thought I might try my hand at this Trifecta thing I just found, by way of Fred. The challenge is to write fiction, between 33 and 333 words, using the word of the week and its associated definition. I think I ended up with more of an introduction to something than a complete story, but here goes my attempt…
Back in September, I wrote that I wasn’t leaving MDN. And, I’m not, really. But, it turns out that FirefoxOS needs some help to reach its first release milestones. So, some of us webdevs from around Mozilla are temporarily switching our daily efforts over to slay bugs on Gaia. That’s the layer of FirefoxOS which provides the overall system UI and core apps.
Somewhat apropos of what I posted recently about freedoms, there’s been a kerfuffle about Facebook and privacy (again). A particular post I just read kind of set me off, so I decided to expand on a comment I left there.
I posted a few days ago about freedom of and from choice, but I think there’s something orthogonal to that spectrum: The freedom to change your mind, both figuratively and literally.
That’s not actually me in this picture: It’s something I found in an archive of a defunct GeoCities page, from who knows when. (Though, apparently, it was forged in the era of the Counting Crows.)
But, anyway, that’s Mr. Sabo there in the middle. He was my High School science teacher, and nearly every day I remember something that he taught me. Let’s see if I can come up with a few off the top of my head…
Freedom of choice and freedom from choice lay on a spectrum. And, in technology, it’s no coincidence that more choice tends to be messier and complex, less choice tends to be cleaner and simple. It’s a trade-off between what you choose and what you leave up to an expert.
About Me
Hi there! My name is Les Orchard. I'm a serial enthusiast, {web,mad,computer} scientist, {tech,scifi} writer, and home{brew,roast}er. I work for the Mozilla Corporation and live near Detroit, MI.
