Oh, how I wish I was back in Vancouver, where people actually celebrate our country, instead of disguising the day as the province’s official moving day…
Tag: personal
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Happy Canada Day!
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A "man pages" approach to information
It still amazes me how Unix man pages shaped my approach to digesting information.
I first started using Unix-based systems around 1997. My Unix mentor had, in retrospect, a fantastic approach to helping me out on my autodidactic path. Whenever I needed help with a command, he would always prepend his answer with “man”.
I: How do you check your disk space?
Len: man df
I: ???
Len: man manI am now more than grateful for his wisdom, but I cursed it many times in context.
What amused me the most about the man repository was how it was simply impossible to read one page without reading ten others, by curiosity if nothing else. The same holds true for many subjects, but man pages have this special twist that unlike so many other publications, they never dumb down their content to widen their audience reach, but instead historically assume that the reader is a highly trained operator and knows (or should know) everything about the rest of the system. This shapes an interesting vicious cycle, since it makes for a documentation system with essentially no true beginning or even accessible entry point.
While this might be perceived as a flaw in the man’s matrix, it truly catalyzed my habit of always pushing myself to learn and know more than just what I need for the very task that brings me to a piece of information. To this day, I find myself quasi-incapable of reading anything without going into the research equivalent to a shark’s feeding frenzy, unless I’m on a on a tight schedule, in which case I only limit and control myself.
In the end, two things are for sure: Thank [insert fav’ deity here] for hypertext, and Digg, Facebook , Slashdot, et alii sure do not help one bit. 😉
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What Hapens to your Body if You Stop Smoking Right Now
Motivation for me and others.Found on Health Bolt, via Digg.
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It's a Love / Hate Thing
It’s days like this I both love and loathe my vocation all at once.Love it: never bored, always have new things to learn, mentally challenging, great interaction with the many development communities, constant stream of new opportunities, etc…
Loathe it: there are only 24 hours in a day and my body and brain stubbornly force me to sleep for a few of these… Almost every day too…
Thirteen years of web app dev, and still see it it as the World’s biggest playroom. 🙂
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McGill Website Wins Silver CASE Award
I guess we must be doing something right:The Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) awarded McGill University the silver medal in the Complete Institutional Web Sites category. There were 41 entries in this category, with two silver medals and one bronze medal awarded. CASE is a non-profit association encompassing 3,300 colleges, universities and elementary and secondary schools in 54 countries.
Via McGill Announcements.
I don’t actually know any more than this, because the details haven’t been published on the CASE web site yet. I really want to know who we tied with, knowing CASE has members such as MIT, CalTech, Harvard, etc.
2007-06-16: The CASE web site has now been updated: Web Sites – 2007 Winners
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Web 2.0 Expo and Conference
The O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo is just finishing up, and my co-worker and I had a blast with most of it. Working in the academic sphere, it really feels great to get first hand confirmation that we are perfectly on track with the rest of the industry with our vision of what is to come. Now, if only we were given the means to do it all as fast as we can dream it, which is always a challenge in a large public institution. But we’re working on that. 🙂
One of the highlights of the conference for me, was to find out (confirm) how close the Digg architecture is to the one that we’ve been developing for our university for many years now: LAMP (though we use PostgreSQL), memcache, Linux, clustering, etc. They actually seem to be facing some challenges that we’ve already tamed in the last year and a half. They’re hiring, by the way.
On the other hand, it was my first time in San Francisco (about time…), and I won’t lie: it’s even better than I imagined it would be! Truly a fantastic city, populated with wonderful people. First time, but definitely not the last one, especially given that I just don’t have the time to stay a few extra days to visit Berkeley, Oakland, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Cupertino, Mountain View, etc. Next time!
On this, I’m going to go and enjoy the city before I have to leave tomorrow morning.
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What Happens When…
What happens when you’re enjoying your work a bit too much? Well, you end up working some more in the evening instead of spending some quality time with your… blog. 😉
I’ll get more chatty again when I’m done with the projects I’m currently handling.
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Is this Really Fair?
The above image shows the OS X weather widget for Montreal (Quebec) and Boynton Beach (Florida): -13°C v. 23°C (or 9°F v. 73°F). Why, you ask? Because I’m in the former, and my wife and kids are in the latter for the week…Does that sound fair to you?
But I’ll have my revenge when I go to San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo in April, and maybe the Red Hat Summit in San Diego in May. Muhahahaha!
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Turning 32
Well, today’s that day when I gain an extra year. It always amazes me how much revolves around our age, and how suggestive the latter is. I’m an old fart for some, yet still a youngster for others. But who sees us as which and when is what usually matters most.
On a far less pseudo-existential note, kudos to my 7 year old on his first in-match hockey goal (1st season). 🙂
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Up to my Elbows in Enterprise Search
Sorry about the lack of updates, but I’m smack in the middle of a huge project rethink at work, and it’s eating up all my time. I’ve been at it for two weeks, and I’m now hitting a point where I’m satisfied with the direction the project is heading. I reached the point where I’m having fun with it. 🙂
I’ll have more time once this is behind us, which I’m glad to say is coming soon!
