This year’s FSOSS was a bit smaller than usual which is to be expected given the state of the economy and a flu virus that seems to be jumping around like a mad grasshopper.  However there was still a quite a bit of neat stuff going on.  I didn’t get to go to as many talks as I would have liked to but I did catch Al MacDonald’s (side note, Al’s site does NOT use Flash!) talk on Processing.js.

I was really interested in it because it is similar in some ways to my own project, the Canvas 3D JS Library.  Processing.js is a language for programming graphics and animations by drawing onto the Canvas Element using the Processing Language.  I had learned a bit about Processing.js before hand but seeing Al McDonald explain it was much much better.

The neat part about Processing.js is that not only will it allow you to create stunning visual effects but being part of a web page means that you can drive the visualization with data from the web.  Al showed a demo of a search engine that visualized search results with processing code. Drawing with processing requires only that you include the Processing.js files as part of your page (similar to how c3dl works).  It does not require add-ons.

There are several students at Seneca working on adding more functions to Processing.js (it is not the complete processing language after all).  Part of this will include adding 3D functionalities to processing.js using WebGL.  As c3dl has already done a lot of work in this area, we are looking forward to working on this aspect with the Processing.js project.

One strange thought I had while attending the Processing.js talk was that for some reason it reminded me of Apple Logo (or was it Apple Turtle?).  This was the second programming language I ever learned (the first was BASIC).  It ran on my old Apple II and basically you can use it to draw pictures by giving commands to a “turtle” (think of it as a cursor that told you where the pen was). As the turtle moves, it draws a line.  You could tell it to go forward, backwards, turn a certain amount lift the pen or put it back down and a probably a whole bunch of other stuff that I cannot remember now.  It was not a fast language but it was really cool because I could visually see what my instructions were doing.  Although I had not used it in years nor was it a practical language it was part of what sparked my interest in programming when I was young.

With that in mind, I can’t help but to think how this could be a really good way to introduce to programming for students at younger grades.  It has some very unique benefits:

• It’s seems to be a simple language to learn.
• It’s highly visual and graphical (its not just text… /yawn /boring)
• It’s open source (no proprietary licensing required to develop or publish with it…just a text editor and a browser)
• It’s part of the web, you can do some really neat stuff that interacts with the web and data on the web.
• What you do is on the web…you can do something, publish it and show off your work.

I have done workshops for high school students in past to trigger their interest in programming.  I think something like this would be far more interesting than plain old web pages.

I’ve been watching the Seneca Open Source planet for a little while and noticed that a few students are using Git.  A friend had recommended it to me when I was working on my website for school this summer.  For those of you using a mac with Git, you may be interested in trying out GitX.  It has a nice gui for some of the tasks (not all… I still had to got to command line for some stuff).

A new school year is about to begin and this semester promises to bring some very interesting challenges indeed.  The courses I have taught in the past were usually C++ based.  It is the language I am most familiar with and the one that I am most comfortable with by far.  This fall I will teaching something totally new/old… COBOL.

Why?  I am not exactly sure how I ended up with this course… but somehow I did.  It is not a language I am familiar with but I have always believed that programming languages are usually not all that different.  There are however little nuances to each language that make them unique and special.  Grasping that nuance is the key to becoming fluent with it.

While I was studying at the University of Manitoba, my uncle, CT Leung,  was teaching a night class in COBOL at the University of Winnipeg.  He had asked me if I wanted to take the class as I would be able to transfer the credit back to my school.  My reaction then was along the lines of “ha ha… funny, why would I want to take COBOL?”.  Ah… well guess my uncle is getting the last laugh now.  As I was prepping for this course, my uncle spent a bit of time going over some of the those COBOL nuances with me.  Cindy Laurin has also very kindly helped me with learning about the AS400 environment and providing some much needed resources for this course.   I would like to thank both my uncle and Cindy for their help

I am now working on putting up my course materials for this semester.  Mostly this involves getting my web page in order.  This past summer I created a new web page for myself.  It is built with Django and so far it is definitely easier to manage than my old site (basically a bunch of html files that I would modify by hand).  It is not without problems though.  I made a couple of stupid design decisions that I am currently kicking myself for.  For example, I decided I only needed 1 programming standard (I was clearly half asleep at that time).  This is great when all my courses were C++ based but I really can’t use it for my COBOL class.  I also should have made the ability to add non-html style notes for my notes link.  Most of the notes that I have for my courses are done in word.  I would not mind redoing them but that will require time and being able to keep my old notes posted while developing new notes is really not a bad idea.  However, these issues should be pretty easy to fix.

Still much to do so time to get back to it!

Yesterday I decided to get back into the school mode by starting to blog again.  I figured I would start light and blog about my pottery class at the Haliburton School of Arts this summer.  In that blog I had mentioned that I used something called the Steve Tool to make some of the pieces for that class.  Surprisingly, today one of the comments I got about the post was actually from Steve of the Steve tool fame.  He kindly offered some suggestions on how to finish off one of pieces (although I admit… It is highly unlikely that I would actually take a power drill to anything, just a bit too squeamish about using power tools) I thought it was pretty cool and pretty unexpected that my little blog was found and read by people outside of the usual Seneca open source community.

Why Blog?

I admit it, I’m terrible at blogging.  I don’t do it nearly as often as I should but I will try to do better this year… maybe its like brushing your teeth.  You just have to make it habitual.

Anyhow, while I was at my little Raku workshop I had mentioned in passing that I would probably end up blogging about the class when I got home. And the question I got was … why?   I didn’t have a great simple answer at the time other than wanting to keep a record of my experience but perhaps now I that I have gathered my thoughts I would better be able to do it.

Record Keeping – Those of you who know me well know that my memory is pretty much like swiss cheese.  I really wanted to have a record of the things that I learned.  Raku is not something that I would have a chance to get a lot of practice on.  It may be months, even an entire year before I’m able to put what I learned back into practice and by then the things that I have learned may already have slipped my mind.  Re-reading some of the experiences will likely trigger memories on things that I should keep in mind when I do Raku again.

Sharing of Knowledge/Experience – This one is tricky.  I know that there is often a resistance to publication of techniques and methodology. We see this even in our school where some teachers publish their notes openly while others put them behind some sort of access restriction, while some teachers do not post their notes at all.  The debate rages on. My raku teacher had commented that perhaps this instant access to knowledge is not a good thing.  I think that underlying most of the the argument against open access is the idea that it would cheapen the experience (even if it is not put in those terms).  That somehow if many people were to have instant access to the material that it would become less valuable.  Here is where I think I highly disagree with that sentiment.  I have always openly published my notes for courses I teach.  This has not led to students not showing up for class.  I believe that students go to class because that class room experience is such an important part of that education experience.  The written material, the notes and so on, those are things that complement the course but they do not make up the whole course.  I can read about someone firing raku but I cannot experience the course by reading about it.  By actually doing the class, discussing the process with classmates and instructor I learned much more than I possibly could have by just reading about it.  There really is no substitute for that experience.

Spreading the word – The Raku course that I took had a low enrollment (which worked out nicely for us as we were able to get more pieces fired ).  I think that part of the problem is that not enough people necessarily knew about the class (or possibly thought the class was too basic for them as the course was called Raku basic).  If people were to blog about it maybe it would have more reach than the usual word of mouth sources.  You never know… I mean Steve found my little blog after all .  Maybe other people looking to do raku will see it also.  For me, doing the pottery classes on the weekends have always given me a chance to get away from my computer and do something very low tech (can’t get lower tech than mud right? ).  However I know that most of the people that go never actually make use of the net in that same way.  For example my regular pottery teacher always hands out fliers to the Durham Potters Guild’s show and sales which is great… our entire class of 12 knows about it but that flyer never goes beyond our class.  I can’t help but to think how much more effective it would be to spread the word via the web.  To expand that community beyond the people that we might see day to day.  One thing that I learned last year is that blogs help keep your name and your project out there.  People interested in your work will keep following up on what you are doing and sometimes will participate when they can.

How to Blog 101

Ok, so with all that said, I figured I would write up the thing that I do to make my blog more interesting and draw in interested parties to my blog.  One of the things I do is a lot is I link… a lot.

For example, in this blog I linked to the school where I took my raku class, my previous post, the Seneca open source planet, Steve’s page etc.  Remember that your blog is not … for lack of better description, 2 dimensional.  It is not just the words that you write but the topics that are related to what you are writing about.  By including links, people will be able to more easily find related articles to your post.  Likewise, when you link your site to other people’s blogs and pages, they will be able to find you via pingbacks and related comments. People interested in a related area will find their way to your post via other posts and other sites.  So, don’t forget to spend those few extra minutes at the end to link up what you can.

The summer is finally over and its time to go back to school.  I really enjoyed the summer this year.  The weather wasn’t too hot which is a nice change from the normal humid Toronto summers.  My cousin came for a visit from Hong Kong.  He will be teaching CS full time at the American International School in Hong Kong this coming year.  I gave him tons of links to awesome open source software and projects.  Hopefully it will help expose open source to a wider audience.  Other than visits from relatives, I also had the opportunity to take a 1 week course intensive Raku course which I wrote about here.

To kick off the school year I am going to make the following new school year resolution.

I will blog at least once a week.

Last year I learned what a wonderful teaching tool blogs/wiki’s and irc could be.  I loved how it was possible to see what students were working on and what they thought, if they were having trouble in one area and so on…  I liked the collaborative creation of wiki’s.

This year I hope to encorporate it into the courses that I’m teaching.  I think the key to doing this is to practice what I preach… can’t expect students to blog if I don’t.  Anyhow…that is the plan… now to learn about the iseries and cobol  (/me wonders if its possible to program space invaders with cobol on the iseries)

I had the opportunity this summer to do an intensive one week course on Raku. The course was held at the Haliburton School of Arts which is part of Fleming College and taught by Michael Sheba.  It was an absolutely fantastic course.  The facilities were pretty good and Michael is a fantastic teacher.  I learned a ton during that class even though I broke a lot of my pieces.

Learning to read the course outline…

As someone who teaches I really should have known better and actually read the course outline.  My classmates at my regular pottery class at Cedar Ridge Creative centre had told me how awesome the class was so I signed up figuring I would treat it like a vacation. I wasn’t completely new to the Raku firing process.  I had done a few workshops at Cedar Ridge and seen what others have done so I had an idea of what I wanted to achieve.  Some of my classmates had done these really cool textured pieces using the Steve tool.  I really liked the looks of them so I went and did 4 of my 6 pieces with it.

I had wanted to glaze them with a matte glaze with lots of rainbow effects.  I had always avoided matte glazes in the past as I always got these ugly black marks on them that were unwashable.  I was hoping to learn how to not get those.

On the first day of class I discovered that matte glazes were not part of the course.  The course outline basically said that we would be working with “3 basic characteristic of raku (Crackle, Lustres and Carbonization)”.  I had made these extremely textured pots that would have been much more appropriate for matte glazes only to learn that we wouldn’t be using any… sigh oh well live and learn right .  At the time I have to say I was a bit disappointed in discovering that the course covered such a small set of glazes.  However, what I learned was that just learning to control these techniques really does require a whole week and in the end I have to say that focusing on just those 3 topics was better than trying to cover everything raku.

This would be so much cooler on a wiki…

Having spent the last year or two working on the C3DL and other open source project and so on, I have to say my perspective on how to teach a course has changed.  Before sitting in the open source course with Dave Humphrey this past Fall, I never would have thought about using blogs/wiki’s and IRC as part of teaching a course. I admit I’m not much of a blogger… my blogs tend to stay in mind (I wrote them… you just can’t read them.. )  instead of being committed to the electronic page but when I do write, I tend to write a lot… Like I am now.

So, what on earth has this got to do with my awesome summer Raku class?  One of the things that we did during class was create a tip sheet.  Things that we learned during class that would help us get the results we want/avoid the mistakes we made.  It was written down and eventually typed up and distributed to the rest of the class.  To me something like this would have been nice on a wiki, something that the class can edit, correct and update as we learn.  Some of the things that we learned would have been nice to know before we even made the piece… for example, I made a plate, which cracked after the raku firing.  I also learned how to reduce the risk of this happening (its all about the distribution of the thermal mass of the plate) but I would have had to do this while I was throwing/trimming the plate.   I can’t help but to think how nice it would have been to have this information on hand before I took the course.  A trail for the course if you will… there are other thoughts I have on this topic that I would like to blog about but it would take this post way too far off its normal course if I put it all here so I will have to leave this for another post .

Raku is not Random!

I think that if I had to summarize what I learned (and I learned a ton) in one simple phrase it would have to be this:  Raku is not random.  Often when we do recreational raku in workshops, you sort of take what you get and hope that it is something close to what you had wanted.  However, what I learned this summer was that if you understand what is happening during the Firing and Post Firing phase and do the right thing at the right moment in time, you can create the effect that you desire (to the limitation of what you are working with of course…).  A lot of the talk was around the idea of artistic intent.  What do you hope to achieve on your piece?  How do you see it turning out in your mind?

Some Results

A good number of the pieces that I brought cracked and broke.  This really was my fault though… I had made the silly beginner mistake of letting a piece of greenware dry on a plastic table cloth and the difference in drying of top and bottom created cracks before the bisque firing occurred.  These cracks were only further aggravated in the raku firing.  That combined with not actually having that many pieces appropriate to the techniques we were doing, I did not have that many pieces that I was happy with in the end.  However, there were two that were sort of ok so I’ll share those here.

A few side notes for those that have never done raku before… the clay that you use for raku is white.  the top of the vase on the left is actually a clear crackle glaze, the black lines are cracks in the glaze that has been filled with smoke.  The bottom part of the piece on the left is actually bare clay that has been burnished (smoothed).  The brown part is a light coating of terra sigillata.  The blackness of the piece comes from smoke.

The piece on the right is an underfired green lustre glaze.  The underfiring makes it a bit more matte.  Although you see that the pot is both green and copper, the piece only has one glaze on it.  The copper that you see inside the textures come from reduction of the green glaze after firing.

Special Thanks… Keltie you rock!

Before I end this blog, I need to make sure I thank my regular pottery teacher Keltie Kennedy.  My plans for this course were nearly derailed due to what is better known as the 2009 Toronto Garbage Strike.  Living in a midrise meant that the garbage part of the garbage strike really didn’t effect me much… sure the city was less neat and clean but all in all it didn’t have much impact on me in that regard.  However, the city not only handles the garbage, they also run Cedar Ridge where I would normally be making my pieces for this course.  When the strike started I had no pieces made (yes… I admit I’m a procrastinator).  I called up Keltie and she very kindly let me use her wheel and helped me bisque fire the pieces I needed.  Thanks Keltie, you are awesome!

So if you are interested…

For those that are interested in Raku, this course is definitely a great place to start.  Even if you have done some recreational firings like I have, the material you learn here is so different that it is well worth taking.  I had not realized it initially but Michael has a back ground in chemistry and when he explains why something happens and how something happens its not at all fluffy.  The reason why a glaze goes copper or how you get the intense blackness from smoke is explained.  Michael not only teaches you how to create a certain effect but the reason behind why an effect occurs at all and what you can do to get that desired effect.

It should be noted that this is an introduction to Raku course but it is NOT an introduction to pottery class.  You need to have 6 bisqued pieces (pieces that have gone through 1 firing so that they are hard and sturdy but have no glaze on them) and the ability to quickly make 2 pieces in the first day of class.

Firstly I want to say that I am extremely excited about firefox 3. There are several reasons for this and I’ll get to that later in this blog post. I rarely blog but something in a conversation with a friend of mine compelled me to blog here today.

Yesterday, my world crumbled a little. I have a friend who works for a big company in the US. He works on autonomous agents (read robots) and yesterday he told me that he wasn’t allowed to use firefox at work. Wait! Not allowed to use firefox??? How can this be?? Say it is not so! … But sadly it is so. My friend isn’t certain why this policy exists but it does. Not knowing his company, I too do not know why this is the case for him. In the past, I have had problems with an ISP doing similar things to me.

One ISP refused to give me support because I was using thunderbird instead of outlook. All I wanted was the proper password/accountname/server combo to use as their outgoing mail server since the info on their site just didn’t seem to work…I didn’t need them to tell me where to point and click but I think that the moment I mentioned the word “thunderbird” was the moment I became Charlie Brown’s teacher to them (In the cartoon, Charlie Brown’s teacher sounds like “bwaa bwaak bwwh bwa”). Students have told me that I could just lie and say that I’m using outlook and answer “yes” to all their questions so that I can get the info that I needed (it’s sort of like answering “no, I’m not using a router” even when you are to get move past that portion of the tech support script). My main objection to this is that I really really do not like to lie. I do not see why I have to be a closet thunderbird user. Why must I pretend? In the end, I basically told the ISP that I will take my business elsewhere and that their refusal to provide support anything other than outlook was the reason for it. Did my little protest do anything… unlikely. One little customer to a giant telecom company is nothing but you have to start somewhere. Let it be known that there are browsers other than IE, that there are mail clients other than outlook.

For years I have been telling my friends to make the switch to firefox (or at least have the option to use firefox). Every time I fix my friend’s computer I always download the latest firefox release and make it easy for them to use it. In the end though, the question from my friends inevitably lead to “why?”. Why should they use firefox when IE is right there! This got me to think about why I use firefox and why firefox was important for me.

Firstly, in firefox 3, the Canvas 3D addon will work with the current browser release as opposed to a beta version or a mine field build from exactly this date. This will make it possible for my project (canvas 3d js library) to reach a wider audience. We have been doing some really interesting work that we hope to release in another week or two that will include models and textures. Things on this front are moving along very well.

The other reason that I’m very excited about firefox 3 is more personal. I teach for the School of Computer Studies at Seneca College. I started teaching at Seneca while I was finishing off my masters degree from the University of Manitoba. Before Seneca, my view of colleges was that they taught what was hot now and that students were not taught the skills to adapt to the ever changing computer world. Boy, was I ever wrong! From the moment of that I first interviewed at Seneca I had the sense that this college is not the college in my narrow world view. I got the sense that this college understood the need to balance the practical with the theoretical. This view was further confirmed recently when I started working on open source at Seneca. I saw students actually working on code that would go into a real product that I use every single day. They didn’t do it after they graduate. They were doing it now… while they were in school. To me that is truly amazing.

I think in the end it is this collaborative activity that will attract new users.  It is not a product made by some faceless corporation, its a product that people from all over the world have contributed to.  “I know the person that added…. “.   Sure, firefox 3 is a great browser.  It is simple to use and fast.  Its got all these great features.  Its got all these awesome addons that you can add to it.  But in the end the reason we should use firefox is because my friends, students, and colleagues all put a little bit into making it.  And that is why it is truly something amazing.

For the past week I have been attending the GCD. Lots of really neat stuff that I learned while there. However, one of the most valuable things during this time was a chance to meet with Vlad about the c3dl project. I showed Vlad what we had and some of our concerns.

Mark, one of the developers for the project, had some concerns about how the animation looked and how it seemed to drop frames once in a while. Mark had a few ideas about this and thought it had to do with error checking on his arguments. As soon as as I showed it to Vlad, he had an immediate answer for me. Two words: Garbage Collection (GC). The hiccup that we saw in the animation was caused by GC. The other thing I learned was that doubles were garbage collected (something that should change soon). Since most of our information (vectors, matrices, etc) are store as doubles, garbage collection on doubles are even more noticeable.

Vlad had mentioned that this is likely going to fixed with the changes currently being made to JS.  In the mean time, we should continue to work on making our code as fast as possible.  Our scene is still very small so I wonder how a bigger scene would affect performance.

The Canvas 3d Library site (http://www.c3dl.org) is now officially up and running. The site was built by the PHUG group and they did a fantastic job of making it look good.

I’m really excited about the possibilities for our project. Currently we are not able to provide actual samples of Canvas 3D right on our site as it is not supported by today’s browsers. One day when it is supported, I think it would be really neat to just have samples built using our libraries right on our page. For now we’ll have to settle for quicktime captures (coming shortly)

Several things are happening today that I’m really excited about. The first is that our website is now up and running (see this blog post about it). The second is that we are now ready for our 0.1 release! Here is a screenshot of what you would see when you run it (the cubes are not static though… they will spin!) :

Ok… I know… its just 4 boxes. Nothing fancy. However the really neat part of this is not in the ability of to animate 4 cubes but rather the simplicity of how this can be accomplished using our API. Using the API, you can create the scene, the 4 spinning cubes and do the animation in under 30 lines of code.

Things that we need to do in the next little while:

Documentation – like many programmers, we really don’t have very good documentation in our code. We need to get our api documented so that people can actually do something with our API

Tutorials – Simple tutorials would be really useful. I have always found reading API documentations to be dumped into the deep end of a pool and then being asked “can you swmi?” Simple examples showing different uses of the API would be really helpful in showing its usage.

Code cleanup/review – the programmers working have a lot of background with C/C++. Not so much with javascript. What we could use is another eye to help us with fine tuning the API. Are we coding in the most effective way possible? Are we on the right track? What would make this easier to use? Do we need to abstract away more (there is still the need to use vectors in some of our calls for directions and so on… do we need to make it even more intuitive?)

This is our first really big step and we would welcome any feedback that we can get.