Community Corner

This new look is courtesy of Jaxon Rice, a talented designer/developer in the growing world of 'community source' on the .Net platform. Sharing code and supporting fellow travellers building and tweaking applications is a time honoured practice made more visible by the success of the open source movement. Their behaviours and results have ...

All societies must perform certain functions if they are to survive.All societies have values.The values will result in a priority ranking of functional requirements.Internal changes in the socio-cultural system and the impact of external socio-cultural systems will also affect the priority ranking of functional requirements.Each of the functional ...

Found a great little tool for easy blogging - LiveWriter. Still in beta, but a nice example of the new approach to applications. Light with a minimum of commands. Powerful in it's integration with other application. After downloading it, followed the instructions at RJ Dudley's blog After integrating it with Community Server, the ...

Son Simon and daughter in law Beth recently treated us to a beautiful day sailing and picnicing around Toronto Harbour. Sharing my appreciation of things technical, Simon uploaded his GPS positions then printed out our route. A level of surveillance previously available only to the military can now be bought anywhere. No more scribbling on ...

During the past two years, while our daughter's been working in Boston, we've enjoyed several visits to her neighbourhood, Jamaica Plain. JP is diverse, filled with interesting small businesses and friendly. Walking around I'd notice announcements for a range of social, sport, educational and political activities. Recently, I came across ...

Ten years ago had the pleasure of returning to my hometown, Montreal, at the internaltional meeting of the Internet Society. Andrew Clement and I presented a paper, Sharing Integrated Computer Communications Among Non-Profit Organizations: The Case of Ontario's Social Development Network. The effort was an explicit attempt at combining ...

Who hasn't heard about the censorship supported by tech companies from that democratic, freely-speaking, world model southern neighbour of ours? Google, Yahoo and Microsoft each deliver different search results inside China than elsewhere. Reporters without Borders reports that Yahoo! is the worst current offender. Their test ...

Staying grounded is not just figurative with me. Getting a mental picture of the physical place that holds us up has always been important to me. This interest in reflected in my map collecting habits, planning and artistic drawings of communities, and, more recently, in the ability to link databases to mapping software. People want accessible ...

Starting this blog reminds me of working with community groups and flyers. We'd quickly put something together with typewriters and Gestetners (what is he talking about?); run them off; deliver door to door and post around the neighbourhood. Many never read, but some attracted new people. Others were annoyed. Now everyone is bombarded by infobits ...

For many months I've used iTunes to manage a small collection of legit downloads and select tracks off our CD collection. Loved the interface. Went regularly to the iTunes store to try out 30 secs. of something known, interesting or curious. Always loved Apple's design, starting with the Apple ][+ that led me down this path so many projects ...