In memoriam, John Knight, May 3 1936 - Dec 22, 2013

I'm sad to say that my father, John Knight, passed away on Sunday evening. There will be a service Monday the 30th and I'm appending the text of and a link to the obituary. He was a wonderful father and a much-loved professor, and will be very much missed by all of us.

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John Knight passed away peacefully at home in Ottawa on December 22, 2013. He is survived by his wife Norma (nee Evans); brother Bill (Eileen); three sons, Alan of Seattle (Kirsten Carlson), Douglas of New Westminster (Ruth Silverman), and Scott of Toronto (Natalie Fong-Yee); two grandchildren, Marisa and Charlotte; and several nieces and nephews. Predeceased by his mother Mary, father Rixford, and sister Margaret (the late Robert Diehl).

John was a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Carleton University since 1967 and remained there until well after retirement. Thousands of engineering students will remember him fondly as an inspiring and entertaining lecturer who was always willing to help.

A memorial celebrating John's life will be held Dec. 30 at 2:00 p.m. at Riverside United Church (3191 Riverside Dr, Ottawa). In lieu of flowers, donations to Stride Wheelchairs Plus or the charity of your choice.

STIC 2013 - video and slides for my talk

I've recovered a bit now from the STIC 2013 conference. The video for my talk "Modern Web Programming with Dart" is now available. I give a very quick overview of Dart and Web Components as approaches to improving web programming. You can also download the slides, which are a bit hard to read in the video.

Other presentations are being added at Jim's site. The most recent is Dan Ingall's keynote talk. On the loose theme of "My Favorite Things" Dan talked a selection of things he's been involved in over the years, starting with some quite interesting history about very early Smalltalk versions and how much they differed from Smalltalk-80, and ranging up through various Squeak projects and a short bit on the Lively Kernel. It includes running versions of some remarkably old software doing some remarkable things. This was part of the historical theme of the conference on the 30th anniversary of Smalltalk-80 being released to the world.

Smalltalk for dessert - photo from STIC 2013

Words of wisdom from Joachim Tuchel. Glorp expects your model to be internally consistent. I've had a number of questions from people who expect, when working with databases that it's enough to modify one side and then the database refreshing will take care of the other side. If you have a bi-directional relationship, and the two sides don't match, Glorp will complain when you try and write. Unfortunately, it complains when it gets down to the level of writing rows and sees that there are two different sources trying to write different values to the same field, which isn't always the most helpful in figuring out the original problem.

http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/glorp-and-conflicting-values-in-rows/

Internationalization, whether you want it or not...

This week I'm in Denmark, and noticing some interesting software behavior that I've also seen on some previous trips to places where English is not the native language. Software companies are slowly figuring out that not everyone speaks English, and adapting the software based on the location. But they can be a little over-broad in applying it.

For example, if I open a new window in Chrome and type a search into the taskbar, it by default searches on google.dk, giving me all the auxiliary text on the page in Danish. It does this on my computer, which has a locale setting that is not Danish, and even though I am both logged into my google account and signed into Chrome. If I click "Search" from the black bar at the top of the window it goes to the right place, but who actually does that instead of just opening a new tab and typing in the omnibox?

Oddly, this only happens on the Mac laptop, not on the Chromebook.

We also have Netflix, and as part of my determined attempt to stay awake until something like local bedtime I was watching it yesterday on the iPad. It warned me that some content might not be available, but generally worked well, but had decided that it needed to turn on Danish subtitles for me. Of course this a setting, and there's a button to change it in the upper right. I can't turn them off, but I have my choice of subtitles in Danish, Finnish, Norwegian Bokmål, or Swedish.

Qatqi

A shout out to Qatqi, a fun word game for iOS. And to the author, Chris Garrett, a former co-worker at The Object People. Since I'm flying nine time zones tomorrow, we'll see how it holds up to extended play...

Chromebook

Writing this on my new Chromebook, which I got yesterday. So still very early impressions at this point, but it seems pretty nice. It's light, but feel sturdy, and the display doesn't feel cramped - unlike the netbook. And it seems pretty decently responsive. Kirsten complains that the trackpad makes too much noise clicking, but she says the same about the MacBook Air. Clearly not a primary machine, but for the price it's quite remarkable, and seems like it'll be handy to have around. Now to figure out how useful it would be on a plane.