Month: December 2009

Yesterday afternoon, I gave a talk at the University of Waterloo as part of their annual WatItIs technology conference. WatItIs is "WatITis is a one day conference for those involved in IT planning, support and decision making at the University of Waterloo." As such, it tends to cover a lot of ground, when it comes to the technology it explores. I attended talks on video conferencing by Koorus Bookan, and another by Ken Salem who gave an high-level introduction to cloud computing. My particular talk was titled "Seeding the Clouds", a live demonstration of what’s involved in deploying servers and operating …

A couple of weeks ago, I bought my five year old son an Acer Aspire One netbook. Not that he really needs a netbook, but it’s another item in our ever-growing arsenal of tools designed to help him develop the skills he needs to develop. That’s not really the story here. The story is that the Acer netbook came with Windows XP pre-installed. Since I primarily wanted to use the netbook as a learning tool, I installed gCompris, TuxPaint, TuxType, and OpenOffice. The latter is set to hide most menus, rulers, etc, and default to a 72 point font. At …