Tim Ginn’s Personal Blog

openFIRST, the project that was my introducting to open source is undergoing changes. In the past two days, two of this year’s volunteers picked up the pace a bit, and started bug fixing. So far, each of them has solved one bug. We’ve also walked through and traced the cause of some particularly nasty compatibility issues with PHP 5. openFIRST remains a very small project, partly due to the restriction that FIRST places on team websites which are entered for a competition– they must be completely student designed and run. So, that limits the range of students from those in grade 9 to 12 (the ages of FIRST robotics). There is, of course, the FIRST Lego League, but I haven’t seen any volunteers prior to those folks in grade 9.

Overall, I’m quite pleased that they decided to be more active than before, and I’m glad that the project is moving somewhere. Myself, I’ve graduated, so, my role isn’t to develop the openFIRST software anymore, it’s to help with debugging, teach various skills, and do (relatively) boring administrative things like packaging the software and acting as a release technician. I’ve also taken to writing up things on Bugzilla.

The other thing I’ve been doing is helping out with pointing out resources, and getting things together as someone just happened to mention they were trying to start a FIRST team at a local high school (local to them, not to me). I guess every little bit counts, though. Doing all of this FIRST stuff is somewhat nostalgic.

Today I drove over to Peterborough, with my mother, we carried the computer up the stairs and along the hall to the apartment where Grandma lives. I set the computer up on a small desk that she’d cleared off, and then we took her out to visit the Bell store (in order to register for DSL Basic to get Internet access). If it weren’t for the few small piles of water-damaged belongings, a rusted appliance sitting on a lawn, the few signs here and there marked “Flood Relief” and the long line up (stretching around the block) outside of a government building where residents affected by the flooding could pick up a government cheque (apparently for $50), you could hardly tell Peterborough was affected.

At the Bell store, Grandma took great care to recite her life story to the woman behind the desk (who was very patient and understanding about the whole thing). We were told the DSL modem should arrive in about 4 business days. So, we drove her back to her apartment and I showed her how to turn on the computer and what to do when it starts up into KDE. I went into Open Office Writer (which, SuSE very nicely chose to distribute with the KDE theme, so it matches everything else) and showed her the basics, like fonts, bold, italic, underline, right, left, centre, spell check (with the UK and American settings), and some parts of typing (ie, shift, caps lock, enter, backspace, etc.). She asked what the control key is for, and I have to say, I’m glad that Logitech keyboard has the control functions labelled on the front of the keys, since it makes things a lot easier to explain.

She’s now decided that she eventually wants to know how to make greeting cards, and send pictures, something that I was anticipating before hand, so I’m glad I put on more than the bare minimum for e-mail. After listening to a bit of what she wanted to learn eventually, and other general conversation of sorts, I finished off with teaching her how to shut down the computer properly, and I drove home.

A while after I got home, I phoned her (she appreciates a call saying that we got home alright). Well, it turns out that she was talking to other people in her building, and she’s now found someone who wants to be taught how to use a computer. So, she’s already got a prospective pupil, and she’s little further than turning the computer on.

Well, I’ve been informed that a little story I wrote for Remembrance Day last year (and that I won 3rd place in the short story category with at the local Legion) has been listed in the Webster’s Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition under Poppy. This comes as a complete and utter surprise to me. I didn’t actually know that such a dictionary exists, but after looking at it, it seems to be pretty neat. All of the entries I checked have a fair number of pictures associated with the word, and I think it’s a rather neat idea to harvest the Internet. (…)

The original message I was sent is included below:

From: Philip Parker 
To: <tim.ginn@sympatico.ca>
Subject: Websters Online Dictionary - The Rosetta Edition
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2004 10:41:23 -0700
Return-Path: iconedit@san.rr.com

Dear Tim Ginn,

I am the editor of Webster’s Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition
(www.websters-online-dictionary.org), and just wanted to let you know that I
have listed your short story published in fictionpress.com. While there are
many versions of Webster’s, this one looks at each word entry from as many
linguistic vantage points as possible. I have decided to add more modern
language use and hope that citing your short story will give an additional
contemporary perspective to the reader. The following URL contains your
citation (see the bibliography section):

http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/english/Po/Poppy.html

Best Regards,

Philip M. Parker, Ph.D.
Editor , Webster ’s Online Dictionary - The Rosetta Edition
Eli Lilly Chair Professor of Innovation, Business & Society
insead
Bd.de Constance
77305 Fontainebleau , France
www.insead.edu

Academic email: phil.parker@ insead.edu
Secretary: Joelle Fabert 33-1-60-72-4977
joelle.fabert@ insead.edu