From major alterations in political stances, both in Canada and the U.S., to revelations about international trade agreements like ACTA to massive changes in global employment levels, energy strategies, and (God!) even food availability throughout the world.

Anyone who knows me also knows I worry about all these things and more. Since I haven't posted in a while, I don't want to dwell on any one thing; instead I'll just wish everyone a happy belated New Year (both "Gregorian" and followers of "The Ox.")

More soon on developments both personal and professional. Till then, take care!

If you think hackers are evil bad guys then Hackers are your Friends is worth a look.

For the rest my favorite part comes early - the difference between crackers and hackers. To summarize:

[fun@psema4.com blog1] diff crackers hackers
1c1
< Jar Jar Binks
---
> Darth Maul

Darth Maul didn't last too long though.

There's two sides to the source.

I spoke a bit about Atomic OS: Take 2 and I'll have some more updates on the project soon.

Following that we learned about the MySQL Workbench project (I look forward to playing with it ;-) and finished up with some more talk on Copyright and related issues here in Canada and in the U.S.

Anyway, my presentation notes are online now if you'd like to have a look. I'll be building on it for future presentations so if you have any thoughts or suggestions I'd love to hear 'em. Thanks!

Agenda:

• Atomic OS: Take², Scott Elcomb
• Report on Ontario Linux Fest, Glenn Simpson
• HLUG Karaoke, Various (Short Topics)

I had no idea he was presenting but I should probably mention that Glenn is a relative of mine. =)

Peter Salus will also be onhand and signing upto 10 copies of his book "The Daemon, the Gnu, and the Penguin" - they're $25 CAD each.

If you're from out of town and interested in coming, please feel free to drop me an email. (The wife suggests I mention this to point out the limited seating.)

Jsin/insmod's purpose is to load additional scripts (and JSON objects! =) into running web applications.

Believe it or not, that's a really hard question to answer. Almost as soon as jsConsole was created I discovered the question should be more like What isn't it good for?

The thing is that WASH is merely an extension to Javascript. Seriously. All it does is add runtime support to applications.

Some "real-world" examples might be:

• Logging. Need a runtime bug report from your application?
• 5GL Processing. Do you like how Office suites can interoperate between applications?
• Prototyping. Like doing stuff on the fly?
• Familiarity. Want to program for the web in ways that are familiar to standard "desktop application" development?
• Ubiquity. Adds to virtually any Javascript library or browser based application.

Really, I don't know how to answer this question. When I gave the WAJAX talk at TLUG I was stumped by the question, "What's the killer app for Atomic OS?"

Quite frankly, I just don't know. The "pattern" (if you could call it such) is simply too flexible to describe.