The digital collections of a Canadian Teacher focusing on technology, where we're headed, and education.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Hacking Kinect: Awesome.
This post is an excerpt from Here's What You Can Build With Kinect: Custom Statues, Training Simulations, Noise Ink & More.
November: Kinect Drivers Hacked, Early Experiments Begin
Kinect's original purpose was to enable gamers to control Xbox games through a natural user interface, using gestures and spoken commands. However, speculation is already rife that Kinect may be a key component of a future Windows OS release. Gestures may become as important a user interface in future computers as the mouse is nowadays.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Wayyy too cool: User controlled Tax Data Visualization
This post is an excerpt from Visualize Your Taxes: Grand Award Winner | DataVizChallenge.org.
The Data Viz Challenge was a call to designers and developers to visualize how our federal income taxes are spent. Created by Eyebeam and Google. Read more.
Be sure to check out the many project examples at the bottom of that page. The McDonald's one is awesome.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
5 Free ebooks on learning Php
From the ReadWriteWeb:
As high performance languages and frameworks like Node.js and Scala become more popular, is it even worth learning a seemingly old school language like PHP? Considering the persistent demand for PHP developers, and the fact that the language is in use as sites like Facebook and Wikipedia, I'd say so. ChartBoost recently posted an article called "Running a Modern Startup on PHP" on its blog.
Furthermore, popular platforms like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are all based on PHP. If you want to want to customize these applications, or build plugins, you'll need to know PHP. And though you don't have to build Facebook applications with PHP, it's helpful know it when developing on that platform anyway.
Here are some resources to help get you started.

Sitepoint's Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL by Kevin Yank is a lucid introduction to both PHP and MySQL for the non-programmer. The full book costs money, but Sitepoint offers the first 168. You'll have to fork over your e-mail address to get it, though.
However, you can much of the material on the Web in this series of tutorials by Yank.
As high performance languages and frameworks like Node.js and Scala become more popular, is it even worth learning a seemingly old school language like PHP? Considering the persistent demand for PHP developers, and the fact that the language is in use as sites like Facebook and Wikipedia, I'd say so. ChartBoost recently posted an article called "Running a Modern Startup on PHP" on its blog.
Furthermore, popular platforms like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are all based on PHP. If you want to want to customize these applications, or build plugins, you'll need to know PHP. And though you don't have to build Facebook applications with PHP, it's helpful know it when developing on that platform anyway.
Here are some resources to help get you started.
Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL

Sitepoint's Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL by Kevin Yank is a lucid introduction to both PHP and MySQL for the non-programmer. The full book costs money, but Sitepoint offers the first 168. You'll have to fork over your e-mail address to get it, though.
However, you can much of the material on the Web in this series of tutorials by Yank.