The activity on the Internet surrounding President Hinckley has been huge this and last week.

Newsroom has an article pointing to some of the major coverage.

How many of you would take your computer to a public place and leave it running?

The second action was to compose a set of general principles to guide further actions. To be effective, principles need to be few in number and of general applicability. Deriving the “right” set of principles is not a trivial matter. Below I share the set of principles I have proposed for information governance, and I invite your feedback, comments, and suggestions.

In this post over at CIO.COM, Susan Cramm makes the point that the average I.T. professional who feels he is ready to be a CIO isn’t ready at all. She makes a call to CIOs to inform their people that they need to get more “business experience” and to develop “senior-level relationships.”

As most readers are aware, technology and the Internet have transformed how Church work—particularly genealogy—is done. FamilySearch, the official Church genealogy site, is currently adding features and options that will enrich your genealogy research experience. Improvements include the following:

1. FamilySearch Developer Network. This is a community where developers can learn about the FamilySearch API, which allows them to build applications that work in conjunction with FamilySearch. They can also communicate with one another and FamilySearch personnel about technical issues concerning the family history and genealogy industries.

2. The beta version of the FamilySearch Wiki. This is a place to share research techniques and tricks and to learn from experts in the field.

Last week brought a most excellent event: pinewood derby.

Oh yes. Pinewood derby.

Pinewood derby is a cub scout event where dads cub scouts take a block of pine wood, four nails, and four plastic wheels and create a car. They then race the cars along a track against all of the other dads cub scouts. Dads Cub scouts look forward to this event all year long.

Talk about a rich environment for potential blog entries!

Podcasts of the 178th Annual General Conference held earlier this month are now available. You can subscribe in a variety of ways.

• If you use iTunes, you can obtain both audio and video podcasts.
• If you use an RSS reader, you can subscribe to audio and video to be notified and download the files.
• If you prefer an e-mail, you can subscribe to audio and video .
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I was inspired by a presentation of a small alcohol stove that was built using two paint cans and fueled with denatured alcohol at a recent preparedness fair at church. A few days later I decided to try to build it from memory with my own "custom air vents" to make sure that the fire would get enough oxygen. I placed this on top of my kitchen stove and lit it to see how long it would take to boil a small pot of water. It was working even better than I had supposed, but then it really started going! I ended up with two-feet-high flames licking the bottom of our stove vent hood! My wife rushed to get the fire extinguisher to save her kitchen cabinets, but I held her back for a moment because I thought that I could still get the flames under control. I used kitchen tongs to put the lid of the paint can back on the smaller can to limit how much air the fire could get. Luckily the flames died down quickly enough for me to carry the whole ensemble out the back door to the patio. I should probably not mention that last year I was a Boy Scout leader, teaching 11-year-old boys about Scouting basics, including fire safety. Probably not the best example, right? Rather, it was more like the bad example of young Scouts playing with fire when the Scout leaders aren’t looking!

It's been five years now since I was first hired by the Church to work on the new FamilySearch Web site. It's been a thrilling ride. The project is vibrant and thriving, and its potential appears boundless. I believe that one of the reasons that this project continues to thrive is its open nature and involvement in open-source initiatives.

My specific work is associated with creating a public Web service interface that can be used to access the huge amounts of data that this project is designed to manage. The technologies we use are based on open-source libraries and development frameworks that have enabled us to focus our efforts on our own problem space rather than inefficiently spending time on reinventing the wheel. Not only do we consume open-source projects, we contribute to these initiatives. And there have even been a few open-source projects that found their roots here.

I believe that public involvement in technical communities is critical to the long-term vitality of a development project. I can think of at least four major benefits to being involved in these communities: