Welcome back. It’s been too long. Far too long. Today is Family Day in Ontario, and I am spending time with my family. Which means I get a rare chance to do things not related to work.

I’ve got some refreshing to do on the site. A few updates to make. But I’m going to try and keep it short and optimize my use of time.

Big News:

• I am currently on a leave of absence from my full-time job at Lambton College.
• During my leave, I am working as the Chief Technology Officer of Link2Feed.
• The Sarnia Tech Community has been growing!
• And we launched the Sarnia-Lambton Linux Users Group.

Lots of stuff going on both offline and online in Sarnia. It’s a very exciting time!

One of the things I get to do is introduce people to the GNU/Linux operating system.

It’s arguably one of the best parts of my job, because it opens a whole new world of software and possibilities.

We teach Linux in the classroom because it’s the single-most-used web server OS on the planet, and it isn’t giving up that spot soon.

My personal history with Linux spans 18 years (I haven’t quite been with it since the beginning.) Today, I use whatever’s right for the job, but I’ve got some insight to share for newcomers to the Linux community.

Welcome back to good intentions. This week I’d like to focus on tech news sources so that I can provide a comprehensive list for my new students that are starting at Lambton College in the CPRO, CSAC, IPRC, and ITP programs.

The two most important sources I use are reddit and Hacker News. These are news aggregators and communities unto themselves.

But there’s so much more, so I’ll continue and break it down into a categorized list.

This week I’d like to focus on the state of the industry in Canadian Tech. A small group of us from the Cube went to the Canadian Innovation Exchange this past week and it got me to thinking that I’d like to do a little who’s who and what’s what.

Canadian Companies Doing Very Well

• BlackBerry - Smartphones from Waterloo
• Shopify - E-commerce platform from Ottawa
• D-Wave Systems - Quantum computers from Vancouver
• Hootsuite - Social marketing from Vancouver

I just wasted two hours solving a problem caused by throwing away good information.

Jekyll has a site.categories collection that keeps a list of all categories on a site. As it should. For some crazy reason, though, that list throws away case formatting. For example, a category called “My Category” would be stored as “my category” in site.categories.

I iterate over site.categories to build my navigation menu, so I wanted that case-sensitivity back. I found a hack that works. Keep reading to see my solution.