we painted the lab

No, not with rollers and dropcloths! Joel Hollingsworth and I painted our department mascot, Phlux*, on the wall. Here's the evidence:



*It's pronounced like "Flux": Tux is the Linux mascot, but we added the Elon Phoenix flames, so we call him Phlux.

Links between academia and open source programming

(Dis)similarities between academia and open source programmers is an interesting short read about the things that are alike and different between these two fields. Mostly I'm interested in the ideas of collaboration and gift economy, but this article points out some subtler things which I had not considered: geography and funding.

high cost of textbooks

For anyone concerned about the high cost of textbooks, here is a report from the General Accounting Office of the U.S. Congress attempting to quantify and explain the situation.

It's a little large (8.1 MB) so perhaps this is not a good candidate to send around to your friends in email :)

Top 10 dot-com flops

In my senior seminar class, we talk a lot about technology business failures. We watch documentary films like Startup.com and e-Dreams to drive the point home. Here is a list of Top 10 dot-com flops which every graduating senior should be forced to read. Don't let this happen to you!

(By the way, the companies that are the focus of Startup.com and E-Dreams are both on this list.)

2005 OSCON

I am spending the week in Portland, OR at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. If you're interested in the list of sessions, here is the 2005 OSCON All Sessions Grid.