Got this in my email this morning, it’s only an excerpt but a good one nonetheless:
Thanks to your early action, your XO laptop is scheduled to be delivered between December 14 and December 24. Our “first day” donors are our highest priority and we are making every effort to deliver your XO laptop(s) as soon as possible. We will send you an update upon shipment.
Since this is a Christmas present for my daughter, I am very pleased to hear this! I’ll keep you posted on how well it goes over.
Got this in my email inbox from someone at Google, sounds like good open source stuff!
Announcement:
November 28, 2007
Google announces first open source contest for pre-university students
Who doesn’t love a contest? We certainly do. Google believes strongly in
students having opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and math,
and today at the Open Source Developers’ Conference in Brisbane, Australia
we’re pleased to announce the Google Highly Open Participation Contest to help
introduce secondary school and high school students to open source software
development.
Students can now visit http://code.google.com/opensou
code and documentation, prepare training materials, conduct user-experience
research, and win prizes — t-shirts, cash, or, for ten grand-prize winners, a
chance to visit the Googleplex in Mountain View, Ca.
For the past three years college students have participated in Google Summer of
Code (http://code.google.com/soc/) with great results: hundreds of college
students have been introduced to open source software, thousands of people
across the globe have begun development together, and millions of lines of open
code have been produced. As we thought about what we could do to help encourage
students before university and build a pipeline of future talent, we developed
the Google Highly Open Participation Contest — the first contest from our open
source team exclusively for secondary school and high school students.
Google will work with ten open source organizations — Apache Software
Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python
Software Foundation, and SilverStripe CMS — for this pilot effort, each of
which will provide a list of tasks to be completed by the student participants.
Tasks typically fall into the following categories: code, documentation,
research, outreach, quality assurance, training, translation, and user
interface, so there should be something for everyone, and parents and educators
can help by sharing this opportunity with their children and students.
The contest is open to students age 13 and older who have not yet begun
university studies, and contestants will be able to claim tasks until 12:00
a.m. Pacific Time on January 22, 2008. We hope that students who participate
will be long-term contributors to these and other open source projects in the
future, and we look forward to announcing the grand-prize winners on February
11.
For more information, please visit http://code.google.com/opensou
I was over at Miguel’s blog reading about empanadas when I decided to leave a comment. I’ve always been a bit frustrated about Miguel’s use of Haloscan, but I survive.
Anyway, as I was leaving a comment about his empanada recipe I noticed the contextual ads above. Sheesh. I’m not losing weight eating empanadas!
Mark Wagner is a fantastic guy who I met for the first time at NECC 2007. I’m working on a longer response to his post the other day, but if you’d like the heads-up, go read it first.
I might even see if I can convince Mark to a Skype conversation that I can record and podcast out. It would be interesting to hear him speak more about Walden life in general and how an online Ph.D. compares to a more brick-and-mortar degree.
Either way, check out his masterful post, and await my response, if you dare 
Chris
Jen Wagner pens a poignant post about friendship and Twitter. What caught me really off guard was David Jakes’ comment.
Whoa, wake up call.
I understand the power of the network, but I also understand keeping one’s distance and not breaking the barrier between the appropriate and inappropriate in that kind of environment. Well, let’s say I understand that better now.
A few days ago I was looking through my processes window here at work on the Windows machine I use. It runs Windows XP Pro, for what that’s worth. I saw this…
Since I was dealing with a slightly sluggish system of late, I decided to Google this process to find out what the heck it was.
Do the search yourself and see what you think.
Do you think what I thought? A trojan! I was worried about this because I am super careful and consider myself darn savvy about where to click and where not to. I immediately ran my Trend Micro OfficeScan client as well as Windows Defender. Didn’t pick up a thing.
According to one link, the trojan is totally memory resident so scans won’t detect it. Uh, ok.
I found a removal tool, which crashed each time I ran it. Did I really have it and the trojan was knocking out the removal tool? Yikes!
I managed to find the log file generated by the removal tool and it said my ssnetlib.dll was not vulnerable. It shouldn’t be, I am up to date with all my Microsoft Updates.
So what’s the problem, then? I’ve got a process taking up 50 megs (sometimes way more) and I don’t know why. As a side note, I am familiar with the plain jane SQL Server and I have not ever installed it here. I don’t have any reason to.
After a few hours of quitting it and having it restart itself (the process, that is) I happened on a link that mentioned Pinnacle. Well, after seeing Dean Shareski‘s green screen presentation for the Flat Classroom Project, I grabbed a copy of Pinnacle Studio 10 with the green screen (couldn’t find v. 11 locally) and installed it.
On a whim, I checked the Add/Remove Programs section and lo and behold…
I promptly removed it and went on about my day with a speedier system. This post is intended to hit the search results rankings so that others can see the sqlserver.exe is not always a trojan.
Just a quick note to say thanks to Dan Meyer and Silvia Tolisano for blogging about us! We’ll have another episode out shortly after Thanksgiving!
Have you seen episode 1 and subscribed to the feed? You oughtta…
