I actually am a technical writer, and I like it. Now that I have been working in the field for a while, I'm chary about getting involved with F/OSS projects because the F/OSS community in general tends to treat non-programmers as not worth bothering with or listening to, even though a lot of us who'd really like to get involved are working professionals with good track records. I don't need to get treated like shit and ignored on a volunteer project when, if I get treated like shit and ignored in the corporate world, I'm at least drawing a paycheque. (Nothing eats like food, after all.)

I've seen far too much of the attitude around that programmers should write the documentation, because the programmers know the application best (as if that's a particularly good criterion by which to create documentation!), and IME that really only accomplishes two things: It makes your programmers (who'd rather be programming, quelle surprise) cranky, and it pisses off your user base, when the documentation reads like something that has been hacked together by someone who doesn't know the first thing or care a whit about documentation. Brilliant.

Now, if someone were serious about getting technical writing students involved in F/OSS projects, I'd recommend contacting these folks: Cooperative Education and Career Services at the University of Waterloo, and the Rhetoric and Professional Writing and Rhetoric and Communication Design programme people. They do co-ops at both the graduate and undergraduate levels in those programmes, and, at least when I was there, seem to be quite open to unconventional project ideas...

Some dimbulb sent me thirty-six copies of an e-mail with a 47MB attachment. It seems she doesn't know a) that PDFs tend to be large; b) how to check the file size on something; c) that the Internet isn't like a toilet -- if something doesn't go down the first time, flushing again won't help; d) how to read a bounce notice enough to figure out why the message was returned; and e) that sometimes a big message takes a long time to go out, and hitting Send again and again doesn't make it go faster (or something).

I sent her an angry e-mail because she'd managed to fill up my disk quota (and boy was that a royal PITA to clean up), and she said, "I don't know why you got all those copies. You should have only gotten three. It kept getting returned, so I tried sending it again." *headdesk headdesk headdesk*

I should probably also mention that she sent this message to about 20 people at the same time.

I really don't know what to do about a case like that. Perfessor Multigeek suggested locking her in a room with a computer and a bunch of reference materials and not letting her out until she'd learnt to program, but I'm not hopeful... Strangulation with a length of CAT-5 cable?

So Google used horizontal partitioning to split load across servers? Wow, that's rocket science. None of us in the database community have thought of doing this before. :-) But, if you want to find some news here, you can. One nice thing that Google did recently was to donate their horizontal partitioning code for Hibernate to the open source community. Hibernate Shards definitely needs a lot of work to get it to the point where it does a lot of stuff that people would want, but, hey, release early and often!