Ask for a raise at work, and continue your open source contributions on the weekend?

Get a junior / intern position doing the work you want while you finish school. That way you get some money (hopefully), keep your skills fresh and gain work experience. Then when you graduate in a few years you have a degree and some experience, you can go for more mid-level positions.

So, the layout is broken on IE7, and upon clicking on any story, it locks up the browser while loading in comments. Here's a screenshot showing the layout issue.

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_j2FyTmuJ5vg/TUA6bF56vSI/AAAAAAAAC_E/eTFM14ZSws4/s800/slashdot_new_ie7.JPG

Unfortunately we're stuck using IE7 corporate wide. Looks like productivity is about to go up around here :)

Unfortunately we're forced to use IE7 at work. The only way to make the new site readable is to add the site to 'Restricted Sites', so that the JS etc does not work. Then it's even uglier, but readable :) Otherwise, the content is squished to about the right 10% of the screen, and overlayed with some side bar... I hate IE7, so feel free to not fix this, I'll just continue to use it this way until we get upgraded at work.

What I've found the least hassle is to buy Dell hardware (I usually go for in-warranty used equipment from reputable eBays resellers), and run the latest LTS version of Ubuntu (currently 10.04). For instances when they need to run something that is windows only I first try the 'wine' emulator, and if that fails I resort to a licensed windows install on virtualbox running on an ubuntu server (this is usually to support some windows only hardware, like shared printers, etc.). Been working great so far with several small businesses now running on this setup.

Doesn't IBM already maintain their own fork? Maybe we'll start seeing some of the business oriented distro's such as RedHat and Novell bundling Lotus Symphony.

That's true. A lot of corporate IT projects spend a ton of money using Oracle to power applications for a few hundred or thousand users. MySQL costs nothing and is more appropriate for larger projects Facebook hosting hundreds of millions of users.

You can use a WHERE condition along with your UPDATE and DELETE statements to verify that the data hasn't been changed by another user before writing your changes, and if it does show some error message or otherwise handle it in some way that makes sense for your app. An interaction may look like this:

1. User selects a row to edit. Application pulls all the columns for that row and stores them into the users session.
2. User makes modifications to some fields and submits back to the server.
3. Server issues an UPDATE statement and includes all the original column values in the WHERE clause to only update the record if nobody else has modified it since we started.

SELECT id, color, name, description FROM vehicle WHERE id = '100'

id = 100
color = 'red'
name = 'kia'
description = 'cheap'

User changes the color to 'blue' and saves changes, the app might do something like:

UPDATE vehicle SET color='blue' WHERE id=100 AND color='red' AND name='kia' AND description='cheap'

If anyone else modified a field in the row the update would fail and you can handle it however you like.

I would also add - get your workout in during your lunch break. If you get an hour for lunch, spend 30-45 minutes working out, should leave time to eat lunch before returning to your desk. If you don't have a gym close to your work, bring a change of clothes and take a jog / walk every day. Nobody has extra time to workout you just have to fit it in where you can.

This little gadget has helped me: http://www.bodybugg.com/ Keeps accurate track of calories burned throughout the day, all day every day. Keep track of food you eat, you know exactly how many calories you took in. This device will show you what you burn just sitting around at work all day. You can adjust your calories-in, and exercise, to get to the deficit you need to lose weight. After a few months I can even see trends in how many calories I burn eating 6-7 small meals vs 2-3 large meals a day, the smaller meals really do seem to boost your metabolism. Good luck.

NetBeans. It's had good support for C/C++ development for a long time. We use Eclipse and NetBeans at work and NetBeans is actually the more well behaved / light weight of the two. I have had netbeans running for about 3 days without closing it, working on a J2EE project and the IDE is consuming all of about 87mb of ram.