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...

That's an interesting thought. By hypothesis, these reboots are covering up a resource-starvation/exhaustion situation. Fine-tuning the limits and timeouts presumably heads this off. Add more memory could also prolong the time between failures (but is likely hard). Since many of these are little Linux systems, does anyone have any experience getting some kind of kernel stats out of them?

My Linksys router is on a UPS, and will sometimes go for three or more months without a reboot. My DSL modem, also on a separate UPS, is a bit more likely to lose its PPPoE connection and require a reboot, every month or so. Whether that's my Thompson modem or the telco DSLAM is an open question. I know my power is quite dirty, hence the UPSes.

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?