Bryan Ruby

I really can't display every open source project's invitation for college students to apply to Google's Summer of Code.  But just like the invitation from Drupal, WordPress would be another one of those projects I wouldn't have minded working on when I was going to college.

As most of you probably know by now, Jeff Robbins from Lullabot and Drupal genre recently released "The Drupal Song".  What you may not know is that Wordpress and Joomla! also have their own songs.  Well this fact hasn't gone unnoticed by Amy Stephen in her own blog in which she says it's time to vote for the top song of the week.

OK. Normally, I am adverse to pitting one open source content management system against the other, but it appears we have no choice. As of today, we have three songs and only one can be the #1 Open Source CMS Song of the Week. It is time to pick the winner. Sorry, it’s how it works. I didn’t make the rules. If you object, you need to contact Casey Casem.

WordPress community member Devin Reams released his song and video back in January. Joomla! community member Anand Omka released his Joomla! song back in November and the video was released last week. Today, Jeff Robins released his Drupal song and Dries Buytaert announced the video will be shot on location during the OSCMS conference at Yahoo later this week.

Any has invited the open source communities to vote for their "favorite song" and as far as I can tell, the vote will take place through comments at her blog.  What?  Wordpress and and Joomla don't have their own poll module built into their core?  But alas, we're not voting for the best CMS here but instead the best song.

All I can do is shake my head in the direction education has taken in the United States. I've written about this topic in the past, a little here and on another blog of mine. In one of those blog posts, I wrote the following.

American society as a whole seems to have less value for education, especially in the sciences and math, than when I was growing up. Maybe I’m more sensitive to these numbers since I am a scientist at heart…but isn’t anyone else disturbed by this trend? While I feel there should have been something done to help reverse this downward spiral sooner, I’m glad at least that it is finally getting some some well deserved attention by the Bush administration.

College students in the United States are not showing up in those university programs that are focused on physical science, computer science, math, and engineering. There are a number of politicians, parents, and students that will blame the public school education system for the current state of education in the United States. I have some serious doubts whether fingers should really be pointed in the direction of the teachers or even school system. I think in many ways, those fingers should be pointed right back to the parents and their children. Perhaps life in America is so good that by the time the student becomes a young adult, life hasn't prepared them to face the challenges and disappointments they need to do well in the sciences.

As we mentioned earlier, phpBB.com was down due to drive failures on their RAID system.  Late Sunday evening, phpBB.com not only brought their site back online, but also redesigned their site.  An announcement was posted in phpBB's forum explaining the details.

I noticed on my way to bed that the phpBB.com site was down.  As of early Sunday, March 18th, a notice at phpBB says that they had a RAID failure due to two bad drives (looks like they're using a RAID 5 configuration).  Either way, they don't plan on being up for a few days.

I'm in the middle of upgrading my VPS server from PHP 5.1.6 to PHP 5.2.1.  So if you don't hear from me anytime soon...you now have an explanation.

Dries Buytaert, lead of the Drupal project, invited students on his blog to participate in Google's Summer of Code and at the same time help improve the Drupal core.  This is Google's third year for the program which hopes to encourage college students to work on open source projects.  Chris Dibona, Open Source Program Manager at Google, wrote:

Jaws 0.7.0 was released this week.  Jaws is a framework and content management system for building dynamic web sites.  New features in Jaws 0.7.0 include:

• Support for 12 languages
• Database support for: MySQL(i), PostgreSQL, MSSQL and SQLite!
• AJAX in all of the gadgets
• Better antispam support: Captchas (simple and mathematician), Akismet and extra tools
• Friendly URLs

Links for downloading Jaws 0.7.0 is available on the official Jaws download page.

A recent eWeek article reported that a United States "policy think tank" found that in the past decade, information technology boosted the U.S. economy by $2 trillion dollars.