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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.

When I first started developing this website, CMSReport.com, it was my intention to also take "the opportunity to provide a series of how-to articles on building a Website using Drupal".  I wanted to help those getting started in using a content management system for their site by suggesting some tips and ideas that could make their life easier.  As time wore on, when it came to my own site I found that except for a few well written posts I failed miserably at this goal.

I'm pretty good at tasks such as developing, innovating, documenting, and system administration.  However, some people can't walk and chew bubble gum at the same time.  Unfortunately, I'm one of those people.  I have difficulty developing and documenting at the same time.  This isn't unusual as one of the most talented programmers I know struggles with documentation and will ask me for help in writing instructions for his own software.  My point is that when you find people who is blessed with being able to document their own work you need to let others know about that person.