Eugene Eric Kim has a paper titled "An Introduction to Open Source Communities" that looks into Open Source communities using various stats and two case studies. Although one of the case studies looks at Squirrelmail, one of the largest competitors to my IlohaMail, it's a good read for anyone interested in Open Source, and also has some insightful analyses for those of us more deeply involved.

It was Friday again. I'm starting to hate that class. The class is fine, it's just that I come out feeling depressed every time. Fortunately, it happens in the morning so I recover fairly quickly too.

Anyway, as I was walking home (this was a whole 7 hours later), I thought about what the hell the problem was. I'm a programmer, and I've solved heck of a lot more difficult problems than this one so figuring out the problem wasn't too difficult. The prognosis? It's what psychiatrists would call a "phobia". A what-phobia I don't know. But it's an irrational fear, and that's what a phobia is. So I started thinking back to when I took "Abnormal Psychology" and tried to remember what the treatments for phobia were... The only ones I could remember were Systematic Desensitization and Shock Therapy.

• Systematic Desensitization: Basically, you take baby steps. If you're afraid of spiders, first you get used to being in the same room as one. Then you try to touch with the 10 yard stick. Then with a yard stick. Then a pencil and so on until you've overcome your fear.
• Shock Therapy: They make you face whatever it is that you're afraid of, and once you've come out alive, you supposedly realize that it really isn't so bad.

So I know what the problem is, I know the solutions. The problem is, with programming, that's all you need. But it turns out I'm not exactly a computer. I mean, computers don't have irrational fears. So that brings me back to square one.

Twitdom continues...

According to Don Rumsfeld, lawlessness is a sign of freedom. He's quoted as saying: "Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things." The next time our Prez decides to illegally invade another country, I'll be reassured that freedom still exists.
Some new propaganda suggestions:

• Let freedom ring, commit a crime today.
• Ask not what crime the country can commit for you, ask what crime you can commit for the country
• Uncle Sam wants criminals

Update: Another article over on the Guardian.

As much as I find the state of chaos our country has introduced to Iraq to be quite dispecable, I must admit that I haven't seen so many happy people as these looters in quite a while. It's pretty sad when you think about it.

In related news, looters have ransacked Baghdad's antiquities museum, stealing or destroying numerous artifacts dating back thousands of years. The deputy directory of the Iraqi National Museum blames the Americans for not protecting culturally important sites. But then, what did she expect? Expecting Americans to respect culture is like asking for rats to leave your left overs alone. Everybody knows that.

Just found this article on Wired about reports of Apple trying to buy Universal Music Group. Apple's stocks went down 8.8% (bastards... I own 150 shares and it's gone down far enough) because the investors don't get it. The article quotes Merrill Lynch analyst Michael Hillmeyer as saying "In fact, there do not appear to be any synergies between a music company and a PC company, even one as innovative as Apple.".

Now, when's the last time any investor/analyst got anything right about Apple? Personally, I don't think it's that bad of an idea. In other industries, it's called "vertical integration" from what I hear. Apple wants to start a music distribution service. They own the end-user environment (Macs, iPods, iTunes) and if they owned a music company, they'd own the whole shebang. Otherwise, they're still going to be at the mercy of music companies, and that could easily kill any efforts to start a music distribution service.

Having said that, I hope this deal doesn't completely deplete Apple's $4.4 billion cash reserve.

Update: This article over on The Register sounds much more realistic.

IlohaBlog: WeLoveTheIraqiInformationMinister.com was taken out due to overwhelming traffic. According to the temporary outage page:

The site was so popular that 4000 visitors per second showed up from around the world and overwhelmed this shared server for over 8 hours until we turned it off in self defense.

That piece of information helps me a lot because it gives me an idea of how much traffic a popular blog could potentially receive... I wish they'd be a little more specific though. Was it really 4000 visitors, or was it 4000 page views? If it really was 4000 visitors per second, that probably translates to much more page views per second.

IlohaBlog: Added archiving for individual entries. Every time a new entry is added (or one's updated) it's saved on disk. The location is configurable (sort of) but it's supposed to coincide with where the PermaLink points to.