alanl

So my house was burgled last night, 2 laptops were taken, a mbp and a windows xp netbook. :(  I have prey source http://preyproject.com/ on the mbp so that should help. On the win xp machine I don't have much, aside from  dropbox.  

Does anyone have any good ideas for geolocating or some other technique perhaps even social eng. tricks that might help me point the police in the right direction and maybe help me recover them?

I work at a large financial institution, and we are really bad at naming our internal applications. They usually end up as some four or five letter acronym of the process or problem. I’m sure others people have worked with application names like CAPS, MAPPS, TRAXS CRIMS and thought they suck.

So does anyone have a nice process for coming up with internal application names?

I want to get involved in an open source project, but I thought I'd ask the HNers for some advice first.

Here's what I have come up with as my initial to-do list:

(1) Find an interesting project that has some momentum.

(2) Study the project src.

(3) Learn the source control environment. (e.g github)

(4) Follow the forums, and answer some questions.

(5) Find a bug I can fix.

(6) Find a feature I can add.

What else should I do?

I am also interested in advice on human behaviours and politics in OS development communities, (i.e.)

What kind of things should I expect to see in succeeding/failing OS project communities?

Thanks in advance.