On their blog Signal vs Noise, 37signals has a series of articles covering the work of Ricardo Semler, a business lecturer at MIT.
I came to the party late with the most recent one on how to work smarter from an employers and leaders perspective.
The three previous articles (linked in reverse chronological order) cover everything from corporate structures to so called “lean” companies.
So we use Jabber a lot at work for internal communication. I’ve always used Gaim^WPidgin but with the upgrades flowing through from Ubuntu Hardy I came across what I thought was a bug to do with size of (and ability to resize) the text entry window. But no, it’s a “feature”!
The Pidgin ticket has comment after comment asking for this feature to be made optional, or even better for the feature’s parameters (“default size” and “maximum size”) to be configurable in the configuration file if not the GUI interface. I for one would love to set and forget them at “4 lines” and “50%”.
The developers of Pidgin don’t seem to waver from their original decision, so welcome to the latest FOSS fork: Funpidgin!
They have a .deb available but I can’t be bothered switching just yet. Might wait and see how this pans out and what path the Ubuntu package maintainer takes with this issue.
An interesting idea from jimmac via jdub.
At home:
(marty@merboo)-(03:42:46 Fri Apr 11)-(~)
$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
106 screen
96 ssh
48 sudo
43 vim
25 ifconfig
25 cd
17 make
12 ls
12 cat
10 iwconfig
…and at work:
marty@boober:~ $ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
142 ssh
82 screen
45 sudo
42 dig
24 pstree
18 offlineimap
14 vim
12 telnet
8 ooffice
8 mutt
So at $work[0] we’re trying to bring up a new service for a customer. It’s a 2meg service from T, which terminates on our side like so:
fibre -> managed media converter -> twisted pair -> router
We think we’re ready to turn it up and a T technician is booked. For 01:30am due to customer requirements. Sigh.
Technician reports he can’t see either the media converter nor the router. He’s on the “basement switch” (a designation which means nothing to yours truly, especially at that hour of the morning). Eventually my sleep deprived haze allows me to parse that he is on a switch in the facility and can’t connect to the service.
Except our understanding is that their end of the service doesn’t terminate in the facility. Their switch is in one meet-me-room but it had cable tray / riser capacity issues. So this service’s fibre went to the meet-me-room at the other end of the building. Where T doesn’t have a switch. But they did have some spare fibre already pulled from an exchange. So a fibre tie later and our service terminates elsewhere. And in my blubbering state I can’t convince the technician of this. Cutover canceled. Furrfu.
So what does the subject have to do with this saga I hear you ask?
The technician wanted me to pull the twisted pair from the router to check for link protocol going down on an interface of the switch he was logged into to. Even presuming he was on the right switch, my original reaction was that it wouldn’t work because the media converters act like bridges, not repeaters, and the link protocol wouldn’t change at his end.
I wanted to confirm / deny this ungodly hour of the morning theory, but my Google-fu appears to be suffering 5 month old child process lossage. JohnF did the heavy lifting for me and turned up this question and answer which covered a similar scenario. The pertinent response that address my question is:
Coming in a bit late here, but…
Has the OP looked at how the media converter is set up? Many media converters have a test mode where a down link status is not passed from one side to another. Once you take it out of test mode, it will pass status. Usually it’s a small push button, or a switch.
Sean
So the answer to my question is: it depends!
SMH is reporting about Google’s imminent launch of “Street View” in Australia. Richard Chirgwin points out the spineless journalism that let quotes like the following through to the keeper:
Still reeling from the backlash by privacy activists after Street View began in the US last year, Ms Mayer said Google was developing technology to blur faces and number plates but she did not know whether it would be ready in time for the Australian launch.
My response to that would be: if the technology is coming you should wait for it and avoid the snafus in the first place.
So I’ve been persisting with using the rt2x00 drivers with 2.6.24 on Ubuntu Hardy but it wasn’t only slow (interface was quite often at 1Mb/s rather than 54Mb/s) but unreliable, dropping out every 15-20 minutes. A quick bounce of the interface brought it back but it’s just un-acceptable to do that indefinately.
I’d been booting into an older kernel in order to get working drivers, in the hope the new ones would be fixed and using them would be a quick reboot away, but after following the bug in launchpad it seemed quite clear that I was dreaming.
I bit the bullet last night and installed the old drivers. I had to pull them from CVS rather than using the packaged ones. But a quick ‘make && sudo make install’ and everything is working perfectly again.
I left a little note in the bug:
I’m not sure why this is “Medium”. Most computers these days are doorstops if they don’t have reliable networking.
You have a LTS release due next month and you are persisting with releasing broken drivers for Ralink chipsets. There was a point about a month ago where someone needed to make a call and either revert to the old drivers or commit to getting the new ones working in time for Hardy.
I for one am using the old drivers.
…in a ticket at $work[0]:
MB's mutt-fu is strong.
$better_half was trying to login to Bankwest the other day and it didn’t work from the desktop. Tried a few different things and eventually tested it from the laptop which worked. The only difference between the two is that one is amd64 and the other is x86. I had a look at the source but there didn’t appear to be any wacky javascript to mess things up.
So, I thought I’d be helpful and let their web developers know:
…our home computer which used to work fine. It just returns her to the login prompt without any error message.
The system is AMD64 Linux (Ubuntu 8.04) and I had her test with both Firefox2 (2.0.0.7) and Firefox3 (beta4).
I had her test from my laptop and that worked fine.
The laptop is x86 Linux (Ubuntu 8.04) and Firefox3 (beta4).
I wasn’t expecting a great response but I got a “talk to the hand”!
Thank you for your message.
Please have your wife contact our 24 hour Customer Help Centre on 13 17 18 to enable one of our operators to assist with the enquiry.Due to security restrictions, we are unable to access or discuss information specific to your account via this unsecure message service as it is not possible to complete the identification requirements. Please accept our apologies for this inconvenience however the strict guidelines of the Privacy Act commit us to this action.
Ummmm, hello?
Sigh.
After reading yet another story on a “credit crisis” casualty, this time Bear Stearns, I was affronted enough to write the following letter to the editor:
To: letters@smh.com.au
Subject: Financial companies shouldn’t have their cake and eat it too.Another day, another debt laden company goes to the wall. The US Federal
Reserve steps in “to promote the orderly functioning of the financial system”.
Why couldn’t they step in during the good times, billion dollar profits and
million dollar bonuses “to promote the orderly functioning of the financial
system”? The industry decries regulation that would “prevent innovation” during
the good times but then they want bail outs when things turn sour. Natural
selection should be allowed to take care of the “innovators”. They made this
“bed”, they should “sleep” in it.
They published it but they made some small changes, mostly fixing my grammar and spelling:
Subject: Lopsided intervention
Another day, another debt-laden company goes to the wall. The US Federal
Reserve steps in “to promote the orderly functioning of the financial system”
(“Nervous traders fear worse to come”, March 17). Why couldn’t they step in
during the good times of billion-dollar profits and million-dollar bonuses to
promote the orderly functioning of the financial system? The industry decries
regulation that would “prevent innovation” during the good times but then they
want bail-outs when things turn sour. Natural selection should be allowed to
take care of the “innovators”. They made this bed, they should sleep in it.
And the fallout from this one? Bear has been bought by JP Morgan Chase for around $2/share after trading near $160/share as little as a year ago. Ka-ching!
Source: Yahoo! Finance
As I mentioned in in my last post I was having problems with wireless.
As the drivers for the rt2500 chipset have been a problem in the past, I assumed it was the same issue rearing it’s ugly head again. I was wrong.
My system had a wlan0_rename interface as well as the expected ra0 interface.
$ sudo iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.
eth0 no wireless extensions.
ra0 no wireless extensions.
wlan0_rename IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"XXXXXXXX"
Hmmmmm… looks like some udev fun! I’d come across the udev replacement for /etc/iftab after we swapped out a network card at $work[0] and the interfaces came up in an odd order. I figured it was something similar here.
$ sudo vim /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
:%s/ra0/wlan0/g
$ sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces
:%s/ra0/wlan0/g
$ sudo rmmod rt2500pci rt2x00pci rt2x00lib
$ sudo modprobe rt2500pci
$ iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.
eth0 no wireless extensions.
wmaster0_rename no wireless extensions.
wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"XXXXXX"
Bingo!