Adventures of a Geek

End of an... Error?

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 11:09:29 GMT

A little over two years ago, when I announced I was leaving Morse to work for MChex from home, I got mixed reactions. Some people were envious of the working from home bit. Some people were just envious I was getting out. No-one was envious I was going to work for MChex. In fact a couple of people told me I was making a big mistake.

Had I known then what I know now about the management, I might have had second thoughts. But I've had a lot of time to think about the last two years recently, and I can't say I have any regrets. Yes, it's been hard work at times, often for the wrong reasons. I've had to do more of what should be other people's jobs than my own a lot of the time, because we didn't have the staff. I've banged my head against a brick wall trying to get a commitment to recruit people. But when all is said and done, I've learnt a lot. About myself, what I'm capable of and my strengths and weaknesses. About new (to me) technologies like EJB and JMS. And about picking up the ball and running with it when other people seem reluctant to do so – moving things forward and involving people to a point where they feel empowered and motivated to do the same.

I eventually got an interview with Capita IT services last Thursday, having spoken to Rob on Wednesday. I wasn't at all sure about the Java test because I haven't been immersed in Java for so long, but I did better than I thought. I think I got quite a good grilling and answering the questions and talking about my experiences really made me realise how much I've done during my time with MChex. So now that the switch has been flipped and the hardware disposed of, my e-mail account closed and my employment officially ended, I can start to look forward.

I decided in the end to take the offer from Data Systems & Solutions. It's a career progression, it's closer to home, the benefits are better. It's probably not going to be the hands-on Java programming role I would have been doing at Capita, which really tempted me, but I think it's about time I tried "officially" leading a team. It's going to be a bit weird working in an office and wearing a suit again... I've not had to wear a suit every day for nearly seven years. But I'm looking forward to my new job and the opportunities that come with it.

Offer!

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 16:12:25 GMT

I've just had a call from the recruitment agency to let me know that I've been offered the role of Senior Web Developer that I sat the interview for a couple of weeks ago. It had been suggested that maybe I should lower my asking price, but today's offer came in at the full £35,000 so I was right to stick to my guns. The offer is good until the end of the week, so I need to get those other interviews in before Friday. I won't be turning this opportunity down unless I have a definite, better offer.

Jobs and Interviews - The Story So Far

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 12:03:03 GMT

Just a quick update on the whole situation. I was in London yesterday to meet Gavin and finalise everything. I was feeling pretty sad all day. I got my redundancy letter which said, to summarise things:

My position is redundant, effective yesterday.
I'll be paid four weeks' salary in lieu of notice – £2,329.38
My employment with the company will finish on 30th June.
I'll be paid two years' statutory redundancy pay – £620.00
I'll probably lose 1 day's pay because I've taken 14 days holiday, which is one day more than half my 26-day annual entitlement.
All of the above will be paid, with my June salary, next Tuesday.

So I'm officially available for work from a week on Monday. I've had further interview feedback. I passed the telephone interview for the Vignette contracting position in London, which was great. But so did a lot of other people and they chose two others instead of me, one of whom I've been led to believe was Rob Morrison. I also got a call on Monday evening about my interview last week, saying it was between me and one other person but they had questions relating to my freelance work. The main areas of concern seem to be the amount of time I'll be spending on it; intellectual property concerns; and conflicts of interest. I've been totally up-front about everything, so I shouldn't have a problem.

Aside from that, things are quiet. I'm still awaiting feedback on my CV and offers of interviews from two ex-colleagues (you know who you are Rob and John!). I submitted my tax return the other night and got a £300 rebate, which was very welcome. And I've been looking into a couple of other little projects that might allow me to get things started. With any luck, I can get the loan paid off and at least one of the credit cards cleared fairly soon and that reduces the financial burden, which is the short-term goal.

Interview Feedback

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 15:06:22 GMT

Well the interview went very well. I was nervous as hell in the lead-up to it, but I calmed down quite nicely in the few minutes before I was taken inside. The interview seemed to go well. I was given some background about the company and the project before being asked to talk through my CV and how specific skills would apply to the role. Then asked some more probing technical questions and some general competency questions. The format was quite relaxed, almost conversational, so I didn't feel too bad talking about myself and my achievements – it didn't feel like boasting.

Initial feedback from the agency is that there's another candidate to interview on Monday, but that they're "very interested" in me. So by next Wednesday's meeting I might even have a job offer on the table, which would be nice.

Interview

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 08:53:28 GMT

In just over an hour. I'm making an awful mess in my pants....

The Job Situation

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 15:05:55 GMT

It's been a good couple of weeks since I discovered I was to be made redundant and for most of that time I imagine I've been hell to live with. Mood swing central. I've been switching between a determined "this is a great opportunity" and "my whole world is crumbling around me" so much, even I wouldn't want to live with me. The stress levels have been pretty high in the household and arguments have broken out as a result.

The crux of the problem has been the uncertainty this whole situation has thrust upon us. When I took my current position, I always had in the back of my mind that there was a contract in place that should, reasonably, have ensured that I had a pretty secure job for at least the next few years. Indeed, the whole rationale behind me only taking on permanent roles since I left University was the perception that it afforded me more job security than contract roles, where I could conceivably be employed for three months and then jobless for a year.

The stark reality, however, is that even a permanent role offers no job security, at least not in a Plc. My first role was at Reliable Hosiery, part of Coats Viyella Clothing, which in turn was part of Viyella Group Plc. We discovered one day that our Directors had just been told in a meeting that the Clothing Division was being wound up and we were all to be made redundant. I got my CV on a couple of jobs boards, applied for a few roles and out of three offers chose Morse Hughes Rae, part of Morse Group Plc.

After surviving several rounds of redundancies and gradually being shunted closer and closer to an on-site consultancy role that I didn't want, I decided enough was enough and moved on to MChex Ltd who had recently been acquired by Stream Group Plc. After all, I'd made enough of a point of the fact that I didn't like the direction I was being forced to take that had another round of redundancies come about (which it soon did), I would probably have been top of the short list anyway.

Stream Group Plc was ultimately to come into the hands of Martin Higginson, formerly of MonsterMob, becoming NetPlayTV Plc in the process, and the vast majority of the Mobile side of the business was ditched shortly thereafter. MChex survived this initial change of the Group's direction, but the severance of the MoniLink contract sounded the death knell for us too.

So now I'm back in the market. Having had a couple of weeks for things to sink in; to consider my options; to get my CV up to date; to reflect on things in the cold light of day; I've decided that my assessment that permanent roles equals job security was misguided. Having "lived the dream for two years" as my wife put it, it seems I will now be falling back into a more traditional working model, traveling to and from an office every day. For all my occasional rants about having to babysit while I'm trying to concentrate on something, I'll miss working from home.

Walking Version 2.0 to and from nursery every day was good for my fitness, good father-son time and great fun. I'm forced to accept that now I'll be working from an office again, I won't be doing the nursery runs any more and will see less of my family in the evenings. I know Version 2.0 had a hard time some mornings when he saw me getting in a taxi to go to the train station because he didn't want me to go – he's never truly known anything other than Daddy working upstairs, so it's not just me that needs to make the transition but him, and my wife, as well.

"Living the dream" is not entirely accurate, either. The dream had me working from home for myself rather than someone else, but the simple fact is that I'm not going to build up a £30,000+ a year freelance consultancy overnight and I still have bills to pay and debts to clear. Given a choice between "living the dream" but having constant debt worries or working for someone else and ensuring my family are safe from such unpleasantries, I'll choose the latter.

All this considered, I've decided that finally the time has come for me to go contracting. I have a broad skill set and a lot of experience now. I've seen enough and done enough to have a good idea of what works and what doesn't and I can turn my hand to most things. And if I really am to sacrifice time with my family to ensure the bills are paid and debts cleared, contracting offers more financial compensation and a better chance of achieving that goal quickly than a permanent position.

I'm going to have some tough decisions to make with my wife. I've had one phone interview already for a Vignette contract position in London. I've got one lined up on Thursday for a permanent J2EE role about twenty minutes' walk from my home. I've also been speaking to a couple of ex-colleagues and trying to line up two more interviews fairly locally. The ideal is a contracting position in Derby, but if it came to a choice between contracting in London or a permanent role in Derby I'd have a bit of a predicament and the wife and I would have to have serious talks.

When the debts are cleared and we're on more stable financial ground I'll have a bit more freedom. I can think about building up a war chest to tide us over while I build up that consultancy and then I really can think about "living the dream". In the meantime, I think it's really just going to boil down to choosing the best path to get there.

First, erm, patch!

Mon, 21 May 2007 15:59:09 GMT

Doesn't have quite the same ring to it as first post, but blah, whatever. With the upgrade to Ubuntu Feisty came a new version of vpnc, the Cisco VPN client. It added lots of new features, including RFC3706 Dead Peer Detection. Unfortunately, this feature was broken for some clients, myself included. Some kind soul beat me to it and filed a bug, but I had a look and proposed a patch. Someone on an upstream mailing list proposed a better patch, so I applied that to my local version and, to cut a long story short, submitted it. It has so far been accepted into feisty-proposed, which should mean that it will make its way into Feisty fairly soon, once it's been tested, and lots of people will again be able to connect reliably to their Cisco VPNs.

Virtual Redundancy

Mon, 21 May 2007 15:49:53 GMT

I've been busy the last few weeks. Really busy. Nothing new there, of course, but Wifey's understanding that "working from home" equates to "available for babysitting, helping bring the shopping in from the car, etc." doesn't help either. That's the only problem I've had with working from home though.

Anyway. After hammering out the platform development roadmap, I got cracking on with writing some Java code for the first time in a while. Actually, there was a bit of hacking a couple of weeks back to support a change by one of the operators. But this time I was going to be actually writing code rather than tweaking... a small piece at first, followed by a great big whacking chunk. I was feeling incredibly positive.

So when I heard on Thursday that the agreement with Monilink had been terminated, it was a bit of a kick in the teeth. Nothing had been officially decided by Friday evening as regards how we were going to deal with the termination. To be honest, apart from the fact that we're going to be winding up the business, nothing has yet either. I guess it means I'm virtually redundant.

I've got a meeting in London to discuss how things progress from here. Gavin sounded completely stunned when I spoke to him. I've been with the company just over two years, so I'll get a minimum of two weeks' salary in statutory redundancy pay. It'd be nice if we were kept around to wind things up properly and given a somewhat higher settlement, given that we could have put the company in a very awkward situation if any of the three of us had decided to walk out at any time – we could have held them to ransom, but we didn't and won't I'd like to think that counts for something.

At this stage, I'm not sure how much more I'm allowed to say. But I think I'm safe in saying that I haven't felt this shit in over six years. I guess it's time to dust off the CV and start getting some interviews... and if I'm not left short financially, finally get my own business off the ground. It's tough trying to pull a silver lining out of such news when you're still smarting.

Yes, It Does Just Work

Fri, 04 May 2007 11:27:10 GMT

During my trip to London, I had some notes that I'd been working on on the train down, as well as a photo of my whiteboard at home which contains an architecture diagram amongst other things. Upon arrival at the office, I wanted to print a copy of these for everyone to read.

This was my first time in this particular office. I had previously set up connections to the printer queue on my home printer server and the networked HP OfficeJet in the Harrogate office. Upon inserting an ethernet cable, I instantly had an IP address on the office network. I checked my e-mail without any trouble as the DNS server had also been set up for me. I opened my document in AbiWord and selected File, Print... but obviously none of the office printers were listed. So I selected System, Administration, Printing from the Gnome panel. Here I double-clicked on New Printer.

After a pause of several seconds while the printer database was read, I was presented with a dialogue box asking me which of the detected printers I would like to use. I went through to the printer I wanted to use, took note of the make and model number (it was a Brother MFC-8840D), and selected that from the list of detected printers. I accepted the suggested driver, clicked Forward, entered a printer description and location so I could easily recognise it in the list and clicked Apply. Then I went back to AbiWord and again selected File, Print... and selected the newly-added printer. My document was printed flawlessly.

Then, from the Printers window which I still had open, I right-clicked the new printer and selected Properties so that my colleague could get the details he needed to manually enter to connect to the printer from Windows. After much gnashing of teeth, he gave up.

Meetings

Fri, 04 May 2007 09:44:55 GMT

In general, I'm not a fan of meetings. I find that they tend to waste a lot of time and unless they're very carefully co-ordinated, such as the daily meetings in SCRUM, they often over-run, go off-topic and achieve very little. In general, I'd prefer to have a conference on IRC, XMPP, Skype or similar – at least then the note-taking is done for you and these methods have an immediacy that e-mail discussions lack.

One area where meetings can be useful, however, is in countering feelings of isolation. Working from home, some people begin to develop a sense of detachment and lose focus. It's not a feeling I'm familiar with personally, I have my targets and I work towards them, although I admit to having felt somewhat apathetic at times when I can see an immediate need for something but haven't been given the support. Getting people together can be a good thing in these situations. Friday was one such occasion.

I left my house at 9am and took a late train down to our head office in London to meet Gavin and the team and talk about our requirements for moving things forward. Moving things forward in this case means getting up-to-date with all the upgrades, patches, fixes and improvements that have been on the ever-growing task list over the last 18 months or so, but have been put off time after time because we've been too busy firefighting something more urgent. We were asked to come up with a list of "must-haves" and "nice-to-haves" for getting things into a reasonable state.

Essentially, the must-haves boiled down to a couple of extra staff, namely an Oracle DBA and a UNIX/Linux Systems Administrator. We have so many little projects started but not finished, because the people who started them either left or got pulled away to work on something more urgent, we just need a couple of people to come in and help us out with the day-to-day stuff. This is stuff that any organisation such as our own would have to deal with, so no prior knowledge of our setup would be required. Admittedly, some of our systems are poorly documented, but the new staff could help out in that department too by documenting things that aren't already. We have a wiki (we have two actually – that's one project that got dropped part way through) and stop-gap documentation can be drafted there before being formalised.

With these staff handling the day-to-day running of things, those with in-depth knowledge of our setup, SLAs, customers and services would be free to finish off some of the projects we've started. With that done, the new staff, specialists in areas we're currently familiar with but not experts in, would offer their expert advice on how to improve our architecture, software installations and so on.

We put this argument to Gavin and were buoyed by the response. I appreciated his no-bullshit style and openness. He told us it was pointless at the moment asking him for a couple of hundred grand in a one-off payment for something because it just wasn't going to get past the board. But new staff – £30k-£40k each over a year – was possible, because it's a long-term investment. He told us that he likes to understand things, so he would undoubtedly ask stupid questions in order to better understand things. He listened to what we had to say, discussed it with us and suggested a few options. He sat and listened intently as we described our infrastructure and applications, what they all do and why it's set up the way it is. He asked questions about how it would fit into a few ideas he has and discussed possible implementations. Above all, he showed a genuine interest.

Even the mood in the office was markedly different from previous times. There was a relaxed atmosphere, a little banter, co-operation and, for want of a better word, togetherness. We sat in the meeting room and ate birthday cake together. As a team. And when we left the meeting, with a task to produce a roadmap for the few months between now and the Christmas party (yes, apparently there will be a Christmas party) we were all positively excited at the prospect of actually making some serious progress and realising some of our potential after being left too long to stagnate and merely survive.

So, if you're an Oracle DBA or a UNIX/Linux Systems Administrator and want to work for a lively, progressive company on exciting projects relating to mobile phones and gaming, why not drop us your CV? Hey, even the meetings are worthwhile!

The Goatee Is Back

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 11:21:34 GMT

It's been ages since I last wrote anything. That's because I went to South Africa for three weeks. I didn't let the general population know because... well, for obvious reasons. Unattended house and all that. Strictly speaking our house is never unattended because we have our killer guard cats and our highly-trained mercenary chinchillas, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

The holiday was the usual arrangement of staying with family. This year, this proved to be a bit of a problem due to certain happenings within the family that I'd rather not go into. Suffice to say there was a certain amount of tension in the air quite a bit of the time, so things weren't necessarily as relaxing as they might have otherwise been. That said, it did contribute to us doing far more than we've managed to do on previous visits like visiting friends and some sight seeing. There's still so much of South Africa that I've yet to see, it's such a massive country.

Before I went away, I had a nice phone conversation with Gavin Whyte, an Executive Director of the company. He really just wanted to reassure me as to the intentions for the company and let me know that he's there to help provide whatever it is we need to keep things running smoothly. When I asked him if his immediate plans would mean I'd be coming home to no job, he said that no, that wasn't going to happen, which was reassuring. It was nice to speak to someone who was so open and no-nonsense for a change.

On my return I did get the impression, though no-one has explicitly mentioned anything to me, that there might be some concern about my blog. As far as I know I've not said anything I shouldn't and apart from my last post, where obfuscating things would have made it unreadable, I make a habit of not explicitly naming people and companies. Whatever. I'm not going to stop blogging, although if something I have posted has caused concern, I'm happy to hear comments as to what and how I can fix it.

I'm due to meet with Gavin on Friday to discuss what's required to take our platform forward really. I think I'm expected to have a road map, which I kind of do although it needs some tweaking, and a list of essentials and nice-to-haves, which I also kind of do. There has been a policy introduced whereby we give a brief report every Friday of what we've been working on for the week, which is a good way of keeping everyone informed and also taking stock of things personally. I liken this to the SCRUM methodology, where the team has a daily "scrum", which is basically a quick stand-up meeting, to highlight what each person has been working on, what they intend to work on and what's getting in their way. One option being considered is sale of the company, but it's still very early days so we'll have to see what transpires.

Then, of course, there's Ubuntu. My holiday coincided quite badly with the kernel freeze and Beta release of Feisty, which was a shame. That said, things seem to have worked out quite nicely. All of the problems I had been experiencing have now been fixed, with the exception of the annoying APIC error messages, which are greatly reduced but not completely gone, and suspend/hibernate/resume not working. I need to look further into the latter as it may well be a configuration thing on my part, otherwise I'm sure there will be a bug already raised. But the Feisty release has come and gone with much fanfare and much greater demand than expected, I gather. The Feisty release seems like a solid one, so congratulations to all involved.

Oh, in case you're wondering, the title is a reference to the response of one Gary Kearley on the #ubuntu-uk IRC channel upon seeing my hackergotchi on Launchpad: "OMG goatee!"

A Close Shave

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 16:42:32 GMT

I had some rather unsettling news yesterday. Back in 2005, when Stream Group Plc acquired MChex, MChex was positioned as part of Stream Mobile. In other words MChex reported to Stream Mobile, who reported to the Group. Shortly after I joined, there was some negotiation between the MChex Operations Manager and the Stream Group board while they tried to bring MChex staff's terms on Stream Mobile staff's terms into sync. As part of that, I was asked which company I wanted to have on my contract of employment – Stream Mobile or MChex. For various reasons, I chose the latter.

Many people have left since then, leaving only two of us explicitly as part of MChex, and one as a shared resource between Stream Mobile and MChex. Later, MonsterMob founder Martin Higginson bought a controlling share in Stream Group Plc from former Chairman Gordon Robson and re-named it NetPlayTV Plc. He had a vision of setting up a gaming company and also purchased Vegas 247 who have a Casino channel on Sky TV. Stream Mobile continued to develop mobile gaming applications as well as running their mobile chat services. NetPlayTV went on to acquire the trading operations of Chariot, the company that ran the Monday Lottery.

Yesterday, out of the blue, I got a phone call to tell me that NetPlayTV Plc's mobile services division was being axed, resulting in approximately 70 redundancies. I'm not sure how many people are involved with the Vegas 247 and Monday parts of the business or what they do, but three directors (one of whom is our DBA and specialist in the SMS software that connects to the operators), two developers (one of whom is our secondary DBA), a support manager, an account manager and a whole load of operators and supervisors (who also handle our 24x7 support desk) were all chopped at a moment's notice. The operators and supervisors all had their access to the services interface dropped before being told, leading to a load of support requests before they realised what was going on. Seems mobile services is not the direction our new owner wants his new play thing to take.

In theory, I should be safe. Due to an exclusive five-year service provision contract we have in place, we can't really be chopped – we have to exist purely in order to service the contract. But it just goes to show how a seemingly small decision can make a massive difference. If I'd opted for Stream Mobile instead of MChex on my contract two years ago, I'd be looking for a job now.

Feisty Fawn Fixes Foul-Ups?

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 13:40:07 GMT

Well well. I got in touch with two people who have listed themselves on the Ubuntu Wiki as having the same laptop as me, outlining my intentions with regard to sorting out the kernel problems and asking for their experiences and what they'd tried. It turns out that the current development release of Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn, due for release next month, fixed a lot of the problems I was having.

To be honest, I was pretty apprehensive about running a development release on my primary machine. I mean, I understand that major breakage can occur in an alpha release and I can't afford to be without my laptop while things get fixed. So I consulted the good people of the Ubuntu UK Team and asked for their opinions on Feisty. Standard disclaimers aside, the general impression was pretty good. So I went ahead and yesterday morning upgraded using:

gksudo "update-manager -c -d"

It took a fair while... I left the packages downloading through Wednesday night, but even the upgrade process was lengthy. I didn't get many questions though " a couple of checks to see if I wanted to overwrite config files that I'd changed with the most recent version from the package maintainer, something about bcm43xx-fwcutter and that was about it. The only problem I had was a dodgy error message:

Bearing in mind that this is still an alpha release, I don't think that's too bad. After a reboot, through the ultra spangly boot splash screen, I now have working Wi-fi, IEEE1394 and Battery/AC Status. Suspend/Hibernate still don't work for me at present, I'm not sure why. My SD card reader has also apparently stopped working – dmesg shows that it detects that an SD card has been inserted, but where in Edgy a swift modprobe tifm_sd caused the contents of the card to be displayed in a Nautilus window, that no longer happens. And Beryl seems to have a bit of a problem, often chewing up 100% CPU, so I've disabled that again for the moment. On the whole, I'm better off. So now I just need to help work out the kinks.

Unfortunately, my Ubuntu time is going to be severely restricted from here on. Wifey is more than a little upset at the amount of time I've been spending on the computer and has limited me to two nights a week. This is still better than nothing, but clearly not as good as seven nights a week! Hopefully I'll still be able to make some contribution.

Free Stickers!

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 12:45:59 GMT

I just took delivery of a strip of six Powered By Ubuntu stickers from the nice people at Linux Emporium.

The photo doesn't really do them justice – they're so shiny the flash really glares. I've put one with the little cluster of stickers that were already on the laptop (beside the Designed for Microsoft Windows XP tag) and one on the case so people can see it when I'm working and they're sat opposite me. If you'd like some, here's the URL.

I've been a little more active on the Ubuntu side this week. Only a little though. I started off by learning how to roll my own kernel the Debian way. I tried the Ubuntu way and although it built the kernel, the packaging into .deb failed. Then I've been tweaking the kernel config, installing, rebooting and checking things like dmesg to see if the various little niggles I've been experiencing are still present. So far, nothing has changed. But eventually I'll hit upon the right combination, I'm sure, and then I can update the tickets so people more experienced than me can deal with the problem properly.

Update

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 23:05:01 GMT

Damn, it's been a month since I posted anything. I've been so busy I hadn't even realised. But now I'm not quite as busy, although I probably should still be, so I'm going to post an update if it kills me.

Much has happened in the last month. I think my last post was about the eGroupWare migration at work. Well that's mostly complete now. I do still have a number of outstanding tasks... like migrating all the old data into the new database and getting our interim PHP-based Customer Support ticket system integrated, writing a couple of guides... but all in all, eGroupWare is now in use and going down well. All the "systems" (read Access databases and Excel spreadsheets) that were previously accessed via Citrix are now on eGroupWare one way or another – be it TTS (which, I now learn, is soon to be replaced with Tracker), MyDMS, or WikiTikiTavi. Now I'm getting the distinct feeling some people aren't pulling their weight, so I'm slowing down a little too. I think I've earned a little rest.

What else has been keeping me busy? I started playing hockey again. A couple of weeks ago we played Buxton (the team who just about destroyed my knee and put me out of action again) and lost heavily. 5-1 I think. Might have been 6-1. I lost count. I was shit. I slipped on my arse for two or three goals. I was awesomely bad. Anyway, Saturday just gone we played Newark, who beat us 8-0 at their place I'm told. We went 1-0 up within the first 10 minutes and held out until the last 10 minutes when they equalised from a short corner. It finished up 1-1. This time I felt a lot better about the performance, both from a team perspective and personally. In fact I'll allow myself a little self-congratulation and say I played well. I ache like a bastard everywhere now, I was about ready to drop by the final whistle, but it was worth it. I'm just annoyed we couldn't hang on for those final few minutes, or force a winner.

My Ubuntu stuff stalled slightly. I think I've posted before about stuff that doesn't work on my laptop, at least unless I supply the irqpoll kernel option. Like the IEEE1394. Like the Broadcom wireless NIC. Like Gnome Power Manager. Like Suspend and Hibernate. The card reader, I've discovered, does. I just have to manually load the tifm_sd kernel module when I've inserted a card, which I can probably automate if I Google for it, but it's not so much of a problem that I've felt the need to.

Well, at least one of the above problems had a suggested fix of updating the BIOS. So I downloaded the latest BIOS update pack from the Acer website. Unpacked. Followed the instructions. But the WinPhlash utility they give you doesn't work on Windows XP Pro X64. Nor does the PHLASH16.EXE work from the Safe Mode Command Prompt. I have no floppy drive and I don't want to burn a DOS 6.22 Boot CD. So I set about trying to make my Disgo 256MB USB Key bootable with FreeDOS. Long story short, I failed... I've got it partitioned, I've got FreeDOS installed on it, but I can't get the damn thing to boot. Yes, the laptop supports it. The closest I've come is getting it to boot, but not finding COMMAND.COM.

In the end, I borrowed a USB floppy from my brother and booted DOS 6.22 that way. Flashed the BIOS (very nerve-wracking experience). And it made precisely no difference. So I still get annoying errors in my logs, and half my hardware doesn't work. I've started work now on trying to get the 2.6.17 kernel in Edgy to be as close to the configuration of the 2.6.15 kernel in Dapper as possible, with all the code fixes still in place. I'm determined to get to the bottom of this. One helpful soul keeps suggesting BIOS updates to everyone who reports they're also experiencing these problems... but it didn't work for me.

That's about it really I suppose. Just been keeping my head down, getting on with stuff. The Boys are doing well. Wifey's fine. I'm in good shape, apart from the aches from the weekend and a nice bruise on my ribs. I'm sure there's other stuff, but that's the main news.

Grab it by the Balls and Pull!

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 17:09:36 GMT

It's been crazy busy at work this week. Which is fine, cos I did very little last week. In fact, when it comes down to it, I've got very little done AT ALL for several months. This week has been different. I've been different.

It all started last week when we were told that our Citrix MetaFrame server was going with the part of the business that was sold off. Our support ticket databases are hosted on that, backed by MS Access – yuck! We've been evaluating eGroupware for a while now, on and off, in between other stuff... so we decided that now was the time to make the switch.

Actually, "decided" probably isn't the right verb. "Conceded" is probably closer. At the and of the day, our support supervisors needed somewhere to store ticket details. We mentioned to them a while back that we were looking at this, and it met with some apprehension, so I was expecting some resistance. This was going to take some careful planning and effort, especially bearing in mind that this had been forced on all of us before we were ready – we're still learning about the system, so we're not best placed to help out the support folks with any problems. But it had to be done.

First step, reassurance. I sent out a mail to the support and technical support teams apologising for the fact that this was going to be pretty much forced now due to the old system disappearing. I also reassured them that we were in the same boat as them, still learning, and that we were all there to help each other. No such thing as a stupid idea, everyone was encouraged to chip in. The only stupid question is one that isn't asked. This went down very well.

Second step, communication. In the mail I proposed a daily Skype meeting between the technical support team and a representative from the support team. We've actually ended up with two from the support team on each of the meetings so far – the duty supervisor and the support manager. Better than I could have hoped. The initial intention was a meeting of maybe half an hour a day, where everyone chips in with what they've done in the past day, what they intend to do today and what's stopping them achieving that – modeled very closely on SCRUM.

With so much going on with such tight time constraints, however, we've ended up with three meetings each lasting around two hours. I was concerned about the loss in productivity this would cause, but actually the exact opposite has happened – keeping the communication channels open (we keep the Skype conference window open all day so we can report progress and ask questions) and involving everyone has meant that things are actually getting done. Not just meandering along like they normally do, but actually at a pretty fast pace. Where on Tuesday morning we had a potentially disastrous situation on our hands, by Wednesday afternoon we had a detailed plan of action.

This leads on to the third step, action. Simply getting people to sit down and discuss things brought about an understanding of what needed to be done. All that remained was to actually do it. This started with simple stuff like getting started on a Wiki to hold the meeting minutes. Knock a few quick-win targets on the head and people start to believe they can make a difference. Information begins to flow, understanding develops – we now have a detailed description of the various support functions and their roles. We have traceability and accountability in our support tickets. We have logs of what we've been doing and concrete evidence that it's making a difference.

I've been driving this quite aggressively. The meeting format has been modeled after that of the Ubuntu UK Team's IRC meetings and has worked incredibly well. The other people involved have responded excellently and we've made massive progress this week. Today I got an overwhelming complement from one of my (still slightly disenchanted) colleagues who asked if I got a bag of whizz for Christmas or something! He's really impressed with my work over the last week and is actually looking forward to next Tuesday's team meeting. Looks like my enthusiastic determination is catching....

Crap Service R Us

Fri, 22 Dec 2006 17:21:25 GMT

A few weeks ago we bought an Avent bottle warmer from Toys R Us. We wanted to be able to keep Version 2.1's bottles warm through the night so when he woke he'd have a nice warm bottle. When we got the thing home, we were a bit disappointed to find that it didn't have a power switch – you just plug the thing in and it comes on, and the unplug it when you want it to go off.

The first night we tried it out. Mr woke up, so we switched the thing on, setting number 1, to warm the bottle. Wifey fell asleep again and it was about half an hour before Version 2.1 started squawking. When Wifey went to get the bottle out, it was so hot she dropped it. We had assumed from the descriptions we'd seen and the instruction manual that the thing would keep a bottle warm, by which we expected it to be warm enough for a baby to drink. You know, with it being a baby bottle warmer.

So we took it back to Toys R Us. I explained what had happened and said I'd like to return it and pay the extra £10 for a different model with a thermostat. I was stunned when they refused to take the thing back. I explained that I'd bought it based on the description on their website and it didn't live up to the description. They said it wasn't faulty, it was working exactly as expected and I should have checked before buying it. So I said it wasn't fit for the advertised purpose and they said they couldn't take it back due to health and safety, I'd have to take it up with Avent.

Now strictly speaking they're right – we checked with Avent, who also refused to take the item back because it's not faulty, i.e. if you leave the thing plugged in it'll just continue to heat the bottle until the milk boils. But what ever happened to goodwill? Any other time I've had a situation like this, I've at least been offered a credit note. Not to mention the fact that I actually wanted to spend and extra tenner with them. So I told them I wasn't at all happy about it and moved on to the next item.

For Version 2.0's birthday we bought him a VTech Challenger laptop. This in an attempt to stop him bashing on my keyboard while I was trying to work. The laptop was fine, but the mouse only went up and down, not left to right. So we took the mouse back to get a replacement. Presented the receipt. They didn't have any VTech Challenger laptops in stock, but they did have one on display. So I asked if we could just take the display mouse.

"No," they said. "We don't have the keys for the display." What? You have a display in your own store, but you don't have the keys for it? What do you do when you want to change the display then? Phone head office and have them come down and unlock it for you? Then they tried to suggest that we'd broken the mouse by dropping coffee on it because there was a hint of a brownish stain on the bottom. The upshot of the whole thing is that they now want us to return the whole unit for a refund. I will do. And I'll leave my Toys R Us gold card there as well, cos I ain't shopping there again.

EDM 179 – Open Source Software in Schools

On a slightly related note, I got a response back from Margaret Beckett about EDM 179. It contained a response from Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for Education and Skills, as follows:

Dear Margaret,

Thank you for your letter of 4 December together with enclosed correspondence from your constituent Mr James Tait of *address withheld* about open source software in education.

I believe that schools and colleges must be able to make an informed choice about the software they need, be it open source or proprietary, and to be aware of the total cost of ownership of that software, including sustainable support and training. The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) work with software providers, both open source and proprietary, to ensure that schools and colleges can make the most effective use of that software to support teaching and learning.

Becta's procurement frameworks consist of a specified range of approved suppliers of Educational ICT services and associated technologies. All of these framework suppliers have successfully completed a rigorous evaluation process, conducted under EU regulations (often involving practical testing as well as written-based assessments). It is not simply a list of approved products or an accreditation scheme.

Institutions are not mandated to purchase form within these frameworks, but when selecting services outside the framework they are advised to ensure that their chosen provider is able to deliver a service which matches the functional requirements and offers comparable value for money.

I would also like to assure Mr Tait that because they are Government-led ICT procurements at a national level (to be delivered locally), Becta's frameworks have to be tendered under EU regulations so there are certain requirements and expectations that have to be met and adhered to. Acceptance onto the framework is by assessment of the capabilities of a supplier to deliver and support a comprehensive suite of technologies and not by providing a single, specific product.

That said, there is nothing to stop any supplier offering open source solutions as part of a managed service, or a procuring authority including open source functionalities within its Statement of Requirements (SoR). The whole issue of open source is therefore one of measured inclusion rather than blanket exclusion.

Becta supports the principles of open source software and recognises the value-for-money benefits that the larger scale deployment could bring. Based upon a clearly defined SoR, which reflects the institutional vision, open source has the potential to play a vital role in educational transformation. However it must be acknowledged that realisation of the Department's e-strategy is not just software deployment; it is a total, integrated service solution.

Yours,

Alan Johnson

Compare and contrast with the Becta press release on the subject. Mr Johnson's response, which I was quite excited to have received at first, is almost word-for-word what's in the press release. I know this is hardly news – a politician hiding behind policy to avoid giving a straight answer to a question – but to do it so blatantly really irks me. I think I shall be writing to Mr Johnson directly and letting him know in no uncertain terms that I don't appreciate being fobbed off with a canned reply.

EDIT Looks like it's a stock response.

Niggle

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 17:31:26 GMT

This made me howl with laughter. Then I wondered what would happen if it were actually true, and I got scared.

In other, totally unrelated news, I decided to disable Beryl after several crashes. I have, however, stuck with the Free radeon driver in Xorg, so my kernel is now untainted. I also tried booting with the irqpoll kernel option, as suggested by a couple of lines in dmesg. Now it looks as though my FireWire and Broadcom wireless are working properly, but I'm getting these messages fairly frequently:

hdc: cdrom_pc_intr: The drive appears confused (ireason = 0x01)

And still getting lots of these:

APIC error on CPU0: 40(40)

I have no idea what's causing either at the moment, and not a lot of time to look just yet. My card reader still doesn't work. I'm not sure what's changed in the kernel between my current one and whatever was in Dapper, but I'm not overly impressed at the moment. The rest of the Edgy release is just brilliant, but the kernel, arguably the most important part of the system, just doesn't seem right.

That said, I've made a "sale", if you like. I was chatting to the Operations Manager at nursery the other day, we get on very well. I happened to mention my Ubuntu fixation (which is now officially sanctioned by Wifey, as long as I'm in bed by midnight!) and she's agreed to give it a go, from the Live CD, and let me know her thoughts. She's also going to try and get her mum, who also works there, to try it. And I've been given permission to put a few Edubuntu CDs on the front desk, so parents can pick one up as they go in/out and give it a go.

More Ubuntu-ism

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 23:13:58 GMT

Ubuntu UKTeam

The news is in and I was there as it happened:

07:01   LoudMouthMan    Yes, okay well the UKTeam is applying for Approval and submitted its application to Jono for the councils consideration.
07:04   LoudMouthMan    sabdfl you asked about UKTeam, we have submitted the approval page for councils consideration do you have any further questinos ?
07:04   sabdfl  LoudMouthMan: sorry, got diverted into low-hanging-fruit forums moderator membership approvals
07:06   elmo    ok, you guys get -0.005 for using "syngeristic" in your approval application wiki page
07:06   elmo    (synergistic even or however it's spelt)
07:06   ubuntu_demon    elmo : what does syngreristic mean ?
07:06   elmo    ubuntu_demon: ... exactly ;-)
07:07   elmo    anyway, I'm +1 on the UK team
07:07   elmo    (sorry, if we haven't got back to the loco team yet)
07:07   GazzaK  :-) thanks elmo
07:07   jono    the UK team have done some excellent work
07:08   jono    they have a strong structure and a number of keen contributors - they also have a good direction forward
07:08   jono    +1 for me
07:08   MikeB-  +1 for me
07:08   PriceChild      +1 UKTeam
07:09   sabdfl  +1 from me on the UK team
07:09   popey   w000t
07:09   apokryphos      nice 8)
=== GazzaK skips about a bit, thanks
07:09   jamesbrose      yay!
07:09   popey   Go us!
=== jayteeuk cheers
07:09   LoudMouthMan    So , sabdfl can I report back to the UKTeam that we have apporval ?  and thanks to everyone for the votes, it is much appreciated.
07:09   sabdfl  LoudMouthMan: all done - and welcome!
07:09   sabdfl  very classy wiki page
07:09   sabdfl  the status chart for projects is particularly cool, IMO
07:10   LoudMouthMan    sabdfl thank you , I will pass the comments on to the team.
07:10   jono    congrats LoudMouthMan
07:10   jono    LoudMouthMan: I look forward to you leveraging synergies and fullfilling verticale markets
07:10   GazzaK  lol @ jono
07:10   LoudMouthMan    jono indeed, ill run those ideas up the flag pole soon enough
07:10   GazzaK  if he starts on that, I'm moving to tibet

The corporate speak is a reference to the fact that the team's proposal page, written by LoudMouthMan, contained the word "syneristic" or something... but the important thing is the outcome, and we're now officially recognised by the project. Go team!

Beryl

Beryl is a Window Manager. You may have heard Mark Shuttleworth's comments along the lines of "Bring the Bling" by which he meant "lets make the Linux desktop look sexy as hell". Beryl lets you do that. I've abstained for quite a while, reluctant to venture into the territory of unofficial repositories and beta software on a laptop I need to be rock solid to do my job. Today I relented, and by god is it sexy. It took some effort – most of the day, in fact – but it's worth it.

I've mentioned before that I have an Acer Ferrari 4005WLMi. It has an ATi Radeon Mobility X700 with 128MB RAM. I had been using the proprietary ATi fglrx driver for it, but in order to use Beryl with that, you have to use Xgl in place of a standard X.org. I didn't fancy that, so I decided to switch over to the free open source ati/radeon driver so I could just use AIGLX. For anyone who's tried this and failed, the pertinent information is on the Ubuntu Help Page for the Radeon driver. Installing Beryl is outlined here. It really is that simple, when you're looking at the right resources. My main problem was the fglrx driver, it turned out.

So now I have all that "Bling" on my laptop. Windows that wobble when you drag them. They melt into the task bar when you minimise them. They zoom into focus. Semi-transparent title bars. Drop shadows. Brightness control on individual windows. Incredibly sexy.

Big Boy

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 17:14:22 GMT

Home

I've got a cold. Wifey had a cold before she gave birth. Version 2.0 caught that, then Version 2.1. Just as Wifey and Version 2.0 were almost over it, and Version 2.1 was in the thick of it, I started to get it, but it only lasted a few days. Now it's back, since yesterday. I read somewhere the incubation period for the common cold is three days, and where was I on Thursday? The doctors. Which explains a lot.

Version 2.1 is still suffering a little bit with his cold, it was almost gone but got a little worse over the weekend, but seems quite a bit better again today. At least now he's feeding again – in fact he's a proper little porker. He's starting to do interesting stuff as well now... little smiles, little shouts when he gets annoyed (like when you smother his face with kisses), his eyes follow me around the room. Actually he has his eyes open a lot more now too. And he's trying to crawl. Yes, he's only a month old, but if you put him face down, he pushes up with his arms and moves his legs in an effort to move. Fucking amazing.

Over all, it hasn't been a massive upheaval, but then we weren't expecting one really. Yes it's been a bit of a pain in the night when he's woken up choking on phlegm, and yes it's difficult to sleep (and fucking expensive, even with energy-saving bulbs) when he wants the light on all night. But it's still good to be a dad again.

In addition to all of this, Version 2.0 has been very good. Very very good. He's really taken well to being a big brother, and apart from one accident last Thursday night has been able to go to bed without a nappy for four weeks. Brilliant! We have a routine now. He goes to bed around 19:30, after a glass of "tasty milk" (Neskwik) and cleaning his teeth. He normally sleeps through until at least 6:00, sometimes even 7:00. Wifey goes to bed at 20:00, and Version 2.1 goes with her. But if he wakes up between then and midnight, which he usually does around 22:00, it's my job to sort him out – which means I pretty much have to be upstairs and awake. That's fine, because it gives me a couple of hours to do my hobby stuff, e.g. Ubuntu. I go to bed at midnight and any further wake-ups, usually around 3:00 are Wifey's to deal with. She gets up at 4:00, I get up at 8:00.

Work

Following the recent announcement, I've been finding it pretty hard to get motivated to do much at work. Not that I've been asked to anyway, if I'm honest. But I went to the team meeting last Tuesday and asked the question right out: "With the recent changes in the Group, where do we stand?" Damn, I'm glad I did. Essentially I was told that, to be fair, the new owners had only been in charge for two days (the EGM having taken place on the Friday). Obviously it's going to take them a couple of months to get up to speed and get to grips with the different parts of the business, what the state of play is. But I was encouraged to hear that they are actually considering their options with regard to our particular part of the business. Not simply reviewing how best to dispose of us, but actually also considering putting a proper management team in place, investing in some more staff and developing the platform. I was amazed, even more so when I highlighted the continuing need for some development work in order to retire some old software and was greeted with an enthusiastic "we'll take a look at what's involved" rather than "that's not important at the moment".

It went on. I asked for further input on the project plan and roadmap I'd prepared for them and was told it needed to be broken down into smaller sub-projects in some places, and prioritised into Essential, Good-To-Have and Nice-To-Have, and that it was my project and my plan and it was up to me to decide how best to implement it, I didn't need to run things past them any more.

So finally, I'm Lead Developer not just in name, but in role too. It actually feels as though maybe some momentum could be gathering again. First things I'll be doing are getting the project plan OUT of Microsoft Project and into eGroupware's Project Manager – thereby removing a proprietary software product from the list of required tools and simultaneously making the project plan available remotely and concurrently, increasing productivity – and also getting the project roadmap OUT of Microsoft Word and INTO the wiki – for similar reasons to the above.

Ubuntu

I've been slightly active in the Ubuntu community of late. Mainly in the #ubuntu-uk IRC channel, it must be said. But I've joined up with the Ubuntu-UK LoCo, set up my wiki and LaunchPad pages. I've added a few bug comments, so I've already started to accumulate Karma, and started to learn Python, mainly because it seems to be used an awful lot in Ubuntu.

Python is a funny language. It feels like a scripting language, but with a kind of pseudo-OO structure. I'm getting along better with it than I ever did with Perl. I've started writing a small utility to help me manage my CV, using Python-SQLObject. That has a similar feel to EJBs with CMP -- you just update the model, which inherits from the SQLObject object, and the changes get persisted automatically. It even handled many-to-many relationships for you, creating the intermediate mapping table between the two entities. Quite cool.

To Take Your Mind Off It

Sat, 25 Nov 2006 05:55:10 GMT

This is likely to be a long, rambling post, given that I've been meaning to post an update all week and now Wifey has just taken Version 2.1 to the emergency doctors surgery in Derby... so I apologise in advance.

Version 2.0 has had a cold all week. A real stinker. There's been vomit and uncontrollable coughing and all kinds of nasty stuff. I've been sleeping in his room while he's been sleeping with Wifey and Version 2.1. This struck me as maybe the wrong way to do things, but Wifey likes to be with him at night when he's ill, just in case he wakes up, and there's not room in our bed for all four of us – especially when Version 2.0 is such a wriggle-arse and takes up half the bed on his own. Besides, she said, she can catch up on lost sleep during the day, whereas I can't because I have to work. A nice thought if not entirely true....

Anyway, Version 2.1 seems to have caught it. He's been sneezing a lot throughout yesterday and started coughing in the evening. He seemed fine, had lots of bottle, just wanted me to sit with him. As an aside, I have to admit it's been harder to bond this time round. I'm not sure if it's because I was less involved with the birth or what, but it took me a good few days to really get into the idea of being a dad again. That's not to say I'm putting any less into it or any less inclined to throw myself on the line to protect him, but it just doesn't feel quite the same.

But I digress. Version 2.1 is currently in transit, with Wifey, to the Derby Medical Centre, having woken up in the night spluttering what can only be described as white foam. Which makes me feel like a bit of a twat really, cos while I was looking after him last night I didn't pick up that anything was wrong. So here I am, in the wee small hours, blogging because someone has to stay home with Version 2.0, Wifey knows more about what's wrong with Version 2.1 and I ain't gonna get back to sleep until I hear something, knowing there's diddly shit I can do.

Work

In other news... I got an SMS message from my kind-of boss the day after Version 2.1 was born telling me that "There's been some changes at $EMPLOYER, check your mail. New chairman is in Harrogate Friday if you can make it." He was referring to this, which was kind of annoying as it puts my position in the balance. Now I know it's a tough call to make, do you actually want to disturb someone on paternity leave, especially with potentially bad news, so maybe the SMS was with that in mind. More likely, I feel, is that it's just his management style and I wouldn't have got a reassuring phone call even if I hadn't been on leave. So the current wisdom is that we should "just keep things ticking over, keep the platform running but don't bust a gut" which sounds ominous. So I've been doing that, closing tickets as normal, and I've decided to learn Python. Then maybe get more involved with Ubuntu and possibly apply for one of the jobs on offer.

UPDATE Wifey just phoned, Version 2.1 is fine, it's just a head cold and isn't on his chest. Some saline drops to help him clear his nose and throat and keep doing what we're doing.

Welcome, Version 2.1!

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 04:08:24 GMT

Callum Aiden Tait was born at 23:40 on Tuesday November 7th in Derby City Hospital, weighing 7lb 2oz. Mommy was a picture of calm throughout and is now sleeping off all that hard work and the epidural. Baby was in no rush, but the labour was still a lot quicker than first time round. I'll admit to a pang of tearful disappointment when we agreed to abandon the home birth due to lack of progress (6cm dilated at 14:00, still 6cm at 17:40), but the experience was much better than we had anticipated – even the bloke who tried to convince us to come into hospital in the first place came in to see us and was incredibly friendly, not at all like the first time we met him. And I blubbed a little bit, but didn't come close to passing out trough hyperventilation this time.

I've just picked up Version 2.0 from the neighbours who took him in at very short notice, Wifey has to stay in till about 12:00 because there was meconium in the amniotic fluid, just a precaution. Although the waters broke at 16:10, the membrane didn't fully retract, which is what caused the lack of progress – one of the doctors sorted that with what looked like a swizzle stick with a hook on the end. The epidural wasn't as effective as Wifey had hoped, and took about eight attempts to get in right, but it took enough of the edge off the pain to be useful.

Now I'm off to hunt down the two cats that escaped during the labour....

In Labour

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 08:36:52 GMT

Wifey went into labour around 5am this morning. I'll update when Version 2.1 arrives.

Ubuntu Continued

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 17:28:24 GMT

I've spent a little time describing what doesn't work on Ubuntu... now I'd like to comment on a couple of things that do. Firstly, that vpnc VPN client for Cisco VPNs... well I used to have to issue a command like sudo vpnc-connect --gateway 1.2.3.4 --id me --username me --udp, then enter my IPSec and Xauth passwords. If I tried it using a configuration file, it just hung up and I couldn't get the VPN to start again without rebooting. Now, I just do sudo vpnc myprofile, where /etc/vpnc/myprofile.conf contains the following:

IPSec gateway 1.2.3.4
IPSec ID me
#IPSec secret mypass
Xauth username me
#Xauth password mypass
UDP Encapsulate

# OPTIONAL
# ========

#
#
# Varios options not undestood by vpnc itself but by some other scripts
#
# Target networks 123.234.210.0/24 10.1.0.0/16
# If Target networks is defined here, the default route is not replaced!

# Don't update resolv.conf though resolvconf is installed
# DNSUpdate no

Enter my passwords as usual and it magically works. The other thing I couldn't do before was use the copy of Windows XP Pro X64 that came pre-installed on my laptop from within Ubuntu using Qemu. It complained that it couldn't find the APIC. Now, however, I'm making some progress:

Further Experiences With Ubuntu

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 10:38:55 GMT

I thought I'd follow on from my last entry with an update on how things are going. The first thing I need to rectify is the NetworkManager problem I thought I was having. It turns out that what I'm seeing is expected behaviour (at least when there are no wireless networks in the vicinity). I read the README.Debian that comes with the package, which says:

Configuration
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Only devices that are *not* listed in /etc/network/interfaces or which have 
been configured "auto" and "dhcp" (with no other options) are managed by NM.

This way you can setup a custom (static) configuration for a device and NM 
will not try to override this setting.

It then goes on to list some examples, but the above made sense to me since my wired LAN interface is configured with a static IP address. I'm not sure if I like this behaviour or not... I can't help thinking there should be some kind of network profile management, such that I can say "I'm at home, so I'll have my wireless disabled and my wired interface statically configured please", and then later "I'm in the office, so I'll have wireless and wired interfaces enabled and configured via DHCP and let NetworkManager decide which network is available at any given moment" or "I'm travelling and I'm at a train station which has a free wireless hotspot, so I'll disable my wired interface and have my wireless pick up a connection and configure it via DHCP." I think this is what laptop-net was supposed to do, but I'm not sure. It would also be useful to have my network-mounted shares synced and made available for me when I go offline, then any changes synced again when I reconnect to the network. Maybe I'm asking a bit much, but I think it should be possible.

I did come across what I consider to be a regression yesterday. I forgot to mention that we do occasionally get Microsoft Office documents from customers, detailing change requests and support tickets usually. This is partly our own fault, as we created the support form and saved it as a Word document, so we currently have to live with it, at least until we can concoct an online support form. I use OpenOffice to view these files and yesterday I tried to open a Word Document with an embedded Excel spreadsheet. I'd opened it fine before the upgrade, although the spreadsheet was barely readable within the context of the Word document so I had to open it separately, but yesterday I got an error saying that the Excel file format was invalid. I got a colleague to send me a copy of the Excel file and that opened fine, it was just when it was embedded that it failed to open.

Otherwise, everything's been fine so far. So I'm off to see if this bug has been filed already and if not, I'll file it myself.