I would recommend (not knowing if you already do this) becoming active with open source projects. I don't necessarily mean become an Apache commiter, but participate in projects in a minor way (bug testing, mailing lists, forums) , create some of your own pet projects however small they may be and share them on github/bitbucket, answer questions on Stack Overflow/Server Fault, etc. That way you establish an online portfolio of who and what you do.
I often refer to people's online presence as a differentiator when I evaluate CVs and interviews. Someone with an active Github account would indicate someone willing to learn and share and would fit in very well in my team. Someone unknown online, would raise a few question marks, and with enough alternative CVs...
Be well rested, happy and then work more effectively for shorter time produces better end result than less effective work over longer time. Apparently. Maybe more applicable for office / knowledge workers, not so much for tollbooth attendants, truck drivers, shop keepers. But you could say a happy rested waiter gets more tips than a tired snappy one...
Personally I think 6 hours is not the solution. It takes a while before I find my flow, my coding happy zone, http://memeagora.blogspot.com/2008/10/code-forrest-code.html and 6 hours would mean most of day is wasted on meetings, lunch, and other interruptions. 40 hours seems a good balance.
Having just had 21 fully paid weeks off last year due to 14 weeks paternity leave and the rest as holiday I shouldn't complain about Norwegian vacation laws.:)
Your manager and team mates are not the problem. They will know and appreciate the work you contribute and daily interaction irrespective of location.
It is your manager's manager (and above) that is the problem. To him you are only a number, he has no idea or interest in what you do. He likes to see bums on seat to match the cost of the department salaries. If you are not in the office for some "facetime" at your desk, canteen or in the corridor, he has no qualms in overriding your manager when praise, promotion, lay offs, or new project members are to be selected.
Hopefully you have a strong manager or similar that can fight your battle. Many wont.
Currently features that should mature more are released as default to everyone. They are stable but not enough themes, documentation, support tools etc for it to be of mature/professional enough for the average non fanboy user.
Bleeding edge but stable features should be in monthly releases so that hardcore fans can develop an community of tools, help etc around the feature so that when a more publicised LTS or quarterly release are pushed on joe average Ubuntu seems more polished. Monthly relases will mean less delta and quicker responses.
Also in my blog I state that Ubuntu should not push the latest release on Joe Average, but instead the more hardended LTS version. And never the initial 10.04 LTS but only when 10.04.01 was released for example.
I would suggest running an Ubuntu server on Amazon ec2 with postfix and roundcube as mention many times above.
It does mean you have to keep the server updated yourself, which is easy with apt-get. And you need to tie down via ssh keys, SASL authentication, TLS encryption, ip ranges etc. And every Ubuntu LTS release it is probably a good idea to create a new server and migrate the data instead of upgrading but not a requirement.
Some continuous sysadmin will be needed, but it is manageable.
That said, while I do run my own mail servers for me and friends & family, my main mail accounts are on Google Apps..... (routed via my servers so at least I have some recovery options)
People dont like change. So if there is not a great reason for them personally to change then they wont.
Local fruit and veg sellers here still cling on to ounces and pounds, refusing the change. Especially if they are of a more senior generation. Ignoring the fact that everyone under 40 have been taught metric since school.
Whip: The government could force a conversion but they will not get re-elected. Carrot: You can gradually introduce it in schools, science, consumer products which is what is happening. Until people have grown accustom to metric and then to the last whipping change.
Cost: Secondly the whip will be unpopular even if converting to metric would mean more exports, more efficient manufacturing and engineering. That benefit is too long away and not personal enough for average Joe. He only cares if foxnews or equivalent will shout that the budget cost for this immediate conversion is X Billions. Irrespective of much large gains after X years.
As a person born and initially raised in an SI metric country but also lived the past 15 years in a imperial measurements country, I wish the last whipping change happens soon. I still convert miles into km (or roughly 2/3 or 50% more depending on which way). I still have no idea if im 5'8" or 5'11" but I know I am 1.75m tall. I know I am 95kg heavy, but never remember exactly how many stones or pounds that is.
Maybe that is metric snobbery but as a scientist I just don't see the point of imperial. It is frustrating to see the inefficiency and nonsense of it. Which usually means confusing conversations with my inlaws which are too old to have been taught metric in school and still refer to fahrenheit, ounces and feet for everything. Mentioning I need 2dl of milk or 1.5 hectograms of flour perplexes my mother in law:)
A claim whose figure was from Tesla's staff. Should be interesting court.
Top Gear was spot on about the real world implications - refueling time is one area electrics need to improve to be viable replacements, as opposed to short trip around town, vehicles.
Unfortunately that requires a lot of new stations and standardised batteries. Tesla would no doubt always require high performance batteries, which may never be available at all these stations...
The Lighter Later lists a whole bunch of benefits http://www.lighterlater.org/benefits.html with detailed research references. Such as less drastic 447,000 tonnes less CO2, save 100 lives, new jobs, cheaper NHS.
Not too discredit the findings from those switched in the US, but there may be many external reasons for their increased electricity use. Such as electricity use increases in general irrespective of DST switches or not. Maybe the increase would just be less with a DST switch, or perhaps not. Or.. if it is lighter later, there may be more barbecues etc.. Actually that would be charcoal / gas increase....
After February or earlier than November would this extra hour mean a more "happy" population with that extra light for their own personal/family time? Would the NHS dispense less Prozac?
This was suggested by the Lighter Later campaign of last year. Basically by having brighter evenings the country saves a lot on electricity and heating etc.
While being on the same timezone as the rest of western europe would simplify business and tourism, the main benefits is for the population to enjoy their post work / school hours in a better, lighter way...
As for it being dark in the morning, I don't really care. My alarm clock wakes my body up but my mind is not working untill lunchtime anyway, when the caffeine really kicks in. In the summer it is light at 5am or earlier which makes no sense to the general population.
Like 640Kb, its not enough: With SuperHD (UHDTV) in 3D simultaneously streaming to my lounge, kitchen, both kids' bedroom, my 10 tuner PVR, and neighbourhood CCTv then 10Gbps is not enough. With one UHDTV stream in 2D already at 600Mbps then the 10Gbps bandwidth will soon be flooded.
Add my 6x2m live 3D streaming view over the Amalfi coast then I really need that 1TB bandwidth. (a never-going-to-happen idea I once had with http://anyview.org/
Considering the time this super Fibre network's research, commercialisation/productation(is that a word) an final rollout of required fibre and routers, it is going to be years before this becomes a reality. Probably in time for when we actually will have consumer UHDTV available....
(I replied to this once already, but I wasn't logged in, and cant find it so perhaps it was not posted correctly and anyway someone has already made the same comment I said that someone once said 640Kb was enough. )
More warning that you are about to post as anon (ie forgotten to log in) would be good. I just realised that I was not logged in about 2s after I pressed submit...
I would prefer that we convert the phone booths to mobile phone, iPod, etc ie gadget charging stations.
May need to offer some lockable lockers with chargers similar to what they offer at music festivals. But not sure terror / vandal paranoid people would accept that.
I have to admit I still use phone booths, but only as a quiet place to talk on my mobile...
Nope, small businesses just require people to transfer money directly into their account. Either pre-, before whatever it is, so they can verify it, or post- (invoice) if they can trust them.
Thats how small sports teams, private instructors, charities etc do it over here(Norway).
Since transfers are free and nowadays pretty instant or at worst a few hours delayed this is quick and easy. And these days people now can transfer money via their mobiles so this is now even easier.
When I first moved to the UK in the 90s I was surprised they still used cheques, and now nearly into 2010s it is quite bizarre. Since the rest of Europe has been fine without cheques for 20+ years I don't really think they need to worry!
I use them all the time, they make getting around town so easy.
You dont need to worry about locking up your own bike.
You dont need to get back to a specific spot to pick your own bike.
You are not forced to go both ways by bike. You can cycle to town, the get a tram, tube, taxi etc home later if you want to.
You dont spend 20mins trying to find parking for your car
You dont spend 10mins waiting for a tram
You can go directions where public transport might not go directly
It only costs 70kr/year which is about $14 as the bikes and bikesheds are sponsored with ads.
The system here also has a realtime website with status of their 90ish depots/bikesheds. And if the one you are at is empty, then the screen lists the status of nearby depots.
There are some drawbacks with the free city bikes:
It is too popular, often the bike rails are empty
People tend to go the same directions/places at the same time. So even with trucks driving around to redistribute the bikes, the ones on the city centre limits are during day time often empty and the ones in the centre are full.
Even with constant maintenance some of the bikes have taken a beating
Some people steal the free city bikes. Makes no sense to me, as they are virtually free.
So I fully recommend them, it has made us get about town so much easier and quicker (and thus more often), but they are only useful if the depots are everywhere and stocked up.
It seems crazy that the data centres seem to run in hot states. Surely Alaska would be better? C'mon Alaska, get the tax-breaks right. I was just thinking the same.
This is why hosting near the customer is considered a Good Thing, and why companies like Akamai have made it their business of transparently re-routing clients to the closest server. I can see why some servers and therefore data centres needs to be close to the companies that owns them. Certainly always been the case with the companies Ive worked for. Call out time is short and network lag between other apps/dbs are low and response time quicker.
However most servers do not really need to be next door. My server is in a different country, and there is no notable difference. Most web sites ( unless perhaps video heavy ) would fine anywhere in the world, especially the load balanced redundancy servers. Alaska, Scandinavia etc just open the door if gets too varm. (Ok, not pedantically, due to dust, extreme temperature differences etc.)
Think how much CO2 we would be saving by filling up Iceland with data centres...;)
I thought the same with Sony Ericsson, so created an alias for when i registered with them.
A few months later I started receiving spam on that alias. Could be they were hacked or they simply realised the cash value with their database of addresses(or an employee did)
Only problem I used the same alias for two different parts of Sony Ericsson, their global site and my own country's support form. So I am not sure which part sold me out. The local could be less competent, however we have very strict privacy laws, so it could be global.
Ericsson was the only one I was receiving spam on for that domain, but a few months on, and I starting to receive loads of spam on non existing aliases. Cant prove it but I believe it all originated from Sony Ericsson selling my email to spammers.
Time to move on, and adjust my alias/spam avoidance. Ive created a little webapp to track and update aliases I use and what it was used for.
> It was not without the quirks and kludgey features expected of a 1.0 database.
Well it was not 1.0 database, more like a v 7 or 8 consider v1 was based on interbase 6 and as mentioned in post further down has been around for 20+ years.
Ive been using it for 4 years now, and we offer it as our prefered database for our products, but the customers can use ms sql server or oracle if they prefer. Choosing other rdbms databases offer nothing more for us, except they cost loads of money.
One thing firbird lacks is a cross database queries ala sql server. And a proper free replication tool.
Please do not compare it to Ms Access and other rubbish. Even MySQL is too lightweight in comparision.(pre v5 at least) Firebird can be compared to proper rdbms' like oracle, db2, ms sql server etc.
If you use IBExpert etc the admin is very easy (http://www.ibexpert.com), And for simple web sites, IBWebAdmin (http://www.ibwebadmin.net).
I did read somewhere 2 years ago, that Firbird was used by 40% of all enterprise level open source applications/websites. Most others were naturally MySQL or PostGres. That number was higher than expected, but I suppose it didn't include the mickey mouse CRUD phpish websites/applications.
Slashdot Mirror
I would recommend (not knowing if you already do this) becoming active with open source projects. I don't necessarily mean become an Apache commiter, but participate in projects in a minor way (bug testing, mailing lists, forums) , create some of your own pet projects however small they may be and share them on github/bitbucket, answer questions on Stack Overflow/Server Fault, etc. That way you establish an online portfolio of who and what you do.
I often refer to people's online presence as a differentiator when I evaluate CVs and interviews. Someone with an active Github account would indicate someone willing to learn and share and would fit in very well in my team. Someone unknown online, would raise a few question marks, and with enough alternative CVs...
Is that really them throwing their toys out of the pram?!
"How dare the Aussies deny us from intercepting data and shutting down sites by Australian companies and citizens"
Which is why some politicians, unions, researchers and even some companies are promoting the 6 hours a day workday.
http://www.6hourday.org/ http://www.informationweek.com/news/6502155 http://www.petitiononline.com/6hourday/petition.html http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2001/0901mutari.html
Be well rested, happy and then work more effectively for shorter time produces better end result than less effective work over longer time. Apparently. Maybe more applicable for office / knowledge workers, not so much for tollbooth attendants, truck drivers, shop keepers. But you could say a happy rested waiter gets more tips than a tired snappy one...
Although the 6h day has also been discredited by other researchers. http://www.thelocal.se/2238/20051007/
Personally I think 6 hours is not the solution. It takes a while before I find my flow, my coding happy zone, http://memeagora.blogspot.com/2008/10/code-forrest-code.html and 6 hours would mean most of day is wasted on meetings, lunch, and other interruptions. 40 hours seems a good balance.
Having just had 21 fully paid weeks off last year due to 14 weeks paternity leave and the rest as holiday I shouldn't complain about Norwegian vacation laws. :)
Your manager and team mates are not the problem. They will know and appreciate the work you contribute and daily interaction irrespective of location.
It is your manager's manager (and above) that is the problem. To him you are only a number, he has no idea or interest in what you do. He likes to see bums on seat to match the cost of the department salaries. If you are not in the office for some "facetime" at your desk, canteen or in the corridor, he has no qualms in overriding your manager when praise, promotion, lay offs, or new project members are to be selected.
Hopefully you have a strong manager or similar that can fight your battle. Many wont.
Agree, something should change. I blogged about the ubuntu release issues earlier this year: http://blog.flurdy.com/2011/05/ubuntu-releases.html
Currently features that should mature more are released as default to everyone. They are stable but not enough themes, documentation, support tools etc for it to be of mature/professional enough for the average non fanboy user.
Bleeding edge but stable features should be in monthly releases so that hardcore fans can develop an community of tools, help etc around the feature so that when a more publicised LTS or quarterly release are pushed on joe average Ubuntu seems more polished. Monthly relases will mean less delta and quicker responses.
Also in my blog I state that Ubuntu should not push the latest release on Joe Average, but instead the more hardended LTS version. And never the initial 10.04 LTS but only when 10.04.01 was released for example.
I would suggest running an Ubuntu server on Amazon ec2 with postfix and roundcube as mention many times above.
It does mean you have to keep the server updated yourself, which is easy with apt-get. And you need to tie down via ssh keys, SASL authentication, TLS encryption, ip ranges etc. And every Ubuntu LTS release it is probably a good idea to create a new server and migrate the data instead of upgrading but not a requirement.
I wrote a howto on how to install postfix++ on ubuntu: http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/
And some ec2 tips as well: http://flurdy.com/docs/ec2/
Some continuous sysadmin will be needed, but it is manageable.
That said, while I do run my own mail servers for me and friends & family, my main mail accounts are on Google Apps.....
(routed via my servers so at least I have some recovery options)
People dont like change. So if there is not a great reason for them personally to change then they wont.
Local fruit and veg sellers here still cling on to ounces and pounds, refusing the change. Especially if they are of a more senior generation. Ignoring the fact that everyone under 40 have been taught metric since school.
Whip: The government could force a conversion but they will not get re-elected.
Carrot: You can gradually introduce it in schools, science, consumer products which is what is happening. Until people have grown accustom to metric and then to the last whipping change.
Cost: Secondly the whip will be unpopular even if converting to metric would mean more exports, more efficient manufacturing and engineering. That benefit is too long away and not personal enough for average Joe. He only cares if foxnews or equivalent will shout that the budget cost for this immediate conversion is X Billions. Irrespective of much large gains after X years.
As a person born and initially raised in an SI metric country but also lived the past 15 years in a imperial measurements country, I wish the last whipping change happens soon. I still convert miles into km (or roughly 2/3 or 50% more depending on which way). I still have no idea if im 5'8" or 5'11" but I know I am 1.75m tall. I know I am 95kg heavy, but never remember exactly how many stones or pounds that is.
Maybe that is metric snobbery but as a scientist I just don't see the point of imperial. It is frustrating to see the inefficiency and nonsense of it. Which usually means confusing conversations with my inlaws which are too old to have been taught metric in school and still refer to fahrenheit, ounces and feet for everything. Mentioning I need 2dl of milk or 1.5 hectograms of flour perplexes my mother in law :)
A claim whose figure was from Tesla's staff. Should be interesting court.
Top Gear was spot on about the real world implications - refueling time is one area electrics need to improve to be viable replacements, as opposed to short trip around town, vehicles.
Which is why ideas like Better place have come about. They suggest you have battery swap stations instead.
Unfortunately that requires a lot of new stations and standardised batteries. Tesla would no doubt always require high performance batteries, which may never be available at all these stations...
The Lighter Later lists a whole bunch of benefits http://www.lighterlater.org/benefits.html with detailed research references. Such as less drastic 447,000 tonnes less CO2, save 100 lives, new jobs, cheaper NHS.
Not too discredit the findings from those switched in the US, but there may be many external reasons for their increased electricity use. Such as electricity use increases in general irrespective of DST switches or not. Maybe the increase would just be less with a DST switch, or perhaps not. Or.. if it is lighter later, there may be more barbecues etc.. Actually that would be charcoal / gas increase....
The current non adjusted BST time makes it unpleasent to leave work at 5pm in the dark for the larger population during the middle of winter.
An extra hour adjusted would eg change the sunset from 4pm to 5pm in the London area on 1st of January.
After February or earlier than November would this extra hour mean a more "happy" population with that extra light for their own personal/family time? Would the NHS dispense less Prozac?
This was suggested by the Lighter Later campaign of last year. Basically by having brighter evenings the country saves a lot on electricity and heating etc.
While being on the same timezone as the rest of western europe would simplify business and tourism, the main benefits is for the population to enjoy their post work / school hours in a better, lighter way...
As for it being dark in the morning, I don't really care. My alarm clock wakes my body up but my mind is not working untill lunchtime anyway, when the caffeine really kicks in. In the summer it is light at 5am or earlier which makes no sense to the general population.
Like 640Kb, its not enough: With SuperHD (UHDTV) in 3D simultaneously streaming to my lounge, kitchen, both kids' bedroom, my 10 tuner PVR, and neighbourhood CCTv then 10Gbps is not enough. With one UHDTV stream in 2D already at 600Mbps then the 10Gbps bandwidth will soon be flooded.
Add my 6x2m live 3D streaming view over the Amalfi coast then I really need that 1TB bandwidth. (a never-going-to-happen idea I once had with http://anyview.org/
Considering the time this super Fibre network's research, commercialisation/productation(is that a word) an final rollout of required fibre and routers, it is going to be years before this becomes a reality. Probably in time for when we actually will have consumer UHDTV available....
(A BBC video on SuperHD.)
(I replied to this once already, but I wasn't logged in, and cant find it so perhaps it was not posted correctly and anyway someone has already made the same comment I said that someone once said 640Kb was enough. )
More warning that you are about to post as anon (ie forgotten to log in) would be good. I just realised that I was not logged in about 2s after I pressed submit...
So is this the first steps towards the gene therapies in Red Mars books? Finally!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
"changes land on a daily basis".
Excuse me, but they already do. What the heck is update manager, but a means for updates to land when needed?
Normal updates are just for fixes.
However the optional backports are for introducing new versions so they already partially do this.
I would prefer that we convert the phone booths to mobile phone, iPod, etc ie gadget charging stations.
May need to offer some lockable lockers with chargers similar to what they offer at music festivals. But not sure terror / vandal paranoid people would accept that.
I have to admit I still use phone booths, but only as a quiet place to talk on my mobile...
When the current reviewer gets promoted to rating PornTube
First post?
Nope, small businesses just require people to transfer money directly into their account. Either pre-, before whatever it is, so they can verify it, or post- (invoice) if they can trust them.
Thats how small sports teams, private instructors, charities etc do it over here(Norway).
Since transfers are free and nowadays pretty instant or at worst a few hours delayed this is quick and easy.
And these days people now can transfer money via their mobiles so this is now even easier.
When I first moved to the UK in the 90s I was surprised they still used cheques, and now nearly into 2010s it is quite bizarre. Since the rest of Europe has been fine without cheques for 20+ years I don't really think they need to worry!
Ermmm. Sure about that? Don't most medium to large non-IT companies mostly outsource their IT infrastructure? Which is another corporation...
Including email, intranet, internet web servers etc.
Got them in Oslo, Norway too.
I use them all the time, they make getting around town so easy.
The system here also has a realtime website with status of their 90ish depots/bikesheds. And if the one you are at is empty, then the screen lists the status of nearby depots.
There are some drawbacks with the free city bikes:
So I fully recommend them, it has made us get about town so much easier and quicker (and thus more often), but they are only useful if the depots are everywhere and stocked up.
However most servers do not really need to be next door. My server is in a different country, and there is no notable difference. Most web sites ( unless perhaps video heavy ) would fine anywhere in the world, especially the load balanced redundancy servers. Alaska, Scandinavia etc just open the door if gets too varm. (Ok, not pedantically, due to dust, extreme temperature differences etc.)
Think how much CO2 we would be saving by filling up Iceland with data centres...
> your neighbor's loud conversation can be annoying and disturb your concentration. The lack of privacy can be annoying.
Use headphone and have your back to the wall.
Always a requirement of mine. Then I can control when I want to interact with others conversations.
Its annoying isnt it.
I thought the same with Sony Ericsson, so created an alias for when i registered with them.
A few months later I started receiving spam on that alias. Could be they were hacked or they simply realised the cash value with their database of addresses(or an employee did)
Only problem I used the same alias for two different parts of Sony Ericsson, their global site and my own country's support form. So I am not sure which part sold me out. The local could be less competent, however we have very strict privacy laws, so it could be global.
Ericsson was the only one I was receiving spam on for that domain, but a few months on, and I starting to receive loads of spam on non existing aliases. Cant prove it but I believe it all originated from Sony Ericsson selling my email to spammers.
Time to move on, and adjust my alias/spam avoidance. Ive created a little webapp to track and update aliases I use and what it was used for.
> It was not without the quirks and kludgey features expected of a 1.0 database.
Well it was not 1.0 database, more like a v 7 or 8 consider v1 was based on interbase 6 and as mentioned in post further down has been around for 20+ years.
Ive been using it for 4 years now, and we offer it as our prefered database for our products, but the customers can use ms sql server or oracle if they prefer. Choosing other rdbms databases offer nothing more for us, except they cost loads of money.
One thing firbird lacks is a cross database queries ala sql server.
And a proper free replication tool.
Please do not compare it to Ms Access and other rubbish. Even MySQL is too lightweight in comparision.(pre v5 at least) Firebird can be compared to proper rdbms' like oracle, db2, ms sql server etc.
If you use IBExpert etc the admin is very easy (http://www.ibexpert.com),
And for simple web sites, IBWebAdmin (http://www.ibwebadmin.net).
I did read somewhere 2 years ago, that Firbird was used by 40% of all enterprise level open source applications/websites. Most others were naturally MySQL or PostGres. That number was higher than expected, but I suppose it didn't include the mickey mouse CRUD phpish websites/applications.