April 2008 Archives

My boss is a very smart man. He's a lousy boss.

I've had a week off, and it's been nice. Long awaited, and in my opinion quite well deserved. In that time, he's taken my main project and offered bits of it to the rest of his team. Without discussing it with me at all, and when I was away.

As a result, I'm inclined to simply wash my hands of the whole thing. Since this project was the only reason I stayed at the company, it puts the whole job into question. If another job came along, I'd take it.

Just what I needed on my first day back.

For years now I've been saying how I feel better as I get older. In almost all respects that's very much the case - older, calmer, maybe even a tiny little bit wiser. It's a good thing, and I think it's a useful way to approach an inevitable fact of life.

It all falls down when it comes to fitness.

I buggered up my ankle at Krav Maga about six weeks ago, and I'm just getting back to fitness classes now. I've been to Body Combat a few times, with the ankle heavily strapped up, and it's been nothing short of torture. I've been stopping mid-exercise, my muscles burning, my chest wheezing. I've got through the classes on willpower - my body's not answering my demands.

I've only been out of action for a month! I begin to understand what people mean when they say that fitness is hard to recover. Before, a month's downtime would have meant I'd have been a bit out of breath where I wouldn't have been before, and it would sort itself out with a bit of determination, certainly within a few weeks. Now, I'm older, overweight, and getting that 'snap' back is so much harder. Depressing.

The real failure would be to give up, and that's not going to happen. Still, it's disconcerting to feel that something has been lost - it seems that the loss of 'elasticity' with age applies to one's fitness level as well as it does to one's skin tone.

Moral: Don't take a month off.

In the software industry, it's hard to imagine a bigger challenge than competing with Microsoft Office. Sun's attempt to create a credible alternative has taken a long time to mature, but OpenOffice.org (and its commercially-supported alter ego StarOffice) are finally up to snuff.

An aside: Sun are a strange company. In small bursts they're totally amazing, and some of their stuff is quite outstandingly good. Java is great, licensing nits aside; OOo is terrific now; Solaris is excellent and has been from the start. Sun are a testament to the sad and terrible fact that superior engineering simply isn't enough.

Back to OOo: I've used StarOffice before, but only on Linux where I didn't have any real choice. Now, I want to do better. I oiled myself up and paid for Windows Vista, but I object to paying for Microsoft Office as it's a perennial source of security problems and compatibility bullshit; so I'm using OOo as my 'main' productivity suite - awful, awful terminology that - and I have the MS Office viewer as a fallback.

You'd think that would condemn me to a hell consisting of broken formatting and unopenable documents. In fact, I've not found any (non-Office XML) Word document OOo can't handle with aplomb. Even documents break the Word Viewer seem to work just fine in Office Writer. I'm more a Word user than an Excel junkie, so that's the format I really care about.

The native format for my documents is now genuinely free (as in speech) and open. I can have faith that future programs will support it properly. This is a big deal, to me anyway. Better yet, I can export straight to PDF without any intervening software, neither (the excellent) PDF creator or - shudder - Acrobat.

OOo does what I want, does it very well, and is free. It doesn't get much better than that.

I'm not at all qualified to review OOo, so I'll just make a simple recommendation: Try it; it's really, really good.

The Linksys NSLU2 is a remarkable little device. When freed from the limited software it ships with, it can become an almost unbelievably useful addition to a home network.

I put Debian GNU/Linux on my slug, following the excellent instructions on the NSLU2-Linux site. After trying it with a solid-state disk for swap and root, I gave up and stuck a laptop 160GB drive on it, in addition to a 500GB 'swappable' disk for backups etc.

The only thing I've really had to change is to patch apt to make it run in the slug's tiny amount of memory. Notwithstanding the lack of RAM, it's a fully functional Debian server with all the power that entails. As long as I do nothing to force it to swap heavily, it works like a dream

Mine runs as slave for NIS, Kerberos, LDAP and DHCP. It could easily do more, though I see memory being tight with much more. It's brilliant for backing up my (flaky) main server without slurping up too much power and space, and without making server-sized amounts of noise. They're wonderful.

Childish fart humour. Love it!

http://www.videosift.com/video/Star-Trek-Lethal-Atmosphere

In a remarkable reversal, today a science story (on the wonderful BBC News website) suggests that coffee - previously presumed harmful - might actually be good for you. In this instance 'good for you' means it might help prevent Alzheimer's!

Lest I get carried away, the science has only been tested on rabbits, though it would appear to support findings found in humans. I'm sure there'll be a dampening story later in the day, perhaps some breathless junior minister on the Today program will tell us what we already know, and that perhaps we should limit our intake. No! I shall enjoy my coffee more today, safe in the knowledge that I'm addicted to it and am now slightly less likely to change that.