Work? What work?

So, just a brief update. I've recently (a few months back *cough*) taken over our Linux "education" group at work, and it's interesting. The sad part is, we mostly only see people who already knows what Linux is as we're working internally in a world where most people are rather Computer savvy as it is. It's given me a few new viewing angles though, and I'll get back to that at a later point.

Currently working on some Trac guidelines for our Change Management process as well. Working from home today to actually get something done with it, as most of the days I wind up getting too many disturbing calls, talks and discussions to be very efficient. Our first two tries at making a decent workflow winded up a bit messy, and I think we really must get this down properly this time.

There are some other things I react on, and want to fix, for example, as it looks now, every single project sets up their own bugtracking/ticketsystem, and every project uses a different system (trac, mantis, clearcase, dimensions, etc). Preferably, this should be centralized in some fashion, and if possible I'd love to get a bit more homogenized environment. As it is, I try to tell people "look, here's a system for handling your day to day tasks, use it!". First time, the workflow got overly complex, second shot was also overly complex, and people where put off by all the choices and steps to take. This problem mainly stems from project/change management criterion.

My latest and greatest (yeah yeah) workflow should alleviate some of these problems by making some of the choices less visible to normal users. Ie, we have one task management system and a problem and change management system baked into one, but normal users (programmers) only use the task management system, while the project manager, tech project manager and CM also have the ability to handle problems and changes in separate workflows.

We're also adding the ability to have supertickets, where a single problem report can contain several tasks. This is a pseudo development so far, as we're not actually adding the whole deal right now, we're just adding the idea of it, not bounds checking or views/reports of it. Basically, every ticket can have a superticket (we add a numeric field to the ticket), which can point to another ticket, which is the "parent" ticket. This makes it possible to handle a large and complex bug in several smaller tickets. Anyways, the idea is there, but it's not fully implemented. If our management likes it, and the others like it, we could implement it for future usage. I'm worried it's too complex however. At the same time, one complex system might be better than 6 alltogether different systems as it allows for longer time to learn? Kind of like... well, unix for example. Once you find ls, its a darn good bit faster than having to click your way through a whole heap of paths to find the specified file list.

At the same time, both me and PM are a bit tired of Trac's shortcomings, maybe change to Mantis for example? My general thought to this however is, we need to stick it out i'm afraid... one more system will just make the normal user less interested in the new tool and hence taking even longer to learn. As it is, people use it at a bare minimum cause they dont know it, give them time to learn it properly, and they might come to like it. Comments on this line of thinking?

For now, tata. Back to writing.

Christmas ending

So, christmas and new years holidays is coming to an end. A long and arduous autumn/winter at work has ended, and an equally joyful christmas holiday is ending. This has been the year of working for my part, and the experience has been incredible. In all honesty, I've never had the opportunity to work in such a stimulating environment as I have the last few months, and I'm very happy for it.

Me and the girlfriend had the bad habit of buying an Xbox 360 for ourselfs this christmas, which made us realize we have a really small tv, so within 5 days we bought a new one. Then, we realized how bad speakers we have, so we winded up buying a set of bose speakers and new spdif cables within 2-3 days as well. This in turn, and the fact that I finally had some spare time, lead to me spending a lot of time finally getting the HTPC configured and working.

The entire HTPC is worth mentioning since I've put it together from parts, and installed/configured everything on my own. My opinion is that mythtv and ubuntu (mythbuntu) has come a long way as a platform for end users, but they still have a long way to go I'm afraid. My biggest annoyance is still the same it was 12 years ago unfortunately, and I think it's to some extent become even worse over time. Graphics and Sound drivers...

I personally have fairly new nvidia card which I want 3d graphics on, and all the hardware accelerations etc, in other words I'm stuck with the nvidia drivers. You would think it would be easy with the proprietary hardware drivers stuff in Ubuntu, but it's not. It's actually worse than some years ago when I last handled these setups, then all you had to do was compile and install drivers in the correct kernel modules directory. Now you have to fight with umpteenth other installers which crashes and overwrites eachothers and so forth, and then when you do an update, all of a sudden you overwrite your working drivers with nonworking versions and you're stuck trying to figure out just what happened. Also, the choice of good graphics cards has become smaller imho. If you want something powerful, you're stuck with nvidia or ati. Both drivers are completely horrible to get working. I'm hoping the rumours I've heard lately will turn true here, and we'll finally see better support for open source software from both companies, at least if they could make a single decent installer for the proprietary drivers in the common Linux distributions.

And my final gripe, which isn't so large as the other ones, the sound drivers. Sound was absolutely horrible back in the days with OSS, whatever soundcard I tried to install, I winded up with either having to run the trial OSS drivers, or choosing between no sound and buying the OSS drivers. This has become much better happily. It's still not working flawlessly as I just found out (SPDIF took a few hours to get working, and I still haven't gotten 5.1 output to work correctly over SPDIF).

These are critical areas of an OS (you expect sound and graphics to "work out of the box" these days, not having to screw around with settings/drivers/installers as soon as you deviate by a single micron from the specifications.

On top of this, I had some more serious issues with my iMON PAD remote, once again after reinstalling the system. That I can live with, but it's a serious annoyance. For some reason, the configurations shipped with mythbuntu had a bunch of codes that where off by a few numbers every here and there, and then there was a lot of buttons not connected between lirc to mplayer and mythtv.

Apart from this, I'm very happy with the setup by now. The basic functionality is there, but it's made for tweaking and having fun, so there's still a lot of things I'm interested in doing on it :-).

By now, I'm mainly waiting for work to start again, I feel rested, I've gotten to fiddle with some hardware and software, and I got new energy for the new year. I just need to try and get working on my webpage and stuff like that a little bit more so I can finally finish it. Like all IT projects, it's running very late ;-).