www.lewiz.org

I know I didn’t blog about this when I first read about the proposed update, but now that it is real and I can use it, it’s definitely worth a mention.

Sun ship a modified version of the panel calendar that supports multiple timezones, very handy when you work in a global organisation and regularly collaborate with people in different timezones.

Admittedly, this doesn’t apply too strongly to me in my current role at Sun, but at home, it’s very handy to glance quickly and know what time it is in China.

Hopefully Sun will quickly abandon their (in my opinion) third-party changes now that a far superior implementation is available upstream.  I present you, the Gnome calendar:

 

Congratulations, Apple!  A laptop that’s only three years behind Sony’s Vaio X505, you’re close to catching up!

 

Not only have you not managed to make it as slim, it weighs just shy of twice as much, has two-thirds as many mouse buttons, fails to pack a DVD-RW burner, gigabit network port and, just like the iPhone, there’s an utter lack of built-in UMTS support.  Worse still, no PCCARD slot means we can’t even use an ISP-supplied card.

Good job!

P.S. did I mention you can’t swap the battery?

In vim you can use :global to perform actions based on regular expressions.

Thanks to MichaelRaskin1 in #vim on Freenode I can now remove lines that don’t match what I’m looking for in a file.

To try it out, let’s have a testcase.  You have some truss or strace output you’re looking through and want to see all of the open() calls (without dropping to a shell and running grep); try this:

:%g!/^open/del

This is pretty straightforward: delete (del) all lines (%g) that do not (!) start with (^) open.

Boosh.  Thanks Michael.

Just booked flights to Qingdao in February. My Mum and I will be flying out to meet Quentin when he sails into Qingdao for a short stop-off on his yacht race.

We’re flying British Airways from Heathrow. Unfortunately we have to spend close to a full day waiting in Beijing airport due to the connections.

As there is little to do around Qingdao, the current plan is to fly (or maybe sail) to Incheon, South Korea. We’ll spend a week in Seoul before heading back, seeing Quentin off and flying back on the 25th (in time for work on the 26th).

Outward flights:

Tue 12 Feb 2008: Depart LHR 1305

Wed 13 Feb 2008: Arrive PEK 0705, Depart PEK 1455, Arrive TAO 1620

Return flights:

Mon 25 Feb 2008: Depart TAO 0755, Arrive PEK 0855. Depart PEK 1210, Arrive LHR 1515

I’ve just written a new ‘page’ (as I will update it as and when required) discussing which Firefox extensions I use. There are some I can’t live without on there, may be worth checking out: http://www.lewiz.org/firefox_extensions/

Seems to have come awfully quickly this year.  I can’t say I’m looking forward to 2008 either, especially as 2007 only seems to have just gotten going.  The joys of being ‘old’.

I managed to book one of my days of holiday off on the 24th, which will give me a nice long Giftmas break.  My last day is Friday 21st and I’m back at work on Thursday 27th.  Just today I was asked to do two late (1.30PM until 9PM) shifts, 27th and 28th of December.  This is good as it means I get a little more time to drive down south after Christmas (it also comes with a little more cash in my pocket).

I’ve barely begun to buy the necessary items for friends… I have a few covered, but I’m stumped for ideas.  When I think about what I really want, I’m pretty low on ideas… I don’t really have any needs and as I’ve been earning more cash for the last few months I’ve been able to afford a few bits and pieces for myself (e.g. a fancy push-bike).

I’ve scraped some ideas together and updated my Wish List... the item I could really do with is a decent pair of stands for my Quad 11Ls… I’m going to start some reading now in the hopes of updating it with a specific stand that suits my needs.

What surprises me the most is that what I really want isn’t something that I or anybody else can buy… I need money to do it, but that’s more of a means to an end.

Ah, well, maybe when I win the lottery…

The first update in what must be well over a month… the biggest change in my life has been at work (I’m sorry to say).

As part of Sun’s drive to maintain profitability they have begun outsourcing some of the more basic work to partner engineers in Poland.  This has both pros and cons:

The plus side is that I no longer have to deal with some of the more mundane problems like disk swaps, memory DIMM replacements and so on.  It also means that, as Sun made a profit, I got a bonus.  It wasn’t much to write home about though… my quarterly bonus was calculated as 128% of 0.8% of my base salary (don’t ask), except in my case, they worked it out pro-rata for the number of months I’d been working.  In the end I took home a whopping £67 (pre-tax) this month(!)

The downsides are that Poland get their hands on some calls before we do… in the longrun this can cause more work for us.  As well as this, Sun had to let go a number of employees.  Fortunately the large majority of those let go put themselves forward for voluntary redundancy, so I like to think it worked out well for most involved.

Guillemont Park, the main campus for Europe and the Middle East (EMEA), now has a desk:engineer ratio that is looking a little underwhelming.  During the last two weeks most of us have moved desks; instead of being spread out over two sides of the building, we’re now all on one side, and I believe there may be plans underway to move engineers from another building to the now vacated side.  This is all rumour though, so who knows what will happen.

I’m happy with my desk relocation; it’s obviously not great to leave behind people who I’ve been working closely with, but the benefit to me is that I’m now sat in an OS/kernel/software community.  Over the coming months I’m trying to move into a more software role, although I will still be expected to handle other types of calls as they come in.

Furthermore, I am no longer in a team that deals exclusively with a large telecommunications company based in the UK… I now support this company, as well as a number of other important Sun customers, including investment banks, telcos and so on.  I am a member of the so-called ‘elite’ team.  (it refers to the customers, not the engineers!)

With some team members leaving, there was cast-off kit going round and somehow I’ve managed to upgrade myself from a single 19” CRT with Sun Ray to a dual-headed 19” flat panel Sun Ray config.  In terms of desktop real-estate, this mirrors my home setup, which is handy.

Hope everybody is having a good December… don’t forget to fire up xsnow!

For the past few weeks I’ve been going to Mandarin lessons at Reading University on a Thursday night, right after work.

The first few were pretty slow: basic vowel and consonant sounds, introductions, etc.  These things I’ve muddled my way through during my time in China.  Certainly a few knowledge gaps were filled in the first couple of sessions, but there weren’t any major revelations.

So far we’ve covered: introductions, farewells, counting (another thing I’m pretty good at…), basic strokes and characters, family members and some general conversation.  Our instructor, Congxia, is forcing us to concentrate on pronunciation and the four tones early on in the hopes that the lessons stick and we all go on to become accurate speakers… as opposed to relying on native speakers ability to work around our shortcomings.

Last week’s lessons was really good.  I have a whole raft of new words that I need to learn… really useful things like classmates, workmates/colleagues, how to ask for a waitress without calling her a whore, etc.

As I’m at work this weekend I nipped out on my lunch break to get a Subway and an A6 notebook that I will work on tomorrow morning to make a decent English-Mandarin, Mandarin-English dictionary of words I’ve been taught.

As ever, no updates recently.  I just don’t really do much that’s worth talking about these days.

The past week has been pretty poor, on the whole.  On Sunday I managed to slip while walking down the stairs in what I now realise to be very impractical slippers… I was walking down with a finished bowl of cereal, a bottle of milk and the cereal box.  My feet came out from underneath me, I shot back, landed on my back and proceeded to slide all the way down the stairs at what seemed like breakneck speed!  I reached the bottom at roughly the same time as my now broken cereal bowl and the vast quantity of milk that had escaped from it.

What I find odd is that my back is absolutely fine, but the first few days were very uncomfortable to sit down… presumably my coccyx got a slight beating on each and every step on the way to the bottom.  It’s much better a week later, but still hurts slightly.  I’m hoping this will go away soon.

Otherwise the week has been a time for plans and Wikis… but none of them really played out the way I’d hoped.

Thursday evening I came out from my Mandarin class at Reading university to find some local scally had decided to pop my driver-side window for the fun of it.  I guess it’s my own fault for leaving my TomTom cradle attached to the windscreen… this time the fact that I’d left the glove compartment open to show nothing was in there helped.  Nothing (I know of) was taken, but I had to drive home in the cold.

Yesterday I had Autoglass replace the window through my insurance… a £50 excess and I got a same-day service.  I’m very impressed with this, top service.  I just wish I hadn’t needed to find out!