Well, several things have kicked off today:
- London has been chosen to host the 2012 Olympics;
- In the European Parliament, there was a huge vote against the software patents bill – this is a very good thing, although the bill may resurface again in the future: let’s not forget the European Council’s habit of ‘ignoring’ decisions made by the European Parliament. To understand why software patents are a Very Bad Things, read this article from the Guardian written by none other than Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation;
- Future prospects work-wise are looking uncertain: our current employer is looking to hand over our department, and all its staff, to the local university. While not necessarily a bad employer, the local university don’t pay as well as our existing employer and as such one might end up with a salary freeze for many years. Unless I’m able to write a suitable job description to get myself on to a better pay scale. Not sure about this. As is typical in this sort of situation, I’ve updated my CV, but as is also typical, I probably won’t actually do anything about it. I shall probably rant about this more another time;
Actual work: today was a good day. I’d invited the bloke from our usual IT supplier for a visit, to show him our shiny new building and to draw up a shopping list of stuff we need to buy. Basically, we’re gonna be getting a lot of rack-kit to rack up and consolidate our existing equipment, a few new UPS units etc.
Also I decided to sort out the aging software on the typical Windows desktop in the department. I took my existing desktop image (using PartImage and went about modifying it. I now have a working Cygwin X server installed, as well as updated versions of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. In fact, the Mozilla installations have been made to a fileserver, so that they can be updated easily: each desktop will access the runtimes across the network, rather than having a local installation. This is made possible by us having a faster network and a faster fileserver than we used to. My previous HOWTO Guide is being updated since I wrote it for a locally-installed Mozilla Firebird. The Thunderbird installation is to include automatic support for GPG via the Enigmail plugin. Now I just need to figure out a GPG public/private key management policy for all our staff.