{"id":188,"date":"2005-07-06T19:39:54","date_gmt":"2005-07-06T19:39:54","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2005-07-06T19:39:54","modified_gmt":"2005-07-06T19:39:54","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=188","title":{"rendered":"A Momentous Day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, several things have kicked off today:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>London has been chosen to host the 2012 Olympics;<\/li>\n<li>In the European Parliament, there was a <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/technology\/4655955.stm\">huge vote against the software patents bill<\/a> &#8211; this is a very good thing, although the bill may resurface again in the future: let&#8217;s not forget the European Council&#8217;s habit of &#8216;ignoring&#8217; decisions made by the European Parliament.  To understand why software patents are a Very Bad Things, read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/online\/comment\/story\/0,12449,1510566,00.html\">this article<\/a> from the Guardian written by none other than Richard Stallman of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fsf.org\/\">Free Software Foundation<\/a>;<\/li>\n<li>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&#8217;t pay as well as our existing employer and as such one might end up with a salary freeze for many years.  Unless I&#8217;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&#8217;ve updated my CV, but as is also typical, I probably won&#8217;t actually do anything about it.  I shall probably rant about this more another time;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Actual work: today was a good day.  I&#8217;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&#8217;re gonna be getting a lot of rack-kit to rack up and consolidate our existing equipment, a few new UPS units etc.<\/p>\n<p>Also I decided to sort out the aging software on the typical Windows desktop in the department.  I took my existing desktop image (using <a href=\"http:\/\/www.partimage.org\/\">PartImage<\/a> and went about modifying it.  I now have a working <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cygwin.com\/\">Cygwin X server<\/a> installed, as well as updated versions of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mozilla.org\/products\/firefox\/\">Mozilla Firefox<\/a> and <a href\"http:\/\/www.mozilla.org\/products\/thunderbird\/\">Mozilla Thunderbird<\/a>.  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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/firebird.html\">HOWTO Guide<\/a> is being updated since I wrote it for a locally-installed Mozilla Firebird.  The Thunderbird installation is to include automatic support for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gnupg.org\/\">GPG<\/a> via the <a href=\"http:\/\/enigmail.mozdev.org\">Enigmail<\/a> plugin.  Now I just need to figure out a GPG public\/private key management policy for all our staff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &#8211; this is a very good thing, although the bill may resurface again in the future: let&#8217;s not forget the European Council&#8217;s habit of &#8216;ignoring&#8217;&#8230;&nbsp;(<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=188\">read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}