Most of my high priority work projects are now slowly coming up to speed. I’ve had to cut out all other non-urgent distractions to get this far, and it looks like that will be the case for another couple of weeks. Now, all my clients (including Golder Software Systems themselves) have a bugtracker to keep their technical/administrative issues tracker in, a subversion repository to maintain their source code and to allow people to collaborate on project work. The main clients also have a secure wiki, in which the main technical team notes are being to be gathered. Golder Software Systems (or indeed any of our clients) are now in a better position to manage their internal and client projects, issues and other day-to-day business. Hopefully some kind if integration or interface with some time-tracking and accounting/invoicing systems will come further down the road.

I am looking forward to going to Bangkok in a few weeks (when a certain payment hits my bank!) to go buy myself a new workstation. It’s badly needed. I’ve been working on a ‘spare’ Celeron-based laptop for nearly a year now. Its impossible to set off a large compilation, or processor-intensive operation in the background and still get a reasonable response from your shell/text editor in the foreground. I need some raw power, and some faster and bigger storage. I plan to get it, so I can turn jobs around faster. The only bottleneck left then will be the bloody 56k dial-up modem, which unless I want to get a leased-line or ISDN first, I’m told I will have to wait a year (maybe more) for it to reach here. Hopefully, while I’m in Bangkok, I’ll get to meet an old friend from Samui I haven’t seen for a year or so, and some potential new friends from open source circles. Normally, a trip to Bangkok is a chore, but this time I’m looking forward to it.

GNOME sysadmin stuff has taken a back seat for now. A few bugfixes and enhancements I’d like to finish off in Mango to make a couple of people’s lives easier, then I want to crack the Subversion walnut. Owen is doing some great work with getting people off CVS pserver, which will help lighten our load.

In other news, my DG814 which connects my main server at my parents house to the Internet via ADSL suddenly started playing up recently, around the same time as Nildram (still the best ISP, in my opinion) upgraded our service from 512k (actually, maybe even 256k) to 2Mbps for free. I’m perfectly happy with this, except that the router now hangs after a few minutes or hours use as it’s processor can’t handle the increased pace of the traffic and gets too hot very quickly. As it’s in a timezone six hours adrift from me, and it houses my e-mail and just about everything else, this is causing me a little concern. At the moment, it looks like my dad is going to drill a load of bolt a dirty great fan onto the top of it (see the pictures here). I’ve also got to start considering getting a proper colo server again - it won’t impress my acustomers if they can’t access test/preview sites, or I tell them I can’t get to me e-mail until my mum wakes up!