A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Recommendations for Linux Support
I just got in an hour or so ago after a week spent over in Ireland. As I mentioned the other day, I was due to do a bit of presales work with a public sector client, and I took the opportunity to spend the weekend in Belfast with Janet and the kids and the rest of her family over there. Amazingly, for once the weather over in Belfast was better than back home and we spent Saturday around town, down by the new Titanic Quarter and in W5. W5 is a kind of "Science Museum and kids play centre" at the Odyssey Centre with lots of interactive displays, multimedia PCs and a kids play area, not a bad way to spend a January afternoon if you've got children to keep occupied.
One thing that didn't go so well last week was the gradual breakdown of all the technology I took over with me. As per usual I took over enough gadgets with me to fill a branch of Dixons, with my work laptop, iPod, 3G data card, mobile phone and lots of little add-ons and accessories. Things started to go wrong on Monday when my laptop's hard disk started spinning and whirring and clicking when I tried to boot it up, and I had to wait until about two hours after I first switched it on before the "Welcome to Windows XP" screen came up. The same thing happened again the next day, and so I started copying all the files onto my external hard disk in case it was about to give up on me for good. Next, and presumably completely unrelated, the light behind the LCD screen went, which meant that I had to borrow a flat screen monitor from the client to get any work done. By this time though the disk had started working OK again - strange.
Next calamity though was me dropping the laptop backpack on the floor, which didn't affect the laptop but broke the 3G data card that was still plugged in the PCMCIA slot - so that's what the PC Card carrying case was for... These things happen though, so although I could only use my laptop with an external monitor, and I'd lost 3G access, I still had my phone ... or at least I did have it, until on Saturday morning the on/off switch on the top of it broke, and I couldn't use the phone now either.
Anyway, the upshot of all this was that by Saturday morning I'd managed to break my laptop, 3G card and mobile phone and I was reduced to using Teletext to catch up with the football scores (Arsenal still lost, which softened the blow somewhat) and my brother-in-law's PC running Windows Me and with a 26k connection to try and keep up with emails. Eventually even I saw the futility of this and decided to take a break from it all until I got back to England.
As I'm now in the market for a phone (work'll replace the laptop and 3G card, thankfully) it got me thinking again about getting one with decent (or any, to be honest) Linux synchronization support. Every year or so I go through a phase where I try and migrate my work and home PCs to Linux - for the obvious reasons really, it's just the "right" thing to do, and it's some good experience that'll be useful for work - but I always get scuppered by poor driver and peripheral support. Now that I'm suddenly in the market for a new phone, it sounds like a good chance to get one that is syncable using GNOME or KDE. Does anyone know of a phone - a recent one, ideally something by Nokia or SonyEricsson - that syncs out of the box with GNOME or KDE? If it helps, I'm on Orange in the UK, usually sync using a USB cable, and ideally want to sync with Evolution or Thunderbird although being honest syncing with anything would be a bonus.
Whilst we're on the hardware subject I've recently been given a budget for getting new laptops for the team at work and we usually get stuff like this from Dell - no problems here and I've never had a problem with them before, excepting the laptop backlight going out of course. What I'm looking for particularly now though is a range of laptops, ideally backed by a mainstream vendor such as Dell, IBM, HP and so on - where all of the hardware has Linux drivers. I'd like to get my team working with Linux if possible - or at least make it easy for them - and what I'm looking for is a laptop range where the Wifi cards, modems and so on have easy to obtain, working Linux drivers. I think for the Dell machine I use - a Precision M60 - you can get Wifi working with third-party drivers from a company called Linuxant but what I really want is a machine where the vendor sorts out the drivers for you. If anyone knows or uses such a setup please write in and let me know.
That's it for now. On Tuesday we've got the UKOUG Business Intelligence & Reporting Tools SIG, where I'll hopefully be meeting up with Peter Scott and listening to Jeff Moss's presentation on Data Warehouse Performance Tuning. After that, I've got a few days off and we're flying over to Nice, so updates will be a bit irregular for the next week or so.