Install was easy, running off my USB stick that I had set up following instructions on the Ubuntu Eee website - with the traditional live-USB style beforehand so I could test that things work.

So far things are good, and in installing it over the recovery partition too I’ve managed to gain some more space for things I want to install, which is certainly nice. The one issue I have encountered is that the wifi seems to be stuck in some sort of powersaving mode as it works in bursts, which is a touch annoying, but I haven’t looked at this properly yet.

The interface is intuitive and good, very similar to the default Xandros one in terms of the large icons on the home app that sits above the desktop and all in all I like the way it works.

By default both of these are the 2003 versions, and there’s always been a number of things that have annoyed me. So when a co-worker recently pointed me in the direction of the internal pilots for newer versions of both of these, I set about installing them.

The first, and most noticeable difference, is obviously the appearance. Office 2007 has famously done away with conventional menus and toolbars in favour of the ribbons, although seemingly not across all applications in all circumstances as Outlook only uses them when editing individual items (be they emails, calendar entries or tasks). Office Communicator 2007 also has a UI change, heading towards the Microsoft Live Messenger style, which is probably better than ribbons as there’s not really much scope for them in an IM application. Aside from the obvious niggle that neither of these applications now fit with the rest of the look and feel of my operating systems, the interfaces are actually usable and the ribbon makes a lot of sense.

Moving on from the initial visual impressions and onto the new features, a number of the things that annoyed me appear to have been fixed (such as only being able to search for contacts in communicator in ‘Surname, Firstname’ form - although it doesn’t yet go as far as working by mailid) and there are a number of new features that I like (such as being able to view other people’s calendars in overlay mode with your own).

Communicator 2007 also now stores the conversation logs in a folder in Outlook, making it much easier to find the conversation you had with someone last week compared to the previous implementation we had involving a (often broken) web interface, and also offers an easy way to view previous logs when a conversation has been resumed.

The addition of document previews and image resizing in emails within Outlook is good too, allowing for a quicker look at the contents of attachments without having to load other applications - although it appears we are yet to acquire previewers for PDF files.

I’ve yet to use the other applications properly - having only viewed a couple of Word documents briefly, but if my experience with the editor in Outlook is anything to go by they’re certainly quite usable. The popup formatting element when you select text, for example, is very useful for quickly editing documents.

So far the only downside I’ve discovered, is that they might use slightly more RAM, which can be somewhat of an issue given my machine needs more memory at the best of times when running the variety of other applications that I need to do my job at times.

All in all, Office 2007 and Office Communicator 2007 are a good improvement over their predecessors and I’m happy with them so far.

It’s been going on for a while really, with the domination of Manchester United and Arsenal of the Premiership (between them winning all but one of the first 12 seasons of the league’s existence) and the presence of Chelsea and Liverpool within the group that have become known as “the big four” - a name not given to them for the average weight of their players, but their bank balance.

With the exception of Blackburn Rovers (who were the one exception to Manchester United/Arsenal’s rule of the first dozen seasons) the only team to have won the premiership is Chelsea, who first lifted the trophy at the end of the 2004-05 season and retained it the following year. Of course, it comes as no surprise that they managed this after a large cash injection from their newfound Russian owner, Roman Abramovic. Many accused them of buying the title, which is a fair comment, but also a fair tactic.

These days it seems that the league is more and more about how money you can invest in buying players at the inflated premiums they seem to have at the moment. Manchester City, as mentioned above, have recently acquired a large cash injection and used this to break the English transfer record with their shock purchase of Robhino. Reports are also around that they’re willing to offer local rivals Manchester United up to £133million for Christiano Ronaldo when the January window opens. This is just ludicrous, but the owners want to get some silverware, and this is the way they’ve chosen to go about it.

All of this, to me, makes the league far less entertaining. You can predict, with almost certainty, that one of the big four will win the league, and it probably won’t be Liverpool. You can guess that the smaller teams, probably those recently promoted such as Hull and Stoke, will get relegated - and you know that the rest will fall somewhere in the mediocraty between. It’s not that fun.

Contrast this, however, to different leagues in other sports such as American football’s NFL. In this league there are salary caps, stricter rules on transfers between teams (with free agents and restricted free agents etc), sharing of revenue from television and ticket sales between teams regardless of size and, by no means least, the draft. In this each year the worst team from the previous season gets to select the player they most want from those coming into the league from college football, giving them the opportunity to get the best new player before the other clubs (who pick in order of success with the Superbowl winners going last). All in all this leads to a league where, as the phrase goes, on any given sunday any team can beat another - regardless of form, as was shown with the Superbowl upset this year where the Giants beating the Patriots (who had been unbeaten and had beaten the Giants at the end of the regular season).

Of course, there’s no way FIFA could introduce something similar into football now, the leagues are far too established and there’d be uproar from fans of the currently successful clubs. It’s also worth remembering that the premiership has penalties for finishing low down (relegation), where the NFL has anything but. With this in mind I guess we’re going to be stuck watching the big four continue their dominance, and perhaps we’ll see Man City make something of the millions of pounds of investment, but for entertainment - I’ll be glad happily watching the NFL now that the season has started again.

Of course, the technology is the first one, with the process-per-tab model being there to stop it from crashing horribly when one tab is dealing with a website that decides to go off on one. A nice idea indeed, as is the idea of jailing off plugins in a similar way (I’ve got pissed off with Flash taking down Firefox at work now, so am currently running with Flashblock enabled to stop this). In a strange turn of events, Microsoft actually got there first with the process-per-tab idea with IE8, so I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Firefox and other browsers look into it.

The main thing, however, that caught my attention was the idea that they’d get much of the market share. As much as we hate it, Internet Explorer has the majority of this, and in the corporate environment things aren’t too likely to change any time soon (especially not with webapps still being deployed that make use of activex controls and broken rendering). This leaves us with Firefox in a comfortable second, albeit miles behind, then Opera, Safari and some other browsers (I’ve not researched this, I’m just going on what makes sense). So where would Chrome fit in?

To my mind, there are two groups of users when it comes to browsers - those who are stuck in their ways using IE, and those who are happy to switch. Obviously the first group is a lost cause, so lets look at the second. This savvy group has already abandoned IE for some other platform, be it Opera or Firefox. To my mind (and at least in my own experience), they’ve likely got whichever browser they picked configured how they wanted; with the extensions and plugins they want installed and set up. Everything just works.

So, how do Google then get these users to move to Chrome? It’s an interesting puzzle. So far (having not used it myself due to the lack of Linux build) people seem impressed with the speed, but miss their extensions (especially an adblock one - which I’m sure google would love to implement) and have found that it is possible to crash the whole thing. Convicing these users to move over is clearly going to take more than a bit of a speed improvement over Firefox. People will want their extensions, and this provides an interesting technological problem for Chrome if it wants to stick with the jailing that they seem to have happily advertised everywhere in their documentation.

Of course, it’s still very early days, and I’ve yet to use it - so will reserve judgement on how well it works until I have - but it’ll be interesting to see how it does in the marketplace.

In the year since I started work I’ve experienced a wide variety of aspects of the business, doing development work for three separate groups - each with their own individual quirks and ways of doing things. I’ve also spent time in the US with the training programme, where I learnt a whole host of new skills, and expanded upon some existing ones. Finally, I’ve also got to know a whole host of other people and have thoroughly enjoyed myself throughout the whole thing.

Going from doing nothing to working an average of forty five hours a week was a bit of a jump, but now it seems like the norm. Sure I’m not averaging a huge amount of sleep during the week, but I’ve got the weekend to relax and get stuff done in, so I don’t actually feel like I’m missing too much - especially as I still find time to see my friends and do things outside of work. Of course, some days drag and it seems like it takes forever to get to 6:30 (when I usually leave) but then there are those that fly by and I find myself confused when the automated e-mails just after market close start arriving.

All in all I’m still enjoying work, and I’m glad that I can say that. It’ll be interesting to see where I am in a year’s time, and what I’m doing, especially given the rapid nature of the industry and the change that the dynamic economic climate often results in.

The premise for this series is that a nuclear bomb has gone off in London during the 2012 Olympics, and the series follows a set of agents recruited in the aftermath trying to do what the Spooks lot usually do, stopping terrorists performing their nefarious deeds. The episodes are shorter than those of the original series, clocking in at 50 minutes rather than an hour, and accordingly there seems to be less that happens in the episodes.

So far the plots in the episodes haven’t been particularly enthralling, although they have set the wheels in motion with the requisite long-running plot. Unfortunately this, along with a number of other things in the first two episodes, have been rather clichéd.

I’ll probably still end up watching the other episodes in the series (if only because I’ve set my BT Vision box to record the series) and perhaps it will get better, but I’ve not really got high hopes after this first pair of episodes.

So, as I’ve recently done a bit more work on Choob I decided to have a look at getting a development environment for this, using Eclipse, set up. This wasn’t exactly easy, given the limited set of packages available by default for the version of Xandros on the Eee, but I’d already worked around this following some instructions on the internet elsewhere - enabling me to install subversion.

The next challenge was finding enough space to install both Eclipse and the JDK in, as preferably these would both want to be on the local machine rather than any additional storage. In the end I opted to (rather than uninstall something like Open Office) move some of the contents of /usr/share (for things I rarely use) onto my SD card and just link to them. Hack-tastic.

So, I was set, all that remained was to use Eclipse. As the Eee is quite low-specced, I had anticipated plentiful performance problems, however I was pleasantly surprised. Start up time is a couple of minutes, which is quite standard, and once going it runs quite well. Occasionally some actions (usually where a amount of building is required) will take a while, but on the whole it’s perfectly usable - provided I’ve got the external monitor and keyboard plugged in. I’ve yet to try it on the Eee’s standard setup, but I suspect it’s not particularly great, although I’m sure I’ll end up doing this at some point soon.

All sensible enough so far, until you find out that the only way to get the libraries that it needs from the server is to download the whole server and install that using their application for this (which takes two passes at the same command to do that for some reason). This pulls about 780MB of stuff down onto the machine, including all of the HL2MP maps, textures, models and sounds (apparently it needs some of these in case you want to run a pure server without people having their own custom sounds and whatnot). All in all the libraries that I wanted were no more than 35MB of this, so it was a little bit frustrating.

You then get to the build process, which first compiles a util (vcpm) to read the vc++ project file and use that to make a makefile for the mod itself. This is all well and good and all done in one fell swoop with a simple ‘make’. Unfortunately if, for some reason, you want to do a clean build of the mod - ‘make clean’ won’t help you. That just cleans up vcpm, leaving the server objects there waiting for you to do it manually.

The whole compile process was also very slow, although that could be my machine (it is 4-5 years old now) and produces one hell of a binary. I’m pretty sure that this is down to it linking statically with a lot of libraries, including some of the c/c++ ones, although I have yet to verify this or follow the guide on the wiki that suggests you can cut 5MB off the binary with some magic. Perhaps in future builds I’ll look at getting that done, but for now I’m just happy that it compiled.

Having done this with gcc-4.1 (4.2 just plain doesn’t work, but then isn’t claimed to on the wiki) I found that crashes occured for other people, hardly good. So I dug out gcc-3.4 and had a bash with that, only to find that errors were soon the scourge of my life again, some of them seemingly in the Valve code - great. Fortunately a bit of digging around in the documentation turns out that it’s a known thing where gcc-3.4 won’t inline functions unless you give it a -O option. This fixed it was clean sailing and I had a nice compiled version.

Unfortunately this version also segfaulted, so it was off to the debug build and to see what was going on with it. This proved rather useless, as the engine produces a stack trace without any symbols (even after the mod is compiled with them) so I’ll need to have a rummage around what’s going on at some stage, probably something to do with my system configuration compared to that of the server. Nothing is ever simple eh?

Of course, with the Blackberry comes more than just another device to receive text messages on, as I can now use it to keep up on my work e-mails when not in the office/at my PC. This I’ve found to be a bit of a double edged sword. On one hand I can read the important messages on my way into the office on the train in the morning, allowing me to hit the ground running when I do actually get to my desk. On the other hand, however, is the bit where the Blackberry gets its “Crackberry” nickname - it’s addictive; the little blinking light telling me that there’s another message for me to read.

Still, I’ve had it for just under two weeks now, and it’s proven useful with keeping on top of work stuff and also having other useful features. As I’ve got the 8800 it has GPS, and combined with Google Maps this can be quite useful for finding places and getting directions when you’re not too sure where you’re going. I’m not going to bother going into the features of the phone, as I’m sure this has been done to death elsewhere on the internet; Google Maps is just one thing that I find myself using occaisionally.

All in all though, as far as devices go it’s pretty good. I’m just having to be careful to stop it slowly taking over most of my life as it starts to weld itself permanently to my hip.

As a result I’m wondering if it’s worthwhile putting the customer service issue on the back burner to the chances of them screwing up. Afterall, if they don’t screw up you won’t have to deal with the (quite likely) atrocious customer service department…

Taking this further it’s also worth noting that, if the error was with packing or something (as mine was), that the same people who made that error will inevitably end up in the chain for the solution. Hardly ideal, as the chances are possible that they’ll screw up again. Of course, this alone isn’t the best yard stick, but it might just be worthwhile taking it into account.