GibbonsR.net

I use to think that a 4-10 work week was considered flex hours, but I soon found out otherwise. Flex hours is demanding that employees be in the office, say 10 – 2, and then can decide where to put the other 4 work hours around that. A 4 day 10 hours a day work week is a consolidated work week. My employer just decided to move to 4-10 work week. Overall, I am very excited about this.

Starting July 14, I will be working Monday – Thursday from 7am – 5pm. I will have to adjust the time depending on whether or not I take a true lunch. And I also get the benefit that I can come in a bit early to leave a bit early. This will put me getting home a bit later then I usually do because traffic shouldn’t be as bad, and then I will have Friday’s off giving me a nice 3 day weekend. The only weeks this won’t take effect is weeks shortened by a holiday. Which I am not too crazy about, but I will get to that in a minute.

The one thing I am not happy with is the fact every employee, whether they are on the 4-10 schedule or not are going to be required to clock in and out for the day and for lunch. This sucks. It was paid enough being a salaried exempt employee having to account for my time in ADP, but now I have to also punch in and out for the day. This sucks. Management is now micro-managing the entire department. We have to report on our time in ADP and clock in and out. We , as a company, are working to save and cut back operating cost. But this is adding cost, to collect, report and analyze the data. To me this is creating more work and responsibilities as well as a management headache as the system has no way modifying records or reporting clock in/out times. We are going to have to print a gaint report and find records for each person to calculate the hours in the office.

As I mentioned above, during a week shortened by a holiday, we are expected to work the remaining days as a normal 8 hour day. In my eyes, this is silly. We are breaking our work flow and normal schedule because of a holiday. What should happen, as part of the 4-10 schedule. If a holiday is on a Monday, and I get Fridays off, then I continue to work my 10 hour days on Tues, Wed, and Thurs and put in 30 hours for the week. This I will only be work 2 less hours during this week. Also, if it is a federal holiday and it falls on my Friday off, then I should be given the option to choose which day I want off the next week. I think this is only fair. For the most part though, this isn’t a big deal, except for the time I forgot a holiday is coming up (because it isn’t a set date, but instead the 3rd Monday of the month) and I have a trip planned using my scheduled day off (Friday). What the hell happens then … can you really expect your employees to manage their personal time on the whim and have to change day to day routines and schedules?

Please don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for my compressed work week. But the company is trying to have it’s cake and eat it to. If they really wanted to implement it, then they should take the could with the bad, and treat our day off as a true weekend. During the 2 holiday for Thanksgiving in the US, employers don’t ask that you work a Saturday to make up for it? Why should they now?

If you see things another way, please share your point of view!

Some seem to think so, other are hoping they will last until through 2009 to release new products and survive the economic downturn.

After reading an article at The Var Guy and another at The Register things are not looking all the great for the company financially. Which in the corporate world, sadly, is all that matters.

Personally I love Sun Microsystems. I think they produce The top x86 hardware in the market, and the some of the best servers period. Their CEO’s stance on open source is a fresh breath and their portfolio is jusy shy of amazing. But yet they still continue to falter, reaching a low on the stock market they haven’t seen in years. In 2000 they hit a high of nearly $250 per share at nearly 64 million shares. Fast foward to now and they are currently at $9.73 a share with just under 1 million. They already hit a low of $9.68 today.

On top of all of this, their are now rumours floating around the internet of Johnathan Schwartz, CEO Sun Microsystems, being at the end of his reign. I sure hope not, this man has done more in his 2 years at Sun then most CEO’s have influence on any single company. While in charge he has open sourced Java, seen Solaris grow into an open source distribution that is going to contend with the best. Sun now has a storage line that is based on open source foundations. Sun has acquired MySQL and continue it’s ongoing Support of Star/Open Office. Yet despite all of these developments the share is falling and the earnings are have problems keeping up. August 1, Sun will be announcing their quarterly results. Can Sun keep for burning out? Can, or even Will, another company save Sun? Only time will tell, but I sure hope so.

I’ll admit it, I was a bit nervous about using b2evolution. The admin interface in wordpress had set my standards pretty high. But, much like my distro of choice, I like to choose things away from the norm. I can report that I have been pleasantly surprised.

First off the admin interface is very sharp. The new ‘chicago’ skin adds a nice tool bar type interface and a pretty good layout of everything else. While it doesn’t have some of the web2.0 features that wordpress has, that is okay. I don’t care that much about eye-candy in my admin interface, I just want a clean look and something that works. One interesting things to note here, is when create post, there aren’t tags like most modern blogging tools provides, but there are categories. You can choose your main category, and then add others, so in a sense, this provides your tagging.

Another neat feature, or at least it seems to be b/c I haven’t dived into it too much yet is the Type of post. By default everything is a “post” But you can change the type to Link, Page or Podcast by default install. You can also define your own post types, I am not sure what all this defines, but it sounds cool, and it sounds like it would display them diffently. As for static pages, in my menu bar, I have added the plugin for to display pages, and then set the post type to page. It then shows that post as a page instead of in my blog … a different school of thought, but so far it makes sense and I like it

The other nice feature seems to be it’s skinning. While it doesn’t use a default skinning engine, it seems to be a pretty simple one. They provide default layouts for all the sections, so you can just copy and paste it, or if you don’t need to modify it, you can just include it in yours. The code seems to be pretty explanatory, and without a lot of fluff. Right now I am using one provided by b2evolution install, but I think I might look into convert a CSS theme over to b2evolution in the near future

Overall I can say I am very happy, and I am still just scratching the surface as to what it can offer. With multi-user and multi-views, the possibilities are really endless. (Okay not quite endless, but close to it)

I found a few linux games out there this morning that I would like to try. Some still seem to be under active development … others not so much.

• LinCity-NG – LinCity-NG is a City Simulation Game. It is a polished and improved version of the classic LinCity game.
• PokerTH – An excellent Texas Hold’em poker game. I believe network play is available.
• Frozen Bubble – Is an hold style game .. can’t remember what it was on the nintendo/super-nintendo, but it was fun. This one offers 1P , 2P and 2P over the network. Lots of fun.

There are also the great games that come with gnome , and I am sure KDE has close to the same ones.

It seems Gentoo has finally released the 2008.0, the first release since 2007.0 which was released early in 2007. This is huge, there have been many changes in packages and such in the portage tree that an initial install took a lot longer then needed to have an up-to-date system. Along with just the updated stage’s, we are also seeing a lot of bug fixes and enhancements. The profile management has changed to help reduce headaches, and the livecd will be switching from gnome to XFCE to further reduce space and headaches with the livecd.

Now I get to go around and migrate my profiles over to the new release, and then I am working on a new box to test this install out on, should be good times

You can Discuss the release or just go ahead and Get Gentoo!

To put it bluntly Hell No!

In a post over at Pratical Technology, they argue that it might be time to fork KDE, while I think the title was just meant to stir the pot, I really thinks his title should be true.

First, let me start by saying that Forking is not the solution. Go look out on freshmeat or sourceforge and see how many empty half finish projects are out there, or even the number that are 80 – 90% there, but just lack the polish or last few features to make the project really complete. That is the one problem with opensource, is when people don’t like what they see, they fork it. While there is nothing legally wrong with this, I believe technically this can cause problems. Most of the time projects are forked because of a disagreement between developers and either other developers and/or users. This leads to split development and re-inventing the wheel at times. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes a split needs to happen because they want to take the project in a different direction. Sometimes projects split only to merge back together years down the road. But to split a project just becuase you aren’t happy with the current alpha or beta release is pretty sily

More specifically to this case, he spends the first 9/10 of his post talking about what is wrong with KDE 4.1 beta. While most of the time in the Open Source world Beta’s can give an accurate picture of what the final release will be, normally only small time bug-fixes are found in beta’s has most of the others are found in SVN or in the alpha’s. But his biggest compliant is he doesn’t like the new interface. He says it isn’t any faster (that he can see) and that it doesn’t allow him to get his work done any faster. Fair Enough. But isn’t this the same arguement Windows Users give us when switching to Linux. That the interface isn’t what they are use to, and it doesn’t “seem” any faster?

In his last paragraph, he mentions one thing, that could actually be usefull. To rebuild KDE 3.5 with Qt 4.x. This is actually very interesting. Moving to Qt 4.x should provide a small speed improvement, along with the newer features Qt 4.x brings, mostly visual changes to most people though. But you are still using the old framework which ties KDE 3.5.x together. While some like it, I’ve never really cared much for that system. And you are still limiting in moving forward by the fact all the other KDE apps being developed are being ported to Qt 4.x with KDE 4 in mind. KDE 4 provide a lot more to the table. Backporting KDE 4.x features to 3.5.x is really a waste a time. To keep from getting stuck in the past, we need to be looking at Porting the things people like about 3.5.x into 4.x. Be it the GUI, File Browser, Web Browser, whatever. But don’t fork it, and don’t limit yourself on an old system/framework

Wow, now this is cool. Matrox as just released a new video card that pretty much tops all the rest. Well maybe not in performance, but in one very nice feature, QuadHead. Yep, you can now attach four monitors (dvi or analog) without the need of a second video card. The only limitation is it supports a max resolution of 1900×1200 when using 4 monitors. If you need higher resolution then that, then you are going to have to live with just 2 running at 2560×1600.

This card is a pci-e x16 with 512MB of ram. My guess it will be able to handle just about anything you will through at it, whether or not it will when those ‘all important’ benchmarks is another story.

I’ve always like Matrox, but they seemed to of been slacking in the last few years, it is nice to see them come up with some innovative and make the news in a world that seems to be dominated by Nvidia and AMD/ATi

Well, I am now a Class B no-www site.

This means that I politely and quitely redirect all incoming www.gibbonsr.net to gibbonsr.net. Why? B/C it is a waste of time to type it and tell it to someone. Back in the day, I might see why this is necessary, and it some cases it might still be (where you want a different site under www.domain.com versus domain.com), But these cases are very rare. Most of the time, the redirect without www to the one with. A few sites don’t do either (digg.com and flickr.com).

Even though the site is active anymore, the content is still valid http://no-www.com

I’m working on bringing over the old content from my other blog, this includes a few pictures and a couple videos of the Frog Mobile, The old blog broke, so I am having to go through the SQL Database to read the post and grab the media/links .. oh what fun.

Well, YAB (Yet Another Blog).

If you are unfortunate enough to be following this blog, then you will know how many I’ve gone through. For those of you that don’t know. I’ve been through Drupal, GeekLog, WordPress, Typo and now I’ve landed on b2evolution.

So far so good, it seems to be more like wordpress then typo did, but less of a CMS like Drupal and Geeklog. So we will see how long this one last. One cool thing, is it supports multiple bloggers, so maybe I can get Stacey on this system http://gibbonsr.net/rsc/smilies/icon_smile.gif” alt=”:)” class=”middle” />