Granada and Málaga

My line manager is Spanish and I've had a standing invite to go and work at his house in Málaga for a few days and this year once the hot weather had mostly receded, Beth and I took up the kind offer. We flew initially to Granada and had a couple of days with a trip round the Alhambra and then a bus ride to Málaga and some work. Though it wasn't without enjoying the beach side location and the chiringuitos (restaurants along the shore). Some warm weather away from the rain that week - and some serious unrushed conversations. The photo album is here and there were the sardines..

- lots of great memories from both parts of the trip.

Fosdem 2018

This is going back a bit but earlier this year I went to FOSDEM in Brussels and this is my report for work on what I saw and heard.

I spent Saturday in the community dev room some interesting thoughts on building and supporting open source communities.
- Talk by Riccardo Iaconelli on Italy as hacker friendly, he described the policy all municipality projects are open source
https://developers.italia.it/ some discussion on how to encourage small municipalities to make source open
when those who are 'not our electors' get it for free
- An entertaining talk by Brian Proffitt of Redhat on Media 101 for communities - how to get the
message across to more than just the echo chamber.
- Then Kevin Fleming of Bloomberg on Software philanthropy for all - a talk about how they engage their
staff in volunteer community projects. Running a git event in New York they found that it helped their volunteers' cross project communications. `Pick what you're good at not what's shiny`
SeeKevin on Twitter
- A talk by Jeremy Garcia not so interesting but a nice demo of MeasuerOSS
> don't consider what you want to measure but what you want to accomplish
- Draws veil over the community karaoke and dancing (relieved to see this wasn't recorded) - but there was an advert for [FrOSCon](https://www.froscon.de/) which they emphasised takes place in warmer weather!
- Finally a talk by Vicky Brasseur on `Passing the baton' on planning for succession
Wikipedia page on succession planning implies only leaders need this - not true - described 'bus factor', How frequent interchange of roles prevents ruts, reduces load (by more knowing)
increases motivation. She moved rather quickly. Limit tenure for role (because you then have backup if you move on)
Slides (and notes) at succession planning

Sunday I was in the Distros devroom, far too much light coming from the back to see many slides.
- A talk from Andrej Shadura of Collabora (he wanted to do a LAVA talk but it wasn't accepted)
Talked about [apertis.org](apertis.org) a weird mix of Ubuntu and Debian
- Richard Brown on Distributions are not democracies. Beneficiaries of an open project are not the users but the contributors/maintainers
Differentiated between projects which reinforce the status quo (eg Apache, Ubuntu) and those having technical
committees which are less 'controlled' by the organisation. Usually the motivated rather than the better solutions win?
'democracy is the art & science of running the circus from the monkey cage' HL Mencken. Appeared to want democracy and yet..
- Others with more background have commented on Tristan's talk.

Touristy photos
Ate more waffles than last year.

Adding some culinary comments later.. ah yes at last - the first evening we ate Chez Leon - - mussels! Then asagain as the previous year it was to the Sushi train at Kabuki and the last evening we ate somewhere Brazilian near the Codethink hotel - I stayed elsewhere this year, slightly quieter and breakfast was included!

FOSDEM

Last weekend I was at the FOSDEM (the Free and Open Source Software Developers European Meeting - the FOSDEM website appears not to explain the acronym?) conference in Brussels with rather a lot (42!) of work colleagues.

I went to lots of talks, enjoyed the atmosphere, ate waffles, beer and had good meals in various Brussels eateries. I hope a report will appear here as an expansion of the summary I wrote on the company wiki!

I was there last year as well but a report doesn't appear to have reached this blog, maybe if I do that other entry that'll make up for the omission?

Prague and ELCE

I wrote something for work about my recent trip to Prague for a Linux Embedded conference. Here's a slightly augmented version with more pictures and restaurant locations!



A number of us have returned from ELCE last week in Prague, some of my
thoughts follow:

Most of my time was devoted to participation at the CIP booth and demos
of the board-at-desk software. Sunday was mainly occupied setting up
those demos, Agustin & I did a talk through of b@d to CIP folk with a demo of
the software. We'd intended to run a tutorial of installation of the
application but - in view of networking issues on the conference wifi -
it was just as well that this was cancelled. It was good to meet some
of the cip folk who had only previously been IRC nicks. I expect the
tutorial will eventually be presented here as well as being made
available to a wider non-Codethink audience. We had lunch at a Veggie restaurant Mlsná kavka close to the Hilton where the conference took place. The restaurant's 'about' page is worth a read on their social concern. In the evening we ate at Zlaty Dvur in the old town, live jazz but the food was ok but not great.

Monday was spent making sure the demo worked at the booth - fortunately
my accommodation was close to the conference so I could return & use
that wifi and rule out any unhelpful things that the venue was doing to
the network. In the end I had to use my phone as a wifi hotspot in order
to demo successfully. In the evening I ate at La Boca a Spanish/Argentinian eaterie where I also had a couple of breakfasts as I wasn't staying at a hotel.

On Tuesday a CIP talk where it was good to see our afternoon's demos
advertised on a slide - someone was obviously paying attention to my
emails that morning!
Then heard 'Introducing the “Lab in a Box” Concept with Patrick Titiano & Kevin Hilman
a different approach to the work on board
at desk - I could see that both are useful.

At lunchtime there was a CIP developers meeting - a rather undersized
room for those that wished to attend. Discussion of the 4.4 kernel not
going beyond 2038 and a general introduction of the developers to each
other.

I attended the 2 Codethink talks - Ben Dooks Open Source Neuroimaging
and Ben Hutchings & Agustin on long term maintenance of Linux kernels
both of which got good numbers and seemed to be appreciated.



The rest of the
afternoon was spent demo'ing, the software behaved itself and I had a
fairly steady stream of small groups to talk to.

If in Prague, beware of restaurants which don't take cards - Ben D and I
ate at one that evening - we paid in a mix of euros and Cz krone! This was U Bronců I ate here twice so I enjoyed the food despite the paying arrangements.

On Wednesday I got to 2 Keynotes: Challenges in Industrializing OSS and
How Siemens Tackles Them - Jan Kiszka some interesting commitments of
Siemens to Open Source - having worked elsewhere in Siemens a few years
ago this was good to hear publicly though I suppose it's not really news.
Then Dirk Hohndel interviewed Linus Torvalds - a pg presentation so he didn't
get to give his views on c++.

I appreciated the paper copies of the conference schedule in place of
the dreadful e-timetable the web provided.

Eventually I saw bits of Prague in daylight and finally assisted Daniel Wagner
with a partial installation of b@d on his laptop.
The conference buffet was in a strange rabbit warren of a historic Prague building
but it soon became far too noisy and a group of us retreated to a coffee
house / book display Ouky Douky on the other side of the Vltava.

(not a good photo apologies!)

The full photo album for the trip is on flickr.

Next year's ELCE will be in Edinburgh - I expect there'll be even more of a Codethink presence!

The party

Back in March(!) my employers Codethink marked their 10th anniversary with a party at the Monastery in Gorton. It was a splendid evening with lots of enjoyable happenings. I'd not been to the Monastery before a wonderful piece of Pugin archtiecture. And there was a cake -

CIP testing

A catchy title - but I see there's been no mention at all here (probably deliberately) of my current employer Codethink, so a brief mention of the product I was involved in which released at the end of last month - follow @cip_project on twitter or read the blog entry here. The code - available in the open for download is for creating a virtual machine on your local machine for the building and testing of long term support Linux kernels. Or you can just admire this photo of my desk at work! The beaglebone black board being tested is just in front of the large monitor.

I've now been with codethink for 12 months and am enjoying the challenge!

The Cold season

Those who follow me elsewhere may have already picked up the news that I'm working again - out of IT - driving for a local artisan bakers Flour Water Salt - very local to us - 5 mins walk from the house. I get to drive though quiet bits of Cheshire countryside and there's frequent visits to Jodrell Bank. Today was the first really cold day, so here's a photo and a quote from T S Eliot's Little Gidding:

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers.

Being out in the countryside in this cold, clear light brings life..

Compromise agreements

A view from a receiver. Now that it's over 6 months from my enforced exit from my ex-company, let me put something down about my views on compromise agreements in the hope that it might help others who get one of these pushed at them. I shall need to be careful in what I write here but I believe it to be important that various views are out there. This should, of course, not be taken as legal advice - as part of considering a compromise agreement you will need to get that anyway - it is purely a personal view and might well contain issues you might wish, if you are in a similar situation, to take up as part of your own legal discussions.

• A compromise agreement is a document signed by both the employer and employee whereby the employee gives up rights to take any recourse to employment tribunals.
• There are normally confidentiality clauses in the agreement restricting what can be said to third parties about the terms of the agreement and indeed whether the existence of the agreement is confidential.
• The company will seek to get the compromise agreement signed between any redundancy announcement and your moving elsewhere. This is likely to put you under pressure, you need to take a long hard look at the terms. My view is that if you feel you have a good case in front of an Employment Tribunal you should be reluctant to sign the agreement in view of the, likely, restrictive terms. I wanted to get past this and 'get on with my life' believing that I was soon to find alternative employment. If you don't have an early return to work the terms of the agreement may make it difficult for you to discuss your situation with (for example) job counsellors.
• The compromise agreement may enable your ex-company to ignore any bits of the relevant legislation which they have not already flouted - I suppose it depends upon your view of that and how much you trust your ex-employers.
• As stated above, legal advice is a requirement for signing one of these, take your time with that, your ex-employers should be paying and you need to explore all options.
• You need to look seriously at the payment your ex-employer is proposing to make and compare it (for example) with the legal fees they are stumping up to get the compromise agreement through. Are you worth more than however many hours of lawyers time your payment amounts to?

Teaser Tuesday - 9 March

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

Irresistible! -

In different species, I noted varieties of modesty or arrogance, honesty or shiftiness, and in one 150-kilovolt type in ubiquitous use in southern Finland I even detected a coquettish sexuality in the way the central mast held out a delicate hand to its conductor wire. The unspoken challenge for transmission engineers seemed to be to fashion a pylon which would subliminally read as possessing much the same blend of psychological and physical virtues as one might search for in an ideal friend or lover.

Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work a journey through 10 occupations with some imaginative photography.
When I was working - it was on software which assisted in the design of transmission networks...

Three months on

As it is now three months since the initial announcement of redundancies which led to my finding myself without work, maybe it is appropriate to outline where I am now, both as an item of news, and maybe publicity, for those who follow here and as a means of reflection.
The job came to an end at the end of December though I'd been on gardening leave since before Christmas. Since then I've done a small amount of contract work for another ex-employer. I'm now reviewing options and looking for the next career steps.
I'm looking for something which will utilise my talents acquired over more than 40 years mainly in the IT industry.
The experience has been mainly focussed in c++ and python with lots of numerical analysis involved with a user interface using Qt, developing on both Linux and Windows in parallel but with experience in managing the company networking infrastructure - email/samba/webservers hoping to find an employer which treats such support as rather more critical - the MD of my ex-company claimed that such things as networking and email weren't business critical(!).
My CV is on the web. Contact/ advice/job offers all welcomed!

Overhead

For some reason, today's Dilbert rings bells.

To everything there is a season

My annual rail season ticket expired today

clearly there was something I didn't know when I bought it twelve months ago, but I probably won't be renewing it - at least not yet! (I hope I've removed all the personal stuff from this image!)

Once more..

I was tempted to wait until the fifth anniversary of this early post on my weblog, but time is, I think, of the essence. Redundancy threatens again and so:

Anyone want an exceedingly young looking 58 year old with 19 years of C++ experience, several years Python, lots of CAD ability, numerical analysis skills... cv has been updated, that's in pdf format!

Email address is in the cv or in the weblog personal details.

Marking an anniversary

I see that today is the 5th anniversary of the first significant blog entry on the weblog. I'd blogged before then on my home machine but those well be a bit broken now. I need to look through that older stuff for anything that needs(!?) preserving. But reading that initial month is, for me, interesting.

Mutterings - 2 August

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Memo :: Note
2. Copy :: replicate
3. Office :: work
4. Stapler :: thump
5. Paycheck :: yesterday
6. Watercooler :: coffee!
7. Desk :: discomfort
8. Human :: being
9. Resort :: busy
10. Boss :: uncertainty

First pitch!

Ella, Russ and Mustafa
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

Just back from a trip to the Manchester Climbing Centre with folk from work, here are some colleagues, the set of photos are here. (Maybe this link is better - as it has just the pics from yesterday). An impressive place!

Christmas market

Jennifer
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

Off to Manchester's Christmas market for lunch to mark Jennifer's leaving. The full set of pictures is
here

from the office

from the office
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

I've moved offices so no more trains though it is only across the landing. Close to the local pub, unfortunately no brewer's drays!

Refactoring

Tante on software engineering and KDE4 (inter alia):

You and your developer buddies know that the refactoring has to take place cause working with your code base is no fun. But how do you get your users to still support you and not run to the other guys? You bullshit them into adapting your developer reasons.

A Wedding..

The Bride and Groom
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

To Holy Trinity Platt for Russell Bryans and Kate Vickers wedding. The official pictures will appear on that website - but we'd better give them a few weeks! My pictures are in this flickr tag set.