New Blood and Motivation

Our XP team is distinctly low on developers at the moment. We're down to five from twelve earlier in the year. The backlog of stories is constantly growing as the team just doesn't have the bandwidth. The extra pressure may be partly responsible for pushing good people out of the company.

It seems that any team looses motivation without a transfusion of new blood, even though years of team experience should create a much more capable entity.

The remaining developers have all been with the company for 5+ years which creates a more cynical atmosphere than usual. New blood brings with it enthusiasm untainted by previous business mistakes, which blends well with experience gained by learning from those mistakes.

The small team size also means that we don't have variety of skills and enthusiasm. Specific jobs cannot be handled by people with a preference for that type of work, so boredom sets in.

The good news is that we're recruiting heavily now and will hopefully soon have some of the necessary claret. It's up to us to make the team successful again.

XMAME Working

Discovered that XMAME now has a parameter -grabkeyboard that fixes the problem in my last post.

When XMAME runs from MythTV, it grabs the keyboard focus, instead of leaving it on the paused MythTV interface... Hooray, I can play OutFoxies again!

MythTV with Fedora Core 5

Well, I've managed to get MythTV working fine with Fedora Core 5. XMAME isn't quite working in conjunction with it, because of a feature of the last version of Metacity window manager that caused the fullscreen window to not have keyboard focus. I think this is reverted in version 2.14.3 which I'm downloading right now.

Haven't yet got an iTunes server running on the box. I've read about the Multi-Threaded DAAP Daemon which seems to be a better DAAP server than the one I recommended previously. I'll update my little tutorial if I start using that instead.

Fedora Core 5 seems to be pretty good. Not 100% sure about the new bubbly look, but if it continues to offend my sensibilities I really should try and create my own desktop skin. Mind you most of the time it sits quietly behind MythTV, so It's not such a big deal.

Electric Easter

Easter Sunday started with a power cut. Unfortunately it wasn't as clean cut as that sounds - it was more a prolonged power dwindle. The lights flickered at about half voltage as I ran around the house switching off the all the computers.

The fault appeared to be just outside our neighbours' house and took most of the day for the electric company to fix. As usual we spent the time playing board games and enjoying the enforced low-tech entertainment.

The pain occurred when the power came back on (no not through electrocution). I found that my MythTV box (recently upgraded to Fedora Core 5) wouldn't boot. The fluctuating electrical supply seems to have managed to strategically uninstall large chunks of Linux. Most of Gnome desktop was missing along with the login screen and many of the installed packages.

I guess the JFS spotted the problems on the first boot and tidied itself up, as there don't appear to be any disk problems - just missing files!

Anyway, I think it's going to be easier to reinstall from scratch than to try and work out which files are missing from each installed package.

I guess that's my next weekend planned out then :(

More Downtime

Okay, now I've done the sensible thing and put Rails into the vendor folder - after a couple of weeks of no site.

That should stop any further problems occurring thanks to my hosting company upgrading (as they should) to the latest version.

Mind you, the latest version includes the capacity to Freeze to a specific version, which should stop this sort of thing happening again.

Meet the New Boss

Our old boss is leaving the company in disgrace. Normally disgrace involves immediate absence, however we like to drag out the agony as long as contractually possible. The same seems to be happening with one of our sales team who, post-resignation is still "selling" the company's wares. Oh well, ours not to reason why!

On the positive side, we have a new chap taking over with a wider remit. At the moment he is meeting with each member of the team to get an overview of the current state of affairs.

The meetings have varied in length from an hour or so to a day and a half. This would seem to indicate some variation in either the amount of issues each person has with the company or the faith each person has that their comments will not be used in evidence against them.

From my experience, I'm inclined to believe that no one starts a new job intending anything other than to make improvements. Of course, what is an improvement from the perspective of the company is not always an improvement for the employee.

Here's to interesting times! I'm positive about the future, but not self deluding enough to believe it will be easy.

Back on Line

Phew! My ISP upgraded to Rails 1.0, which knocked the version of Typo I've been using for six. I probably ought to put the correct version of Rails into the vendor folder to stop it happening again.

I decided to start using the Subversion release. I normally wouldn't trust code that's non-release, but since Typo seems to be written test first, I have a lot more confidence in it's ability to stay unbroken by new code.

Anyway, after some struggle converting my old data into the new format - including trouble installing MySQL Server 4, I'm up and running again.