What I'm Working On...

I haven't posted in a while, guess it's time. The days seem to go quickly and blend together. I sit in a cubicle listening to XM Radio with headsets most of the time, but am making steady progress on some projects.

Evolution Deployment
Still not live yet on SLED 11 :( , but in the last 3 weeks have made some progress. Our beta testers have been patient so far, and I really hope we are nearing the end of this process. All features that we need are now merged. We had a nasty performance problem that took a while to resolve. It turned out that a user had birthdays entered on a blackberry, and Groupwise gladly synced and uploaded them. The problem is that it uploaded them for 100 years. Our version of evolution-data-server doesn't play nicely with a calendar that goes out that far into the future. We found it, cleaned the users data and things are better. Now are awaiting the code to make bug-buddy launch so that I can get some backtraces from the users.

Thin Client Updates
All for of our thin client devices are synced and work with the same code and provide identical features. Our support group has started updating the thin clients around the City with the new code and for the most part is a nice upgrade. The one issue that I am tracking is that there seems to be an X crasher when using 3D effects in Debian Lenny on the ATI driver. It happens to me about once every 2 weeks and you lose all of your work. I need to get a bug report packed and hope that someone is interested in working on a fix. It doesn't seem to happen to 2D users.

Firefox Server Upgrade
With the explosion of Internet and Firefox usage we are going to be building a new server to hold us for the next few years. We also got word that we are buying a major new application that uses Java in the browser. Java has always proven not pleasant to deploy, so hopefully this server will meet our needs and provide adequate performance. It's an eight processor, six core machine. 'top' is going to report 48 CPUs, that's going to be interesting for sure. :)

Next Generation Desktop
I brought down OpenSuse 11.3 beta and have started poking at it and am going to be building a server for alpha testing it as part of a plan to upgrade our desktop (login) servers. These servers provide GNOME and 3D. XDMCP seems kind of broken and untested in the current betas. I'm going to see if updates exist. Gnome-shell was a no-go over remote display, so looks like we will be using Compiz for another upgrade cycle. I did some testing of compiz and performance was excellent. I'm doing a kickoff presentation for our users next week and will be showing them screen shots and mockups of ideas that I have to improve our current design. Of course, as things are deployed I'll post them here too.