Jeff Licquia: Rest In Peace, CompUSA
I’m very surprised about the popularity of an old post of mine, regarding my experiences with CompUSA. It continues to collect horror story comments, the last one coming less than three weeks ago. While any company has its detractors (especially any company dealing directly with the public), it seems odd to me that people continue to be motivated enough to post to my blog, of all places, their tales of woe.
For me, life has been very CompUSA-less of late. Indianapolis now has a Fry’s, one of only two east of the Mississippi as of this writing, and for someone in the relatively tech-starved Midwest, it is a godsend. (People from the west coast: please stifle your laughter as best you can.) And evidently enough of these horror stories have been passed around that they felt the need to close over half their stores in February.
The Indy store was spared that time, but not for long.
The electronics retailer decided to finish what it had started earlier this year, announcing that it would sell or close the remainder of its stores in the US after the holiday season. The company, controlled by Mexican retail management company Grupo Sanborns since 1999, has been sold to Gordon Brothers Group, a restructuring firm that will be responsible for selling off the remainder of its assets.In an abstract sense, less competition in the electronic retail business isn’t ever good. But it’s arguable that we’ve never had so much competition in the electronic retail business if you count the Internet stores that have sprung up all over. And I’m certainly happy to see an outfit that will slander people for profit go belly-up.
It's now far over a year that the ipw3945 driver doesn't work reliably for me
on stock Debian kernels. From other blogs I figured it only occurs in SMP
situation, and even then not on all systems.On my laptop, I can reproduce it rather reliably: connect to the WPA2 encrypted
network at my parents and transfer a file to one of the other computers on the
network. An IO rate of a couple hundred kb/s will make the wireless card
disconnect frequently. Often I end up having to flip the kill switch twice to
get it working again.I have however found a workaround: use a kernel with preemption enabled.So it seems that there is something in that driver which will in certain
situations trigger a big lock. Actually you can even hear that - sound will
also be interrupted shortly when the wireless dies. Without preemption enabled,
this will make the wireless card run into a timeout and reset itself.I don't know yet if this completely fixes it. But other comments in the
Today I went for the second time[1] to 
As of late, I've shifted quite dramatically my sysadmining/development activities. On the development front, although Perl is still my mother tongue and I maintain many systems I wrote with it (and my main involvement in Debian is through the 
I've been using vim for long time. Last weeks I've been improving 
There seems to be some kind of tradition for publically telling when one finally gets a debian account. It was apparantly my turn late last night. Unfortunately my internet was gone at that time, so no possibility to see for myself. But now net is back and time to celebrate.
It seems to be a tradition to thank all sorts of people, so I guess I need to follow that tradition as well. Thanks everybody who helped me on the way. Including but not limited to the big group of regular sponsors, one time sponsors and NMU sponsors that have put my work in the archive. (and that also covers my application manager - he sponsored the second or third attempt to NMU a *urgh* yada-using package).
Time to try break stuff.
Something recently broke with the setup on my laptop.
Symptoms: when I switch from one application to another, suddenly
nothing gets updated anymore. I can move my mouse around; but apart from
that, the screen shows no updates. Judging by the sound of the fan, it
would appear that something or other is looping at that point, too.
So far this has only happened when switching from one GTK+
application to another, but I haven't had enough of them to be sure it
really is GTK+-related.
For reference, I'm using the 
Congratulations to Yves-Alexis Perez (Corsac), Nicolas Fran ois (Nekral) and Sune Vuorela (Pusling) too \o/
Finally, some accounts (~30 ?) were created and i’m in.
Thanks to all people involved in Debian and Kubuntu. In particular (no order) my co-maintainers, sponsors, helpers and application manager:
I spend quite a long time to fully configure my new Thinkpad X60s laptop. This will be my work computer and i wish to use Debian Etch on it. Since it is for my job, i want to use a stable debian release. The aim of this laptop is to always have something that works -- to keep focus on my job.
The configuration was tricky because there is a lot of people reporting that everything works with this laptop, but not a lot of people describing problems they encounter. Here is a list:
Sound:
Like most things, the scale of decisions that have to be made by a person
or organisation fall across a wide spectrum. At one end, you've got the
fine-detail work: lines of code, individual config settings, IP addresses,
that sort of thing. This is crucial work, because it's this detail that
ultimately produces saleable results. Travelling all the way to the other
end, there's the "big picture" decisions: the "visionary" stuff. What
market segment will we target? What will we do (in large-scale terms)
to get there?
I am convinced that individuals naturally gravitate towards one end of this
spectrum or the other, depending on their psychology. While people usually
can work at all scales, they have a "most comfortable" point where they
work the most naturally. The further away from this point they are pushed,
the less comfortable and effective they are.
No level of thinking is better or worse than the other; they're just
different. While "large scale thinker" and "small scale thinker"
could be taken as being insulting, I certainly don't mean it that way.
I should point out that "Strategy" isn't (just) about setting goals. A
strategist isn't someone who comes out with grand pronouncements like "By
the end of next year this company should be providing telecommunications
services to 20% of the Fortune 500" without knowing how to get there.
That's not a strategist, that's a poor-quality management consultant.
People whose only skill is making vague pronouncements should just be taken
out and shot. They're not doing anything useful for anyone.
A strategist is someone who is good at planning the goal of "20%
of the Fortune 500". They're thinking about the big picture issues,
without getting bogged down in the minutiae. A tactician, given the job of
planning something at the macro scale, will chase some good idea down an
intricately detailed rabbit hole, and miss the other dozen or so large
issues that need to be considered. The strategist's planning needs to stop
at a certain level and let other people take on the detail work.
Conversely, a good tactician can focus on the individual details
without getting distracted by the big picture. A strategist put into a
tactical role will miss all the important minutiae because they're working
out how their little part fits into the big picture, instead of working out
how to make their little part work, in and of itself.
It's important, for individual happiness, to try and work out what level
you're most comfortable thinking at, and then trying to find a job that
puts you there. It's almost as important to make sure that the people who
are working at the more and less detail levels around you are equally
comfortable.
Take, for example, the micromanager. We've all either been there ourselves
or have heard multiple stories on the subject. I think the micromanager is
nothing more than a person who wants to work at a smaller scale than they're
being forced to by their organisational rank. Since they can't do
the detail work any more, their only outlet is working vicariously through
their subordinates. Voila! Instant micromanagement.
An even more painful case of micromanagement would be when the subordinate
wants to think at a larger scale than the superior. In that case, the
subordinate will naturally be thinking large scale, and will miss the
details. To the small scale thinking superior, that is incompetence, and
will naturally be dealt with by more micromanagement. In reality, both
parties are incompetent at their jobs, and they should really swap roles,
so that everyone is in their element.
It would be nice if companies stopped thinking hierarchically in this way
-- that a more "senior" person has to think at larger levels. Just because
you've been somewhere longer (or have been working in an industry longer, or
got higher marks, or whatever), it doesn't mean that you're more of a
strategist. This is probably the Peter Principle restated: people get
promoted to a level where they just can't comfortably think at the necessary
scale any more. If instead people were put into a planning hierarchy based
on their natural scale of thinking, we'd all be a lot better off. There'd
be a lot less power games, though, which makes me think it's not going to
happen any time soon.
A business, at whatever size it might be, needs an appropriate mix of
strategists and tacticians. A really small business (1-10 people) can get
away without needing large scale thinkers, in the same way that a really
small boat can get away without needing a rudder or pilot. If a really
small boat gets itself into trouble, everyone on board can grab an oar or
bucket and help get the boat out it's predicament -- it's small and nimble
enough to be able to do that.
As the company expands, though, it's important to make sure you've got some
strategists around. If you don't have anyone to keep an eye out for
problems and plan around them, your small-to-medium sized boat is likely to
have a hole punched in it by a submerged rock. Even if somebody on board
happens to notice the rock before you actually hit it, once you get to a
certain size you can't physically stop or turn the boat in time.
If you don't understand the growth issues in the company, you might not
even realise that you're no longer the nimble and low-inertia dinghy until
you're up to your knees in sea water.
Although an obvious solution to this problem might be to say that all
businesses should be small and nimble ones, it's as impractical as saying
that all boats should be dinghies. A fleet of dinghies isn't going to be
able to support the worldwide sea freight market, and a fleet of small
companies doesn't have the necessary resources on hand to take on the big
projects that are so often needed. Also, a dinghy is at risk of being
swamped by one freak wave, while a larger ship can weather significant
storms without going under.
Regardless of the size of the business, there always needs to be a good
supply of tacticians. A boat (of whatever size) full of people who are all
looking out for rocks isn't going to go anywhere, because nobody's making
the thing move. Similarly, a company full of strategists isn't
going to be doing any of the day-to-day work that actually earns money, and
no money means no company.
The single most important thing, though, is be self-aware enough to know
what sort of person you are, and try to find something that lets you work at
the level you're most comfortable at. Otherwise you're just setting
yourself up for unhappiness.
I've set up a quick 
I'm organizing a micro-
Patents are the best way to improve development, and software inventors have just the natural right to their algorithms and designs. Research and Development in industry wouldn’t just work without patent protection, and technology improvements would just stop, right?
Well, I’m not so sure of that.
Key