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Crikey, it’s nearly the end of January already… unfortunately, it’s also Monday which means the start of another working week (which I almost missed due to forgetting to turn on alarm clock :().  Anyway, let’s see what the rest of the business have been up to.

Marketing brings us their update from Martyn:

“What have we done today then? Well, I’ve been writing an email to some of our dial-up customers, and also working on a mini-site that we’ll be launching in the not too distant future. We’ve also been working on the newsletter and Chris has been busy with some admin for the Broadband Your Way Pro free game offer.

Preparations for the removal of the £30 My Referrals offer continue and the rest of the team have been eating Jaffa Cakes. Not me though, can’t stand them… See you tomorrow.”

Chris from Comms will hopefully bring us an update on the saga of the laptop…:

“Well today has been a typical Monday. There was more chuckling at Bob this morning when he declared that ‘this lock has been tampered with, my key doesn’t work’ and then proceeded to unlock his laptop cable first time. He looked rather sheepish after that.

Mand has been busy showing a new starter around and introducing him to the wonders of PlusNet. She’s also found time to deal with problems, development change controls and some personal tickets. If that wasn’t enough she has also been writing training material for new starters.

Bob has been dealing with Network change controls, writing a blog on spam and winning a prize in a little competition we had.

I’ve also won a prize today and been busy sorting out some task work. Similar to Mand I’ve been writing some training, this is for the current staff as well as the newbies tho.

James, well I haven’t seen him all day. (woohoo)
From what I understand he’s been sat with products again and helping show a new starter around.

Matt hasn’t been here, he’s probably playing GH3.”

Ah well, someone else with the laptop issues today then. Next up we have Alan, one of the Database Administrators (DBA) in the Networks Team:

“Hello one and all, Alan of the DBA team reporting back on Networks achievements for today:

Adey: problems, improving monitoring checks, reviewing peering, learning perl
Ben: improving our mail policing systems
Dan: Tickets, DSPam training, mail policing
Denis: improving the resiliency of firewalls in our backend network
Duncan: working problems and peer reviewing documentation
Mark L: Working on the partner platform, improving our webmail resilience
Matt: Lots of tickets, today I have been mostly working on fixin’ traffic management and Email problems
Michael: investigating problems
Rich: customer tickets
Riz: working on problems related to radius and relay server monitoring, and tasks related to security auditing
Russ: migrating the database of our monitoring platform
Sarah: monitoring, making some DNS changes
Mark H: assisting Stephen with his P1
John: improving internal reporting, newsletter email data set and some customer profiling work for Marketing, and working on replication P1
Me: Replication P1, Workplace P1, SQL peer reviews, and monitoring the performance of our DBs

That’s about it for another busy day for the worker-bees in Networks. Have a good evening!”

Adam from the Business Support team:

“A quiet day for calls for BSC today, busy on tickets and faults again. Andy is working the retention faults role this week so he’s been picking up fault escalations and issues from customers. Logged faults for the rest of us today apart from Keith who’s been working tickets and ensuring we keep them all within SLA

Steady day for the parbin guys again who have all their workflows under control. Not much further to add today, more updates from us tomorrow!”

Next up, it’s Darren from Products:

“A busy Monday here in the Products team with lots of work to catch up on. I’ve been busy covering work for Shaun while he’s on annual leave and generally working through some data requests. Dave’s been working on usage and bandwidth analysis. Rich and Ian have been meeting with suppliers of possible future hardware. Maria has been working from home working on the development prioritisation and preparing for the Industry review on migrations.”

Lukasz from Development updates us on what they’ve been doing in the Dungeon:

“Hello everyone, hope you all had a great weekend! I went for a walk to Rother Valley Park with my friends on sunny Sunday afternoon.

Yep, spring is drawing on very quickly. I have seen a few new jonquils (daffodils) on Sheffield’s squares and roundabouts this weekend.

It’s been a busy Monday around the development floor.
I have become that lucky guy, one who can demonstrate problem solving skills…
I’ve been working on a P1 problem about email notification in our system, and when I finish that I will be back on my MadAsAFish Phase2 tasks.

We’ve had some changes on our Pod recently too. I moved to new desk and now I sit between Simon and Seb. That’s because we’ve started preparing for new team members! New guys from India will arrive next week to help us with work on MadAsAFish Phase2 Development, which means we will have a lot of opportunities to fine out more about Indian culture and customs.

And last thing today, we just finished our weekly feedback meeting about “Learning hour”. Each of us from our team have one hour in a week to read and learn about some new technologies, techniques and
whatever else which is related to our business. We’ve been sharing our knowledge this afternoon which was very useful.

I was reading about Object Relational Mapping (ORM) in PHP5 and looking for advantages and disadvantages of using Propel framework for PHP5. It allows you to access your database using a set of objects, providing a simple API for storing and retrieving data.

Simon found out more about new things which will come with PHP 5.3, including namespaces and late static binding.

Seb made comparison between Test-Driven Development PHP Tools: PHPUnit vs SimpleTests. And the winner is PHPUnit it seems, but there’ll be some work to do before we can integrate it into our development framework.

Finally, Rys was reading about binding GTK API and Python to develop some desktop tools for developers and QA.

Have a nice week everyone…”

That’s it for today…

Colin

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This entry was posted by Colin on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 6:15 pm and is tagged with and is posted in the category EOD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.