Integrated Logistic Support

I'm spending this week in Malmö in southern Sweden, participating in a course on Integrated Logistics Support (ILS). ILS, basically, is about planning for and supporting a product's whole lifecycle, from its early planning stages and onwards to the deployment (called "employment plan", a phrase that to me meant something very different until today), the product's useful life, including maintenance and support, and the product's eventual disposal. As always, the idea is to create a better and more cost-effective product, meaning more money to you. See, what's really intersting is how the results of an ILS analysis, called LSA (don't you just love acronyms?), can be put into the design of the product itself and how a proper analysis can help significantly reduce cost.

ILS is traditionally about military products, preferably state-of-the art helicopters or perhaps a large frigate but an ordinary rifle can benefit, too, and so is the course I'm attending, but it's easy to see how ILS can be put into good use elsewhere. It's fascinating stuff. Obviously it's a bit early for me to comment on anything factually relevant, being a complete newbie in all things ILS, but I can see a relevance to document management and the systems I help build when I'm not in Malmö.

As I said, fascinating stuff.

More on KDE 4.3

I like KDE 4.3. Let's make that perfectly clear, because after reading this, you might get the wrong idea.

KDE 4.3 ha a far more finished look and feel than 4.2. Things seem to be better integrated and the crashes are fewer, with fewer causes. I've finally got the hang of Dolphin (that tricky address bar, for one thing), and I even got Kscd to work.

But.

There are many annoyances as well:

• KMix mutes the master volume on every startup (I only have to unmute it and turn the volume up, but this is very annoying to do on every startup).
• Okular won't accept (or remember) landscape print settings (Document Viewer from Gnome, that uses the same printer drivers, as far as I can tell,has no problems).
• The eye candy on Desktop settings usually crashes parts of the KDE environment, with the taskbar going first, if you try more than one or two settings.
• The PulseAudio/Phonon combo is very unreliable. With GStreamer, it won't output sound, but with the Xine backend, it usually does.
• Amarok no longer knows how to play CDs. I tried to use Rhythmbox but it chops up CD audio in 15-second bursts with a 200 ms pause between every one, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why.
  

Some of the eye candy issues could easily be related to the (very) buggy Intel Xorg driver, but I still think that KDE shouldn't crash as a result.

On the whole, I like the environment, though. ;)

KDE 4.3...

...is a big step forward. Finally things are starting to actually work. Now, if they could only reimplement the CD player functionality in Amarok I'd be even happier. (And to be honest, I'm not sure I like Amarok's new look.)