Efficiency vs. Inefficiency, in a no-holds barred fight.
Just had an irritating couple of hours when I discovered that my WordPress Theme was broken. The sidebar had slipped to underneath the main column, and the background of the main posting area had disappeared. I tried clearing my cache first of all. Then I tried looking at the site in different browsers. It was still broken in IE: although the symptoms were slightly different the sidebar was still misplaced.
OK, time to roll my sleeves up …
Having spent hours tinkering with getting Ubuntu's wireless to work on at least three previous Thinkpads, before I bought this Vostro I did some research around the internet. I found a bunch of happy Vostro 1400 Ubuntu 8.04 users, and the fact that Dell was releasing Ubuntu on some of its other machines. Good signs. However it seems that the hardware specs between Vostro 1400s vary depending on where and when they're manufactured, so I think that research might have been misleading.
Step back a few years … I've often thought when I'm under a desk somewhere jiggling wires, is that some kind of audio feedback on ping would be useful: your server isn't responding, but when you re-seat the ethernet connector it comes back online; you have a messy, unlabeled switch to work through, so you unplug wires until the audio feedback stops, and you've located your machine. That kind of thing.
I've occasionally looked around the internet for such a tool and uncovered a couple of scripts and tools which don't quite work. I've even thought of writing my own script, but never quite got around to it.