Archive for February, 2006
Just thought I’d let you know that I started a new blog. Don’t get me wrong, this one is great (hey, at least that’s what I think), but the new one is different. Since starting this blog, I’ve felt that something is missing – I can’t really write about TV or political events here because what happens at home in Germany is of not much interest to most of you folks. So I’ve decided to blog in German on my new blog. Those of you who know German can head over there and see what I’ve created – but be warned, it’s not as serious a blog as this one… sarcasm is my weapon of choice over there. And those of you who don’t speak German, don’t worry, nothing’s going to change about this blog, I’m still going to post here as frequently as before. The blogs don’t really overlap very much.
February 28th, 2006
I’ve been wanting to post this for a few days, but there just wasn’t time – meetings in England, some customers demanding a lot more attention than I anticipated and on top of it all a broken webserver (hardware) that needed to be replaced before I could do anything. But now it’s all ok again, at least for the moment, so I can take a few minutes to tell you about our walk in the beatiful Lake District in the North of England last Saturday. I’ve actually uploaded all the photos that my colleagues took (can you believe it, I don’t own a digital camera) to my gallery on this site, so you can get an idea of what I’m talking about.
So we (a few colleagues and I) started in Carlisle around 9:45 and drove down to Buttermere, parked the car and made our way up a steep hill called Robinson. I honestly thought the climb would never end and whenever we thought it couldn’t possibly get any steeper, it did. Oh, and half of the group had wet feet when we arrived at the top, thanks to some parts of the path that had turned into marshland thanks to the thawing of several inches of snow that must have been there before. But it was well worth the effort – the view was spectacular and the walk along the ridge over two other hilltops and back down into the valley was one of the nicest ones I’ve done in the Lake District. We had some rather funny moments, like when Leon wanted to have his picture taken with a valley in the background and while everyone was busy taking photos, the background disappeared because a large cloud appeared. Seems like every time I go to the Lakes, I ask myself why I’m doing this to myself on the way up, then once I’m on top of the hills, I remember why… and the next day, I ask myself why I did it because of all the pain in my muscles. Anyway, the pictures remind me how great it was and I know I’m going to go for a walk again the next time I’m there. Which may be a while… the next trip is taking me to India and after that I don’t really have any trips planned yet. I guess it will be nice to be home for a while.
Technorati : England, Lake District, gallery, photos, walk
February 25th, 2006
I made it to England yesterday, but it sure wasn’t easy. It sounded easy enough – get on a plane in Düsseldorf, go straight to Manchester, be picked up by a colleague together with some others also arriving the same day and go up to Carlisle. That of course would have worked nicely… if the flight to Manchester hadn’t been canceled because of some unspecified problem with the jet that was supposed to fly us there. As luck would have it, there was a flight to London from the gate right next to ours that was delayed enough for me and some other passengers to still get on. Then another flight from London to Manchester. Delayed, of course – official reason announced to the waiting passengers: “We can’t find the cabin crew and don’t know where they are”. It’s a good thing we were being picked up in Manchester as a group and I would have been the first one to arrive, with about three hours waiting time before the last person arrived – so in the end, all the others had to wait for 30 minutes for me to arrive, but hey, at least I still got a ride.
So now I’m in Carlisle and we already had a first meeting to decide who is going to be in which meetings and when they are going to happen. I guess this one week is going to be over in a blink of an eye. Hopefully we get some nice weather this weekend for a quick trip to the Lake District (my real reason for being here… *g*).
Technorati : British Airways, England, flights
February 16th, 2006
Interesting article on TechWeb the other day about a study done by security researchers from the University of Washington. What they did was use unpatched version of Internet Explorer and Firefox and use them in two different setups, one emulating a user who clicks “yes” whenever he’s asked a security question, the other one always selecting “no” instead. Those two setups were then run against a reference set of 45.000 websites and the number of successful spyware infections was counted.
It’s important to note that the study does not make the claim that one of the browsers is more secure than the other; what it tried to find out instead is which browser gives a safer browsing experience to the user. As it turns out, there is quite a difference – while IE users were infected with spyware in 1.6% of the cases when they always clicked “yes” and still 0.6% even when they clicked “no”, the respective numbers were only 0.09% and 0% for Firefox – which means that no spyware was ever installed under Firefox unless the user accepted the download.
ActiveX seems to have played a major role in the involuntary spyware installations – so the lack of support for the proprietary ActiveX seems to be what gave Firefox the advantage in this study. In fact, the only succeful spyware installations in Firefox happened through Java applets – and all of those required the user to consent to something before it happened. One can only hope that Internet Explorer 7 will offer better protection against “drive-by” installations of ActiveX components.
In the meantime, there are two conclusions that can be drawn from this study. The first is that you should most definitely always keep your browser patched with all the latest security fixes. The second is that, if you want a safe browsing experience, you might be a lot better off using Firefox.
Update Feb. 16, 2006: Brian Krebs has some interesting numbers in his blog again, taking a look at the number of days it took to get patches for critical vulnerabilities to both browsers out last year. Definitely worth reading and a great piece of research by Brian.
Technorati : ActiveX, Firefox, IE, Internet Explorer, security
February 12th, 2006
I discovered this wonderful story the other day, when I was browsing through a couple of christian blogs. In short, it’s about a guy who came to help another boy at school, someone he would have never, under normal circumstances, even talked to, much less been friends with. But this one day, he saw the pain in the boy’s eyes when he was being bullied by a few others. Over the course of the next years, they became best friends and in his graduation speech at the end of their highschool time together, the boy talked about the day they first met. To the amazement of everyone, including his friend, he revealed that he had planned to commit suicide that weekend – a little friendly gesture from someone he barely knew, but who noticed that he was hurting, saved him.
The conclusion of the article really struck me: “Never underestimate the power of your actions. With one small gesture you can change a person’s life. For better or for worse.” At first I thought “wow, I could have been that guy”. Of course, I do see the pain in peoples’ eyes. Sometimes I choose to do seomthing about it. More often than that, I probably don’t. And I have to ask myself, how often have my small gestures changed someones life… but for worse?
It’s really true… often it’s not the big things that really make a difference, not the great and noble gestures, but the little things, the ones you hardly think of. The things you hardly notice when you do them – but to someone else, they can mean the world. For better or for worse. A friendly nod, a smile when you pass someone on the street – maybe insignificant to you, but signalling “you have been noticed, you are somebody” to a person unsure of himself. And in much the same way, you can easily send a quick “you are worthless to me” signal to someone. I wish we’d all think a little bit more about our actions, even in the little things. Jesus was all about the small gestures… if we want to become more like Him, maybe we should, too.
Technorati : Jesus, actions, gestures, suicide
February 6th, 2006
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