Archive for March, 2006
Yes, really! Well ok, I was trying to catch your attention with this headline, it’s not quite as spectacular as it might sound – “Paradise” is a shopping district in Secunderabad, Hyderbad’s twin city. And I didn’t even really go there, I just passed through it on the way to the waterfront restaurant where we had a great dinner last Tuesday. But it sure got you interested, didn’t it?
Anyway, I’m back in Germany now, where it’s cold and wet and the weather isn’t quite as pleasant as it was in India. The training was a huge success, not so much because of me but because the circumstances forced me to make decisions that turned out to be really good, even though I wouldn’t have made them if I’d had another choice. So I guess that a lot of the experience of this training will actually help us improve future OM system administration trainings; we’re working on restructuring these anyway.
If you’re waiting for future non-personal articles, I can assure you that I’m working on a larger piece on the cultural and ethical aspects of DRM, based on the feedback I received on my last article and some further thoughts that they sparked. It’ll be a few days before it’s done, though, maybe I’ll slip in something on the recent sendmail vulnerability in the meantime.
Technorati : India, personal
March 25th, 2006
Last night, while I was travelling to India via Dubai, I thought of what I was going to write here today and what the headline would be. And then, on the flight about halfway between Dubai and Hyderabad, 39000 feet above the Arabian Sea, I saw one of the most magnificent sunrises I’ve ever seen. I’m not usually the kind of person who adores the beauty of God’s creation a lot, but at that moment, I knew that God is a painter.
Anyway, I was also going write that I arrived alive and well. The flight was actually great – Emirates is an excellent airline. Although I must say, Dubai International Airport is a bit of a mess at the moment – it feels like a giant building site. I don’t think I’ve ever been driven for 20 minutes from the plane’s parking position to the terminal building anywhere in the world. It looks like they are crash-building at least two new terminal buildings. Inside it was quite funny – the departures terminal is not very complex, but insanely long, the kind of flattened tube structure that seems to be en vogue with airport architects all around the world (London Stansted is like that, Addis Abeba as well). It was kind of hard not to be run over by one of the not so little electric carts that Emirates uses to collect passengers who got lost in the building and need to be brought to their departure gate at breakneck speed.
Here in Hyderabad, it’s around 30 degrees Celsius… quite a change from near freezing temperatures at home. And what is it with the half-hour timezone, who had that weird idea? Anyway, I’ve found the training room to my satisfaction and am being treated almost like royalty. The training starts tomorrow, hopefully it will go well and my participants will really go away after a bit over a week with the feeling that it was worth their while. I’ll see if I can provide updates here while it’s going on or if it’s going to consume me so much that there’s no time for anything else…
Update Mar. 16, 2006: Deepu has taken some pictures that I’ve uploaded, just follow the Gallery link at the top of the page.
Technorati : Emirates, God, Hyderabad, India, nature
March 14th, 2006
My visa for India arrived today, finally. The whole trip had to be planned on rather short notice (at least for a part-time detailer like me), so it was only Monday last week that I finally had all the paperwork needed for a business visa. My flight is next Monday, so there were only two more working days for it to arrive… but arrive it did, so I’m happy.
I’ll be running a system administration training over there, focussing on our Linux, with some sprinklings of Windows, application software and so on. Can’t say I’m not nervous… normally we split the teaching task between four trainers, this time I’m the only one, so I’ll have to teach lots of things I don’t usually teach and some I don’t even use. But I guess that’s just the way it is… if I don’t know something, I’ll just have to wing it. As the saying goes… “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches”.
By the way, in case you are a burglar reading my blog to find out when I’m away, so you can break into my house, let me assure you of two things. First of all, the house won’t be deserted while I’m away. And secondly, the only valuables there are my laptop and some other hardware and I’ll be taking those with me for the training, so you’d be pretty disappointed. What, me paranoid? Who told you that…? 
March 8th, 2006
You know how media companies keep telling us that digital rights management (DRM) is necessary to curb piracy and give us, the consumers, a better experience with the digital media we buy (err, license) from them? Of course “better experience” basically means only being able to play it on devices that the DRM system is available for and making it illegal to even make other devices compatible with it through the use of patents and encryption techniques and cleverly lobbied-for laws that make even software that only serves to play your legitimately bought media on unsupported (Open Source, for example) devices an illegal “circumvention device”.
What they always fail to tell us is what happens if something goes wrong and the DRM device that is legally allowed to play our files either becomes unavailable or defective. I mean seriously, do you honestly think that closed, proprietary DRM “standards” will still be supported 10 years from now? No way, you still want to watch that movie you paid for and downloaded today, most likely you’ll have to pay again for a version with an up-to-date DRM. What should really serve as a warning sign is what happened to Microsoft’s Media Center users after they installed the Upgrade Rollup 2 package from Microsoft – their DRM stopped working and they were unable to play any of the files stored on their device that were “protected” by this software. Well protected indeed…
It’s a scary thought that even a simple update could keep us from viewing content that we paid good money for and we are completely at the mercy of the DRM vendor to fix the problem and make the content we legally possess available to us again. It should make us see that DRM is not making our lives better and it sure isn’t, at least in the long run, making our culture richer. We’re still able to watch movies that were made 100 years ago because we know how to play them – will we, 100 years from now, still be able to watch movies and other media made today? If the media companies have their way, I seriously doubt that… and it would be a sad world where a large part of our cultural history is lost forever.
Technorati : DRM, Media Center, Microsoft, OSS
March 7th, 2006