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Commuting in Beijing

by | Apr 12, 2007 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Most of the visitors to the Novell office here in Beijing are from the US – and get ferried around in a company car with driver.

The first time I was here with Laurence we wanted to stay at the Marriott – a whole 15 minutes away; we got a lot of pressure from the local team to stay at the ‘company approved’ hotel just a 2 minute walk (or a 2 minute drive!) from the office.

This time we just made our own bookings and are staying about 20 minutes from the office; nearer the city center.

We’ve been commuting in on the Beijing subway. That’s an experience.

Bejing subway

Not so much “Mind the Doors” – at every door there is a uniformed subway employee who physically pushes people into the train.

The walk to the office is also interesting – every crossing has a uniformed crossing guard keeping people moving and traffic moving.

Crossing

PGP Whole Disk Encryption

by | Apr 8, 2007 | Technology, Uncategorized

I upgraded my PGP to the latest version to support Vista – working well – even the GroupWise C3PO works reasonably.

I took the plunge and did the Whole Disk Encryption for my laptop. Wow. 60GB of data encrypted in 3 hours. Now I get the PGP WDE sign on at boot, I use my home Active Directory password and I get single-sign-on into Vista. Very well implemented.

Now I’m less worried about travelling with my laptop and confidential data. BIOS password and physical security are part of the solution; but crypto for the whole disk is important.

It’s also a lot easier than the Vista Bitlocker. It works with 2000, XP and Vista – and does not require TPM on the workstation. My T42p works flawlessly so far.