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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.

Copfilter 0.84 beta 1

by | Apr 5, 2007 | Evangelism, evilzenscientist, patching, Uncategorized

Copfilter

My IMAP patch got included in the latest update to Copfilter.

 

  • fix: fixes from various copfilter forum users (see the bugs section in the forum or
    CHANGELOG for the details), most important ones are mentioned below
  • fix: fix in cron.daily (it could hang) – thx DaPinky
  • fix: IMAP Buffer increase (it could hang) – thx evilzenscientist
  • fix: deleting a huge amount of mails from the spam quarantine is now possible – thx mdages
  • fix: proxsmtp/tmp could get filled up without removal of old files – thx Alevizos Dimitrios
  • new: ability to sort spam quarantine by columns (ex. by score level) – thx taurus

Nice to see my stuff make it 🙂 Officially “I don’t write code”

Blogging at Microsoft

by | Apr 4, 2007 | blogging, Uncategorized

Shel Israel writes:

UK Microsoftie Darren Strange reports that Microsoft now has 4500 bloggers among its 71,000 employees.  Both numbers show significant growth.  As irecall, when Robert and I were writing our first chapter of naked Conversations there were 2500 bloggers among 56,000 employees.  By the time we finished the book in October 2005, the bloggers were topping the 3,000 mark. This would mean that the number of Microsoft bloggers has grown by over 50 percent in about a year and a half.
By percentage, I’m not sure whether Sun Microsystems or Microsoft has more bloggers, but both companies continue to grow and continue to extol the virtues of doing it.
One interesting aspect in Darren’s report is that there is no longer any controversy about it. When Joshua Allen, became Microsoft’s first blogger, the first call to fire him for blogging came just a few hours later, as we reported in Naked Conversations.
Now it is seems to me, blogging is normalizing at Microsoft and that is what should happen.

In contrast I think Novell has a couple of dozen prolific bloggers at most. That is way below par.

The now never-ending WordPress mill

by | Mar 26, 2007 | blogging, Uncategorized, wordpress

WordPress

From the dev lists:

The target release date for WordPress 2.2 is less than a month away, April 23rd.

Phew. Patch and relax. Update and relax. Patch and relax.

When Matt and the others from Automattic said they’d be stepping up the frequency of updates – I didn’t expect this 🙂

It’s good though. Lots of new features promised for 2.2 and especially 2.3/2.4 and beyond.

Housekeeping

by | Mar 25, 2007 | patching, Uncategorized

Back from BrainShare and the usual round of patching the internal boxes.

The firewall/spam server got a good round of updates. IPcop had two major updates. Also the CLAM anti-virus for the mail sweeper got updated to 0.90.1

There are also a stack of SLES 10 and Windows 2003 updates to test and install. Sigh. Windows 2003 SP2 is now live; I need to check it doesn’t make anything barf. SLES 10 just has the normal slew of packages.