Media Players and Privacy

Many browser users are now aware of how websites use cookies to track the users and their preferences. Most also know how to disable cookies or delete them. However, like me, many are probably not aware of media players tracking users activity and profile information and then sharing that with content providers and others!

This came as a surprise to me when I read an article in Internet Week about privacy issues with Macromedia Flash. What bothered me is that when one downloads and installs Flash, there is not notification or warning about content usage being tracked and reported. I guess some may argue that as long as one is paying for content and not violating copyrights etc. there is no need to be concerned. But who knows what exactly these applications track and report.

In general, I worry about any program that runs on my computer and is able to report back to a server in the Internet. For all you know it could scan for Quicken files on your disk and report your financial information! Hence I am weary of downloading freeware. At least with reputed companies one would hope they will not surreptetiously report private information from your computer.

I wonder if regulation is called for in this space. Perhaps any software that reports personally identifyable information should be required to seek the user's permission each time it does so. Kind of like how the Microsoft error reporting service asks the user if they would like to send an error report. The user should have the ability to view deatils of what is being sent and also have the option to deny sending of the information.

By the way, to set your privacy settings in Macromedia Flas, right-click on any Flash video and choose the Settings and then Advanced Settings options.

It's not 9 to 5 for some of us anymore

As communication and collobration technology improves and workforce becomes increasingly global, the concept of having fixed work hours are fading more many. This is especially true for many in hi-tech industries and the so called knowledge workers.

The fading of the boundary between work and home is both a boon and a curse at the same time. On one hand the ability to work from home, or in some cases from anywhere, gives an individual a lot of flexibility. Personally for me, it let's me avoid traffic, save on gasoline and makes it very convenient if I have a dentist/doctor appointment or if a service-person is coming to my house to fix something. It enables me to scheduled meetings as early as 6:30am with colleagues in Europe or late in the evenings with colleagues in India and Singapore! Services such as Accessline enable me to make and receive phone calls and faxes anywhere I am and gadgets like Blackberry provide wireless access to e-mail.

The mobility provides lot of flexibility in term of work hours and location and also saves companies expensive real estate and energy costs.

There's also a downside to this mobility and flexibility however. One can sometimes feel distant and disconnected. This is why I make it a point to go to the office at least once or twice a week. Use of video conferencing and video chat can help mitigate this somewhat but face to face meetings are still very effective.

For people who are not disciplined, working by themselves at home or elsewhere could get distracting leading to loss of productivity and ultimately poort performance. On the other hand, it can also mean people work a lot more than the normal eight hours. Sometimes it is difficult to pull one self away from answering that e-mail or reading that document or writing that paper when your home and office are in the same location.

With increased connectivity, superiors also begin to expect people to be always available. This could mean you get an urgent e-mail or instant message from you boss when you are in the middle of a quiet dinner with your family or out enjoying a movie.

All said and done, this seems to be becoming more and more common and as one of the technology evangelists at our company put it, soon people are going to be surrounded by a swarm of devices always connected to the Internet.

Staying fit

For the past 3 months or so, I've been doing the workout from Kathy Kaehler's
Kathy Kaehler's Basics: Total Fitness workout DVD. When I first started, I found some of the exercises a bit challenging but as I got more used to it, I am now able to do them all fairly easily.

The routine covers a little bit of aerobics, flexibility and toning, all in 35 minutes! I like Kathy's friendly demeanor and the exercises are not complex. I have noticed a clear difference in my fitness since I started working out. My legs are stronger and I am able to pick my six year old without much effort! One thing I find useful is not to go thorugh a decision whether to workout or not that particular day. I decided to workout every other day and now I just do it. Occassionally I have to skip due to other priorities but I try to make this truly an exception.

Converting audio cassettes to digital MP3 files

Jake Ludington has a nice article which described how one can record ones own podcast[ My guess is the term podcast came from Apples iPod and refers to making MP3 audio files available over the Web]. He descibes how one can use an open source program called Audacity and an associated plugin called LAME to record audio and save it in MP3 format.

These programs can also be used to convert audio cassettes to digital audio MP3 files. You can connect the audio out from your cassette player to the line in of the sound card in your PC or you could also record it via the Mic if you do not mind slightly degraded quality. I have many good cassettes which I am planning to convert to CD using Audacity since I have found tapes get damaged quickly.

Audacity is great and its free. However, I bought their T-shirt to show my appreciation and support for the Audacity developers.

Money and Happiness

A decade ago I lived on the east coast and longed to move to California and work for a hi-tech company. Back then if someone had written down my current situation on a piece of paper and asked me what I thought, I would have said it is more than what I dream for! However, now that I have all that, it does not seem all that exciting. Many of us have probably gone through similar experiences. This has often made me wonder what makes one happy.

Recently I came across this interview with Laura Rowley author of Money and Happiness: A Guide to Living the Good Life. She made some points during the interview that truly struck a chord in me.

First she said that studies have shown that a certain amount of money is needed for one to be happy. This seems intutive. If a person does not have enough money to even feed oneself and one's family, we can not expect that person to be happy. So some basic amount of money is necessary to be happy. There is no magical figure or formula to figure out how much this basic amount is. I suppose it depends on the cost of living in various parts of the world. However, it is possible to generalize and say that one should at least be able to feed one's family, provide them shelter, clothing and basic education and health care. The word basic is key here. Shelter does not imply a huge villa in a posh neighbourhood and we are not talking designer clothes here nor are wwe talking about gourmet food and ivy league education.

Laura point out that studies have shown that happiness does not rise in the same proportion as money. She also points out that we quickly adapt to improvement in our circumstances and then we want more - a concept described by Richard Easterland as Hedonic Treadmill.

I have come to believe that once a person's basic needs are met as described above, happiness is more of an attitude more than anything else. This is why we often find different people with approximately the same wealth with different levels of happiness. My son often says he can not imagine how my generation must have got by without video games, personal computers, theme parks etc. He actually feels sorry for me. However, I do not think his generation derives any more pleasures from the toys and activities they have at their disposal than the pleasure my generation got from the simple toays and games during our times. Growing up in a third world country, my family had much less material good than we have today. However, we were no less happy than we are now.


Laura makes another important point - Persuit of money or material goods as a primary goal has negative consequences on one's mental health. I also believe that putting a ceiling on desires is key to being happy. Every desire that is satisfied gives rise to two or more other desires and this vicious cycle goes on. Some feel that lack of desires leads to a dull life with no ambitions or goals. That is not what I am talking about, however. What I mean is aspiring to do ones best but not making one's happiness contingent on the results or rewards. Needless to say, this is a difficult feat to achieve but I believe we need to gradually train ourselves to do so.
Technorati Tag: Happiness

My Content Feed

Oops...I guess I was wrong. My blog provider does provide content feed for blogs they host. I just added one to my blog.

Managing Information and RSS feeds

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. I had noticed small orange boxes on web sites and blogs with XML or RSS written in them and when I clicked on them, my browser simply displayed an XML document and I did'nt quite know what to make of it.

Then recently, I began using Mozilla Thunderbird as my e-mail client. Thunderbird has built in RSS support so I decided to explore it. It turned out to be very simple. I simply created a news and blogs account in Thunderbird. Then I used the Manage Subscription option to subscribe to RSS feeds that I was interested in. I did this by specifying the URL for the feed. This is the same URL that is displayed in your browser when you click on those orange boxes I mention above.

Within minutes I subscribed to RSS feeds from NPR, BBC and some technology sites I am interested in. These feeds are essentially summaries of articles or news items at those sites. Thunderbird displays the title of the item much like it displays the subject of an e-mail. A short description of the item is them displayed in the frame where the body of an e-mail is displayed. There is also a link to the entire item so if I am interested in it I can go to the source and read the entire item.

With so much information out there, I find RSS feeds very helpful in keeping up with the information and quickly determining what is of interest to me so I may read about it further.

Many sites now provide RSS feed. Unfortunately my blog service provider, to the best of my knowledge, does not provide RSS capability else I would have provided an RSS feed for this blog as well!

Try RSS readers like Thunderbird. There are several other readers listed here.