Android in the enterprise

One of the main reasons I bought my new phone was that it natively supports Exchange, but the sad thing is that there is not currently a single Android phone on the market that any corporate security department worth their salt would allow.
Corporations don't care about the devices per se - what they care about is the potentially valuable inside information that may be on that device. If a thief / corporate spy / whatever gets access to the phone, the data on it needs to be protected. To that end, the _minimum_ requirements to allow a phone to hold corporate data would be:

1) PIN or password protection that can reasonably expected to not be broken. Logical requirements for that are:

--PIN / password existence and complexity enforcement

--After a predefined number of failed attempts, the device either self-wipes or permanently locks.

2) Ability to remotely issue a remote wipe (in case an employee quits on bad terms / is fired but he doesn't know it yet / whatever)

3) Encryption of all data on the device, so that if it physically falls into the wrong hands, the thief(s) won't be able to access the data, even if given a long time to do so.

The new FroYo build is supposedly able to do all of these, except for the data encryption. If you were in charge of security for your enterprise, would you allow users to use a device with no encryption?

Blackberrys have supported all these for a long, long time. iPhone 3G supports it (although apparently not all that well), pretty much any new Windows Mobile smartphone supports it. There is currently no single Android model that supports it (AFAIK).

I find this really strange. Considering that plenty of enterprises would love to bring Android devices into the fold, it's weird that nobody yet makes a handset with hardware encryption. I still have no idea why this is.

Google feature request

I really wish there was a way to exclude sites from search results in Google preferences. The site that's been royally pissing me off lately is codeweblog (not gonna post a link here), which (as far as I can tell) is just a site that has indexed a boatload of tech articles and sites and has created "pages" for just about every combination of keywords found on those sites. Let's say, for example, that I'm searching for a scheduling library in Android, and I happen to know that quartz is the most popular scheduler for java. Search for "android quartz classes" in google, and the first hit is...yeah, those guys.
These codeweblog guys aren't the first ones to have this idea, but they've certainly refined it nicely; furthermore, they could claim that their site isn't just a search honeypot (which it is!), and is providing a useful indexing service to the tech community (which it isn't). They would be lying, but the site looks juuust enough like something useful to be in the gray area.
Anyway, why can't I just decide that I never want to see anything from that site? The above situation is only one of many that I can think of off the top of my head why I might want to do this. Sure, I can add in "-site:xxxx" to all my Google searches, but...c'mon.

Anybody see any reason why this is not a good idea?

Eurovision 2010 -> cheese overload

So Clau and I hosted a little party to watch the Eurovision 2010 contest. About 20 or so people showed up, almost entirely women and gay men - there was one other straight man there and he discretely slipped out about halfway through. The liquor we had purchased for the event was gone in about an hour and we resorted to drinking most everything else in the apartment. Thankfully the ladies weren't into single malt or we might have had a very expensive night indeed.
Before moving here, I had no idea the Eurovision contest existed, but it's apparently quite a big deal, at least amongst women and gays. The voting period (SMS only IIRC) lasts 10 minutes. 10 minutes!!! The way the votes worked was pretty interesting, but too complex to be worth explaining - suffice it to say that they're constantly tweaking the balance between the judges in each country and the general public.
Anyway, Germany won by a landslide, so it was a pretty happy crowd. I woke up with a fierce hangover the next day but it was totally worth it. If possible, I'll be watching this every year from now on.

The obligatory YouTube links - the ones from BBC don't have the full performances but you get the idea, and they're the best sound you'll find on the net.

The winner - this song has been playing non-stop on MTV for the last couple of months, but the Germans don't seem to be sick of it yet. Admittedly it's pretty catchy, but it gets old after 50 or so listens:



Yes, she is in fact imitating a cockney accent. And she is German - from Hannover, which is the German equivalent of Liverpool. I've included the actual music video because the contest performance was pretty crap (although it still won).

"Most awesome mind-blowingly sterotypically Euro" award goes to Moldovia. Epic sax man FTW.



My top picks were Turkey and Romania, which came in at #2 and #3, respectively. I don't feel particularly good about myself for mirroring Europe's choices. I thought Turkey had the best song, plus of course major bonus points for the senseless robo-hottie. Sorry about the disabled embedding but it's by far the best full recording of the thing.



Romania's entry - I actually find this kinda catchy, plus I have a weakness for hot eastern European girls in form-fitting outfits (but really, who doesn't?). The live performance was, sadly, pretty tame; of course that's all relative - from those last 2 clips you can tell that the bar for Euro theatrics was set pretty high.



The "instant gay club hit" songs - Albania and Iceland.





And many others that just sorta sucked. You can see all the live performances at http://www.youtube.com/user/EurovisionESCTV if you want, but trust me these are the highlights.