ODEX

There's a recent buzz on the internet of ODEX against the local anime downloaders. I'm surprised to hear of a judge ruling against ODEX demands of Pacific Internet to release 1000 names of its subscribers that download anime. Quoting from CNA,

In a surprise court ruling on Thursday, a judge decided that Pacific Internet (PacNet) does not have to give up the names of its subscribers who had been accused of ripping content from Odex. ...

The ruling raised eyebrows because two other Internet service providers (ISP) - SingNet and StarHub - had earlier been ordered to give up the names of their subscribers accused of similar violations. StarHub said the company is now assessing its options. (link)

Wow! Now who says the authorities are pro business. Hurray!! For Pacific Internet for fighting for its subscribers. Shame on the other two incumbents especially SingTel. According to news report, they didn't even resist, simply blindly comply. I guess out of this episode you wouldn't find much support for ODEX, maybe more would order animes from other online stores. After all there has been lots of complains on how slow they are at bringing in new anime and even their sub-titling is of sub standard quality. A shame compared to the high standards the fan-subs do for free. The other bad publicity are the other two ISPs. Especially SingTel. Quick to surrender without a fight. Starhub, well they did try and perhaps the Pacific Internet's team of lawyers learnt from the outcome. But StarHub can still shine, they are still weighing their options as of now.

Odex said that the settlements it is seeking are not for damages, but reimbursement of expenses incurred in pursuing enforcement matters. (link)

Well, shouldn't some of the reimbursement be given to the rightful owners?

Too bad, in the end. This whole exercise, aside from trying to make some profit re-cuperate expenses and scare all downloaders has some what failed. For more detail information, check out this thread on Hardware Forum.

ActiveRecord update

Realise for some data modification on the database a simple sql session is still necessary, despite the availability of the Rails console. Learnt it the hard way today, when I tried to modify some production data and I couldn't. I couldn't because of some rules built into the update methods of the ActiveRecord model. In the end, I had to do it by firing up an sql session (eg. SQLPlus).

On hindsight, I could still get around the rules by calling the method, update_by_sql. Oh well, am still on the learning path on RubyOnRails and Ruby.

Monday before national day

My joints are stiff am sleepy. È buzz of the bull has faded. I can feel it in è air. Some how less traffic and people about over the weekend. Psychological? Maybe. But the market did lose billions of dollars. I wonder how much of that is from retail investors?

STI is down 100 points and declining. Markets across Asia are in a sea of red. All reacting to the US credit bubble, delinquent sub-prime lenders. And so history repeats. Mans greed.

So some finance genius or group figures out how to pass these risk to investors by turning these debt repayment to bonds with fancy names, dividing them, repackaged and sold to investors.

Well, its the start of National day week. And markets are red. But I bet STI at least will turn green just for National day.