Kudos to open source world

I have never been a windoze fan, infact I have never really left an option to sabotage the name of M$. Having said that, I use windoze on my laptop, and though I work on a remote fedora core box, I still use windoze to check my mails, to keep my appointments, to write my documents, heck I spend 90% of my computer time on windoze. Last month I decided to change all that.

Last month AT suggested Ubuntu, and boy it works, just wonderful. OpenOffice takes care of the docs, Thunderbird totally replaces outlook, it can even setup meeting requests. Firefox & VLC obviously work just as fine on Ubuntu. Gaim/Pidgin is awesome and so is liferea & Amarok. Tomboy Notes is just the right application for me. The best part of Ubuntu is the ease with which you can install stuff, windoze should really do something about it (read cheat it and name Unified Microsoft Installer or something) to install amarok all you have to do is yum install amarok. It downloads/installs/configures the app for you, awesome, isnt it?

I tried quite a few flavours before/after Ubuntu, Fedora is difficult to configure otherwise I kind of like Fedora core. Ubuntu supports all my hardware, I was impressed with the way my wireless was automatically detected & configured. Even windows takes longer to configure!!

All in all its almost a month and the only reason I log in to Windoze is to play online pool with MS as pidgin does not support Y! Games. Kudos Open Source world. Hats off to you guys.

On lending a helping hand

Every now and then there are mails floating around asking the receiver to forward the mail to others as that would lead to the service provider paying up anywhere between 1 paise to 1 cent for every forward. This money in turn would help some poor soul to afford a terrible sickness. Today I got one such mail:

IIT Bombay student Anupam Biswas 5th sem. Mechanical Engg is suffering from Colukabki (caused due to excessive nabad and depression) a disease very rarely found (3 in a billion). His condition is very pathetic and the treatment is very expensive, obviously his parents are not able to afford his treatment. Orkut has agreed to pay 1 paisa after each time this message is forward. So please pass to all ur friends. please i request you to pass it to as many people as u can and lets try to save someone's life. I request please do not ignore this. It will take......

It made me wonder about a few things:
1. How naive can a person get!!! Colukabki ?????? nabad??????? Unimaginably random names.. Google is just a click away, it will take a second to know that there is NO ailment by that name.
2. What kind of people can start such sick chains! There will be many who would be forced to mistrust even a genuine mail.

3. There is a VERY small part, almost an appendix in us which wants us to help other human beings, someone in need, but there is a bigger larger sense that prevails and wants most of us to chill and relax and do our work, sit in our tight loop of what we call our lives. Unless it involves sending a mail [without even thinking twice of its implications] or writing a blog about the poor, most of us just pass. And though there is a struggle inside which really wants us to do something make some change somewhere, ultimately our better sense prevails... And we pass... and that.. sadly is what I have been doing....

I am reminded of MG... [http://www.noragging.com/], amazing to see someone doing his bit to bring about a change that can effect somebody's life in his busy schedule of work... hats off to you MG....