Firefox 3 Download Day 2008

Posted by Nazly on Thursday, 29th May 2008 10:51:18 (GMT +0530)


Help set a Firefox 3 world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours on Download Day! Go to the Download Day Headquarters and pledge to download Firefox 3. With your help the Firefox community can go down in history.

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/worldrecord

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Cheaper than pumping fuel

Posted by Nazly on Sunday, 25th May 2008 19:54:51 (GMT +0530)

I got this from a friend of mine via email. It will be the case for most of us in the near future considering the recent fuel hikes here in Sri Lanka.



The cartoon reads, "I don't have a problem in my car. It's cheaper for me to pay these two than pumping fuel"

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apt-get install wife

Posted by Nazly on Sunday, 25th May 2008 14:38:45 (GMT +0530)

Geeky way of getting married

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Showing the right path to alternative software

Posted by Nazly on Sunday, 11th May 2008 19:49:47 (GMT +0530)



The news Raids against 'software pirates' in Colombo caught me by surprise this morning while I was going through the news papers. I'm not sure whether similar raids have been carried out in the past but it was unexpected. I'm really glad that such action has been taken to protect the Intellectual Property Rights for software. But where does it lead to? The next target will be the general users of pirated software. But have we educated people about pirate software? Do they know the consequences of using pirated software?

As far as I can see it, 90% of the general public are unaware of the fact that they are doing something illegal. If they go to one of these outlets that sell pirated software they can buy a CD for Rs.80 ($0.75) or a DVD for Rs.150 ($1.3) quite easily. They actually think that they are paying the price for buying the software, which is not correct. The software is actually worth hundred times than that. Even if you buy a genuine copy of one of the proprietary software for its price you cannot make illegal copies of it. Because the licence clearly states that you cannot do that. Most of the tech-savvy users understand what is pirated software. But there is a non-tech crowd in other industries that use pirated software for their day to day needs without realising the fact that they are doing something illegal.

So whats the solution? Are you ready to pay over Rs.10,000 ($100) to get a genuine copy of the software? Or will you look for an alternative software which will give you the freedom to use and share among the others? The latter will be my choice. That is why I use Free and Open Source Software. I think for a country like ours using FOSS is the ideal choice for people involved in any industry. By choosing Free and Open Source Software you have


As you can see you have the full freedom over the software unlike the software tying you down. Its important to make the public aware that for almost every proprietary software there is one or more alternative Free and Open Source Software available. I made my move to GNU/Linux as my primary operating system sometime back and never looked back since then. As I said I had more than one alternative in this case as there are hundreds of distributions for GNU/Linux. I did try Redhat Linux 9, Fedora 3, Slackware and finally settled with Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) at that time. This doesn't mean that the other distributions I tried are bad. It means that I had choices to make before settling down with what I was comfortable with. Currently I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) on all my computers. I use FOSS for all my day to day needs. I use Mozilla Firefox for Web browsing and Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client. I use Pidgin for Instant Messaging which supports Yahoo, MSN (yes, I have friends there too ) and Google Talk. I use OpenOffice for handling all types of Word Processing, Spreadsheets and Presentations. And the list goes on.
Find FOSS alternative for your proprietary software at www.osalt.com

What I wanted to emphasize is that there are FOSS alternatives. By using it you won't be considered a criminal. You won't be caught by the police for copying a FOSS software in a CD and selling it to someone by charging the cost for the CD. You are free to do so. More than that you can modify the source of that software. In a proprietary software the source itself is not available. Lets not consider that part for now.

It was the Lanka Linux User Group and FOSS Sri Lanka that were behind my move towards FOSS. They conduct workshops, trainings, conferences all around Sri Lanka in order to promote Free and Open Source Software here in Sri Lanka. Specially in Schools amongst the younger generation. So when ever you are in need of any help of FOSS you know where to look for. So make the move now. Don't wait till its too late.

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Comments (7)

Does Web 2.0 solutions really solve problems?

Posted by Nazly on Saturday, 3rd May 2008 16:28:53 (GMT +0530)

If you haven't seen much updates in my blog lately, its mainly because most of my updates are on Twitter. I kinda liked the idea about micro-blogging from the start because updates can be short and sweet + updated via Instant Messaging or SMS to Twitter. I wrote about my Twitter experience in one of my previous blog posts "What am I doing?". I think now it has got up to a point where there are very minimal blog posts in the recent times and everything else is on Twitter. The good thing about it is that there is a set of crowd on Twitter that follows me so that they get notified when I update. Apart from that the Facebook application for Twitter will update my Facebook status and the Twitter badge on my blog will show my latest tweets as well. The bad thing is that there is another set of crowd that want to see my blog being updated more often and not interested in my little tweets. This set of crowd is not the super-techie kind to spot the Twitter badge on the right-side column of my blog. My blog posts are more techie but in between there are posts about Cricket as well. So it can vary. There was a time my blog being categorized to Cricket but its my personal blog. So I really didn't care. I do try to keep it balanced but there is no define rule as such.

But then there are few other services I use on a day-to-day basis to share news, photos and articles on the Web. I use Flickr to share my photos. I Digg. I share news and articles on Google Reader. I share my bookmarks at del.icio.us and the list will surely grow. I already have the Twitter badge on the blog. I was displaying the Flickr photos but removed it for now coz the Flickr API was giving some problems. I surely can incorporate the rest of the services into my blog using the APIs, badges or feeds provided by them. In fact I was in the attempt to do that but have second thoughts and wonder whether it distract the main blog itself.

Now I have a problem. There are too many services I'm using. I need to syndicate all of them in one place. If you are one my friends in Facebook you could easily track all my updates coz I have added all the necessary applications for all the services I use. But then you need to be my friend. There is a bit of an urgency to get everything in one place. So I started working on building a Website for this purpose.


In the process I came across FriendFeed, a service that will grab all my updates from the services I use. You can check my FriendFeed page to get all the latest updates on all the services I use. So I guess I will settle with this for now. But it doesn't mean that I will stop the development on my Website. It will be up soon.

My current situation reminds me of a saying I found in an article that I read.
Are we nerds just making solutions to solve problems created by our own solutions?
I guess the answer is Yes based on the increasing number of Web 2.0 services. Any thoughts?

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