It’s one of the (may be ‘The one’) greatest free software event that has been held in Sri Lanka. RMS – The founder of the FSF (free software foundation), GNU project & the licence and Emacs is now in Sri Lanka which in itself is pretty cool, but today I got the chance to attend one of three public gatherings organized in his tour of Sri Lanka and it’s an unforgettable experience in my life.
I always liked reading about prehistoric free software details (in 1950’s when software was inherently free because computer wasn’t an industry yet) ,how commercial software came to the arena in about 1970’s, downfall of MIT and born of GNU, born of GNU/Linux and born of OSI and such, but it’s just that – “reading”; but hearing from a person who has been the main figure or a catalyst of all these events is so wonderful, it’s like meeting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle after reading all Sherlock Holmes stories 🙂
But this doesn’t mean that I agree 100% with RMS. I don’t believe proprietary software are inherently evil or Open Source is bad. Some technologies such as compression technologies may be hidden from the public eye because the owning company may completely depend on that technology and releasing the source may mean basically the destruction of the firm. So my opinion is that sometimes we should be flexible enough to work with proprietary software and also Open Source should be used when adapting free software to a business model. But that’s me anyway.
However it has been a privilege to meet with this visionary man and to hear his speech. I sincerely hope that his speech today has turned many more young hearts to free software ideology.
(From left) Nadun, Sameera, RMS, Lakshan, me
Btw, also got a chance to play with a OLPC lap. Pretty cool stuff considering the price and very cute (eew, sounds …).
Updated:
First I have to say it’s absolute true in saying “time is gold”, because it seems to pass so quickly in front of our very eyes. However, last year was a fairly successful one for me, specially considering getting selected into GSoC and having a chance to do a project with Gnome. In addition to that, I also did some contributions to Drupal community in regards of modules and also can’t forget getting a new laptop :).
Also at Vesess we launched Plex – the job portal which is continuously gaining popularity and also got the chance to work in several other projects. So all and all, it can be called as one of the best years of my life so far.
Now here comes a new year, new hopes and new challenges. Yeah, It’s common in each passing year but I feel like it’ll be more challenging for me this year than in previous years when considering my personal expectations and expected of me in new year.
Whatever stocked there for the new year, I wish everyone that their stocks contain more pleasant surprises and all hopes may become true !
I loved reading Prof. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings and all other Middle Earth related books written during WW II season. And there’s no need to talk about LOTR movies done by Peter Jakson because they made a land mark in modern Hollywood movies, specially in Special Effects arena. Then LOTR games done by EA Sports also became one of my favourites. So all and all I’m a huge fan of Lord of The Rings in every aspect.
After the success of LOTR movies it was reported that there has been some issues between New Line Cinema and Peter Jakson. But it made my day hearing that Peter Jakson and Fran Walsh are going to build another two more movies based on “The Hobbit”, which is the preclude to Lord of The Rings trilogy.
PETER JACKSON AND NEW LINE CINEMA JOIN WITH MGM TO PRODUCE “THE HOBBIT” Movie
Hopefully we will be able to see another two great LOTR movies in another few years time.
I had enough with eating crap with Vista. My last line of patience warned off when I happened to wait about 5 seconds when changing from one MS Doc file to another and also happened that I was running with time to finish a project report. No, I’m not running on 256 ram, it’s 1 GB and this kind of a time wastage is totally unacceptable. You may ask why I put up with Vista in the first place. That’s thanks to HP’s decision to embrace Vista so my laptop was pre-built with Vista and no chance to downgrade because there are no drivers. So where to go now ? Easy….Gutsy.
So I’m now another guy who left windows permanently because of their own defects. I was playing dumb with Vista for this long had nothing to do with Vista being better, it’s because of substitutions not being available for some applications that I was used to in Windows environment – mainly Macromedia(now Adobe) Dreamweaver and Fireworks. Now before biting my head off, yes – there are good web developer editors in Linux such as NVu or KompoZer but they will need another few developing years to get into the same line as Dreamweaver (which had a long time to develop into the state now in) and I have to have some thing until then.
But my worries were groundless as Wine now supports Macromedia 8 series like a babe. Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash all works perfectly with Wine – installation to Execution. Another great thing with Gutsy is that my Broadcom network card support is inbuilt and with some additional applications I can search networks and connect to them like a charm. Also I’m using AWN manager to manage desktop (here is a great article on desktop styling – thanks to Lakshan) and now it looks like a hybrid between Leopard and Vista. So what else I can ask for ?
Here is my application list in Ubuntu.
Web developments = Wine + DreamWeaver 8
Web images = Wine + Fireworks 8
Photo Editing = Gimp
Java editor = NetBeans for Linux
Python = Eclipse with PyDev plugin
IM client = Pidgin
Wifi manager = gtkwifi and wifi radar
Skype = Skype for Linux
Btw, My machine is AMD 64 X2, therefore had some issues and had to do some tweaks when installing some applications but nothing I can’t handle with some effort. The catch is that I can work with all comforts like in Windows with half the memory usage as in Windows.
