Mysore Palace at night

Basement Window

Now running Dapper Drake

I just installed Dapper Drake flight5 on my laptop. For those of you wondering if I have lost my mind, dont worry I havent. Dapper Drake is the latest release of Ubuntu linux, a flavour of linux I have been trying out for the last year.

A good open source alternative to M$ Windows has been something I have been interested in a while, and its good to see a version of Linux that is finally coming close. For anyone who has ever tried installing Linux or using Linux for that matter, it can be pretty daunting. I once took a whole day trying to update a program on Fedora, and didnt succeed. So when Ubuntu gets to a point where, installing/updating a program is as easy as a Win/Mac, then there is good reason to cheer. The fact that Ubuntu now lets me log onto wireless networks (what Win and Mac users take for granted) underscores how far free OS alternatives have come.

I wont bore folk with why Linux is so much better etc., everyone has an opinion on such stuff and I wont bore you with mine.

I hope to post some post-install procedures I used to get Dapper to a point that I'm happy using it instead of Windows. I hope that helps other newbies like me who spend considerable amounts of time trawling the web trying to find useful guides to getting everything up and running.

Photo blog

Being a passionate photographer, its always been frustrating to realize that its pretty hard to post photos online in one central place. I have had a flickr account for a while, but if you want to associate those photos with your blog, you need to do that from within flickr, etc. etc. All in all, things were painful.

Hello, a program that Blogger encourages users to use, was always off limits as it didnt work behind a proxy server (one of my few complaints with the computer system at NCBS. Now that those restrictions don't apply, expect to see many more photos on my blog, and more often.

I hope to post photos more often now, with some luck, I may actually get better at this photography stuff...

A Tree

Interesting signature :)

Yes, its another post on Firefox, but it isnt what you think it is. I came across this signature belonging to a slashdot subscriber. I thought it was really funny, so I had to post :)

"Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes."

Constant gardener - go see

My initial reaction to the Constant Gardener was rather tepid. The almost anarchic wife of a british diplomat who keeps breaking the rules, how boring...

But there are many things that set this movie above the rest, fine performances by Ralph Fiennes & Rachel Weisz (she won an Oscar for this role), very realistic somewhat raw imagery from some of the poorest parts of Africa, great music and last but not the least, the very interesting premise or plotline. So, do big pharma companies take advantage of poor people in the third world, they probably do. The movie also reminded me of why Africa always makes me sad, I dont think there is any other place on the planet that attracts such misery, wish we could fix it...

Go see this one.

NBA game I went to...

Originally uploaded by j's shoebox.

This is a snap from the NBA game (Philly Sixers vs. Chicago Bulls) I had gone for a couple of weeks ago. Really enjoyed the game, it was the first big basketball game I had ever gone to, and I always wanted to see an NBA game.

That said, its amazing how well organized the games are, nothing like the unruly cricket games you shudder to go to back home. Anyway, the Sixers won the game in a closely fought game that was pretty high scoring.

Will get T & A for these things once they are old enough :)



ps. The photo was clicked by Jeff