The Maths Tower (right), which is adjacent to Computer Science (left) and was recently demolished

ATER this evening I shall attend a lecture, which will be delivered by an honourable guest: Irving Wladawsky-Berger. It takes place immediately after my meeting with the Supervisor, who happens to head the Department.

I don’t go to public talks as regularly as I used, but it’s probably because it no longer is a must. Attendance is not mandatory and absence is rarely frowned upon. I sometimes look back at them days when I attended lectures and exams. I have no yearnings whatsoever. My bad and sporadic sleeping habits had me fall asleep in virtually any early lecture. Examination has proven to be no-one’s favourite either.

The last exam I took dates back to June 2003. I remember this date rather vividly because, rather than celebrating this milstones, I prepared for an job interview that I had scheduled for the following day. At that stage, I was not at all nervous about exam. A quick ‘session’ involving Seinfeld episodes (I had all episodes on my hard-drive) become almost a must right before any exam, as a deliverer of light entertainment.

Either way, today I shall return to the Department of Computer Science to be part of what should be a fascinating presentation. As I slept 3 times today already, there is little or no chance of me falling asleep. Fingers crossed.

The affordability of Linux begins to show. Last year I was getting excited over a Linux laptop that was sold for under $500. This year, however, new barriers are being pushed. A few prime examples are listed below:

• $150 for a Linux desktop computer in China
• The $100 laptop for developing countires
• Linspire PC for $159 in the States
• In Britain, several shops sell an eSys unit for as little as 127 pounds. Nowadays, the cost keeps sliding. There are finally some laptops from eSys as well.

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

N my own eyes at least, this story is pretty remarkable as it marks a certain milsetone. Sony, being a large and proprietary-oriented brand, has opted for Open Source solutions. The news has so far it has been covered in techworld.com and computerpartner.nl. To quote:

Sony Online Entertainment is to replace some Oracle databases with software from EnterpriseDB in a vote of confidence for the open-source company. Sony is the company’s biggest customer win to date.

Oracle’s acquisition of Open Source companies was not enough to prevent the inevitable. They even tried to buy and thus eliminate MySQL, unsuccessfully so.

NE part of me truly loves Google — loving Google like nobody else! Google gives me plenty of referrals: about 500 for text search and over 400 for image search every day; and that’s for my main Web site alone. So how could I ever complain? It seems to respect me and treat me so well. Then again, it is akin to having an evil spouse, whose living is made in some dishonest ways. Allow me to elaborate if I may.

As many others, I sure have my Google ‘pet peeves’. I love them and dislike them at the same time, for a whole variety of reasons. Some of the more recent controversial moves, such as censorship in China and paid-for competitive ads (leading to manipulation the search results), had me think twice. I have mixed feelings, which makes me no exception. I feel betrayed sometimes. I feel as though I have been cheated on since Google is not the woman whom I married — the one who vowed to “do no evil”.

However, and despite it all, Google seems to hurt others the most. It rarely if ever punishes myself. So should I respect that ‘wife’ of mine? Or should I sympathise with others and demonstrate whenever I get the chance? I was once approached by Google regarding a job (during controversial times too), but nowadays, I do not believe like I could ever accept it. I continue to respect the Google search engine, which is doing a splendid job, technically-speaking. I am not going to embrace too stern a principle. I am about to ‘Googlefast’, as Chris Pirillo recently called it, but I just try to remain objective and fair (thus come my outbursts of criticism).

My ‘wife’ has committed her sins. One day she may face the consequences, but I will probably abide by my commitments to her and remain passive while she justifiably suffers in court. Each crime has got to bring its bitter consequences and I just hope that the mantra was not disposed of , yet.

Google can still improve. And I am not talking about their search results.

According to the French, OpenOffice is far more affordable than Microsoft Office. Although the figures do not account for running costs, at least on the face of it, they provide an initial estimate of TCO.

The French tax agency claims that upgrading its 80,000 desktops to Office XP would cost €29.5m, but switching to OpenOffice.org only €200,000

In other news, France will invest plenty of money in Open Source projects. The story’s original source states:

Capgemini, LINAGORA and Bull recently won the largest Open Source support, maintenance and solution development project in the country, as part of the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry’s COPERNIC program. The deal is worth a minimum of €15 million and a maximum of €40 million over three years.

After some shallow exploration, I have found a template/example for poster preparation in L^AT_EX. It is only one among many, but I pressed on with that particular one almost blindly. I am currently in the process of preparing one poster for a conference I will attend in Arlington, Virginia within a couple of weeks (there will be no blogging in that period).

Ironically perhaps, the author of this ‘T_EX forgery’ is currently working at Microsoft. He has been quite a successful researcher and I even exchanged a few E-mails with him. Nonetheless, the scenario is rather odd. Employment in Microsoft lies in complete disagreement to intentions of such contribution to to our L^AT_EX community. T_EX often obviates the need for commercial, proprietary software such as Adobe Illustrator.

Upon closer inspection, I discovered that another poster template produces visually-richer results. Yet, I have no experience with this L^AT_EX kit. If you have experience with other such packages and can also comment on them, please post them below for others to benefit from.

Previously, in my younger days of naive existence, I actually created a poster by handling a 6,000×4,000-pixel image in the GIMP. It was rather convenient, to be honest, but making subsequent changes was a tough task. You can find the amateur outcome on this site as a shrunk-down and down-sampled JPEG, as well as a lossy full-sized version. On my hard-drive I retain a ZIP archive which contains the 70-megabyte original bitmap. What a pixelated beast!

RedHat Linux

HERE is finally a large bunch of screenshots from Fedora Core 5, which in this case is GNOME-based. The gallery has been added last night and it provides insight into the process of installation up to the level of a running working environment. Red Hat have good reputation for an installation process which is user-friendly.

Personally, I continue to prefer SuSE. KDE may not be as simple as GNOME and thus less suitable for beginners, but it gives greater power and has many reasons to be favoured.