Replace the 'aanava's

Unicode standard has been updated to 5.1

May malayalees are not happy with this version because they have something called
aanava chillu in place now. You can read more about it here.

You can see why people dislikes aanava chilus here.

Meanwhile, I wrote a greasemonkey script to replace aanava chillus with the good old
chillus.. get it here.

Free the University !

Did you have to study M$ access in your Database course?
Or did your syllabus specify Borland Compiler to learn C ?

Report it here : fci.wikia.com/wiki/Syllabus_Review

The initiative is to collect all instances of proprietary softwares in curriculums
and try to clean them up.

Mammootty and Microsoft ??

Mammootty going to be brand ambassador for Microsoft !!

"Mammootty said he wants to launch the project to help make all sections of the society IT literate."

Mr Mammootty, do you want to take away our freedom for that? That too when there are better ways for doing this.

An Open Letter to Mammootty by freedom lovers

GNU/Linux Install fest

ilug-tvm organized GNU/Linux Install festival at trivandrum on April 12th.

The event was a huge success, we installed GNU systems into more than 50 machines!

More news...

The free software movement is a political cause, not a technical one.

Richard M Stallman writes in emac-devel list.

  What I'm trying to say is: I won't discuss which dVCS we choose
(unless it makes Windows development a PITA). But I agree with Jeremy
Maitin-Shepard that the cause of free software is strengthened by us
selecting among the free alternatives the one that best serves our
technical, not political, needs.

That is completely backwards.  The free software movement is a
political cause, not a technical one.  "Choose based on technical
criteria first of all" is the opposite of what we say.

There are many reasons why GNU packages should support other GNU
packages.

The GNU Project is not just a collection of software packages.  Its
intended result is a coherent operating system.  It is particularly
important therefore that GNU packages should work well with other GNU
packages.  For instance, we would like Emacs to work well with git or
mercurial, but we especially want it to work well with Bzr.

The maintainers of one GNU package should use other GNU packages so
they will notice whether the packages work well together, and make
them work well together.

We also promote use of other GNU packages in this way.
Other people don't necessarily see which editor you use,
but they all see what dVCS you use.

Professors Slam Java As "Damaging" To Students

"The resulting set of skills [from today's educational practices] is insufficient for today's software industry (in particular for safety and security purposes) and, unfortunately, matches well what the outsourcing industry can offer. We are training easily replaceable professionals... Java programming courses did not prepare our students for the first course in systems, much less for more advanced ones. Students found it hard to write programs that did not have a graphic interface, had no feeling for the relationship between the source program and what the hardware would actually do, and (most damaging) did not understand the semantics of pointers at all, which made the use of C in systems programming very challenging."

Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?

Free schools of proprietry software

Richard M Stallman gave a small speech at The University of Pavia, in Italy, in which he focused on the importance of having free software at schools.

Transcript here

I had to study Microsoft Access in my DBMS course at college. It was too late when I released that it
was the worst example !!