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Archive for the 'Software' Category

Standards: Will India ever wake up?

Tuesday, May 15th, 2007

ConsortiumInfo.org - Norwegian Standards Council Recommends Mandatory use of ODF and PDF
Norway is the latest European country to move closer to mandatory government use of ODF (and PDF). According to a press release provided in translation to me by an authoritative source, Norway now joins Belgium, Finland, and France (among other nations) […]

Show us the code!

Sunday, February 25th, 2007

Well, this is what the community had to say to Steve Ballmer.
It’s come to many in the Linux community’s attention you have claimed again and again, that Linux violates Microsoft’s intellectual property. Not only that, but it’s been reported Microsoft has convinced businesses to pay for a Linux patent that you can’t provide.
So, Ballmer […]

Indic Input Extension

Monday, January 8th, 2007

Indic Input Extension is an extension to Firefox that lets the user input Indian language content without much difficulty. It supports Hindi, Telugu, Tamil and a few other Indian languages for phonetic input. Needless to say, I wrote the ‘firefox’ part of it and the backend is mostly from the Entrans project, which […]

Mozilla and Firefox forked?

Friday, October 13th, 2006

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/
That was kind of hard to believe, but had to after I saw this page on gnu.org.  Its true that it would not take more than a week to roll out another browser based on the free sources available from mozilla.org, but would this not dilute the dominance of mozilla and lead way to IE […]

Quickest Microsoft Patch Ever

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006

It took three days for Microsoft to release a patch to its DRM after a hacker developed an application called FairUse4WM that strips the copy protection from Windows Media DRM 10 and 11 files.
Compare this with “Patch Tuesday” - the second Tuesday of every month, the day on which Microsoft releases security and other patches […]

Online Encoding Proxy

Wednesday, September 6th, 2006

For all those people who are fed up of downloading fonts, one-per-website for all the Indian news-paper sites you visit… Here is a good news, the Swecha team has put up a web proxy for encoding conversion.
All you have to do is follow the link to your favorite news paper from http://uni.swecha.org/ [Offline at the […]

Choosing the right MTA - Part 2

Thursday, August 31st, 2006

The following are two articles on LWN about the mail transfer agents.  The second would be available for free reading after September 7th, 2006.
A Comparision of Mail Transfer Agents  - Part I
A Comparision of Mail Transfer Agents - PartII

Choosing the right MTA

Thursday, June 29th, 2006

What are the general expectations from an MTA?

Perform its primary task of sending mails. Should allow custom mail routes, sending via a SMTP server, envelope rewrite, virtual hosting.
Allow interfacing with spam and anti-virus utilities
Support authentication using the already existing authentication systems in my organization
Efficient mail storage (mbox is obsolete)
Support quotas
Easy to configure, help the […]

NetworkManager - Mobile Networking made Easy

Monday, June 26th, 2006

NetworkManager:
Networking on Linux right now is painful for the mobile desktop user, especially in comparison to other operating systems. A laptop user should never need to use the command line or configuration files to manage their network; it should “Just Work” as automatically as possible and intrude as little as possible into the user’s workflow. […]

Ubuntu: Derivative or Fork?

Thursday, June 8th, 2006

LXer: Ubuntu: derivative or fork?:
Ubuntu has something special that no other distribution ever had before. It shipped its own CDs to you, anywhere in the world for free. It has money (10 million USD from Mark Shuttleworth) and can afford that. For Linux newbies out there, Ubuntu is like Windows. In much the same way […]