GIMP Rocks!!!

Long time since I changed the look of my web site. Was wondering over the weekend how to change it and then this idea struck. Simple design with a cartoon picture of mine. Sounded interesting. After searching all the pics found one which can fit. Actually there are very less of mine present so have to pick one of the existing. 

Now need to convert it to a black and white sketch. GIMP was the first one to be selected for editing but not sure how to do and also not comfortable with all the menus in it. So the google boss helped it out. Got a tutorial which does that and its pretty straight forward. Few steps and here it comes. Good and nice looking drawing of mine :) 

GIMP has too many options and not sure if some one is using all of them. But it is too good for a open source tool and of course I am not into the domain of image editing so can’t tell how good or bad it is but all I can say is it did the job and worked for me. 

Just created a wrapper and uploaded it to site.

Looks cool isn’t it? 

That’s why I say GIMP Rocks!!!!

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Browser Wars!!!

Quite impressive to find that Mozilla has captured good amount of users :)  Here are the list of statistics from w3 schools. Happy to see Mozilla taking over. 

2008	IE7	IE6	IE5	Fx	Moz	S	O
August	26.0%	24.5%	0.1%	43.7%	0.5%	2.6%	2.1%
July	26.4%	25.3%	0.3%	42.6%	0.5%	2.5%	1.9%
June	27.0%	26.5%	0.5%	41.0%	0.5%	2.6%	1.7%
May	26.5%	27.3%	0.7%	39.8%	0.7%	2.4%	1.5%
April	24.9%	28.9%	1.0%	39.1%	0.9%	2.2%	1.4%
March	23.3%	29.5%	1.1%	37.0%	1.1%	2.1%	1.4%
February	22.7%	30.7%	1.3%	36.5%	1.2%	2.0%	1.4%
January	21.2%	32.0%	1.5%	36.4%	1.3%	1.9%	1.4%

This is from the w3schools. You can see the same info here http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp. 

So now IE is at 50.5% and Mozilla at 43.7% Will have to wait and see for the month where Mozilla will post more. Hope that is not far......

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Why Open Sources failed to capture the market?

Microsoft and Apple the major two players in the operating system sector have captured quite a good amount of market may be entire before the actual open sources started developing. Now as usual when you have a system in place and is good no one wants to even look at other options even there are better things available. There might be several bugs and security issues with Windows but people still tend to use that (including me, but at least I will have dual boot always even the office laptop) because they are used to it. Now that people are used to a kind of interface they find the other user interface difficult to learn.

A typical example a Nokia phone user will find it difficult to use any other mobile. So all the other mobile’s interface is bad is false knowing that all other manufacturers are having the same amount of market.  It’s the same with other brand mobile users with Nokia. So actually it is not that the things are actually bad, but it is that people are not used to. 

Coming back to the open sources at least to make people try you have to tell them it is better, to tell them it is better it has to go through some media, to go through some media it involves cost, for those costs some one has to support and pay. Huh? Now in spite of spending effort to write good programs and giving them free some one has to pay to make the user use it? Sounds awful. 

So what is the way out now?

To be continued..

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So Today.....

Reached home on time today and it started raining after I reached it started raining badly and as usual the power went off and so in dark :) This is what happens to the IT City. Had a busy day at office, and was not feeling well so reached home early. It rained quite long almost for 2 hours continiously.

Took a bit of rest and started to write this entry. Today have seen the Microsoft Ad of the Shoe Circus and was surprised to see how stupid ads can be. So they have started the ad campaign now. But why? Insecure about the open source or the free soft wares available today? Or Vista not working as expected? Might be few of the reasons. So the war of Open Source Vs Microsoft had already begun. Which side are you on? I support open source. At least if not war I like the competition with MS.  Most of the things I use daily keeping the OS aside are open sources and are free wares. And I am sure most of you out there will be using the free services of some one, yet we fail to recognize and acknowledge the importance and usage. Take it from the Instant Messengers, Mail accounts, forums, blogs, downloads and lot of utilities that are installed all comes free, there are few widely used of the many present out there.  Well these might be free but some did the effort to get all those applications. 

Coming to Open Source, I use most of them in my day to day life. If they are not going to give me those facilities and sources for free today I will have to close down all and will be struggling to get my own things up. To accept the fact there are out standing applications available as open sources, it is just that people are not aware. A friend of mine who is a software engineer for the past 3 years was setting up a site and he is going to take a paid service when I actually told him he can go for one of the open sources already available. He was like they are not ‘Ad Free’. I was shocked and told him that is a misconception and told him some facts. If a Software guy doesn’t know open sources how will a common man know.

So decided today to start an awareness program on open source. Do some ads or write some analytical statistics of the programs that are available and tell the people out there how good the things are. If you are interested in joining me please get in touch I will be happy to work with you and make a better software world.

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