Platonic

The entire world seem to be on the run. It’s longer than marathon and there does not seem to be an end for this. Alas! its already 9th Feb 2008. I might submit this post on 10th ;). Are we in a “Time Machine“? H.G Wells took us to the future with his book and I really want it to happen here in real life. Check these lines and they have caught my attention from few days. From the song “Imagine” by John lennon

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one

Life is ain’t no funny. Its fun to live and let others live. Its real and its just not the dream. When there is a lot to achieve and explore no one bothers to slow down and look back. At least, its true in my case. Oh yes, I’m a workaholic. Its not work that I do its my hobby. I love the work which I do and hence I never get tired. When there is fun in work why not enjoy and live happily for few more hours with what we do.

This week the time I spent analyzing what I have been doing and what I have got to do did teach me a lot. I did learn where I got to slow down and organize myself to take the right path and optimize the possible results. Looks like the training which I have been conducting is ending with a good result. There are few more who need to be deployed into work but they can work on Linux with little or no help. There is a lot to be done in order to manage the work flow and its high time for me to reach up to the next level and there are many more reasons to think on these lines.

My company is going to celebrate its 5th birthday very soon and preparations are underway. And I’m also growing old day by day and there is one more year which will be added to my profile. Yes, I’m entering into the prime time of my life. Turning 25 in an another 3 days time. Its time for me and my company both to do lots of planning to see a rapid growth in the near future. There are lots and lots of challenges ahead. It’s not at all difficult to set the milestones, targets and achieve them. All it takes is kicking our targets far away from us and set new ones far away to keep going. Life is a never ending journey and we should be adding spice to it all the time.

What milestones I have to set? What is my real target? Where I’m heading to? How much I need to prepare and plan for future? Am I gambling with options? How I can organize my self much better? Where I’m going wrong and why?

If I can get answers for these in a couple of days time, thats going to be my birthday present for myself. I think it’s necessary for every one to slow down and check the checklist to avoid crash landing.

“On the run, apply breaks when you see some humps else you might get hurt. Drive safe and live longer”

Grammar is important…it’s the vessel that carries your ideas.

Many of us depend on various tools to correct the errors in our write ups because we fail to identify the silliest mistakes which we keep repeating every now and then. Its very much important to read and re-read our letters, memos, reports, responses etc in corporate words to ensure that we are conveying the right message to every we deal with. Any ignorance towards spellings and grammar can result in helpless situations and we make fools of ourselves in front of customers.

It was hard to find a good tool in Linux to make corrections to my documents so far. I have been searching for some tool which can help me with this task for years now. Yes, Firefox does come with good spell checker now but we are talking about “Grammar” which more important than spellings. While reading text, we just ignore the spelling mistakes many times. I have come across various novels in which I found many spelling mistakes but I couldn’t give much attention towards it to report back to the writer or publisher just because some of those novels were very interesting and I was unable to put them down.

OpenSource language checker found at LanguageTool dot Org is just great and it proves that FOSS community is not far behind any other proprietary software developers in anything. You won’t believe this tool is available for free and you can even go ahead and plug it into any application you want. LanguageTool is a tool which can detect errors that a simple spell checker cannot detect. So far this tool supports 11 language. If you have OpenOffice you can integrate this tool into it.

Try LanguageTool via Java WebStart: I found this stand alone application very much useful for my needs at home and also for my office work.
Start LanguageTool (9 MB)

Download:
LanguageTool 0.9.1, 9 MB, requires Java 5.0 or later

Online Demo (If you don’t want to take pain of trying it): Click here

License: LanguageTool is freely available under the LGPL.

Brain behind this tool: LanguageTool was originally written by Daniel Naber and is now maintained by Daniel Naber and Marcin Miłkowski. To contact him, subscribe to the mailing list or visit his homepage at www.danielnaber.de.

Software requirements: Make sure Java 5.0 or later from Sun Microsystems is installed on your system. Java versions which are not from Sun Microsystems may not work. Then make sure this version of Java is selected in OpenOffice.org (under Tools -> Options -> Java).

For hackers: The source is available at Sourceforge

Few Screen Shots: available here.

Presentation by Daniel: Integrated Tools for Spelling, Style, and Grammar Checking

You rock when you make no mistakes, when you make one no one will buy it.

I wrote about “Fun with Crash” on 31st Jan. But forgot to mention about biggest Internet Outage which affected many businesses in two continents very badly.

Find the detailed report here CNN and Renesys

Few cuts in internet cables under Mediterranean did bring in lots of chaos and work was at standstill in many countries. Luckily I didn’t get affected much during this outage. Even at home internet connection was found to be just fine. At office it just took me seconds to switch the gateway to an alternative one.

We created so many things on this earth but we are still trying to create reliable backup solutions. See the impacts which are directly affecting our lives. When do we create something which never gets broken and when there will be no impacts even if there is a huge breakdown of system? Can we beat the Creator who created this world?

We talk about technology and talk big about bringing that nearer to common man. How much successful we are? Piracy is one of the biggest problem which we keep discussing all the time. Are we really fighting against piracy? We also know that there is a community which works for nothing to bring good things for Society and does help us to stop using pirated softwares on our machines. How many of us share info about it with others?

Linux, Free and OpenSource software who doesn’t know about these words these days. But how many really think of going and adopting a technology which might turn out to be a headache?. Just a sec., Headache? Linux? OpenSource? Hey, come on you have better things in this free world and there are enough freedoms for you to choose what you want also you can decide what you want to do with it once you have it in your hands.

Not many encourage use of Linux and there are not many people who can show off what can be done with Linux and how it is far better than other proprietary operating systems. Even many of the governments doesn’t have ‘CS’ factor to analyze what is good and what is not for the society and end up using our tax money to purchase insecure solutions from corporates.

When you think at the root level, many people in our country can’t even understand “What is technology?”. The knowledge is not reachable, this might be the main reason behind this. Most of the books related to many technologies are available in “English” and it does take a good amount of time for any one to learn English and then start reading about technologies. I have been reading Poornachandra Thejaswi’s scientific books from few months now and I did learn how much it is important to teach our people about the technology and advancements. That too in their own language.

Yesterday I started writing about “Linux” in Kannada on my blog space at Sampada. It is a series of write ups on Linux and it’s usage for every one in ‘Kannada’. My small effort to spread knowledge to my own community. The series is called as “LinuxaayaNa“.

“Knowledge is Power! Share it“