How The American Economy Got Messed Up

I received this in an email forward.

Linda is the proprietor of a bar in Cork. In order to increase sales, she decides to allow her loyal customers … Read more.

India’s 500 rupee laptop out in February 2009

India’s $10 laptop will be out in February 2009.

UPDATE: It was a hoax. There was no laptop, it was a storage device with wires sticking out.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to my blog visitors.

Christmas is a festival celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. Read the Bible verses related to Jesus’ birth.

Also, learn how to send Christmas wishes in over 100 languages.

Make Money from Old Shoes

What do you do with your old shoes? Throw them away? Ever thought about making money from them?

Here’s a cartoon in today’s Deccan Chronicle that suggests a solution.

Shoes go green, literally.

Resumes on t-shirts

Signs that the economy is terribly messed up.

People have had resumes on their t-shirts before, just for fun, but this one is more serious.

Read more.

Teacher confiscates Linux CD and writes angry letter to founder

In latest news, a teacher in Texas saw a student showing off his Linux LiveCD in action. She was so angry that she not only confiscated his CD but wrote an angry letter to the founder of HeliOS, Ken Starks.
Her letter reads as follows:

Upon looking at his computer, I saw he was giving a demonstration of some sort. The student was showing the ability of the laptop and handing out Linux disks. After confiscating the disks I called a confrence with the student and that is how I came to discover you and your organization. Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows. Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you, the claims you make are grossly over-stated and hinge on falsehoods. I admire your attempts in getting computers in the hands of disadvantaged people but putting linux on these machines is holding our kids back.

Ms. Teacher, first of all, conference is spelt as “conference” and not “confrence”.

Next, how do you assume that no software is free? Are you so uninformed or did just get out of your cave this morning? If you had a problem with Linux during college (which college? I’m dying to know!!) you can’t dump the results of your unsucessful attempts on kids who are eager to learn a new operating system that is far superior to Windows. Kids who want to learn how to use Linux should be allowed to do so and not restricted to the OS shoved down on their throats as the “standard OS”. You are holding the kids back, not poor Ken Starks’ flavour of Linux.

The teacher goes on to say this:

This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older verison of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them…”

Karen xxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxx Middle School
AISD

Very interesting! I’m sure Microsoft is keeping NEA happy. I’ve heard of other teachers who have tried to get Linux installed in their school computers so the kids can learn something other than Windows, and all these teachers have had stiff opposition. Some were told to keep it down or they’d lose their jobs.

Teachers like Karen should be made to attend a lesson in OS tolerance. If they think Microsoft is king because that’s what they were told or because they couldn’t handle Linux, its their problem. I’ve seen 11-year old kids use Linux with ease. Maybe the teacher wasn’t smart enough, maybe she didn’t have the patience, maybe she just couldn’t handle something as hot as Linux. But she’s very wrong to impose her monopolistic beliefs on her students. Its beyond her scope if she doesn’t understand the benefits of something she hasn’t used properly.

Labelling Linux with the wrong tags and forcing kids to grow up on some proprietary software with no scope of imagination or creative thinking is yet another reason for the dumbing down of the school system in America.

Read more here.

Bush and Intrepid: Happy Veteran’s Day

Before reading the article, I thought for a second Bush had embraced Intrepid Ibex or saluted veterans starting using Ubuntu’s latest Intrepid Ibex.

No, actually he paid tributes to the American soldiers at the rededication ceremony of the USS Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. I salute these brave soldiers who are serving America in different parts of the world and join others in praying for their safe and quick return.

Happy Veteran’s Day. Particularly to my good friend Don Martin and the other veterans who frequent my blog.

Read more here.

US lawmakers put bailout bill online

The US lawmakers have finally come to a bailout decision. They quoted a “spirit of openness” as they put the bailout bill on the Internet. The Bill is called Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008.

The House of Representatives will vote on the bill on Monday and the leaders hope it will project a sense of transparency.

The Bill has more than 100 pages and you can download it as as a PDF file here.

Read the rest of the news here.

Google Chrome: Turn off Password Save

One of the first things I do when I install Firefox is to disable the password save option. I have no intention of letting my username/password pairs get saved automatically for others to view later on.

In Google Chrome, to disable the save-password option, click on the little spanner icon on the top right (beside the address bar), select Options, click on the Minor Tweaks tab and select Never save passwords. If you want to view passwords already saved, click on “Show saved passwords”!

turn off password saving in google chrome

UPDATE: Commentator Jim has this useful information to add in the comments section.

Here’s a scenario no one has discussed.

1. Allow Chrome to import information from a previously existing Firefox installation
2. Look at Wrench(Spanner)/Options/Minor Tweaks/Show Saved Passwords
3. Select a site, then click “Show Password”

Your saved password from Firefox is displayed in plain text. Chrome has read your password from Firefox, then made it available to anyone in possession of your machine. Physical security is still the most important aspect of security! We really need the master password now!

Google Chrome Browser is Out

Google released its browser named Chrome this afternoon. After downloading the tiny file (474kb) and installing it, I tried visiting a few sites and they all rendered very fast. CSS support is great in this browser.

Then, I visited my website to see what the user-agent string would be displayed as. I was on Windows XP at the moment. The user-agent string was this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

Okay, I tweaked my browser display code to recognize the Chrome browser, so you can check it here. You should get something like this:

google chrome browser detect on aruljohn.com

The browser comes with Adobe Flash Player 9 out of the box (unlike Firefox), so you don’t have to install it. Java runtime isn’t installed and I’m not sure if that can be done at the moment.

One of the things I like most about this apart from the speed is the Chrome Inspector. Right-click on any page and select Inspect Element. It will show you a multi-tabbed display of the DOM elements, beginning with html and body. This is very useful for debugging.

chrome > elements

Selecting the Resources shows a graphical display of the time and size of each components of the current webpage.

chrome > resources

Yes, there are Firefox add-ons/extensions for this, but I think its great that Google included this in its web browser. Its a boon to those who use Firebug on a daily basis.

As of now, there is only a Windows version, Mac users will have to wait for a little more while.

Go ahead and download it here.