a mARTIAN dIARY

retroactive continuity - usually applies to television and film, when they revise something that happened in the past, possibly Conflicting with previous material

You ask people why they don’t like Linux; one of the common answers might be that they do not feel comfortable in the Linux GUI as in windows. But is the windows GUI actually better?  Here again the Matrix’s chicken question finds relevance, its not that Windows GUI is better than Linux or vice versa. It’s just a matter of familiarity. When you have been brainwashed into using windows from the time you touch a computer, you get withdrawal symptoms similar to people trying to stop drugs when you try to move into Linux. Similarly make a person work on *nix for most of his life and take him to windows he would experience the same.

My relationship with the little penguin started in my ninth standard, among the same time my relation ship started with windows though windows did beat Tux by around 5-6 months. Till then my exposure to computers was limited to the “special” classes of WordStar in my 7th and 8th standard. My guru of computers was my best friend Akhil from the ‘A’ batch (myself from the notorious the ‘C’ batch), whose SUPW (YES!! Socially Useful Productive Work :P) classes for computers started one class ahead of me. So while making the long journey back home from W/Island to kakanad our battered school bus.If you ever saw our old school bus you would understand why i just called it battered, rumor has it that it was a old old KSRTC bus that then transferred hands to a vegetable dealer who used to transport vegetable and finally it was brought by our school for transporting the vegetable of tomorrow, the students J. Ok it was just a rumor like the old school rumors of school Gardner who was a escaped convict and the abandoned house near the school that was haunted. But unlike the latter two, the first was very believable…. Well back to computers, I remember eagerly hearing each and every word uttered by him in the bus, as a humble disciple, by hearting each and every procedure, command and then going to class next week and showing off the revered skills of making font Bold and underlining and creating sub directory upon subdirectory to hide the file with your crush’s name.

Of course now these are things I remember fondly, for both my childish enthusiasm and my nonchalance about the obsolescence of the software I was so eagerly learning. These days were particularly relevant at the time when I was pretty disgusted to find out about the uncountable number of computer languages and platforms in this world. The fact that pained me was , at that time at least, thought that devoting time to a particular language/platform would make me that company’s stooge….I wanted to be a pure programmer, even it was just a figment of my imagination.

And this was the question posted by me to Shivu, our MindTree campus contact Mentor, to which he gave me one of my most valuable lessons as a engineer. I think he could empathize with me when I asked him about the futility of learning any particular language as it is bound to be replaced by a better one within our life time itself, Maybe he had gone thru the same questions in his youth himself? Anyways what he said makes eternal sense, that languages/platforms are not what make a engineer, they are just means to an ends. It’s the engineer’s ability to understand the problem, identify the correct tool and finally execute the solution that makes him an engineer.

During my 9th standard, while I was taking my one year sabbatical (actually my father got transfer there ) in lucknow, I got my first computer. Naturally it had just windows in it and I remember asking the person who installed a game in my comp on seeing him go to the c:/setup/setup.exe and execute it, “Do we have to learn all this??” Over the next few years a substantial amount of my father’s income went to cybermedia company with me becoming a regular reader of PCQuest and CHIP magazine( I think it was called something else then?) their obsession with Linux presented me with my first Linux setup CD which even though I installed properly, did not work due to some corrupt setup files. I remember one of my dad’s friend’s working at IBM(?) being pleasantly surprised at a 14 year old interested in linux and came to our house and installed from his CD. But the penguin and me did not hit it off at the beginning due to my never-heard-off video card which it would not support beyond 640×480. On a side note I had a sound card that was also not supported by linux but it was a possessed card. It would work only the first time everyday that I switched on the system. After a reboot it would make ghostly noises (dragging the sound) which I never got around to debug/explain. Some things are better left as a mystery I guess. So I stuck to windows for the better resolution and one-time-per-day sound for around a year.

Later in cochin I met up with Bhatt sir, a avid FSF enthusiast who came to my house  and installed the linux properly, the geeks’s disto Debian ??? and my tryst with the penguin truly started. I sent days doing things that I cant even remember but was a lot of fun at that time and am sure contributed in some way for helping me be the decent programmer I am today.
Coming back to our fav lil tux in the current world, I think that it offers a lot of things. But that does not mean that the other side does not offer anything. They have given the computing community a lot. Let be honest, unless people see a chance for making money , we would not see the kind of growth we have seen in the OS and particularly GUI department. And there are some areas that need commercial motives to succeed. Not to say that the emergence of linux has affected a lot of the MS/Other Propriety sf companies polices: some for better, some for worse. But the fact to remember is the penguin is a good alternative for various reasons maybe its to drive the cost down or maybe the application that you have in mind requires you to use the philosophies of *nix but he is and always will be  our cute lil tux and he’s here to stay