தமிழ் பெண்ணே...

ஒரு பெண் என்னைத் தொட்டால் இனிமை
    அவள் பெண்ணல்ல உண்மையில் புதுமை
அவள் புதுமையல்ல அவள் என் இமை
    அவள் இமையல்ல அவள் என் சாதிமை

வான் மழைத்துளி எல்லாம் மண்ணுக்கே
    என் உயிர்த்துளி எல்லாம் தமிழ்பெண்ணுக்கே
  

After a long time I saw a very good movie "Mozhi". I am not good at writing movie reviews, but I felt I should write about this movie since it has created a wave deep inside my heart. I have come across a lot of characters in my life, this movie made me to look back and take a review of these characters.

Long back when I was doing my seventh standard, myself along with three of my school mates did a project called "Care For the Uncared". I don't even have traces of the project report or the findings with me, but those memories still remain pleasant in my heart. We used to go to a lot of orphanges, spastic schools, old age homes, schools for the disabled, etc and even went to the roads interviewing the difficulties of the poor people. I did not know what is the cause for all these things but, I think at a later part of my life these experiences which I had with such people are going to help me. These things flashed my mind when I was watching that movie. Myself and Arun Ponniah (my room-mate and senior) watched this movie together. When they introduced Jothika, Arun was telling that she may be deaf and dumb, suddenly I remembered that the description deaf and dumb was inappropriate. When we were collecting information about such kind of people in one of the schools for disabled in a village near Trichy way back in 1996, we happen to meet the headmaster or the principal of that school. We had a chat with her regarding the difficulties these students face and things like that, during our conversation, we used "deaf and dumb" to describe these students. The headmaster of that school corrected us by saying not to call them "dumb", because usually a dumb person is the one who is foolish or stupid, but she told us these students are not fools, they have a sound knowledge and they have some disabilities. She asked us to call a person who has difficulty in speaking as "mute" and not as "dumb". So the correct term is "Deaf and Mute". These things rolled at the back of my mind when I saw the movie.

Since I started using a 64-bit processor, I got these doubts. After installing a GNU/Linux in my AMD Turion 64 bit X2, I would like to know whether the installed OS is 32 bit / 64 bit OS. Thank you for Ananth Srinivas who pasted this information in one of the mailing lists. Just issue the following command in GNU/Linux:

$ getconf LONG_BIT

If you get '64' then the OS is a 64-bit one, else if you get '32' then it is a 32-bit OS. The second thing is, you have a machine with some 'x' type of processor. You want to know whether your processor is 64-bit capable. In order to find this you can put the following command:

Finally I figured out a way to install Iceweasel web browser in Ubuntu Edgy Eft. In my workplace I use Ubuntu, and miss Debian a lot. One of the cool features in Debian is they have compiled Iceweasel with Indic fonts support which is a feature missing in Ubuntu Edgy Firefox. Due this I face issues when I access tamil pages in Ubuntu's firefox.

Hence, I decided to install Iceweasel in Ubuntu. After a lot of searching I finally found the procedure to use the debian package of Iceweasel from Debian's unstable package repository. The problem in installing the deb package of Iceweasel is the conflict with libfonconfig1, libpango and libpng versions which is available in Debian testing and that available in Ubuntu. I made some small changes to resolve these conflicts in Ubuntu without breaking the consistency of the system :)

This is one of the happiest moments of my life. It was a long time dream of mine which came true today. I ve become the offcial Debian package maintainer for gnome-subtitles . Gnome Subtitles is a subtitle editor for the GNOME Desktop. It supports the most common text-based subtitle formats and allows for subtitle editing, conversion and synchronization. Gnome subtitles is developed by Pedro Castro.

This how to explains the steps involved in configuring BCM4310 UART wireless card in Debian etch. Before proceeding to the steps check whether this how to applies* to you by issuing the following command:

 $  lspci | grep 4310 

I was one of the speaker and resource person at the FOSS2007 Workshop held at Thiagarajar College of Engineering (TCE). I took sessions on various topics such as Database tools, Web Programming tools and Content Management tools. This was a great experience for me since I was able to share my knowledge with various class of people. There were many lecturers and students from different colleges across Tamil Nadu.

It was a 6 day event and I was there on the last 2 days ie., on 12-01-2007 and 13-01-2007. On the first day FN, I handled sessions on Database tools and web programming tools for the delegates and in the AN I handled the same sessions for the second year CSE students of TCE. Both these sessions went on well for about 3 hours. There were good questions posted by the audience on these sessions. Unfortunately I had some problem with my throat at the end of the day and my voice was totally different. In the evening I had a nice chat with my junior friends.