I do. So do many, many people embracing open-source for this very reason.

There may not be enough numbers in the real world at the moment, but isn’t this too early to see hordes of people jumping ship? Yes, numbers are important, but to get them, I think you’ll need time.

Freedom and Linux were left trailing for most of the last decade, and a good part of this, while proprietary systems like the Mac and Windows raced ahead. In addition, Freedom has had psychological setbacks in corporate minds of the likes of SCO lawsuits derailing adoption progress. Yet, it is remarkable to see operating systems like Ubuntu spring back and rejoin the progress curve.

We’ve only had a couple-of-years old operating system, which truly appreciates users’ freedom, and which is perfectly suitable for users with any skill level. LTS (long term service support) licenses that Ubuntu currently offers only reinforces the right kind of confidence in the corporate IT environment. For the home user, we need more visibility, and demonstration of ease of use—too many previous Linux versions have disappointed the optimist adopter, when compared with what has been commercially available. That Ubuntu stands a chance, needs a voice, which needs to be heard.

A lot of us, who have embraced freedom, are doing what we can—family, friends, community, our weblogs, and in our companies explaining the benefits of a system that is free as in freedom.

But more than being a fanatic about a specific operating system, I’m rather an active advocate of freedom of data. How can this happen in other commercial operating systems? If Macs and Windows of the world can truly allow the users to have their content transported (imported or exported) without loss of fidelity, and without being locked into applications, and/or other proprietary formats, then that would mark the arrival of a true levelling field in terms of freedom. Then, to me at least, it wouldn’t matter if I’d use a Mac, or a Windows or Linux, or any other.

The last stat, imho, tells the most interesting story. That 94.3% or 352.46 GB out of 373.68 GB [is] comprised of ISOs.

In fact, instead of “Official Country Mirrors”, IMHO, we need several “local” (read regional / state-wise) mirrors in India.. So, let 100 mirrors bloom!

I couldn’t agree more. Organizations, government and educational institutions with unlimited bandwidth can make this happen. Without local mirrors, FOSS as an ideology and its actual usage is hard to imagine; and that would be a shame since India is such a pro open-source country.

I bet the supreme geeks at Flickr didn’t think of this either—or else they’d have provided us with a Golden ratio option among “All sizes”. Stewart, Caterina, how about it?

1. At least by default.

Mankind found an easy form of energy in volatile fossil fuels. When they were first discovered, everyone concerned had no doubts about them as a finite resource. But, that became fuzzy over time, as our dependency and the need for energy increased. So much that today, we cannot live without them and cannot think of anything else but them.

Today is a scene of exponential energy demands, rapidly depleting available and accessible resources; hunger for power, acute need for development and well being — of nations and its people. On one hand, you need energy, while on the other, you need to think of the world’s well being as a whole. This is a precarious balance, and an extremely difficult one.

The holy grail, of course, is clean, environmentally friendly energy. How do you get it? That’s a priceless question. And no one seem to have the right answers. So, we go with what we know best, in maintaining that balance, which is already tipping.

At the heart of climate change is the excessive emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. And at a rate that’s heating our planet enough to cause glaciers to melt, experience warmest winters and bringing in unpredictability into everything we thought we already knew. Before I go on, I invite you to read more about Climate change and how it is already affecting us — in order to get a bearing of what I am talking about. Go on then, I’ll wait till you come back.

While this is a crisis, it is also an opportunity to join hands. Work together, across barriers and boundaries, to take collective responsibility in doing the best we can, to reduce the burden and reduce emissions. Some (like Industries and Governments) more but we as citizens of this world, no less in our homes, work places, our vehicles, wherever we are and wherever we go.

Governments must take the first step.

Without regulation, there can be no compliance — voluntary or involuntary. EU recently took a brave step in getting carmakers to cut CO2 emissions to 120 grams per kilometer by 2012¹. In addition, Governments can take some constructive steps:

• Help innovative companies working towards energy efficiency. Give them tax holidays, real estate and reduce other hurdles of setting-up infrastructure.
• Start a media campaign on energy efficiency. Smart advertisements in public interest among others. (A Dutch energy company recently gave away free energy efficient lamps to people. This is not a great example, but nevertheless, an important step in spreading awareness.)
• Make devices working on human energy cool again. Subsidize energy efficient products, make them free of all forms of tax. Also tax, those people who use efficient forms of energy, less.
• Build more infrastructure to aid energy efficiency, indirectly: bicycle tracks; subsidized multi-person travel (reduce toll tax), build more runways to avoid takeoff / landing time to save fuel and operating costs.
• Encourage alternative fuel industry, hydrogen for one and Gas for the other. Reduce excise tax on them.
• Enforce efficient public transportation. Make them cool (and safe wherever) again. (In Amsterdam, people wait for that particular Hydrogen powered bus when they could, otherwise, take any other bus.)

Those are just a few from the top of my head. I am sure there are many other ways that Governments can think about.

There are some wonderful tips, for you and me, to take action.

Wishful thinking on innovation: Ideas, I have some, which might sound stupid, but what if?

• Develop large capacity batteries with small form factor. If USB drives can be 30+GB, why not two AA sized batteries, which can run your home for a whole day before requiring a recharge?
• How about developing chargers that charge your phones and laptops while you bicycle to work?
• Your iPods charge while you run on the treadmill.
• Tennis, squash rackets, jogger shoes and even cars as battery chargers for not just your utilities but also to electrify your homes. Think of a tiny pair of batteries charging from any of these sources as you do your daily chores and you come home plug the batteries in and you get hot water, lighting, powers-up communication and entertainment system and other such utilities? How cool would that be?
• Jogger shoes as battery chargers.
• Bring back those automatic watches that auto-charge based on human movements.
• Use LEDs for lighting in homes and work places.
• Use dynamic weight shifts in public transports, sports stadia to generate and recharge power.
• Convince Dean Kamen to become the next Bill Gates by subsidizing those human powered Segways. If they bring those prices down, I am sure Segway human transporter would be the next best thing to iPod to hit us, in terms of cool factor, not to mention a plus one on human energy efficiency. Get everyone to move just by positioning themselves dynamically. How’s that?

If each and everyone does it in America, China and India, half of the energy problems could easily be solved. On those thoughts, here’s to Earth Day, today. It’s the only one we have and it’s precious. Lets not waste it.

1. Our recently bought car, is fuel efficient, emits CO2 between 140gm–156gm, a class B vehicle, that we’re happy about

I got hold of a list of company holidays, created a new calender for Company’s holidays in the Netherlands (Manage calendars > Calendars > Create New calendar). Spent the next 10 minutes actually populating holidays for the year 2007, and then, finally shared it with everyone. It’s here, if you want to add it to your Google Calendar.

Digression: To keep up with Indian (vedic) times and Indian festivals, Sneha and I actually carried a hard copy of Kal Nirnay 2007 calendar to Holland. But, it would be nice to have this via Google Calendar. Now that we know how easy it is to create a public calendar and share it with us all, anyone up to it? I am sure this would be mighty useful to a vast majority of Indians living within and outside India.

Email is such an integral part of a company, corporation, that I cannot stress enough. (I was looking for some real moving words to have an effect here, but they fail me. Oh, never mind. But you know the feeling, right?) So what is this about, then? Well, it is about the big announcement from Google.

A few weeks before this happened, someone in my organization called for views about deploying third-party email solutions to contractors based in our offices. This obviously came out of the problems of having to set up relatively temporary mailboxes on the company domain and get things working for specific non-staff groups.

The discussion evoloved, and some of us who have been using Gmail and Apps put our force behind this thing, enough to raise a genuine interest in not only thinking about options to deploy for non-staff contractors, but also a possibility of deploying them for over 100,000 staff worldwide. It’s a definite possibility, there are people really looking this up and other aspects around it at this very moment.

Now, why would we, as employees, do such a thing? Well, there’s this thing about have your say in making your life easier (as if there was a better and brief way of saying it). Let’s look at the wind-down version of why we would support Google Apps.

Let me start with Email.

My company lets me work from home or from a remote place, when I need to or when I cannot be in office, for some reason. In such situations, more often than not, the only thing I need to access is my corporate email. Presently, the only way we can do it is via the VPN. Somehow, email via the VPN, except on one occasion, never worked for me from home. And I was forced to haul myself back to office, so I could be connected.

Our present solution is Outlook + Exchange. The first time I saw it, I cringed. (I even bought a used Outlook 2000 in a nutshell, just so I could be productive without wasting time learning some basic things. But as it happens, the 600 odd page book lies neatly on my desk, unopened.)

From what I see around, a lot of people have attachment issues, mailbox limitation problems archiving, not to mention searching, indexing and a whole lot of other stuff. People complain about it all the time, but there’s nothing much they could do. But now, the prospects look better, because there’s a better solution available.

For some of us, the only email we have ever had is the corporate address. For that at least, I think we deserve a lot more than a crappy system.

Gmail’s amazing feature set is a boon for corporate users in any environment. Comfy offices to extreme weather conditions of up to -30ºc in near arctic zones.

Calendar is another. We have a lot of events happening. Some, I end up skipping because I didn’t keep Outlook open. Google Calendar sends SMS alerts to your phone, and that’s a great way of getting a notification while on the move about your appointments, events, et al.

We have a lot of specifications that a whole team of people are working on at the moment. The progress is often at snail’s pace, and in a serial manner. If there was a way to collaborate officially, the comment and review system could be a lot quicker, thus reducing the time taken to complete such tasks.

Google Apps provides all those, just lets us get our work done, quickly, effortlessly and without experiencing pain. I just hope the company sees our POV.

How the block is hurting directly:

• My layout looks borked, when it fails to show-up the Flickr stream column.
• It reduces my time spent on Flickr, so I can’t annotate my project pictures in detail.

I am not so much worried about my layout being broken, I can always fix its visual appearence with an alternate layout. It is the other one that worries me the most. The most important feature in Flickr (in my opinion) is the ability to annotate. This has the power to educate: draw, label, add notes, explain. Every other feature of Flickr is secondary to me.

I haven’t come across any image gallery (desktop) software that can do this. Only Flickr does. And with Flickr getting blocked at workplace, it is not helping. My uploads to Flickr have dropped drastically because of this.

A while ago, I wrote to Picasa team for an annotation feature request. But, looks like it’s a low priority for Google, and probably people are not requesting this feature enough. Captions and tags are not enough. The ability to add annotation (notes) directly on a picture without modifying the image is a huge usability feature, that I cannot stress enough.

I wish I had a (desktop) software that allowed me to do what I can in Flickr (annotate, add notes, tags) and which does not require my administrator’s permission to access a website to do my work.

If Flickr continues to be blocked, I cannot use its service, as I had initially intended for. And I will be forced to discontinue my subscription.

This may sound pessimistic, but I am beginning to see the downside of web based services (when compared with desktop applications), at least from this angle of view.

I have always thought of post offices to be more than just being clearing houses for postal mail. In a limited way, I realized this for the first time back in 1993.

While on a trip to Bangalore, I happened to visit a local post office. I noticed that the post office kept passport application forms too. In a country where people have grown used to running between offices and desks to get even miniscule of jobs done, this was a pleasant surprise.

Availability of a passport application form at the local post office was a luxury. It saved me at least a couple of hours’ time, that would have, otherwise, taken me to get from the passport office on MG Road, the long human queue notwithstanding.

As modern ways of communication broke time barriers and saw mass acceptance of sending and receiving messages via e-mail and the internet opening up many ways of communication, a thought among people began setting-in. That the post office was being marginalized. I intend to break that conservative thinking with this post.

Today, I am pained to see hubs of 20th century communication becoming sidelined, when in fact, they should be leading the glorious era of communication.

21st century post office is an ultra-modern place of communication, for all walks of life. It is a highly utilitarian, extremely social and community benefiting house in more ways than people have imagined it to be.

It’s entirely possible, even with tiny steps. Let me give you a visual: Think of a post office counter. Utility bills pay counter. A modern Helpdesk. Coffee Day. Cyber cafe/internet kiosk/Wifi lounge. A ticket booking counter (for movies, concerts; road, rail and air travel). A small bank counter. ATM kiosk. A parcel and cargo office. Now put them all together. That’s a modern 21st century post office.

The post office counter functions like a normal post office. Serving people for their postal needs, selling stamps, courier services, etc.

Utility bills pay counter accept bills to all services (Some post offices already have this and people easily vouch for their high usefulness).

A modern helpdesk will be a connected information counter for disseminating all kinds of information. Depending upon local needs, this place will serve any kind of information that citizen seek. A helpdesk in a real sense. All kinds of forms [tax, services, and applications] will be available here.

Cyber cafe/internet kiosk/Wifi lounge would provide that much needed connectivity and the need for information and for social interactions (limited only by floor space available). These would also house faxing services, photocopying and other mundane office related type that people can avail services of.

Coffee Day or a Starbucks like coffee lounge breaks the stereotype office environment towards a warm, friendly and relaxed atmosphere. It would even help people spend more time in their new community house.

A ticket booking counter. Be it for cinema, music / cultural concerts or for booking your travel. A personal help at a nominal surcharge for the busy types would complete the picture.

Post offices have always functioned as banks. They started to get noticed, as they began offering better interest rates than the banks, in recent times. But their infrastructure needs a stature, of the likes of Citibank. Even purely from a utilitarian point of view, to be functional, to be efficient.

(This is where I rub in many ideas together. Buy those 100 dollar laptops and put it on every village post office’s table, deploying them for [rural/government] internet kiosks would just be a couple of ideas. )

ATM kiosks or bank counters (if the town or village lacks one) can serve local people without having to make them go distant places just to get their task done.

A parcel and cargo office or counter is essentially part of a Post office. An upgradation of their services would boost revenues and renewed interest in the people availing them.

Stepping back a bit on the concept of a multi-purpose post office: The conventional model of service of postal mail is on the decline. Post and Telegraph department can harness utilitarian needs of citizen, all at one place, by using existing and established information houses, such as local post offices.

People already know that post office is an information house. Just drag this idea into the 21st century. And acceptance would be immediate.

Random thoughts: Infrastructure for HelpDesks — Install information kiosks [at least three languages: English, Hindi and a State language] that connects to a central Government database to query for information on Government related stuff and to the internet for general stuff. (Government would provide the connectivity for such kiosks.) Use embedded systems to save costs and field maintenance and for robustness.

Every village has atleast a small house being used as a post office. A minimal post office could at least have some of the above discussed things in addition to being purely post offices. A tiny improvement would go a long way in improving lives of ordinary citizen.