I have posted about Small Steps Foundation in the past. It is a Bay Area based Non-Profit working to fund education projects in India. To raise funds, they are oragnizing a 5k/10k walk and, as always, the event is targeted towards a whole family experience. These are the details of the SSF 2009 Walk.
If you are inclined to donate, consider this team.
Thanks, Vidur
Filed under: children, education, non-profit | Tagged: non-profit, ssf | Leave a Comment »
No offence meant but this very funny 
Filed under: bakkar, fun | Leave a Comment »
It has almost been a year since I started lending at Kiva.org and it would be fair to say I can come a long way. The most interesting change that Kiva folks made during this time is that instead of crediting the loan repayments to lender’s account at the end of loan term, they do it as the repayments come-in. This has had a real money multiplier effect. Let me explain.
I funded my Kiva account with $500 last May. Of this, I have donated $55 to Kiva. And I have made loans worth $800 which as almost twice my investment and all this in less than a year I hope I am doing my part in helping the global economy.
I have made 22 loans till date out of which 2 have been repaid and no defaults. My Kiva page (link) has more info. I encourage everyone to explore micro-lending, as a lender and/or loan seeked. I believe it is way of helping people becoming self-sufficient and conribute to the society.
Releted Posts: http://blog.vidur.name/?s=kiva
Filed under: kiva, micro-finance | Tagged: kiva, non-profit | 1 Comment »
I am sure half the world knows this but I having been using pine at work on the servers. I recently moved from Windows to Fedora 8 as my work-station OS and wanted pine. This is when I came to know that I am supposed to use alpine instead of pine now
These are instructions to install alpine:
alpine: if you read your e-mail with pine (the latest GNU-friendly version is now called alpine) on your machine, there is good news in Fedora 8. alpine, because of its new GNU licensing, is now available through the normal fedora repository. so, simply:
$ yum -y install alpine
This is the source of the info.
Filed under: office, tech | Tagged: linux | 1 Comment »
I use VNC regularly and for quite a while I struggled with the fact that I could copy from my VNC window to my PC. Finally, I had a breakthrough couple of weeks ago. This is what should work:
- logon to your VNC session
- open a terminal window (like Xterm)
- type ‘vncconfig &’ which should result in a small window with 3 options.
- enable all the options, put this little window somewhere in the corner and forget about it.
This should do the trick
Filed under: tech, work | Tagged: linux, vnc, windows | 5 Comments »
Well, there something about a rainbow that makes me feel like a kid and puts a big smile on my face. Now, I have seen a rainbow for 2 consecutive days and I took some snaps. These are from my iPhone so not very clear but do capture all the colors and its beauty.
These are snaps from Monday. This was about 5 pm when I stepped out of my office in Sunnyvale, CA.
Rainbow1 on 03/02/2009
Rainbow2 on 03/02/2009
Rainbow3 on 03/02/2009
I wish I had my camera for a close up
Filed under: environment, life | Tagged: wow | Leave a Comment »
After reading a few blogs and praises of Chrome I decided to give it a try. The one reason was that Firefox, my current browser, seems to take ever increasing amount of memory as the day progress and makes my notebook sluggish. This is my experience with Chrome on a Windows XP notebook.
I downloaded Chrome from the official website and followed the instructions for installation. The first glitch was that it hanged while trying to retrieve Firefox passwords and bookmarks, at least that’s what the installer said it was doing. The CPU utilization was upwards of 97% and the memory usage was 16,828k. I decided to kill the process after 10 minutes. Chrome was installed but it failed to get the Firefox user data.
Next, I went to Chrome settings and tried to import the bookmarks and passwords. It did get them but the support for passwords seemed to be a bit patchy. It worked for some sites and didn’t for others. This is some data I collected: -
| Firefox | Chrome | |
|---|---|---|
| Start Time (seconds) | 1.60 | 0.90 |
| Memory Usage (K) | 42,940 | 28,448 |
| Shutdown Time (seconds) | 1.80 | 0.70 |
| Memory Usage after a minute(K) | 43,928 | 28,836 |
I liked the fact that each instance of Chrome ran as a separate process, the memory footprint in smaller and seems to be faster. But, not much data to go by 
This is when Chrome got my PC, I think it was my visit to cricinfo.com (no malice intended, just a fact) when all the trouble started. It could have been some other site but these were the same sites I visit with Firefox. My notebook was infected by both Ad-ware and multiple viruses. This caused a 3 day downtime, not very convenient as works piles on.
In the end, I have decided to go back to Firefox. The good thing which came out of this is that I used my home notebook w/ Linux in office and decided to get a linux desktop for work. I am a new user of Linux as my base OS but have been working on Free BSD based OS (JUNOS) for a few years and use Linux servers for development, so lets see how it goes.
Filed under: google, virus, work | Tagged: chrome, firefox, laptop, linux, virus | Leave a Comment »
About a month ago I had posted about Gaurav, who has AML, and his families efforts to raise funds for the Non-Related Allogenic transplant he needs. I am sure a few people have had there doubts if this is genuine, I have seen a couple of hits on my blog from Google w/ search terms as “help gaurav fraud”. I came across and article in DNA India about how the students of Gaurav’s wife, Anuradha, raised funds for the operation. I hope this will clear some doubts.
This is the article Prof plans ‘gift of life’ for hubby and this was my original post Help Gaurav. Finally an update from Help Gaurav
Lastly, the total financial contribution has now reached an incredible INR 98L (Approx US$ 217,000)!! Our sincerest thanks to all the contributors. This has been an incredible leap of faith for all of us and I must admit, I am overwhelmed by the support that we continue to receive every day. Needless to say, this is still a journey (with total cost of the operation being upwards of US$ 300,000) and hence any support is most welcome.
Filed under: health, help, India, life | Tagged: India | 3 Comments »
Why Global Warming May Be Fueling Australia’s Fires – TIME
It’s important to acknowledge that no single weather event can be definitively caused by climate change — and it’s possible that the current inferno in Australia might have been as intense and deadly even without the warming of the past several decades. Police are beginning to suspect that many of the fires may have been deliberately set, and the sheer increase in the number of homes built in fire-danger zones in southern Australia today puts more people in harm’s way, raising the potential death toll. Still, heat waves and drought set the table for wildfires, and temperatures in the worst-hit areas have been over 110°F (43°C) while humidity has bottomed out near zero. Climate change will continue to be a threat multiplier for forest fires.
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Filed under: environment, life | Tagged: global warming, greenhouse gases, wildfires | Leave a Comment »
Global Warming Threatens Antarctic Sea Life
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Filed under: environment | Tagged: global warming, greenhouse gases | Leave a Comment »
