We apologise for the outage in bloggage. Normal services will resume soon.
My travel writing will be posted here, in serial form. The format (and timing) is a conscious choice of quality over immediacy, but since it's light entertainment, I hope you won't mind.
In the meantime, here's an interesting project from BarCamp Bangalore, as well as the latest installments of Newtown Ghetto Anger.
PortableApps is a project to make a host of open source applications usable straight from a USB drive, which I'm finding quite nifty after four months without a computer (sob).
Of the range of software available, the most useful would have to be Firefox Portable. It means that you can run Firefox at internet cafes etc. where only IE is available, but better still, you can keep all your settings and bookmarks wherever you go, and because everything is run from the USB drive, you don't need to install anything and you don't leave any personal information behind.
It's supposed to work on any version of Windows, though I had trouble getting it to run on a Pentium running Win95 on a hill in India. Nor have I tried it in a high-security setup, but otherwise, it's been working fine for me. A bit slow on the start-up, but runs fine.
Also available are the staples, like Abiword/OpenOffice, Thunderbird and instant messaging clients, as well as tools that are just handy to have handy, like a PDF reader, sound editor, grunty image editor, archive programme (rar, ace, zip, etc.), FTP and all that jazz.
All in all, it means that you can have your software and your settings wherever you go - and it all fits on a thumbdrive.
Neat, eh?
And now, for the return of NGA:
Click here for more NGA.