The placement and training officer of our college, Mr. Raja Singh, called me up to his office last week. I was not sure what it was about, the last time we had a discussion was at Empower.IT, more than a month back. And when I went to his office, there were quite a few familiar faces waiting already. It was the team that won second place in web designing at Empower.IT!

It was about this Web design contest from Microsoft, for college students, in which, you get to keep the free hosting and domain name, even if you don’t win (We have to send them a draft for Rs.1000 as registration fee, to cover the cost of hosting indirectly anyway)

I knew I was expected to participate, and I could protest neither on grounds of principles or on lack of time. God has made me that way, I’m really bad at saying ‘no’.

After reading all of Richard Stallman’s articles on how Microsoft is capturing the markets by giving subsidies to schools and college, I’m here participating in one of Microsoft’s contests, intended to get colleges to use Microsoft technologies. Can you believe it? Why didn’t my placement officer know FOSS enthusiasts don’t like to work on Microsoft technologies? Not that I’m anything like bad on Microsoft stuff. Infact, I’m much better at programming on Windows, than on Linux. Still, I’d like not to do this if I had a choice. But I’ve ventured too far, and if I try to get back now, it might just be enough for them to screw me up totally. And now that I’m in it, I’ll have to give it a good shot :P. The prizes are too tempting too.

It is called the GoAlive Challenge, where the task to design a website for our college, with Windows Live mail integration, and integrate other Live technologies like calendar and stuff too. Each college can have one team of 3 to 5 members.

Our college has its own domain, and fortunately, its hosted on a Windows server, so that’s one problem solved. So, the first thing we are supposed to do is create individual email ids for the students and staff (you know why), using Microsoft’s equivalent of Google Apps (Sorry, I don’t know what it is called yet :D).  The higher the number of email ids, the higher the points we score. Once that is done, we can get on with the development. We’ve got around 3 months to get it done.

I hope we get innovative enough to win something in this contest. And people, please don’t let anyone else know

The Office Open XML(OOXML) document format of Microsoft has been rejected by ISO as an international document standard. MS had been trying very hard to obtain ISO certification for its format. MS had even published an advertisement to promote the OOXML in Linux for You!!

And as always, MS has failed again to please the experts. Phew.. There is some space to breathe now on the internet. But MS has never relied on the experts for its revenue. It has always targeted the Layman. If MS had targeted the experts, it would have been nowhere by now!

Anyways, OOXML is not an international standard, and the Open Document Format(ODF) of the Free Software community is an international standard. MS should better add support for the ODF in their Office Suite.

Microsoft is desperate, but it appears it isn’t going to make it. Its hopes to get the new OOXML document format certified by the ISO are fading away slowly. Here’s why:

1. Several countries have expressed their disapproval for OOXML.
2. India and more countries have officially given the middle finger to OOXML.
3. As many as 200 design flaws have been detected in OOXML.
4. Unlike what MS claims, editing OOXML documents manually makes them unreadable in Office 2007.
5. Communities opposing the OOXML appear to be way too active!
6. There are rumors that MS has already resorted to bribery and corruption inside the ISO to get their format certified.
7. The WashingtonPost has reported that MS has been forcing partners to vote in favor of OOXML.
8. Rea Maor had predicted that MS will be doomed.

Meanwhile, the OpenDocument Format(ODF) has already become an ISO standard. Infact, it is even supported by MS.The only thing that bothers me now is that poor Microsoft’s first Open initiative is a failure in the making.

By the way, why isn’t anyone thinking that this issue is getting too much attention world-wide? It might be encouraging to see MS fall, but does it really matter to us? Don’t we have bigger things to think about?

“How is something with three the same vowels to compete with Vista? That name almost is as stupid as Google! Those hackers really can’t think of names, they sound as if it were the first and last sound a newly born baby made when he choked on an apple his evil babysitter gave him.”

~ Bill Gates on Ubuntu forks

I noticed that the English lab at our college has been upgraded. It must have been done at least 6 months back. The lab has been nicely furnished with cool looking tables n chairs, and around 40 new computers, all with dual-core processors and lots of RAM and hard drive space. They’ve also purchased English training software approved by the university for all the computers.

I’ve been in this college for more than 3 years (I’m in the final year now), and during this period, there have been several improvements in infrastructure. Still, we find if difficult to get resources where we need them.

For example, the common computer center here has some 75 computers and the students can browse during non-class hours. The problem is that all these computers were bought at least 3 years before I joined the college, and are vintage items now. They have Celeron 700 Mhz processors, have 128 MB of RAM and run Windows 2000.

Well, even the Windows 2000 thing doesn’t matter. The biggest problem is that all these computers have only Internet Explorer 5.0 installed. The technicians say all other browsers are as evil as hell. Nobody cares if IE5 doesn’t support AJAX. Why does it matter to them? The entire computer center is not capable of display in the standard gmail interface, and they don’t have the slightest idea of installing at least a newer browser!

And moving on, even while opening normal HTML pages, these computers won’t let us open more than 3 browser windows at a time. If we do, they will slow down terribly or worse, stop responding completely!

Why does the English lab, which runs only training programs need such nice computers while the common computer centre has vintage computers? What is sickening is the fact that the college has nice computers, but not where it is actually required.

This college would have been at a much better place, if they had learnt to manage the resources properly. I was wondering if their idea of creating a nice learning environment is different altogether!