Thanks to Unicode, we can write in Bengali. I use a very nice software Avro Keyword which is fully unicode-compliant. 🙂 It sits pretty on your screen as a sleek toolbar. Supports Windows 2000, XP and 2003 – as the previous versions of Windows don’t have adequate support for unicode. It also includes the UniBijoy layout for users habituated with Bijoy. Best of all, it is a freeware.
[Update]: A newer version of Avro has been released. I have written about it here.
With viruses, trojans, malwares, spywares… abound and hackers on the prowl, the internet is not a safe place. I use the following softwares to fortify my rig.
Antivirus
Avast Home 4.6 (Freeware)
This lightweight yet very effective antivirus — free for home users — is serving me for about a year and I am impressed. It does not hog a lot of system resource, unlike Norton Antivirus the 2006 version of which requires at least 256 MB of RAM. What I like most is its update mechanism. Updates are very frequent and the update files are very small in size… just connect to the net and the update is just a matter of seconds. Ever since I started using Avast I have never had any virus-problem — it simply rocks!
Avast also blocks trojans trying to intrude into my system. I am considering to buy the professional version of Avast which has extra features like script blocker, command line scanner etc.
Firewall
Zone Alarm Pro (Shareware, US$ 49.95)
Since I remain hooked to the net for a greater part of the day, a firewall is a must. Apart from keeping hackers at bay, Zone Alarm also monitors which programs are accessing the net. Using this for more than 3 years and I am all praise about it. Zone Labs ZoneAlarm Antivirus (a combo pack of including Zone Alarm firewall and Zone Alarm antivirus) has bagged the 11th rank in the PCWorld The 100 Best Products of 2005.
Anti-Spyware
Ad-Aware SE Personal and Spybot Search & Destroy. (Freewares)
Both of them feature among the top 10 most popular downloads at Download.com. According to Digit, India’s premier technology magazine, these two programs complement each other very well, that is to say, if Ad-Aware fails to detect a particularly spyware, Spybot catches it and vice versa. Apart from these two, I also use the anti-spyware included in Zone Alarm Pro.
Winter is here. One can already feel the chill in air. It’s only early November and already I am finding it quite difficult to get up from bed in the morning.
Many a times we hear a cry that politicians should retire, at a certain fixed age like other professions. This is a well justified demand. We can expect the people who govern the country to be efficient. But then a pertinent question arises – what should be the ideal age when a politician should retire. Some say it should be 65 while some others argue that it should be 75. I, however, don’t believe in any such age-barriers. A 70-year old person may be more energetic than a 30-year old. It all depends on how one lives his life.
I have a different idea. I think that the politicians should be made to sit in an annual examination. The exam should be a simple one focussing on reasoning and analytical skills as well as memory test, also touching upon elementary arithmetic and a bit of G.K. on current affairs. A pass marks will be set. One has to pass to be eligible to contest in elections. The consequences will be great and far-reaching. Half-literate politicians will no longer enable to occupy important chairs anymore. Many a times we have to suffer for illogical decisions taken by imbecile ministers. This will put an end to that.
It is a nearly impossible proposition. All politicians will vehemently protest against such an exam-system and even if this ever executed in practice our corrupted netas will soon reduce it to a mockery by cheating, leaking the question paper, bribing the invigilators, forcing the invigilators to cooperate at gun-point, and what not? Such is their nature!
In the middle of my month-long Puja vacation. Not much to do right now.
I intend to study hard the rest of the hols. Apart from that, on my list is a plan to visit my school St. Lawrence to have a dekko at the table tennis board there. I also have plans to have some group discussion sessions with friends, always a very good way to learn, in fact.
For the time being, I am following a rather boring routine – study, eat & sleep. I can’t go out as it is raining incessantly for the past two days, enough for the roads to get water-logged. The meteorology office has held a low-pressure development over Bay of Bengal responsible for it.
These days I am reading Bankimchandra in my leisure. I am not a great fan of his but I like those novels based on historical events of Bengal and India as I get to know a lot from them. I read ‘Rajsingha’ 4 years ago, found it really absorbing.
This Pujas, I had no big plans. Hang out with school friends – that was all I had in my mind.
It was in the Sasthee morning when we started our pandal-hopping spree. A Tata Sumo was hired and we gorged through the streets of Kolkata. There were 10 of us, good old friends of school – all Lawrencians.
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My cabinet was groaning for some days and yesterday my computer went off for good. I guessed the SMPS has went wrong. Fortunately my old Pentium 4 system has most of its parts intact, I took out its SMPS and fitted into my current system. And voila! here goes my PC running again 🙂
I was just wondering about this… 
When one dies, his material properties are inherited by his successors. That is good. But what happens to his online belongings? Will no one ever open the dead person’s mailbox and it will be shut down one day forever when the user inactivity period is over? His descendants will never get a taste of his mails. But letters (the hard copy ones) are kept with care. In fact, I have a collection of letters, that my late grandpa wrote to me when I was a kid. If I consider my own mailbox, I find that many memorable mails – that my pals wrote to me or I wrote to others – are there that can be cherished from time to time. And what if a blogger dies? His last post won’t read that he is dead. The blog will also gradually die out with the death of its creator.
Yesterday I got the BSNL broadband connection. Oh boy, what great speed! My download times have decreased ten times at least and, not to mention, superfast page loads. I am really impressed. I chose the Home 500 plan that gives me a monthly bandwith usage limit of 1 GB and a speed of 256 kbps (plus free usage between 2 a.m. and 8 a.m.). All this for 500 bucks per month; reasonably priced–I must say for I was paying the same amount before to my cable operator who provided a speed of 32 kbps at the most. It took only 10-15 days for the connection to come, during this period they called us at least 5 times to check the connection (because this is broadband on phone). Very cool service man. Simply rocks! They have supplied a sleek looking ADSL modem of Chinese make that connects between my phone line and LAN port. I can receive phone calls and surf the net simultaneously. Only drawback is that the ADSL modem heats up at an awfully fast rate. Setting up the connection is a breeze–attach the wires in their places, ‘create a new connection’ in network connections, select broadband, type in your username and password and get connected instantly. You can set your LAN properties to ‘Obtain an ip adress automatically’ at first. Then once you are connected, see configuration instructions at this link.
BSNL offers other plans as well to suit different users. The cheapest one comes at 250 bucks per month with a monthly bandwith usage limit of 0.4 GB, a real deal for the casual surfers esp. who have been on dial-up this far.
Google launched its chat software recently. Now in its beta release, Google Talk has little to offer its users. A crisp interface and close integration with GMail is all that may catch one’s fancy. When it comes to features, Google Talk seriously lags behind its competitors. The fancy emoticons which are the very essense of instant messaging are missing. No support for webcam or file transfer either.