Since I’m house-sitting my pal’s house here in Lavington (a Nairobi suburb) until the end of April, I’ve had the privilege of daily Internet access courtesy of her $200 per month iWayAfrica satellite (VSat) hookup. In a way, my friend Samantha (of Bedouin Camp fame) is doing me a favour by letting me house sit for her.

Decisions, decisions…
Well, I was peeking some enticing IT articles & discussions on ZDNet, SlashDot, Jon Auza’s blog, and a host of other spots in cyber space. And I ran into this gut-wrenching scenario that a programmer had to face: Should he choose a programming job using a language (PERL) that he loves versus a 66% pay rise with another company that’s using Microsoft’s .NET framework.

Heck, in my state of affairs, I’d take the damn .NET job if I was that dude. I can always do PERL scripting in my off time, or even take part in a kick-ass PERL project on SourceForge, which just happens to be the world’s largest Open Source Software repository. Here, you’ll find tons of FREE amazing software projects – like the OpenBiblio Library Information System (LIS) that I implemented for the Jewish Youth Library of Ottawa (JYLO) back in 2004.

Anyhow, I urge you to peek the discussion…lots of interesting points for and against taking both jobs. See Choosing Your Next Programming Job: Perl or .NET. I even blogged about .NET here a year ago. See, I was right! .NET is gaining momentum. Heck, I’m sure a lot of .NET coders are paying off their mortgages in 3 years or less.

Gripe central…
Since I’m using Samantha’s iBook G4 laptop while she visits the south of France, the UK and Dubai, I’ve gotten a bird’s eye view of the Mac OS/X operating system. And to be honest with you all, I’m not that thrilled with it. The major reason is just the little things. Have you ever used cut & paste in the Windows Explorer? Well, I couldn’t find a similar feature in OS/X at all. I had to bloody copy a file or folder from somewhere, paste it to the destination, and then delete the original file. Damn it, but how bloody ANNOYING is that? Yeah, Windows has some warts, but give me Explorer over the Finder in OS/X any day of the week. I think I’m just gonna turn Windows Server 2008 into a workstation (see info on how to do this here, here, and here) on the laptop I plan to buy within 30 days – if all goes well. Let’s just say that I’m skipping Vista after hearing so many horror stories.

Thanks Steph…
By the way, my good pal whom I met on XVI dropped by Nairobi en route to Rwanda and Uganda to do 6 months of academic research. You see, she’s doing her Masters in Peace Building & Conflict Resolution through Royal Roads University. Oh, that’s waaay over there on Vancouver Island, which is in the beautiful province of British Columbia on Canada’s west coast. She hung out with me for 4 days, and I got her to deliver the goods. You see, since Stephanie was coming from Canada, I got her to download a ton of software on her super fast DSL broadband connection before she left for Africa.

Now I have the latest versions of PC-BSD (a kool desktop distro based on the popular FreeBSD server O/S), SimplyMEPIS (a Linux distro that’s getting tons of rave reviews), OpenOffice (a free alternative to Micro$oft Office that runs of Linux & Windows), PostgreSQL (a free database manager that competes admirably against Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Sybase et al), VMware Player (Linux & Windows versions), and XAMPP for Mac OS/X.

Heck, I would never in a million years attempt to download all that stuff over here. Nope! Anyhow, I’m gonna take them all for a spin and I’ll review them right here. It’ll give me a chance to spread some open source love here in East Africa. I hear po-po (er police) has been going around Nairobi nabbing peeps in offices and cyber cafes using pirated software. This is a good thing as it’ll force EVERYONE to utilize open source software like Linux, FreeBSD, OpenOffice et al.

Happy computing!