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Technology

How The Other Half Compute

i’ve been a Windows junkie for a long time now. Made my living living, eating and breathing Windows. From ’98 to XP, and now Vista, i been using, coding, configuring, patching, coding [did i say that twice ;)] everything Microsoft. Funny though, my roots in computing go back to C, Borland nogal. Anyways, Microsoft-related work paid quite well, so it’s what i did- and continue to do. However….

Because i work within the education arena of software, it’s only inevitable that i’d come across a project like edubuntu, and from that, get infected by a whole other world. and slowly, but surely, things are getting infected, in a good way 😀

But the challenge remains.. how do i migrate into a linux world? And why even bother would be a good challenge to pose… indeed why? Equally inviting, why not? More on that later.

First step, replace XP with Ubuntu as the primary OS for all regular “work”. Writing documents, emailing and IM, are OS-independant tasks. Developing asp.net, so so much.. but we’ll see [he says with a glimmer in his eye].

Fortunately, and i do mean fortunately, most of the implementation tools we use to develop asp.net are non-ms. Our choice IDE, as an example, is SharpDevelop. And interestingly enough, it won hands-down as IDE of choice against VS.Net [Express Edition]. It’s just soooo much more productive 😀 And in case you’re wondering why not the full fledged VS.Net product: we compared apples with apples and the apples in this case, was $.

Hey! We live in Africa. We certainly cannot afford them shiny-looking price tags.

The adventure begins….

nogal is, as far i know, purely a south african term pronounced nau-chul, with the ch being closer to the classic Scottish ‘ch’ as in loch ness that anything else. kinda like you’re clearing your throat. anyway, it resembles the english equivalent: nonetheless.