Buying a new computer

Is this meant to drive you crazy? I have spent over two weeks now desperately trying to configure a new desktop for under £600. I thought this would be relatively easy. I only had two non-modifiable factors: first, it would be a AMD dual core processor based system and second, it will run only linux on it. I decided to build a system to run only linux for a number of reasons. The most important is out of respect for the man I work for who has taught me a lot - in surgery, life and computers. The next reason is that it will force me to learn and become good at linux. And, this has huge implications when I go back home and start running my own hospital. A linux based network would be infinitely simpler to manage and cheaper.

I have so far decided on the processor (athlon fx x 2 3800+) and the motherboard (an asus one with the nvidia ultra 4 chipset). I am yet to decide the rest of the stuff and hopefully should have ordered all the components before the end of next week. And, for the next 10 days I will spend a lot of time staring at online catalogs. So much for the pleasures of building my own computer.

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Tamil Translation Messages for Mediawiki

I have created a new MessagesTa.php for the Wikipital project. This contains a larger number of translated messages in tamil than the default file that ships with MediaWiki 1.7 . A lot has been derived from the work done for the Tamil Wikipedia but I have added a considerable amount of stuff. This file, I hope, will be very useful for all Tamil Wikis. Remember to replace விக்கிபிட்டல் with your own project's name or {{SITENAME}} before you install using this file. You can download this file from here . While at it, also check out விக்கிபிட்டல் . Please link to this blog to download the file until I upload it to a more permanent location. I don't want people cursing me for a broken link to my googlepages.

Bollywood Movies on Goolge Video

I was browsing Google Videos today and clicked on the 'Top 100' link and chose 'India' to see what was being posted by my countrymen. I was very surprised to find two videos that were over 2 hours long at the first and third positions. The first one had 158,314 views and the third one had 33,453 views. They both turned out to be complete Bollywood movies. Now, if this isn't copyright infringement, then what is. Google does not have an easy mechanism to flag a video as copyrighted material. Check out t his page for yourself to see what I mean. One of the videos was posted by a site called megaload .com. (no hyperlink here to save you the trouble. Take my word for it when I say...) It turns out to be a parked domain with only a zillion pop-up ads to boast. Come on guys...if you want to watch a movie, pay for it. But, just look at the number of views and the ratings. I bet most of these have come from outside India. I live in the UK and it is not very often that...

My first wiki entry

Today I made my first entry into the world of wikipedia. I operated on a lady with an irreducible, painful femoral hernia a couple of nights ago. She did not have any clinical evidence of obstruction or strangulation. I chose to use the infra-inguinal approach as this is much simpler and a much lesser procedure. She had a bit of omentum incarcerated in the hernia. I excised this and fixed the hernia using sutures. My consultant had a little chat (the kind you get when you have done something silly) the next day. He thought I should have used the high-approach, so I would have had better access to the abdomen. This would have been useful if she had needed bowel resection. I was planning on opening the lacunar ligament to get bowel out through the femoral canal. This, he said, was not ideal. So, I decided to read up and was looking on the internet and came across a wiki stump. And, I decided to add some stuff to it. I hope to add to more medical articles in the coming days.

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