The First Decade of the century...

This day marks an era of my foray into the world of computers. Today marks six years at work and counting a good four years at college before that would make it a decade with the man-made-machines. So comes the new design to the blog, to celebrate.

Roughly ten years ago it was, that I wrote my first C program, and as anybody would guess, it was the hello.c program which printed "Hello, world!" with the exact punctuation and capitalization :-)

int main() 
 {
        printf("Hello, world!");
        return 0;
 }

What struck me the most at that point was the colors on each word, which I came to know later was called 'syntax highlighting'. Back in school days, all I knew was BASIC and it did not have this feature. So it was kind of new and colorful. What started then became a hobby, then a vocation and later a profession.

In these ten years, I have seen transformations and advancements in the computer industry of all kinds. But the biggest and the most far-reaching one in all of them would be the "collaborative web". Powered by the likes of wikipedias and the youtubes, this revolutionary idea has changed the game called internet.

 Back in the day a website meant information being pushed one-way i.e., from the websites to the internet users. If you had some information and wanted the world to know about it, there was no direct or rather "free" way of doing it. You had to buy website hosting services and host a website of your own.

 But today, if you have some information to share, you have a host of websites ready to present it to the world, all for free. Take blogger. I have been able to write for over so many years, without spending a single pie. Take wikipedia, or youtube, or yahoo answers. The collective knowledge of all the people in this world, wherever they are on the planet, is readily accessible.

 There were thousands of instances, personally for me, when this altruism of fellow internet users helped me find relevant information, that too in a few minutes.

 Imagine going to a library and searching through books when you want to find about interesting tour places in Japan, or understand what an "off side" meant in football, or the Bertrand Russell’s paradoxes or the billion things you to go to the internet every other minute.

 All of this has been possible through the advancement of technology, yes. But underlying the success of these collaborative projects is the benevolence of mankind in contributing their time and effort in making these projects so useful to all of us.

 It is these acts of selflessness that raises hope for a better tomorrow and fills one's thoughts with optimism in a day where we hear more about the bad than about the good.

 Hope, Empathy and Peace.