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where ever you go, there you are
Living within ones means... (aka learning to work without my Powerbook)
Related to country: Panama

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Over the last few months my computer has provided me with nothing but problems. I took it into the shop before I went to Costa Rica and had the screen and logic board replaced. Then weeks later it failed again, and I had to take it into Icon to get fixed in Costa Rica. As the part had to be sent even farther than before, I was forced to start work in Panama without my own computer, doomed to work on a PC. In Latin America there is a tendency to run ridiculously memory intensive software on machines that just can't handle the load. Most machines I've worked on are running Windows XP with less than 250mb of RAM. You get used to monitoring tasks so that you are using the least RAM possible.

Imagine designing a website, where your computer losses power once a day, and freezes constantly? You learn to live... in my attempt to live within my means, I've adopted a few strategies which I will share with my fellow web designers who are working in the third world. Bridging the digital divide does not mean just giving away free computers, it means that as a community we have to develop software which relates to the hardware that people are already using. Not everyone can run Windows XP and Adobe CS3! Even Adobe's software licensing program for NFP's excludes organizations who don't have the most up to date computers because of the hardware requirements!


So what do you do if you can't run the latest slickest graphic software? Well, you download GIMP, an open source super light graphic editing program which works across a variety of platforms including Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows. You also make sure to uninstall every Microsoft program you can on your computer, including IE7, and Windows Messenger! With just the simple tools of Firefox, Joomla, and GIMP; I have been working on CEAAL.org, and it has been going great. I have to admit that sometimes I cheat and sneak onto Josue's MacBook to do a bit of editing in Photoshop, but I feel like by the end of this time I should be good enough at GIMP to preform the exact same tasks.

So if you're running low on RAM, try it out! You might be surprised at all the cool things you can create.

March 5, 2008 | 11:38 AM Comments  1 comments

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joseolmedo JOSE OLMEDO
March 8, 2008 | 12:53 AM
Thanks!
That's a great software, I'm gonna try it right now. Thanks!
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