Seeing a friend giving directions to another friend on how to reach the given location, over twitter made me realise all over again as to how much we can achieve using such simple and relatively cheap technologies available to us today. A GPRS enabled mobile phone and a twitter account is all that was needed in this case to make it possible.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. With more websites and applications coming up with various interactive contents and cell phone with never before heard of features & ultra portable laptops coupled with internet on the move, we are all set for a big change in ease and style of communication. It can now happen in absolute real time, at lower cost. But, unlike previously it need not be one to one anymore. The cost still remains the same if it is for a group or for one on one interaction. At the same time service providers stand to gain as they have more subscribers subscribing to such services.
To top it all, India is already getting ready for high speed Internet connectivity on the move with technologies like wimax, evdo and 3G. Once those technologies perpetrate to the masses we will be able to have world wide video conferencing while travelling in a local bus or train.
What we really need is technologies like wimax to reach the remote parts of our country to realise the true potential of these technologies. We have all been dreaming and speaking of the day when the technology will be advanced enough to make any kinds of communication – audio, video, real time, delayed, private, group, one-to-one, open to public and so on. The technology to change these dreams to reality is here. But, there are 4 areas that need to be worked upon:
1) Reaching critical mass
2) Right implementation for the right people through proper segmenting and need-based product/service customisation
3) Ease of use and good interface
4) Adequate security
As always this development will have both positive and negative impacts but technology has to evolve and people will adapt to it.
It is going to be great to see this unfold in front of us. The dynamics of communication are changing – the cost of communication is going down and the user has choice to make on appropriate mode of communication to select.
I had to urgently view a MS Word file but I didn’t have a word processor on my system to view it in, KWord2 beta wasn’t able to support MS Word files. And I couldn’t find any small word processor or the one that wouldn’t being a gnome and a half in with itself. So, I decided to explore the CLI way.
I came across this nice article on how to view MS Word files on CLI. One of those softwares which I tried out is antiword, as it seemed most suitable to my purpose. A nifty utility to download and use while Oo.org takes it’s sweet couple of hours.
Another nice thing is that it can be used when you don’t have X running or if you’re connecting via SSH.
Viewing the file in antiword is as simple as typing
antiword filename.doc
Though it has a few options to format stuff via parameters, I don’t need them. But, they can be quite useful for some purposes.
Pipe the document through a pager and nicely sit and enjoy reading your MS Word document over Command Line Interface.
My thoughts on the software – simple, easy to use and makes life easy when all you want is to view simple text from a MS Word document. What I miss the most in the software is the ability to open odt files 
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