Cool, Stylish, Sad

Just read about the Debian Common Core Alliance (DCC Alliance). It's a group of Debian distros that are banding together to help get a core of Debian packages that will meet with the LSB 3.0 requirements. I'm a Debian fan (even though I've been using Windows and my iBook more often lately). From the day I got Debian up and running, it's been my favourite OS. While the text based installer is just scary enough to keep away the neophytes, there's a plethora of specialty flavours of Debian that are super easy to install: Knoppix, Gnoppix, Mepis, and Xandros being a few. Ubuntu is the latest popular Debian based distro and it's becoming a big one (most popular over at distrowatch and it apparently got a few Google kids over the summer). I switched to Debian because of the package manager, and I know apt is available for RPMs now, but I'll always like ol' vanilla Debian.

The iPod Nano was released to much fanfare. The solid state storage runs up to 4GB so the player is extremely thin. Otherwise it's just like the regular 20/60GB versions in that it can show CD covers for songs and pictures on the colour LCD screen. I have friends drooling over them already. They are nice, but I'm loving my iPod... and besides, I've already got well over 4GH on there.

Also looking at the UNAIDS report for 2004. Some 2 million children are living with HIV and about half a million children died just last year from AIDS. That's about 15% of the total AIDS deaths for 2004 (which was around 3 million). HIV/AIDS is increasingly affecting the most vulnerable people in society. The chart below (taken from page 8 of the UNAIDS report) shows how AIDS infection has increased significantly more among women than men.