Site: http://www.kiva.org

Kiva's mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.
Kiva is the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world.

I got introduced to Kiva via a blog I read, www.theroadtothehorizon.org - a site by an engineer who joined the UNHCR and writes about aid and development (a good site to read to get one's horizons widened and one's perspective adjusted).

Kiva's principle is simple, aggregate normal people, who can perhaps only contribute a small amount (amounts start at $25), to offer microcredit to people all over the developing world, via existing microcredit organisations.

on a personal note last week when I was feeling quite worried (still no job, savings decreasing, can't decide what to do, take a 'lesser' job, try to go self employed, ah poor me!) I went and lent 2x$25 to people, and frankly it reminded me that I am far far far from poor. Here are their stories:

Rosa is 40 years old and lives in the Laureles Norte section of the capital, Managua. She is married and has three children in grade school, ages 2, 7 and 12. She hopes to offer her family, her children, a bright future and to leave them an inheritance. Rosa has a small business selling homemade food. She has ten years experience in customer service, and would like to improve her business, expanding it and increasing sales by offering new types of food. In order to increase her income and sales, Rosa plans to invest this loan in new products and appliances, such as staples and perishable items for food preparation, a grill, and new tables and chairs to provide for and attract new customers.

Silvia is 55 years old and lives in the Laureles Norte neighborhood of the capital, Managua. She is a single mother with four grown children. Thanks be to God, she has been able to help her children to prosper and has started her own business, a guest house. Silvia hopes to leave her family something worth inheriting. In addition to the guest house, she also sells cosmetics retail and on credit. For the past ten years she has rented a room to bring in more income and to help herself financially. Her goals are to expand and buy new product lines. Thanks to loans from Afodenic she has been able to buy products such as perfume, lipstick, nail polish, shoes and silver jewelry, generating higher profits and offering her clients better and a greater variety of products.

The site is extremely simple to join and use, create a basic profile, browse entrepreneurs by type, country etc., and make your loan. Payments are over paypal.

My oldest loan is less than a month old so I do not know much about what kind of information one might get from the lenders in the long run, but I did get a fairly generic email from each of the organisations about the loan and its recipient, and I assume I will get more.

It feels quite good to be able to do something that feels *useful* - although I find it very hard to choose between all the people. They are all tales of courage, self reliance and dignity, and of lives much different from our own (I remember the old grandmother whose children are all dead and who is working to get all her orphaned grandchildren a future)

Because these are loans, you do get your money refunded eventually, which you can take out or re-lend.

I like the spirit - and I'm planning to lend a further $50 in the next month, probably in Africa this time around.

PS: I would be quite happy to join a donationcoder group if others are also on kiva, make donations in the name of cody ;) - here's my profile http://www.kiva.org/lender/iphigenie

(this was triggered by a near-religious linux post in a thread about windows XP. I figured I wouldn't pollute that with my rant and will just rant where people can ignore it easier)

Please don't come and tell me that your particular OS is the bestest of them all, super stable, easy to manage, easy to learn, no security issues. It isn't. None of them are. If you think so you have forgotten all the times you scratched your head or tore your hair trying to figure out how to do...

It always bothers me when I see people get religious about an OS (or programming language) - this started as an open minded conversation and at some point it starts being an advocacy discussion - with people using the usual myths about each other's OS (linux is not that user unfriendly and mishmashy, neither is windows that insecure or unstable). The worst is that most of the people get all religious not about the reality of their OS (or language) but the idea of the OS, and the image it projects about them.

Once someone gets religious, then others feel they have to defend their choice (even if they weren't religious about it, their image has been attacked, implying that they are morons/heretics for using something else. Hard to shut up after that)

I have used: several flavors of DOS, Vax/VMS, SunOS, Solaris, Opensolaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, desktop distributions of BSD, Windows 3.11, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista, Windows Server (NT, 2003, 2008), AIX, OS/2, HPUX, SGI, MacOS, about 20+ flavors of linux over 15 years.

I have administrered/managed, in a commercial setting: DOS, SunOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows (the whole list above except for server 2008 which i only played with), AIX, OS/2, MacOS, Linux: Slackware, Redhat, fedora, debian, DLD, Suse, Centos, and a few specialised one (router/firewall) i can't remember right now. Some as servers, some as desktops.

So when people talk to me about how wonderful X is, or how innovative, I tend to see red.

First, If you cannot list at least 3 ways in which the other person's OS is better than yours (things you wish your OS had) then you don't know enough to debate in the first place. This is called Nebbe's rule when applied to programming languages, i'll call it iphi's rule for OSes.

1. All OSes suck - they fall way short of what an OS should be and might be one day - but most of them don't suck enough that we cannot get used to them and like them

2. All OSes are unstable - at least any one I have ever used with a GUI has had mysterious crashes, problems, freezes. The worst was probably redhat/fedora, and that even without a GUI.

3. Updates and software install are a problem on all OSes. There will be numerous cases and people who have had things mess up just by trying to install or uninstall on any OS - whether windows, macos, solaris, bsd, aix, linux distributions. If you think you haven't had any you either have been extremely lucky, or you have forgotten the teething problems in your enjoyment of the idea of your OS.

4. All OSes are insecure in the hands of an uninformed user. Granted, some are safer because an uninformed use cannot even begin to use them.

5. All OSes are frustrating - With any OS, there's a time right out of the box where they are fun. Then as you start to really do work with them, especially with deadlines, the cracks will appear and you will tear your hair out. Then if you stick with them you will get to the point where they are stable, work to your satisfaction, and you will be comfortable like and old couple. It can take a month or 18 to get there, depending on luck, the match between the chosen OS and the task you are trying etc.

6. All OSes are fun if you use them to dabble. If you use an OS mostly to have fun and dabble, without pressure, you will like it better. So if you used windows at work but linux at home, linux will feel infinitely more easy, fun, stable - because you can just put up or ignore things that are less than ideal, and what projects you conceive will be projects that fit within the limitations of your chosen platform. If you have linux at work but windows at home (for games and chatting), you might feel otherwise. I have at some point or another absolutely hated every single OS I have had to use, except for the ones I have only ever dabbled with.