Tsunami alert in Mauritius

The news broke last night as I was watching BBC , there is a new EarthQuake off the shores of Sumatra and it seems that the risk of a new Tsunami raging its way through the indian ocean is very probable.

At this moment 2,000 people are estimated to have died on Nias an island off the shores of Indonesia and 80% of buildings have been affected in the town of Gungunsitoli.



According to French news site TF1 it is believed that there might be a risk of tsunami in the south of the indian ocean , which in this case would mean that we in Mauritius , Rodrigues and Reunion island would be directly affected.

From what i heard there are people in the north of Mauritius who fled from their houses to go in safety during the night.Although i havent any record or witness from anyone in Mauritius who have felt any quake tremor so far.

Lets wait and see what happens do stay in tune with your radio or tv set and be very careful if you are planning to go to the beach today.

I would like to thank Silflay Hraka for pointing out the danger of this new quake to me, his site has got very useful facts on the event.

Category: Mauritius , Indonesia , Tsunami

1 TB free email

After the 1GB mail offerings from GMail and soon Yahoo Mail now we are moving in the 1TB email era. One such mail service offering 1TB mail is hriders.com. I must warn you though that there are a lot of adds in this mail service.

Still on the 1GB mail offerings i have tested walla.com which is kind of nice with not too many ads and a nice simple interface.

Category: Mail, Email

JAVA GUI builder comparison

Here is a study done by Mitch Stuart on different GUI builders currently available on the market. Netbeans , JFormDesigner , FormLayoutMaker , Foam , Jigloo , JBuilder , Eclipse , Jvider are all investigated and the pricings of each tool is also provided.

The study is found at this location:
http://www.fullspan.com/articles/java-gui-builders.html

Category: JAVA

PSP review

The PSP reviews are out , check out the review by Alec Matias , complete with details the PSP hardware itself and first impressions about gaming on sony's hand held game console.



Apparently the PSP is much more powerful than the Nintendo DS although the game titles are not very interesting for the moment compared to the Nintendo which has over a decade and a half of experience in hand held consoles.

Review:
http://www.shacknews.com/extras/reviews/psp/032405_psp_2.x

Here is another review of a guy who bought 2 PSP consoles and is going to sell one of them on ebay (lots of packaging and inside packaging pics .. :P)

Dont forget the Messenger Plus World Wide contest to win a PSP console every week until April : http://www.msgplus.net/download_contest.php?id=2865

Category: Psp , Nintendo, Gaming

Mail Wars Yahoo v/s Gmail

Apparently Yahoo is planning to offer free 1GB mail storage space to all its users.So if you don't have a GMail account (which is already at 1GB) then this is really good news for you.The service is to start late in April for Yahoo Mail users whilst GMail will shed off its beta version tag to go public on April 1.


Yahoo Mail!

Lets see the good features of both the Mail systems:

Yahoo:

1. Going from 250MB to 1GB this leverages Yahoo to the same rank as GMail in terms of storage space provider.
2. Many more years of experience than GMail , the Yahool Mail system is more reliable
3. Doesnt make use of JavaScript like Google, this means that it is more compatible with most browsers
4. Free antivirus scanning of your attachements
5. SPAM blocklist , feature not availble in GMail

GMail:

1. Unlike Yahoo Mail Gmail is completely Ad Free
2. Mail forwarding allowed
3. POP3 access allowed
4. Ability to search your mail
5. Labels , allow you to monitor your mails as if they were part of a conversation
6. Automatic refresh, you dont need to refresh your page to know if you got a new mail

So from what can be seen , Yahoo Mail will give more emphasis on reliability and security whilst GMail is biding more on new features and pioneer concepts.


Category: Mail, GMail, Yahoo

Hennie does her job

Woke up this morning to find that there was a cyclone warning class 3 in Mauritius. Which means literally stay in bed no work today...so thats what i did!

There was lots of wind , some rain and lot of noise thats how i can describe the event nothing worth stating apart from that ..which is abosultey great.This is the weather the way I like it!

Category: Mauritius Cyclone

Cyclone Hennie targeting Mauritius

Currenty there is a cyclone warning class 1 in Mauritius , which means that there is a risk of cyclonic rains but no great dammage. Dont be mislead cyclones are usually welcome in Mauritius mostly by the thousands of students who dont have to go to school when there is a cylcone warning class 2. I do remember when I was one of them ..sniff..

Ok enough flashback...here is a Infrared Image of the cyclone (just look next to Madagascar):


Cyclone Hennie

This cyclone is expected to be weak so there is no major threat, but in the past we have seen much more powerful natural bulldozers crashing on the island.

For more information visit Servihoo


Category: Cyclone , Mauritius, Weather

iPod Shuffle and Mac Mini now avaible in Mauritius

LCI (Leal Communications Informatics Ltd) is commercialising the iPod shuffle and Mac Mini in Mauritius.

There is currently no crowd yet to acquire iPod goods on dodo island but I dont think this will take very long before people start buying this little goodie. The iPod shuffle as its name implies shuffles your playlist and picks out songs at random it is currently being initially prized at Rs4000 + VAT.



As for the mac mini which is really very small in size ,6.5 inches wide and 2 inches tall, it is being sold at LCI showrooms for Rs17,900 + VAT. Macs don't have a big place on the Mauritian market, I personally dont think people will prefer a MAC to a PC but the prize seems good...who knows.



Category: Mauritius , iPod, MacMini, Mac

AlienWare the review

This is what i believe are the coolest hardware on the planet, not only is the design wicked but the performance of the AlienWare desktops and notebooks are really excellent.

Check out the AlienWare desktop:

...and notebook:


I think we should all throw away those big ugly pcs and get these babies instead, although the price is a bit high i must confess. The Alienware Aurora ALX SLI for example comes at a hefty price tag of $5259.00 !! However it does have some neat features such as:

1. Dual 10,000rpm RAID 0 drives


2. DUAL 256mb top-of-the-line PCIe graphics cards


3. ATHLON 64 processor (finally, intel isn't the "gaming" processor


4. PCI Express and SLI for the graphics cards


5. PC 4400 RAM

Category: Notebook, AlienWare , Desktop , Performance

w.bloggar the blogging client

I have started using w.bloggar as a blog client for blogger to post and publish my blog entries. It is a freeware with absolutely no ads. Its got a cool UI and great authoring tools along with it. The installation takes about a few seconds and up you go blogging your contents.

Its just like writing up a word document and when you finish you just click on the Post&Publish button to publish your entry on your blog. There are numerous interesting features such as:

1. Editing of posts and templates
2. Post preview
3. Post to many blogs
4. Spell checking

A number of blogs are supported for more information visit the w.bloggar website

Category: blog,utility,freeware,Mauritius

FireFox the movie!

Last nite I watched FireFox the movie, it had nothing to do with our popular browser but was a good film nethertheless starring Clint Eastwood as a veteran top gun pilot asked to re-join the US Airforce to steal a Russian airplane able to fly at Mach 6 (wooow) and equiped with mind-guided missiles (that was a bit far-fetched) which responded only if you thought in Russian (hahahahhaha).


Firefox movie

Category: Firefox , Movie

Won PSP console from Patchou

Guess what one person from Patchou contacted me for the Messenger Plus World Wide Contest and I was not online! Imagine my disapointment of losing the chance of winning a PSP console. Am heart broken... sniff.

Well I still have a little hope , i suppose he could try to contact me again. Am online 12hours a day and it had to fall in the 12 hours where i was not online.....fate oh fate ... !

Anyways this does denote that the contest is genuine and you can all try your luck:
http://www.msgplus.net/download_contest.php?id=2865


PSP console

Category: MSN , Messenger , Patchou , PSP , Contest

Murky Monday

Its again raining a lot today in Port-Louis the weather is getting worse..so worse that the ministry of education decided that today would be holiday for school children. Rainwater is accumulating in craters on the roads and it becomes a real heachache for fellow pedestrians to try not to be splased by cars , buses and lorries.

For my part i had to take my jacket out of the closet for today. We are also apparently moving out of summer as a cold breeze is strongly being felt.

Category: Mauritius , Port-Louis, Weather

MSGPLUS 3.5 released WorldWide contest

messenger plus

The new messenger plus 3.5 is finally out and compatible with all versions of msn messenger upto version 7. It got the normal features of the previous versions plus some cool new features such as emotion sound.

I just installed my msg plus and it works pretty fine .The feature i love the most however is the dockable msn contacts , people that you want to be continously in contact with can be added directly on you desktop in dockable translucent boxes.

On top of that Patchou has organised a contest to celebrate this launch. Every week till end of April , a winner will get a PSP console and the final winner will get an AlienWare laptop , which by the way is mondo cool. This contest is held worldwide so join!

To get started please visit:
http://www.msgplus.net/download_contest.php?id=2865

Category: MSN , Prizes, MSNPLUS, Patchou, Contest, Mauritius

Record number of hits

After GoogleX was brought down following complaints from Mac Os , there was a great amount of zeal from the Genie effect enthusiats to find a screenshot of the GoogleX website. This has caused the number of visitors on my blogspot to surge from the mere 2-10 visitors to a wooping 200 visitors yesterday!


Visitors report


Category: Blog , GoogleX, Google

GoogleX

GoogleX 

Google released its portal GoogleX , which is supposed to be in "hommage" to Mac Os X. I really can't see any difference between Google portal and GoogleX except for a difference in the menu style.

Yesterday I couldn't login at all on blogger , I was only able to post the pic of GoogleX via Hello.

Category: Google

Yahoo launching blogging service

Yahoo!360

In the trend of Microsoft's msn spaces , Yahoo is to start a new service called Yahoo! 360 ° . The service will be operational on March 29. And it will have features such as sharing of photos , blog ,inviting your relatives and friends to your space on Yahoo.

You can as from now register yourself to the beta version of the service.

Category: Yahoo , Blog, Beta

Port-Louis under attack

bad weather

Outside lightning is falling like crazy every 5 minutes , its weird how this event occurs every day at 12:00 just when i need to go out to eat something.

The picture above has been taken from my office parking lot. I waited like 30 minutes to be able to take a picture of a lightning bolt but i guess it was not my day.Anyways am still hungry... grrrr.. (thats my tummy)

Category: Mauritius, Port-louis , Lightning, Weather

50 things i will do in my lifetime

my 50 things 

The brits really don't know what to do once you give them a webserver and hosting . Take a look at my50.co.uk , its a site where you post the 50 things that you would want to do before you fall stiff on your back. Man i do wonder who would want to know what i would like to do..hmmm... obviously a lot of people !!!

Well you can always check this site you will find my wishlist and a couple of other thousand of people's (only 2 people from Mauritius though).

Category: Website , Innovation , UK , Brits, Mauritius

BluggCaster - cool podcasting

bluggcaster 

Ever heard of a podcast? Well its literrally just like a blog , although its more of audio than text , people record their information in mp3 format for example and upload it on their website , so as others can listen to all the blablabla that you can possibly imagine.

I thought that podcasting was like listening to the radio until i came across BluggCaster. Man its so mondo cool , the presenters are in fact ALIEEEEEEEEEEENS yes ! They have this squeaky little voice and they analyze the news from our planet earth with their dullish eyes before recording everything and publishing their podcast... its really crazy, funny and the best part being that they have this awesome flash site ..man i feel that its christmas already.

Category: Podcast , Blog

Transfer Money on MSN

Bill Your MSN banker 

The guys in the netherlands are always a couple of decades in front of us. With the new service from snsBank called Bill, you can now transfer small amount of money to your friends or perform online shopping without leaving your msn IM.

According to mess.be no registration would be required. I checked the snsBank but the site is entirely in dutch which is not very pratical for people like me.There are offering this pioneer service the least they could do to increase the audience is to provide translations in english , french , etc..

Still its an interesting idea , hope other banks will follow.

Category: MSN ,Bank , Netherlands

Open-source projects

Java-Source.net 
One word to describe this site "awesome" . Java-Source.net is really worth the visit , it has a wide collection of open-source java projects (am i repeating myself here ... :P) ranging from blogs , code analyzers , groupware solutions , to IDEs , template engines and webservers.

Actually all the different categories are listed in alphabetical order and the easy navigation is quiet nice for a java website. Most of the java websites i've been too dont really take the aesthetics into account but this site has really good interface and no gimmicks and certainly no ads (apart from the usual Goolge adsense ads).

To sum up this is really a java developers heaven and has enough goodies to keep everyone happy.

Category: Java , Download , OpenSource

Baby Luna

I would like to welcome the youngest blogger on the planet ,baby Luna Julia Verveen , born in the Netherlands. Her blog is at http://luna.verveen.net. The blog is currently maintained by her daddy Stephan Verveen who is a collegue and friend of mine.

You can know all that the cute little baby is doing on her blog which has got uptodate news. Her parents adore her and we are all waiting for her to start her first steps on the net.

Happy Birthday Mauritius

Happy birthday to you , happy birthday to you , happy birthday dear Mauritius happy birthday to you!!!

Wishing you a very happy 37th independence day and 13th republic day. Hope now you will prosper more , have a diminished crime rates , lower inflation level and have even better standard of living for your inhabitants.

Wishing you the best that can happen..along with better broadband for the years to come.

Category: Mauritius

Creating a mailing list

Ever thought of creating your own mailing list?..obviously not... well I have! So i decided to have a look at the potential solutions available (free).

There are many advantages from having a mailing list , you can send mails to all your friends , relatives , co-workers without having to add everyone's email address each time and its just fun to spam other people's mail address with all the blabla that you can produce.

Here is some of the options i found:

1. Mailman - Written using Python , there are loads of sites which use this but for me humble XP user ,it was really a pain into understanding how it worked. So i gave up after reading the installation instructions :S .

2. James - This one is in JAVA , so i can talk a bit longer on it , so its pretty straight forward minimum requirements being JDK1.4 or above. You just have to unzip James and go to the bin directory and click on run. There are some configurations (depending on your patience) to be set for the mailing list to work. I had a few problems though with DNS addresses on some XP machines there are dummy DNS address of style fec0:0:0:ffff::1%1 which are added , this causes James to crash but on 3 other pcs i tested it worked fine. James also serves as a Mail server.

3. Coollist - If you dont require a professional mailing list with its own server running behind your firewalls do consider coollist.com which offers creation of free mailing list. You basically create an account and add your friends. An invitation mail is sent to your friends , if they accept they can start receiving mails from the mailing list.

My own mailing list is javed@coollist.com .If you want to be added just add a comment or mail me ;)

Category: Mailinglist , Mail , Apache , Ideas

ADSL by ClickPost

I almost slipped and fell down when i saw the front page news of L'express this morning, i couldn't beleive it. ClickPost ,a Mauritian internet services provider, is offering ADSL 128 kbps at Rs 899 (+ VAT) with unlimited access.

Having read that I immediately went to check the tariff details on the ClickPost website . The newspaper article also mentioned that the main leader on the Telecommunications market in Mauritius, TelecomPlus was offering ADSL 128k at Rs1000 for only 12 hours. Thats absolutely not true becomes when I checked on their site , the kit they were offering was at Rs990 and for 24hours unlimited access.

Anyways I'm very happy to see that we are finally moving out of the 56kbp dial-up era to ADSL. But i do wonder when we will be enjoying a T1 connection.

Category: Internet , ADSL , Mauritius , Telecom

Maha Shivaratree

Today our hindu friends are celebrating Maha Shivaratree.So its public holiday ,actually yesterday too was public holiday due to this festival where pilgrims in Mauritius go to Grand Bassin which is a dormant volcano..yes we are all ver brave on dodo island.. and fetch holy water from the lake which is at the center of the Grand Bassin crater.

Yesterday I went to the seaside at Mont Choisy thinking that as a lot of people will be praying I would have the beach all for myself, but i guess a couple of hundreds of people had the same idea as i did. But nethertheless I had a great time swimming through the seaweeds (yes it was low tide..).

Today after months of neglect i finally found time to remove the Sasser viruses which were feasting on my pc.Now I can surf without getting silly warning dialogs all over my screen. By the way if you do get warnings of type "Syshost.exe..." or "LSA shell" don't click on any buttons just ignore them else your pc will shut down in 60 secs.And do try Stinger from Mcafee


Category: Festival , Holiday , MahaShivratree , Mauritius , Seaside, Virus , Sasser , AntiVirus

Five Worlds

Read an interesting article about software development from Joel Spolsky .

He categorises software development into five worlds:

1. Shrinkwrap
2. Internal
3. Embedded
4. Games
5. Throwaway

and explains each category.

Here is the link to his article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html

Category: Software , Programming

Add spice to your builds

So you are planning to setup continious integration in your project or you already have CruiseControl blasting nightly builds but you would like your team members to be a bit more interested in the whole process.The daily amount of build failed emails is spamming your mailbox well why not try adding some bubbles to the build. (no am not insane ;)) . This is something I heard from a colleague who had witnessed the event , I found the site which gave the details today.

The pragmatic programmer website gives a comprehensive explanation of how to illuminate your builds using 2 lava lamps , a transceiver and a firecracker computer interface.


This is how it works , (hope i understood it right) when your build is executed the outcome is converted through a special CruiseControl plugin to a signal sent to the firecracker computer interface which sends a wireless signal to the transceiver which in turn controls which lamp to light up (red or green).



Lava lamp: red build failed  Here you are in big trouble , the build has failed. The red light lights up slowly , the longer the time you take to fix the build the more it will glow red. Dont let it glow for too long as it gets pretty hot else you might have the whole building glowing along ;).


green bubbles, Build Successful!  Hey the build worked just fine no sweat guys this is the ideal solution now you can take a coffee break and then come back to keep it green!

Category: Build , Java, CruiseControl

Softpedia the download site

Normally when I needed a particular software , I used to run to download.com , to get all that I needed. Download.com does have a rich variety of softwares from utilities to tweak up your system to macromedia flash mx 2004 (trial :P).

However over the years I slowly started to get fed up with the never changing interface and the lack of useful information. Plus to actually download something you need to click on the download link , it redirects you to another waiting page , loads lots of useless graphics on that page and then you can download. This takes like ages for the 300Mhz prehistoric pc i have at home.

Lately I came upon softpedia which has a nicer presentation of the downloadable contents It shows related files which you would want to download depending on your search and provides you in certain cases a certificate that the software is spyware, tojan, virus free, which is mondo cool.

Its a pretty good alternative if you are fed up with download.com which is the case for me :P.

Category: Download, Review

Chatting on MIRC irc.moris.net

Yesterday nite around 11pm i finally found time to enter the chatroom for moris.net , found at irc.moris.net.You can also download their version of mirc which gives you direct connection to all the related chatrooms

Although at the time I was connected there were not many fellow chatters , I did meet some interesting people (and bloggers) namely Phi and Aadil who had previously read my blogs and we exchanged some comments and thoughts about blogging and IT in general on dodo island.

I really encourage you all to go and visit this chatroom if you are into chatting and making friends online. Its really a cozy place to chat. For my part I really loved using MIRC again after such a long break, actually I learnt the basics of programming whilst creating my custom MIRC scripts some years back.So see you all there soon.

Category: Mauritius, chat, IRC