Thursday, October 27, 2005

A long summer night's dream


I have been really busy lately at work this explains the sporadic blog entries. Well I still don't have much time to blog so am gonna make it fast.

Comming to fast , we are approaching the last week of Ramadan the new moon should be seen "theoretically" on (3rd of November 2005) thursday , my bet is that Eid would be celebrated on Friday.I do long for a good briani... miaaam. For those of you who don't know what briani is .. well you will see on Eid's day ..vegetarians please abstain.

Summer is so painful i do prefer Mauritian winter which is very comfortable. Right now in Port-Louis its like living in hell. On top of that there is a stupid bat which keeps eating mangoes 2 metres off my bedroom window and it makes awful squeaky noises ... damn stupid animal!! I thought it was a small thing until I saw it last night , its like arms length and with its wings unleashed it does look creepy.

Apart from that there is nothing really important going on except for school children who are having their final exams and are soon going on holidays ... lucky kidos.

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Friday, October 21, 2005

Flock - New variant of firefox


Am currently writing this post using Flock the new variant of FireFox . This new browser has really tight integration with tools such as blogger , flickr , del.i.cious etc.. which adds really powerful editing capabilites to your browsing experience.

Monday, October 17, 2005

Goowy mail now at 2Gig and much much more


The war rages on in the battle of email clients. The coolest of them all with its flash inteface , Goowy , now is offering 2Gig mail storage capacity which makes it a direct concurrent with Yahoo Mail and all below ..including Hotmail.

You would have thought that this would be it but Goowy is also launching a desktop client to allow you to get notifications of your mail directly from your desktop along with all the functionalities such as calendar , notifications ,games ,etc..

Installation is pretty simple and straight forward.

Right now however am currently getting problems connecting thought the email client , site says they are performing maintenance.

[Blog edited on the 18th October ..removal of content with access to beta site]

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Thursday, October 13, 2005

UFO information

These high tech pictures come from the UFO sightings website National UFO.




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Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Mailnation comes up with 1000GB mailbox



The war of mail providers are at its peak , now comes MailNation offering 1000GB mail thats way more than GMail , Goowy , Yahoo Mail and 30Gigs .

The interface is very professional and is just like outlook express , dont expect AJAX , FLASH or advanced JavaScript here. Theres nothing out of the common and its simplicity somehow gives it a really "work" type attitude.

Unlike 30gigs , mailnation does show you the amount of storage you still have left , you are allowed to send up to 10MB mail attachments, there's wap-acess , auto-message ,forwards and completely-utterly ad-free. Its really brilliant.

No need of any invitation to get a MailNation account just register directly.It terms of mail size , i beleive that MailNation is simply awesome , give it a go!

By the way thanks to the little kitten who helped me find it :P .

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Got 30gigs mail account and invites



Got a 30gigs invitation from Faisal , thanks loads man!! So here i am with my brand new 30gigs mail account with 5 invites left, already sent 2 invites away.

So if you want to get invited to 30gigs just drop a comment at the bottom of this post and let me know your email adds.


I created 2 accounts , one of which i managed to crash :p , well dont worry 30gigs is still in beta so small bugs are still present. They are actually still collecting all bugs for fixing.


The pages are processed really slowly as compared to GMail but at the same time GMail uses javascript for most of its processing , so thats why it seems to be faster than 30gigs. Still the later has a less interesting interface than GMail or Goowy. Futhermore 30gigs runs over php which may not scale up to perfom with thousands of simultaneous users , this agains explains why it is so slow.

Now lets get to the main attraction which is the actual 30 Gigs .. well from what i see attachments can only be of 2MB max and there is no indication of storage space.

There is a somewhat similar Search functionality as GMail.

You can create folders but strangely when I created a folder , it did appear under Inbox but my 'Sent Items' , 'Deleted Items' and 'Draft Items' disappeared although :) .

Anyways if you want an invite just let me know.

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Saturday, October 08, 2005

Mauritius Continuum and the Aibo dog


Bright saturday morning , nice weather , no birds chirping , an excellent day to stay at home in front of your pc you will say...hmm. Well just finished reading the newspaper it seems some laptops are being sold at really low prices in MRU finally such as the Gigbyte 1.7Ghz laptop from Leal informatics which sounds cool at rs39,000 .

Its getting warmer on dodo island these days an definitively less windy. Mango trees are all laiden with their fruits , actually am getting unwanted visitors at night in the form of bats. The little beasts are eaten up all the mangoes on my tree. Thats not really a problem except that they creat a lot of mess in the yard under the good old mango tree.

Coming back to the newspaper , I also read that the japs have created yet another version of their robot Aibo Dog with additional features including the ability to take pictures with its cameras and upload the photos along with words that it hears to a blog online! Imagine not only does man's most faithful metallic friend get your newspaper and roll when you clap hands but is also blogs all the crap that it see's in your house online...without your permission (ok am kidding here)! Actually the owner is the one who decides the entries to be sent to the aibo blog.

However if it was to be hacked the Aibo could turn out to be a really cool spy and be sent on secret missions all around the world to save the world.But until that happens we have to contempt ourselves with a blogwriter doggie which comes at the price of around $ 2,000.00 and in 3 different colours black , white and gold. The Aibo also provides video recording functionalities and can be used for house sitting which honestly i think is great , you get a robot that can run all corners of your house take pictures , send them online for monitoring , doesnt not make stupid noise , doesnt mess up your floor , doesn't require any feeding and on top of that serves as a music player and diary. So much functionalities that make your life ever easier , for my part am waiting for the next version of Aibo , the one that irons your clothes and does the cooking ;) .

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Thursday, October 06, 2005

Ramadan - Roza 2005

The days of fasting have started for all muslims across the globe . I thought i would write a few lines on the subject , it is true that this holy period is not really known outside muslim communities and outside of Mauritius (here we know everything about everyone's religion).

So what is roza all about you will say? Roza is about fasting and making muslims realise the pain and hunger people striken with poverty face in their everyday life. Its also about donating a percentage of one's income to the poor.As you may see there's a lot about trying to bring a balance between the poor and the rich. Well that was my short introduction to my beginner's guide to Roza.

Now how roza affects our everyday life is kind of surprising. You have to wake up before sunrise , have breakfast , do prayers and are not allowed to eat or drink anything until sunset. Muslims all over the world don't spend the some amount of time fasting (that is period where you dont eat and drink). For example in countries like Mauritius fasting starts at 4:35am and ends around 6:30pm as we are in summer and our days are longer than those in winter countries where the fasting is definitively less.

Roza lasts one full moon cycle which is more or less a month time. You would think that people lose weight when fasting although in some cases thats indeed what happens however many people actually gain in weight or dont lose wieght at all!!! Unbelieveable but true , there's 2 reasons for that :

1. At the end of the day , in most families we make lots of cakes , delicous food and the famous alouda (which is milk and sirop) to drink. This is like a reward to the fast keeper .. but there is an overdose at times with all these goodies.

2. The time at which you would normally have breakfast and dinner changes not to forget that the time where you would normally have lunch DOES NOT EXIST ANYMORE! So this creates a stomach clock disbalance(dont look up in the dictionary .. i just made it up).

But roza is cool :P , people tend to be more calm , patient and comprehensive. Roza ends normally when the new moon is seen and the next day we celebrate Eid-Ul-Fitr . Then we eat briani but thats another blog entry and we are still on the 2nd day of fasting ..hehehe.

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Tuesday, October 04, 2005

30 gig email service

New mail service is out from 30gigs which provides a 30Gb mail box. Its not something really exciting in terms of mailbox size , i have like a dozen gmail accounts and use around less than 4% of my 2GB space , however whats interesting is the interface.

Lets see what this service will have to offer to compete against Gmail and Goowy.

Currently registration is not available , you can get 30Gigs mail only via invitation. So if you happen to have a spare invitation , please send it my way :P .

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Dangers of popularity

Since the pass week my blog has been the constant victim of blog spammers , if you see such comments as "Hey nice blog , ...please visit".. well these commenters are the source of my nightmare.

So i decided to turn on word verification on my blog. Spammers prey for bloggers which have a good net presence in the attempt to have their adds indexed on search engines.

There mush have been around 80 spam comments registed on my blog now , already removed a few.
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