MY.T enduring its first network problems

The MY.T connection is one of the best I have seen so far on the Mauritian market , however yesterday a lot of users experienced a sudden unavailability of Internet connection .

I personally thought that my LiveBox had stopped working since every time there is a powercut the red bulb next to the '@' symbol starts blinking rapidly..which means no Internet connection.Occasionally you hear a clicking-like sound which means its unable to connect.

Then I called 8585 which is the My.T hotline and discovered that the actual problem resided on the MY.T network itself not on my LiveBox ...fiouff.. and was told that the problem would be solved in the coming hours.

Eventually I got fed up waiting and discovered only in the morning that the network issue had been fixed. A brief has been communicated on servihoo about it.

Lets just hope this does not happen on a regular basis.

A free alternative to MS Visio

Visio is a brilliant tool , frankly I love using it , however it costs money and unfortunately I don't have the bucks to install it on all my pcs. I have been looking for a long time for a good alternative to draw up my network , UML , Architecture and other diagrams until I stumbled upon gliffy this afternoon.

Gliffy.com is a flash based website that allows you to draw up your diagrams free on the web . The interface is similar to that of Visio and other similar desktop equivalents. You simply drag and drop your shapes on the canvas to start your diagram.

Current supported drawings are Flow Chart , UML ,Network , User Interface , Floor Plan.You can register free and all your diagrams are stored online. This is really one of the most useful sites I've seen this year.

Here below is a floor plan I made of my room .

JBuilder 2007 is out

The long awaited JBuilder 2007 has been released and unfortunately it is not yet available for download in the Borland JBuilder Downloads section.

Still you can always try out Foundation version of JBuilder 2005 which is absolutely free however it is a scrapped down version of the commercial IDE.



Before Eclipse ,JBuilder used to be the King of IDE's for Java Development but nowadays JBuilder has slowly slipped into a dark Era of unpopularity maybe due to its commercial nature and lack of plugins "a la Eclipse".Maybe this is why this time the core of JBuilder has been written upon the Eclipse platform :D.

Reviewing ReviewMe

The following is a paid review

The idea is simple and brilliant ReviewMe.com is a site where you can actually purchase a review of your blog , product or service.



Signed up to the ReviewMe.com site is a number of writers may they be expert in Art , Culture , Technology or literature who offer their reviewing expertise.

Now a company or individual would hire these writers to write something about the service that they are offering and the writers get half the sum of money depending on their popularity on the web and the other half is collected by ReviewMe.com .

Its an easy way to make some cash if you are a fellow blogger who likes reviewing stuffs and expressing your opinions.

I have personally signed up and the review that you are reading right now could eventually bring me $20 at the end of the month :D...isn't that great $20 I could buy myself a mega-dinner at pizza hut ;) .



The first thing that struck me when I came across ReviewMe.com was the fact that the interface was so simple and easy to understand. Thats the way that most sites should look like , the more complex the information being provided the simpler the interface should be.

If you are a blogger and you accept to take up a review , you are provided with a deadline for example for this review am expected to complete it in 48 hours. So not only is it bringing some money but also its a bit like a game where you have a time limit ..else no mega-dinner at pizza hut :P.

For any blogger its a good experience in the sense that it tries to bring more maturity and volume to articles.

On the other hand for the advertiser its definitively more interesting to have people giving their opinions on the service they are trying to sell than putting pointless banners and pop ups on websites that people totally ignore . Furthermore with browsers like Firefox that have plugins that can detect adverts and completely hide it from the surfer , it becomes more and more useless to pay huge amounts of money on such means of marketing.

I think now the best that could happen to ReviewMe.com is that advertisers discuss this powerful tool that can help them become famous or notorious on the web in no time :P.

Snap.com the new web 2.0 search engine

The new generation Web 2.0 search engines doesn't just provide you with accurate results and provide alternatives if they detect spelling mistakes nor do they just auto-complete your queries itself ...actually they even allow you to preview the results directly on your search page.



If you don't understand what am talking about just check out Snap.com to give a new dimension to your surfing experience.

However the fact that only 4-5 results can be viewed at a time is a bit annoying , this means a lot of time spent with the next page button to eventually find what your looking for. Still its a really good tool.

By way do you know the meaning of the Web 2.0 ?... well neither did I until I did a little search on the net about it . Apparently the word was coined by O'Reilly , it seemed that O'Reilly and his buddies wanted a new word that would depict sites such as MySpace , YouTube , Flickr that allowed the surfer to participate and build a network of users . The new "Web" would allow the deployment of web applications which normally would replace desktop applications in the coming years ..or months :p .

If you want more information on Web 2.0 do check out the Wikipedia page dedicated to it.

The joy of reading a free book thanks to Don

Donald Crowdis is considered as one of the oldest bloggers on blogosphere , am really baffled at how he is still able to write such good, funny and intelligent articles.

The guy even has a wikipedia entry and from what am reading he is still having a very active life at the age of 92.



Well thanks to one of the entries of Donald Crowdis I was able to find this nice little link to the University of Adelaide which allows you to search through their online library which spreads across various categories such as Literature, Philosophy, Science, and History.

Now coming back to Donald he wrote an very interesting and puzzling entry about cannibalism which is mentioned on BoingBoing.net where I initially discovered Don's blog...I leave you to find out about it .

Garfield 2 the return of the King

On saturday we went to Star at Caudan to watch one of the most memorable films in the whole wide world GARFIELD 2.

There was like 3 of us and about 30 kids and their parents ... so we did look a bit weird there.The guy who sold the ticket had even asked us if we had any kids accompanying us :).


But as soon as the animated garfield lit up on the screen everyone young and old started to laugh their heads off. Its a really nice movie specially if you like cats and cats ...and cats.

In this new movie Garfield discovers a look-alike kitty which lives in a cool castle in the UK . Cast along-side Garfield is his friend Oddy ..a really wonderfully stupid doggy...and there is also his master and his master's girl friend.

You dont have anything to do this weekend? .. well Garfield's a must see !

The Sucks No Limit T-Shirt

Yashvin has interesting pics of his Nomad Suck No Limit T-Shirt on his blog. It was so funny that I couldn't help not writing about it .. really good sense of humour.



Good thing the nomad people had a sense of humour too :D !!

Infotech 2006 updates

Yesterday we went to the 2006 edition of infotech which for the first time was held at Swami Vivekananda centre at Pailles. I had taken a few photos there but it seems its high time i get rid of my phone cause I was unable to download them to my pc :(.

This years infotech had less stalls namely those of smaller companies , my assumption would be because of the fact that the prices are much higher for stalls at Swami VVivekananda. The good thing is that the entrance fee is still free.

We were greeted by a BMW at the HM Rawat stall , i think most people went to the stall because of the car . As for the price of the phones these go as follows the 2 centres of attraction were as usual the now famous N93 which is being sold around Rs 31,000 (VAT included) and the E70 which revolved around Rs 26,000 . The E70 is mostly a business phone which can open up into a Keyboard .


Then there we went to the i-mate stall which had some nice smartphones , I gave my email address to one of the representatives to send me the pricings of the handhelds but he has up to now not sent anything.

The Emtel stall was amongst one of the most impressive stalls but they had bet more about attracting customers with fewly clothed top model type of girls and big wide screens instead of actually portraiting what they wanted to sell. So eventually people were like looking at the stall from a distance without actually knowing why they should actually go inside .

There were also tons of laptops being sold went to see one Dell Inspiron with Core Duo processor priced at Rs 85,000 and the lady there told me that that was actually a promotional price the real price would be Rs 100,000 . Who said that laptops were getting more affordable?


Courts however is proposing a couple of Acer laptops which are quiet nice and fall around the Rs 45,000+ VAT range but with only 512Mb on most models . They even had the famous Acer Ferrari Laptop with 2GB RAM , however although this particular beast sported a nice design the fact that its DVD drive was external was not very appealing.

Do note that Accenture , Ceridian and Currimjee stalls are open to provide information to prospective candidates wishing to join these companies.

My opinion is that the Infotech is a good show but I would expect many people to be actually buying anythere there because of the price of the products being sold.

Pimp my ride by Borat

Another clip from our friend Borat found on youtube.com , here borat pimps your ride a la MTV style:

Watch a movie inside of a concrete block

In the future we will be able to watch our movies and tv on our wall itself ...did i forgot to say.. without a projector?

A company has recently developed a special type of concrete with optical fibers embedded into it.

The potential of such a technology is huge , imagine your office wall turning into your pc monitor and your concrete bus stand into a advert displayer.

Have a look for yourself at the video :

Make art from..red bull cans

Red bull has long been my key energy generator whenever i had to work or party all nite .. but never thought that the best selling taurine drink of the century could also be used for art !!



Checkout the site www.redbullartofthecan.com , please note that the site is in flash if you see a blank white page its normal ..its loading :P

Blackberry to be launched in Mauritius

Cellplus has announced that it will soon launch the cool business smartphone blackberry in Mauritius which will target mostly business people.

Blackberrys have a proven track record of being one of the most useful handsets on the market currently to keep track of your office mails and contacts.

Two models will be proposed the BlackBerry® 7130g and the BlackBerry® 8700g .

However one thing that does lack from the numerous possibilities offered by the phones are that you can't actually take any picture as they are not equipped with cameras.

Prince Of Persia

Spent the whole morning lazing around my pc playing Prince of Persia : Sands of times until i got stuck not even after completing like 2% of the game ...yeah yeah yeah i admit it am a bad player.

So i did what any impatient gamer would do , i decided to get the damn walkthrough and that didnt help much either ..

So i installed another game ..Prince of Persia : The Two Thrones ..which by the way rocks ..awesome gameplay.



Now my eyes are all blurry ..need some rest :P.

And some people are enjoying themselves at the seaside!

Unusual Mail Opener

What do i hear ??? .. you want a low tech solution to open your mails ... you lazy folks get yourself a bunny:

Tera mera pyaar on Utube

This is one nice video from the album Tera mera pyaar don't know how it ended up on youtube but enjoy :

yourminis.com

One more flash powered gift from the guys from goowymedia ,who created Goowy Mail , yourminis.com allows you to neatly organise all your widgets or minis together.

In the end you get your own dazzling personal dashboard from where you can monitor flickr , youtube , your email accounts , play games , read dilbert comics and there is even a notepad and todos widget... Dont you want to sit down and cry with joy?

The email accounts supported are gmail , goowy mail , however for Yahoo and Hotmail you need to have a premium or plus account . hmmm wished i could check my hotmail and yahoo from there too ... too bad dont have any dough to upgrade :( .



You can add tabs to yourminis account and organize your widget tab wise or absolutely any you want. The widgets themselves are draggable and re-sizeable whilst the tabs can be skinned using flickr photos .. coool. huh?



One more neat feature is the ability to publish any of the tabs and thus offering friends and other people the ability to view it . Mine is here http://www.yourminis.com/javed .

Registration is free so go get yourminis :P !