A day before the last of 2006

Its rare but tomorrow am not just celebrating the New Year I will also be celebrating Bakr-eid or Eid_ul-Adha.I won't be describing what New Year nor Eid_ul-Adha are am pretty sure you are all well educated readers :) and there are a lot of people that gonna blog about it.

This morning the Port-Louis bazaar was sizzling with goodies you could see that people were busy buying groceries for New Year parties , I guess this is one occasion where people of all faith and origin celebrate at a go. You could see that a swarm of buyers were going through the stalls much more than usual , much more than on Xmas even.

I was a bit disappointed that I didn't win the lottery though. The results had been out since yesterday but I only got the chance to check them out this morning.. ok maybe am not so disappointed I just hope someone in need would win the rs10 million and maybe bring some light in the lives of the people around him/her ...yes happy thoughts its the new year after all. An alouda was just what got me over my earlier disappointment...mmm would love to have one right now.

After the bazaar I had an absolutely great and memorable afternoon at the caudan . Went to see the new James Bond , Casino Royale . However I must say I think Pierce Brosnan does a better job than the new guy , Daniel Craig. The guy looked a bit old ...the Bond should be young come on but the thing that caught my eye the most during the flick was the Aston Martin ,just too good.



On going out from the cinema I noticed that I had lost my caudan parking ticket so I had to pay rs 200 fine and the guard at the exit took my Id and gave me a receipt for the fine. He told me that if I ever find the parking ticket I could give it back to them and the would return me back on the rs 200.



Thats it from me just can't wait to see what tomorrow has in store. :)

The 2006 most searched words on Google

Here is the top 10 most searched words on Google:

1. bebo
2. myspace
3. world cup
4. metacafe
5. radioblog
6. wikipedia
7. video
8. rebelde
9. mininova
10. wiki

Google being my favorite search engine I use it many times during the course of the day and honestly I never used any of the mentioned words in my search.

In fact I never heard many of the words used like for example bebo ,which is a social network site ,let alone of rebelde which I learnt from wikipedia was a Mexican telenova nor of mininova which is a bit torrent site.

Its surprising to see what other people are looking for.

Connection problem ends 2006

According to a communique by Mauritius Telecom due to an earthquake in asia , some important fiber optic cables have been damaged.

This has caused serious connectivity problems with asian servers along with congestion issues with Europe and America.

I fell the latency here on my MY.T connection its really annoying really to end the year with such a bad internet connection.

99.9% Xmas Spirit

Xmas is tomorrow and where others are having a cold and white Xmas we are having a hot and wet one.

I was at the bazaar in Port-Louis earlier, man it was crowded , people were in a special frenzy to get all their vegetables , meat and fish for the XMAS dinner and parties. One guy almost stumbled over me , he was carrying a bag of potatoes on his head ....that was scary :S.

Another thing I noticed were that lottery tickets were selling like pancakes needless to say that I bought Rs 200 worth of them, after all the grand prize is Rs10 Million ...but then i did win the lottery some weeks back so its ok if i don't win the Rs 10 Million ;) . Then had a cold glass of our national Alouda with Cream on top of it ... mmm delicious.

Its now time for me to wish you all a very happy , safe and festive Xmas . Remember do not drive and drink , I need you to read my blog!

My Xmas present for you people , a video of a stupid kid jumping off a balcony on top of Xmas tree :

Movies in 2007

This is the official list of films I will be watching in 2007:

1. Code Name: The Cleaner : Cedric the Entertainer, Lucy Liu, Elizabeth Hurley



2. Shrek 3



3. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End : Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley



4. The Simpsons Movie



5. The Invisible:Justin Chatwin, Marcia Gay Harden




6. Resident Evil: Extinction:Milla Jovovich, Oded Fehr



7. Mr. Bean's Holiday : Rowan Atkinson



8. Alien vs. Predator: Survival of the Fittest

9. Beowulf:Robert Zemeckis (director), Greg Ellis, Brendan Gleeson, Crispin Glover, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Sebastian Roché, Ray Winstone, Robin Wright Penn



10. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix



11. Transformers



12. Ocean's Thirteen: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon



13. Ghost Rider: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes



14. Spider-Man 3:Sam Raimi (director), Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Thomas Haden Church, Topher Grace, Bryce Dallas Howard

USB Missile Launcher

Disappointed by the performance of your co-worker or just want to get their attention when they are listening to music with their headphones on ... well here is the solution the USB powered missile launch .

This makes also a pretty cool gift for XMAS... so dont hesistate to buy half a dozen for me :P.

By the way , getting hit my USB missile rarely causes death and nuclear contamination ..just in case you wanted to know




Jack getting hit by 3 missiles .. man this guy is better than Bruce Willis in Unbreakable

Wii entry

As far as I can recall game pads haven't evolved a lot over the past 2 decades. The new generation of game pads are now equipped with movement detection mechanisms. The Wiimote is its name and its the new baby from Nitendo.

Over the past weeks I have been seeing really cool adverts on cable about the gaming possibilities with the Wiimote and its console the Wii , absolutely fantastic. Its like a breath of fresh air in the game world. Along with the fact that its your whole arm which needs to be in movement to play and not just your fingers is absolutely great , the more you spend time on your console , the more you exercise :D. Who needs to sweat in the gym when you can sweat in front of your TV set?

Now I just can't wait to get my hands on of them consoles ..even more than the PS 3 actually :D.

The binding power of the Jewels

Behold magnetic jewelery to make your mom , wife , girl friend and sisters go crazy this Christmas.

Coding at home

The problem with working at home is that you are detached from your office tools and utilities. This inaccessibility is a major problem at times for example am so used to RAD 6.0 for development where almost every configuration is made via wizards that having to configure a web-app or webservice by hand or by writing a script makes me really lazy :P.

Finding the right opensource tools and being able to integrate it with your development environment is always a major headache. Thats the biggest problem with open source , you might get it free but as far as being able to get it working in your development environment you have to do the little tweaks and configurations yourself.

Its at this crucial moment that you find out that there is a lack of documentation for your new downloaded open source gizmo or that it actually runs on a newever version of JDK than you are using or it requires half a dozen of other stuffs to be installed before you can actually start doing anything with it.

I just can't thank the guys at Eclipse.org for making our lives ever so easy with the version 3.2+ onwards of my favorite IDE.Creating webservices and J2EE applications is really such a breeze with Eclipse Callisto. There are dozens of plugins which you can add on top of it to make your coding experience really worth while. I tend to think of coding with with Eclipse 3.2 as a really pleasurable moment these days just like racing my car at night :P.

As far as servers are concerned I really can not afford to buy a Weblogic or WebSphere server although in the latter case there is the Geronimo project . I think the server I use most at home is Apache Tomcat , can't find anything easier to install and manage than good old tomcat. The advantage with kitty is that there are hundreds of documentation sites for it , this can be pretty handy if you want to diagnose whats wrong with your server at times.

Building the codes is another story everyone has his own idea about how to make this happen. Some prefer using Ant which is right now on version 1.7 others prefer using Maven 1 or 2. This really doesn't matter if you are at home working alone .. as long as your codes get compiled and archived properly , you can use whatever makes you happy. Although I do definitively prefer Maven 2 because of the strong jar versioning emphasis , reusability and modularity of the build tool.

Frameworks allow you to develop faster however it doesn't mean that your code will perform better ..so be careful about thinking that everything new is good.. try to see how they do in terms of development and what added value they bring to performance. My favorite framework of the moment is spring . Don't know how long this framework will survive in the framework jungle but right now its the best.

But then before you do implement any piece of code there should be some kind of design work in terms of class diagrams and the layout of the architecture of your codes. Dia seems to be a neat alternative to Visio but I haven't been able to use it a lot , what I have been using on the other hand for some not so complicated diagrams is Gliffy.com. Since I blogged an entry on the Gliffy service many of my friends have actually started using it and are happy with it.

Do also check out Osalt.com which provides a nice directory of open source alternatives to commercial products.

Bittorent goes HD

High definition phenomenon is not just for your TV sets now enter the HD quality films that can be downloaded using the Azureus bittorent client.



The site offering these superior quality videos is called Zudeo. There are some films , trailers , music videos and home made vids which are already available for free to download... there is even The Simpons movie trailer.

However HD also means a chunkier file so do expect like 100MB+ for a 7 min flick :P.

The chicken or the egg

This must have been the silliest question which has troubled so many ingenious minds all through these centuries which came first boiled eggs or kentucky fried chicken ?.. the egg or the chicken ?

So I made a search on wikipedia where the problem is extensively documented. How some people get such a kick from writing these kinds of stuff is even a bigger mystery for me :D.


Here is an extract ,

Since both the chicken and the egg create the other in certain circumstances (a chicken emerges from an egg; an egg is laid by a chicken) it is ambiguous which originally gave rise to the other. Purely logical attempts to resolve the dilemma result in an infinite regress, since an egg was caused by a chicken, which was caused by an egg, etc. Since every chicken originates from its egg, it seems obvious the egg came first.

My personal speculation is that Santa Claus came first , however this theory is overruled by many academics.

Here is another site which deals with the very exciting mystery.However be prepared for some incomprehensible explanation about the evolution of our common chickens.

Insaniquarium

Insaniquarium is an insanely addictive game where you need to breed fishes in an aquarium and in return they give you money with which you can buy more food and more fishes.



Its simple but fun to play...but don't expect graphics a la Prince of Persia :P though.

Flamboyant season

My mood has been really good since the past week , actually it has been absolutely great. This might explain why I caught interest in the flamboyant , a tree with bright red flowers.



This tree flowers only in December and lasts until end of December-start of January. Thats why it is associated a lot with the new year in Mauritius. We do not have snow here but hey..we got the flamboyant :).



I couldn't help taking some pictures of these trees as I went to the seaside on Sunday.

The battle of the ISPs

Nomad has been long targeting the niche of low budget households and students that cannot afford to get themselves a broadband package from Mauritius Telecom. However it was recently announced that MT would be lowering its price from rs900+ something to rs 700 .

Given the fact that MT offers a definitively better connection than Nomad which relies on WIMAX wireless technology , this has become a threat for Nomad's business. I even heard on the radio that Nomad was contacting authorities to prevent MT from reducing the price on MY.T's packages as this could mean major losses for this company.

Many people have been arguing with me about the fact that MT's packages were so expensive .. i think now they should realise that even when the price does go down some other company just causes a freeze down and we are all just stuck with the same pricing.

Dual screen phones

Be prepared for some futuristic designs for mobile phones ...presenting the dual screen mobile.



Apparently this is being patented by an asian firm but might just been seen in the year(s) to come.

Am waiting for the plasma phone , by the way things are going this shouldn't take very long.

SketchUp video

A few months ago I blogged about google SketchUp the (free) tool that allows you to create your 3-D buildings in no time .

Here is a movie that shows you just how powerful the tool is:

Amazing Software From Google Team - video powered by Metacafe

Xmas Decorations

Ho ho ho ..the XMAS Spirit is spreading across the world...December is here and as everyone knows this is the month where we party the most....which is a good thing after a year of hard work . By the way father xmas if you read this blog .. its been 15 years since you gave me anything .

Anyways (meh) we have started decorating our TNT office (the best company in the world) , with some decorations. Because of security reasons I will show only the entrance though. Yes you can consider the office as a mauritian version of Area-51.





Father XMas ...(yes am coming back to the old bugger..oops ..forget i said that Papa Noel) , you will find my socks in my cupboard , there are 50 of them. There is also my shoes and a shoe polish and brush next to them ...if you have some spare time ..well you know what to do ....just kidding there father xmas no need to get angry.

Okie so just in case you forgot where I live (??!!!@&%£$), am leaving my GPS coordinates with yah -60.1234222,69.91231232 .Now you don't have any reasons to miss me for the 16th time.

However if you reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally need to give presents to more needy ppl ..(pfft kids they always get what they want)...well you can just send me a blog comment :) .

The Long horse

This is one interesting article about the existence of a horse that looked like a teckel in width and had such a long torso that it could carry 4 people at the same time.




However this breed of horses got extinct due to the fact that it had a small lifespan. Some tend to believe that this is a hoax whilst others think that it might just be true but still it is a nice story :).

Dhoom 2 Review

Went to watch Dhoom 2 today , I never watched Dhoom before so I didnt really know what to expect except for the fact that Abhishek Bachan is a cop that needs to nail down thieves like Hritik Roshan . Abhiskek is assisted by Udhay Chopra. Its strange all 3 have families strongly linked with the Bollywood film industry.



Did i mention that there is Bipasha Basu and Aishwarya Rai in the flick? ....by the way i think Bipasha is way better than Aishwarya!



This motion picture is family oriented although there are loads of muscles and very little clothes, so you can take your grandma and kids safely to watch it. The film shown at Star , Caudan , is subtitled so if you don't understand Hindi , you can still enjoy it ...at times the subtitles were really helpful to understand what Udhay was talking about.

Some scenes were really nicely made and scripted like the one where Hritik needs to steal a diamond in a museum which is heavily protected. But then there are loads of crappy scenes especially those pictured on Aishwarya ....her acting is really awful... even worse is Udhay in a funny role .. although i must admit he did made me laugh a few times with his silly lines.

This is an action movie and one of the best of 2006 with spectacular stunts executed mostly by Hrithik Roshan which did a marvelous performance as usual. Lots of fighting in sea , on land , on sand, in the air , ..everywhere.

The songs are one of the key points of this movie they rock really hard I can tell you that , the ones I like most are , Touch Me , Crazy Kiya Reh , My name is Ali.



I would certainly recommend this movie to anyone wishing to watch a light and entertaining film.

The million dollar homepage

Some dude on the web go an interesting idea for selling advertisement space, the milliondollarhomepage.com , he took one page and sold each pixel of the page for $1 now he's idea worked so well that he now is a multi millionaire.. did I mention that his advertisement page is sold out ?

World Aids Day

Today 1st December is World's Aids Day. Many people through out the world are still suffering from this evil virus which has shattered many families and killed thousands of innocent children. As much as 5,500 people die on a daily basis in Africa from AIDS.

What's annoying is that simple gestures could have saved so many lives . Use condoms when having sex, if you are a drug addict don't share your needles (don't be an addict in the first place!)..these are stuffs that we have been taught for so long and still so many people don't care to take their precautions thinking that AIDS happens to others and not to them.

For those that want to help people affected by this virus please do not hesitate to donate and help progress research to find a cure against HIV AIDS.

Meanwhile the (RED) campaign under the blessings of U2 singer Bono is selling a number of products for the benefit of helping those suffering from this disease.