Javed Mandary :: Dodo Unleashed

Adding GTalk to your Google Homepage

2007-03-15T07:17:00.000+03:30

Google just launched yet another feature . Now you can add a GTalk widget directly to your Google Homepage.

Its cool I gave it a try a minute ago. Conversations appear in tabs.

Now you can access your Gtalk via GMail , the Gtalk desktop client and also from your Google Homepage.

I got published on lifehacker

2007-03-03T19:28:00.000+03:30

Wow I got published on one of the sites I love reading the most lifehacker !!!

I was baffled to see so many comments at one go in my mail box then I came across one comment which was talking about an entry on lifehacker about my How to Read Hotmail from Gmail post.

Mutant Ninja Turtles are back - TMNT

2007-03-02T18:43:00.001+03:30

Tears flowed down my cheeks as I got the news (5.6mins ago) that my puberty heroes were back ..yesssssss.. KAWABANGA! The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are here for some serious ass kicking action.

The trailer looks awesome apart from the fact that in 3D our turtles look more like lizards ,seems as if they been on a serious diet.

Man all the sewer adventures , ninjas , stupid jokes , mutants and the Pizzas that will show cast cant wait to see it! I bet Pizza hut is gonna make a max of dough with this flick... i started licking pizzas while watching TMNT cartoons ... can you believe that?

By the looks of it our mutant amphibian friends will need to fight against some new evil baddies .. can't see good o'le shredder anywhere in the trailer.. oh yeah I forgot he is in our office kitchenette :P .

The animated movie is to be released on the 23rd of March in the US and probably by December in Mauritius (wild guess :P ).

UoM Comm Studies

2007-03-02T18:20:00.000+03:30

Am a great fan of mauritiusblogtracker.com I think this must be the site I visit most after engadget and lifehacker .

Some 3 years back when I first started blogging there were only a few Mauritians on the Mauritian soil that were actually publishing on the web and now when I see all the names in the mauritiusblogtracker.com blogroll I feel really proud.

Lately however I was confused seeing entries like Result transcripts and Protected:Yr3:Slides for Advertising on the tracker which was pointing to a Communication Studies blog for UoM students.

I think thats a good initiative and a change of mind from lecturers and students . Although am not sure if student-teacher talk should be make available to the eyes of everyone online , its a nice way of initiating students to the world of media ..and the internet is nowadays the best distributor of information.

The fact that UoM students are showcasing themselves on the web prove that we are really moving towards a new era .

However people (all new bloggers) be careful with what you post , being visible is not always a good thing and sensitive information should not be disclosed to everyone ..some rodents are always present to prey on what you say.

But on the whole its a nice picture , I hope next year at this time when I check the tracker's blogroll its even bigger ..and i have a feeling that it will :) .

Reading your Hotmail email directly from Gmail

2007-03-01T10:00:00.000+03:30

This is a simple hack that will allow you to read your free Hotmail (No POP3 enabled) emails directly from GMail.

Recently GMail has enabled a feature that allows you to read mail from other POP3 enabled email accounts . (To learn more in detail how to set this up please read the instructions ...however this is of no great importance to our hack.)

Now my problem was that I always forgot to check my hotmail account so I thought why not make use of this new GMail feature to automatically poll my Hotmail messages into one inbox.

As you might (not) be aware however that Hotmail (the free version) has no POP3 support so I registered an account on IzyMail which basically asks for your username and password and then provides a POP3 server on IzyMail from which you can connect to retrieve your HotMail electronic mails.

After you register this is what you will get on your IzyMail screen as settings:

User name:
(Account name) javed@hotmail.com

including the ...@hotmail.com part!

Password: •••••• (your password)

Incoming server: in.izymail.com
Outgoing server: out.izymail.com
Server type: POP / POP3 or IMAP / IMAP4

Now all you need to do is to fire up your Gmail then you click on Settings -> Account

Here you can see I have already configured a hotmail account , it gives me an indication on when it was last checked.

Click on Add another mail account to retrieve email from in the Get mail from other accounts section.

Now fill in your hotmail username and password :

In the POP server section however replace the default value with the following: in.izymail.com

You can optionally add a label to messages that come from your hotmail account such as you recognize from where they originate. To do this check the Lable incoming messages option.

Hit Add Account to finish the wizard.

Thats it now you can check your Hotmail directly from Gmail !

[3/3/07 update: It has come to my attention that www.izymail.com is not a totally free service so am busy looking for an alternative , if you have one please post in comments.

Maybe the people hosting www.izymail.com will come to realise that they could make more bucks if they prolonged the trial period or provided a free version of izymail thus opening up to more customers with the help of google's new feature :P
]

Joost invitation give away

2007-03-01T08:07:00.000+03:30

I've got 2 invitations to give away for Joost .. if you are interested please let me know by writing a comment.

Joost the new way to watch TV

2007-02-26T18:23:00.000+03:30

As you might have witnessed we are gradually moving away from Satellite and Aerial antennas to watch our favorite channels and series. Many people are now downloading Heroes , Stargate , Lost or Prison Break , all their series directly from the internet(and at times illegally :P..bad!).

The way we watch TV is shifting as the Web has now the capacity to provide for our thirsty eyes... although our ISP still can't :P deliver as fast as we wished it would . Here is where Joost comes into play .

Joost as you will see on many review sites comes from the makers of the popular Skype , they want to do what they did with telephony but this time with video s'il vous plait.

At a 9.8MB something install this new Television on the desktop application is not very big in size which is a good thing as I wanted to test it out as soon as I was sent my beta testing password.

The user interface I must admit was very simple and pleasant to use. You can select from a wide variety of channels proposed by Joost and here I must say they did get some nice channels like National Geographic and Fifth gear , just to name a few.

The image quality is much better than YouTube for example . Actually you can't really compare Youtube with Joost as the latter has for objective to replace the channels you watch on your conventional TV set whereas Youtube is more about sharing videos . Joost provides quality image and content.

The application itself starts in full screen mode which is a bit surprising if you are not used to having your media player spread automatically across your display.

However quality has a price and that means for us My.T users that the video is really sluggish and stops every 5 seconds . What I do is that I just let it play in mute and after it has streamed I rewind back and look at the videos... its painful but what can you do .

Joost is still in beta so there is much improvement to expect before they finally deliver something nice and smooth.

So for me this is a brilliant piece of software but the biggest drawback is that its not for users on slow connections and at times the commands just disappear by themselves from the screen.

Joost provides free contents legally and is funded by adverts which pop up now and then ...see so you still are watching commercials after all ...yaaayyyyyy!

Ok got to leave you I need to watch the Aston Martin V8 Vantage Road test on the FIFTH GEAR channel ...tough life :P.

Aweful Saturday

2007-02-24T12:30:00.000+03:30

Gamede is still outside howling and shaking big trees as if they were made of paper. There has just been a power cut in Port-Louis and the AC current has been fluctuating a lot making my pc restart at least a dozen times.

I hope I continue getting power its really annoying not being able to watch anything on the TV or not being able to use the PC. I wonder what people would do in the old times when electricity was still a luxury and a cyclone raged outside. I guess they must have been worried about whether their houses would stand or not. Its only quite recent that most Mauritian families live in solid concrete houses. I do know that some people must be playing card or board games or just talking around a hot meal.

I have another satellite picture of Gamede , the storm doesn't seem to want to move away it has slowed down its pace meaning tomorrow is still not going to be better.

Gamede Class 3

2007-02-23T19:06:00.000+03:30

Just an update on the weather here in Mauritius .. we are now in class 3 the weather has deteriorated a lot over the pas 6-7 hours . Now its absolutely insane to go outside its not that its raining a lot but the winds are quite strong.

Here is an additional satellite photo of the beast:

Some links for you to track down Gamede:
1.Cyclone bulletin: http://metservice.intnet.mu/wfcmrue.htm
2. Mauritian Meteo Homepage: http://metservice.intnet.mu
3. Australian Meteo service: http://australiasevereweather.com/cyclones/index.html

I wish you all a very nice weekend too :D

Cyclone Gamede attacks Mauritius

2007-02-23T07:48:00.000+03:30

Its been a while since I heard people mentioning the cyclone shelter points in Mauritius. There has not been any cyclones since a long while until yesterday when a class 1 was issued.

We are right now as I speak in class 2 which means:

no school =lots of happy kids

The official meteological bulletin can be accessed here

and it looks like this :

SEVERE TROPICAL STORM GAMEDE WAS CENTERED AT 0400 HOURS WITHIN 50
KM RADIUS OF LATITUDE 15.3 DEGRES SOUTH AND LONGITUDE 61.6 DEGREES
EAST, AT ABOUT 660 KM TO THE NORTH EAST OF MAURITIUS.

GAMEDE IS NOW MOVING AT A SPEED OF 20 KM/HOUR TOWARDS THE WEST-
SOUTH- WEST.

ON THIS TRAJECTORY GAMEDE CONTINUES TO APPROACH MAURITIUS AND HAS
BECOME A THREAT.

A CYCLONE WARNING CLASS 11 IS IN FORCE IN MAURITIUS.

WEATHER WILL BE CLOUDY WITH INTERMITTENT SHOWERS, MODERATE AT
TIMES, MORE FREQUENT OVER HIGH GROUNDS.

EAST SOUTH EASTERLY WINDS WILL STRENGTHEN WITH A MEAN OF 50 KM/HOUR
AND GUSTS OF 100 KM/HOUR.

SEA WILL BE VERY ROUGH.

THE PUBLIC IS ADVISED TO TAKE PRECAUTIONS.

NEXT BULLETIN WILL BE ISSUED AT 1010 HOURS.

A CYCLONE WARNING CLASS 11 IS IN FORCE IN MAURITIUS.
A CYCLONE WARNING CLASS 11 IS IN FORCE IN MAURITIUS.=

It is expected that a class 3 will be issued around 15:00 from a reliable source...no I can't tell you who it is ..yes it is top secret ... no you can't buy me ....ok for $3000 i could tell you.

Anyways Gamede or not Gamede our weekend is ruined for sure .. or is it? ...I am however certain that there will be cyclonic conditions on My.T bandwidth with so many people staying at home , they are bound to hit the information superhighway.

Some things to remember during a cyclone class 2+
1. do not roam about the streets on foot
2. buy candles , they are nice to look at (that would be my main reason)and work great when there are powercuts
3. buy food provisions
4. get something nice to watch on TV or on DVD
5. call your friends and chit chatt about anything and everything
6. eat a lot of homemade rotis!
7. turn your pc , tv and other appliances off if there is a power cut
8. go to sleep
9. look outside your window at trees dancing a wild tango
10. listen to your battery powered radio if nothing else works

In the meantime this is how our region looks like from outerspace:

The parking that parks your car

2007-02-17T19:50:00.000+03:30

This youtube movie portraits what the next generation car parks would look like:

I think it really rocks hard ,makes me remember the scene where Will Smith parks his Audi in the movie I-Robot .

Maven 2.0.5 is out

2007-02-17T15:40:00.000+03:30

Yes the new version of my favorite all time build tool is out with version 2.0.5 , I have been using Maven since its initial version and development life was never the same afterwards.

The guys at Apache promise a seamless upgrade from version 2.0.4 which has already been a while on the market.

Needless to say that I have already downloaded this new version and have it installed on my home pc ..my office workstation will have to wait until I have verified that all the builds indeed work without any hitch.

The version 2.0.6 shouldn't take too long to surface either.

The laureates 2007

2007-02-12T19:11:00.000+03:30

Every year for 7 years when I was at the Royal College of Port-Louis ..(a long time back)..February was the month (and still is) when the Mauritian laureates were announced.

The laureates are those kids about maybe 20 of them who due to their high marks in the High School Certificate get full scholarships in big Universities abroad.

In the early years of my time at RCPL my college used to have a considerable amount of laureates and the sound of firecrackers and teenagers singing would echo all throughout the school compound.

The day would be half day and one day in the week was choosen to be holiday , this is why many kids were all eager and praying that the school would have laureates . But over the years the RCPL has produced less and less of them laureates nowadays its the Royal College of Curepipe , RCC , which is dominating like in this year's HSC exams results.

Anyways what really matters is that children who worked hard have been rewarded. But for those of you who might not be getting a state scholarship but still who worked hard and gave the most out of yourselves this doesn't mean failure...loin de la... You will soon realise that HSC is only a fragment of your existence many interesting things lies ahead . A student having 3 As may not always be better than someone with 3 Bs.

Keep striving , keep learning and have faith in yourselves the adventure is yet to begin . Some of you may need to take the exam again but still work hard and it will surely pay off.

Congratulations to all HSC participants !!!

Your phone in 5 years time by Nokia

2007-02-10T19:13:00.000+03:30

Lets face it every 5-6 years theres a major change in technology like right now Windows Vista is taking over Windows XP (big change according to Gates), IPod now allows you to make phone calls ..with the IPhone, fried rice is now replaced by ...no this one is not replaceable!..

The following video shows how Nokia believes the future of handhelds would look like in the next coming years ..it looks like a Nintendo DS packed with I must admit ..awesome features!!

As a bonus this is the second part of the video it seems that it was taken from a Nokia presentation

The GUI on the 2nd concept phone is just as cool as the first although it has clearly a different design .

Both models make use of touchscreens which is i believe the way things are going to be for our friends in the future ..now you will have to make sure your hands are clean ..not just for dinner!

Water balloon burst viewed in slow motion

2007-02-10T19:08:00.000+03:30

Have you ever wondered how it would look like if you saw a water balloon being punctured with Superman's eyes!!!!!

Well here is what it actually looks like:

Animated Paper Video

2007-02-10T18:33:00.000+03:30

This nice video shows animated folded paper I know at least one person who is going to adore this :) and thats specially for her :

A lady with an appetite

2007-02-07T20:55:00.000+03:30

This lady was so hungry she ate 183 pieces of sushi in half an hour and 20 pounds of food in one sitting:

The Web 2.0 in video

2007-02-07T20:40:00.000+03:30

Check out this great video about the Web 2.0 which i found from boingboing.net .

Filling your Ubuntu 6.10 with goodies

2007-02-07T19:11:00.000+03:30

Ok so you just installed Ubuntu like me and you try to play your favorite mp3 .. au claire de la lune.mp3 ..and guess what it just does not play !!!

Now being an expert Windows User you start pondering how on earth this can be .. well thats the problem with Ubuntu , it just doesn't come with the codecs you need to play your favorite videos and tunes.

Well no need to worry there is always Automatix2 ..ok yeah so from the name you know that it automates something ..but what .. well Automatix is a little app that provides a menu showing all the essentials that you require ..including codecs to play MP3 , DVD burners , desktop enhancement utils , VMware , WINE (To run Windows).. and a host of other stuffs which I leave for you to discover.

All you need is to tick which application you want to be installed on your box , click the start button and there you go Automatix starts downloading , extracting and installing your goodies.

Sorry now but i need to rush .. my codecs just finished downloading from Automatix :P.

Now running Ubuntu

2007-02-03T18:26:00.000+03:30

Here is what I achieved note wise:

1. Installation

After having finally downloaded my ISO of Ubuntu , I mounted my iso file using Alcohol 100% which is a neat little tool that allows you to simulate a CD or DVD drive on your pc. Afterwards using Nero I burnt it to a CD-RW .Mind you if you want to use a DVD-R or DVD-RW it just won't work.

After like 5 minutes I got my Live CD for Ubunto 6.10 and I merrily restarted my pc with the CD inside. I was pleasantly greeted with the Ubuntu logo and had a quick look at the OS GUI before deciding to install it.

2. GRUB Booloader

However I am getting quiet an issue with GRUB which is the bootloader for Ubuntu (and Kubuntu). GRUB menu list shows Ubuntu and Windows XP in the boot menu screen at startup, however am unable to move the highlighter down to Windows XP for every 6 or so times I restart my pc.It appears that on the boot menu my keyboard is rendered inactive.

I had a similar problem with Kubuntu's GRUB and I still yet need to investigate why this is so. To temporarily solve this PITA I had to modify the menu file for GRUB which showed the different OS installed on my system. So I clicked on Places -> Computer -> boot -> grub .

Now you will see a file called menu.lst . However unlike windows you require to have permissions in Ubuntu (Linux,etc..) to be able to make System Admin modifications. In short you need to be root which is the Super Mega Powerful User of all times in the Linux World, able to delete , rename , edit any file.

To achieve this if you are in Ubuntu you need to log in as root ...whats good is that you do not actually need to restart and enter root in the GNOME login screen ..as it is this just wont work. You need to launch nautilus .

3. Creating a password for root

However prior to that you should create your root password , unlike windows where the Super Admin creates his password at the start of the installation , on Ubuntu the password must be created after the OS install. So here is the command to execute :

sudo passwd root

Enter your current account password , then confirm the new password that you want to set against root.

4. Editing files as root

Now that you are root you need to go to Applications->Accessories->Terminal and enter the following command:
gksudo nautilus

Now you can edit GRUB's menu.lst file at ease. In my case I moved the Windows option up above the Ubuntu boot options .

My Linux Experience

2007-02-03T08:00:00.000+03:30

Being a hardcore Windows XP user it took me a lot of years and convincing to finally appreciate using Linux. This occurred mainly because i started working a lot on our office Redhat box.

Last week I thought it was high time for me to boot up on Linux at home too . One of my friends had a Kubuntu live CD so I thought I would give it a try. The live CD allows you to run the OS without from a CD or DVD without actually requiring that the OS be installed on your PC.

This is a good strategy to win Window users over and it worked on me. So after trying out the live CD I was convinced enough to install Kubuntu , which is a KDE version of Ubuntu. I was really pleased to find that it sported all that I required on my home PC , an internet browser called Konqueror , RSS feed reader and even an instant messenger that allowed me to connect to MSN. I was thrilled to find that My.T was working seamlessly and I could connect to the internet without any hitch.

However after a few hours I decided that Konqueror was not the best browser around so I downloaded FireFox2 but was unable to install it. Furthermore I was unable to see any flash enabled websites because the Flash on Kubuntu can be installed primarily only on Firefox browsers. Damn I was annoyed , I searched and searched the web but I learnt that the mainstream version Ubuntu come loaded with Firefox and that it was sporting GNOME instead of KDE.

Now I wanted to get rid of my Kubuntu so as I can later download Ubuntu and install that instead. I thought maybe formatting the 36GB root partion and 1GB swap Linux partions would remedy the problem... I was wrong . I had to actually modify my GRUB config file , GRUB is the bootloader used by Kubuntu, and remove the entries for Kubuntu leaving only those for Windows XP.

After that all that was required, according to my friend and the different sites I visited, was that I needed use a windows bootdisk and perform fdisk /mbr .

So I went into the Phoenix bios set up of my core duo ,to boot on diskette instead of on CD, only to find out that the vendor had placed a password for the bios . Reading online i discovered that there was a backdoor password for Phoenix bios which was "phoenix" and which of course didnt work! So now am downloading a bootable CD ISO which would allow me to remove the damn GRUB thing.

In parallel am also downloading an ISO for Ubuntu 6.10 using uTorrent client , which is the best torrent client I've seen so far even better than Azareus.

My Linux experience is yet to be over ..i will keep you updated!

Mine Appollo has a blog too

2007-01-26T14:51:00.000+03:30

After all kinds of blogs here is one original blog about mine appollo which is the favorite noodle of the Mauritian nation.

I normally eat mine appollos like at least 3 times a month .Some while back when I was still going to college , I used to eat at least one everyday. I even took 5 packets to South Africa last year and I must say it was just fantastic to enjoy a good mine appollo far from home.

Mine appollo comes in at least 4 flavours there is Shrimp , Chicken and 2 Vegs , if am not mistaken here (please correct me). I love the Veg ones then I can add all kinds of toppings to enhance the flavoring.

On the mine appollo blog you will get all kinds of recipes that you can try at home. If you live outside of Mauritius , I can always send you a packet of noodles by courrier ;).

Maven2 SSH site deploy Tip

2007-01-24T12:57:00.000+03:30

Am gonna walk you into how to achieve deployment of maven site from a windows XP machine to a Redhat box, assuming you already have installed maven2 and the know-how to execute commands.

These are the stuffs which you need to perform:

1. Configure your POM.xml by adding the distribution management tag:

< distributionmanagement>
< site >
< id > redhatServer < /id >
< url > scp://HOST /var/www/html/site < /url >
</site >
< /distributionmanagement >

Note: HOST is the ip address to your webserver.

The id element must be a unique name to represent your site.
The url element must point to the location on your remote server where you want to deploy your site. Do note that scp:// is prefixed , this specifies that we are using ssh for tansfer.

2. Edit your settings.xml file ,which should be located under C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR_USERNAME\.m2 , by adding the following:

< server >
< id > redhatServer < /id >
< username > USERNAME_ON_REMOTE_SERVER < /username >
< password > PASSWORD_ON_REMOTE_SERVER < /password >
< filePermissions > 664 < /filePermissions >
< directoryPermissions > 775 < /directoryPermissions >
< /server >
< /servers >

USERNAME_ON_REMOTE_SERVER and PASSWORD_ON_REMOTE_SERVER should correspond to your username and password on the remote server (RedHat box).

3. Run mvn site site:deploy

This should now start creating your site and deploying it to your remote server.

4. If you get a nagging prompt that keeps coming like the following :

The authenticity of host '10.206.14.48' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 14:93:e7:25:e5:cb:fe:d9:8b:3f

:c2:81:84:9f:b5:15.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting? (yes/no):

Then all you need to do is create a directory called .ssh under C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR_USERNAME\ .

You would require to use the mkdir .shh

Thats all that is required to perform the site deploy, hope it will help you out . I know this post is going to be boring for my not so techie readers :).

The Jeep Waterfall

2007-01-20T10:12:00.000+03:30

What if you could draw in a waterfall ?

Leja Leja

2007-01-15T19:20:00.000+03:30

Heard a nice indian song called Leja Leja on B4U music the clip is sadly copied from Daniel Porter's Bad day video.

They used to copy movie scripts now even song scripts are being mimicked have a look:

Whats annoying is that the song is actually awesome save for the copied video.

By the way here's Doorie from Atif Aslam , god there are all videos on youtube :

Take care of your car

2007-01-15T12:56:00.000+03:30

Jalopnik.com provides an interesting section about car care. Here you will find why you need to check your engine oil level every now and then and how to take care of your car battery.

These are stuff that many of us , including myself ..take for granted and leave it to our mechanics but its very important to do these verifications regularly.

French Special Characters Shortcut

2007-01-15T11:05:00.000+03:30

Here is a list of those special characters shortcuts that you always find hard to obtain :

Use ALT + the 4 character codes for these French chars:

133 à (0224)
131 â (0226)
135 ç (0231)
130 é (0233)
138 è (0232)
136 ê (0234)
137 ë (0235)
140 î (0238)
139 ï (0239)
oe ligature (0156)
147 ô (0244)
151 ù (0249)
150 û (0251)

183 À (0192)
182 Â (0194)
128 Ç (0199)
212 È (0200)
144 É (0201)
210 Ê (0202)
211 Ë (0203)
215 Î (0206)
216 Ï (0207)
OE ligature (0140)

A full list of special character shortcuts can be obtained from starr.net .

Adding a flickr badge to your blog or site

2007-01-13T19:23:00.000+03:30

This may sound stupid but I never quite figured out where to find the settings from flickr to obtain the javascript code to paste on my blog to be able to get the flickr badge until tonight.. when I finally found the page for the flickr badge.

Turkish PopStar

2007-01-13T16:09:00.000+03:30

The turkish Popstar video :

I can't understand a single word that the girl is singing but hey its way much better than Star Academy or a la recherche de la Nouvelle star . Excellent music!

Giant Rabbit in your plate

2007-01-13T14:19:00.000+03:30

The North Koreans finally found a way to solve their hunger problems , giant rabbits !

A 67 year old pensioner Karl Szmolinsky has been asked by the North Koreans for his secret in breeding giant rabbits. The rabbit expert has already shipped some of the rodents to Korea already along with tips on how to feed the monsters.

Apparently one giant rabbit can feed up to 8 people... so can sheeps ! However I guess that since rabbits have babies really fast thats why the Koreans are seeking to breed rabbits instead of sheeps.

13 Jan Saturday blues

2007-01-13T13:24:00.000+03:30

As usual I went to the Cite Martial bazaar (la foire) in the morning only to find out that it had moved to another location inside a brand new building with separate sections for vegetables , fish , chicken , beef and cloth/accessories sellers. The new bazaar is located behind the Mahmmad Elahee stadium up near the mountain..actually just at the foot of it .

The shift was not made smoothly as there were many merchants who were unable to find stalls at the new complex . This is why the police force made sure to show their presence in the area and where the old bazaar stood the roads had been blocked.

Afterwards I headed to galaxy where there was a sales going on .An advert had been playing on the air assuring that you would be glaxaciter (..apparently get excited) by their sales. Personally I didn't find anything really interesting or worthwhile. There might have been like 10-12 persons more than usual but nothing worth getting excited about.

I also went to the Cash & Carry to get a new iPod but the price tag was still too heavy at Rs10,000 something , I guess I would prefer buying it out of the country.

Then I came back home and decided to have a go at Second Life , I initially downloaded the client last year when I bought my PC but then gave up on it. After a 26MB update I was teleported to an empty landscape ,seems there are less and less people in the virtual network.

Suddenly it came to me that I should blog about all this uninteresting things because I really didn't have anything better to do :).

Hot phones for 2007

2007-01-10T19:08:00.000+03:30

The hot phones to expect from 2007 have already been announced at the 2007 International CES. I know you must be salivating to know them better.

We start by the N800 which looks like an old grandpa transistor with a wide screen. This handset is meant for those geeks that really can't live without checking google.com every 30 minutes. If you always want to be online then the N800 is your phone.

The Nokia N93i is the smaller sister of the N93 . It is an inch or so smaller than its predecessor and is blogger friendly according to Nokia. With its 3.2 megapixel camera this baby can shoot DVD like quality video upto 45 minutes. The price should be around $780 which makes it one of the most expensive Nokia phones.

Am seriously looking for a clamshell ~~since last year~~ I have been following closely the N93 but then there were 2 factors that really deterred me from getting one the first being taht the price of the handset was way too high ...at Rs 30,000 I could buy a new pc instead ..and the other factor was the size of the phone ...really big , which is such a shame.

When I saw the N76 like an hour ago I thought hey this might just be in my pocket in a few months time. This is the first slim phone a la RAZR from Nokia. Its attractive , trendy , fashionable , comes in 2 shades black and bright red. And above all its a smartphone.. can't wait for it to come out. Should cost around $507 - Rs 18,000 something.

See all the nokia phones in action from the nokia site .

Another interesting phone is the iPhone , yes you heard it right the iPod just got magical powers. Now not only can you listen to music but you can actually take calls too!

Its designed to provide easy access to the web and your email. Apple is convinced that it's a breakthrough Internet communications device .The iPhone will not have any buttons but will be controlled with its touchscreen. The nice big screen is certainly a wow factor along with the big storage unit which will allow up to 3 films to be stored , 4GB and 8GB units will be available

However with advanced technology comes big price tag so do expect to spend at least $500 for the 4GB version and $600 for the 8GB one.

thephonespot.com Review

2007-01-09T19:00:00.000+03:30

The article below is a paid review

Design is not the most striking point about thephonespot.com. Initially I thought it must be just one of those commercial phone sites that are appearing here and there on the web until I discovered that the engine behind thephonespot.com was simplicity.

You can nagivate through the mobile phones being offered either by make or by network. Most of the new phones on the market including the N93 are listed on the site.

A good tool to find your dream phone is the Refine your search option which is very easy to use. In my case I usually just click on the features that am looking for my new phone and there you go a list of available phones just pops up beneath.

If you are a trendy shopper well you can always check out the latest phone section as you can see from the screenshot above. Here the N93 seems to be at the top of the chart . I believe its a cool phone the only minus part is its size which is monstrously big, if only it was a little bit smaller!

Clicking on a phone provides you with a list of its features .There is also a full specification and a nice 3-D view page that is available for each phone. I like the 3-D view page as it gives you more insight as to what to expect design wise from the handset especially when you haven't seen it close up before.

It would have been nice however if they had offered videos of the phone . Some phone sites are now offering this feature thus providing more in-depth coverage as to how the phone works and looks like.

The most remarkable thing I discovered about thephonespot.com was the PhoneFinder service . What you must know is that phones on this site are sold based on packages that are offered by 5 popular networks namely Orange , T-mobile , Virigin , 3 and O2 . Now the same phone based on different types of packages will be sold at different prices and the monthly package fees will also vary from network to network.

In the end it does become a headache if you have to manually calculate the right package which will fill your needs. This is where the PhoneFinder service kicks in . A wizard like character dressed like a salesman will guide you from the point of choosing your ideal phone from all the options that you are looking for (e.g 3G , Video , Bluetooth,etc..) to actually picking one phone from the list that is proposed to you and finally choosing from the 5 networks the best package that suits your needs.

Whats nice is that the sales-man wizard is funny and even gives his suggestion as what he "thinks" is the best solution package wise.

Personally I think that this site does its job smoothly and effectively without any unnecessary bells and whistles. This is certainly a site am gonna come back to if I need to buy a phone in the ~~very~~ near future :P .

On demand Video in Mauritius

2007-01-09T07:58:00.000+03:30

The general trend these days is that the web is getting everywhere and allowing bigger chunks of data to be propagated throughtout its global network as more and more people get connected via broadband.

Thus it becomes plausible to watch TV and listen to music via streams. I find it really enjoyable to be able to control what I want to watch. Personnally I think video on demand or VOD has great prospects.

In my little room at home for example I got a DVD player , Satellite TV and my livebox with a VOD settop box. The DVD player is cool you can watch your DVDs on it ...obviously .. but you need to feed it with media. Satellite TV provides a ton of video content , channels with specific genre for example Cuisine TV channel provides recipes, cooking tips and National Geographic channel provides documentaries about animals , plants and nature in general.

However at times you don't have any new DVDs to play nor do you find any interesting content on Satellite ,you end up either on the Net or in bed ..fast asleep from boredom. Of course it would have been healthier if you did some exercises instead.

With VOD this is another story depending on the video on demand service to which you are subscibed , in my case its MY.T watch, you can choose from a collection of video provided online. Its like another type of freedom the freedom to choose what YOU want to see.

Unfortunately for my case the video archive for MY.T is not very big as its still a new service and trying to seek its niche in the booming broadband market.Am however confident that in the coming years either MY.T watch or another VOD service provider will find its place in our bedroom/living room.

The logo homepage

2007-01-09T07:52:00.000+03:30

Did you know there exists on the web a place where logos reside, an actual homepage for logos?

...well there exists such a place , actually it looks like a big ad page a la million-dollar-page , but still its nice to look at :D and you can actually click on the logos to go to the respective site.

You can also submit your own logos to the site which is neat , provided you have one .

Toyota Ad

2007-01-07T08:16:00.000+03:30

One well made advert from Toyota:

The Mauritian Tuition

2007-01-06T20:56:00.000+03:30

The start of a new year implies a lot of different things to different people. For me its about keeping my resolutions whilst for many secondary students new year means new teachers , new mates , new subjects , new uniform ....and new private tuitions.

I remember how private tuition selection used to be in my days , we used to talk between friends which tuition had the greatest concentration of cool people or which tuition professor was the most brilliant ever ...

But then there was those private teachers that had built a small empire from mass teaching school kids and this is why am writing this blog. I know at least a handful of these so-called "semi-god" teachers .Parents love them and other teachers worship them. From my personal experience I have only one word for these individuals "escroc" !

There is no such thing as mass teaching with a small room filled with knowledge hungry teenagers. Come on tuition are meant to be given to help a student in a specific area where he or she requires more attention. Now how can an idiot with 30 students in his room be able to achieve that in 1hr every week ?

On top of that some of these "teachers" are so unreachable that you actually need to book an interview for your child with him. I know of one star ~~(etoile filant)~~ which used to give GP tuitions in my days...and apparently still does. The guy was on every parent's tuition wish list for their kids. Kids who were unable to squeeze into his tuition used to feel as if they would never pass the General Paper exam. I got the "privilege" to be in his class at school .... guess what he did to make pupils learn to write essays ... well he gave them the essays to learn ..pre-mache.. the ones where he has already thought about what should be written.. so dumb.. I would say its a sacrilege to our freedom of thinking.. come on make your pupils creative and make them think for themselves.

I got the incredible chance to have a great GP tuition teacher on the other hand ,called Mr. Kudrath ,which I respect a lot . I never got the chance to thank him for allowing me to express my gratitude and thankfulness for helping me develop a creative and scientific approach into writing essays and in other every day life situations.

Mr. Kudrath instead of having a room of 30 students would have only around 5-6 people at max and he would take the time to talk about different subjects and allow you to express your feelings and opinions. I really enjoyed going to his tuitions that was something really worthwhile in my teenage life.

Thanks also to Mr Luximon and Mr Payandee for maths and physics if it wasn't for these two people I would not have developed a love for solving problems . Parents if you are reading this don't go for the teacher with the most students go for the teacher with the teaching vocation.

1st of Jan 2007 in Mauritius

2007-01-01T07:54:00.000+03:30

I woke up late usually by 6:30 am already on my feet but this morning was hard maybe because I slept on a different bed , had to giveaway my room to my cousins as they were crashing at my place for the night.

My head is still full of last night's new year celebrations at the Caudan waterfont. 2006 had a better fireworks than the one we had on 2005 which was spoilt by rain , not may people had gone out of their homes that year..

Several people after midnight struck where lighting really big and dangerous fireworks on the esplanade and placed them in water bottles before setting fire. Now yesterday ,as is the case still this morning, was very windy due to a cyclone passing in our region and many a time the water bottle would fall down or move resulting in the firework going towards a crowd on the ground or towards the Caudan Labourdonnais hotel. In one instance a tourist at the top of Labourdonnais hotel in his room was quietly enjoying fireworks when one of them fireworks went straight from below directly into his room , needless to say the guy was really frightened.

Strangely yesterday I didn't have much problems sending SMS or making calls around midnight on the CellPlus network. Reading through the papers this morning it seems that around 6 million texts have been exchanged overall yesterday which is a record. Both Cellplus and Emtel had made special arrangements to cater for the load of the festive season.

On moving out of the Caudan at around 1am in the morning there was a really huge queue and it took me at least 20 minutes to get out. Thank god there is Caudan if there wasn't we would have probably been enjoying the New Year at Champs de Mars.

Anyways just would like to wish you all a very happy and prosperous new Year 2007.

A day before the last of 2006

2006-12-30T17:16:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-29T21:13:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-28T20:28:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-24T10:27:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-23T09:34:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-23T09:11:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-23T08:48:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-23T08:36:00.000+03:30

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

Coding at home

2006-12-23T05:54:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-21T19:57:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-21T15:47:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-19T19:02:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-18T22:29:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-16T15:07:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-08T19:06:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-08T18:58:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-08T07:44:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-03T08:57:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-02T19:54:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-02T08:19:00.000+03:30

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

2006-12-01T19:44:00.000+03:30

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.

MY.T enduring its first network problems

2006-11-30T12:48:00.000+03:30

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

2006-11-27T19:26:00.000+03:30

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

2006-11-22T10:26:00.000+03:30

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

2006-11-21T19:29:00.000+03:30

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

2006-11-20T19:47:00.000+03:30

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

2006-11-20T18:52:00.000+03:30

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

2006-11-20T13:46:00.000+03:30

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

2006-11-17T20:34:00.000+03:30

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

2006-11-17T07:25:00.000+03:30

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

2006-11-11T14:17:00.000+03:30

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

2006-11-10T18:59:00.000+03:30

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

2006-11-10T18:48:00.000+03:30

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

2006-11-09T10:05:00.000+03:30

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

2006-11-04T13:05:00.000+03:30

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

2006-11-04T07:31:00.000+03:30

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

2006-11-01T19:42:00.000+03:30

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

yourminis.com

2006-11-01T19:04:00.000+03:30

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 !

Sukhoi 27 Cobra fighter planes

2006-10-24T08:20:00.000+03:30

We have gone very far away from top gun style airplanes :P.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

2006-10-24T08:07:00.000+03:30

The Borat movie is definitively a must see , although am sure we not gonna get that on cinema in Mauritius .

Will have to get the DVD as soon as its out its really too hilarious.

Find below the Borat interview :P:

By the way did you know that Borat had a fan , from Kazahstan ?

Eid Mubarak and my best wishes

2006-10-24T07:38:00.000+03:30

Just came back from Eid prayer , i'd like to wish you all Eid Mubarak. Roza 2006 is now over the fasting has ended.

Today many muslim households will be cooking the traditional biryani. My mom is a known expert for that but however I never managed to understand when and how to place the ingredients :P .

What I do know is that you need to fry your onions (cut in thin rings) and your potatoes (just peeled , not need to cut it any futher) beforehand.

Then you need to place your meat, chicken , fish or whatever else you want to add to your biryani at the bottom of your cooking vessel. Marinate the whole with "ti anis" and herbs and ...(thats where i forget what to add) ... and blablahblah... everyone has his own version for the marination.

On a seperate fire boil your basmati rice , get rid of the water ...without burning yourself..thats important.

Place the boiled rice on top of your marination , cover and seal . Let to cook on a medium fire.

OOooh , you need to open up the vessel again cause i forgot to tell you that you need to add jaffran for yellow colouring ...hhehehhe... sorry about that.

Now your ready for a traditional biryani meal which you eat for lunch and dinner .. in my case its the next day too. Whats good with the biryani is that the longer you keep it , strangely the better it tastes .. however dont try eating a 4 days old biryani.... not recommended.

Dove Evolution - Raise your self esteem

2006-10-22T04:33:00.000+03:30

This youttube video called Dove Evolution speaks for itself.

Thats the way i like campaigns to be :) .

Wish u a happy Divali

2006-10-21T12:37:00.000+03:30

Happy divali to all of ya .. please make sure i get my cakes on monday though ..even though i will be fasting :P

CHEERS!!!!!!!

Alien loves Predator

2006-10-21T09:12:00.000+03:30

More comic strips at AlienLovesPredator.com .

Now officially online 24hrs a day

2006-10-20T19:18:00.000+03:30

I just got My.T installed at home and i must admit that it simply rocks ... the joys of being online 24 hours a day for only a little over a thousand rupees per month.......wicked!!!!!!!!!!!

Hurray!

My room now look absolutely hyped up with a cool powered up PC connected to ADSL and my TV connected to the digital tuner box.

I can hardly hide my joyyy ...blastingly goooooooooooooooooood!

Aston Martin in Mauritius

2006-10-20T18:08:00.000+03:30

Just got the news from L'express this morning , HM Rawat and Leal have made up a company that will sell luxury vehicules in Mauritius.

Some models that will be provided include the Aston Martin , Porsche and Ferrari. Its absolutely thrilling to see these beasts on our roads.

However the article mentions that the vehicles need to be ordered a year in advance . In the case of the legendery bond car do expect the price to soar up to 7 million rupees and guess what our Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam just bought himself one ..lucky dude!

Enter the N95

2006-10-19T08:39:00.000+03:30

Just as am having a look at the N93 Nokia is already announcing the N95 (.. dont know the actual release date though).

With a 5M Pixel camera , the N95 has already got its community of fanatics worldwide. This is one smartphone am definitively gonna follow the coming months .

Check out the details of the phone allaboutsymbian and Nokia website .

Power your enterprise from a container

2006-10-19T08:13:00.000+03:30

Initially found out about the Black Box project from Eddy Young , on his blog entry.

The idea as Sun suggests is simple and innovative and the recipe is as follows take your average everyday shipping container , wash it up , do some electrical wiring , install some racks , place your servers , routers and switches weave everything up in a network and there you have the utilmate power house the BLACK BOX.

And to tell you the truth its a rocking good idea . Now Sun has less hassel when it has to ship servers world-wide. However I do wonder how practical it is if your company is on the nth floor of some building , would the Black Box go through the elevator ...or the stairs :p .

Some interesting popential uses of the Black Box have already emerged on the net .

N93 Arrived in Dodo land

2006-10-12T07:46:00.000+03:30

Nokia N93 has arrived in our stores or more precisely at Cash and Carry where its being sold off at Rs 25,900 something + VAT which is quiet a lot of money.

I mailed the guys at HM Rawat but didnt get any response back , preciously they told me that the N93 would arrive in mid -August this year.

Am still wondering whether I should get it coz of the prize. I was at Cash and Carry on Saturday to buy a Dual Core PC with 1GB RAM , cost around Rs 34,000 + VAT and the quality of the product I received in return was really not what I was expecting. The casing which looked great on the shelves , suddenly revealed that it was not something really strong and my keyboard is already broken the keys get stuck inside.

Mind you the thing does not come with Windows XP , so you actually need to install Windows yourself or alternately have Cash and Carry install it for you for a mere Rs 2000 something :S .

But the Dual Core Processor at 3.+ GHz is quiet nice to work with thus am not complaning too much coz thats the main thing else I would be depressing too much.

However I took the opportunity to ask to see the N93 , there was one guy there that said something about having it in the back store and whether I would take it immediately. That sounded stupid to me given the price I would expect to have a proper look at the object. I told him so and he said well maybe they were out of stock (as they sold one this morning...) but he readily hushered me to a pc and typed the url to the N-Series N93 specs page where he was dumb struck himself by the spec details of the N93. That was really annoying , me who had thought that I could have a look at last at the phone arrrrrg.

Summer is here

2006-10-05T16:56:00.000+03:30

Had to blog about this
its damn hot at nite ,
falling asleep becomes an eternal fight,

mosquitoes have started flying high ,
creating chaos to most newspapers' delight,

children play here and there ,
and the beaches are full everywhere,

time and again i look at the dates,
but all that my calendar states,
is that summer is here to stay.

That was a dumb poetic tentative wasn't it loool ;)?

Mondial auto 2006 and prototypes

2006-10-04T07:10:00.000+03:30

Every car fanatic would know it if you happen to be in Paris until the 15th of October make sure to put Paris Expo , Porte de Versailles , on your travel map coz thats where you will find all the new models coming out from the different makes this year.

If however you are like me far away from "La Replublique" well there is only one alternative satellite .. M6 around 6:30pm on Sundays will give you insight on the different models being exposed and all the new trends in the motorvehicle industry.

The Mondial is also the opportunity to view some of the coolest prototypes on the market like the cool and feline Peugeot 908 which comes in 2 versions one is the sedan which is a real beast and technology-wise it rocks with PDA-controlled door locking and bluetooth enabled environment with touch screeens displays on board to control your habitat.The other version of the P 908 is going to be used for the "24hr du Mans" and is a race car.

Citroen's C-Metisse as its name implies offers a hybrid propulsion system that combines conventional petrol and electric motors to run this baby.

The Audi 2008 is also one of my favorites with its fast and furious style design and it does look like Will Smith's Audi in I-Robot.

There's a link to the new cars on displays http://www.caranddriver.com/autoshows/8672/2006-paris-motor-show.html.. thanks ashna :)

Hotmail and Yahoo have a facelift

2006-10-02T07:42:00.000+03:30

The mail providers Yahoo and Hotmail have yet again upgraded their service to keep their heads out of the water in the battle of who will dominate the email arena.

Yahoo Mail Beta offers a very interesting and user-friendly interface that makes reading your inbox quiet an enjoyable experience.

The downside is the connection speed and the tons of gimmicks and adverts that fill up your screen at times but on the overall I like it a lot.

Hotmail on the other hand , re-branded Windows Live Mail , offers a new interface too , although I would tend to prefer the Yahoo one. It is however customizable but right now you can get Live Mail only if you have registered for beta version testing...which i did ;).

Unfortunately Microsoft's baby also suffers from being sluggish , you get this annoying "Request being processsed" messaged being displayed whenever you click on a link and that just spoils the fun.

Both Live Mail and Yahoo Mail now make use of AJAX-like gimmicks , normally I would have thought that this should have decreased loading time of pages but its suprising to find that both mail providers warn their customers that if you want to use the AJAX version of their interface , it is recommended that you have a broadband connection!!

Category: Mauritius,Hotmail,Yahoo,Mail

Saturday at Casela

2006-09-25T09:52:00.000+03:30

2006-09-23 - Casela 029
Originally uploaded by ledodo.

Started with my friends who decided to make a list of places that we could possibly visit during the weekends since we were missing Birmingham's Bull ring so much.

We thought hey why not visit the Casela as most of us hadn't set foot there since junior school... I know that was a weird thought.. I haven't set foot in the Champs de Mars children playground too since junior school ..maybe thats where we are heading next week :P..

After a long journey through port-louis , petite-riviere and bambous .. the traffic jam ..the endless pointless humps on the roads..the shady oasis of Casela greeted us.

Didn't have much hope that it would be a really exciting day but when we saw the duckies funnily moving their little tails , we thought hey its not going to be too bad after all.

Had a really nice saturday there , the cost of the ticket is a little bit expensive at Rs200/something but hey they do have a lot of beaks to feed.

It was really hot though, the 2 tigers were hiding in the shades. There are a number of birds such as the peacock who roam freely inside the zoo , at one point we saw like 4 peacocks staring at a seagull's cage as if mockingly saying hey buddy look at us we managed to escape ..heheh...or more preciseky.. quiiiiik quiiiik quiiiiiiiik (I Know i can talk peacock now )

There a host of other animals such as wallaby , kangaroo , thousands of different bird species , gold fishes , endemic plants ,etc...

As activities there is tilapias fishing (...which you need to release them afterwards...thats dumb) , quad-biking (requires reservation and does cost quiet a lot of money) , a safari and mini-golf courses..

There was also a giant draughts set , which you can play its located just behind the restaurant.

I wanted to bring one little orange duckie with me but the thought of waking up every morning to feed it made me give up any ideas for little duckie's prison break.

Dont expect to see any noise making , ferocious wild beasts at casela but strangely its a really relaxing place to be in and you really wanna come back ..believe me.

Category: Mauritius,Zoo,Casela,Animal

The mobile fish

2006-09-21T11:23:00.000+03:30

Ever felt sad looking at your favorite fishy in its bowl swirling around in its restricated space... well you wont be sad anymore after you see Mobile Fish.

Equipped with a camera at the top of the bowl which monitors your fish's movements , the camera directs wheels on which the bowl is set to turn in the corresponding direction.

However it was noted on engadget that the fish kept turning round ...so did the bowl... must have been a tipsy fishy.

One pre-requisite though if you see your fish going towards the motorway please make sure that its got its driving license and fastened its seat belt.

Category: Mauritius,Fish,,Gadget,,Robotics

My Luck

2006-09-19T07:03:00.000+03:30

At times I feel like the luckiest dude on the planet , everyday when I wake up , I check my mail I win a lottery in some far end corner of the globe like the states or the UK. People harass me so as I come collect my prize but am really so lazy..even to collect money.

At times some people send me mails about Top Secret plots in Africa and they send me all kinds of links which I must visit. I also gets loads of business ventures in this continent , I guess given the time I am receiving their kind invitation I must be knowing more people in Mozambique and Zaire than in my own country.

Last month I had a tragedy some really far relative which I never met or heard of before sent me a mail on his dying bed (... yes he had wifi in his house), in his mail he gave away all his wealth to me . Its all mentioned in the Will he scanned as attachement (..yes he had a scanner next to his dying bed).

Only mails i really cann't support are these mails about pharmaceutical products .. i say its really none of their business! :P

Category: Mauritius,

Fondue - Geneva

2006-09-14T10:35:00.000+03:30

Fondue - Geneva
Originally uploaded by carine_chan.

Carine's flickr page here she is eating fondue alone as usual without inviting me !!!..mechant..eee!

Do you have a cold or a flu ?

2006-09-08T07:19:00.000+03:30

Here in the southern hemisphere we are slowly preparing to greet Summer , at last the days of sneezing and coughing are going to end whilst our friends in the Nothern hemisphere will gradually have there dose of sunshine diminishing to a cold and pityless weather.

Its then the time to catch a cold or a flu. Did you know that there is actually a difference between the two and that both can be treated with off-the shelf pharmacy products instead of going to a doctor who would inevitably rip you of some bucks? However if you get an influenza and require anti-biotics you do need the prescription from a doctor , depending on local health policies in your country.

I came across a pdf explaining this whilst suffering from a acute influenza in the UK last month. It explains clearly what you should do and some very interesting facts about treating yourself when you suffer from these illnesses.

And of course don't forget to keep some tissues with you they are always really very handy ;) .

Resource
Battle Against Cold and Flu

Category: Mauritius,UK,Flu,,Influenza,,Cold

Venom

2006-07-26T08:06:00.000+03:30

Check out the new Spiderman 3 trailer and weblog here .

However the movie is to come out next year more precisely on the 05/04/07 . I really wanna see venom in action , this promises to be really wild.

Category: Mauritius,Venom,Spiderman

N93 officially on sale

2006-07-25T11:07:00.000+03:30

My future phone is now in stores in the UK and US , the N93 is the latest baby from Nokia N-series phones.

I can't seem to get the price of the phone though normally in Mauritius it could easily be above the Rs25,000 range .

I did found one being sold on eBay at £7.72 which seems to be really absurb.

Vodafone UK mentions that the phone's price has not yet been fixed , so still have to wait a bit. As I will be in UK "theoritically" next week I might be having a peek at it at their shop.

Category: Mauritius,Nokia,N93

Choosing the right Mauritian ISP and Internet Package

2006-07-19T14:28:00.000+03:30

Lately I have been noticing that many people have suddenly switched to ADSL or WIMAX (Nomad) , frankly I was taken aback ...since I don't even have a connection at home(..modem burnt out) :P.

Mauritians no longer hesitate to take a Rs500+ something package to enjoy the bliss of surfing the web...which is a good thing ..at last we can say babye to our dear old dial-up modem.

So here is a list of things that you should consider (Please correct me if am wrong) , when you do take your Internet Package:

---------Nomad :

Frankly I got to install a Nomad Kit at my cousin's house she was completely loss as to how to configure the thing. So she called me I came over realized that there was only a USB connection , then was equally puzzled as her until I figured out that a LAN connection had already been created and that she could as it is surf the web.

So the plus side I would say is that installation is simple and that it is easy to get a Nomad package at any Nomad stand, no need of any big paperwork.

Also you can take the kit with you and install it on your friend's pc , so thats cool.

The bad thing is the connection speed which is I must say awfully slow. I just hate having to wait for my pages to appear let alone download something. So thats a minus .. along with the fact that coverage is not guaranteed everywhere.

Also note that the Nomad box needs an AC current so if your power socket is near to your window then your really a lucky bunny.

Packages offered:

64kbps - Rs 550

128kbps - Rs 890 --my choice of a better option

512kbps - Rs 1900

------Wanadoo ADSL:

Obviously if you are taking an ADSL connection from Telecom Plus this would mean that you connection would be faster than Nomad. However the big disadvantage is the paper work and you have to wait for the telecom guys to come over and install the gimmicks for you which can take a while ..heard it took like 2 whole weeks.

Personally I dont have much patience, when I buy something i intend to have a quick and good service.

Unlike Nomad your ADSL kit is dedicated only to your phone line , so you can't really take it with you..argggh.

Packages offered:

Home 128 - Rs 950 /month

Home 128 - Home 512 - Rs 1,540 /month

ADSL 1 M - Rs 6,410 /month

Note: These prices are going to go down by Rs 100 in a few days

-------My.T :

My.T is the latest offering from Mauritius Telecom basically its the Wanadoo ADSL plus certain additional features:

My.T Watch - allows you to watch films and TV streamed over the internet

My.T Surf - surf the web thats is Wanadoo ADSL

My.T Call - allows you to make cheaper phone calls at discounted rates

So basically from what I understood you will be provided a LiveBox which is a small rectangular box with wires going into a TV Decoder for you to view new channels on your TV .

The LiveBox also acts as a WIFI server making your house WIFI-enabled.In human language this means that you can connect to the internet without the need of wires .. you just require to add a WIFI card (which the telecom will add for you) to your pc.

So installation is not that straight forward as the Nomad.

Here with the Rs950 + VAT package you get a clear 256Kbps connection which is really fast , so surfing is like a breeze along with the fact that you enjoy a 2MBps connection locally within the country...awesome.

However there is a big "BUT" there is a limit to this freedom and that is 1Gb if you download the equivalent of a ..lets say DVD on you pc well you would need to pay on top of the monthly fee Rs0.50 per megabyte which really is so annoying ...arrrg .. just when you thought that you could download all those freebie movies and software on the net.

So do take care of the amount of stuffs you download with this package.

There is also the TV remote which allows you to pay for a movie and view it. Now there are some channels which are available for free like TNT and some films which you do have to buy .

But believe me the film listing is ..really aweful and aweful is a small word ..the movies available are just plain bad. People choosing that should consider newer flicks , movies just out on DVD or something ..comeon who is going to watch The Army of 12 Monkeys , i already saw that a couple of dozen times....There's even bobby there ..aaaah awful.

So I personnally wouldn't go for My.T for just the tv stuff , go get Canal Sat instead!

----> So my Choice would be for the My.T package although the 1G limit is annoying still its 256Kbps for an affordable price and who knows maybe in a couple of years they will upgrade the level of the programs too!!

Resources:

ADSL Availability Check
My.T Homepage
Wanadoo ADSL
My.T Film listing

Category: Mauritius,Telecom,Surf,Broadband,Price

How to fry an egg without fire

2006-07-18T07:48:00.000+03:30

Its lunch time your hungry nothing in the office kitchen except an egg , your stomach starts growling, you ask yourself why you didn't take your wife's smelly tuna sandwitch and you become deaf by the noise your tummy makes... well not anymore!!!

One guy found the solution to your problem , fry the egg with your laptop!!!

Laptop nowadays although being 'almost' as powerful as regular desktops do have something really annoying , they emitt a lot of heat and this can be really uncomfortable if you have to actually place it on your lap while watching tv or in the plane for example.

The guy pictured above demonstrated that by literally frying an egg by placing it at the back of the pictured Macbook. Don't know if it tastes as good as being fried on a pan but hey thats better than becoming deaf from your stomach noise :P .

Category: Mauritius,Laptop,Egg,Cuisine

Winter 06 ..CODENAME plan wrecker

2006-07-17T08:57:00.000+03:30

We have come yet again to our annual weather report. People currently on dodo island are suffering from windy , cold and rainny conditions . Tell you how it is, you wake up in the morning wash your car ,its sunny , you get on the road , starts raining , get to the office , its windy and ruins your mood and your plans , not to forget that it dirties your car again...arggh.

Haven't been to the beach yet but heard that it was however full with tourists....not very intelligent to come to us in winter when its summer in europe. Anyways this ends our annual weather report.

Category: Mauritius,Weather,Rain