Awesome flickr photos

Its amazing how photos uploaded on flickr can be such a delight to the eyes. As a picture is worth a 1000 words I leave you with 5000 words to understand what i mean . ;)











Category: Mauritius,flickr,Photo

Extortion Virus Code

This is the weirdest ..(and most intelligent) virus I've seen so far.Named Archiveus this virus combines all files in your My Documents folder and you can't open any of them unless you have the proper password. The virus actually asks for a "ransom" !!! You must give money to the extortionist so as he sends you the password to regain access to your files.

The full story can be obtained from slashdot .

Someone fortunately did actually crack open the password which is : mf2lro8sw03ufvnsq034jfowr18f3cszc20vmw."


Category: Mauritius,Virus,Windows,,Archiveus

Quatres-Bornes.com has your address!!!

Guess what I was surfing the net when a friend of mine (who will stay annonymous as he is a secret agent) ,we will call him agent 000 , discovered a site called Quatre-Bornes.com , I told him :"Hey I already know this site"...which i did!

Agent 000: "Did you know its got the address of everyone above 18 living in Quatre-bones".

me: "....huh?.????????????"

So he gave me the link : http://www.quatre-bornes.com/address/az_index.php . This link really had the names of everyone living in Quatre Bornes and who were above 18 on top of that it had the residential address of these people.

Agent 000 saved the world again!!

It should be noted that this is very sensitive information and should not be made public I will contact the people behind the portal and see why they have done so without the consent of the people concerned.

Meanwhile you can verify if your name is on the list .

Topic still under investigation ...;)

Note to myself: revise my french i wrote Quatre with an s ..hmmm.

Category: Mauritius,Quatre-Bornes

I saw an N91

Am still trembling from the experience of seeing an N91 , Nokia's new mobile phone of the N series which actually has a hardisk that can store thousands of songs , now mind you I have been waiting a long ,long ,loooooooooooooooooooooong time to see the phone in Dodo country . My techno-geek prayers were answered when i went to Jumbo (Phoenix), there I saw the phone..my first impression was ... "woww" followed by .."huh?"... then i said "damn its big"!

Thats the most boring thing ever, in all adverts you see the phone small in the palm of a hand then the phone actually comes on the market and magically grows in dimensions , this is so lame ... shame on you Nokia !!!

'N' thats not all its really expensive Rs30,000 , man at that price i prefer buying myself a hardisk with a casing , a monitor , a keyboard , a mouse and a p4 3Ghz processor , not to forget a Voodoo Video Accelerator Card and I would still have some money to watch Fanaa at the cinema :P.


Category: Mauritius,N91,Nokia,Phone,Javed Mandary,Fanaa

Okkaz.com rectification letter

Got a mail this morning from the owner of okkaz.com which is an FREE online auction I made a blog entry/review on this site :

----------Letter Transcript---------------------
Hi,

I'm the owner of OKKAZ.COM service.

I just want to reply to your post
(http://javedmandary.blogspot.com/2005/08/okkazcom.html)

OKKAZ.COM is a totally free service , It is not a Mauritius site but a
French site (that's why the prices are in euro)
And I made it alone. I made the entire software ( as I made others more
complicated)

So, I did'nt buy any software or licence for that. I just wanted to
offer free stuffs .

I'm an independant developper and my society make other free services.

Unfortunatly, okkaz.com is not yet used by lot of people, and there is
few submissions. But I hope it will be more popular and used by more
people.

One time, a man say me that people witch come to okkaz.com think there
is a problem because it's totally free.
He said : "It's suspect ! None enterprise provide free services ! Maybe
it's a trap !!"

No !
It's not a trap !
Nothing to pay, just fill the form, join an image and let's go . Your
email is crypted in the source code of the page. No newsletter, no spam,
I don't sell or transmit any personal information to other society . And
I don't use your personal information for something else.

About servihoo : it's a service provided by wanadoo ( probably not
free!)
And servihoo is not the same system as okkaz.com : I'm not working for
wanadoo .
----------------END-----------------------

Well wish you luck buddy and hope that you get a better audience in the days to come.Let us know how we can help you get started ;) .


Category: Mauritius,Okkaz,Auction

Chup Chup ke

Got the album its brilliant love it and here you get the review from my friend Gianysh Toolsee (his the expert on desi flicks n songs). My favorite song is Dil Vich by the way ;) .

Category: MauritiusMusic,review,Gianysh Toolsee,Bollywood

Preparing for the weekend

This weekend am going to rock the roads in my car , drive through the Mauritian landscape at 10km/hr .. I know thats not very fast but hey how fast can u drive on Mauritian roads without having to stop at a traffic light , round-about or having an idiot motorcyclists (they are my worst enemies now!!) who rides just in the middle of the street in front of you ...or even worst than a motorcyclist a LEARNER (described as an idiot who drives a car with a big L sign and spends all his/her money to another intelligent and diaboliq car instructor).



Well thats my plan for the weekend , whats yours ? ..heuh what did i hear ..watching cartoons on MBC 1 .. what plan ..awesome!

Anyways happens that I found another cool blog Nienke 's blog , really nice from which i got the Which Sport Car are you Quizz ? and guess what am a Chevrolet Corvette , at first i was so happy man god have you seen a chevrolet corvette ... well obviously you haven't but its a really wicked car. Then I saw the result of all the results so far for the quiz:

Ferrari 360: 155015 (10%)
Lamborghini Murcielago: 105598 (7%)
Mazda Miata: 101095 (6%)
Honda S2000: 38601 (2%)
Dodge Viper: 88255 (6%)
Chevrolet Corvette: 421804 (27%)
Porsche 911: 232253 (15%)
Mazda RX-8: 95460 (6%)
Porsche Boxster: 23402 (1%)
Audi TT: 35460 (2%)
Mercedes SLK: 68389 (4%)
Ford Mustang: 140061 (9%)
Lotus Elise: 42007 (3%)
Nissan 350Z: 40514 (3%)

Damn it hit me , there are so many people like me out there 27% are chevrolet corvette ..thats so common ..brrr .. wish i was a Porsche Boxster.

Category: Mauritius,Javed Mandary,blog

XMen 3 Last Stand

They are back for a final battle against ...god knows what they fight against... and they will win .. hopefully on the 26th of May.


In the meantime you can preview the trailer or visit the official website .

Category: Mauritius,XMen,,Movie

Windows Media Player 11 download

Windows Media Player 11 is to be out this week and is expected to bring more goodies to Windows' star entertainement unit.

I use media player a lot so its gonna be fun trying something new for a change. Anyways if you are in a hurry to get your hands on media player 11 , you can download it from softpedia here .

Get user comments and reactions from here .

Category: Mauritius,Windows,Media,Mp3,Music,Rock,Vista

Da Vinci Quest

I never read the Da Vinci Code but am sure gonna watch the movie coming out this year with Tom Hanks , Jean Reno and Audrey Tautou.

Meanwhile there is a game on Google's personalized portal called the Da Vinci Quest you need to add it by clicking on add Content.

Its a puzzle game , kind of neat and is sure to provide good advertising for the forthcoming film .

Category: Mauritius,Google,Da Vinci Code

Download uTube movies

Here is a site that allows you to download uTube videos its called KeepVid.com. I dont know if thats legal though :S but whats good is the site is clean from any popups and other crap.

All you need to do is enter the link to your movie stream in a textbox and click download , then a download link will be displayed on the site , click on it to start downloading.

You would require an flv player to view your downloaded movies.


Category: Movies,KeepVid,uTube

Mauritian Desi Music reviews

Some have friends who love rock others have friends who love slows , well i have friends who love rock , slows , reagge and hindi music.. which i love too by the way ;) .

So let me continue my story .. well my good childhood friend Gianysh Toolsee is actively participating for the moment in reviewing some of the latest musical scores on the market I thought i would share his review with you guys:

1. http://planetbollywood.com/Music/36ChinaTown/

2. http://planetbollywood.com/Music/PyareMohan/

I personnally like only one song in each album.

Category: Mauritius,desi,Music,Review,PyareMohan

National candle light Mauritius

I dont know whether i should laugh about this or praise the initiative around the national candle light Mauritius program brought to us by Association Civique Midlands which has been circulating a lot through emails lately.

The slogan says :
------SLOGAN----------
Turn out your lights for just two hours
Do something special...

Read a book with your child by candle light
Enjoy a quite dinner with a special person.
This night can mean many things for many people.
A time to save energy, to think about peace,
To think about people in distant lands who share your planet.

Pulling the plugs opens the window to anew world
Awakens us to human freedom and diversity,
It's a process of discovery about our potential

However you spend them, for just tow hours, join us.
Turning off the lights, and help us spread a gentle wave of candle light around Mauritius
----END SLOGAN---------

I dont know if turning out your buld lights will increase your potential but it will surely sore up the sales of candles.

I think the main idea is to take it slow and spend more time communicating with others ... at least i hope thats the idea.

Anyways its good to know that the Mauritian youth are active and using the web as means of communicating their ideas , thats definitively worth a big clap ....CLAP CLAP CLAP!!

The event is to take place the 2nd of June 2006 from 8-10pm . All those of you willing to show your solidarity are kindly welcomed to turn off your lights and go to sleep ;) .

Category: Mauritius,Energy,Midlands

Reading Monster Nation from your IPOD

Damn this little piece of junk which i absolutely dont understand the craze is really finding various uses . Its just an mp3 player as any other sure its got a big storage capacity but so do many other mp3 players .The new release from steve-job-land is the video ipod but i guess that apple goodies will still take a while before landing on our shores.

Anyways there are some cool free books which you can actually read from your ipod or just read in a browser online. The one that caught my eye recently is Monster Nation by David Wellington (which comes as a triology), who also posted latest book Thirteen Bullets on the net too.

The book is about a couple having special powers and zombies infesting ... (well read the book am not gonna read it for ya will i ;) ).

You can also order the book from Amazon . Help David before he turns into a zombie.

Category: Mauritius,iPod,Novel,Zombie

Week in an entry- Chagos , Blogs , CPE

First thing well done people of Chagos , they were able to go to Chagos after many decades to see their island which is now occupied by the Americans and turned into a military base.

Found a couple of nice blogs
1. Amina : just started blogging so hope you will all encourage her.

2. humeriah : an islamic blog

3 Dan : nice one really cool each entry is marked with funny images and the fact of the day is replaced with Chuck Norris fact of the day

e.g Chuck Norris fact of the day: In ancient China there is a legend that one day a child will be born from a dragon, grow to be a man, and vanquish evil from the land. That man is not Chuck Norris, because Chuck Norris killed that man.

I have also been looking at many cars and gosh every week i see some really cool beauties and one thing i learnt so far is that the longer you wait the better the car you get and the more the chances that their price will go down.

One cool utube movie : Here comes Dr Tran really worth watching.

The frech gov finally decided to get rid of the CPE (Contrat Premiere Embauche) that made college kids who had been protesting since a couple of weeks through-out the french territories go back to college (START LEARNING KIDS!!!!.. they never miss an opportunity to protest!) and complete their exams. In Reunion island it made them dance to Sean Paul music on campus. Please note that we in Mauritius got rid of our CPE a while back :P.

Category: Mauritius,blog,Chagos,CPE,France

Goowy + IM + Virtual Storage

Goowy is back with a vengeance 2 new sleek features which are to rock up mail city , integration of Instant Messaging an Virtual File Storage.

I was kindly allowed to checkout out these neat features which is really just great , although i did have a few problems with the virtual file storage.

The IM features works like a breeze , you can connect to not only people having goowy accounts but also MSN , Yahoo , AIM , ICQ users , etc..

Below is an extract of an interview I had with CEO of Goowy Alex Bard:

1. What is the maximum capacity for the File Storage feature?

We are offering 1gb free with premium services in the near future to upgrade to more space.


2. To which IM networks would the IM client be able to connect?



You will be able to connect to AOL, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Goowy to Goowy and shortly all other Jabber networks.


3. What features would the IM client have apart from text e.g Voice , file sharing , emoticons , etc..



Take a look and you can see – some of the main features are:

1. emoticons
2. individual themes for windows
3. pop windows in and out of the browser
4. sounds
5. and in the near future full integration with file storage and email


4. When is the official launch for both services expected ?



We are rolling them out over the next few weeks in phases. The official launch is coming inside of the next 30 days. If you want your account enabled just email us at comments@goowy.com


5. How is goowy thinking of competing with the giants such as GMail , Yahoo and Hotmail ?



We have been doing it ever since we launched goowy in early 2005. We are competing by providing a better experience and a more dynamic, interactive environment. Additionally we integrate with all of the major players whereas they do not play so well with one another.


6. What other cool features could we be expecting in the coming months ?

We are working on a lot of really cool features, including more enhancements to our core components - email (tags, more folder support, multiple views, rules, etc.) contacts (better integration, synch) calendar (synch, public events, mobile notifications). Additionally we are working on opening our APIs for external development and some other stuff we are not quite ready to share J

-------END INTERVIEW ----------------

So do look out for Goowy in the coming days ;) it rocks...

Category: Mauritius,,Review,Goowy,MSN,IM,YAHOO,Mail,Storage,Interview,Alex Bard

Car Hunter

Hunting for your Car is so tiring but it does also have its share of excitement. I browsed though the newspapers for weeks and endless months to find the rare pearl that I could possibly buy but thats really painstaking and if you are someone like me who has really few spare hours per week to go check out second hand vehicules from particulars it soon becomes a never ending journey.

So i shifted gear and decided to check out re-conditioned vehicules , now like most developing countries Mauritius has an arsenal of car centres specialised in these. Cars usually start at Rs 400 ,000 onwards and can reach up to Rs 600,000 (thats the case for Honda's and Toyota's even saw a Mitsubishi 2003 at such a price).

Most of these specialised shops provide payment facilities via leasing and they do all the registation work for you which is really good.

Advantages of a re-con is that the car is definitively newer , right now there is a law which has just been passed which forbids car older than 3-4 years from being imported to the island this ensuring that our roads are not filled with wrecks that could be potential hazards.

I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel , but hey the hunt is not completely over yet ;) .

Category: Mauritius,Car,Reconditioned,Toyota,Honda,Second-Hand

fancy a car ?

My good friend Avinash just booted up his website fancyacar.co.uk. The site started as a project for learning php and has ended into a brilliant car portal that allows uses to search for used cars and provides useful information on getting driving theory , car insurance and buying-selling advice.

He is adding new functionalities every week and the site promises to be a really cool tool if you want to get your hands on the cars that fit your budget.

The services offered are free so do check it out !!!

Category: Mauritius,car,,portal,UK,Used Cars,Second Hand,Tip

Diwa Cyclone and Zee cine awards

At the time of writing of this article a cyclone warning class 1 is prevailing in Mauritius in other words our weekend is gone for good , damn i love DODO land.

All is set to make people stay at home and watch the Zee Cine Awards , one of the biggest shows todate in Mauritius. Performs will come from bollywood direct to our little island for a 5 hour show broadcasted live to many stations through out the glode tommorrow.

Tickets are really expensive the lowest being rs 7000/- something to rs 20,000 for the VIP ticket which lets you sit with the Shah Rukh and Amithab Bachan. Its making big noise here almost outclassing the Chikunkungha epidemic which is just around the corner with the cyclonic rains that awaits us.

So i would be expecting many mauritians clustering in front of their TV sets on Saturday nite watching the show whilst Diwa makes her show outside and people getting themselves suck and bitting by mosquitoes on Monday... not a very rosy perspective but thats how nature gets it way with you when stars fall on your head :p
Category: Mauritius,Bollywood,Diwa,Cyclone,Zee Awards

Google Page Creator

Google is really up to becoming a big superforce on the internet. Their new baby is called Google Page Creator and allows you to create webpages using your Google ID , the same that you use to check your gmail account.

Creation is really simple and even my next door 90-year old neighbour would find it easy. However there is a lack of advance features that amateur web-designers will find irritating.

I created a page here: http://javed2.googlepages.com/home to test the new service.

I would trust google to keep adding features over 2006 to make this service really cool. Anyways AJAX rocks on Google Page Creator.

Category: Javed Mandary ,Google,Mauritius,Webdesign,Web

Windows Live Messenger

Got my Windows Live Messenger invite today in my hotmail inbox , i was like a kid getting a christmas present only to find that this wicked tool was in fact very far from working properly.

After the somewhat sluggish install , entering your username and password is absolutely enerving , the text just doesnt come up and I am upto now not able to login to the system even though am using a really powerful 1GB RAM P4 pc.

Its really not worth downloading if you ask me , its just not ready yet for the general public. So will have to wait for the official realease somewhere mid-2006 to really get the best out of this.

Category: Windows,Messenger,MSN,Hotmail,IM

Mosquito 2 or the return of the Chikungunya

A mosquito is spreading havoc and terror amongst people in MRU-DODO country these days. Our sister island is already in a panic since the Chikungunya spelt "Chicken Gundah"..(at least thats the way i spell it :P ).., has been infesting all the little ponds and stagnent water.

Our dear minister of health has been saying since last week that there is absolutely no reason to panic ...last week the count of sick people related to the mosquito bite was around 300 , at this moment it is around 600 so yeah he is right i mean its just that the number of sick people is doubling , we will wait for next week before panicking.

Given the fact that its been rainning intensively since a couple of weeks this has helped increased the number of these pests considerably. They even got their website http://www.chikungunya.net/.

Do note that unlike common mosquitoes ,which by the way are just as malicious, the chikungunya is bigger and has white stripes across its body and normally doesn't move very far from where it is born. This may explain why for the moment only people in Mahebourg are falling like flies (.....thats a good one).

Category: Mahebourg,chikungunya,Mauritius,Reunion,Epedemic

So far so good

Now we are almost end of Feb and must say that this year has started nicely with its little bit of ups and downs but so far so good.

I haven't been really eager to blog since there was not so much interesting things going on (..that i can share with the hundereds of annonymous people online).

The only experience i suppose i could narrate is that of my intensive search for a car that would match my budget. I have been skimming though the pages of l'express , browsing servihoo for my dream vehichle but to no avail.

Last saturday i went to Phoenix where there seems to be a boom in second-car and re-conditioned car sellers , but the cars were just too lame or just too expensive. Second option is to get in contact with a "courtier" which i did but damn these guys just want to make money out of your head.


How difficult can it possibly be to get a good working condition, manual , 1500cc/above , full option, 1997/above vehicule ? Now the only problem is that i dont know which make/model am gonna look for. The Japanese are very expensive and not so high-tec as the European ones whilst the European cars have very low-resale value and you dont get spare parts as cheap and easily as the Japs.

So much parameters to take in consideration that i might just as well end up choosing the first vehichle that i see a "FOR SALE" notice on it.


Category: Mauritius,Javed Mandary,Car,Vehicule

DODO is back

Am back in the island , its really hot here ..wish winter would come soon.

Category: Javed Mandary

Been to Sun City on Sunday

Had two consequetive brilliant weekends , the first of them i went to MonteCasino which is like a big casino with lots of attractions like bands , balloon rides , casinos , circus and food courts.



Had a balloon ride then we ate at the Ocean Basket which is a really cool place to taste delicisious fried Hake and Calamari, before finally having a chill listening the live band playing.



This Sunday we went to a park i think its called plainsberg"-something" park on the way to Sun city it was a good ride , nothing really obvious to see until you stop your car and realise that you are actually in a middle of a herb of Zebras or buffalos , their camouflage is so remarkable that its just very difficult to spot anything if you drive like crazy. I saw an elephant , loads of zebras , buffaloes and what i like to call as a "leopard" which actually turned out to be a deer or a donkey or something.



Then hunger struke us as we drove the 1km drive from the park to Sun City , which was just brilliant and awesome . We had lots of fun going through the water rides , one of which was actually at a virtual 90 degrees and at one point you do end up being airborn. The artificial tidal waves were also just awesome its really a shame though that i left my camera in the lockers.. but i did get some pictures try my flickr photos here.



Category: South Africa,.Sun City,Holidays,Mauritius,Javed Mandary

Backr-Eid Mubarak from South Africa

Just would like to wish Eid Mubarak to muslims across the globe. Am so unfortunate to miss the Quarbani ceremony , hope the rest of you will make the most out of today in Mauritius and else-where.

Category: Eid,South Africa,Mauritius,Quarbani

Back to a Dodo XMAS

Am back in dodo land for a few days (holidays) before going back early Jan. So I got off my plane like 4 hours ago . Watched Alien v/s predator DVD . Ate some noodles , read the newspaper and now am blogging.

Dont no where i get the energy to do these things. But am planning to catch Father Xmas today read handed as he misses my house as he has been doing ever since I turned 11.

What has changed in the country since i left exactly 31 days ago ? ...the weather. Its really hot here in Port-Louis , even hotter than in Sandton , Jo'burg.

Must definitively go to the beach under these conditions.

Anyways MERRY XMAS to all of you people out there !!!!!!!!!!!

Category: Xmas,Mauritius,South Africa,Holiday,Javed Mandary

South African Safari

Yesterday I went on safari at the Lions Park which is very near to Lanseria Airport in South Africa. Was able to encounter animals that would be impossible to touch and see in good old Mauritius.



I saw giraffes , lynx , hyena , cheetah and the king of all animals the lion , loads and loads of them . I actually parked my car just next to lioness having its mouth full of the severed head of a cow. She was chewing on it as if it was a lollypop or something.



I also played with the lion cubs , adorable little lazy animals which didnt mind hundreds of tourist playing with them everyday.

Unfortunetly these animals are not really in the wild and would not be able to survive by themselves if they were let loose. Its a pity that because of mans wrong doings these majestic creatures now have to live in private farms and closed areas.

Category: South Africa, Mauritius, Lion,Wild,Safari

Blogging from South Africa

Here I am in South Africa and its my first blog from here. Its a really beautiful country , the weather is great and people are kind. I'm currently in Sandton , Johannesburg.

Will try to find some time to blog more.
Category: South Africa,Mauritius

Out to South Africa

To everyone whom I might not have had the time to say this , well am leaving Mauritius tommorrow to South Africa for work ,I would be back normally before or on X-MAS.

Sorry for not having called everyone cause I just got the news myself.At least its a good thing to have a blog :P, you can desiminate information quickly.

However I dont have any clue if I will have facilities there to go online or if I'll have time to blog ...normally i wont.

Ayways be sure I will try to take a maximum of photos possible and will go hunting for the LION in the bush !!!!!

I do hope to meet some Mauritians there in SA , so if you are Mauritian and you are in SA just send me a mail javed.blog@gmail.com ... :P

I think I will concentrate all the personal blogging on My MSN Space as its faster and keep the photos on flickr so do check these out.

Category: South Africa,Mauritius,Work,Blog

Mauritius AutoShow 2005

Had a blasting time at the Autoshow 2005 on saturday ..definitively much more than I had for Infotech 2005 . I have brought some good news and some bad news with me though, the good news is that cars really look much better now , designs are sleek and aerodynamic but prices now top the rs 2 millions for semi-luxury models !!!!!

Many people came to Pailles to see the show , on the way I came across the iframac centre where there were at least a dozen jaguars ready to be sold . That was enough to have me salivating . In front of the Pailles centre there were at least 6 classic cars . Ticket cost around rs 35 rupees which is really cheap .. depending on the number of people coming with you.

The main attraction was at the Nissan stand and more precisely for the Nissan Z 350 which where showcased , 2 sexy beast which i would have loved to ride. Well enough of talking pictures speak for themselves:
Pictures I took : http://www.flickr.com/photos/56452775@N00/

Category: Mauritius,Pailles,AutoShow,Honda,Nissan,Toyota,Car

You will never guess what this blog is about!

Ok I know am out doing myself today ..here is a blog on powerpoint presentations , a lot of interesting material to read , reall nice though... but still a blog about powerpoint presentations ...where are we heading!

Category: Blog,Powerpoint,Presentation,Site,fun

Customize msn spaces blog

This guy
talks you around how to customize your msn space ..if you have one of course
Category: MSN,BLog

30 gigs invite hack

Just copy pas the following URL in your browser :
http://www.30gigs.com/accept/79380/enter-any-name-here

You can replace enter-any-name-here by anything you want.

Found this hack on dreamchaser's. blog

Category: Hack,30gigs,Mail

Infotech 2005 aftermath

So I did eventually go to infotech 2005 on Saturday, there was less stands than before , it was hot and everyone was crowded inside a small arena, it felt a lot like being in an oven with lots of crawling ants...needless to say rude , pushing and sqeeking ants.

This time I walked with my hands in my pocket so as vendors dont keep junking their brochures my way or at times I just kindly(..hmm) refused to grab everthing they threw at my face.

Met loads of people there with everyone saying the same thing .. "Nothing new!" or "Theres nothing to see" which depicted exactly the situation. One stand that really attracted me was that of the MT+ livebox , which is a small rectangular box which provides you with ADSL access , internet TV and video-enabled fixed telephone line surprisingly the stand was empty....yes Mauritians are really techie

Most people were after the cash & carry stands which had on display their inexpensive computer-wares ..mind you a Sony Vaio at rs62,000 , I do wonder who would be the idiot who would spend that amount on a laptop. There was also the leal informatics stand that had quiet a few visitors with the IPod Nano looking realy cute and sexy. And the Apple-Mini being sold at rs 18000 (without a screen).

On the whole the only thing I would cherish in my memories of that Saturday would be the ride to Mer-Rouge and back home!

Category: Mauritius,Javed Mandary,Infotech

Eid the day after

Eid Mubarak if i missed one of you people . Eid went well , lots of briani and now am suffering from stomach ache ... ouch.

Lets wait for bakreid now :) heheheh.

Category: Eid,Mauritius

YouTube - Upload Tag and share videos

YouTube is the technorati and flickr for video files . You can upload and share your videos with thousands of other users and visualize all the sites content via Tags just like technorati.

The idea is great and right now the japs and chinese are making the most out of the service. There are some really cool videos like this Ninja Man or the funny 2 chinese boys I want it that way , which is an absolute must see loool .

If you want to save the YouTube videos follow this guide.

Update: The Lion Song kewl!

Category: Video,Tag,Site,Share,Review

Me v/s the Mango Eater Bats

Eaten up mangoes
Originally uploaded by ledodo.

Last night was one of the most annoying and sleepless night of my entirely life. The reason BATs!

This must be my 3rd blog entry on these dumb creatures. Even my parents are now concerned with them, no one is able to sleep peacefully annymore.

Imagine being waken up at 1:45am by flapping wings , sqeaky noises over a well-laden late-night mango dinner party... just after having seen Dracula TV ..brbr..

So I decided that enough was enough , me and my dad come up with a list of possible solutions to frighten them off .

First we tried to light up all lamps in the house but this did not have much effect . Dad told me that someone had advised him to put a radio near the tree , so we bundled his little blue radio to a sort of long stick and placed it high up near the mangoo tree ... that was the end of dad's favorite blue radio ... as it fell with a big crash .

Exasperated I took hold of the stick and angrily rattled it through the leaves of the tree , imagine our surprise on seeing at least 20 bats rising up to the dark skys one by one . And there were big ones amongst them. Actually the entire area we live in is full with loaded mango trees at this period of the year and for the bats its like a gigantic mall.

Tonight am gonna try scaring the hell out of them with firecrackers. Anyone has any suggestions , i would be glad to hear them.

Ah and yeah the picture shows the mess after the late night dinner in my yard.

Category: Mango,Bat,Mauritius,Pest,Port-Louis,Javed Mandary,Dracula,Halloween,Sleep

Cheap Alienware Laptop

If you are anywhere in the northern hemisphere and happen to want a laptop then do consider the new Area-51 laptops from Alienware not only are they cool but are also cheap starting at $1,049 ..on top of that they have wide-screens.

Category: Alienware,Laptop,Review

Create your avatar with Yahoo Avatars

Having your personalized avatar is no longer a problem with Yahoo's Avatar maker. You can quickly make up a decent avatar of yourself or your friends.

Category: Avatar,Yahoo,Fun

Diwali 2005

Today is Divali , one festival that i definitively love more than Christmas (since i stopped getting presents). Divali or Diwali is the festival of light celebrated by Hindus all around the world and enjoyed by all the neighbours and friends of them people ...because you get loads of sweets .. tons and tons of them.


By sweets I mean indian delicacies which are absolutely ...no words can describe what I mean to say here.. Divali strikes memories also by the fact that our hindu friends light up their houses with beautiful little lamps and light-bulb bases decorations. And there is also a lot of firecrackers which will go up in smoke tonight.

On the whole divali is celebrated by everyone in Mauritius except for people like me who have to work on that day :P .So Happy Divali festival to you all!!!!!

Category: Divali,Diwali,Mauritius,Hindus,Sweets

A long summer night's dream

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

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

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

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

Category: Mauritius,Javed Mandary,Bat,Summer,Eid,Moon

Flock - New variant of firefox

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

Goowy mail now at 2Gig and much much more

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

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

Installation is pretty simple and straight forward.

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

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

Category: Goowy,Gmail,Hotmail,Yahoo,Flash,New,Cool,Mauritius

UFO information

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




Category: UFO,Alien,Site

Mailnation comes up with 1000GB mailbox

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

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

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

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

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

Category: 1000Gb,MailNation,Mail,Gmail,Yahoo,
Hotmail,
30gigs

Got 30gigs mail account and invites

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

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


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


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

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

There is a somewhat similar Search functionality as GMail.

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

Anyways if you want an invite just let me know.

Category: 30gigs,Invite,Mail,Give+away,Gmail,Mail

Mauritius Continuum and the Aibo dog

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

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

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

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

Category: Mauritius,Dog,Aibo,Sony,Saturday,Bats,Javed Mandary,Mango

Ramadan - Roza 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Category: Muslim,Mauritius,Fasting,Roza,Ramadan,Eid

30 gig email service

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

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

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

Category: 30gigs,Mail,Gmail,Goowy

Dangers of popularity

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

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

There mush have been around 80 spam comments registed on my blog now , already removed a few.
Category: Spammers,Blog,Victim

Goowy Calendar Beta

Goowy has released yet another feature in Goowy Mail , the calendar. Now i must say these guys surpassed themselves . It looks like a normal calendar except that its in flash of course and that means nice little effects which makes it look really professional.

Am seriously thinking of using it for my every day appointment schedules as its really one excellent tool.

There are really stuffs which AJAX wont be able to do like Flash and Goowy is an excellant application to demonstrate that.

Category: Mail,Goowy,Calendar

Yahoo Instant Search

Still in beta , Yahoo Instant Search allows you to visualize what could be the expected results of your search even before hinting the "Search" button.

Seems a a good idea for those people that find it hard to write and wait for the 0.000004secs it takes to move their mouse to the search button and left-click.
...hmmm.. anwyays it makes use of AJAX and once again this demonstrates the craze around this techno.

Category: Yahoo,Web,Ajax,Technology

Bunny lets you know when you get Mail

This bunny moves its ears and lights up whenever you get a new mail ... itsn't that the greatest invention ever??



Its WIFI enabled so you can place it anywhere and is 23cm tall.

Category: WIFI,Bunny,Mail,Invention

Cyborg Name Generator

Generator your own cyborg name with the cyborg name generator , you can also choose an avatar.
Category: fun,Avatar,Cyborg,Name

Infotech 2005

Infotech 2005 registration has already started and the event is due in November. Some years back lets say 5-6 years ago , this used to be a very hyped event where many companies used to compete to provide the best pc equipments at the lowest possible prices.Actually many companies would get the most clients during this interval.

The show would attract many people and just the sight of the number of visitors and cars parked around Mer Rouge itself showed how popular the event was.

However since a few years Infotech doesn't seem to attract visitors , the stands are almost empty and very few items are actually on sale. There are more and more institutions trying to sell IT based training and less and less companies selling pc equipment which is a shame.

Its really heart breaking that such an event would lose its magnitude , I even wonder if am gonna take the trouble of going there in the first place this year. I think the organisers should do more to attract the crowds and allow small companies to enter the event with less registration fees as it is these companies which attract pc / gadget consumers by their low price tags on goods.

Category: Mauritius,Infotech,Show