Flamboyant season

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



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



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

The battle of the ISPs

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

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

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

Dual screen phones

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



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

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

SketchUp video

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

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

Amazing Software From Google Team - video powered by Metacafe

Xmas Decorations

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

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





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

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

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

The Long horse

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




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

Dhoom 2 Review

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



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



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

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

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

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



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

The million dollar homepage

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

World Aids Day

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

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

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

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

MY.T enduring its first network problems

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

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

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

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

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

A free alternative to MS Visio

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

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

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

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

JBuilder 2007 is out

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

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



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

Reviewing ReviewMe

The following is a paid review

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



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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

Snap.com the new web 2.0 search engine

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



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

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

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

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

The joy of reading a free book thanks to Don

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

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



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

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

Garfield 2 the return of the King

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

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


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

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

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

The Sucks No Limit T-Shirt

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



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

Infotech 2006 updates

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

Pimp my ride by Borat

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

Watch a movie inside of a concrete block

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

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

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

Have a look for yourself at the video :

Make art from..red bull cans

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



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

Blackberry to be launched in Mauritius

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

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

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

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

Prince Of Persia

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

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

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



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

And some people are enjoying themselves at the seaside!

Unusual Mail Opener

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

Tera mera pyaar on Utube

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

yourminis.com

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

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

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



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



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

Registration is free so go get yourminis :P !

Sukhoi 27 Cobra fighter planes

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

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

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

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

This youttube video called Dove Evolution speaks for itself.



Thats the way i like campaigns to be :) .

Wish u a happy Divali

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

More comic strips at AlienLovesPredator.com .

Now officially online 24hrs a day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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