Thank you!

I would like to thank each of you who has voted for me from the bottom of my heart for having voted for me at the Franko-Elektro Competition for the French Games 2009. Thank you for your support and for believing in me. It was still more than that: believing in our country.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to make it up to the next round. But this is not the end. It has been an all great experience and I encourage each and everyone to dare to dream and dare to make it reality. Do all your best. The rest will follow. Do all that's in your capacity to make your dream come true and only then accept the results - whether good or bad, whether success and failure. And one more thing: there's no such thing as bad thing or failure. It's just the way we look at it.

Voting reloaded

In the previous post, I requested you all to please support our country, our nation, our Mauritius, for the upcoming French Games.

Unfortunately, the site was pirated a few days ago. However, this has been solved. Voting is up again. And all votes have been reset to nil.

I urge you to please vote for me once again. The steps are the same:

1. Visit http://www.jeux2009.org/franco-elektro-voting.aspx
2. Choose “Vocal Trance” in the “Type de musique” box
3. Click on “GO”
4. Cast your vote for Dil Kris and vote for Mauritius!

This time you will be asked to provide a valid email address. An email will be sent to you. Please do check your email and do click on the link to vote for me.

Thank you very much.

Truly yours,

Dilraj

Dil Kris (Dilraj) at Franko-Elektro

The Franco-Elektro competition is organised by The French Games 2009 organisation. It is the world’s largest competition for DJ’s among French-speaking countries. Six best DJ’s having the largest number of votes will be invited for a semi-final.

Dil Kris (Dilraj) represents the paradise island of Mauritius. If you want Mauritius, our country, our nation, to be represented, please do vote for him. Each vote counts.

Together, we’ll make Mauritius top on the world’s electronic music scene.
Vote for Dil Kris, vote for Mauritius!

How to vote?

Visit http://www.jeux2009.org/franco-elektro-voting.aspx
Choose “Vocal Trance” in the “Type de musique” box
Click on “GO”
Cast your vote for Dil Kris and vote for Mauritius!

To listen to the mix:
http://rapidshare.com/files/272530865/Dil_Kris_-_l_Amour_en_trance_-_Jeux_2009_demo.mp3

Please spread the word to all your contacts!

Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=121971418586

An Apple is an Apple and Apple loves Apple

A few days ago I wanted to install Mac OS X on my PC to test-drive the operating system and see for myself why there's so much hype about it. Is it because of the user-experience? Or because of the supposedly elegant metal look with some kind of blue? I somehow managed to get my hands on a version of Mac OS X and proceeded with the installation.

I was surprised to see that Mac OS X is in fact an operating system that works as follows:

1. it only understands Mac products
2. it only works with Mac products
3. it does not support third-party products

In other words, Mac OS locks users with Apple's products.

Let's take an example: let's suppose Apple is in the manufacturing sector - it makes screws, screwdrivers and doors. Incidentally, the screws are designed so that only an Apple screwdriver could be used to fix the screws and the screws have such a design that they would only fit in the Apple doors. The Apple screwdrivers can't be used to open other makes of screws. And the doors can only be fixed using Apple screws. The Apple doors themselves can only be mounted on an Apple wall. And the wall can be mounted only in an Apple building. And the building can only be built on Apple land and the latter can only exist in Apple world, which may only exist in Apple universe.

The latest case that's been reported is this one from the BBC. Palm's latest phone Pre was claiming seamless syncing with Apple's iPhone iTunes (update). Apple has updated its firmware claiming the latest version fixes a bug which allowed some non-Apple devices to be detected as Apple's. Therefore, the Palm Pre, and perhaps other devices as well, is no more compatible with the iPhone iTunes.

Can a company build something that's closed, the inverse of being open, as in open-connectivity? As it seems to me, Apple's way of working is more restrictive than its rival Microsoft in some way.

To complete my story, of course I've been unsuccessful at installing Mac OS X on my PC. As expected? Perhaps.

Update: The Pre was synced to iTunes, not iPhone as I mentionned.

Napster goes 10

Back in 1999, the Internet was just becoming popular among the Mauritian youth, especially at school. And the Internet was also the new Eldorado. Yahoo! was a leader, as well as Microsoft with MSN. And Google just made it's first appearance.

Then I discovered Napster from friends at Café National Super Cyber cybercafé. It was the program that every youth had to have if he/she were to be musically trendy. It was a very light peer-to-peer program, easy to download and install. It had very few buttons. And it was very simple to use.

I wanted to test-drive it. I wanted to download the song 'It's my life' by Doctor Alban, but ended up with that of Bon Jovi. And soon the latter became the killer song, and is still rated as such today. That song made the charts around the world, hitting 1st place.

My friends who were fans of hard-rock music used Napster to download tons of music of Metallica, Marilyn Manson and Nirvana. They used Napster to download some 5 Gigabytes of music at 128 kbps. Phew! What an astonishing amount. Undoubtedly, they did so at the cybercafé itself, enjoying some kind of broadband.

At home, I could download a song of merely 3 MB at 128 kbps over my 56.6 kbps dial-up connection in just over an hour and very often the songs were always downloaded at 90-99 percent and as a consequence I always 'missed' parts of songs. But still, I managed to download a few hundreds of megabytes of music at that speed. I always envied the Americans who had 128 kpbs ADSL, 512 ADSL and T1 connection lines at that time!

During that time, waiting for a song was of an immense pleasure. No need to buy pirated CDs. We were pirating directly from source! Metallica's, Madonna's and Britney Spears' songs were available for download weeks, even months, before official releases. To our happiness, both ears and pockets.

In around 2000, Metallica and Madonna filed lawsuits for copyright infringement and Napster was closed down to re-open later.

Today, Napster is still considered the first program to have shaken the music industry. Indeed, it has inspired many later applications like BitTorrent, iMesh, eDonkey, eMule, Morpheus and Kazaa, among others.

All other programs or protocols still pose the same 'threat' concerning copyright matters as Napster did. Or is it that the music industry has to re-invent itself and do business differently?

And even today, every mention of Napster makes the music industry tremble. Problems posed by Napster to the music industry are being spread to other media such as books and movies which are all being digitised, ready to download, with an ever-growing world population who's downloading more and more.

All in all, Napster has been revolution. And as with every revolution, there are good sides and not-so-happy consequences.

Happy birthday Napster!

Partial eclipse visible in Mauritius for Chinese New Year

As the Chinese community celebrates its new year according to their Calendar, a partial eclipse of the sun was visible in Mauritius! This natural event made the Spring Festival more sense to me this time since I not only got delicious cakes from my neighbours (thank you!) but I was also amazed by the sun's eclipse.

This shot is the best one which I was able to take :P

I've always been interested in the stars and the universe since I was young though I've never been able to decode any zodiac sign from maps.

Here's some fantastic things which keep me interested:

• are we alone in the universe? E.T. are you here?
• universe or multiverse?
• moment of singularity where all laws of Physics as we know of vanish
• when we look at the stars, we look at the past
• universe is expanding or shrinking?
• are we from the Earth itself or from another place? Mars?

These are just some of the topics that are sufficiently good to do a PhD I guess :P

I've heard of the Mauritius Astronomical Society since I was a kid but I've never managed to get into contact with one of the guys. It would have been so nice to get into contact and see how enthusiasts are doing in the paradise island.