If I said all that I felt
If I did all that I could
If I realised all that I dreamed
If I lived all that I could experience
Only then
I'd say I lived a life
I'd be ready to leave this world
With fewer regrets
Coz there'd still be so many feelings not shared
So many things I could have done
So many dreams left I could have realised
So many experiences I could have lived
In my on-going search for better opportunities, I have recently joined a company called astek Mauritius, which is a subsidiary of astek France. The astek group is present in over 10 countries, including France, Mauritius, UK, Tunisia, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Vietnam, China and Mexico.
In the previous post, I requested you all to please support our country, our nation, our Mauritius, for the upcoming French Games.
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
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!
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:
Hooray!
After one month of probation, I'm finally confirmed as an AIESECer!!
AIESEC is the world's largest youth-run organisation, present in over 105 countries. It is present in Mauritius since June 2008 and has been officially launched in August 2008.
AIESEC is an international platform that provides a unique experience for youths in terms of leadership opportunities, international internships and developing the full potential of oneself so as to create a positive impact on society.
Think of an artist, a music producer, and a designer. Their artworks are protected by what's called 'copyright'. For the computer industry, copyright is at the center of software. Companies like Microsoft know much about it.
Then comes open source-related software. The codes are available freely to anyone and anyone may modify them to adapt to a new situation or free to use them.
Based on my ethics classes, I've always thought that any new creation is automatically protected by copyright, even if that's not stated. That's because most countries have signed the Berne Convention.
But for open-source software things weren't clear up to now: does the author retain copyright even if everyone's allowed to use and modify the codes?
Not now. This story from the BBC reports that a US federal court has made a ruling where the author retains copyright, and that all works based on the author's code should respect the license.
Such protection for the merit of the original works is a good thing and will encourage more of us to publish our work as open source. The fear of losing recognition will now fade away and authors of derivative works will be forced to properly acknowledge the original works.
Linux users have for long been wondering what´s the best desktop manager to use. When I had a Debian, a few years ago, I didn´t worry much since both GNOME and Kde are installed by default. So, it was just easy to switch whenever I wanted a new ´look and feel´.
Then came Ubuntu distro. Since it´s a Live CD system, I had to choose either between Ubuntu (with GNOME) or Kubuntu (with KDE). And then very recently, Kubuntu Remix (with KDE 4).
I downloaded Kubuntu Remix and solved nearly all the ´issues´ that I considered ´annoying´. And I was happy. KDE 4, though still a beta, has great features like window animation and supports gadgets (or widgets!).
Last week, I was impressed by GNOME: so neat, so beautiful, so Mac-like. Therefore I did a small
# sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
on my machine.
Wow! So great. Apart from the great look that´s elegant, I now know what ´stable´ release means: my applications won´t crash for any reason at all. With KDE 4, they did. However, it´s understandable since the latter still in beta.
Therefore, when I boot I see the Kubuntu logo, then it´s GNOME desktop manager and GNOME look and feel.
I wanted to make a complete removal and download Ubuntu, but I would have to go through the daunting task of fixing the ´annoying issues´ once again.
Nevertheless, I love Amarok. I did uninstall all KDE applications, except KNetworkManager for WiFi and Amarok.
In the end, I´d say: let´s use whatever we want. There´s no best. Try all. And experience with them.
Holidays are also meant to look back at what one did during the last year. My first year at university has been a great one, with lot's of experiences that changed my life. One year at Spoon Consulting Ltd and another at Linkbynet Indian Ocean have also been great. I can't forget good times and friends at both places.
So, during the last year, here are the things that I can remember:
It's been a real buzz among the Mauritian Facebook community: yesterday Facebook was put offline in Mauritius just because the Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam wanted to remove a humorist parody of a profile bearing his name! Le Mauricien reported the news yesterday's morning. Eddy's blog entry, Pascal's blog entry and Avinash's blog entry have serious thoughts about this stupid act.
I join the cause since this is an insult to free speech, especially since Mauritius is a democratic country.
And second, what about the other humorist parodies of Paul Beranger, our President Sir Aneerood Jugnauth and the very funny minister Gawressoo? Shall they also express their concerns and shut Facebook for a while in Mauritius, while 'their' profiles are being cleaned, as expressed by Pascal?
After going against the press, the Government is now going after the online community. Are we going to see another Great Firewall of China in Mauritius, as expressed by Eddy?
The picture shows what I get when I search for 'Navin Ramgoolam' today. Of course, there are other profiles and groups that have been created in the same spirit, which I have not shown. Is it only us in Mauritius who don't have access to Navin's profile? Or has Facebook genuinely removed them? I'd love to know if we're being fooled and if there's a special Facebook page for Navin for Mauritian users generated by local ISPs...
Last week I wanted to see what's there around me and how the things around me look like. You may not agree with me over what I did, but I think that it's a nice way to get what I wanted.
In fact, I went discovering some magnificent satellite pictures of the earth! The following sites proved to be very attractive:
I'm finally very happy about being able to give my first report for Software Architecture in style! In fact, I've used LyX (pronounced 'licks').
So what's LyX? It's just a simple word processor which does "What You See Is What You Want", and not "What You See Is What You Get", as with other word processors. To put it simple, it's a simple word processor with pre-defined styles for headers, footers, paper format, font size, and so on. You don't change them. You only bother about your content. And then apply the pre-defined styles to your text! After all, is it not that content is the most important thing?
LyX is a graphical front-end for LaTeX (pronounced 'la-tek'), a markup language for TeX (pronounced 'tek').
A few weeks ago, Apple announced the public free release of Safari, it's legendary web browser. As an enthusiast, I downloaded it. And started to adventure on the Internet to see what's so amazing at it.
Safari's website claims that it's got major advantages. I do admit that Safari's indeed faster than any other web browser I've used; may it be for surfing or for downloading. Of course, it's not going to beat a download manager which supports threads!
The other feature which I think is new is the idea of 'private browsing'.
I get all the other features in my favourite Mozilla Firefox on the other hand.
But I've got a question: why has Apple made a release for Windows? And not for any distro of Linux? Well, I think it's following the same concept as it did for iTunes. Apple wants to make Windows users shift from their OS to Mac OS.
So how does it do so? Simple:
Last Thursday, Yanesh, a friend, invited me to his house for a LAN party. Our plan was to connect some PC's and to play NFS Underground 2 on LAN!
That was just fantastic!
Our plan was like this:
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