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.

I am an AIESECer!

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.

I own my work

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.

War of desktop managers

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.

Looking back at the past year, or so

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:

• Think, think and think, but think differently - university has changed the way I look at things
• Great friends are enriching - all moments are meant to be enjoyed and lived to the fullest
• Sharing is such a pleasure
• Group work is good
• Hectic life, no time to relax
• Playing Need for Speed from midnight to six in the morning
• Concerts and concerts - house and trance music turn me up

And I also got

• A notebook - Dell Latitude D630 :)
• A Hercules MK2 DJ console

That's it, in simple words...

Holidays... good times

Hurray! Holidays are back for me!!

What this means?

• More free time
• More time for work
• More time to do what I want
• Less headaches :)
• More time to spend with friends
• More time to lose on facebook and hi5
• More time to do to funny and silly things
• More TV
• More downloading of music
• (More) time for blogging :P