Low-cost laptops in Mauritius

Last year, the MIT make a really nice move to leverage technology and bring some hopes to the poor developing world. In fact, the team at MIT planned to give governments laptops for USD 100 each so that the latter gives them away for FREE to the poor children and students. Details about the project.

The laptops run Linux OS, and have great advantages, as per the specs.

A few weeks ago, the Government of Mauritius announced that it has partnered with Microsoft to sell laptops at MUR 15,000 (USD 450). Report from the local newspaper (sorry, in French).

So how are the Microsoft laptops different from those of MIT? And is the Government making a move to oust MIT and Linux and favour Microsoft? And as it can be seen, the Microsoft laptops are far more expensive than that of the MIT team. So why has the Government chosen such a move which is not logical in an economic point of view and going away from the free software movement?

(As an aside, I have heard that the IT Minister has close links with guys at Microsoft.)

CSE programming contest

The Computer Science and Engineering Department (CSE) at the University of Mauritius is organising a programming contest these days. I think that this is a very good initiative that has been taken. This will bring some fresh air to the department. Students and lecturers will enjoy some sort of interaction apart from classes and the lecturer-student relationship. They will be able to talk other things apart that in the syllabus.

Students and lecturers in the department will also be more friendly I think. It will be time to make new friends and share ideas.

The important thing is to participate and enjoy, not winning! Good luck to you guys (and gals) participating and have a nice time and lots of fun together!

Unfortunately, I'm not able to join them since I'm no more a student. But I'd love to participate in one way or the other.

My.T critic

It has been a few months since the local telco Mauritius Telecom released a new subscription-based service My.T. It has three services bundled together:

My.T Watch
Digital television which includes 6 free TV channels
Video on demand (VOD)
Plus some interactive services

My.T Talk
Lower price rates for international calls

My.T Surf
Internet package

So far, the move is a good one by the telco. In fact, we may argue that MT has done this to maintain its leadership in the sector in Mauritius.

However, the digital TV is nothing than analog programmes being recieved in digital mode. So saying, there's no EPG information associated to the programmes and no choice of language, which I regret.

The Surf option guarantees a 2 Mbps download only for sites residing on MT's servers. Access to international sites remain at a low transfer rate. It's a shame that we say 256 Kbps, 512 Kbps and 1 Mbps "broadband", knowing that my friends studying in the UK enjoy a 12 Mbps access!

However, I do appreciate the move made by MT to stop charging for the extra bytes in excess that we transfer. But still, MT has not said how the lower priority packets are different than the higher priority ones and how will they affect our Internet usage.

The Talk service is only the 'Sesam' scratch cards tariff reloaded in a new service. And those who use their phones only for local calls a lot do not benefit from the service.

Companies use Mauritius flag colours

The Mauritian flag is made up of four colours: red, blue, yellow and green. Each of the colours represents one aspect of Mauritius:

Red: symbol of country's independence
Blue: the marvellous blue sky
Yellow: the bright future
Green: the fertile land of the island

Over the past few months, I've noticed that many companies are using the four colours as part of their logo. The first example is a very old one and any Mauritian should have noticed it: Microsoft Windows! Yes, it uses the four colours of the Mauritian flag! Here are a few logos of Windows (old logo and new one as at Windows XP):





After a bit of analysis, you will find out that the red-blue-yellow-green sequence is in anti-clockwise direction in the windows.

Now here's Google logo:



It has all four colours, but not in the red-blue-yellow-green sequence.

And now comes that of eBay:



This one is remarkably similar to the Mauritian flag not only in the colours used but also in sequence. This is the one that really caught my attention!

In the light of the above, I should say that I am proud to be a Mauritian!

Note: All images and logos of trademarks are the property of their own companies. They have been taken from Wikipedia and follow the same copyright notice for fair use.

Problems with labels

After playing a bit with labels for this blog's posts, I found that Google's having problems with them. In fact, labels are sometimes in lowercase and sometimes in uppercase. After a bit of googling I noticed that other users are having such problems too as described here.

Not all posts are found under the appropriate labels. Therefore, when you want to view posts under a specific label, you will always have some posts missing. That's why I removed all labels for my postings. I will add them again when the issue is solved.

Joined LUGM

It's been quite some time now that I've been participating in the LUGM (Linux User Group Mauritius) forum. It's a really nice one where we can share our thoughts and help people using Linux or any *nix.

After many weeks, I finally made my mind to attend the meetings. In fact, yesterday I attended my first LUGM meeting that was held not far from where I live. These meetings are open to the public, so I wanted to discover a little.

I got up at 09.15, did morning things like having a bath and taking a breakfast, and was at the meeting place at 10.15, after some 10 minutes' walk. Phew! I couldn't risk being late the first time! There, I met two guys that were already there, and they told me that I were the first one to arrive!! Hmm... And the others reached there by 11.00 - an hour late!

However, I should say that I was impressed by the friendliness of the guys that were present. I was able to meet other guys really passionate about the free software movement. They are really warm and have a lot to share. A guy did a presentation about the tweaks on the X Window System. Then, it was discussion time though nothing was discussed. I discovered that there were other newbies like me too at the meeting.

The LUGM gives away CDs and DVDs for free. They have a library and members are able to take books that are sponsored by O'Reilly.

I took a Fedora Core 5 DVD. I will be happy to give you a copy if you want to. This is legal since according to GPL, I may make copies of DVDs and give them away for free. I am also able to sell the copies that I make and thus make profit! Therefore, I will more pleased to sell the copies to you at some Rs 15000, the price of the licence for the new upcoming Windows Vista! (That last few words are for kidding, right.)

Windows filesystems better than Linux!

Yes, according to me, Windows filesystems are better than Linux!! I made a bad experience a while ago when my Linux box crashed.

As I stated earlier, I cannot boot on Linux. However, I would greatly want to recover some data found on that partition. So I downloaded a small application called Ext2 IFS. This application is just great since it mounts the filesystems that are used in Linux under Windows. Like this, I get new drives when I click on My Computer in Windows. Then, I am able to read or write to EXT2/EXT3 filesystems!

So far, so good. However, here's my bad experience. Since my Linux OS crashed, EXT2 IFS could not access the EXT3 partition! In fact, EXT2 IFS gave me the error message "The disk in drive X is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?". When I looked up what caused this on its website, I found out that I could diagnosis this issue by downloading and running another program called moundiag.exe. When I ran it, I got another error saying that my EXT3 filesystem has some flag set that EXT2 IFS does not yet implement, and that there are some transactions left in the journal. However, if the Linux OS had shutdown properly, I wouldn't have such problems.

So, my only hope is to re-install a Linux OS without deleting my data.

As such, the EXT2/EXT3 filesystems are not as "recoverable" as that of FAT, FAT32 and NTFS that are used in Windows. Whenever the Windows OS crashes, files on the partition may still be recovered by mounting the drive in Linux or mounting the hard disk on another computer.

So Linux users, beware! Don't let your Linux OS crash!