I don’t know if it’s the result of the visit of people from Google in 2008 (or was it 2007) in Mauritius but Google seems to have taken an interest in Mauritius!
For some time now, Google Maps has most of our roads (more below), we have google.mu in ‘Kreol Morisien’ – that is sure to put a dent in those who still claim that Creole is not a language but a slang! - Google map has most of the roads and I’ve recently heard that Google will put some of its servers in Mauritius!
While Google Moris is more fun now than useful (we must still be able to understand french or creole to read the answers), the cache servers can really help to boost our miserable internet speed and Google Map with all the roads is a fantastic tool. Just think of all the possibilities; we can show traffic, buildings, … and I’m even considering sending my address to people as a tag on the map!
Mapmaker- time to contribute
Yet, the maps are incomplete: some roads are missing, name are missing or inaccurate. This can be changed and this is where Mapmaker helps. It allows you to edit current maps and these can eventually be incorporated by Google. If everyone would just correct/add information about the road he lives on and if possible the roads that he knows, that would make a massive change!
The road section in blue is being updated – the power is in our hands. Let’s help make things better.
I’ve recently assisted a few talks about learning (namely the one given by Stefan Brandle at the University of Mauritius on the 28th of May 2009) and I’ve grown to like the contructivist approach to learning. But at the end of the day, the most important is: no matter how the teaching has been done, it’s what has been learnt that’s important! A new fancy name is needed for that; something like “pragmatism”.
Has anyone considered the possibility that it’s just not fun any more? — Don Knuth, October 2006
The decline in the number of students interested in Computer Science seems to be a worldwide trend. It’s not the lack of prospects that is a problem here, on the contrary, some companies in Mauritius seem desperate for fresh graduate in Computer Science. It’s mostly (at least in Mauritius) that there is the general belief that you’ll be working very hard and that you will need to write programs which is very difficult.
Alice in Wonderland: Chapter 1 – Down the Rabbit Hole
This is where Alice can make a difference. As it was rightly stated by some of the people working on Alice, the goal is not to replace C++ or Java or Python as the first language that is used to teach first year university students programming. The aim is rather to show that programming can be something fun and interesting and it can thus be used prior to the first programming course to teach students the basic concepts of programming like what is a loop? What is recursion? What is a selection statement?Sequence, Selection and Iteration are the three very basic concepts of procedural programming and once completely mastered, there’s just the syntax to learn.
A small Object Oriented movie
Furthermore, Alice allows students to better understand the Object Oriented approach. Right from the start, the student will be working with objects without knowing it.
Suppose I want to create a cow. I need to access the package Animal and draw an instance of the cow from the class Cow and the cow will have some attributes and methods. But to the student, it will only be a movie that he is making. The above screen shot shows the Object Oriented program which uses sequence and loop and below is the movie generated.
Today I suffered some additional ranting about how things are but should have been. When I confronted that person with: “Well what have you done to change things when you could?”
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Nothing
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What I mean is that there was no answer. This is what I get all the time: ranting, more ranting and even more ranting – I’m now ranting about ranting. I do agree that ranting is nice but there’s a limit and life is not only about complaining. We need solutions, ways of solving problems, ingenuity or at least raise awareness! It doesn’t need to be life changing – you don’t have to invent the Internet. But it’s just about doing your part to make this world better.
Millions are doing this everyday. You might not be successful but it’s definitely worth a try.
Since I started using Linux some 4 years ago, I’ve been a fan of Kubuntu or rather the KDE desktop which I preferred to Gnome. With the announcement of KDE 4, I was all excited as it could only get better! Yet I was disappointed. KDE 4.0 was unstable (beware of the even number releases, especially 0) but it got better with KDE 4.1 and eventually KDE 4.2 (yuopi we can save files on the desktop again!) but it’s still not where I want it to be! To start with, even the start-up menu looks weird! What I need is a simple and messy-less interface!
The transition to Ubuntu (Gnome)
Upon installing ubuntu, the main thing that you will notice is that there’s a toolbar at the top that can be used to launch applications ( a la mac)! and the first nice thing that you will notice is that Firefox is already there (I still wonder why Kubuntu doesn’t provide that by default – it’s I guess the most widely used browser on Linux).
As for the other applications, well none of the KDE stuff is there (all the apps that start with K). So what do you really need? Kate is not there but Geany is a nice replacement. Apart from that, I didn’t see anything very different; it’s ubuntu after all!
Apart for that, some links that you will probably find useful if you are doing the same transition:
Some time back I discovered Papers, an extremely nice software for managing scientific papers – I don’t know wherther it runs on any other platform than Mac OS. That left me wondering if there are similar solutions for ebooks. After extensively googling around, I discovered Adobe Digital Editions.
It’s a very nice software that allows you to organise your books into bookshelves and allows you to read them. It’s currently one of my must-have software.
41 years since we exist as an independent country and still we hesitate to call ourselves a nation!
We all speak creole but still many refuse to acknowledge it as a language, our ancestors have common origins but many choose to stress on our physical differences and we have a common culture (we eat the same food, live similarly, dress likewise, …) but many claim to be closer to India, Africa or Europe!
Crime against a nation
Why are some so keen on stressing on our differences, coz they depend on that to exist (who would pay attention to the head of all the “Associations Sociaux Culturelles” - the proper name is “Association Sectaire” if we were just one nation) and are too lame to exist without that! You don’t believe me: well did you know any of these self proclaimed “leaders” before they became the president of their asociation? Nada, they didn’t exist and should they continue like that, when we one day become a nation, hopefully their names would have fallen in oblivion else they might be tried postumously for crime against a fledgling nation!
ARToolkit is a very nice toolkit developed by Hit Lab (New Zealand & US). It offers pretty good performance. However, it seems more fun to try it with VRML rather than just OpenGL codes since it’s easier to get VRML models. However, making VRML work on Mac is a pain – there are very few sites explaining how to do that. The only useful link I got is a Japanese site (wouldn’t have been able to do it without them) where unfortunately the explanation is in Japanese – the UNIX commands are however not in Japanese . This is how I managed to do it.
First of all you need to get ARToolkit from the ARToolkit download site. You will be guided to Sourceforge where you can get the toolkit. While you are there, download the openvrml zip file (openvrml-0.16.3-bin-macosx.zip).
Go the the Setup documentation for MacOS. Follow the building ARToolkit instructions. All should be fine except for the VRML part.
For the VRML part (the core of this post), you will probably see that trying to use fink to install mozilla-dev and openvrml4-dev openvrml-gl5-dev won’t work. So we are going to see alternatives to using the fink command.
You first need to get Openvrml. This is available the sourceforge site (if you didn’t download it earlier)
Copy the contents of the include of openvrml to ARToolkit’s include folder; the latter should originally only have a folder called AR.
Copy or move the contents of the lib file of openvrml and paste it in ARToolkit’s lib folder. You should now be able to build ARvrml as instructed on the ARToolkit MacOS setup site
cd ~/Desktop/ARToolKit/lib/SRC/ARvrml
make
Next create some symbolic links (in the ARToolkit lib folder) coz if you try building now, ARToolkit will complain about missing libraries
Once this is done, use the makefile to build the SimpleVRML project.
cd ~/Desktop/ARToolKit/examples/simpleVRML
make
Finally go to ARToolkit’s bin folder to run the executable produced
cd ~/Desktop/ARToolKit/bin
./simpleVRML
On running that, simplevrml complaining about some missing things as follows:
dyld: Library not loaded:@executable_path/libopenvrml.6.1.2.dylib
Referenced from: /Users/....(hoge).../ARToolKit2.72.1/build/Development/simpleVRML.app/Contents/MacOS/simpleVRML
Reason: image not found
In simple terms, it is saying that it can’t find in /opt/local/lib. To solve that, create some simbolic links pointing to the missing items (it will probable complain more than once) as follows for each:
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -
As for building on Windows, do as the ARToolkit site says: build using Visual Studio .NET 2003. I’ve tried to build it using Visual C++ 6.0: no luck at all. With Visual Studio 2008, it works until you include Vrml where it breaks! With Visual Studio .NET 2003, it works perfectly – note however that that the the include folder of Visual Studio .NET 2003 has no GL subfolder; you will thus need to create that!
The names of the different versions of Visual Studio (from Wikipedia):
* 5.1 Visual Studio 97
* 5.2 Visual Studio 6.0
* 5.3 Visual Studio .NET (2002)
* 5.4 Visual Studio .NET 2003
* 5.5 Visual Studio 2005
* 5.6 Visual Studio 2008
* 5.7 Visual Studio 2010
Why the hell do the 2002 and 2003 have .NET in their name and not the versions 2005 or 2008???
The Oscar nominees for 2009 are out and as usual, most of the nominated movies have not come to Mauritian Cinemas!
Indeed, this is the sorry state of Mauritian cinemas. In addition to the cinema tickets being overly expensive (this is what I think anyway) we only get average movies and only very occasionally great movies – if I’m not mistaken, apart from the Dark Knight, we were only served with crappy stuff! How I regret the University Cinema and Kino of the days when I was in England!
However, can we blame the cinema owners? I’m not too sure. Two years back, I went to see “La Mome” – great movie and the small girl singing LaMarseillaise is one of the best parts – but I was one of the rare people there! Cinemas are businesses; they want to make money. But what about the Mauritius Film Development Council (MFDC) or Ministry of Arts and Culture? Can’t they try to promote some culture and bring some decent movies! Totally useless!!!
Since Microsoft has released its beta version of Windows 7 for download, the web has been buzzing with articles so full of praises for it and many have quickly spelled the doom of Linux and Macs.
Does that upset me? Not at all. Every year (for maybe the past 5 years) has been the year where Linux would take over from Microsoft according to Linux fans and Microsoft fanboys have in turn derided Macs while the latter have self proclaimed themselves as better than anyone! Has anything changed? Hardly. Microsoft continues to dominate the world and Linux continues to grind small pieces of the market while MACs are progressing.If Windows 7 is as good as they claim it is, it might regain the tiny tiny market share that it has lost to Linux laptops but I don’t foresee any major change in the OS demographics.
Windows 7 might be so much better than Vista but I’m not throwing my Mac away!
Many people tend to think that I’m anti Microsoft coz I prefer Linux and use a Mac. The truth is (apart that I just can’t be bothered) I simply use what makes more sense to me.
I don’t like Windows coz:
it’s just too slow to start – it might take less than one minute for the login to appear but loading the programs after that takes forever
it’s such a pain to have to continuously worry about virusses and spyware – I’m not saying that Linux or Mac is virus free but it doesn’t make sense for now (thank God for that) to make a virus to target these users as there are so few!
I deem it unsatble at times, more unstable than Linux and Mac OS (which is based on UNIX) and stability followed by a nice interface is what I’m after when using a PC
Does that mean that I’m in adoration of Linux? Certainly not. Some time back, I tried to recommend Linux to everyone but the interface and ease of use is not completely there yet. This meant that i often had to attend to new users in distress. People are used to their PCs slopwing down coz of virusses but don’t want not to be able to connect to a wifi network coz there’s no linux driver for their wireless interface and then need to use a hack. It might sound stupid but that;s how things are!
Now what about Macs? As Stefan Brandle puts it: “Macs offer the best of both (Linux and Windows) worlds”. It’s as stable as Linux and offers an interface that has nothing to envy from Microsoft. Of course it comes at a price – it’s more expensive than a standard PC coupled with a Windows license but there’s just no free lunch.
So it’s time that we realise one very important aspect of the OS wars: people use what’s best for them. If windows suits you better, go ahead but don’t complain about virusses and long waiting times. If Linux suits you, don’t complain about occasional idiosyncracies (no driver for some peripheral). If Macs suit you, don’t complain about the price! It’s a free world and meaningless OS wars won’t change a thing!
Most of the parastatal bodies in Mauritius have at their head a political nominee and this has been the practice for a very very long time. Unfortunately, quite a few of them have not been attributed the job on merits but on relations. As long as economic conditions are stable, anyone can manage any company – you just need some common sense and a few good managers that have been around for some time. However, when facing unstable economic conditions … like right now; you need the right man in the right place.
For example, I find it tough to put the blame on Air Mauritius for doing a hedging contract. Everyone was expecting petrol to rise to around $200 and striking a deal on $105 seemed to make sense – of course many are claiming otherwise but I didn’t hear them saying petrol would go down a few months ago! Doing a hedging contract is therefore normal. However, going for 80% of the fuel on such a long contract (2 years) is where “the right man in the right place” would have said: “Guys hold on, I think this is unwise! That much and for two year deal is just too long.”
Divine Retribution!
Many political nominees have been reigning unquestioned over their kingdom until … overthrown by economic crisis! Had the price of petrol gone up, as everyone thought it would, these political nominees would have been seen as heroes praised for their exceptional vision and gift of claivoyance! Unfortunately, for them, it turned out not to be so!
Instead they have been decried as incompetants. Their primary sin, according to me has been their supreme arrogance – how do you call a salary of about Rs 800 000 (when the average salary in Mauritius might be around Rs 10 000 if not lower) and assigning yourself free tickets for life on Air Mauritius? Today, they are paying the price of that, and it will be hard for them to get the sympathy of anyone when they have been so full of themselves!
Though I’m a self proclaimed agnostic (one who continuously ask questions about whether God exists and is just looking for answers), I can’t find a better word for that than “Divine Retribution”. I don’t know if it’s the work of God or just a mere coincidence but that should serve as example for future autarchs!
. This is how I managed to do it.
