Crazy little planet called Earth

Everybody seems to be talking about Facebook these days and Mauritius is not the exception.

Navigating through the network (of friends) I even managed to see the profile of Navin Ramgoolam – proof below (seems that someone is taking the mickey out of our Prime Minister, Paul Beranger & Anerood Jugnauth – unless I’m completely mistaken and it’s really them but I’ll let you draw your own conclusions…)

 Seriously

What is attracting a lot of people to Facebook compared to other social networking systems like Linked In, Hi5,… are the number of applications that exist and especially the possibility of creating applications (I’ve started to create some apps, I’ll blog about my woes and joys soon – btw, FBML is great!).

Many applications exist just for fun and can sometimes even be spam-like but with the number of people on Facebook everyday (it reportedly hit 30 million active users last July) and the phenomenal growth that it experiences, it is attracting the attention of businesses as well: the population of Facebook is like a pond full of fish – just cast your net…

If any proof is required for that; recently TripAdvisor bought the Facebook application “Where I’ve been” for reportedly $ 3 million.

In Mauritius, the government is always promising us higher bandwidth and they have a big dream: one PC in all homes. Yet, funnily enough I’m still paddling (not surfing) on the web and splashing water all around but how would I like some of this water to be flowing from the taps!

Indeed, today at around 8:30 a.m. there was only a thin trickle of water flowing from the taps in my house. If that goes on, I’ll soon be singing: dilo pou arreter 9 heures …

I lent my Usb Pen drive to a friend who needed to create a bootable usb disk. On getting it back, I formatted it on Windows but… it would then only work in Windows!!! Not on my beloved Kubuntu!

I tried several utilities, software,… and it only ended up in manking my pen drive useless (impossible to read from and write to) on both Windows and Linux

So the solution (just a wild guess) which finally worked was to format the pendrive as a FAT32 drive in DOS!!! Now it works on Windoiws and Linux. How, Why, … I don’t know but it works. Thank God!

So the command was simple:

format E: /FS:FAT32 (where E: is my pen drive name and FAT32 is the fle system I want on the disk)

For more help on the command, type format help at the dos prompt.

Just accquired some hosting space and a name. There’s nothing there but soon (hopefully) there’ll be lots of stuff on: www.zetwal.net 

v/s 

Today MBC showed a splended match on TV: Hearts was playing against Rangers and the final score was 4-2.  It was a breathtaking match full of pace and …

Oh God, when did we get so so desperate! Honestly who knows about Hearts and Rangers in Mauritius and since when did we care about scottish football? If there’s no decent match to show, well don’t show anything! Am I paying Rs 100 per month for MBC to buy this!!!

Cimg is a nice and simple image library. What I especially like about it is that it is not fussy and does just what is required – it can load/save many different types of images, provides quite a few very useful built-in functions and provides direct access to individual pixels.

The following piece of code loads lena – the muse of all image computer scientists – seperates the red, green and blue channel and finally saves the red one as lenaRed.png

#include <iostream>

#include "CImg.h"

using namespace cimg_library;

using namespace std;

int main() {

    // Create 4 images - imgLena: a jpg image loaded - imgR, imgG & imgB:

    //                       4 blank images of X, Y, Z, v, fill

    // X-width of image, Y-height of image, Z-depth of image, since 2D Z=1,

    //                       v-number of colours, fill-colours to fill with

    CImg<unsigned char> imgLena("lena.jpg"),

        imgR(128,128,1,3,0),

         imgG(128,128,1,3,0),

         imgB(128,128,1,3,0);

    // for all pixels x,y in imgLena

    cimg_forXY(imgLena,x,y) {

        imgR(x,y,0,0) = imgLena(x,y,0,0),    // Red component of imgLena sent to imgR

        imgG(x,y,0,1) = imgLena(x,y,0,1),    // Green component of imgLena sent to imgG

        imgB(x,y,0,2) = imgLena(x,y,0,2);    // Blue component of imgLena sent to imgB

    }

    // 4 display windows, one for each image

    CImgDisplay main_disp(imgLena,"Original"),

        draw_dispR(imgR,"Red"),

        draw_dispG(imgG,"Green"),

        draw_dispB(imgB,"Blue");

    // wait till window is closed

    while (!main_disp.is_closed){

        main_disp.wait();

        cout << main_disp.mouse_x << "," << main_disp.mouse_y << endl;    // display the coordinates of the mouse  

    }

    imgR.save_png("lenaRed.png");            // saving an image as png

    return 0;

  }

More info is available at http://cimg.sourceforge.net/.

In some earlier post, I mentionned that I saw some ipod nanos in Rose-Hill that looked suspiciously fake; identical look but too “applish” – some even have the small apple on their cover.

Recently a friend of mine bought one and now he is going to “met la faya”. Read more here.

Last Monday, I went to Piton de la Petite Riviere Noire with my colleagues. At 828m, it’s the tallest mountain of the island but it might be infact one of the easiest ones to climb.

So how do you get there? Check the map here or the National Park & Conservation Service website.

Just go to the Black River National Park, park ur car/van/… in the parking next to the viewpoint (5 on the map), walk about 500m down the road and u’ll see the track indicated by Black River Peak (yes they did not put Piton de la Petite Riviere Noire!).

As soon as you go down the track, it’s a bit confusing – instead of going up, you go down. It’s only after about 30 mins walk that you reallys start the ascent which is basically a gentle rise to the top. After a little scrambling for about 10 metres, you reach the summit and enjoy the view.

The round trip is about 9km and roughly a 3-4 hour trip.

Photos of our trip and the whole story.