Crazy little planet called Earth

Piracy is bad and I believe that especially students studying Computer Science should not pirate software – how can you expect to earn a living by writing and selling software when you are yourself stealing other fellow programmers?

Stealing
One of the reasons why software piracy is rife is: Why would you bother paying for a software when you can easily get it for free? Your friends are offering you that, loads of sites on the Internet allow you to download those? Well it’s just about being honest; why do you bother buying vegetables, just steal off your neighbor!!!

So if you won’t steal veggies, don’t steal software. However, while you won’t get your greens free, good software is available freely and it’s just a matter of getting used to using it. OpenOffice is a good replacement for Ms Office as is Firefox which is a more than adequate replacement for IE!

However, can you live with only free software?

While I’m a big fan of Linux (it’s free, stable, you don’t get viruses, sypware, …) I unfortunately need to agree that it’s not as straightforward to use as Windows! But guess what, Windows Vista is about $100. It might be peanuts if you live in the US where the average monthly salaries are I guess around $2000 but when you live in Mauritius and the average monthely salary is around $300, it’s just unaffordable! Half of your pay to buy Windows is just crazy!!! Even if you are a Uni graduate and you earn maybe about $700 (which is very good), spending 1/7 of your salary on buying  Windows is crazy and it shouldn’t amaze anyone that piracy is rife.

Special Pricing for Developing Countries
While I don’t think an IT graduate should be scared of Linux and be pirating software, I cannot blame others for not using only Open Source or Free software. However, unless special prices are introduced for developing countries, we are simply inviting piracy. We cannot expect someone to spend $40 dollars on a game!

As long as software will be essentially created in Western Europe and the US and spread round the whole world, we cannot expect prices to fall. We thus have only two choices:

• push for Open Source at all costs (yet I don’t see Computer Games being Open Source or free anytime soon)
• start developing good software that everyone want to use in developing countries. It’s time to be creative and productive!

Today I went to Ile aux Cerfs again after a very long time and things have changed a lot since I last went there some 15 years ago.

We started our trip in Trou d’eau Douce at around 10:00. A boat swiftly took us to Ile aux Cerfs where a guy there explained how our day was going to unfold: a short visit of the island for now, at 11:00 a trip to the Waterfall of Grande Riviere Sud Est and then lunch on a nearby island and finally back to ile aux cerfs at around 2:30 to 4:30 where we can relax.

Ile aux Cerfs
It’s like a small town – lots of people everywhere. However, there a nice, but shallow, lagoon with crystal clear water near the jetty. It’s nice to walk around and be like a “tourist” strolling in its warm water – we even saw a starfish there! For a swim, it’s better to go round the island and look for a better spot. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to visit more of the island … spending just 1 hour there, like I did, you won’t be able to see much!

Waterfall of Grande Riviere Sud Est
We took a speed boat from Ile aux Cerfs to the waterfall and that was nice! You travel hair in the wind to see the waterfall. The latter is nice and you get to come real close to it.

After lunch on an island nearby, we went back to ile aux Cerfs for a while before hurriedly going on a glass bottom boat…

Glass Bottom Boat
If you want to know honestly what I feel about that: It’s a rip-off!!!

When we first landed on Ile aux Cerfs, we inquired with a guy about possibilities of snorkelling and the latter proposed us a trip on a glass-bottom boat for Rs 300 per person (never ever accept that; it’s a bloody rip off). After some haggling, the price was brought down to Rs 200 per person (it’s a rip-off but we didn’t know at that time) and we agreed as the guy would take us back to the mainland as well.

But guess what, we were squeezed in a small boat whose engine was struggling, and complaining loudly, to ferry us to the … “corals”. The latter are scanty on the east coast and most that we saw were darkish (luckily they showed signs of being alive; their tips were blue) and we were overjoyed, excited, euphoric, thrilled (you bet we were, we paid Rs 200 for that crap) at each rare tiny fish that we saw. In sum, we ended up spending one and a half hour crammed up like sardines in a tiny boat. I got so fed that I even started talking about work on a day off. God, just how low can you get??? 

It might have been fun for those who dived to the fish but if you plan to just see the lagoon in the glass bottom boat, well don’t. You want to see fish, go to the Mauritius Aquarium instead! (I won’t even dare comparing it to the Marine Park in Blue Bay)

In sum, ile aux Cerfs is nice but by all means, prefer a speed boat all the time.

Given that I would sometimes need to run Windows on Mac, I very quickly decided that I’ll install Windows XP through boot camp. It seemed like a good idea until I had to restart my mac to run windows just coz I needed to run a small application for 10 mins. Despite having only 1GB of RAM, I soon decided that I had to use virtualization!

Which one to use?
A  quick analysis revealed the winner; it was to be Parallels. This seems to be the default solution on Mac for Windows.

Parallels is easy to install and within an hour I had parallel and Windows XP running (it takes some time to install XP)

Performance
As I had suspected, Virtualization with only 1GB of RAM is not great. When Windows is running, Mac OS X tends to slow down but Windows runs fine and it’s best to just use Windows completely then. I guess I need to upgrade my RAM for some decent performance.

However, given that I’m too lazy to reboot just for some small apps, I’m going to stick to Parallels for some time now. Yet I don’t see myself playing games.

Today I attended an event held at the Society for Welfare of the Deaf (SWD) in Beau-Bassin for the 40th anniversary of that organization.

A nice presentation of the society by Mr Vinesh Hookoomsing recounted the story of the SWD which I gather was officially launched in 1968. They’ve gone a long way since with the help of many dedicated people - Mr B Jomadar (OBE) (chairman from 1966-1981 & 1993-1995), Mr Guy Marot (chairman 1982-1992) and currently Miss Noorjehan Joonas (1996 – to date). They offer a number of facilities like equipment for those with hearing problems, diagnosis and are also heavily involved in educating young Mauritians with hearing disabilities. In this regard, they have introduced the Mauritian Sign Language (MSL) a few years ago though “Mr Alain Gebert, Teacher for the Deaf at the INJS, Paris and Dr Dany Adone, professor of Linguistics at the University of Dusseldorf, Germany, the principal investigators of the project”  - http://www.swdmauritius.org/msl.htm

The MSL is something in which I’m quite interested for a number of reasons:

• it’s something Mauritian – we have few innovations in Mauritius
• it posses many technological challenges
  • recognizing the signs and gestures
  • creating the different MSL gestures from French, English or creole

I wish them a very happy birthday and many happy returns. Well done guys!

I’ve seen lengthy discussions on the web why we should go for firefox but I think it can be summarized in 3 points:

1. Firefox is faster
Firefox starts faster and it seems (to me) that pages load faster as well  

2. There are loads (loads loads loads) of add-ons available for a variety of features
Firefox allows developers to create plugins that work with its browser. You have add-ons to manage download, to download all pdf on a page, to create shared bookmarks,…. – you’ll find what you want and if you don’t have it, code it.

3. The Looks
Loads of themes are available and you can even make firefox look like IE. Also I don’t know why IE has hidden the top toolbar: File Edit … Help. It’s just an HCI hell.

If you are still unconvinced; The others (that I like)

1. It blocks popups efficiently
2. It allows you to save passwords after you have entered the right one (this especially helps when you have 20 accounts and need 2 – 3 attempts to remember the correct one for a site )

The story of my computing life told in terms of Operating Systems (OS)

The genesis: MS-DOS & Windows 3.1
I started using PCs at the age of 14 in secondary school. At that time, you would boot a computer to get a black screen (and that was MS-DOS). I would then navigate to the Windows forder and then type “win” to start the Windows 3.1 operating system. On the 486 model computers that I was using at that time, Windows 3.1 was slow but it did allow us to use Word and Excel.

Windows 95
In August 1995, Windows 95 was released and this was a major breakthrough; I remember seeing people queing up in front of stores in the US to buy that OS. You would no longer boot to a black DOS screen but you had a nice graphical interface welcoming you. None of the other releases of Windows after that had such an impact – Windows 98 (it crashed when Bill Gates demonstrated it) and Windows ME (the Mistake Edition) were just ehhhhhh … well you know.

My Uni Years
The next interesting release of Windows was Windows 2000 which was built on Windows NT. By that time I was at uni and I was starting to touch Linux – Red Hat and I haaaaaattttttttted it. Everything was just so hard; saving on a diskette, finding a file,… and since then I’ve never liked Red Hat. My undergrad years were mainly Windows 2000 which was dual booting with Red Hat (coz I “unfortunately” needed that at Uni).

In 2003, I went for my MSc and I suddenly stated using a lot more of Linux. There, they had “Monkey Linux” certainly a custom-built distribution of Linux and I started enjoying its speed. At home, I had moved to Windows XP and Mandrake which was just so much better than Red-Hat (same inside but the interface is so much better).

At work
The major change of OS would take place after I got a job at the University of Mauritius. I had Windows on my PC but it was sooooo slow. Avinash, a colleague of mine & the founder of the Linux User Group of Mauritius, urged me to move to Linux and he introduced me to Kubuntu (Breezy Badger at that time) and it was kind of … ok. Dapper Drake which was released a few weeks after my initiation to ubuntu proved much more stable and had everything I wanted. I stayed on Dapper for quite a while and it would dual boot with Windows Media Centre on my laptop (which was used only for playing games and doing graphics jobs).

Now
I’ve now moved on to Mac OS X; why? Coz it’s the best looking OS I’ve seen! Of course it rarely crashes and it’s easy to use (it boots in 30 secs and shutdowns in 5 seconds) but Mac are just beautiful and of course you can do whatever you want, same as linux or windows.

In fact, I’ve realized that what I’d want Linux to become. I want Linux to be Mac OS X.

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All above images are from Wikipedia

Have we reached the end of human evolution?

Lions
For a start it would be good to recap how evolution works. Let’s say that a lion gives birth to 3 cubs and out of these 3, the first one has only 3 legs, the second one is a normal lion and the third one is faster than a normal lion. Which of these three has a better chance of surviving? The first one will surely die young coz he won’t be able to hunt. the second one will live a normal life while the third one will be able to eat better food and live longer. Living longer will also mean more offsprings (dying young means less or no offsprings) and so the third lion will pass on its athletic genes to its offspring, the new generation. This new generation will then eat the food of the normal lions and these too will die and we’ll only have the faster lions left. In this way, evolution has produced faster lions, lions fitter to survive.

Humans
We currently live in a society where being fitter or smarter doesn’t guarantee us to have more children than others and where being “unfit” doesn’t mean that we’re gonna die early and have no children. With health care and social security, even those who are weaker than others live a normal life and basically that’s what differentiates us from animals.

Implications
So what does that mean? It would seem to me that the process of natural selection is over. If tomorrow someone is born with a super regenerative ability like Wolverine in X-men, that person will pass his/her genes to his/her children (he’s not going to have more children than “normal” folks like us) but that would not prove to be a substantial advantage over those who are “normal”; his offspring will not take over the world. Similarly, if someone is born with only one arm, he’s not going to have fewer offsprings or die younger.

So have we put a stop to evolution? Personally, I think we have done so.