The debate has been going on for a while. Should we or should we not have the Gamma Covanta waste incinerator in Mauritius? I don’t know much about incinerators and the technology they use and so I’m definitely not in a position to comment on whether they are safe or not. So my analysis of the situation will be based on other points:

1. No free lunch

We’ve got a lot of waste and don’t know what to do: let’s burn it and we’ll get energy! Doesn’t that just too good to be true: turning a major problem (too much waste) into a source of revenue. There’s just got to be a catch somewhere. I might be mistaken but I’ve not heard anyone saying that we should classify the waste and selectively burn only some of them. This is just too too easy and definitely look fishy.

2. Why do they want to set it up so badly?

Gamma Covanta seems to be extremely keen on setting up this plant. There have been adverts everywhere on the island and recently there are even adverts on the radio saying that the incinerator is our only solution to deal with waste in Mauritius. Gamma and Covanta are not philanthropic organizations – they are businesses and the aim of a business is to make money – and if they are putting so much effort to convince everyone, there’s got to be a lot of money behind it.

Well this is just my personal opinion and there’s no scientific basis behind what I’m saying but common sense tells me that it just can’t be that good, that easy and generate some and have no side effects.

Panaceas like that just don’t exist.

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Update (23 July 2009) starts here: The myth of dioxins

I’ve assisted the talk at the university today (Thursday 23 July 2009) given by Prof Jean Francois Narbonne. It was a good talk followed by a very nice debate. In the light of this, I know a bit more about incinerators and the Mauritian context and I was wrong along several lines:

• the incinerators, if used properly operating at 850 degrees, with filters are basically safe: the level of dioxin the emit is well below the level recommended by the European union
• I was mistaken, the incinerator will separate the different kind of waste and selectively burn some
• incinerators are not a super way of becoming rich; dumping the waste like we currently do is.

Is it really the solution?

However, it’s not that great and I’m not too sure it’s the best for Mauritius. To operate the incinerator, we will need a lot of waste; if I got it right, an incinerator needs at least 150 tonnes of waste to be effective – will we have enough to burn? Moreover, we are not going to burn metal, glass and plastic (these can be recycled) and that leaves us with burning paper and organic waste (I suppose that will produce lots of Carbon dioxide). Out of these two, in Mauritius, we mainly have organic waste but it’s got lot of water and the amount of energy required to dehumidify these might be more than what the incinerator produces. In addition to that, if we burn all the organic waste and paper, there’ll be nothing left for composting as these need a minimal amount of waste as well to be cost effective notwithstanding the fact that even paper can be recycled. Finally, even incinerators produce waste which must be stored in class 1 landfills (landfills that are constructed with impervious material that will prevent fluids from leaking into the ground and polluting underground water for example).

What are the other options?

Landfills like we have in Mare Chicose seems to be worse than incinerators. In addition to being an eyesore, it’s very polluting.

Recycling paper, plastic, metal, glass, … basically everything that would seem ideal but do we have enough of these to make these recycling plants sustainable. I think we already have a plastic recycling plant (one of my friends take plastic bottles somewhere in Plaine Lauzan I think) and some people are so keen on recycling metal that they even steal them but I think these are exported. I don’t know if it’s cost-effective to export all that can be recycled though; again I know very little about waste disposal and all the mechanics involved there.

Given that we have mainly organic waste, composting could be a solution there. Professor Narbonne warned against producing compost of poor quality but since we mainly have organic waste, I suppose that wouldn’t happen here. But still not a complete solution: what happens to non-organic and non-recyclable waste?

Plasma arc waste disposal: this is what is used in Japan but it seems to require high technology.

Others exist but I don’t know enough and this post is getting too long anyway !

Conclusion

1. Wrong debate!

Down the line, it would seem that dioxin is not the main concern for the incinerator. Why the hell are so many people talking about that? Two possibilities:

• The ecologists are totally clueless about what is happening!

• Gamma is trying to focus the debate on that so that it appears as the major hurdle. Since, it seems, that it can be easily proved that the dioxin levels are very low with incinerators, there’s no reason to stop the project and Gamma wins easily.

2. We need a solution … soon

Landfills for everything is not an option and an alternative needs to be found soon. Like I said before, panaceas do not exist and I believe the ideal (or less evil) solution will be an array of techniques and I’m not too sure incinerators are the best choice (again, not because of dioxins) – even Professor Narbonne prefers other alternatives to incinerators. We need a Mauritian solution to the problem as the Mauritius context is very specific.

Who’d believe that waste would be such an interesting topic!

The valley of Ferney is a nature park situated on the South East coast of Mauritius quite close to the small village of “Riviere des Creoles”. It had previously been earmarked for a highway that would have linked the airport to the east of Mauritius but was luckily saved thanks to Nature Watch, George Ah Yan of the Mahebourg Citizens Welfare Organisation among others. Anyway it’s one of the rare places in Mauritius where you won’t see any buildings, have noise pollution. It’s just fresh air, trees and mountains: ideal for a break.

You first start the journey at the Tourist information area where the chauffeur will drive you to the restaurant which is where the trip really starts. The guide starts by explaining the terms “endemique”, “indigene” and “exotique” which qualifies the plant of the reserve and off we go. The trip starts with a part where we have some exotic plants before we step in the reserve where we have the endemic species – note all the trees which are marked in red, they would have been erased by now. Your guide will most probably show you the “Bois Coulou” which saved this reserve; at that time, it was the only one know of its specie to exist in the whole world.

Currently, five are known to exist round the island.

Finally, special mention to the our driver, Raj, and the guide (can’t remember her name): they were both extremely nice and helpful. It’s a treat for the price you pay and I badly needed a break from computers I guess!

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:

• Top ten ubuntu downloads
• Gnome project listing – a list of useful software
• Gnome Files

And with Gnome-do, you can even have a mac like interface!

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!

Happy 41st Anniversary!

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.

1. 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).
2. Go the the Setup documentation for MacOS. Follow the building ARToolkit instructions. All should be fine except for the VRML part.
3. 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

   ln -s libopenvrml-gl.6.0.4.dylib libopenvrml-gl.dylib
ln -s libopenvrml.6.1.2.dylib libopenvrml.dylib
ln -s libboost_thread-1_33_1.dylib libboost_thread.dylib

4. Once this is done, use the makefile to build the SimpleVRML project.

cd ~/Desktop/ARToolKit/examples/simpleVRML
make


5. Finally go to ARToolkit’s bin folder to run the executable produced

cd ~/Desktop/ARToolKit/bin
./simpleVRML


6. 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:

   sudo ln -s ~/Desktop/ARToolKit2.72.1/lib/libopenvrml.6.1.2.dylib


That should work, at least it worked for me!

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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!

Good Luck!

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Names of Visual Studio

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 La Marseillaise 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!!!