Competent Mauritius?

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Just read a comment by kass-cole on Le Défi Media website following the terrible events of yesterday in Port-Louis:

“dans moris mank dimune competent,et bane ki competent zot pas gagne zot chance et tous bane protezé et bane non competent ki gagne travail dans bane secter important [...] ab li normal nous bizin xpect bane defaillance .”

and, a few minutes ago, the Minister of Public Infrastructure, National Development Unit, Land Transport & Shipping, Anil Bachoo, said the following on radio (I’m quoting from memory…):

“anyone who has an idea why Port-Louis is flooding and can help to find a solution is going to be heard. For the time being, we don’t have a solution.”

I was having a conversation with some friends yesterday on that very topic : the lack of competency. And I think, as kass-cole observed, that there is an element of politics in it. It’s not normal to nominate incompetents. But, when I think about it, most competent people in the country, and they are a lot of them, suffer from being unknown to the public and, by extension, to those above.

Do you think that, if those with competencies were better known, they would have been invited to join committees and participate in the running of our Republic?

Or is Mauritius doomed?

(Image courtesy of mayukichan on deviantart)

My top posts of 2012

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I started blogging in March 2004 and, like a lot of bloggers, I blog a bit less now.

Here are a few of my highlights from 2012:

Feel free to revive the posts, comment on them and share them on social networks too.

Enjoy!

This is Blue Monday


 
Thirty years ago, New Order released Blue Monday and revolutionised music. Enjoy!

Another Earth

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Watched Another Earth on CanalSat today with Christina and the kids and we were all amazed by the quality and the beauty of this movie!

It’s about a tragic accident, seeking forgiveness, love and another planet earth.

The script is written by Brit Marling, the main actress, and she also is the producer of the movie.  For someone who is only 30, this is an epic achievement as both her writing and acting are wonderful.

I give Another Earth a very deserving 9/10. Watch it with an open mind and I’m sure you’ll love it.

Open source DJing with Mixxx

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On 31 December, my mission was to make people dance from 22:00 to 03:00 in the morning. Fortunately, I could rely on Mixxx, a fantastic and powerful DJing software available for free for all platforms (Linux, Mac OS X and Windows).

Mixxx performed admirably during the five hours.

On Linux, Mixxx supports MP3 out of the box but as I had quite a lot of AAC (i.e. M4A) files, I had to compile it from source. Here are the commands I used on my Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS box:

sudo aptitude install scons qt3-dev-tools libqt4-dev g++ bzr libportmidi-dev libsndfile1-dev libtag1-dev libmad0-dev libid3tag0-dev libmp4v2-dev libfaad-dev portaudio19-dev

scons -j2 faad=1 shoutcast=0 tuned=1

sudo scons prefix=/usr/local install

The first line is to install all the required dependencies, the second is to compile Mixxx with AAC support (faad=1) and specifically for the processor I was using (tuned=1). The third line is to install it in /usr/local

Have fun DJing with Mixxx :-)