by on 28 Feb 2007 8 Comments

Is LinkedIn perfect for grown ups?

Some extremely prominent people (like Guy Kawasaki) are raving about LinkedIn at this very moment.

According to Wikipedia,

“LinkedIn is a business oriented social networking site, mainly used for professional networking. As of January 2007, it had more than 9 million registered users, spanning 150 industries and more than 400 economic regions (as classified by the service).

The main purpose of the site is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business. The people in the list are called Connections. Users can invite anyone (whether a LinkedIn user or not) to become a connection.”

LinkedIn seems to be made for two categories of people (overlapping allowed):

  • those willing to get acquainted with more people
  • those looking for a better job

I’ve created my profile (http://www.linkedin.com/in/avinashmeetoo) and I’ve a couple of contacts. In addition to that, I’ve just sent 65 invitations to people I know professionally and, believe it or not, I’m watching them add me to their network in real-time.

Personally, I see a lot of value in LinkedIn. What’s your opinion?

Filed Under: Technology, Web
by on 25 Feb 2007 6 Comments

Comic Life, the Mac and my niece…

(Click on the image for a bigger version)

Because of the cyclone (which is gone now), I’ve spent some hours playing with the software I got when I bought my Apple MacBook. One of those is Comic Life which allows you to build comics out of digital photos. As you can see, my first ever comic is on Ashvin’s and Prema’s new baby (who still has no official name) and, as expected, I had a lot of fun doing it.

Comic Life is fully integrated with iLife. For instance, it fetches photos from iPhoto seamelessly. Another nice feature is the built-in text manipulation and distortion facilities (I’ve used that for the ‘Welcome!’ caption). Obviously Comic Life handles balloons (the areas where text appear) with grace.

Incidentally, Comic Life is not the only software you get freely when you buy a Mac. You also get:

You also get Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Test Drive and a 30-day trial of iWork but I don’t need those… except that I’ve been thinking a lot about Keynote 3 lately as I do a lot of presentations.

Personally, I like the free software very much. They are fun, easy to use and, at the same time, bloody effective. Hey, that’s what Apple is :-)

Filed Under: Apple, News, Technology
by on 24 Feb 2007 5 Comments

Welcome to the Dungeon

Today is an important day in my life : this is something that I wanted to share to the world since, at least, 15 years!

Yes, I have a photo of the infamous Brain Virus!

From Wikipedia,

“Brain [...] is, (in its first incarnation written in January 1986) considered to be the first computer virus for the PC. It infects the boot sector of storage media formatted with the DOS File Allocation Table (FAT) file system. [...] Brain was written by two brothers, Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi, who lived in Chahmiran, Lahore, Pakistan. The brothers told TIME magazine they had written it to protect their medical software from piracy and was supposed to target copyright infringers only.”

This photo must be from around 1989 (when I was 15-16) and, if you look properly, you’ll notice lots of cool little details:

  • The two brothers put their coordinates in the virus. I wonder if the phone numbers still work? By the way, Basit and Amjad are now in the ISP business.
  • The photo shows an hexadecimal view of the boot sector of an infected floppy 5 1/4″ disk (Path=A:) because home computers rarely had hard disks at that time (and the capacity of the floppy was a massive 360 kilobytes – yes, 0.36 megabytes)
  • I used PC Tools Deluxe 4.22 to view the boot sector. PC Tools was an extremely versatile tool. I used it to do my normal daily file manipulation routines (copying, renaming, deleting). It also featured lots of low-level functions like displaying the boot sector of a disk. It was cool but, unfortunately, I could not find one single interesting site on the whole Internet on it.
  • I took that photo from the monitor of my PC (a Sanyo PC-compatible which cost us around Rs. 55,000) at that time. It featured an extremely powerful Intel 8088 processor running at a breathtaking 8 MHz (compared to the 2000-3000 MHz we now have). The PC had 640 kilobytes of RAM which was good enough for that era (640kb is less than one megabyte!)
  • The graphics card was a Color Graphics Adapter which could display (hold your breath) 4 colours at 320×200 (and, still, the games were intensely playable) and had a monochrome mode at 640×200. It also could display text at 40×25 or 80×25.

I wonder how many of you knew hexadecimal when you were 15-16?

Filed Under: Programming, Technology
by on 23 Feb 2007 10 Comments

Cyclone warning class II in Mauritius

An update: A cyclone warning class III is currently in force in Mauritius. In other words, at this very moment (22:23 MUT), Mauritius is under full cyclonic conditions.

A cyclone warning class II is currently in force in Mauritius as confirmed by the Mauritius Meteorological Services

Gamede is dangerously approaching our island.

Many students have contacted me to know if they should come to the University today but, as confirmed by the Head of Department Dr Oveeyen Moonian by phone, all classes are cancelled because of the cyclone warning class II.

The CSE website has immediately been updated (the website is currently down – this is surely due to a power cut…)

Notice that I had to call the HoD by phone to get this information as I could not (even after 30 minutes of intense search) find anything pertaining to cyclones and the university rules on the UoM website, the Ministry of Education website or the Mauritius Meteorological Services website.

In my opinion, this is not acceptable.

Filed Under: Education, News, Technology
by on 20 Feb 2007 26 Comments

Launch of the UoM Computer Science website

I’m happy to announce the official launch of Computer Science & Engineering departmental website of the University of Mauritius.

The URL is extremely easy to remember. It’s http://cse.uom.ac.mu/

About the website

This website has been built over a period of two months by members of the CSE Website Subcommittee which I chair. The other members are Pascal GROSSET, Begum DURGAHEE, Dr Shakuntala BAICHOO, Sheeba ARMOOGUM and Soulakshmee GHURBHURRUN.

We have tried to cater for a varied public. You’ll find pages relevant to:

  • Current students
  • Prospective students
  • UoM academic staff
  • Academic staff from other universities
  • People from the business sector
  • Journalists
  • and members of the public at large…

The initial content is relatively complete and it’s bound to become better as time passes. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any suggestion.

Incidentally, I have done most of the photos on the website using my new Canon A540 digital camera with some processing courtesy of my Apple MacBook.

Technical details

The website is powered by the Drupal content management system, uses some custom PHP scripts, manages its data in a PostgreSQL database and runs on the Apache web server and Kubuntu Linux operating system.

I guess this is a good indication that opensource is now playing a major role in the CSE department…

I am happy ;-)

Filed Under: Education, Linux, Programming, Technology
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