Noulakaz — Music

by Avinash Meetoo on 17 Mar 2013 Leave a Comment

My top posts of 2012

20130317-highlights

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:

I Say No to having to go to political meetings on 1 May and listen to dubious politicians,
Infotech 2012 feels like an empty box and this is why it needs to be rebooted this year,
Enabling Nvidia Optimus on CentOS Linux 6 to enjoy 3D on a Linux distribution designed for work,
What Mauritius can learn from the USA on being friendly, a doer, learning and saying what we think,
Made In Moris?!? on how some have still not understood that Kreol Morisien is a full-fledged language,
No HD for Euro 2012 matches on CanalSat on the pain of watching football in glorious low resolution,
Wanted: an E3 Flasher on my PS3 in Mauritius on how I would love my PlayStation 3 to be mine again,
Great carnival, worst traffic jams ever! on how we miss out on fundamentals in Mauritius,
Playing lottery is a very bad investment is how improbable it is to win anything when playing lotteries and
Neil Armstrong is flying to the moon… as an example to young people to work hard to make their dreams come true.

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

Enjoy!

Filed Under: Business, Education, Linux, Mauritius, Movies, Music, News, Photography, Politics, Programming, Sports, Technology, Travel, Web

by Avinash Meetoo on 08 Mar 2013 2 Comments

This is Blue Monday

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

Filed Under: Music, News

by Avinash Meetoo on 09 Jan 2013 7 Comments

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 :-)

Filed Under: Linux, LUGM, Music, News, Technology

by Avinash Meetoo on 18 Dec 2012 2 Comments

Gangnam Style Piracy

Gangnam Style is the most popular video on YouTube ever… as if I needed to tell you.

The video has been seen 978,000,000 times already. Simple maths tell us that it will probably reach 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) views in a few days.

Interestingly, one of the reasons this song and video are so popular is that PSY, the author, does not try to stop copycats. Thousands, including people here in Mauritius, have done their own interpretations of the song and posted them on YouTube. This has contributed massively towards the buzz for the official video. Naturally, PSY has managed to earn quite a lot of money, mainly by participating in TV commercials in Korea and elsewhere.

Piracy actually has helped sales and made an artist earn his living very very decently. Food for thought.

An update

The video has just reached 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) views on YouTube on 21 December (yeah, the day the world was supposed to end…) Read this very informative article on what Psy raps about and what Gangnam means.

Filed Under: Mauritius, Music, News, Technology, Web

by Avinash Meetoo on 18 Apr 2011 Leave a Comment

Visiting Los Angeles and Hollywood

During our stay in Los Angeles, we opted for a hotel in Hollywood for obvious reasons.

We are all movie buffs and we were delighted to be at Hollywood, the world capital of (occidental) actors, directors, producers and studios. Speaking of studios, we couldn’t prevent ourselves from spending the whole of two days at Universal Studios Theme Park.

The kids (as well as ourselves) were amazed to be able to take pictures with all their favourite comic characters…

… from the inoffensive (?) Bart and Homer to the more lethal (yet friendly) Bumblebee.

Anya, 8, and Kyan, 6, are, of course, huge fans of Scooby-Doo and they were ecstatic to have their pictures taken with Scooby, Daphne and Samy. Naturally, we were ecstatic too.

Universal Studios, being the home ground of Steven Speilberg, naturally features a quite magnificent Jurassic Park ride through rivers infested with dangerous dinosaurs.