Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

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Orange expo 2009. What for?

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Yesterday, Christina, the kids and I went to Orange expo 2009. We were not very impressed. Granted, the décor was modern and the hostesses were nice looking but the products themselves were lacking. I felt the objective of this expo was to sell instead of to make people discover new ways to use technology… and become empowered in the process. When talking to the people on the stands there, I felt only a few knew about what they were talking about and this was frustrating. For instance, I asked someone from the iPhone stand whether it was possible to buy applications from the Apple App Store with one of his Orange iPhones and he couldn’t answer me satisfactorily… I also spent a few minutes talking to someone demonstrating an ebook reader but he knew his product only superficially and I felt he thought it was pathetically crap… and I personally didn’t! (I would love to get a Kindle 2 for instance.) It was surreal. I was more enthusiatic about his product than him.

Anya, my 6-year old daughter, summarised my feelings when she later said in the car: “I would rather have been to a real expo.”

Announcing avinash.meetoo.name

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I am happy to announce the official launching of

http://avinash.meetoo.name/

As you can see, I have bought the meetoo.name domain (and .name is really a top-level domain like .com or .net!) I spent a few days thinking about what to host there, discussing with some people on Twitter (thanks Saajid!) and finally come up with what you can see above.

At first sight, the webpage looks simple but, in fact, making it has allowed me to learn a lot of new tricks. For example, the XHTML is fully semantic (look at the source to understand what I mean.) Layout is entirely done by CSS courtesy of a framework called Blueprint. And I’ve used Javascript to modify the targets of the images as strict XHTML does not support the target attribute. Furthermore, I’ve used powerful caching strategies which mean that all the images, scripts and CSS files are only downloaded once on the client no matter how many times the page is accessed. And the result is that the page is quick to load and is valid XHTML and valid CSS.

Naturally, clicking on the various images will send you to the various websites and social networking sites I like. Have fun exploring

http://avinash.meetoo.name/

Les logiciels libres: une opportunité pour Maurice?

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Jeudi, je vais intervenir pour la seconde fois pour l’Université Populaire sur le thème “Les logiciels libres: une opportunité pour Maurice?” dont voici un résumé:

“Un logiciel est un ensemble de programmes qui permet à un ordinateur d’assurer une tâche. Un logiciel libre est un logiciel dont la licence d’utilisation donne à chacun le droit de l’utiliser, de l’étudier, de le modifier, de le dupliquer et de le diffuser sans contrepartie, en particulier sans paiement. Le système d’exploitation Linux, la suite bureautique OpenOffice, le navigateur Firefox et la plate-forme de développement Java en sont des exemples très connus qui sont utilisés par des millions de personnes dans le monde. Or, tout pays qui aspire à adopter l’informatique comme un des piliers de son économie requiert des infrastructures et des ressources humaines de très haut niveau. Les logiciels libres, étant gratuits, fiables et performants, représentent t-ils donc une opportunité pour Maurice?”

Mon intervention se tiendra ce Jeudi 21 Mai de 17:30 – 19:30 à la salle du Conseil de la Municipalité de Port-Louis. Le public ainsi que tous les lecteurs de mon blog sont cordialement invités.

PS: Si vous avez envie que je parle de quelque chose de spécifique, n’hésitez pas à me le dire. Envoyez moi un mail par exemple.