Noulakaz

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

Technology

Bandwidth survey in Mauritius

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I want to do a study of the real bandwidth that we get through our ADSL connections in Mauritius. I want to show that we are getting only a subset (I would say < 40%) of what we are actually paying for. I want to do the survey over 7 days (from Monday to Sunday) on at least 5 different ADSL lines (i.e. I need 4 volunteers). I think that we can time how long we need to download a 1Mb file from the US and Europe at different times (say, around 8:30, 16:30 and 22:30) This will obviously produce 5 x 7 x 3 x 2 = 210 different bandwidths which when averaged will produce a pretty good estimate. Who wants to help? I need 4 people with MyT at 256kbit/s. It would be best to start the experiment on Monday 2 July to cater for the 1Gb limitation. As you can easily calculate, the experiment will only use 7 x 3 x 2 x 1 Mb = 42 Mb of your 1Gb quota... There is an ongoing discussion on Facebook on this.

Facebook and the Web 2.0 GetMoBlog group

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Like many many people all over the world, I’ve finally discovered Facebook! It’s (obviously) one social networking site but with a twist: it has a 100% public and open API which enable anyone to enhance the site. And guess what… Facebook features more than 1000 user contributed “applications”…

Consequently, it seems that everyone who is someone on the web is moving to Facebook.

For example, I’ve set up my own Facebook profile and we can be friends :-)

GetMoBlog aka Xchange Platform

Last week, I met Marc Israel and Patrick Beeharry both from Microsoft and we talked about the lack of general awareness of Web 2.0 among Mauritian individuals and companies (Of course, I’m not referring to young people here as we all know that they are fully aware of those things :-) )

What we realized is that we should organize a kind of workshop by the end of the year where anyone willing to talk about Web 2.0 could do so. The fact that those two are from Microsoft is only a coincidence. They are interested in Web 2.0 as I am (i.e. out of curiosity and passion and not because they are being paid to be interested if you understand what I mean).

In order to start identifying those willing to help and participate in the workshop (and in order to start some preliminary (i.e. cool) discussion on Web 2.0 in Mauritius), a group has been setup on Facebook called GetMoBlog (that name was chosen by Marc Isreal and refers to the fact that most people interested in Web 2.0 have a blog…)

Linux User Group of Mauritius

I’ve also created the LUGM group on Facebook to complement the website.

Come in and let’s start the cool discussions! Everyone can participate!

Three great technical books

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I’ve just discovered ProgrammingBooks.org and I find it great. I’m impatient to start contributing to it as soon as they solve their user signup problem as it is not working well presently.

In the meantime, here are three books I bought relatively recently and which I find excellent:

The second edition of Programming Ruby is extremely interesting to read (the first version is available freely online). It describes the Ruby programming language of course as well as its standard library. Ruby is an extremely expressive programming language as it allows the programmer to solve complex problems very easily. I’ve already written about my fascination with that programming language. The metaprogramming aspects of Ruby will blow your mind away!

Linux Kernel Development fully describes (and explains the rationale behind) the various subsystems found in the Linux 2.6 kernel. It’s one extremely complex and specialized subject that has been made simple thanks to the pedagogical talent of the author. Incidentally, my students have indirectly benefited from that book in the sense that I know a lot more about the kernel than before. Consequently I regularly ask them to investigate sections of the Linux kernel (e.g. the scheduler or the process creation mechanism) and write reports for me…

The third book is also another book that I’ve read cover to cover. The Inmates are Running the Asylum has an obscure title (at first) and it’s only when the author explains its meaning that you realize that this book is a gem. The Inmates are us, programmers. And the Asylum is the software that we are always trying to write. The point is that we, programmers, design the user interface of a software in order to please us and not the real end-user. Consequently, the software becomes difficult to use for the majority and therefore is not successful. The author argues that one should always use a goal-directed design approach. Incidentally, the author is the creator of Visual Basic but he does not like to use it to design user interfaces… I’ve already written on that.