Noulakaz

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

Technology

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.

The right to fail

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While reading a Slashdot discussion today, I stumbled upon an article in The Economist called Lessons from Apple. Here is (according to me) the most important paragraph:

“The fourth lesson from Apple is to fail wisely. The Macintosh was born from the wreckage of the Lisa, an earlier product that flopped; the iPhone is a response to the failure of Apple’s original music phone, produced in conjunction with Motorola. Both times, Apple learned from its mistakes and tried again. Its recent [operating system Mac OS X] have been based on technology developed at NeXT, a company Mr Jobs set up in the 1980s that appeared to have failed and was then acquired by Apple. The wider lesson is not to stigmatize failure but to tolerate it and learn from it: Europe’s inability to create a rival to Silicon Valley owes much to its tougher bankruptcy laws.”

My impression (and I can be wrong of course) is that entrepreneurship is revered in North America. So many young and bright people fresh from university have revolutionized the world we are living in. And some of them have succeeded after some very public failures (including a chronic incapability to graduate).

As the article points out, this does not generally happen in Europe. And, unfortunately, neither here in Mauritius…