Archive for June, 2008
45% increase in students at UoM next year!
June 25, 2008 by InF, under Mauritius, UoM.
This is the astounding news that the L’Express Newspaper reports today to us, starting with those lines as the article header.
L’UoM se propose d’accueillir 4 467 nouveaux étudiants, soit 1388 de plus que l’année dernière. Elle offrira par la même occasion davantage de formations : 23 licences supplémentaires et sept maîtrises de plus.
I’ve been at UoM for a year now, and my year 1 class had around 110 students. The labs were nearly packed full. The cafetaria could barely contain the crowd during peak hours. Common room was often so full that there were no chairs or tables, so students had to find somewhere else to hang out. Same goes for Raised Plaza.
Now, I see this article about a 45% increase in the number of students at UoM and I tell this to myself: “Are our decision-makers insane?”
Don't want to lose another post? Here is your chance. Grab our feed to have contents delivered direct to your browser.
5 Comments
New Rapidshare.com Captcha: No pets in
June 25, 2008 by InF, under Tech News.
I was downloading a file off Rapidshare.com today, and guess what I see?
They finally acquired some common-sense! The infamous Cat Captcha system is DEAD!
The new captcha looks like this, which is very much easier to read:
The new captchas look like the letters were modelled off a flat surface, like a terrain. The letters look like mountains off the ground.
This is a most welcomed change, since the Cat Captchas were sometimes very tough to decipher, and a general pain in the rear. This will surely make leeching off pirated files off Rapidshare easier for us netizens! The new captchas sometimes are not clear, but still easier than differentiating cats from dogs, specially the tiny things Rapidshare used! (Is that end letter a D or an 0?)
Thank you Rapidshare, after soooo long, you are seeing the light!
2 Comments
Why we are all liable to receive a DMCA notice?
June 22, 2008 by Guru, under Torrents.
Bittorrent is one of the most famous way to share data among users. The files ranges from legal to illegal. This method of transmission is very much vulnerable to many exploits. Given its popularity, one ca imagine the number of illegal files like music, movies, tv shows and the likes are alive in the community. The immediate benefiters of these media are going berserk of what is happening. They are getting lesser than ideally they should be. Here come into scene, the monitoring agencies to track down those infringing copyrights. (more…)
No Comments
France: Taking anti-piracy to the next level
June 21, 2008 by InF, under Tech News.
France wants to step up the pace of war against piracy, by adopting a new law that will make it possible to ban users from using broadband Internet for up to a period of one year.
The new law would make use of a 3-chances policy, and after you are caught downloading illegally for 3 times, you are barred form using the Internet. As simple as that. Quite a radical measure you might say, considering that till now, people were only threatened or advised not to download illegal material off the Internet.
Now, as I said, the French authorities want to literally keep you away from the content you so much want to download, whether you like it or not. And apprently, this new law seems to receive support from the French president, Nicholas Sarkozy.
Why am I blogging about this? Just take a look at who is our main ISP is. Orange. Any bells ringing yet? No? French ISP then?
Yep! Orange is a French ISP, and if this law is actually accepted in France, and if all French ISPs are to sign it, I believe this would include Orange.
Now, I’m not really sure how this would work, but is there a risk that Mauritian Internet users will be affected too?
I don’t know. I’m no law student. But if anybody can bring any clarity to this matter, your comments are most welcome.
I wonder what would happen if somebody happened to be leeching off their neighbour’s wireless connection and downloading illegal content, and the connection owner gets caught. Who goes down? The owner or the leecher?
I personally think these “repressive” ways will not end piracy. Waging war on your own customers is never great. In my opinion, offering better content, more content at affordable prices would really tempt customers away from illegal downloading. If only “download all you can” for a reasonable price ($10/month?) existed, it would be real bliss.
Cheap prices, availability of extra content and services and total freedom. I believe this would be what an average customer like me would ask for. Not much huh?
Your views?
7 Comments
Firefox 3 hits 8 million+ downloads!
June 19, 2008 by InF, under Firefox, Software.
Well, considering that I was supporting the Firefox 3 Download Day to help with the world record initiative, I thought I might update a bit about the number of downloads Mozilla Firefox 3 Final got in the first 24 hours.
Well folks, be amazed, for it is a whooping 8 million downloads in 24 hours, crushing the 2 million downloads in 24 hours set by Firefox 2. Mozilla has gone beyond their expected 5 million downloads. All this came at a price: The Mozilla servers were brought down to their knees (if ever they had knees), and a lot of users got timeouts or “page cannot be displayed errors”.
For the record, Firefox 3 got 1 million downloads in 4 hours, following its release.
The number of downloads is still going up, even after the 24 hours period. If you want live updates on the number of Firefox 3 downloads, check the page that Mozilla has setup here.
Also, from here, it can be seen that Mauritius registered 1055 downloads, 205 for Reunion Is., 286 for Madagascar, 4 for Comoros. So, we are the leading small island in the Indian Ocean? Sri Lanka got 2214 though!
At the time of writing, there are more than 9.3 million downloads registered, with around 2600 downloads per minute. The US folks is leading the race with 2 million+ downloads. Simply amazing!
Big congrats to the Firefox team in any case!
Ps. In case you are wondering, that incredibly cute fox above is called Foxkeh, and is the mascot of Mozilla Japan. More info available here.
Other Firefox 3 articles:
No Comments
Randomly fill your audio player using RandomFill
June 19, 2008 by InF, under Reviews.
EDIT: I’ve found a better application to randomly fill my audio player. Click here to jump to the review of Mr. Random.
So, there is another freeware review today on the menu. This time, I’m looking for way to randomly fill up my mobile phone with tracks from my music collection found on my PC. Why? Because I’m just too lazy to randomly select tracks myself. Because I’ve got no idea about what I want to listen to. Because I love using Google to find freewares and share them with you. Voila! Now you know, and on with the review.
For this job, we will be making use of a creatively named software named… RandomFill.
Mind you though. RandomFill will work with classic “drop-and-play” audio players and mobile phones, and not iPod-like players with advanced library features, requiring specialized software to upload tracks to them. Anyways, you can download RandomFill and give it a try with your favourite player and see if it works.
Using RandomFill is a 4-step process, as shown below.
The steps are as follows:
- Add folders or playlists from which the tracks will be chosen. Usually, this will be your MP3 directory. Optionally, if you have used RandomFill before and saved your settings, you can load these in this step.
- Here, you are going to select where to send your random tracks. This can either be a location (your player?) or a playlist which will contain a list of random tracks. You can choose to delete everything at the storage location before the random tracks are moved there. I chose to send the tracks to Drive E, which is my mobile’s memory card.
- This step is quite interesting. You can choose to bias the selection process to include more tracks from a particular folder which you add. For example, you can bias the search to include more tracks from your favorite album. Just add the folder, and you will be prompted to add a weight. Weight should be greater than 0. (positive real numbers!).
- If you add a folder and set the weight as 0.1 or 0.2, tracks will probably not be selected from it, and if you add a folder with a weight of say, 20, there will be more tracks from it in the “random” selection”. Add your favorite albums, and bias the weights as you wish.
- This is the final step. Now, you select the total size of the selection in Megabytes, or how many hours of music you want. Useful if you want to only fill up your player or mobile up to only a certain limit, and not completely. You can also choose to fill up by hours if you want, but remember that more hours = bigger file size, so don’t go overboard, keeping your player’s maximum memory size in mind. Save your settings if you want, so that you don’t have to repeat the same steps completely every time. After that, just click Finish and let RandomFill do its job.
Now, there is a small “bug” I’d like you to be aware of. After the copy, if you click Finish again, it will try to re-copy a random selection to your destination, which can cause problems such as full memory. So, after the copy part, you will need to click on Cancel instead. A bit weird, but it’s useful to know. Another potential disadvantage is that the last folder used is not remembered. This will probably be made in future versions. For now, it’s not available.
That’s about it for the RandomFill review. It’s not perfect yet, but I hope you can find some use to it. Give it a try, and drop us some comments. 
Ps. iPod users, you might want to check Floola as an alternative to managing your device with iTunes.
Mr. Random: A better Random-filling App
RandomFill did not particularly suit my needs, so I ended up finding a better app called, Mr. Random. It’s Java-based and requires the Java Runtime Environment and this needs to be installed if you don’t have it. Just Google for it.
The Settings window is accessible by going to Options menu. That Settings window will allow you to customize all the aspects of Mr. Random. Here’s a list of the important options there:
- Collections Folder: Where your music is found. Where the selection will be made.
- Device Folder: Where the music will be copied. I’d advise you to put it as a temporary local folder, then manually move the files after the random selection is made. It’s safer that way. Less risk of messing up during transfer.
- Device Type: If you have a Sansa, choose it there. Else leave it on Generic Player like I did.
- Capacity Slider: The total size of your player. I use it to choose what will be the combined size of all the files copied.
- File Types: What files will be copied. Eg. If you want only MP3s, uncheck the rest. There is a box for Custom extensions. Eg. for .flac files if you have those. Put .flac there.
The rest, you can just leave blank. The Advanced button allows you to select which random algorithm to use, or just leave things default.
Now, click on Ok to go back to the main window. To make the random selection, repeatedly click the “Fill List” button until the list stops filling. At the bottom-right corner, you can see the number of files selected, as well as the combined size. I marked that with a red dot.
It’s a bit annoying to repeatedly click the button, and I hope it will be fixed in future versions. I don’t know if it’s just at my place that I have to click many times though.
The Add File / Add Group button are there if you want to include some particular file/folder in the selection, that is if you want to override the random selection for some selected files. Move Up/Down is for re-ordering files. This is because Mr. Random also creates a playlist out of the files.
After that, just click the Copy to Device button and wait. If you have selected a local folder as I recommended, you will need to go there and copy all the files to your device manually.
That’s all. Mr. Random is free, and does not crash as often as RandomFill. I need to mention that Mr. Random seems to have a 20GB limit. To overcome that, I guess you just run it multiple times.
No Comments
Firefox 3 Final: The Review
June 18, 2008 by InF, under Firefox, Reviews, Software.
Firefox 3.0 Final has just been released today, 17th June 2008 (it’s already 18th in some countries though), and I already downloaded my copy to help establish the Firefox World Record. Now that it is installed and ready to work, I am going to review it. I’ve been using Firefox since the early 1.x versions, and I kind of saw its evolution. If I could resume Firefox 3, it would be “Shiny Search Boxes”, with respect to the glass buttons and the large number of new search boxes scattered everywhere.
Without much delay, on with the review. But first, you might consider getting your own copy here, and help with the World Record initiative (you need to download from the official mirrors of Firefox, else the download does not count!). Beware though. Some of the pages of the Mozilla website have yet to be updated, and are still showing Firefox 2.0 downloads. Also, the page is taking a significant time to load, probably considering that lots of people are currently downloading.
A word of warning. Before installing Firefox 3, make sure all your add-ons are compatible with the new Firefox. A number of my add-ons are not yet compatible with the Firefox 3 Final. Specially Tabmix Plus, which is not yet compatible. Even Unplug is not yet compatible, according to the default install. So, check beforehand, or simply backup your Firefox profile before upgrading, in case you want to revert. As you can see below, some of my extensions are not compatible with Firefox 3.0. Unfortunately, you will have to check manually via the Mozilla Addons site.
To backup your Firefox profile, you could use the FEBE extension (cross-platform) (doesn’t work with Firefox 3 Final yet), or you could use the MozBackup (Windows only) application. More info about manual profile backup is available from Mozilla, here.
3 Comments
Firefox Download Day
June 14, 2008 by InF, under Firefox, Software.
EDIT: In case you don’t already know, the Firefox 3 Download Day is on the 17th of June 2008 (expected). Yes. Tuesday. Pledge now, if you haven’t done it yet.
Firefox 3. This is ONE software the whole of the Internets is waiting for. The expected release date is somewhere in mid-June 2008.For this special day, Mozilla team wants to set a Guinness World Record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours.
Well, I was checking the Pledge site, and guess what I saw. Apprently, 192 person from Mauritius pledged to download Firefox 3 on that day! That’s NOT enough! 
So, I’m dedicating this post so that you can go and pledge to download Firefox 3 on the Download Day! Follow the banner above! Let Mauritius be shown on the map!
Edit: (14.06.06) : 292 pledges and climbing! Keep it up!
3 Comments
Hott Notes: Get virtual post-its!
June 14, 2008 by InF, under Software, Tips and Tricks.
Post-its. For me, nothing beats these as a simple reminder tool. I wanted something similar for reminders on my computer, and didn’t really want to stick some yellow sheets to my screen. So I went for the virtual version of post-its. These are simple floating windows that get overlayed on your desktop, and can contain some text.
There are many, many applications that can do virtual post-its for you. However, they all seemed to lack one feature or another. That was until I found Hott Notes.
No Comments
How to Manage Projects?
June 12, 2008 by Guru, under How To, Tips and Tricks.
With already a couples of failures in the past, we can just think to move forward with a dose of success. “Success”, this word seems glamourous. While some can easily achieve their objectives, others are able to do so in a much longer time period. But what is the difference between the two??? If you do not perceive things the same way as I do, then do so now. Everything that we do is a project. Agreed??? The only variation is its scale and priority. An assignment has a higher order priority and at times takes a larger scale as compared to nailing a piece of wood. Having the right tools and mindset to get things done is important.
To start with, dreaming is bad. Be completely down to earth. This will allow you to perform better, evaluate your progress and be able to take corrective measures. Now that I mentioned these key points, roll up your sleeves and get to some serious work.
The number of people working on a project can range from one to many; forming a team. Now that we have got our team, to start, we need a minimum level of commitment. Being committed to whatever we are doing will have a direct impact on the end-result. The more time, the more effort is put will give better results. Good results gives much better self satisfaction and improved skills.
Each team members must have a particular role. To name a few, president, vice-president, treasurer, public relationship officer and so on. Having said these particular posts you can guess that each team member’s action will pay-off with a better result. Right? We should not forget that each and every human are capable to do everything (taking asides handicapped - in fact they do better than us). Everyone ought to be a leader. Being able to take decision, announce new ways of proceeding and be able to think aloud.
Now that the basic structure and mindset of the team has been set, lets see what concerns the project. The whole backbone of a project lies in its objective. What is an objective? In simple terms, it is just what must be achieved. The objective should be crystal clear so that unnecessary jobs will not be done thus straying from the core tasks and losing precious resources. Alongside with our objectives we have something called “aims“. What is that? Let me explain using an example. I want to but a laptop. My objective is to but a laptop. To be able to do so, I need to work. That is an aim. Another aim could have been, I just need to steal 5 under wears of a certain celebrity to sell them. 
I hope you can now make a difference and how important they are.
Communications is an important aspect. With easy access to internet, many projects are going towards the “online” trends. Like I am currently doing for “AgriMauritius”. To ease communications and interactivity, there are a certain tools that will help you. Here are a list that would help:
- Scriblink is an online whiteboard. It can accommodate as much as 6 users online. It acts just like the traditional blackboard. Each participant can scribble, write and chat at the same time. InF and I have used it to helps us study. I believe this tools will also help you clarify some points in your projects. Other alternatives would be Netmeeting and Marratech.
- Freemind is an open source software, It allows you to make a mind map. What is this? Simply, all your ideas will be presented in a “graphical” manner. This will make sharing ideas easier and neater.
- Microsoft Live messenger or Skype can be used for the purpose of interacting with team members. An added benefit of skype would be it allows VOIP and addons as whiteboards can be added. Interesting?
- Now is the most important part. Use Webcollab as usual another open source software. It is just a project management tool. Assign tasks and permissions to users. That is a bonus to project management. View?
Project management is a vast topic and this article has covered just the essential topics. I am not a pro, you see errors drop a word. Want to add something, comment it. I will be adding it.
As always comments appreciated. Find it helpful, stumble it.
Thank You.
