Archive for October, 2008
Farcry 2 features a Mauritian Mercenary!
October 30, 2008 by InF, under Cool Stuff, Gaming, Mauritius, Tech Posts.
Picture courtesy of VideoGaming247
Farcry 2 has positioned itself as a very probable candidate for the “Game of the Year” with highly advanced AI and graphics. It was to be expected from the guys that made Crysis and the Cry Engine. If you have ever seen the screenshots of FC2, you know what I’m talking about. If not, then see this video as a teaser.
It’s already out, and you can go and buy/download your copy now itself. It appears to be a game that’s worth playing.
It has not yet reached me, and as soon as I finish it, you will have my review here on GS.
My friend just informed me of something really interesting. Farcry 2 is about you being a mercenary, and progressing through the game doing missions for various factions and everything.
The interesting thing? One of the playable characters is a Mauritian! Yes, you read it right. You can play as a Mauritian, called Quarbani Singh, coming from Port Louis! (Fictitious person I hope!). Apparently, he’s a retired SMF! Thumbs up for detail!
It’s amazing that some big developers like Ubisoft knows about our tiny Island, and even features a Mauritian character! Thank you Ubisoft! I guess it’s probably that one of the developers there visited Mauritius and wanted to let others know Mauritius is great, or something like that. Or there is a Mauritian developer there. Nevertheless, it’s much appreciated.
This will probably boost knowledge about Mauritius among the gaming community, which is not a bad thing. They will get to know how crappy our Internet speeds are, and gamers value speed! 
So, what do you think about it? Will Mauritius be better known?
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11 Comments
China Channel Firefox Addon: Experience Internet Censorship
October 27, 2008 by InF, under Firefox, Others, Software, Tech Posts.
I’ve seen my fair share of Firefox addons. There are addons that can make your browser do virtually anything, including controlling your music player from your browser if you wish, or get live weather info, or draw diagrams, or… or anything else I can’t think of.
Today, however, I encountered an addon in my feeds that I found particularly interesting. It’s called the China Channel Addon.
What does it do? It gives you a taste of what it means to surf the Internet in China.
As you probably know, the Great Chinese Firewall (or Golden Firewall) is used to censor the Chinese Internet and prevent people from looking up subjects like “Free Tibet”. I guess they just get a “Page cannot be found” or “Error 404″ or possibly very long wait times with no page displayed at the end.
Well, this addon recreates this effect. It places you behind the Great Firewall, and allows you to see what Internet Censorship means.
Personally, I don’t find any day-to-day use to this addon. It’s just a curiosity I wanted to share with you.
Now, if ever you are preparing a project or paper on Internet censorship or something like that, you may want to experience this effect first hand, and the China Channel Addon is what you will need.
Any other interesting Firefox Addons you would like to share?
6 Comments
Summer time in Mauritius: Pointless?
October 25, 2008 by InF, under Mauritius, News, Tips and Tricks.
At least this is my opinion. You may no agree with me, but after reading this article, maybe I’ll be able to convince you. First, let me tell you that I’m against this measure, even if I’m for the saving of energy and protection of the environment. But summer time? I’m totally rejecting that idea.
What’s the summer time concept basically? In Mauritius, we’ll be moving our clocks forward by one hour. That is, if it’s actually 6 a.m in the morning, our clocks will be showing 7 a.m. This means that people waking up at 6 a.m (without summer time) will wake up 1 hour earlier. You go to work 1 hour earlier, and return 1 hour earlier. This also means (in theory) that you will get to use daylight for 1 more hour per day instead of using electricity.
(DST will apply from 26th October to 29th March at midnight for both).
But according to me, it’s not that simple. Let’s see the case against, since the Government and others are already hammering us all with the case for.
15 Comments
PHP - An Overview
October 18, 2008 by Guru, under Programming.
PHP has been going strong since its very first public release. Today it is among the leading scripting language powering the web; think Google, YouTube, Digg and the likes. You might and might not have got the feeling of dynamism after I have mentioned the previous websites. Yes, you make the ground move. You can turn your old static page into a living one (dynamic), well I am talking about PHP right now. I am not going to bias you into thinking that we have got only PHP for this particular need; we have got asp .net as an example.
PHP is still a young language under under heavy development, with its developers writing and rewriting its core, improving it with each new release. You must be at least aware that we are in the object oriented generation. As from version 4, PHP has object oriented available for you to play with. With now its 5 series it has improved object oriented, but cannot be compared with Java and C++ language object orientation. Yet, it is sufficient for us to write beautifully.
I will now try build up your thinking stream; how you should do it in PHP. 
PHP can be embedded anywhere in HTML. For instance we can display a simple text using PHP and html. Before going any further, PHP is used for its logical potential as compareds as the HTML counter part which offers us only the “displaying” ability. PHP does all the processing and its end product is some “HTML” that you will use for displaying. I am sure you must have this part right in your head.
<html>
<head>
<title>A simple html and php example</title>
</head>
<body>
Here is a <?php echo ’simple text’; ?>
</body>
</html>
After running the above snippet in your web server you will have the below html code when viewing its source in your web browser.
<html>
<head>
<title>A simple html and php example</title>
</head>
<body>
Here is a simple text
</body>
</html>
Quite simple? This is the stepping stone. Get the feel of it.
Try to think!!! What will it be like having hundreds of tit bits of php codes in your html. Urhh? Sounds messy? In fact, it becomes real messy. To counter this, you cal use templating engine. May be Smarty? This is the most recommended nowadays. I will talk about it in a later post.
Data is something unmissable for most of our websites. We all want a data backbone to play with. MySql? PostgreSql? Oracle? PHP can interface with almost any database server you can think of, urhh?? it can do so too with a simple access database (not a server). Connectors make this possible for us. We don’t need to know the underlying details.
I would recommend you to use MySql as your back-end. Open-source, free and strong going. And, it has made a reputation on the market.
PHP is a loosely typed language, that is it we do not need to strictly declare a variable in our script. We can do so as we go. Sounds good? Yes, but it is disadvantageous. (I will cover it in another post). We can cast from one data type to another. It just happens smoothly and it makes you mad while debugging at times.
PHP does not comes with a predefined security toolkit that you can just use. But, it comes with functions that you can use to build the weapon to fight evilness.
We are given even more flexibility, we can break down our code into its very own sub modules and include them together to make the whole “thing” or even put it anywhere we want it to.
I guess I have been able to try to build up a new thinking stream. Where you should maybe be heading. We will next be talking about syntax in my post.
In short PHP is a hot enough scripting language to mess with. It is your choice to love or hate it. Keep the reason(s) to yourself.
3 Comments
Student Union Elections 2008: My views
October 13, 2008 by InF, under Mauritius, UoM.
Hello readers. If you are a student of the University of Mauritius, then you probably know that the Student Union elections are currently taking place. This year, there are a number of parties and individuals, as you’d expect. Each of them is offering us students some hope to improve the campus life. In this post, I’m analyzing the promises of parties, whom many people are considering to be the biggest ones (or at least the two who are advertising the most I guess). These two are: Students Welfare, Students Rights and Students Power. Why they all include “students”? Lol?
Personally, I don’t know any of the ladies and gentlemen in those parties, except one guy in Student Welfare. So you can say I’m not biased towards anybody in these elections. Another issue about me: I generally don’t like politics and politicians. Too many lies. Too many false promises.
For the analysis of main points, I’m confining myself only to the Faculty of Engineering and general student areas. Other faculties are out of my league since I don’t know much about how they work, or the needs of the students in those. At the end, you get some ideas from me, which I think is important.
Let’s start. Student Welfare first, shall we?
