Latest Entries
10 Awesome things about Beijing Olympics Games Opening Ceremony
09 August '08 by InF, under Events.
As you all probably know, yesterday 08/08/08 marks the opening of the Beijing Olympics Games, the 24th Olympiad. I just watched the opening ceremony on TV today, and it was so stunning that I thought I might compile a list of things that really really amazed me and to create some debate. Even if it was on TV, it was still a great ceremony in my opinion. Extravaganza yes, but amazing, YES!
(Click here to read the rest…)
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Orange UK sees subscribers leave
08 August '08 by InF, under IT, Mauritius, Tech News, Tech Posts.
The Register has an article about Orange UK’s subscribers leaving it for other, more juicy ISP offers. Here’s the article:
Customers are continuing to desert Orange’s ADSL offerings, the firm’s results revealed today.
In the six months to 30 June 44,000 net broadband subscribers quit the firm, leaving it with 1.06 million. Orange said its UK broadband customer base was “levelling off”, but figures released in February showed that just 4,000 net subscribers were lost in the last three months of 2007. On its own numbers, Orange’s decline is accelerating.
Despite the toughening economic conditions, the rest of the big six ISPs have maintained the positive trend in their customer base as the market approaches saturation. Orange has claimed that its failure to capitalise on market growth is a deliberate strategy to allow it to sort out problems with its network.
Revenues for the UK Home Communication Services unit, which also includes fixed line voice telephony, fell 7.7 per cent. Much of the sales slide was due to the industry-wide decline in traditional home telephone usage. The proportion of margin-boosting unbundled ADSL lines rose from 23 per cent last year to 40 per cent, however.
I’m not very surprised though, considering the huge amounts of complaints made by Orange users in Mauritius.
Well, I hope that this “exodus” of subscribers as The Register termed it will influence the folks at Orange MU to offer some better services instead of low speed connections (megabit for the masses is a dream!) and weird capping and monitoring policies.
Comments please?
1 Comment
Jumpy start for UoM 2008 academic year
07 August '08 by InF, under Mauritius, UoM.
Hello readers! I found 3 interesting articles in Le Mauricien newspaper of today. Guess what? They all talk about UoM, our dear University of Mauritius. Two of the articles do not flatter UoM, and the third is the interview of Miss Aartee Beekharry, actual president of the Student Union.
I’m sorry for the lack of quality of the pictures, it’s due to the crappy quality of my camera. I couldn’t get the article about the management of Cafeteria due to the page layout. Quite a good article, try to read it.
Alright, so my point is this: University has not even started, and it’s already receiving criticism! This is rather humorous, considering all the claims of “we are ready” already said by UoM management. Now, I’m eager to see what will actually happen when all the students flock in on the 11th. Let’s see!
As students, many of my friends and myself are not too reassured as to how the management will cope with the increase in students. It was estimated to have around 40% increase, but not this article comes and says that courses are canceled due to… lack of students. Lol?
Canceling courses is an abomination. Many students work through their HSC years with a view of what they want to do at Uni, and just as they set foot in there, they find their course canceled. Their options? Go to another university locally, or go abroad and add to the brain-drain of Mauritius. What about their already-paid fees? Who knows…
Another comical issue. If you read the article, apparently UoM needs to wait for orientation day to know “how many students registered for a course”. Ok, I may agree that O-Day represents the actual number of students that will attend the course, not those that registered and went elsewhere. (”mass registrations to land one uni seat, UoM as backup” strategy) But it’s still weird. I wonder what the “not enough students” mean. What’s the minimum number of students for a class to run?
Next, the cafeteria issue. I gotta agree, cafet sucks. No truly! There is nothing for me to eat there! (I’m veg). I’m not even sure if the “pain au chocolat” is actually veg, even if it’s mentioned on the window-display thing. There is still some vegetable pickles and bread, but still nothing much. There are loads of French cakes, gotta admit, but I doubt anybody will have a lunch on French Cakes, are they? (Napolitan lunches… *drool*). They could at least provide some good, hot meals. This would mean less students eating at MIE cafet, and more at UoM cafet. Let’s wait and see.
Note that the article actually deals with how the cafeteria is actually managed, not what food is served. You will see mentions of how the caterer and the VC are “close together”, and some other matters. Note that the complaints were made by the SU “viva voce” as commented by Le Mauricien.
The last article is about SU president’s interview. Makes a good reading material if you want to know a bit about what student union was doing, is doing and will do. Nothing really detailed, but ok, you still have some more info about SU. Happy Birthday SU, 37 years huh? (old!)
That’s the end of this post. Drop us some comments please, specially UoM students.
4 Comments
DCL to introduce Wireless Internet in Mauritius
31 July '08 by InF, under IT, Mauritius.
I found this interesting article in Le Mauricien today, and I thought I might share it with you folks, if ever you may have missed it.
As you can read, it’s about DCL (Data Communications Ltd.) introducing a wireless Internet connection here in Mauritius. Nothing surprising here, since you might say that Network Plus’ Nomad is already here.
Even I say the same thing, and we all know that whatever the ads may say, Nomad still has some problems in some regions of Mauritius. Can’t blame them if Mauritius is a mountainous country, and if wireless signals can’t go through mountains so well.
Due to the short length of the article, not much details are provided just yet. It appears to be long-range, but there are no details about the underlying technology, for example whether it’s WiMax or something like that.
What is mentioned is “haut débit” which I hope is better than the 256K and 512K that we currently have now (for users like me, megabit is out of price!). I wouldn’t mind a megabit, wireless connection if it’s fairly priced and uncapped (or high cap).
Another good thing. The creation of DCL Telecoms, so this could probably indicate the coming in of another ISP on the national market. DCL was already there, and it’s just that the company *might* dedicate more efforts to Internet now. This is just my opinion, huh! 
There is not much info now, so let’s wait and see what happens, and if ever the project can survive.
3 Comments
Spice up your live messenger
27 July '08 by Guru, under Randomness, Software.
We can’t go around without having a nice chit chat. Online, Instant Messaging has bridged this gap. Google it and these will be endless lists of services providing Instant Messaging services; some for free, others for a low price that we often call premium. Without doubt we must all have heard of MSN or Windows Live Messenger; the most used free service from Microsoft. Today I will try to pave a path from a simple to a more customised Live Messenger.
What you will need?:
If you don’t have a “passport.net” account head over there and signup for one. Remember you can use any email address for this purpose. Preferably, one from Google, Gmail will do.
After having downloaded Windows Live Messenger, which is a freeware, install it into your computer(s). This is quite easy, just follow the steps in the wizard. 
Now, you can sign in and start chatting right away!!! But will you be doing it? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. If you are reading this it must be out of curiosity or for satisfying your needs.
I will be proceeding with patching Windows Live Messenger first. Launch the downloaded patch (A-Patch) and you will be asked to tick what you will want to “power up” your “chat world”. Please note that we would be using windows live messenger 8.1 for our purpose. Personally I removed the ads as they were intruding. (I am not imposing). You can use your common sense and your requirements to tick they various possibilities available for customisation. You may like to play around with he nudge, remove the limit 
I can now say we have a “cleaner” live messenger as you wanted it to be. If you have not yet downloaded Live Messenger Plus do so now. It allows us to extends Live Messenger 2 ways; plugins and skins. Plugins allowing us to add on more options and automating some processes. In addition you can code plugins to suits your specific needs. Quite handy? Skins gives you the opportunity to dress up Windows Live Messenger to your taste.
Here are some of my favourite plugins that you may like to try:
- Display Picture Changer - Allows you to have a “dynamic” like display picture. It scrolls through a set of picture and changes your display picture for a set time period.
- Linked Chats - Allows you to share what your are chatting with friends. It is a convenient way over the traditional copy and paste.
- LinkSaver - You often receive links from your contacts. Configure it to save them into a file directly. Thus, no need to ask again if you missed it or do not have history to revert to.
- ReduceMem -You can often witness the memory consumption of WLM, with ReduceMem you can reduce if many folds. I have not tested it well but it seems that it works miracles.
This is a small list but keep tuning I will write more. It is a post after months of no writing. Thanks for your readership. I am back.
4 Comments
RaceDriver GRID: The Review
20 July '08 by InF, under Gaming, Tech Posts.
Upon recommendation from Abi, I purchased RaceDriver GRID on PC. The graphics in the previews and demos were simply superb as you will see in the coming pictures. Codemasters really went all-out to give us a great treat for the eyes. I’d go as far as saying that the graphics surpass even that of Need for Speed: Pro Street.
But, as you will also see in this review, GRID as I will call the game, as a number of quirks that bring down its value. By quirks, I do not mean bugs, but design flaws. Specially i handling. For now, a video for you to drool on!
Click here to read the rest of the review
2 Comments
Changes on GeekScribes
08 July '08 by InF, under Geekscribes.
Over the next few days, I’ll be making some changes as to what GeekScribes really is about.
This blog, or I should say co-blog, started as a collaboration between Guru and myself, so that we have a common place to blog all of our articles instead of on our separate blogs. Since we mostly blogged about tech articles, this collaboration works well for us.
Unfortunately, I guess Guru is a bit busy these days and he will probably not be writing very often for now (until I can find him to… persuade him to be less busy! :P).
Anyways, what the hell is this post? It’s just to tell you about the “new” GeekScribes. Of course, you will still find your tech articles here, and probably a good dose of sarcasm from me. So what are these changes about?
Firstly, a new slogan. We found that the old one doesn’t really match us much. You will see the new one up there near the site name.
Second, we’ll be expanding the scope of what GeekScribes covers. Tech and news is fine, but we’d like more. So expect to see more topics on GeekScribes soon. What topics? Articles about anime and manga, movies, music and other similars. The full extent of the scope has not yet been decided, but GeekScribes will no longer be a tech-only blog.
Finally, there will probably be changes in the post categories. Also, though I’m not sure, you might see a change in the tone of my posts.
That should be about it. Before I do changes, I’d like to know what you think. (Thanks for voting! Comment if you want.)
1 Comment
Rapidshare loves you: No Captchas now!
08 July '08 by InF, under Tech News.
This is excellent news, coming straight from the link Shah gave me:
No more captchas - higher flexibility for premium-users
July 02, 2008
By eliminating the captchas we simplified the use of RapidShare’s free services significantly. In addition, free-users can now upload and download bigger files (up to 200 megabyte). Anyhow, to protect RapidShare from congestion caused by automated downloading, we limited the maximum download speed for free-users to 500 kilobit per second. To compensate for that, they do not have to wait anymore until starting a succeeding download.
Premium-users now profit from more flexibility regarding the download volume: It used to be limited to 10 gigabyte per day and can be “saved” now to a maximum of 50 Gigabyte. As a consequence, the volume that was not used is transferred to the following day automatically, up to a maximum of 50 gigabyte. If the complete download capacity is used up during one day, the premium-user is able to save another 10 gigabyte the following day.
(Source)
Enjoy yer leeching mateys for now, yer have no lame captchas. (Ok, sorry for my lame attempt at pirate speech).
This really simplifies downloading off Rapidshare, and I wonder how and if download managers can be used now. Previously, there was competition to see who can crack the RS captchas, now that’s a non-issue.
Oh by the way, the download timer is still there, so you will still have to wait. I’m sure somebody, somewhere will figure out a way to beat that.
Regarding the speed limits and the download limit, I doubt it really affects us Mauritians. Firstly, 500Kbps download speed limit doesn’t matter. Most of us have 128Kbps, or 512Kbps. It’s not that bad. 128Kbps folks will probably be enjoying full speed.
The 10GB limit is plain off-limits to us. I doubt anybody can download 10GBs in Mauritius with our available connections (unless you are an godly haxx0r).
Overall, I find that it’s a good move from Rapidshare to promote its services. But with limits like 10GB per day, or cumulative 50GB, isn’t Rapidshare directly condoning piracy? I don’t think your videos, documents and free music that you may share with others will amount to 10GB daily, will it?
Let’s see your views.
2 Comments
The end of privacy on the Internet?
07 July '08 by InF, under General, Tech News.
A number of recent events occurring over the Internet prompted me to write this article. What were these events about? Well, if you want to know, they are about privacy decreasing over the Internet. Most users think that while they are online, they are nameless and faceless; One among the millions or billions of users and that they can do pretty much what they want.
Guess again buddy! In fact, I’d go as far as to say you are never anonymous over the Internet. Why? There is always your IP address. Hide it via a proxy you say? Your ISP still has your record, and if ever your proxy is not totally reliable, then you could easily be found.
I’ll be talking about the decreasing levels of privacy. “The Internet is an unregulated network with free-flow of Information”, or so the definition says. Is it really true? Not according to me. Do you consider bandwidth regulation schemes, commonly known as “bandwidth capping” to be unregulated flow of information?
You are not allowed to use some services at some times of the day, by some ISPs. That’s a lot of some’s, but it’s there. P2P throttling is becoming increasingly common among ISPs who are seeing their bandwidth being swamped with P2P traffic. This violates the basic philosophy of a free-flow of information, right?
But let’s see what the Japanese have to say when it comes to how they use the Internet.
We know that the Japanese are very good when it comes to high-speed Internet, with something like 100Mbps available at around $45 per month. We also know that Fair-Usage Policies were introduced by Orange in Mauritius, giving you a download-capping of around 10GB a month, or so we guessed. Guess what the Japan ISP, NTT did. They implemented an upload-capping of (!!) 30GB per day! Downloads, of course, are still unlimited. Ok… *shocked* Read more here.
Now for the decreasing privacy topic. Starting with the most recent now, let’s see flagrant cases of what I’d call “invasion of privacy” but which authorities seem to consider “normal”. You be the judge.
3 Comments
45% increase in students at UoM next year!
25 June '08 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?”
(Click here to read the rest…)
