A mauritian blogger in the news!

The president has been informed through confidential sources that a local newspaper (lexpress) intends to publish an article in their magazine by the end of this month about “blogs de femmes”.

While guys tend to enjoy more technical stuff (from my personal observation), girls enjoy keeping diaries. As a result, before the advent of Web logging (shortened to blogging some time afterwards), guys were designing their own personal web pages that required atleast some html knowledge while the girls found it easier to write in paper-based diaries and were thus able to concentrate more on the contents.
As a result, the technies were able to reach a wider audience with poor quality content while the better quality ones were restricted to personal girls’ diaries locked in a drawer…

Blogs changed that! Web-based applications such as WordPress’s and Blogger’s platforms empowered people with even zero html knowledge to publish content online with pictures as easily as preparing an article in a word editor on your computer. And thus, we find both guyz and gurlz on equal footage, able to concentrate on high quality content while reaching a worldwide audience.

In Mauritius, even with about 100 blogs, a sizeable number of local bloggers are girls, and their writings are very much appreciated; I will go on to say that they simply write better than their male counter-parts. But no worries guyz, you are still ahead on topics related to technology, and news related post since girls tend to write about girlish topics, poems and romantic stuffs :p

Well, let’s move to the motivation of this post itself: The female blogger to be featured in lexpress’ magazine this month:
I have the pleasure to present to you : Miss Aniisah whose blog url is: http://aniisah.wordpress.com and guess what, her blog turned 2 years old yesterday 8th of June.
An extract of her first post :

Well here I am!!! Finally I should say. It has taken me long enough. The main reason I wanted to have a blog is not to lose the habit of writing. Back to college years, I used to write an average of four essays per week! Now that I am at the University…read more

In the article she will be speaking about her motivations behind blogging, what she usually talks about in her blog post and the main purpose of her blog itself. So if you want to read her answer, let’s wait for the magazine to come out now

A small note to conclude: I have not been asked to advertise this event by anyone. I have done so simply because Aniisah is a good friend of mine and as fellow bloggers we should be proud that the mauritian blogosphere is becoming known! Congratulations anii and happy birthday to your blog!

Autoblogging: Where pervasive computing, semantic web and web 2.0 meet!

Greetingz!

Exams and coursework are now over. Discussed with my supervisor for the first time about the dissertation and he was happy with the topic I proposed: Autoblogging.

Autoblogging is all about aggregating data from sensors and other devices such as smartphones, car navigation systems…etc, analyse these data and present them in the form of blog posts.

The main reason behind this topic is: I like to blog but I feel lazy am too busy to blog. Thus my idea is to have blog posts produced automatically on my behalf, and probably I will add only a few personalised words in them   Although it will not be possible to come up with a system that can blog about everything yet (mainly because we dont have many intelligent home appliances and devices) but atleast it will be a first brick t0wards that vision of mine

Feedback and advice are as usual, very much appreciated

Presidentially yours,
Roushdat.

Are men and women equal?

Scale of justice

We have often heard women shouting for equality. Unfortunately many misunderstand or confuse equality with justice. While women and men are not the same physically and mentally that in no way means one should have his/her  rights restrained.

For those who believe women and men are equals, consider:

• Can a man give birth to a baby and breastfeed him (naturally) ?
• Why most reputable scholars are men ?
• Is it not a fact that in general men are stronger physically and women are more emotional ?

Men and Women complement each other and as a result should enjoy what is due to them. Instead of fighting of equal rights on everything, there are several aspects that require justice  rather than blindly applying equality.

And of course there are some who are homosexuals: These are simply considered the abnormal of the society by most people and of course…they should have justice that they deserve as well, definitely not equal rights.

And no…men and women are obviously not equal…except for those who do not understand the meaning of  “equal” !

Images from wikipedia.org ( modified )

I am on google’s Street View in Southampton-UK

Ok…i know there are many other people as well, but this blog post was validated to be published the day I saw the google-car taking pictures while i was waiting for uni-link bus

The first picture is me wearing the same tshirt as the day of google took my pic :p

Here’s the link: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?t=h&hl=en&ie=UTF8&layer=c&cbll=50.922386,-1.405096&panoid=sIzqrkNu9VWwfs0UxjzM_A&cbp=12,351.01793401115145,,0,15.900000000000015&ll=50.922285,-1.40507&spn=0,359.980688&z=16

Mauritian Bloggers, make yourself known!

Greetingz all! My codes for processing mauritian blogs and their inter-links is now ready! The next step will be to feed in a list of mauritian blogs. Selven and I have compiled a preliminary list through google docs and I have posted a copy below. If your blog or friends’ blogs are not listed below, you are welcome to contribute to the list.

Blogger Name/Nick	Blog URL	Blogged in 2009?
1Day1Thought	http://1day1thought.wordpress.com	n
Muhammad Ahad	http://ahadoo.blogspot.com	n
Aniisah Badulla	http://aniisah.wordpress.com	y
Tear of Pear	http://anivad.blogspot.com	n
Antish	http://antishblog.blogspot.com	n
Arenophile	http://arenophile.wordpress.com	n
Ashvin	http://ashvinchundee.blogspot.com	n
Bruno	http://blebon.blogspot.com	y
blogosquare	http://blogosquare.com	y
Christina Meetoo	http://christinameetoo.wordpress.com	n
Ramila Venakatasamy	http://coldplaygurl.blogspot.com	n
Vishali	http://crazyvish.wordpress.com	n
Dakshinee	http://dakshinee.net	y
Deeyaa	http://deeyaa.wordpress.com	n
Adarsh Hashna	http://diaestro.blogspot.com	n
DjSwift4U	http://djswift4u.wordpress.com	n
Doorghesh	http://doorgesh.wordpress.com	n
Rowan	http://flicenflac.blogspot.com	n
Gavin Sathan	http://gavinsathan.blogspot.com	y
Infinity Sama	http://infinity-sama.blogspot.com	n
Irfaan Nujjoo	http://irfaannujjoo.blogspot.com	y
Keli	http://keliati.blogspot.com	y
Kevina Choolhun	http://kevina.wordpress.com	n
Kavi Khedo	http://khedo.wordpress.com	n
Koonul	http://koonul.wordpress.com	y
Angele	http://lady-angele.com	y
LightPrincess	http://lightprincess.wordpress.com	y
Loona	http://loonareview.blogspot.com	n
m0rphmix	http://m0rphmix.blogspot.com	n
Miranda	http://mirandasnest.blogspot.com	n
Carine	http://moi-carine.com/wp	n
Harry	http://nerdworld.wordpress.com	y
Nussaibah	http://www.nussaibah.com	y
Pascal Grosset	http://pascalg.wordpress.com	y
Ritesh	http://ritesh2103.wordpress.com	y
nEha	http://riverofbliss.blogspot.com	n
Rokingangel	http://rockingangel.wordpress.com	n
Rooch	http://rooch.wordpress.com	y
Roushdat Elaheebocus	http://roushdat.wordpress.com	y
Racyn	http://sansconcessions.wordpress.com	y
Shah M Fadil	http://shah.developer4ever.com	y
Sixwells	http://sixwells.blogspot.com	n
Souraksha	http://souonline.wordpress.com	y
Splash	http://splashonline.wordpress.com	n
Sunflower Avi	http://sunfloweravi.blogspot.com	n
Jevin	http://thatjevin.blogspot.com	y
the sundeep	http://the-sundeep.blogspot.com	n
Loveliebutterfly	http://veganlovlie.blogspot.com	y
Blackmachina	http://videomachina.wordpress.com	n
Waz	http://wazkim.blogspot.com	y
Selven	http://www.blogged4ever.com	y
Chaya Fowadar	http://www.chaya.fowdar.com	y
GeekScribe	http://www.geekscribes.net/blog	y
Giromon	http://www.giromon.com	n
Lash-69	http://www.lash-69.com	n
Morinn	http://www.morinn.blogspot.com	y
Avinash Meetoo	http://www.noulakaz.net/weblog	y
Priscus-Former	http://www.priscus.info	y
carrotmadman6	http://www.themediaguru.co.cc	y
Zahool	http://www.zahool.com/blog	n
Maliha	http://xxmalihaxx.wordpress.com	y
Yashi	http://yashi-g.blogspot.com	y
Yashvin	http://yashvinblogs.com	y
YasirMX	http://yasir03.online.fr	y
True Side of Me	http://yearsofbliss.blogspot.com	n

Go to google-docs here or send your links as comments to this post. Thanks

The president’s contribution to the Bloggers’ Community in Mauritius

Greetingz all. There has been some buzz lately about the launch of a bloggers’ club in Mauritius. This initiative has been on-going for some time now, primarily through the Mauritius Blog Tracker, and also The Mauritius Blog Brethen, both of which had their moments of glory but the light soon dimmed out (not completely). Although the intentions were good, I think the basement was not strong enough (mostly due to the small number of mauritian bloggers) and the timing was not appropriate.

But in the Web arena, things change rapidly, and we now have an ever-growing community of bloggers in the country, coupled with the decreasing cost of broadband, we can confidently expect the number of Mauritian blogs to rise in the near-future.

For the time being, We will be focussing on the links among mauritian blogs, who is linking to who and come up with a graph of the Mauritian blogosphere. With time, we will analyse the morphing of that graph and understand its implication for the mauritian society.

As pre-requisite for this experiment, I will require an up-to-date list of all Mauritian Blogs.  I think Yashvin must be compiling such a list currently. But anyone of you already having a list can mail it to me on roushdat [AT] gmail [DOT] com preferably in the form of a datasheet with 2 columns: Name, URL

Check out Yashvin’s post to learn more about the on-going iniative

After MSc, What’s next? PHD of course ;)

After successfully obtaining my BSc from the University of Mauritius (a university which i am proud of being an alumni), with the help of many of you, I managed to get myself a state-sponsored seat at the University of Southampton and I’m currently almost half-way the MSc degree in Web Technology and things are going really well

So I guess now is the time to focus on the next target, the PHD.

There are many reasons why people do PHDs…some think it will get them more money, others think that addind the Dr title in front of your name brings you pride…and most successful PHDs are those that do it because they love to be discovering/improving things.

Personally I will not say that I’m 100% of the last reason given above, let’s say 50%. The remaining 50% is divided among:

1. I DO NOT want to to work under a boss putting loads of pressure on me to complete a development task!
2. I want to be my own boss, manage my own time, and do things that I enjoy doing
3. I want a good life , not a dog’s life. (Waking up early in the morning everyday, go to work, work whole day, get back home late at night thinking about how to resolve a bug, sleep, repeat ->that’s not a life!)
4. The Dr. title is tempting as well huh ->It will look great for the president to be a doctor :p

So I am now hunting for opportunities available for the PHD. Still unsure about the specific fields, but I think I will be quite flexible about that. Have considered the area of Ubiquitous Security. Went to meet Dr. David Argles this afternoon to discuss about it. Seems the major obstacle will be to find a research group that has funding for international students and are willing to accept me onboard. That’s the unfortunate thing when you live in a small country, the government cannot afford to fund  many students for PHD and on top of that, since I have already benefited from a scholarship from the government of Mauritius, I am no longer eligible to apply again.

So as things  currently are, either I will get some research group here willing to fund me or I’ll be back to UoM doing the PHD at home

If you are from a company willing to sponsor my studies (the future president of earth’s studies), don’t hesitate to get in touch, my email adress is roushdat [AT] gmail [DOT] com

C# code to convert a relative URL into an Absolute URL

As part of the Foundations of Web Science Module, we were tasked to investigate the Web Graph by building up a crawler that goes through a page, extract links, follow these links and loop…and ultimately generate a graph showing each link as a node pointing to other nodes.

One of the minor obstacle we encountered was about dealing with relative links since extracting relative links from a webpage and trying to download the content pointed by that link will lead nowhere since stand-alone, the relative link is not really pointing to anything concrete in the Web.

Lazy as we are…my friend Deyan and I tried search for some c# codes online that can convert that…Couldn’t find it. So we had to code it ourselves and thought about sharing it with other lazy people. All you have to do is to create a library in c#, copy paste the code below, build it. In your project, you can then refer to the .dll file generated for that library.

/*A humble request, please include these comments if you use this code, part of it or it is helpful to you somehow.This piece of code is free to use, modify and share. Original Authors: Roushdat Elaheebocus & Deyan Karaivanov, University of Southampton, March 2009. Part of the Web Graph project, Foundations of Web Science. */
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using System.Net;
using System.Web;

namespace RelToAbsConverter
{
    public class RelToAbs
    {

        public string GetAbsoluteUrl(string sourceUrl,string relUrl)
        {
            int countOfDots = relDotCount(relUrl);
            relUrl = relUrl.TrimStart('.');
            relUrl = relUrl.TrimStart('/');
            return convertRelToAbs(sourceUrl, relUrl, countOfDots);
        }

        private string convertRelToAbs(string sourceUrl, string relUrl, int countOfDots)
        {
            WebRequest req = WebRequest.Create(sourceUrl);
            Uri uri = req.RequestUri;
            int countOfParts = uri.Segments.Count();
            string collectedParts = "http://" + uri.Host;
            for (int i = 0; i < (countOfParts - countOfDots); i++)
            {
                collectedParts += uri.Segments[i];
            }
            collectedParts += relUrl;
            return collectedParts;
        }

        private int relDotCount(string relUrl)
        {
            int dotCount = 1;
            if (relUrl[0].Equals('.'))
            {
                dotCount = 1;
                for (int i = 1; i < 10; i++)
                {
                    if (relUrl[i].Equals('.'))
                        dotCount++;
                    else
                        break;
                }
            }
            return dotCount;
        }
    }
}

Web Science : My veiled vision

University of Southampton, Building 32, November 2008: That’s when I received my first insight about what Web Science: A new branch of science that researchers (including Sir Tim Bernes Lee aka TBL) from MIT and the University of Southampton have successfully convinced enough influential people about its necessity.

For a  more conventional explanation about what this new science is, check Professor Nigel Shadbolt’s podcast recorded in November 2008 here.

And for my veiled-view of Web Science, read on

Basically, with so many stuff in computer science nowadays, researchers have been overwelmed! And computer scientists have this modular approach of breaking things into smaller units. Combined with the trend of everything being web-based, why not distinguish the Web as a unit in itself…

Around two decades ago, most people’s vision was: computers at the centre of all aspects of our life. To a large extent, this is something that has happened (our parents got it right!). But then, here comes the TBL’s Web and all the stuff that was being done on a desktop has now been moved online, web-based services!

Web Science’s vision: The Web at the centre of all aspects of our life! IT services, Law, Sociology, Economy…you name it, it has something to do with the web. And the frightening thing is that if ever someone was to gain complete control over the Web, theoritically, he will be controlling of the planet! ( Is TBL trying to double-cross me???)

While Web Science will be a discipline of study and research for probably the next 10 years, I feel that it’s thunder will be stolen in a shorter timespan compared to it stealing that of computer science…(and what about pervasive computing…still hiding in the shadows?)

A small advertising for the university now (no, they won’t be paying me for this):

• New module introduced this year: Foundations of web science
• New MSc in Web Science, introduced for September 2009’s intake

I’ll be writing more about Web Science in the future…since i have to prepare a report on that :p (so for those of you having to write that report as well, make sure not to plagiarised the presidential writings…)

Cyclone Gael in Mauritius?

last update: no cyclone warning…it’s over guyz…

Update 6 (Thursday, 12:30pm): At 10:10am Gael’s centre was at its closest location to mauritius and is now normally getting further away…next bulletin at 16:10…when most workers complete their day…

Update 5 (Thursday, 5am): 4:10am bulletin maintained a class 2, so the good news is: No school, college, university…the bad news: workers do what they do best: go to work! Next bulletin scheduled for 10:10am. Until then, have a nice cyclonic day

Update 4 (wednesday, 10pm): Still class 2, and probably there won’t be classes tomorrow, TO BE CONFIRMED AT 4:30am in the morning.

Some info-bits i’ve been getting from different regions of the island:

L’Escalier (South)-Selven saying that there was a short power cut but things are back to normal….in that village, we usually have more frequent electricity outage during normal weather than during cyclone. Lightnings have been flashing…but the sound was muted…no loraz (thunder).Bit windy, bit rainy…

Vacoas’ Sam complaining about her longanes….”tou longanes p tomber “. Probably she didn’t want to share longagne with others….And according to her there are strong winds but little rain…

From PortLouis, Anii says “grooo zeclairrrrrr…nek zeclair ek loraz” mentioning that there is more or less no rain or wind…

Feel free to voice out your situation through comments guyz

Update 3: A cyclone warning class 2 is in force in Mauritius, and as usual, they waited for schools and most workplaces to end before doing that . Looking at the images provided by foreign meteorological stations, there is very slim chance that the centre of gael reaches close enough to be a threat to the country. So guyz, the chances of a holiday tomorrow is getting slimmer…pray!

Update 2: Latest bulletin issued at 10:10am still confirm a class 1 warning. Next bulletin will be at 16:10.

gael dream trajectory

Before u get too excited about it…the red line is just imaginary…and the original picture is from meteo france.

Update 1: At 4am, the latest cyclone bulletin maintained a class 1, next bulletin will be at 10:10 am…so students…, go to school!!!

So a warning cyclone class 1 is in force in mauritus, ene warning  siklone  klass 1 en viguere lor moris, darger ek ki toofan…(please complete)

Official cyclone bulletin from Vacoa’s Sok Apadu station can be reached here

But according to a forecast from http://www.tropicalstormrisk.com/ shown below, Gael is not a major risk for the country.

This forecast is confirmed by meteo france (considered more reliable than sok’s). Meteo France’s page about gael can be reached at: http://www.meteo.fr/temps/domtom/La_Reunion/TGPR/actif/activite_en_cours.html

So have fun guyz…specially those expecting a holiday, start praying to God…everything is possible!

By the way, I had a primary school classmate whose name is Gael Souris, i seize this opportunity to say a hello to him if ever he stumbles on this page one day.