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;
        }
    }
}