I’m happy to announce the official launch of Computer Science & Engineering departmental website of the University of Mauritius.
The URL is extremely easy to remember. It’s http://cse.uom.ac.mu/
About the website
This website has been built over a period of two months by members of the CSE Website Subcommittee which I chair. The other members are Pascal GROSSET, Begum DURGAHEE, Dr Shakuntala BAICHOO, Sheeba ARMOOGUM and Soulakshmee GHURBHURRUN.
We have tried to cater for a varied public. You’ll find pages relevant to:
- Current students
- Prospective students
- UoM academic staff
- Academic staff from other universities
- People from the business sector
- Journalists
- and members of the public at large…
The initial content is relatively complete and it’s bound to become better as time passes. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any suggestion.
Incidentally, I have done most of the photos on the website using my new Canon A540 digital camera with some processing courtesy of my Apple MacBook.
Technical details
The website is powered by the Drupal content management system, uses some custom PHP scripts, manages its data in a PostgreSQL database and runs on the Apache web server and Kubuntu Linux operating system.
I guess this is a good indication that opensource is now playing a major role in the CSE department…
I am happy ;-)
seems like the dept is moving..
slowly
bt surely
welcome to the world..
some features that i think will be really nice:
access to our lecture slides :S
A forum with active participation by lecturers might be nice.. there is the forum of selven, but its kinda restricted and not well popular among staffs
After ACM contest now, Cse website..and as sundeep is saying some really nice changes taking place in the Dept
Keep it up
This is a fantastic mini-site that includes all necessary information for prospective and current students.
It has an easy-to-use and elegant interface, respecting many HCI guidelines. It’ s just superb.
More: It’s dynamic and powered by Linux – how great!
To Vicks:
The obvious next step will be to have lecture notes and a study guide for each module online. But this is the responsibility of the lecturer teaching the module. Personally, I’ll update my pages as regularly as possible.
To Dilraj:
It may be mini but it has required a lot of hard work :-) In fact, there are a lot of pages (most of them being extremely relevant – that’s the tough part). And the website will grow with time…
:s my name was misspelled in the student page :s
Well, honestly, having played a lot with php myself i’m not really impressed. Filling in the menus and adding content in a ready made CMS is within the reach of everyone.
I mean the current theme looks like one of the default ones that come with drupal.
I was kinda expecting something more worked out and maybe more thourough…
would’ya at least change the default drupal logo to something more CSE like? … crap. I just realised we don’t have something CSE like…
As a CSE student from 2003 till 2006, all I have to say is… FINALLY it’s live. I remember trying out http://cse.uom.ac.mu 3 years ago which only gave me the very hollow message: “This page is under construction.” Strangely, if anyone knew about it before, http://cse.uom.ac.mu/linux at that time revealed the good ol’ Red Hat Linux Manual in HTML format! Hmmm…
Hope I’m not the only one who spotted this:
The lecturer profiles’ pages seem to have mixed up with Mrs Agarwal’s name cascaded on so many pages (except yours and Pascal’s). Sure it will get fixed in a breeze.
To give you my candid opinion, I find the site well designed with a nice touch of simplicity.
To Yaasir:
In fact, it’s like when you first setup your wordpress blog. You just the default Kubrick theme. We did the same thing here. The default Drupal theme was good enough (especially compared to what is used on the UoM website).
The really hard part was to build a team of volunteers and to design an optimal navigation structure. And I believe the contents is good enough for a first iteration.
To Onlooker:
If you look at the HTML source, you’ll see that this is because of the ALT attribute of an IMG tag. Must be a consequence of some over zealous copy paste :-)
Thanks for appreciating the simplicity of the site. As Saint Exupéry said: “you know you have a good design when there is nothing non-essential to throw out”
Hi
I visited the site last night following your email to the Linux group. Very nice, simple and most important of all, no Adobe flash stuff :-) that just take much bandwidth.
By the way do you host the whole thing at the university itself? I checked netcraft but didn’t find it but found out that UoM uses Windows 2000/IIS as webserver. Now I’m sure there’s a plan to move away from this :-)
Hi Raj,
We have really tried to be as simple as possible without being simplistic…
The website is being hosted on a plain PC in our “server room” (this is supposed to be sarcastic) running Kubuntu Linux.
As far as I am concerned, I don’t use Windows at all (I have Mac OS X, Linux and FreeBSD in my office) and ALL my lectures and labs require my students to use (at least) Linux :-)
Hi
I visited the site last night n its great compared to that University website :-) Its also easy to use
Congrats to the whole team
Thanks Ishtiba.
We have really tried to create something focussed on giving adequate information to all our potential audiences.
it seems that the new heads in the cse dept are actually getting something done, congrats to the website sub-comitee..
though being simple, i find the site quite interesting… getting to actual content in 2-3 link clicks is great!
and i must say i totally agree with vicks, it would be awesome, if lecture notes could be available online…
knowledge should be shared… and frankly i dont feel it would do harm to place a copy of lecture notes found on dolphin on the web site… no need for complex cms, i guess most students will be satisfied getting directory listing access.
This is what I’ll do next :-)
In the long run, we’ll get rid of Dolphin!
green peace won’t be too happy about that.
We already wasted a whale…
@ Yaasir
lol i don’t mind wasting Dolphin too.. mwahahaha
as long as the next alternativ facilitate my life :)
@avinash
This is kinda off topic..
i recently wanted to connect my laptop to the uom network, to have internet access , access to dolphin while working in our labs.. the long list of stuffs that CITS guys told me that i had to go through. woow.. i gave up.. :(
is there a sort of simple way to connect to the network.. ?? :)
To Yaasir:
Dolphin is used for authentication (the infamous csestudent login in WIndows) and for the shared drives: Academics (which students can access) and Department (only for us :-) )
In a few weeks, I believe I’ll migrate the shared drives to the CSE website (i.e. make lecture notes availalble online) but I have not thought about authentication yet (of course I know Samba – but, remember, I am not the Systems Engineer of the CSE department…)
To Vicks:
Yes (connect to a Squid proxy which is itself connected to the network) but I can’t give you more details… IMHO, it’s better to do the CITS thing :-)
site very informative but not conforms to web standards.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fcse.uom.ac.mu&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline
Thanks for the tip.
I’ve checked my markup. It seems to be ok (i.e. the error found are not from what we wrote). The problem might be with Drupal (which we use as a CMS). I’ll investigate.
Respected sir,
I want to learn how to create an operating system to rival microsoft and im serious.
If you mean an OS to rival Windows, then you are lucky as there are already many of them around. Try Ubuntu (which is a Linux distribution) or FreeBSD. If you don’t mind buying an Apple computer, Mac OS X is an excellent choice.
… and, of course, five years later, the website does not exist anymore. Regression.
I’ve always wondered why didn’t CSE students task themselves on say a final year project or even better as an open source project to rewrite the UOM website using Drupal.
I would have gladly contributed to it.
It is a pity that Computer Science at the UOM is such in an archaic state…
As an example i was extremely surprised recently when talking to a couple of CSE lecturers that they had no idea what git (and github) was.
Try to talk to the Director of CITS. He is the one who manages the team responsible for the website. Drupal is good but, personally, I’ve transitioned 100% towards WordPress: it’s simpler and themes and plugins are plentiful.
The CSE department, as a whole, could have been so much better. Anyway, Mauritius, like all countries, need its geeks to be educated and trained properly so, I suppose that, in the long run, there will be a proper CSE institute in Mauritius…
Thks for your suggestion i will try that.
Anyway i think its up to us to educate the younger generation about the amazing technology out there and foster their curiosity to innovate….
I think the dept will finally mature when it can train people well enough that they can become entrepreneurs right out of school. We should not be complacent though; African countries with way less resources have long overtaken us :
http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-story/426983/kenyas-startup-boom/
You’re 100% right : the future of Mauritius depends a lot on its (young) entrepreneurs.