Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Archives for 2007

Launch of the UoM Computer Science website

By 26 Comments

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 ;-)

Self organising bookstores

By 11 Comments


Dave Thomas writes about self organising bookstores:

“Say you had a store where you encouraged people to reshelve things. You’d have broad sections (Computers, Photography, and so one), and some cardboard labels you could put on the shelves themselves. People could write their own labels, create their own sections, and move books as they saw fit. If someone really likes a book, they could turn it face out to show others they approve. They could even move the books onto display tables. Not sure if a Photoshop title belongs in Photography or Computers? Put a copy in both sections.

Would such a store work, or would it just be chaos? I frankly don’t know. But I suspect that people felt that user-organized sites such as wikis wouldn’t work, and Wikipedia and friends have proven that wrong. Flickr and del.icio.us have shown that tagging is a great tool for organizing content. And all these sites have an additional, emergent, property that would be wonderful to see in a bricks and mortar store—they allow serendipitous discoveries. You come across things that delight you that you wouldn’t have thought to look for.

Wouldn’t that make it worth going to a real store again?”

There are at least two places I would love to see this put into practice:

  • The University of Mauritius library where there are a lot of (old) books but extremely badly shelved according to me,
  • Editions Le Printemps where there are a lot of recent (and cheap) computer science books except that many of them are easy to miss because they are shelved horizontally instead of vertically (if you understand what I mean)

Apple to replace TV broadcasting?

By 3 Comments

I’ve been reading Robert Cringely latest article on the latest gadget from Apple, the Apple TV, intensely and it is extremely interesting.

The Apple TV is being advertised by Apple like this:

“Say you’ve just downloaded Cars from iTunes. Instead of huddling around your computer to watch, you pop some popcorn while your computer wirelessly syncs your new flick to Apple TV. Then you pull up a seat, put up your feet, and pick up the included Apple Remote to play your movie on TV. Give yourself a hand: You’ve just changed the way you watch digital media.”

But if you think about it, it’s not cost effective to have a hard disk inside only to store 640×480 video sequences (as those can very easily be streamed from your PC or Mac running iTunes – it requires only 1.5Mbit/s). Of course, it’s nice to be able to watch something even if your computer is switched off but could the hard disk be used for something else?

Robert Cringely thinks that Apple simply wants to change the way movies are distributed over the Internet (and, in the future, how movies are distributed full stop)

He says:

“If the Apple TV is plugged in it is turned on. Did you notice that? That means the hard drive will have at least the capability of running 24/7. Now envision a BitTorrent-like file distribution system that is controlled primarily by iTunes, rather than by you or me. A centrally controlled P2P system is VERY powerful because it allows for the pre-positioning of content.

Say Disney releases Cars 1.5 — a direct-to-DVD release expected to sell millions of copies in its first few days. There is no way iTunes could even hope to participate in a launch like that simply because there isn’t enough bandwidth at a good price — or any price. Even BitTorrent would have troubles handling a small part of such a launch until enough seeds were populated and running. But what if the movie was effectively pre-seeded — loaded over a few days on a distribution tree of thousands of Apple TV boxes which could then deliver the movie locally at high speed if purchased. Or if not purchased the seeded copies could still work together to serve other Apple TVs on the same ISP subnet.”

The more I think of this the more I see it might actually happen.

Imagine a sea of Apple TVs always on participating in a massive P2P movie distribution network. If the movies are pre-seeded (i.e. they are sent to the Apple TVs, say, one week in advance), then, in essence, they would be watchable the second they are actually released by the film company.

Will Apple change the way we watch films? Or will the hard disk only be used to cache iTunes media? Only time will tell.

But this being Apple, I think that Robert Cringely might be onto something.

(Image courtesy of Apple)