Avinash Meetoo

I see the light !

14 April 2004 By Avinash Meetoo 2 Comments

As you know, I’ve been working on Advisare for some time now. It’s a program which does two things, (1) connect to Canal Satellite’s website to fetch the TV program of the day and (2) advises about what to watch.

While doing some research the other day, I found out that part (1) is the aim of an existing project called xmltv. xmltv has grabbers for each country but unfortunately not for Mauritius. So, I think I’ll write one. So watch out for tv_grab_mu in the coming weeks :-)

Then, I found out that xmltv is used internally by many PVR software (aiming to replace the VCR, the DVD player and the game console) to show the TV program of the day. I discovered that MythTV for example uses xmltv and by writing tv_grab_mu, I’ll be able to use MythTV to record my satellite programs.

So I’m pretty excited right now. I’ll think I’ll have a go at tv_grab_mu. I’ll keep you posted.

Eclipse is extraordinary

11 April 2004 By Avinash Meetoo 12 Comments

I’ve been using the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment for Java programming language for the last year now and I can say I’m impressed.

In fact, I’m so impressed that I’ll make a bold move and say aloud: Eclipse is the BEST programming tool ever.

It’s nicest featured according to me are: its integration of JUnit for unit testing, its rather magnificent refactoring facilities and its compatibility with CVS for version control and team development.

I also like the fact that it’s compiler is very quick and that its sourcecode editor has a lot of very useful features (like syntax colouring of course but also all sorts of automatic error correcting tools).

But the best thing is that Eclipse is Open Source Software meaning that it can be freely downloaded and used (and abused…). Thanks to IBM for having created and donated something as powerful as Eclipse to the OSS community.

Eclipse works wonderfully well in Linux but it also works in Windoze and MacOS X.

So give it a try… and I’m sure you won’t look back :-)

Dining at Spur

10 April 2004 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

This evening, Anya, Christina and I went to Spur at Quatre-Bornes where we had a nice dinner. We started with some Quesadillas: a Mexican dish made of flour tortillas, cheese and chicken and cooked until the cheese melts. Then as the main course, Christina took some Fajitas, another Mexican dish. For my part, I ordered a simple (but very nice and tasty) beef steak with french fries and fried onions.

Anya, of course, was allowed to take whatever she wanted from both our plates :-)