Noulakaz

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

Education

Imagine a World without Free Knowledge

By 8 Comments

Imagine a world without free knowledge! This is what is going to happen if the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) are passed by the US Congress and Senate.

Wikipedia has been blacked out for the next 24 hours to raise awareness on this important issue.

Some people believe that they can dictate what other people know. I believe this is wrong. People should be free to decide how to get, adapt and create knowledge.

Knowledge needs to be free!

Update: Google (in the US only…), Reddit, Wired, Mozilla and WordPress are blacked out too. Glory to them.

Announcing AndroidMauritius and Knowledge Seven forum

By Leave a Comment

This is an article I published on the Knowledge Seven blog and which I would like to republish here on my personal blog:

Knowledge Seven is proud to announce the launching of a new Android portal at androidmauritius.com. During the past 18 months, Android use has exploded around the world and in Mauritius to become the world’s most widely-used operating system for smartphones and tablets. Google has just announced that people have downloaded Android applications more than 10 billion times hence showing how dynamic the Android ecosystem is.

AndroidMauritius provides the latest news concerning Android, reviews Android smartphones and tablets available in Mauritius, and gives tips and tricks.

Remaining faithful to Knowledge Seven’s motto ‘Sharing Expertise’, we are also glad to announce the launching of our new forum at knowledge7.com/forum. Open-source enthusiasts and IT professionnals will be able to discuss and share their knowledge on the various open-source software and technologies they use on a daily basis such as Linux, PHP/MySQL, Java. Android, etc.

We hope that you will find both AndroidMauritius and the Knowledge Seven forum useful. Feel free to share with your friends and colleagues.

John McCarthy is dead

By Leave a Comment

John McCarthy, creator of LISP and the one who coined the term Artificial Intelligence, died today.

LISP is different.

LISP makes programming fun. And, because LISP is so expressive, it is possible to write very powerful programs with just a few lines of code. As a matter of fact, John McCarthy created LISP in order to be able to write Artificial Intelligence programs as FORTRAN (the only other high-level language at that time) was not capable of manipulating symbols, only numbers.

Since the 60s, LISP has evolved into the very powerful but somewhat difficult to master Common LISP.

Personally, I am a major fan of Scheme, a simplified version of LISP designed to teach programming but powerful enough to do great things (e.g. writing plugins for The Gimp). I used Scheme in the past to introduce real programming to my university students. One implementation of Scheme is Racket, a great open source software.

Ruby, my currently favourite programming language, is also a LISP.

Steve Jobs died 20 days ago. Dennis Ritchie died 10 days ago. Today, we geeks, are losing another monument…