Education

I’m buying a Linksys WRT54GL tomorrow

27 May 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 17 Comments

Why?

I need to connect my two desktop PCs running Kubuntu Linux to the Internet. As you know I already have a Sagem F@st3202 Livebox which has wireless and Ethernet capabilities. But as the Livebox is far from my PCs, I don’t want to have a wired connection. I’ve tried a Wifi USB dongle on the PC but (i) it is not reliable and (ii) it is a pain the ass to setup with Linux.

What?

I need something like the Linksys WET54G which supports (as its name indicate) WET which allows the device to work as a transparent Wifi to Ethernet bridge.

Unfortunately, the WET54G is not easily found here in Mauritius and is expensive anyway.

A better solution

I guess many of you have heard of the Linksys WRT54G which is a wireless router which has four Ethernet ports. It is powered by Linux and its firmware has been released under the GPL license. Notice that it is NOT a transparent bridge out of the box.

With the appropriate opensource firmware (either DD-WRT or Thibor (which is the one I want to use)), the router transforms itself into anything you would like (from a router to a firewall to a VoIP server to a transparent bridge etc.) just by changing some settings.

Just to be sure, I’m buying a Linksys WRT54GL which is certified to work with Linux. I am buying mine from a friend in Vacoas at around Rs. 3200 which is reasonable.

This means that tomorrow I’ll be able to connect my two PCs using Ethernet wired connections to the WRT54GL which will itself connect to my Livebox wirelessly and life will be cool :-)

MIPS32

One interesting feature provided by the Thibor firmware is a SSH server. I’ll therefore be able to open a terminal session to the Linksys. Of course, this is cool but (remember: it runs Linux!). What is even cooler is that the WRT54GL features a MIPS32-compatible processor. This means that I’ll be able to play with a pure RISC processor. I’ll even been able to write some simple C or assembly program on my Macbook or my Linux and cross-compile it to the MIPS32 processor using the GNU gcc compiler. For fun, I’ve downloaded a MIPS32 simulator called SPIM which seems to work well on my MacBook and it works on Linux and Windoze too.

Incidentally, the MIPS architecture is considered to be one of the best and simplest RISC architecture making it very nice to teach assembly programming. Heck, even Patterson and Hennessy are massive fans of MIPS.

I’ll let you know by tomorrow if everything works correctly.

Call me a geek :-)

Between 1968 and 1992 in Mauritius

27 May 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 93 Comments

Like most of you, I am proud of my country, Mauritius. Sure, I would love to be elsewhere participating in OOPSLA, JavaOne or RailsConf but my heart will always remain here…

… except if politicians make me regret being Mauritian!!!

Here is an extract from a small booklet that was distributed to every Mauritian kid and adult during the Independence Day celebrations in March:

I don’t want to sound condescending but many things happened in my country between 1968 and 1992 and I find it disturbing that some people are manipulating Mauritian history for their own gains. Mauritians should know the history of the country they are living in… It is tough to imagine a young French child not being told of Mitterand or an american child not been told about Clinton… but the equivalent is being done here.

I was born in 1973 and my childhood was during the 70’s and the 80’s. Of course, I was too young to understand everything but I do know that:

1968: On 12 March, Mauritius officially becomes an independent state and Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam becomes its first Prime Minister.
1971: Promulgation of the Public Order Act which bans many forms of political activity (Mauritius was under a state of emergency when I was born and this lasted until 1976 when I was three!)
1976: General elections held which the MMM wins. The Labour Party forms a coalition government with PMSD and remains in power.
1979: Devaluation of the Mauritian Rupee (I distinctly remember the Minister of Finance of that day making his speech on TV. I was six…)
1982: The first ever 60-0 during the General Elections. The MMM-PSM alliance led by Sir Aneerood Jugnauth, Paul BÃ©renger and Harish Boodhoo wins all the 60 seats of the General Assembly.
1983: Collapse of PSM-MMM alliance. Newly formed alliance between the MSM-Labour Party-PMSD led by Sir Aneerood Jugnauth, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam and Gaetan Duval wins general elections. This is the start of the economic boom of Mauritius which will last for years…
1985: Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam dies at the age of 85. National funeral for the former Prime Minister.
1992: Mauritius becomes a Republic but stays member of the Commonwealth.

Of course, many things happened after 1992 but I will leave this part to real historians.

(Thanks to Mauritius.org.uk and, of course, Wikipedia)

5 January 2007: an update

Thanks to Baboo, I’ve corrected a slight mistake on the duration of a state of emergency in Mauritius.

Another thing that has been bothering me lately is why don’t Mauritians learn the contemporary history of Mauritius at school? I remember, from my college days, that I learnt a lot about Mohenjodaro and the Indus Valley (etc) but nothing about modern Mauritius… Is this done on purpose?

3+1 beautiful articles to read…

18 May 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 14 Comments

I am happy to have checked Reddit the other day because through it I found three beautiful essays by Mike Tarver and one by Larry Wall:

Why I am Not a Professor OR The Decline and Fall of the British University – Gasp! I am amazed by the parallels between what Mike Tarver writes and what we are doing here in Mauritius. Ok… some parts are a little bit caricatural but I’m 100% with him when he says that the University level programmes should be much tougher than what they are now. I wonder what percentage of my UoM students would have managed to succeed if they were given the exams I had when I was in France ten years ago… I’ll be even bolder: Universities should be elitist!
Hackers and Fighters – Is there a correlation between studying computer science and knowing about computers? Is a street programmer better than the computer science graduate? Is there a way to teach programming so that a computer science graduates become as good (if not better) than a street programmer?
The Bipolar Lisp Programmer – Having read this article, I must now confess that I am Bipolar! A Bipolar has “intellectual acuteness and [does] not [take] things seriously. The not taking things seriously goes with finding it all pretty easy and a bit dull. But also it goes with realising that a lot of human activity is really pretty pointless, and when you realise that and internalise it then you become cynical and also a bit sad”. Mike Tarver refers to the Lisp community in his article and it’s now obvious why I am such a big fan of Scheme and Haskell…
Perl, the first postmodern computer language – It is easy to guess that this one has been written by Larry Wall. And it is beautiful! Before reading the article, I did not like Perl (even after having read Programming Perl). After reading the article, I want to give Perl a chance to convince me once more… I’ll definitely buy Learning Perl. The article focusses on the difference between a modern programming language and a postmodern programming language. Postmodern? How can that exist? In fact, Larry Wall argues that the modernists oversimplify problem solving. Modernists puts the focus squarely on the hammer and the nail. He says that a good postmodern problem solver uses different tools to solve different problems hence the necessity for something like Perl.

(Beautiful photo by Doorgesh!!!)