Noulakaz

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

Linux

Announcing AndroidMauritius and Knowledge Seven forum

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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.

Terminator and Xournal

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A brief post to tell you that I stumbled upon two great open source software yesterday:

Terminator can be used to open multiple Gnome terminals in a grid as shown above. As it also works in full-screen mode, Terminator is great when you have to, say, administer multiple servers at the same time using SSH.

Xournal is, according to its author, a note taking application. But, and this is a wonderful side-effect, it is also a quite formidable PDF annotation tool!

Both can be installed on Fedora using yum and I suppose they are also available in the Ubuntu repositories (even though I’ve not checked) and can be installed with apt-get or aptitude.

Dennis Ritchie is dead

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Dennis Ritchie died this morning.

Forty years ago, he invented two things: the C programming language (together with Brian Kernighan) and the UNIX operating system (together with Ken Thompson).

C

I first came across the C programming language when I was 16 in Lower VI. At that time, I had an Amiga and I wanted to do some game and AI programming. I read in magazine articles that this required a powerful programming language such as C and, by sheer luck, I managed to get a copy of the seminal book, The C Programming Language, from Editions de l’Océan Indien in Curepipe. I distinctly remember that the book cost Rs 120.00 and that I had to borrow the money from a good friend of mine, Ritesh, to buy it.

I started reading the book when I got home and couldn’t leave it until the end. After 20 years, I still have the book and I still like to open it at random and marvel at its conciseness and precision.

I still think that all computer scientists should know C.

UNIX

What can I say? UNIX is a marvelous operating system: powerful yet easy to understand. The historical UNIX has given way to modern variants like Mac OS X and Linux but the philosophy has remained the same and even has a name: it’s called the UNIX-way. In UNIX, each tool does one thing and only one thing. The trick is to combine the tools (using pipes or logical operators for example) to build more complex workflows…

Funnily, laymen do not realise that they depend on UNIX all day long as all Mac computers, the Orange Livebox, Sony and Samsung LCD televisions, Android smartphones, the iPhone and the iPad as well as all the computers at Google, Yahoo! and Amazon (among others) run some variant of UNIX.

Interestingly, the most powerful computers on the planet are powered by Linux.

So, thank you again to you Dennis Ritchie. You changed the world.

RIP.