Noulakaz

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

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Comic Life, the Mac and my niece…

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(Click on the image for a bigger version)

Because of the cyclone (which is gone now), I’ve spent some hours playing with the software I got when I bought my Apple MacBook. One of those is Comic Life which allows you to build comics out of digital photos. As you can see, my first ever comic is on Ashvin’s and Prema’s new baby (who still has no official name) and, as expected, I had a lot of fun doing it.

Comic Life is fully integrated with iLife. For instance, it fetches photos from iPhoto seamelessly. Another nice feature is the built-in text manipulation and distortion facilities (I’ve used that for the ‘Welcome!’ caption). Obviously Comic Life handles balloons (the areas where text appear) with grace.

Incidentally, Comic Life is not the only software you get freely when you buy a Mac. You also get:

You also get Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Test Drive and a 30-day trial of iWork but I don’t need those… except that I’ve been thinking a lot about Keynote 3 lately as I do a lot of presentations.

Personally, I like the free software very much. They are fun, easy to use and, at the same time, bloody effective. Hey, that’s what Apple is :-)

Cyclone warning class II in Mauritius

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An update: A cyclone warning class III is currently in force in Mauritius. In other words, at this very moment (22:23 MUT), Mauritius is under full cyclonic conditions.

A cyclone warning class II is currently in force in Mauritius as confirmed by the Mauritius Meteorological Services

Gamede is dangerously approaching our island.

Many students have contacted me to know if they should come to the University today but, as confirmed by the Head of Department Dr Oveeyen Moonian by phone, all classes are cancelled because of the cyclone warning class II.

The CSE website has immediately been updated (the website is currently down – this is surely due to a power cut…)

Notice that I had to call the HoD by phone to get this information as I could not (even after 30 minutes of intense search) find anything pertaining to cyclones and the university rules on the UoM website, the Ministry of Education website or the Mauritius Meteorological Services website.

In my opinion, this is not acceptable.

Self organising bookstores

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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)