Noulakaz

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

News

Expensive is not necessarily good

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Social Networks

The other day while having dinner at a friend’s place, we had an interesting conversation about one of the core values of Web 2.0 i.e. harnessing collective intelligence. One friend argued that websites like Wikipedia and Amazon were so full of vandals (defacing pages on Wikipedia and writing bogus reviews on Amazon for example) that we should never use them to learn / decide what to buy…

Interestingly, my other friends said that they were not too sure about Amazon being unreliable (maybe because they had no choice than believing that the comments on Amazon were sincerely written as their entire buying strategy was based on that being true…) but, surely, he was right about Wikipedia which couldn’t possibly be authoritative.

 

I was the only one saying that Wikipedia is good enough. In fact, it’s more than good enough in the sense that if one feels a specific page is not good enough he can make it become good enough by editing it. Of course, there are vandals on Wikipedia but the website features an excellent version tracking system and, more important, more honest people than vandals.

In fact, I immediately realised that some people had a bad perception of Wikipedia because, brace yourself, it is free. Yep. Same as open source software. For some bizarre reason, some of us believe that something which is free is obligatorily not good. And, of course, what is expensive is obligatorily good.

And this is a very bad thing. Because it’s false. Remember this when doing your Christmas shopping.

Merry Christmas to you!

My music

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As most of you already know, I have been composing music for some years now. I started around 1993 when I bought a Kawai K4 synthesizer and I got some sequencing software on my trusty Amiga 500. You won’t believe it but I composed Atomic Disintegration on that day I bought my K4!

That period coincided with a love story which finished very bitterly only for another one to start (and which is still going strong…) My first album, My Contribution to Art, contains 12 tracks composed between April 1993 to May 1995. For years, the album did not have a cover but I’ve finally settled for one:

I’ve settled for a very naïve art depiction of an airplane (courtesy of Donna Spurrell.) Of course, the tracks are not that great (or else I would have been Thom Yorke) but they mean a lot to me. In fact, I’m very proud of them. The whole album can be listened and downloaded freely at Last.fm.

My second album, So Logical, was released in 2004. It coincided with the births of my two kids, Anya and Kyan. That album too didn’t have a cover. I’ve settled for:

The image is courtesy Sharpbrains. The So Logical name of the album comes from the fact that it was entirely composed using Emagic (now Apple) Logic Audio. The album contains 8 tracks and most of them are linked to a special event concerning either Kyan, Anya, Christina or myself. For example, I always associate This is real and Beautiful sea with Anya’s birth. All in all, So Logical is a much nicer album that the first one and it has an excellent audio quality (judge for yourself by listening to it or downloading it freely – I believe it sounds better than most of the “professionally” mastered albums being released now.) Of course, the music is perfectible but, what the heck, I am just an amateur after all.

The third album

Since getting my MacBook, I’ve bought Logic Express and I’ve worked on some tracks (a few which are pretty much done but the vast majority is still in alpha state.) Maybe I’ll finish around January 2009. I’ll keep you informed.

Lexpress.mu is not working well…

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Today, L’Express.mu has been launched and it is positioned as a new product by La Sentinelle where people have the possibility to interact and comment on news items.

Unfortunately L’Express.mu is not working well (and this is a major understatement.)

It seems to me that the web application has been written from scratch instead of being based on something proven (either Open Source or not.) The problem seems to be connection-related i.e. the database server cannot accept any new connection presumably because the application has a simple two-tier architecture and it has not been tested properly when under heavy load.

 

When I taught my Software Architecture MSc course last year, this is something I spent a lot of time on: scalability is not something that can be tackled as an afterthought. If the application is not built with scalability in mind (by using a proper N-tiered architecture with a well-designed business layer) then there is no way it can become scalable without a partial rewrite.

Incidentally, the website runs on Windows 2003 Server and uses SQL Server 2005.

By the way, what is:

catch (Exception ex)
{
    throw ex;
}

supposed to mean?

The “paper” newspaper

In parallel with this new product, the normal (paper) newspaper is available at a new URL: www.lexpress-newspaper.com. Unfortunately, the technical team has decided to use a Flash application to display the newspaper. I wonder why? This makes referencing and quoting very difficult. Furthermore, Flash and Google are not really good friends… I would say that putting a newspaper online and making its content non-discoverable through Google is bizarre.

By the way, what is “Le site est mieux vu avec Internet Explorer et une résolution 1024 x 768.” supposed to mean? Is this a copy-paste from a 1998 website? Things have changed since 1998. In 2008, website creators are supposed to write:

“We comply with W3C standards like HTML and CSS and, consequently, you can use pretty much anything to access our website (like your computer, your mobile phone, your PDA, your coffee machine, etc.)”