Noulakaz

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

News

A privacy policy for Google Adsense

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A lot of bloggers I know display Google advertisements on their respective blogs in order to earn some money. Naturally, I also have two Google advertisements on every page of this blog for exactly the same reason… (I’d like to point out that I have not received any cheque from Google up to now.)

This service from Google is called Google Adsense.

I got a comment today from Josh who told me that I need to have a privacy page on this blog to comply with Google’s Adsense latest Terms and Conditions. Using Google (what else?), I discovered a blog entry by Jennifer Slegg explaining in details the changes brought by Google. The most relevant paragraph is:

You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.

The idea is to make explicit that Google uses web beacons aka web bugs and cookies to track visitors. I suppose this brings some peace of mind to Google lawyers.

Then I realized…

This blog, noulakaz.net, is in violation with the terms and conditions and Google might terminate my Adsense account anytime. Fortunately, Jennifer Slegg has also thoughtfully written a sample privacy policy which she has made public. I read it and realized it was much too long for my blog. With some cut and paste, I finally came up with:

The privacy of visitors to noulakaz.net is important to me. Like most other websites, I collect and use the data contained in log files. I do use cookies to store information, such as your personal preferences when you visit my blog. To support my weblog, I also use third party advertisements which may use cookies and web beacons. You can choose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies in your browser settings or by managing security preferences. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with noulakaz.net as well as other websites.

Nice and compact! I’ve added this to my About page.

 

 

 

15 Common Mistakes

Not having a privacy policy was a mistake. But it’s arguably a cosmetic mistake. The baddest mistake as far as Google Adsense is concerned is for someone to click on his own Adsense ads or get them clicked for whatever reason (e.g. click on my links coz i need to pay for my hosting.) I came across this list of 15 Common Mistakes that violate Google Adsense Terms & Conditions and I would strongly advise all bloggers using Adsense to go through it once or twice.

Addendum

The “Software Failure / Guru Meditation” picture shown above should bring tears to those happy few who had an Amiga 15-20 years ago… To the rest, this is what we got when the Amiga crashed. No blue screen of death. No core dump. Instead, we had a flashing Guru Meditation message. People were cool at that time…

My Contribution to Art

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When I was 19-20 (i.e. more or less the same age as my current students) I started composing music and the result was my first ever album released in 1995 pompously entitled “My Contribution to Art” featuring the following tracks:

Interestingly (for me at least…), “My Contribution to Art”  is a concept album which tells the story of a boy (let’s call him A. before you ask) who meets a girl (call her A.), falls in love, gets dumped and only finds happiness again when he meets another girl (call her C.)

I have to be frank, some of the songs are crap but, what the heck, they are mine and I spent hours working on them. I composed the tracks using my old Amiga 500 running Bars & Pipes Pro and my trusty Kawai Kawai K4 synthesizer from 1993 to 1995. I was lucky to have saved them in MIDI file format and I managed to easily import them in Logic Express on my MacBook this week-end. I was delighted to be able to record them in pristine 24-bit audio quality directly from my still-living Kawai K4 and apply some mastering polish.

I am now a proud artist with two albums, My Contribution to Art and So Logical (released in 2004), both available as free downloads as well as free streaming on last.fm.

You’ll notice that neither album has a cover yet. Maybe someone can come up with interesting (and appropriate) covers for the two albums? I don’t mind people using my photos on Flickr. I’ll invite the “winner” for lunch in a nice restaurant…

Time for a change

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Time has come for me to leave the University of Mauritius. I have already given my notice and I’ll be leaving at the end of August after having worked as a lecturer in the Computer Science department for more than three years.

The main reason I’m leaving is that I am currently trying to obtain a visa for a foreign country but I’ll only have a definite answer in a few weeks… If I do obtain the visa, then we’ll have to move by the end of the year at latest.

Of course, there is an element of risk. If I do not obtain the visa, which is perfectly possible, I’ll have to get a new job in Mauritius. To be frank, I’ve not started searching yet.

Some people have been telling me that I should have kept my job as lecturer and then leave impromptu. I can’t do this because I don’t want to abandon my students in the middle of an academic year.

On being a lecturer

Being a lecturer is fantastic.

I love sharing what (little) I know to receptive students. I love having to always learn new things to keep the students awake. I love browsing and stumbling upon something that I immediately want to blog on and share with my students the next day. And I love having students who know what a university is and understand that they need to work hard to pass.

Another positive is that I also have a bunch of colleagues who share (more or less) my philosophy on teaching and having fun and we have managed to work on some cool projects during the past three years.

Of course, there are also some things I don’t like at the university like the lack of resources, the enormous workload imposed on us as compared to other universities and the pathetic Internet connection available.

But the one thing that bothers me most is the lack of passion and/or creativity and/or intelligence shown by some people. I guess outsiders may find this situation funny but I can tell you it’s really tough… Sometimes, you feel like having spent the whole day in a parallel universe where things look familiar but where few things happen as logic would dictate.

Some background

I come from a family of teachers. I would say that 75% of my family has done or is still doing some teaching either at secondary or tertiary level. Since I was a kid, my house was always filled with books and people willing (when they were not mad at me!) to explain things to me. My parents bought a set of encyclopedia when I was a kid and my favorite pass-time was to pick one of the books and spend an hour reading some articles more or less chosen at random. As a matter of fact, this is what I do now when I have some spare time except that I do it using my mobile phone and Wikipedia. (PS to my students: this is how you become knowledgeable.)

I was extremely good in school as I intuitively knew how to study and cruised. I obtained a scholarship to France where I studied for five years. And there too, I had no big problems being top until Christina and I realized that there were more important things in life as (only) being first in class…

I always felt that I was born to teach. I love to communicate. And share. Hence this blog I think (by the way, I wonder how people can manage in 2008 without blogging?!?)

When I returned to Mauritius in 1998, I started working as a lecturer at the Mauritius Chamber of Commerce & Industry for about six years and then joined the University of Mauritius where I have been working for the past three and a half years.

Awesome!

People who know me personally know I don’t like false modesty at all. So I am going to be honest and say that, for the past ten years, I have been an awesome, chill, cool, fun, exciting and daring teacher! Of course, I didn’t come up with those adjectives myself. Rather, they are what many of my students have told me over the past ten years. To be honest, some students have also told me that I am too elitist and too severe in marking (and not at all tolerant vis-à -vis stupid people.)

But I have to make something clear: I did not become awesome, chill, cool, fun, exciting and daring just like that. I spent days and days and nights and nights learning and practicing Computer Science as well as I could and find ways to restitute my knowledge in such a way that students could make sense of it all without falling asleep. Sometimes I felt so drained, at 2:00 in the morning after having uploaded a lecture I had just prepared, that I couldn’t sleep. But even so, at 8:30 the next morning, I was in my class doing my best to be a Jerry Lewis (lite) / Albert Einstein (lite) hybrid. And my students loved it. Me too.

All in all, I have loved being a lecturer at the University of Mauritius.

Big thanks to all my friends there. And lots of thanks to my students with whom I have spent so many hours of intense intellectualism and pleasure :-)