Noulakaz

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

Technology

Google Earth on AMD64 Linux

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Google Earth 4.0 has just been released for Linux. If you don’t already know, Google Earth is a fantastic desktop application which allows you to view the whole world using very high-resolution satellite images.

Google Earth works very well in my AMD64 Kubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake Linux even though it is a 32-bits applications which relies on a bunch of 32-bits libraries.

The 32-bits compatibility packages that I’ve installed fortunately provide whatever is needed for Google Earth to work properly. For your information, here are the packages I’ve installed:

ia32-libs
ia32-libs-gtk
ia32-libs-openoffice.org
lib32gcc1
lib32stdc++6
lib32z1

Google Earth is fantastic! Try it (don’t forget to read the docs) and you won’t be disappointed.

The future Mauritian cybercity?

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Can we, Mauritians, hope that one day our Cybercity will become a new Silicon Valley?

Paul Graham thinks that there can only be one Silicon Valley and it can only be in America.

 

And I have to admit that I find him pretty convincing.

Let’s look at the main reasons why our own Cybercity will not become a small version of Silicon Valley according to him:

  • Mauritius does not have rich investors to finance nerds (we have lots of bureaucrats though).
  • A technology hub is not only some buildings.
  • A top university is needed and UoM has still a long way to go.
  • The area does not have any personality and therefore it’s difficult to attract the best.
  • Mauritius is not prepared to wait years and years but, unfortunately, creating a technology hub takes time…

Can we still succeed? I have some doubts.

A guided tour of the Internet circa 1995

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Yesterday, I bought an old second-hand book from the British Council Library for Rs. 20 (less than $1):

A Guided Tour of the Internet
by Christian Crumlish
Published by Sybex in October 1994
ISBN 0782116191

Before you think I am mad, let me tell you why I bought this completely outdated book… IT BRINGS BACK LOTS AND LOTS OF MEMORIES :-)

In fact, I started “using” the Internet when I was in Réunion Island around 1994-1995. At that time, the Internet was very different from what it has evolved to now. The client applications I used were very primitive ; I was transferring files from the U.S. at 40 bytes a second (yep!) and I was overwhelmed!

E-Mail

I only used elm for reading and writing my emails. It was text-only and it ran off a SunOS server and I accessed it mainly from a telnet session on WinNT or from a DEC VT terminal:

There was another text-only mailer at that time called Pine but I didn’t like it a lot (for some very subjective reason I believe). My first graphical email application was Outlook Express (on Win95 I think) then KMail then Evolution and now Mozilla Thunderbird (on Linux of course).

Usenet News

Aha! Usenet News were fantastic at that time. No warez, no porn (or very few :-) ), no kids bragging about their latest mobile phones but only very good quality technical discussions. I used tin:

What you need to realise is that I didn’t care about the ergonomics of the apps I used (even if I tend to think that old is gold in that case – some modern GUI apps are just too complex to use). What was revolutionary was the (mostly) real-time discussion that I could have with someone at the other side of the planet.

Today, of course, I’m tend to read online forums and weblogs more than newsgroups but Google Groups is still handy…

Surfing the Worldwide Web

Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1990:

I hope you all notice that he used a NeXT computer.

In 1994-1995, only a few websites existed and they were mainly run by government, universities and very big companies as confirmed by Netcraft:

I browsed those few sites (and my very first website built using vi and xv and hosted at an URL which does not exist any more…) using lynx which was text-based:

until I moved to Netscape Navigator (which is the ancestor of the rather fantastic Mozilla Firefox):

The world has changed a lot since ;-)

(Images courtesy SlackBook, Netcraft, Internet Watch and some other sites I discovered using Google Images)