Noulakaz

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

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Football is back!!!

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Tomorrow, the Premier League starts again. According to a majority of football connoisseurs, Chelsea is going to be the champions again, followed by Arsenal and most probably Manchester City and Manchester United. Of course, being a Liverpool FC supporter, I know, deep in my heart, that the football connoisseurs are wrong and that my team will be among the top four and will win at least one cup this year.

Last year, Liverpool played very badly, with a damaged morale caused by the departure of Luis Suarez and the multiple injuries suffered by Daniel Sturridge, and with Steven Gerrard losing his influence in midfield. The 6-1 defeat courtesy of Stoke was a much needed reminder that drastic measures needed to be taken.

Fast forward to today and Liverpool has been completely revamped with the arrivals of Adam Bogdan, Joe Gomez, Nathaniel Clyne, James Milner, Roberto Firmino, Danny Ings and Christian Benteke. Among these players, at least four of them (Clyne, Milner, Firmino and Benteke) are starters. The first match of Liverpool will be against the mighty Stoke (again!) and it’s pretty obvious that the score will not be 6-1 for them at the end of the match…

Fantasy football

I would have loved to be a football manager. But (the real) Liverpool FC doesn’t seem to be looking for someone of my caliber… Anyway, the next best thing is to become an armchair fantasy football manager. The last time I did that was about five years ago. This year, out of the blue, I have chosen to participate in the official Premier League Fantasy Football competition.

I have just finished choosing the 15 players who are in my team. Mind you, this is tough as your budget is limited to £100 million and you cannot choose more than three players from one team. Here is my selection:

  • GK: Courtois (Chelsea)
  • GK: Schmeichel (Leicester)
  • DF: Clyne (Liverpool)
  • DF: Terry (Chelsea)
  • DF: Ward (Crystal Palace)
  • DF: Kelly (Crystal Palace)
  • DF: Simpson (Leicester)
  • MF: Depay (Manchester United)
  • MF: Coutinho (Liverpool)
  • MF: Hazard (Chelsea)
  • MF: Schneiderlin (Manchester United)
  • MF: Westwood (Aston Villa)
  • FW: Benteke (Liverpool)
  • FW: Aguero (Manchester City)
  • FW: Agbonlahor (Aston Villa)

Not bad at all, isn’t it? With this bunch, I hope to win something at the end of the season.

In any case, I’ll have a lot of fun together with Christina, my assistant, and my two coaches, Anya and Kyan :-)

My nomination as Chairperson of the ICT Advisory Council

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On Friday 6 March, the Government announced my nomination as Chairperson of the ICT Advisory Council. As specified in Part VII of the ICT Act 2001:

  • The Information and Communication Technologies Advisory Council consists of ten members including the Chairperson,
  • The Council shall advise the Minister of Technology, Communication and Innovation, Hon. Pravind Jugnauth, on the promotion of the interests of consumers, purchasers and other users concerning IT services, equipment and effect of any tariff policy in Mauritius,
  • The Council shall also advise the Minister on research opportunities in ICT, the adoption of new technologies as well as the improvement of existing services.

ICT is an enabler: it allows people to do things that they couldn’t do before. During the past few decades, ICT has revolutionised the world. But this is nothing compared to what is going to happen next…

As you can see, the Council has a broad mandate and I am looking forward to contribute to make Mauritius better through the proper use of ICT in all fields.

To be complete, it should be noted that the ICT Advisory Council is distinct from the ICT Authority (ICTA). In a certain way, the ICTA looks at the present while the ICT Advisory Council looks at the future.

I would like to thank all of you who have sent me words of encouragement. My apologies for not being able to reply to every single one.

Using jigdo to rebuild a Linux ISO image

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A few years ago, Internet was very slow in Mauritius (and some will argue that this is still the case…) Downloading a Linux DVD (or, more precisely, an ISO image) took ages.

Now the Internet is way quicker but downloading a 4Gb ISO image still takes a long time.

A few years ago, a Debian guy invented Jigdo, a tool which I’ve been using for some time now to only download the few files I don’t have when a new Linux release is made and reconstruct the ISO locally. The steps to follow are documented in this post but are basically:

(1) Download the full ISO on a server where Internet is very quick (I do that on a VPS I have in the middle of the Silicon Valley where I routinely get 250Mbit/s). Let’s call the ISO image Centos-Linux-6.6.iso

(2) Use jigdo to create a .jigdo and a .template set of files. Before that it is important to mount the ISO on the distant server so that the individual files in the ISO can be accessed directly by jigdo. I generally do:

mkdir Centos-Linux-6.6

mount -t iso9660 -o loop Centos-Linux-6.6.iso Centos-Linux-6.6

jigdo-file mt -i Centos-Linux-6.6.iso -j Centos-Linux-6.6.jigdo -t Centos-Linux-6.6.template Centos-Linux-6.6/

(3) On completion, Centos-Linux-6.6.jigdo and Centos-Linux-6.6.template (which are generally small) need to be downloaded locally.

(4) The final step is to reconstruct the ISO locally. This is done by:

jigdo-lite Centos-Linux-6.6.jigdo

jigdo-lite will prompt for folder names with existing content. For example, when I used jigdo yesterday to reconstruct the latest Centos 6.6 ISO image, I already had a Centos 6.4 DVD and all the updates released since. I only had to point jigdo-lite to these existing folders and, voilà, in a few minutes I had the latest Centos 6.6 ISO image ready.

To be complete, jigdo-lite complained that one file was missing (python-paste-script-1.7.3-5.el6_3.noarch.rpm) which I had to download manually. It was just a small file so no big deal.

All in all, jigdo, even if the software is now in maintenance mode, is still a lifesaver for me. I hope it becomes one for you too.

Have fun ;-)