Noulakaz

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

Happy 13th birthday to us!

By 24 Comments

Time flies!

Today Christina and I are celebrating our 13th year together. We met on 11 September 1994 at the university of Réunion Island. I was in 2nd year studying Sciences et Structures de la Matière (aka Maths and Physics) and Christina was starting her first year in Lettres Modernes.

This photo was taken on my 21st birthday in a restaurant in Saint-Denis on the 25th of September 1994.

After about one year, we moved to Lyon in France where I finished my studies in Computer Science while she did a Masters in Information and Communications.

Back to Mauritius

We returned to Mauritius in 1998 and started working in January 1999. We managed to save a little bit of money and we got married in January 2000.

By that time, Christina was already working at the University of Mauritius while I was working at the Mauritius Chamber of Commerce & Industry.

Anya was born in 2002 shortly followed by Kyan in 2004. I joined the University of Mauritius shortly after.

Today, Anya is 5 years old and she is going to start primary school in a few months. Kyan is a strong 3 years old boy.

Christina and I feel exactly the same as we felt in 1994. We might be a little older physically but we have not changed a lot in our heads… That’s cool!

What next?

Great things! Stay tuned :-)

My opinion on my Nokia 6288 cellphone

By 13 Comments

Last month, I bought a Nokia 6288 cellphone in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Here are its main features:

  • High gloss black painted surfaces
  • Slide concept
  • High-quality video recording and playback
  • Bright QVGA 262,144 color display
  • Two integrated cameras: Back side 2 megapixel camera with flash and front side VGA camera for video calling
  • Two-way video call capability for face-to-face communication
  • Video ringtones
  • 512MB miniSD memory for saving those special moments
  • High-speed connections with 3G and EDGE

The phone is a Series 40 3rd Edition phone. So nothing too fancy. But it’s functional and quick to use. It feels a little fragile though and that’s why I always carry it in a pouch that Christina gave me.

The 2 megapixel is woeful at night but good (but not excellent) in bright light. I’ve managed to capture some nice photos of the family and I’ve even put them on Flickr! In fact, it’s great to always have a decent camera handy.

 

Connectivity

The cellphone comes with a USB cable and even though I managed to make it work with my Macbook once, it has stopped working since. But I don’t care as Bluetooth works great. I use the great PhoneDirector application to copy data to and from the cellphone. And iSync also works great for synchronizing the address book after this simple hack.

Conclusion

My Nokia 6288 is a good cellphone. Granted, it’s camera is not great. And it seems to be fragile. But you can use it to make calls (and this is important on a phone). And it’s user interface is snappy.

I’ll use it until I become rich enough to buy an Apple iPhone :-)

An essential update

For some unknown reason, the phone does not allow Java applications to access the web and this is a pain in the ass if you want to use GMail or Opera for example.

I finally found the solution today!

Follow the steps and everything will be OK. The only slight modification I had to do was to use “WEB” instead of “Cingular WEB” as this is what Emtel calls it.

Let’s all use the OpenDocument Format

By 10 Comments

From Wikipedia:

“The OpenDocument format (ODF, ISO/IEC 26300, full name: OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications) is a file format for electronic office documents, such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations, databases and word processing documents (e.g.: memos, reports, letters).

The standard was developed by a technical committee of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium and based upon the XML format originally created and implemented by the OpenOffice.org office suite. As well as an OASIS Standard, it is a published ISO and IEC International Standard, ISO/IEC 26300:2006“

There is even an ODF plugin for Microsoft Office.

In a perfect world, everyone would have been delighted to have a common file format for office applications. No more compatibility problems. No more portability problems. And no more single vendor lock-in.

Except Microsoft (of course).

Bill and friends submitted their own file format (devilishly called Office Open XML (OOXML) to confuse the layman) to ISO and, on the 4th of September 2007, OOXML was rejected by the ISO members:

“A ballot on whether to publish the draft standard ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML file formats, as an International Standard by ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) has not achieved the required number of votes for approval.”

Here are the detailed results per country. Note that 2/3 of votes are required for something to become an ISO standard and OOXML had substantially less.

Here are the countries which voted against Microsoft’s proposal:

Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, France, India, Iran, Ireland, Japan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand and the United Kingdom.

Beautiful! I guess Microsoft lobbied a lot but representatives of those countries rightly felt that they couldn’t tie themselves to one commercial company for ever. And if you look closely, you’ll see that we are talking about major major countries here.

These countries abstained i.e. they neither voted against nor voted for (Abstentions are counted as negative votes because the way the ballot is organized):

Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, Finland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Slovenia, Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Viet Nam and Zimbabwe.

Notice Mauritius??? I am so proud that the intense lobbying didn’t work on us!

I believe a team of CS and IT guys and girls should start working on advocating ODF in Mauritius and about the best way to deploy the required software infrastructure so that the documents we all create (i.e. the wealth we generate day-in day-out) does not become unreadable in 10 years.

Let’s start changing our world for the better :-)