The president has been informed through confidential sources that a local newspaper (lexpress) intends to publish an article in their magazine by the end of this month about “blogs de femmes”.

While guys tend to enjoy more technical stuff (from my personal observation), girls enjoy keeping diaries. As a result, before the advent of Web logging (shortened to blogging some time afterwards), guys were designing their own personal web pages that required atleast some html knowledge while the girls found it easier to write in paper-based diaries and were thus able to concentrate more on the contents.
As a result, the technies were able to reach a wider audience with poor quality content while the better quality ones were restricted to personal girls’ diaries locked in a drawer…

Blogs changed that! Web-based applications such as WordPress’s and Blogger’s platforms empowered people with even zero html knowledge to publish content online with pictures as easily as preparing an article in a word editor on your computer. And thus, we find both guyz and gurlz on equal footage, able to concentrate on high quality content while reaching a worldwide audience.

In Mauritius, even with about 100 blogs, a sizeable number of local bloggers are girls, and their writings are very much appreciated; I will go on to say that they simply write better than their male counter-parts. But no worries guyz, you are still ahead on topics related to technology, and news related post since girls tend to write about girlish topics, poems and romantic stuffs :p

Well, let’s move to the motivation of this post itself: The female blogger to be featured in lexpress’ magazine this month:
I have the pleasure to present to you : Miss Aniisah whose blog url is: http://aniisah.wordpress.com and guess what, her blog turned 2 years old yesterday 8th of June.
An extract of her first post :

Well here I am!!! Finally I should say. It has taken me long enough. The main reason I wanted to have a blog is not to lose the habit of writing. Back to college years, I used to write an average of four essays per week! Now that I am at the University…read more

In the article she will be speaking about her motivations behind blogging, what she usually talks about in her blog post and the main purpose of her blog itself. So if you want to read her answer, let’s wait for the magazine to come out now

A small note to conclude: I have not been asked to advertise this event by anyone. I have done so simply because Aniisah is a good friend of mine and as fellow bloggers we should be proud that the mauritian blogosphere is becoming known! Congratulations anii and happy birthday to your blog!

Greetingz!

Exams and coursework are now over. Discussed with my supervisor for the first time about the dissertation and he was happy with the topic I proposed: Autoblogging.

Autoblogging is all about aggregating data from sensors and other devices such as smartphones, car navigation systems…etc, analyse these data and present them in the form of blog posts.

The main reason behind this topic is: I like to blog but I feel lazy am too busy to blog. Thus my idea is to have blog posts produced automatically on my behalf, and probably I will add only a few personalised words in them   Although it will not be possible to come up with a system that can blog about everything yet (mainly because we dont have many intelligent home appliances and devices) but atleast it will be a first brick t0wards that vision of mine

Feedback and advice are as usual, very much appreciated

Presidentially yours,
Roushdat.

Scale of justice

We have often heard women shouting for equality. Unfortunately many misunderstand or confuse equality with justice. While women and men are not the same physically and mentally that in no way means one should have his/her  rights restrained.

For those who believe women and men are equals, consider:

• Can a man give birth to a baby and breastfeed him (naturally) ?
• Why most reputable scholars are men ?
• Is it not a fact that in general men are stronger physically and women are more emotional ?

Men and Women complement each other and as a result should enjoy what is due to them. Instead of fighting of equal rights on everything, there are several aspects that require justice  rather than blindly applying equality.

And of course there are some who are homosexuals: These are simply considered the abnormal of the society by most people and of course…they should have justice that they deserve as well, definitely not equal rights.

And no…men and women are obviously not equal…except for those who do not understand the meaning of  “equal” !

Images from wikipedia.org ( modified )

Ok…i know there are many other people as well, but this blog post was validated to be published the day I saw the google-car taking pictures while i was waiting for uni-link bus

The first picture is me wearing the same tshirt as the day of google took my pic :p

Here’s the link: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?t=h&hl=en&ie=UTF8&layer=c&cbll=50.922386,-1.405096&panoid=sIzqrkNu9VWwfs0UxjzM_A&cbp=12,351.01793401115145,,0,15.900000000000015&ll=50.922285,-1.40507&spn=0,359.980688&z=16

Greetingz all! My codes for processing mauritian blogs and their inter-links is now ready! The next step will be to feed in a list of mauritian blogs. Selven and I have compiled a preliminary list through google docs and I have posted a copy below. If your blog or friends’ blogs are not listed below, you are welcome to contribute to the list.

Go to google-docs here or send your links as comments to this post. Thanks

Greetingz all. There has been some buzz lately about the launch of a bloggers’ club in Mauritius. This initiative has been on-going for some time now, primarily through the Mauritius Blog Tracker, and also The Mauritius Blog Brethen, both of which had their moments of glory but the light soon dimmed out (not completely). Although the intentions were good, I think the basement was not strong enough (mostly due to the small number of mauritian bloggers) and the timing was not appropriate.

But in the Web arena, things change rapidly, and we now have an ever-growing community of bloggers in the country, coupled with the decreasing cost of broadband, we can confidently expect the number of Mauritian blogs to rise in the near-future.

For the time being, We will be focussing on the links among mauritian blogs, who is linking to who and come up with a graph of the Mauritian blogosphere. With time, we will analyse the morphing of that graph and understand its implication for the mauritian society.

As pre-requisite for this experiment, I will require an up-to-date list of all Mauritian Blogs.  I think Yashvin must be compiling such a list currently. But anyone of you already having a list can mail it to me on roushdat [AT] gmail [DOT] com preferably in the form of a datasheet with 2 columns: Name, URL

Check out Yashvin’s post to learn more about the on-going iniative

After successfully obtaining my BSc from the University of Mauritius (a university which i am proud of being an alumni), with the help of many of you, I managed to get myself a state-sponsored seat at the University of Southampton and I’m currently almost half-way the MSc degree in Web Technology and things are going really well

So I guess now is the time to focus on the next target, the PHD.

There are many reasons why people do PHDs…some think it will get them more money, others think that addind the Dr title in front of your name brings you pride…and most successful PHDs are those that do it because they love to be discovering/improving things.

Personally I will not say that I’m 100% of the last reason given above, let’s say 50%. The remaining 50% is divided among:

1. I DO NOT want to to work under a boss putting loads of pressure on me to complete a development task!
2. I want to be my own boss, manage my own time, and do things that I enjoy doing
3. I want a good life , not a dog’s life. (Waking up early in the morning everyday, go to work, work whole day, get back home late at night thinking about how to resolve a bug, sleep, repeat ->that’s not a life!)
4. The Dr. title is tempting as well huh ->It will look great for the president to be a doctor :p

So I am now hunting for opportunities available for the PHD. Still unsure about the specific fields, but I think I will be quite flexible about that. Have considered the area of Ubiquitous Security. Went to meet Dr. David Argles this afternoon to discuss about it. Seems the major obstacle will be to find a research group that has funding for international students and are willing to accept me onboard. That’s the unfortunate thing when you live in a small country, the government cannot afford to fund  many students for PHD and on top of that, since I have already benefited from a scholarship from the government of Mauritius, I am no longer eligible to apply again.

So as things  currently are, either I will get some research group here willing to fund me or I’ll be back to UoM doing the PHD at home

If you are from a company willing to sponsor my studies (the future president of earth’s studies), don’t hesitate to get in touch, my email adress is roushdat [AT] gmail [DOT] com

As part of the Foundations of Web Science Module, we were tasked to investigate the Web Graph by building up a crawler that goes through a page, extract links, follow these links and loop…and ultimately generate a graph showing each link as a node pointing to other nodes.

One of the minor obstacle we encountered was about dealing with relative links since extracting relative links from a webpage and trying to download the content pointed by that link will lead nowhere since stand-alone, the relative link is not really pointing to anything concrete in the Web.

Lazy as we are…my friend Deyan and I tried search for some c# codes online that can convert that…Couldn’t find it. So we had to code it ourselves and thought about sharing it with other lazy people. All you have to do is to create a library in c#, copy paste the code below, build it. In your project, you can then refer to the .dll file generated for that library.

  /*A humble request, please include these comments if you use this code, part of it or it is helpful to you somehow.This piece of code is free to use, modify and share. Original Authors: Roushdat Elaheebocus & Deyan Karainov, University of Southampton, March 2009. Part of the Web Graph project, Foundations of Web Science. */ using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.IO; using System.Net; using System.Web;  namespace RelToAbsConverter {     public class RelToAbs     {          public string GetAbsoluteUrl(string sourceUrl,string relUrl)         {             int countOfDots = relDotCount(relUrl);             relUrl = relUrl.TrimStart('.');             relUrl = relUrl.TrimStart('/');             return convertRelToAbs(sourceUrl, relUrl, countOfDots);         }          private string convertRelToAbs(string sourceUrl, string relUrl, int countOfDots)         {             WebRequest req = WebRequest.Create(sourceUrl);             Uri uri = req.RequestUri;             int countOfParts = uri.Segments.Count();             string collectedParts = "http://" + uri.Host;             for (int i = 0; i < (countOfParts - countOfDots); i++)             {                 collectedParts += uri.Segments[i];             }             collectedParts += relUrl;             return collectedParts;         }          private int relDotCount(string relUrl)         {             int dotCount = 1;             if (relUrl[0].Equals('.'))             {                 dotCount = 1;                 for (int i = 1; i < 10; i++)                 {                     if (relUrl[i].Equals('.'))                         dotCount++;                     else                         break;                 }             }             return dotCount;         }     } }