2007 is over, and 2008 is now on scene. It's also my first blog post for 2008, and I will use this post as MBB Theme of the Week #5: Most Promising 2008 Event. Here goes, and a long one at that!

What I hope will happen in 2008 is this: Our Mauritian Internet (read: outdated) gets FASTER! Every Mauritian Internet user's dream! Or that we do get FTTH.
Yes yes! I know. I'm sure (if you are Mauritian), you will say that whatever connection you have, "IT'S SLOWWWWW!!! ARGHH!". Right! Mine's like that too. However, before we start blaming ISPs and other people, we need to consider that the number of Internet users in Mauritius is low (less than 100k) and they have to work on tight resources. Ok, maybe not so tight, seeing the profits some companies are making.

But that's not the point today. I'm not complaining about services being offered, be it ADSL, MyT, MTML's 144Kbps Dial-Up, DCL's packages, Nomad or Emtel's wireless. What I'd say is that, they are all deprecated, save maybe for Emtel's newest offer.

Come'on folks, many of us still have 56K dial-up. This thing is ridiculously slow, making things like "Youtube" virtually impossible to use. Online gaming on dial-up is almost a myth. Online apps? Forget it! This thing called dial-up, this "pay-per-use/minute" service is only good for people that only browse for around 20 mins a day to check their mail. Who does that nowadays? Even the busiest of people, or the most basic computer-illiterate will try to access some video site at least once to check something, or listen to music.
Multimedia is everywhere on the Internets nowadays! Flash animations, Flash videos (youtube, metacafe, dailyvideo and the countless others), music and other streaming content are flooding websites across the globe. The famous Hi5 is overflowing with multimedia content. Try browsing any female's profile with dial-up and see the results. Useless. Downloading and interactive content are non-existent in the dial-up world.

(Unless you make use of it for specific purposes like VPN. Those COULD justify it, although much better solutions exist.)


I excluded MTML's 144Kbps dial-up above. It's worth considering if you are a light user, since it's pay-per-usage. However, it offers fairly decent speeds (16KBps down) considering it's price, and it being wireless. Do not think you'll be downloading massive files with this, unless you want your bills going through the roof! It's wireless btw (portable!). Pretty cool! If only it was unlimited usage...

Next target: ADSL. This service is considered to be "fast" by many Mauritians. We all desire that golden 128K ADSL when we are stuck with 56Kbps dial-up. When we have 128K, we want 512K, and then we want 1Mbps, but then we can't get it since it's priced at a whooping Rs.5990+VAT. Unless your daddy is Bill Gates or nicknamed "Deep-Pockets", I doubt you'll be taking it. With oldish ADSL, you will be stuck with speeds like 14KBps and 55KBps. Ok, 55KBps is a pretty big number, but it's slow. Trust me. You'll see why.
ADSL is fairly fast, I admit. Have you ever tried using ANY Internet connection in Mauritius during the day? Whatever ISP, whatever connection, it's awfully slow! I saw my 512K going like 3-10KBps during the day, instead of its top 55KBps. I can agree that during the day, businesses are booming and are given bandwidth priority. But come'on! That's less than 1/4 of what I should get! I still pay full-price btw!
MyT is another interesting service. It's a combined Internet-Video-Telephony package. It's cool actually, giving you 256K for the price of 128K. I dunno why people don't like it. Maybe because of the tons of "MyT is SLOWWW!" articles I see popping everywhere from time to time. I haven't tested it personally, so I cannot say. My friends who do have it say it's slow. Go ask them. :P
Next we have the wireless ones, that is Nomad and Emtel's packages. I've tested none of them, so I can't accurately describe how they are. I know loads of people using Nomad who keep complaining about slowness and loss of connection. I think it's normal, considering it's wireless. The connection can easy be affected by weather conditions, and Mauritius is not the flattest of countries. Mountains create shadow-zones. I've got nothing against Nomad. I never used it, though was very tempted for a time. But whenever I see Nomad mentioned, I tend to see other people using the word "slow".Go figure if it's true or not. I still give them a thumbs up for being MT's main competitor regarding Internet. It's not easy to compete against a big boy like MT, but seriously, the people at Nomad need to be applauded.


Emtel recently launched a new wireless Internet package. I haven't read any reviews of it yet, nor have heard anybody mentioning it. IMHO, it's more suited for business-people who are constantly on the move, rather than home users. The price of its "modem" should also be considered. Priced at Rs.6000+, I doubt it'd find many home users.

Long, huh? You still with me? Good! :P Now comes the good part.

I mentioned that Mauritian Internet is outdated. Yes it is. Dial-up and ADSL are things of the past. Nowadays, people talk in terms of VDSL, ADSL 2, cable, combined packages and FTTH. Oh the greatness! What does this mean? Megabit speeds, baby! In excess of 1Mbps usually! 2Mbps, 8Mbps, 16Mbps, 24Mbps! That's the speeds we are talking about! FTTH? 50+ Mbps! That's the beginning! Comcast wants to offer 150Mbps through channel-bonding! Universities abroad have GIGABIT speeds!

A rapid check here shows a very interesting thing: you can get 8Mbps at sub-10 pounds prices! This means 8Mbps at less than Rs.1000, while you pay Rs.5990+ for 1Mbps. You pay around 6 times more, for 8 times less speed. See any logic in this? I don't. Unless I consider that UK has many more Internet users than Mauritius! Feast your eyes on these Speeds/Price comparisons!

With 512K at max speed (55K or so in Mauritius), you can download a 5MB audio clip in around 2 minutes. If you had 1Mbps (priced at Rs.5990 - omphh!), you could download that same clip in under 45 seconds. If you had 8Mbps or more? It'd take less than 10 secs. More? It'd be instantaneous. That's the importance of speed. If you wanna time it yourself, here. Now we are talking about streaming HD (High Definition) content off Internet? Forget it if you have less-than-megabit speeds.

This is what I'd call a decent Internet connection, one that does not need to buffer my youtube videos every second or so, that does not take ages (~1hr at max speed, but I once waited almost 7hrs for 100Mbps to download - at 10KBps speeds) to download a 100Mb file and that doesn't lag my online gaming sessions. This is the type of connection required if you want to participate in the web 2.0 revolution, the social and multimedia Internet. Alright, you don't need 24Mbps to do most things, but a 2Mbps priced at less than Rs.1000 does help! Specially considering that 512Kbps (1/4 of 2Mbps, and 16x less than 8Mbps) is priced at Rs.1360+VAT.

Still need proof? Check the pictures below. Click for a larger version. They show the average price/megabit in other countries.


Mauritius is being promoted as a Cyber Island, and temping major IT players to come and invest in Mauritius and do business and employ our people. I seriously doubt that any major company will come if they see the crappy Internet we have here. No seriously! Would you come to a small island, almost lost in the Indian Ocean? Maybe. To invest? Maybe. Knowing it only offers max. 1Mbps or 2Mbps? Overpriced? You are kidding! They won't! The only folks that will come are call centres. They have already flocked in, and are doing a good job soaking in the unemployed.

Thousands of call centres do not make a cyber island. Programming companies do. Data centres do. Specialized services do. Development and research companies do. And I doubt any of those would come knowing the state of our Internet infrastructure. We need to realise that our Internet connection service is what links us to the real world out there. It's like a highway that leads to development. Unfortunately, the highway looks like the small lane that my dog dug near the mango tree! It's nothing! We need something big! Like this:


Oh we had hopes! Oh yes we did! When? When UCL said they'd be bringing FTTH in Mauritius. When the rumor said that MTML would be offering high-speed, uncapped Internet services at Rs.500. Whenever there is a decrease in prices. All these boosted our hopes. For a time. Price decreases are nice. They make Internet available to the people, but in no way help existing power users, who hunger to surf on the newer and bigger waves of the Internet. It's time to change. It's time ISPs and the government decides to act. I knowwwww! "We don't have enough Internet users." "The investment will not be justified." bla bla bla!

What's that? If there are 5 people living in a village, does this mean that CWA will not put pipelining there, justified by "there are not enough water users there"? Same reasoning! Ok, water is a life necessity. Internet is rapidly becoming one. We are more and more connected, and it's already very apparent.
I am adding this section following a comment from Carrotmadman6, reminding me of EASSy (Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System) cable. Will this be the ultimate solution to our oldish Internet services? Maybe, maybe not. I've not heard about Eassy for almost 3 years now. Governments have apparently approved of the project, but so far, nothing new has emerged. More information about EASSy can be found here. Note: the map doesn't show the cable connected to Mauritius, since this addition is quite recent and the map is not up-to-date. It's here to give a general idea. EASSy is in red.


For now, we only have 2 lonely Cyber Towers in Ebene. The Two Towers only cannot grant us the name. We need to act, then we can call ourselves a Cyber Island. For now? Let's be humble and call us: Prehistoric Internet Services Island.

Hello reader! 2007 is about to end, and MBB wanted a theme (Theme #4) about the end, so here is my contribution. Thought it might be a good idea to review the year from my point of view, and talk about things that marked this interesting year, alas with a bloody ending.

For me, 2007 started on a good tune, with my HSC coming to an end, and results being announced. Not bad actually, those Aaa and BB. I kinda sux in Maths and Physics sooo.. :/

Nothing much after that. The long months of holidays, doing nothing, unless spending 12+ hrs per day on a computer can be considered to be an "activity". I think my mom didn't consider it to be, so I was "motivated" to go for N+ and S+ courses. Was nice, specially after some friends and myself accidentally wrecked havoc there! I think I'm officially banned from bringing a laptop now! :( Those were nice. Very nice. The teacher, Ikhlass was fun! Miss those times! Sorely miss them. :(

After that? Uni! That was the best! A totally new experience for me, and totally worth it. New friends, new faces, new poke victims, new things to learn. Niiiceee! The only thing I complain about is that I have too much free time during the day. Why can't all the courses be crammed in morning, leaving afternoon free? This remains to be answered.

Basically, this was my year. Nothing so great after all. Now, how did the world change in 2007? If I could resume it all in one idea, I'd say that 2007 was just a bloody year. Call me a pessimist or negative person, but it was the truth. Want proofs?

Virginia Tech Massacre. Iraq war. Assination of Mrs. Benazir Bhutto. Oh yes, it has been a bloody year for most of it. War. Bloodshed. Terrorism. Violence. Suicide-bomber. Those might be the most used words in the news in 2007 IMHO. The pictures down can only remind us of the violence we came to face in 2007. A bloody year indeed.

I woke up yesterday, and got really irritated at Kubuntu. I suddenly hated its bulkiness, its looks, its bugs and all. I wanted something minimalistic. I wanted GNOME. Dunno why. It was just an urge. I checked out Ubuntu Gutsy. After a while, I got a bit tired of anything *buntu-related. I wanted something new, and I required simplicity. I wanted things to work out of the box. After some checking, I found a new distro that is quickly rising to fame. Linux Mint. I wanted to try it out, the distro that claims "with freedom came elegance". Nice slogan. So here's my nooby review of Linux Mint. I got Linux Mint 4.0: Daryna.

Linux Mint is essentially based on Ubuntu, running kernel 2.6.22-14, and GNOME as interface.

~700MB later, I had my new distro ready. I booted into it via LiveCD. Yikes! Gripes. Dunno why, but it didn't boot at first. It just showed me a nice black wallpaper, and my cursor. GNOME was not starting. Reboot! Again, but this time, I saw the GNOME bottom panel, but blank, and no icons! WTF! REBOOT! Poof! This time, for a weird reason, everything loaded fine, and I got my desktop and all icons and all. Strange...

After this rough start, I wanted to try it out, to see if it lives up to its name. At first sight, I really really liked its minimalism. No longer did I have to see a large KDE panel at the bottom. The sleek GNOME panel was awesome. The wallpaper, and the default theme gave an incredible look.

From the menu, I could see a whole bunch of applications already installed, most notably Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, GIMP, Totem, Mplayer, Amarok, Open-Office 2.3 and Serpentine. All the awesomeness of Linux already there! These are really useful, and I didn't have to install those. Overall, I had what I needed out-of-the-box.

Regarding drivers, I was amazed. My WiFi (Intel Pro Wireless 4965) worked directly, prompting me for ESSID and the other usual settings, and minutes later, I was on Google. Same for my graphics driver (Intel GMA 965), giving me my 1280x800 native resolution. Sweet!

What really amazed me in Mint was its support for formats. Most audio I threw at it worked, directly out-of-the-box! Same goes for video. I tried mp3, avi, mov, rmvb, flv and wma. Anything I tried, Mint ran them all! This is superbly great! I had a whole portable media player system directly from LiveCD. Flash plugin was also installed by default! Here I come, Youtube!


So much awesomeness prompted me to rapidly discard my bulky and buggy Kubuntu Gutsy install, to be replaced by Mint.

Install went on smoothly, with the usual questions of language, keyboard, timezone, partitioning and all. 15 minutes later, I had Mint installed and running fine.

File browsing is handled by the quite heavy Nautilus, but I didn't complain. I might try Thunar some time later.


What I want to say is that Linux Mint is really great for users that want a simple and clean system, that is fast and efficient, and that works without hours of configuration. Judging from what it offers, I confidently say that I'm moving away from Ubuntu, towards Mint. It's that good, and I tend to be very exigent. Even then, it manages to satisfy me very well. I didn't have to set permissions for my File Browser to run. I didn't have to ndiswrapper anything (note that there is a GUI front-end to ndiswrapper in Mint - useful for beginners), and did not have to install anything to get an almost complete system. My devices were all recognized out of the box, and I can say my sound is better on Mint than on Vista! I hear bass more clearly now. Dunno why.

In fact, till now, I only installed gkshutdown - to shut my pc automatically at desired times, and the updates being offered. Nothing else was required till now.

Aside from all this goodness, there is also a control centre, sort of control panel where you can do all your system setting changes and customization. It's pretty useful if you want to tinker with loads of settings.

Note that for eye-candy lovers, Compiz is already installed and usable. Unfortunately, I am unable to use it due to issues with the GMA 965. Maybe later, when the issues are resolved. I've seen guides to make it work, but I'm not in the mood to be downloading Xserver packages and all. Maybe later..

Mint is a complete Linux system, with added support for media formats, already installed goodies and apps. It also has the generic features of linux, like workspaces, terminal and everything you might expect to see in any decent distro. And it has this with GNOME: Custom panels. This is extremely useful.


To conclude, I'm heartily recommending Mint to anybody who wants a simple and sleek Linux distro that works. It easily handled all my media, detected and ran all my devices and has all the apps that I commonly use. What more can I ask? Apart from the initial booting problems of LiveCD, I have no complaints. I think that after loads of searching, I finally found my soulmate distro. For now.. :p

Anyways, whatever I say here might seem great, or bland, depends on you. The best way to get to know Mint is to go download it and give it a try. Even if you don't install, check out the LiveCD. I can say it's one of the most usable ones out there.

Btw, this also qualifies for Theme #3 of ThemBB Weekly Themes! This is my review of Linux Mint.

As always, comments appreciated! Thanks for reading.

MBB launched the Theme of the Week, or the MTW. This week, we'll be talking about online communities, so here's my post. :P

Online communities. That's an interesting word. First I'd like to define the web as we know it today. Simply put, it's a network of computers, connected together that is. Now what is a community? People connected in some way to other people. See the similarity? By the very basic definition of web, we know that it will, at some point, involve the inter-connection of people, via the inter-connection of machines. The web has brought far-flung people together, people who can now chat, talk, view and interact with each other as if they were mere metres away. This is the marvel of the web, and of online communities.

I think the oldest online communities I know of would be newsgroups, particularly those of Usenet. Imho, these have always been around. Should be a by-product of the big-bang or something. Com'on! Who hasn't heard of Usenet at least once? If no, it's really time you get to Wikipedia and Google Groups! NOW! Newsgroups are interesting places where people used to share "news" and bits of discussion. In some ways, they are the ancestors of our "forums" of today. These were regrouping people who shared the same ideas and passions, and formed the first communities.

Gradually, people wanted a more "real-time" way of interacting. With this came IRC, Internet Relay Chat. This is again, another very popular community on the web. Although it's not really a community by definitions, many IRC rooms have their own subculture, their own jargon and their own lifestyle if you want. They are like small worlds of their own. To me, these look like communities too. IRC is still very much alive today, and widely used. There are rooms for almost everything: books, food, games, general, and as was to be expected, p()rn.

Over the years, Usenet evolved into forums. MBB has its own forums, so do many many other sites. They allow users to post messages, and read other's message on a particular topic. Forums usually have many topics in many boards. In fact, forums can be said to be a very common way of community-building today. You want an example? Assume you have a passion for stamps. Build a site for stamps, create a forum, and in no time, you'll have other people sharing the passion joining your forum. That or you might be over-run by p0rn-posting spambots.

Nowadays, we are seeing the Web 2.0 revolution, that is the migration of "commercial" web into "social" web. And whenever you see social, you should also be seeing "community". Web 2.0 brought its whole lot of new communities with it. With the first waves came Del.icio.us, the well-known social-bookmarking site, and Flickr, the social-photo sharing site. As I said, wherever you see social, there are communities. Del.icio.us is a community for people to share links, Flickr is for sharing pictures. DeviantArt (artists' community) rode into 2.0 too, and hasn't stop growing till then. Our small cute art Deviant is now a frickin big huge mammoth Mega Deviant with millions of users. Other well-known communities would be Digg where people share news, same for Fark and many others. The list would be long and un-ending. All these sites are online communities. And this goes without mentioning blogs, which again are small communities upon themselves, evolving through posts and commentors!

Other kinds of communities now are the file-sharers community, namely via Napster, Imesh, ex-Kazaa, ex-WinMX and others. These have a life and moral of their own, and are not afraid to defy the big boys to continue their community. These are Peer-to-Peer networks, and are like Hydras. Cut one head, 2 pops out. Here it'd be bring down one network, 734^87389 others come up!! I won't elaborate here since it's a subject upon itself.

Now another kind of community is coming to the scene. Virtual lives. Ok, we are not yet into Minority Report-like life where humans have nearly merged with machines, nor into Ghost in the Shell, where "humans" are technically machines and can connect to networks with their (cyber) brains, but we are not far from that. By virtual lives, I mean that people have alter-egos on the internet that differ from their real lives personality. Taking myself as example, I am not called Inf in real life... Ok, my friends DO call me Inf in real-life too and I have nearly the same personality online and offline, a geek!

Facebook, Hi5 (Mauritians' favourites?) Orkut, MySpace, Bebo.. bla bla bla. Name it. There are tons and tons of such communities where people meet people. Like a dating site, but less dating, more friendship. Or so they say. In real life, I can be a classy company CEO, but my Facebook profile might not reflect it. Instead, it may reflect my online alter-ego who could be a famous rockstar, a vision of myself that people in my company might not know. A more vivid example is Second Life, which is a 3D virtual world where people live alternate lives. They build houses, buy things (with real cash, not virtual!) and interact with others. Again, it's just an avatar, and may not totally reflect their real self, or it might as well reflect it. All depends on how the person wants the community to see him or her. I want to point out that since Second Life exists, and as per Rule 34 of Internet, a p()rn version also exists, for the curious! :D

As you can see, just as the web evolved, so did the communities. They grew bigger, have more features, have more users, and are more functional. And the best thing is, they keep evolving to match the new eras. This is what's fun about the Internet in general: it evolves.

I personally think that as time passes, people will become more and more interconnected. It's the nature of the human race to be inter-connected, since humans are often defined as "social animals" that cannot live solitary lives for long. And I think that the Internet too will evolve to match the desires of its creators: to be more connected. We are already seeing this trend today. Internet shifted from computer-only to mobiles, and other devices, and more recently, to Portable Media Players and other devices like freezers. It's not unexpected that in the near future, we would merge with machines and maybe as in Ghost in the Shell, access the global network just through our brains via implants. We will be able to participate in our communities, just as if we'd do in real-life, through immersion. I think this would really mean "be part of the community" then! :P