1. Great spirits have always been violently oppressed by mediocre minds. – Albert Einstein
2. Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. – Thomas Edison
3. Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. – Thomas Edison
4. You should prefer a good scientist without literary abilities than a literate one without scientific skills. – Leanardo da Vinci
5. Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another; it is the only means – Albert Einstein
6. I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn – Albert Einstein
7. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. – Albert Einstein

Merry Christmas 2008 To you.

Mauritius Daylight patch

This concept of DST was introduced by William Willet in 1905. As he pointed out, DST does not change the length of the day but an opportunity to increase outdoor leisure activities during afternoon sunlight hours.

From a personal perspective, I can say that I am adapting to this situation. I wake up at 6.45 am (which would have been equivalent to 5.45 without DST), which is quite early for me. I just hope that it will remain like this through out the mauritius DST period. For a practical use, I did not change my clock at 2.00 am this morning. I did it just before going to sleep. I was planning to sleep from 23:00 till 07:00, so what was the use for me to wake up in the middle of my sleep only to chnage the time. Maybe that was what help me for the adaptation to that mauritian DST. As soon as I changed the clock by 1 hour, I started to feel sleepy.

There are some practical issues from this mauritius DST. Since mauritius was not using any DST in the past and as such there were no DST rules for mauritius. No rules simply mean no implementation into windows. So we need to manually change the timezone, until microsoft include an update for this, which will be in december 2008. Another issue is the use of satellites television. The programmation is normally delayed by exactly 24 hour or sometimes in live. This would normally be a slight shift in 1 hour, but until the 28 of october. After that they will apply their onw DST and there will be a lag of 2 hours.

The Mauritius Barcamp finally took place on the 20th and 21st of June 2008 at le hochet. Unfortunately I’ve missed the session of Friday but was able to attend the Saturday session. There were about 10 participant for this first session of the barcamp mauritius:

- Jean-François : Developer at Vinivi. Tags : Geek, hobbyist, web 2.0

- Malcom : Technician at Air Mauritius. Tags : hobbyist, bater-bis, Linux

- Julien : Student in marketing. Tags : commercial, web 2.0, game

- Antony : Developer dotnet. Tags : electro, gamer, dotnet

- Vincent : PHP Developer and Blogger. Tags : blogueur, passionne, humoriste

- Annabel :’ secretaire-receptioniste-standardiste’ at TopFM.

- Pascaline from Radio 1.

- Ashesh :Freelance Developer and Graphic designer .

- Georges our host : Director at BM. Tags : expressionweb, retraité, 33 ans

- Pierre : manager of HappyWebAgency. Tags : passionné, amoureux, curieux

We were able to have 3 presentations:

Ubuntu by Malcolm Madelon
Malcolm gave an overview of Ubuntu as well as some applications that came with that version of ubuntu.

Wordpress by Vincent L’Ecluse
I did a presentation on wordpress which was in 2 parts. The first part was with a brief history and features of wordpress. The second part was a live demonstration of installation and configuration on a local server.

OpenID by Pierre Bernard
Pierre did an introduction to OpenID and gave some advantages of using and implementing such systems on various websites.

In this photo: George, Pierre, Jean-François, Me, Malcolm

There was also a short presentation on the association in which Malcolm and I are members, SUD. The journey was rich with discussion and debates about various subjects related or not to the internet and open sources. During the Barcamp, we also had the chance to be involved in a flashmeeting with the Barcamp of Dijon. I was amazed by the video quality of the transmission.

For all those people that have missed the Mauritius Barcamp, you can have a chance to join for the BracampEarth in August (17 – 19). This would be an international event for the commemoration of the first Barcamp. This just remind me of the JOTA – JOTI events in october from all the scouts around the globe.

You can have more info on Bernard’s Blog with video’s and photos but the article is in french

What is a BarCamp ?

A BarCamp has nothing to do with any activities related to Bars nor alcoholic drinks. A BarCamp is simply an international network of user generated conferences. This mean that all the participants are free to provide a presentation on a topic related to informatics. Most of the topics are normally focused on one or a mixture of those things: web applications, open sources, social protocols and open data formats.

BarCamp in Mauritius

Mauritius network is organizing the first BarCamp hosted in Mauritius. The BarCamp Mauritius will start on Friday 20th of June 2008 at 10.00 am and will end on the Saturday 21st of June 2008 at 5.00pm. This activity will take place at the Domingue building, Le Hochet – Terre Rouge. There is going to have presentations of 30 to 45 minutes on different subjects in informatics and internet, brainstorming sessions, video conferencing and lot more. This is a free activity and there is no fee to pay for participation.

This experience is going to be unique and it is a must not to miss out. You will have the chance not only to share your knowledge in a rapidly evolving technology but to create potential contacts with other people in related fields as well. There are already many users of open sources in Mauritius, from a program such as notepad++ to operating systems such as Linux, but they do it in an isolated way. I think that is would be very important for the Mauritian community to build up and strengthen a network of open source users in order to be able to move with the informatics technology.

If you want to have further informations on the BarCamp or if you want to register, visit the official website:

BarCamp Mauritius

Don’t forget to also invite your friends. You can help by talking about this events over the internet in chats, forums, by posting on your blog or by using social bookmarking. The more people we have, the more knowledge we are going to share.

and the other participant are indocontest and Rajaram S.

I hope that you enjoy it people.

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