Editors and IDEs help!

Last time, we saw about indentation. Basically, indentation is making specific lines of code offset a bit so that you know at a glance where they belong. There are two ways of making indentation while programming: one is to use tabs (i.e. the tab key) and one is using multiple-spaces e.g. (press the space key 4 times).

Which one you use depends on you. As long as you stick to the style you choose, you should be alright. Now, if you’re writing code for other people e.g. open-source projects or a company, they may enforce a style on you i.e. you should only use space for e.g. because upstream, some other people have troubles with tabs. At this stage, you shouldn’t worry too much about those. In any case, you can have your Integrated Development Environment (IDE) do the substitution for you for e.g. replace a single press of the Tab key by 4 spaces.

You still remember what an IDE is, right? It’s that program that makes the task of writing other programs easier. Like a word processor for writing programs.

It’s a good idea to use an IDE when writing programs. Which IDE you will use largely depends on which language you are writing in, so we won’t go into the various IDEs that exist. If you write in many languages, or don’t want the hassle of having to install and learn an IDE, you could use so-called “Programmer Notepads”.

I did say you’re fine using Windows’ Notepad program. Actually you are. Only, it is not specially meant for writing programs. It’s just a generic text editor.

These are text editors that have IDE-like functions especially code highlighting, syntax checking, code completion and indentation guidelines for e.g. There are many of those out there, so I’ve listed the 5 most common ones so you have something to start. Just choose one and start typing! The number of features provided will vary from just syntax highlighting to fairly complex things like versioning through plugins. So just get one of those 5 and you should have an easier task at writing code:

1. Notepad++
2. PSPad
3. Programmer’s Notepad
4. Crimson Editor
5. Notepad2

On Linux and other Unix variants, you will have the all-powerful Vim and Emacs, as well as GUI variants such as Kate and GEdit. Am just listing those here for reference, but if you’re already on Linux, you should probably already have found those. They probably come ready installed with your OS anyway so just find where they are and start using them.

Which editor you choose doesn’t really matter as long as it does what you want, and it makes things simple. If your editor makes a simple task more complex, you should either consider using another editor or see whether you’re doing stuff right in the first place! Editors vary in terms of features: some people like editors that does everything from highlighting brackets to sending satellites in space on their own. Others just want a place to type and if it provides pretty colors, fine! See what you want in an editor and choose appropriately.

At first, it’s good to try a lot of them to see which one you like. But after a while, try to choose one and learn how it works. You don’t want to keep switching editors mid-project and having to re-learn where the various options e.g. search and replace are found. I.e. find one and love it.

When you’re using one of these editors, the task of checking indentation, finding where brackets and braces open and close etc are handled automatically. That’s one less thing to worry about. But you still need to ensure your indentation is correct. Let’s see how pseudo code would look in one of these editors: Notepad++.

And here’s how it looks in plain old Notepad:

You can see a few things are different from the Notepad++ image. First, the “reserved” or keywords are highlighted in a different color: blue. Second, brackets are highlighted so you can easily identify where pairs of brackets start and end (they are bolded here). Quoted text is in a different color, so if you accidentally missed a quote, you’d see everything in grey and you know something is off. See the faint dotted lines below “If”? They represent indentation guides. That is, they show where the “If” is going to end and what code falls under the control of the If. Similarly, if I had different levels of indentation, I’d see additional lines.  Finally, you can see line numbers. If you’re writing code and a friend says there’s a problem on line 13028, you don’t have to start counting but can go directly to it! Notepad cannot do this for you.

All these little things really help when you are writing large programs with thousands of lines. You can immediately see where a block starts or ends without having to do a ton of scrolling.

I think you’ve got the point now. Use an editor or an IDE. It makes life easier!

Comments

What are comments? It’s as the name says, things you write in the code to make it clearer when reading it. They’re like small notes you write in the code itself to describe bits of code that might be difficult to understand at first glance.

Why would you want to type additional things and make things more tiring? Well, comments help. A lot! A LOT! They may not make sense now, but think about reading the same code, but 2 years later. Will you remember then, what that obscure piece of code does? Probably not. If you have put comments there, then yes, you’ll know immediately.

First, don’t write stupid comments. After you start programming, it’s no use commenting every single line of code. That is both senseless and wasting time. Things like (a+b) are obvious to any programmer. What you should be commenting is when you have codes that do special tasks. For e.g.

Does this make sense?

Does it now?

Now you know the importance of comments.

Comments are identified by different symbols in different languages so make sure to use the right symbol, but here is a quick rundown of the most common symbols used to identify comments in code.

Now you how what comments are, i.e. descriptions about code, written in the code itself and identified using special symbols, I advise you to use plenty of these where you think the code is not very clear or easy to understand. You’ll learn what to comment as you start writing more and more code. It then becomes second-nature and you’ll wish every programmer out there commented their code appropriately.

Consistency

Consistency refers to writing code in the same style, every time. This is not always possible as sometimes different projects impose different styles. But whatever style you will choose, stick to it. I.e. be consistent.

For e.g. I like plenty of white space in my code. I find it makes stuff easier to read. The second one is how I’d write this code. The first one could be written by another person who likes compactness and minimalism. Both do the same thing. If it makes sense to them, fine.

But now, if I start arbitrarily switching between the various styles, for e.g. I use different numbers of white-spaces or different styles of opening and closing brackets, it makes things tough for others.

We’ll see more styles of coding in the other parts, especially after we start “Conditions”. It then becomes important that you write in one consistent way instead of as-you-please. Just keep this point in mind at the moment: choose your style and stick to it. Don’t change mid-way because you think brackets are prettier on their own line. You’ll make many other people angry!

That’s it for this rather short part. I hope you found it interesting. As usual, ask your questions using the comments box below and I welcome comments from other programmers if they think I could have written things better or provided more details. See you in the next part!

In the same series:

• Fundamentals of Programming: Part 3 - Style, Indentation and Comments (This post)
• Fundamentals of Programming: Part 2 - Pseudo Code and Batch Jobs
• Fundamentals of Programming: Part 1 - Introduction

This article comes from GeekScribes

Fundamentals of Programming: Part 3 – Style, Indentation and Comments

We’ll start with writing some instructions in pseudo-code. What is pseudo-code? Does it mean pseudo-programming? Yes, sort of.

You want to make sure you understand how to write and understand pseudo-code because that’s what I’ll be using through the rest of this series. They’re easy, English-like statement so don’t worry too much.

Pseudo Code

Pseudo-code refers to instructions written in a structured language. That is, there are specific words to represent specific things. Like commands for e.g. You’ll understand what I mean soon. The good thing about pseudo code is that it is programming language-independent. You can write instructions in pseudo-code then hand your sheet to any programmer and he or she will be able to write a program based on that. Why? Because pseudo-code represents instructions in an independent way. The programmer will then be able to translate those in the language of his/her choice with appropriate syntax.

In short, pseudo-code are step-by-step instructions to solve problems, written in a “strict” way that can then be used as guideline when writing a program.

Algorithms are usually step-by-step instructions to solve a problem. You could say that pseudo-code is  a way to write algorithms. For e.g., some algorithm in mathematics can say, you need to square this, differentiate that. In pseudo-code, you’re just writing the things to do in a structured way. So for the purpose of this article, I’d say they mean the same things. Just step-by-step instructions.

How do programs begin? They start in the mind of a programmer as a series of steps that must be completed to solve a problem. Programmers think in terms of pseudo-code, and then use those to write programming language codes. Sometimes they write these instructions on paper or a whiteboard to make it easier for them, but for simple things, they just do it mentally. It becomes simple enough with some practice.

To get you started, let’s assume you’re telling a friend how to draw a simple house. You need to tell them instructions. What would you be telling him/her? Write down your commands.

If I were to do that, I’d probably write those lines:

Draw a square, each line being 10 cm. (walls)
At the top of the square, draw a triangle, touching the square. (roof)
Inside the square, draw two smaller squares near the top. (windows)
Near the bottom of the square, in the middle, draw a small rectangle. (Doors)

Hopefully, that should give you a decent-looking house drawn like a 5-year old. Congratulations, you just wrote some pseudo-code!

Let’s see another example. We want to have the computer ask the user for two numbers, add those two numbers and then show the result to the user. Simple enough, huh?

This example has 3 sections: an input section (asking the user), a processing section (add numbers) and an output section (show the result). Those 3 steps are the basic things that happen in programs. These 3 things occur in almost all programs, although they may not be very apparent in all programs.

So let’s see how we can write pseudo codes for this problem:

Input 2 numbers, a and b.
Result = a + b.
Output result.

Simple, yes? This is pseudo-code for addition of two numbers. If you look carefully, you will see I used “a” and “b”. These are called variables and we’ll see about those in the next part. Basically, these act as two generic numbers so whatever 2 numbers the user will tell the computer, they will be represented as a and b.

This is a simple set of instructions and a number of things could go wrong in that. It’s also fairly limited in terms of functions. What if you want something else than addition? What about multiplication? Can’t do. Actually, we can. We will do this in the lesson about conditions. What about adding more than two numbers? Can’t do. Oh yes we can, but in loops lesson!

Normally pseudo-code has a fairly strict syntax so that code written by different people. If a person writes “Input 2 numbers” and another “Enter 2 numbers”, it’s still ok. But if a 3rd writes “Shout 2 numbers”… then no. Thus, pseudo-code uses a restricted number of words in English, normally words which you will normally find in other programming languages. For e.g. “input”, “output”, “if”, “else” etc. You’ll learn about those words as we go along.

Batch Jobs

Sometimes, programs don’t ask the user for any inputs. They just take their inputs from some file or from some other place. Batch jobs, or batch programs, are those programs that run without the user having to supply any data during running. Data, as in numbers, text or other information. They run, do their processing and could do some outputs, although not all of them do.

Let’s see about two examples of batch jobs. First example will read a series of numbers from a file and add them all together. If you don’t understand some parts, don’t worry too much. I’ll cover them in next parts. So, here it is:

Open numbers file.

While there are more numbers to read in file

Add number just read to Total.

End

Output Total.

Close File

Here, we didn’t ask the user for inputs. We just get numbers from a file and add them all to a total count then show that to the user. The “inputs” are actually read automatically so the program can run fast, i.e. doesn’t have to wait for the user to supply numbers one by one. Thus we had to tell the computer to open the needed “numbers” file, read off it and finally close it when it’s done.

Note one thing: the “Add number just read to Total” is a bit off-sided as compared to the rest. This is called “indentation” and it makes reading code blocks easier. At a glance, we can know that this line falls under the control of the “While block”.

Which do you prefer in terms of clarity:

While there are more numbers to read in file
Add number just read to Total.
End

Or:

While there are more numbers to read in file

Add number just read to Total.

End

Guess I already know the answer.

Code blocks are important in programming since they normally do different things as the program is running. So seeing what code is running under the control of which blocks is very important and I encourage you to properly indent your code when you are writing inside blocks. You will learn what this particular block of code does if you read the “Loops” part of this series.

Let’s see another example. This time, no inputs, no outputs. Just processing. The “output” is actually writing to a file. We’ll do the same thing as above: read numbers in a file and find their total. But we’ll then write this number in another file.

Open numbers file

While there are more numbers to read in file

Add number just read to Total

End

Open results file

Write Total to results file

Close results file

Close numbers file

This time, we don’t show the user anything. We just read from one file and write to another. Basically, if this program was ran, the user would just see the program start and exit, and nothing else happen. They will have to open the results file to see something had happened.

That’s it for this part. I hope you enjoyed it and learnt something interesting. If you have questions, just ask in the comments below. Again, I ask programmers out there to please provide suggestions and comments. Thank you for reading and see you in Part 3.

In the same series:

• Fundamentals of Programming: Part 2 - Pseudo Code and Batch Jobs (This post)
• Fundamentals of Programming: Part 1 - Introduction

This article comes from GeekScribes

Fundamentals of Programming: Part 2 – Pseudo Code and Batch Jobs

I don’t know how many parts there will be and I don’t know if I’ll have time to write about everything I can think of at the moment.

Here is what I intend to cover. I may add other things afterwards:

1. What is programming? Questions and IDEs
2. Algorithms, Pseudo Code, Batch Jobs
3. Style, Indentation and Comments
4. Variables and Arrays
5. Conditions
6. Loops
7. Errors and Bugs
8. Functions
9. Classes
10. Libraries and Plugins
11. Syntax and Programming Languages

So please stick around and I hope you will enjoy reading my series of posts. Of course, your comments, questions and suggestions are welcome. I’d really like if my programmer friends, contacts and anonymous readers out there would provide some inputs in these posts to help beginners.

Without further delays, let’s start.

What is programming?

That.

Ugh! What are all those brackets?! What are those awful colors! Public WHAT?! My brain is melting!

Keep calm! Breath in. Breath out. Are you alright? Fine. Don’t worry about this at the moment. You’ll understand more as we go along so just be patient. At least, be positive! It’s in English!

Programming is basically giving instructions to a computer so that knows how to accomplish some task. Why would you need that? Well, everything you do on your computer, you’re doing it through programs. You’re currently viewing this page through a program that allows you to view webpages. You are using a program that gives you an environment to run other programs. Everything is a program. You are in the Matrix. Haha.

Well yes, programs are everywhere. And guess what? Each of these programs were written in some programming language. That thing you just saw above? That was a programming language. That’s what is used to make programs. That is, the “Firefox” or “Internet Explorer” or “Safari” or “Chrome” etc you are using to view this page at the moment? It was written in a language that resembles that one above.

Programming is writing programs in some language. There you have it.

Why do we need programming?

Simple! To make your computer understand what to do or what you want it to do. There’s a difference in that and we’ll see about it a bit later.

Computers are generally dumb machines of metal, silicon, plastic and lots of tiny little stuff that beep, light up and do other wonderful things. But they don’t really understand English. They only work with 2 numbers: zeroes and ones.

Programming is you telling it instructions, but you have to tell the instructions in some language the computer understands. If you think you have to write in zeroes and ones, you’d be correct but not completely.

Programming in zeroes and ones was done at the very start. It was hard as hell because, well, do you think something like 01001100 is meaningful to a human? Nope.

Some person thought it would be a good idea to translate some of those codes into meaningful words and have the computer translate this language into its zeroes and ones.

That person hence created a program that converts English words like “if” into computer-meaningful things like 01001100. Nowadays, you write English and your computer figures the rest out for you after you click a few buttons here and there. Then you see your shiny new program running and you’re happy.

This translation process, if you wish to know, is called “compilation”. There’s also “interpretation”. Both are basically translations, but compilation is done all-at-once while interpretation is done as-you-go.

How many languages are there?

Too many. Estimate? Above 4500. Be scared.

Waaait what?! How can I learn all that?!

You’re not supposed to. You’ll probably be fine learning one of them and you can write nice little programs. But why do we need so many languages? That’s because languages are created for specific tasks. For e.g. PHP is used to create dynamic web sites. That is, the web pages react to things you do, instead of being just boring, static, non-changing pages.

Other languages are for other things for e.g. C++ is used when there’s need for high speed of execution i.e. the program should run fast.

So how do I get started?

Well, you could read books on some language you want to learn. But if you don’t understand programming itself, it’s pretty much pointless to do that. Did you learn English by reading Shakespeare? OMG FOR REAL?!

Nah you probably started by learning letters. And made a mess on walls everywhere. Then you learnt words. Swear words I bet. Then you created sentences. Then you wrote your first paragraph etc etc until at the end, you can finally understand English pretty well.

Programming is like that too. You have to start from the start. What is the start? Letters.

Not really. Programming languages are mostly in English. Mostly. There are some truly weird things out there. But yes, mostly English. So you already have a head start. What you need to learn are the words actually. And that’s what this series of posts will try to teach you about.

You’re not expected to be able to write codes at the end of the series. That will probably be for another series some time later. But at the end, I hope you’ll be able to read a program and able to think about how to write your own program.

I’ll make sure to use plenty of examples while writing so you get to know how programmers think when they are confronted with a solution.

Is there any special equipment I need?

Not really. All you need is a working, powered-on computer, keyboard, mouse, screen and an Internet connection. Since you’re here reading this, you’re all fine.

Ironically, you’ll be using programs to write programs. Interesting huh? First programs were actually “written” using punch cards so these were not really programs. Then after a whole lot of troubles and annoyances, we arrived at the languages we use today. Be happy you don’t have to program in binary. Zeroes and Ones, if you didn’t know what binary (2 numbers) means.

Programmers do use a number of tools to facilitate their task. You can use “Notepad”, that simple text-writing program in Windows that nobody likes. Love it, it’s a nice program. If you’re  using Mac or Linux or some other operating system, just find a text editor and use it.

When you become more familiar and get more powerful (HAR!), you’ll want to use more capable tools. We call these “Integrated Development Environments” (IDEs). Fancy term for “big program that allows me to write big programs”. It’s still a sort of Notepad. Just one on steroids.

You don’t need to bother about any of these for the moment, although you may want to check out Notepad since it makes writing the basic codes I’ll show you WAY easier.

Alright, that’s it for part 1, the Introduction. In the next part, we’ll move on to how programs are born. See you! If you have questions and comments, use the form below.

In the same series:

• Fundamentals of Programming: Part 2 - Pseudo Code and Batch Jobs
• Fundamentals of Programming: Part 1 - Introduction (This post)

Sources:

Picture

This article comes from GeekScribes

Fundamentals of Programming: Part 1 – Introduction

Let’s start.

Online Shopping

I know a few of you will say that Mauritius has a few online shopping sites now. For example, the multishop is considered Mauritian. But you have to agree, there are not so many Mauritian online shopping sites online yet, despite many shopping malls opening in the country.

Sadly, even the big names in shopping don’t have websites. For example, none of our well-known bookstores have websites where you can check their catalogue! Come’on people, it’s 2011. Even if you don’t have online-shopping facilities, an online catalogue is a must! But nope, not even that.

Don’t bother trying to buy furniture online. Clothes? Hardly any local sites. I’d even say, no local sites as far as I know. Electronics? Same. Most other things? Nope.

Why?!

I say, we don’t  have local online shopping for 3 reasons:

Firstly, buyers will not have a method for safely paying online while sellers are unable to accept electronic money. Remember, Paypal does not accept Mauritian account holders to receive money. I don’t think any of the other payment processors let Mauritians accept money too. Local banks could have done something about that by implementing our own, local payment processor. Some effort is being done, such as paying by mobile phone. But those are not applicable online yet. For now, there is no method to buy online, short of putting your credit card online directly – something few Mauritians want to do. The fear that “people will steal my credit card number if I put it on the Internet” is very much present.

Second reason: lack of customers. Maybe I’m wrong here, but I think not many people know how to shop online yet. At least in Mauritius, they don’t. Even if we had local shops selling stuff online, not many people would know how to buy. Granted, we can teach them easily but the distrust of online shopping will remain present for quite a long time. Considering the few customers wanting the convenience of online shopping, I doubt many stores will want to invest in creating shopping websites. Although, that does not explain why they don’t even have online catalogues.

For the third reason, you only have to look at our postal service. It’s not that fast, not that reliable and worst of all, does not make an effort to encourage people to use its services. It’s not completely at fault here: there is just not enough reason to use the postal service for shopping at the moment – there are so few online shopping sites anyway! Let’s hope that in the future, the postal service standard increases in the country, as the number of shopping sites increase.

Auction Site

I’m not saying we should have a local Ebay.co.mu or something, but we could at least have a functional auction site by now.

I remember we had a few, but as far as I know, they’re all dead. Due to lack of interest? Probably  not. Some even ran quite successful advertising campaigns, using bill-boards etc. But? They didn’t have the variety of products people were expecting.

Above all else, they were not very user-friendly. Most looked like pages filled with pictures and text, but not a simple, guided page on how to use the site to buy stuff.

We had a few but they all died I think. Due to lack of interest? Probably not. I’d say they went off quite well, but they didn’t

Why?!

They were not real auction sites anyway. There were merely catalogues where people posted what they had to sell and others searched through. To buy stuff, you’d have to contact the seller manually, arrange for payment and collection offline. Not very secure, huh? And, no warranties!

Secondly, Orange.mu’s Classifieds site is king in this domain. It’ll not be easy to dislodge it and take its place as “auction catalogue”. You’d have to come up with a really creative solution. We’ve not reached there yet.

Finally, no online payment facilities. Again!

A portal / Discussion Forum

Strangely enough, Mauritius does not even have an “official” discussion forum! I mean, a place where people just sign in to have a chat and discuss country issues. Don’t tell me Facebook has completely obliterated forums – it has not.

Facebook is good for keeping track of what friends are doing but it’s not that good for discussions with people you don’t know personally.

Most countries have specialized forums for discussing specialist topics – such as, lowyat.net for Malaysia’s Tech Community to discuss about technology and buy/sell/trade computer or electronic parts.

We did have a few forums, such as Nubaz. I was a member there for a long time but finally, the discussions died down as people got more interested in Facebook and spam-bots overran the site.

Why?!

Facebook mainly. It was much easier to use than a forum. You could have your own profile, stalk people’s pictures etc…, things which you cannot do when using a forum – most people use avatars and nicknames anyway. Posting on forums is relatively tedious and disorganized as compared to Facebook. Can Facebook pages replace a forum? Nope. Your discussions will get lost too quickly on the page walls. You’d also need one page per discussion topic.

I wish someone would spawn a Mauritian forum again, where we can discuss with fellow Mauritians about day-to-day topics, the news but also, buy and sell second-hand stuff. That at least would attenuate the need for an online auction site. One can run auctions quite easily using a forum.

I have one question: how come none of the private radios have forums? Are they THAT hard to moderate?!

Bus Route Planning

Update: Carrotmadman points me to this site: mauritius-buses.com. The site allows you to plan your journey by bus.

What I had in mind was a site, where you can set your current location on a map, and type in your destination, or again click on a map, and it’ll give you all possible bus routes to this destination, schedules, estimated travel times etc. But mauritius-buses certainly does the job. The presentation needs some work e.g. the map, and the prices need reviewing: “Total price: 19 / 9 / 10 MUR” from Port Louis (victoria) to Curepipe is only Rs. 19? But at least, that’s one more service we have. Thanks Carrotmadman.

A major annoyance to me. I never know which bus to take and where to find them in bus stations! I’d just ask friends if they know which bus to take then wander through bus stations trying to look for that bus, and if all else fail, ask around until I finally find it. So much for tourist-friendly!

Why can’t we have a simple journey planner in Mauritius? You enter your starting point and your destination and it gives you the potential bus routes you can take, the route numbers, where the buses are found at which bus stations and their schedules.

Why?!

Too many bus companies! How can one expect to have a site that regroups all those companies and plan their routes, give their fares, schedules etc…?

Turns out you can. Ever heard of crowd-sourcing?

You just need to have a website, maybe powered by Google Maps. Then leave it to regular travelers or even the companies themselves to add their details and maintain it. That should be easier than having one entity maintain the whole thing. If a company doesn’t want to maintain their routes, too bad. That’s lost money for them.

I can’t imagine why a service like that doesn’t exist when almost every year, computer science students at the University of Mauritius are given projects that often contain route-planning and geo-location. I’m pretty sure it’s the same for University of Technology students too.

Can’t one of the companies take one of these projects as a prototype, have it refined and implemented? Can’t UoM / UTM themselves run one of these projects on their infrastructure and maintain it? What’s the point of Universities if none of their research ever gets used?

You want even more features? How about the service letting you buy and print your ticket in advance? How about buying long-term tickets for e.g. a ticket which you can use for a whole week?

Oh I forget… payment facilities. AGAIN!

Movie Renting service

Piracy is high in Mauritius. Why? Because we don’t have good things to watch on TV, buying original media is ridiculously expensive (Rs. 2000 for a recent DVD, are you kidding me?) and you can’t rent legal media to watch / listen. Video on Demand, while available, is not great.

What I want is a Netflix-like service. I understand that our local Internet speeds may prevent streaming HD content without Orange complaining that everyone’s leeching off its bandwidth. And I can tell you, if we did have a streaming service, Orange will probably charge you additional just to watch stuff. You’d be a “heavy downloader” or whatnot and therefore, must pay more.

So what can we have? A site that allows you to rent movies / music online. You pay a monthly fee, just like you’d pay a monthly utility bill. You then access your account on their site and they post what you’ve chosen to you.

Think of it like an online video club. Instead of going there in person, you choose what you want in person and they post it to you. After that, you just post it back to them. Posting charges are paid by the company and included in your monthly bill.

Not a critical service, but it’d be interesting to have.

Why?!

Our postal service. First, it’s relatively slow. A letter takes around 3 days to come from Mahebourg to Port-Louis. Second, there’s a big risk of breakage. Third, it’s quite expensive to post small parcels, even locally. Fourth… it’s easier to just pirate the damn thing if you want it so much. But hey, I was trying to suggest a legal alternative here!

SME marketplace

Do we have a Business-to-Business marketplace for SMEs and handicrafts in Mauritius? Nope. What if I wanted to say, buy 1000 mini-dodos to give as gift? Where do I go to find that? I’d have to contact SMEDA probably, then get the address of a few artisans. Then contact each of them individually and see if they can match my order of 1000 dodos. Etc etc… Basically, a long process.

If they had an online B2B market place, I’d just browse through, find who makes dodos and what size of order they can take. The site would list their contact details, pictures of their products etc…

I’d like a site like Etsy or Alibaba but for Mauritius. I don’t think there is such a site yet. In what way would this help? Boost our SMEs and startups of course! If no one knows what they’re doing, how can they hope to secure clients? A site like this may even help them reach an international market, who knows.

You can even extend the site to make it into a business directory with an SME corner, so that the site is able to help Mauritian businesses in general. For example, if I ask you to find me all the resellers of Logitech in Mauritus, how would you go about it? Open the Yellow Pages directory and go through the “Computer” sections? How about all the website hosting providers in Mauritius that can offer unmetered bandwidth and hosting space? Good luck searching!

Why?!

Lack of will. I can’t imagine any other reason such a site doesn’t exist. There is simply no will to invest effort in implementing such a service.

Local knowledge / Search service

Ever tried Orange.mu’s site? It is supposed to search the Mauritian webspace. Do try it and you’ll notice that it never returns anything Mauritian.

We need a local knowledge site, sort of like a Wiki for Mauritius or something similar. Say I want to find a mechanic in Quatre Bornes. Where do I search for that? Google? You won’t get meaningful results. There are no good places to search for local info about Mauritius.

Another example: You’re in the south and want to find a good restaurant to have lunch with some friends, especially Chinese food. How do you search for that? Would Google tell you that there’s a good restaurant, with good user reviews, found on the 2nd floor of some building that sells awesome noodles? Nah, I doubt it. You’d need local knowledge for that. Even better, searchable local knowledge. With pictures and user reviews if possible.

Here’s another example of where crowd-sourcing could help: just create the service and allow users to add their own local knowledge to it.

Why?!

No one wants to invest in such a service? I don’t really know why Orange.mu doesn’t offer this service. One could think local knowledge would be important, but I guess, not enough for Mauritius.

P.s. for fun: Orange.mu search just searches Google for you anyway! So much for local search! Is our local web space so meaningless?

So there you have it. My list of online services Mauritius ought to have but sadly, doesn’t. Can you think of other online services that would be good to have in Mauritius? Are there other reasons why we don’t already have these services? Is there one particular serivce you know of and want to recommend to others? Comment below!

This article comes from GeekScribes

Online Services Mauritius Does Not Have And Why

Why do social networks bother with real name? Because it is easier for your friends and people to find you. Because it looks more professional. Because they make money by knowing a ton of things about you. Social networks will do various things to “persuade” you to use your real name, such as suspending your account if you’re caught using a display name, or a name that resembles a display name. Quora goes as far as to possibly require you to prove your identity using official documents just to use their service. Insanity, I say.

Why should you be using a display name?

EDIT: A few days after posting this, I see this very nice article slashdotted about the topics of display names on social networks. Worth checking!

EDIT2: This piece by Danah Boyd is well worth reading and expands a lot on actual dangers people may face when using their real names online. Gizmodo has also written about Google+ Real Names policy.

You get better privacy

I ask a simple question: Does every person that see you automatically know your name? Probably not, unless you’re wearing a Tshirt that has: “My name is <name>!” in big Impact letters across it. That’s how it works in real life.

On social networks, you will usually upload a picture of yourself, after being “convinced” to register with your real name. Voila, now everyone that sees your face automatically knows your name.

The problem with current social networks is that whatever your privacy settings are, your name is still visible to all, whether you like it or not.

My idea of social networks is allowing you to find people you know, not allowing people you don’t know to find you! Using display names, you become harder to locate on social networks. Is that a good thing? Yes and no.

Yes, because only people close to you are likely to know your display name and locate you on social networks. No, because your not-s0-close friends may not find you if they want to. Do not despair, there is a solution to that, which we’ll see further down.

You can dissociate your online self from your real self

You went to party with a few friends and one of them snaps a picture of you in pose that does not show the best about you, probably sleeping on a couch with a couple of empty beer bottles beside you. You are now tagged and everybody has a good laugh.

A few years later, you are going to a job interview and you are nearly through. Your boss decides to do some background check on you on social networks and stumbles across that picture, as well as your friends’ and your own comments. Well… your chances of scoring the job have just slumped down quite a lot.

Social network profiling is happening a lot these days. True, you can configure your privacy settings to be restrictive and disallow public members from seeing details about you. But are you sure your friends have done the same configuration? No certainty there. In those cases, a display name may help you.

Actually, a better solution would have been to keep two different profiles: one for your “fun” self and one for business purposes. The problem? Social networks prevent this. Why? Because you are more difficult to track. Also, it can be cumbersome to manage two different profiles and make sure they don’t clash.

It is simpler just to use a display name. So if someone tags you in a picture, they’re tagging a display name, not the real you. So your boss looking for “John Smith” doesn’t see the unflattering picture in which “Rockstar John” has been tagged, and where he has copiously used the F-word.

The main disadvantage is this: people can be trolls when they enjoy anonymity. Doesn’t mean they cannot be trolls when they are using real names. Again, the solution for this exists.
Anonymity protects people

This point builds upon disassociating your real and online selves. If you live in a country where freedom of speech is restricted and you happen to say something which is “unacceptable”, you might land into pretty serious trouble if you had registered with your real name. People who are in this situation are intelligent enough to know the value of a pseudonym.

But there are disadvantages!

Of course there are! The biggest one is that some people do weird things online or turn into trolls under the cover of anonymity.

One of the reasons put forward against display names on social networks is that you’re not meant to have anonymity when using such services, since you want people to find you and interact with you. Also, another reason I’ve seen (and a funny one at that) is that social networks are not 4chan or just other forums. People do serious business on social networks.

Right, I totally agree regarding the business part. But! That doesn’t mean that right for privacy is waived!

display names will provide anonymity, but at the same time will allow people to act like a certain body orifice. display names will also make it more difficult for your friends to find you. How are they supposed to know “John Smith” is actually “AzurKnight22″?

That’s where options come in

So how to we solve this problem? Give people the choice to use display names instead of their real names. Require them to register with their real names as it is done now but they are given the option to use a display name that shows to the “public”, while the people who they add as friends can see their real name after registration.

If the person has opted to use a display name and instead of real names, again supplies display names then the service has a good reason to suspend their account, just like it is currently done. But how does this simple-looking solution help maintain your privacy but at the same time resolve these 2 disadvantages?

But how can your friends, whom you have not yet added as friend, find you? Well, your friends will know your full and exact name, correct? If they search for that exact name, your profile will turn up in the search results. Now what? Normally you have a profile picture set up, so they can easily locate you by face. If you are so paranoid and didn’t set a profile picture of your face, well, you do not be found.

Otherwise, another option might be: “Allow my real name to show in search results” to make you even more findable. This results in you being findable for people who really know you while keeping you away from the rest.

Basically the system remains as it is, only an option for display names is added. So tracking user habits for advertising purposes etc remain same. It’s the system that needs to track your habits, not the general public.

Finally, we come to trolls. Trolls are already present on social networks at this moment and are already using display names, so allowing the use of display names will not change the situation. As such, arguments such as display names will increase spam are unfounded. What if your friend, under a display name, starts spamming your wall? Remove them as friend. You can add them afterwards if you like.

Display names are not necessarily the best idea to get additional privacy, but I believe it will certainly help in providing some measure of privacy until some better system comes around. If you have such a system in mind, do let us know! So anyway, what’s your views regarding display names on social networks? Hit the comment box below!

This article comes from GeekScribes

Why Display Names Should Be Allowed On Social Networks

Do you often use the folder view settings in Windows? It’s a handy feature, that is usually accessed by right-clicking on empty space in a folder, and selecting either View or Sort By options.

Using these settings, you can, for example, tell Windows to display files according to the date they were created, with newer files shown first (Sort By → check Date Created under More), or you can see thumbnails of pictures instead of icons in your family photos folder.

The problem with Windows is that, by default, it only remembers those view settings for the first 5000 folders you apply these settings on. After that, the settings are no longer remembered! Yep, even if you stop using a folder, its settings are remembered and not replaced. Very dumb. You’d think the oldest of 5000 entries would periodically be replaced by newer versions, but nope, Microsoft did not want that.

I very often use this feature, and I’ve used up the 5000 entries, and as such, new folders are not sorted the way I like. Initially I thought the folder somehow got corrupted. Deleting the folder and putting back the files in it didn’t solve the problem. Editing the registry did. Those folder settings are stored in the Registry, all 5000 of them. We’re going to do some cleanup. I’ve tested this fix in Windows 7 only, but it should be same for XP/Vista.

A word of warning: Messing up things in the Registry can cause your system to crash. Know what you are doing before attempting these instructions. I will not be responsible for any damage you cause to your system/files/health/dog if you decide to do those steps. But! I can tell you they work since I’ve done them myself to fix this problem. Also if you’ll be working in the registry, you might want to use Regalyzer. Windows’ in-built Regedit is fine, but it lacks some nice functions. You can use Regedit too if you wish.

Also, if you do these instructions, you will lose the view settings you currently have on existing folders. Not the folders or their contents, just the view settings i.e. “Sort by Date” for e.g. will be reset to default “Sort by Name”.

The symptoms are:

• Folder settings chosen using View or Sort By are not remembered when you close a folder and open it again. Applies mainly to newly created folders.
• Thumbnail images don’t appear or incorrect thumbnail is displayed

Ok, instructions! Here they are:

• Open the Run dialog box, either by typing “run” in the Start Menu searchbox (the Orb’s search menu) or using Winkey+R
• Type “regedit“, or if you’re using Regalyzer, just run it.
• Navigate to each of the following paths by using the sidebar. You will need to repeat instructions for each of those paths:
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ShellNoRoam
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Wow6432Node\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell (only if you are using a 64-bit version of Windows)

• For each of those paths, repeat these steps:
  • Under the “Shell” or “ShellNoRoam” folders, delete these two folders by right-clicking on them and choosing Delete:
    • Bags
    • BagMRU
  • Re-create these two folders: Right-click “Shell” or “ShellNoRoam” folders from the sidebar and select New → Key. Create two such keys:
    • Bags
    • BagMRU
  • At each of those paths, right-click “Shell” or “ShellNoRoam” folders from the sidebar and select New → DWORD. Type “BagMRU Size” as the name.
    • From the right-pane, double-click on the newly created “BagMRU Size” key, select “Decimal” and type “10000” as value. So instead of remembering 5000 folders, Vista/7 now remembers 10000 folders. Don’t go overboard with that value – it’ll increase the size of your registry and slow things down.
    • Note: as Carrotmadman6 pointed out in the comments, don’t increase the “BagMRU Size” value if you have an older PC, say from a 5+ years back. It can cause some major slowness.
    • (Actually, this BagMRU Size key could be created at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell only since that’s where Vista/7 read this information. I just wanted to make sure it gets read by including it at all 4 locations. You don’t need to if you don’t want.)

That’s it. When you reboot Windows next time (I didn’t need to), the settings will be remembered for folders you choose, and more folders will now be remembered. Remember, existing view settings will be lost, so you might want to re-create them. Hopefully now, Vista/7 will be remembering your settings.

This article comes from GeekScribes

[Solved] Windows Doesn’t Remember Folder View Settings