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Most of us complained a lot of times that Orange Sitara was completely copied from other international famous dance/singing competition…

Well, seems they tried to be original, for once….

Since some weeks they brought a new concept into the competion….

They made the participants sing, dance and even the mentors had to perform live…

And one of them thought:

Why dont we make the musicians sing???

Well, that was a completely foolish idea… at least for me…

Since some weeks, the musicians have been performing live, practically most of them, from the electronic keyboard player, the guitarist to the tabla player (technically known as a tabalti)

The story does not stop here!!!

They have even introduced another extra into this concept:

Why not make the viewers vote for the musicians???

LOL ! Who will want to spend rs10 per sms to vote for them (except the family members and friends of course)…

Surtout dans ene lepok kot p serre ceinture and petrol p monter lol…

No need to tell you how “fabulous” those musicians perform, LIVE !
Hoever, not applicable to all, but still !

Something perhaps the organisers (mbc) might find informative to know, musicians are made to play musical instruments and not all of them know really how to sing, ya, they do sing, but not all of them are  good enough to sing LIVE on a national television channel…

I am was a musician too, some years back, ya lol, i was a tabalti (tabla n dholok player) in religions ceremonies (ya lol! believe it or not, i played in kirtans and bhajans, despite i never believed in god!) lol…
I also play electronic keyboard, but nowadays, i rarely have the time to spend some time playing music, since am blogging lol…
My Dad, and uncle too are musicians, and at times, they even sang & played instruments in weddings, hotels etc, as a hobby/leisure of course!

We are not big singers/musicians(not me definitely), but i dont go live onto tv to show that i can sing when i dont know how to!

However, there are not many musicians who can play their instruments and sing at the same time, except of course, famous superstars singers which Orange Sitara wants to build here in Mauritius it seems lol…

lol, just before blogging, Vicky was telling me that “to ene fan orange sitara twa”.
In fact ya, but not exactly, as i like to watch their show because of their originality, stupidity(sometimes and often lol), copying of international ideas/concepts, importance they give to certain persons,  quality of tv platforms they offer here in Mauritius to promote new talents…

For sure, they do make the best SHOW on tv lol !

So, how do you find this innovative and orginal concept brought forward on our “petit ecran” these days???

A lot of bloggers I know display Google advertisements on their respective blogs in order to earn some money. Naturally, I also have two Google advertisements on every page of this blog for exactly the same reason… (I’d like to point out that I have not received any cheque from Google up to now.)

This service from Google is called Google Adsense.

I got a comment today from Josh who told me that I need to have a privacy page on this blog to comply with Google’s Adsense latest Terms and Conditions. Using Google (what else?), I discovered a blog entry by Jennifer Slegg explaining in details the changes brought by Google. The most relevant paragraph is:

You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.

The idea is to make explicit that Google uses web beacons aka web bugs and cookies to track visitors. I suppose this brings some peace of mind to Google lawyers.

Then I realized…

This blog, noulakaz.net, is in violation with the terms and conditions and Google might terminate my Adsense account anytime. Fortunately, Jennifer Slegg has also thoughtfully written a sample privacy policy which she has made public. I read it and realized it was much too long for my blog. With some cut and paste, I finally came up with:

The privacy of visitors to noulakaz.net is important to me. Like most other websites, I collect and use the data contained in log files. I do use cookies to store information, such as your personal preferences when you visit my blog. To support my weblog, I also use third party advertisements which may use cookies and web beacons. You can choose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies in your browser settings or by managing security preferences. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with noulakaz.net as well as other websites.

Nice and compact! I’ve added this to my About page.

15 Common Mistakes

Not having a privacy policy was a mistake. But it’s arguably a cosmetic mistake. The baddest mistake as far as Google Adsense is concerned is for someone to click on his own Adsense ads or get them clicked for whatever reason (e.g. click on my links coz i need to pay for my hosting.) I came across this list of 15 Common Mistakes that violate Google Adsense Terms & Conditions and I would strongly advise all bloggers using Adsense to go through it once or twice.

Addendum

The “Software Failure / Guru Meditation” picture shown above should bring tears to those happy few who had an Amiga 15-20 years ago… To the rest, this is what we got when the Amiga crashed. No blue screen of death. No core dump. Instead, we had a flashing Guru Meditation message. People were cool at that time…

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Back to University yesterday, this time to ‘chill out’ in The University Of Mauritius End of Academical Year Party 2008.

Early in the morning, i set out for a long drive since i had taken my day off from work to hmm hmm…

Late in the evening, i reached Reduit where i met lots of friends (again) and we took some drinks before we entered the uom permises which was quite well secured with the loads of police officers controlling the access to the Party.

The food court was again in the Basement Parking like the years before…

Unlike last year, I had no coupons to get my dinner, instead i had to pay for the 2 bbq which I took.

Effectively, this year, my sis had done the necessary to get our names in the list of guests for the party since i am not a uom student, not now (again lol, perhaps for my masters now)…

Chill Out Orange Night Party

Btw, the party was held in Raised Plaza and the schedule was as follows

17 30 - 18 30 - Chill Out with Buddha Bar
18 30 - 19 00 - Live Tecktonik Show
19 00 - 22 00 - DanceFloor with DJs Xceed & Yan
SMS Dedication & Games

At 2000hrs, the dance floor was quite ‘empty’

But some 30mins after, lol, it was completely full!

Here is a video of the party….

There was Orange Lucky Draw Coupons being distributed everywhere, which allowed you to enter a draw by filling in your name, tel numbers etc to win gifts at the end of the party…

Damn it!

How many of us did bring a pen during party? LOL !

pssst

You can read the post of the End of Academical Year Party 2007 and the End of Year Party 2006

Chilled out! lol!

If you browse some Internet services websites regularly, you should recognise this lady. We call her the “datacenter lady” or the “Ensim lady.” This picture is in some royalty-free image banks. She is being used (and abused) on many websites.

TinEye lists about 37 websites using this picture but I personally know some more. She was previously on ensim.com.

Here is a good sample of the websites:

http://primustel.ca/en/business/security/index.html
http://www22.verizon.com/it/vzit_index.html
http://www.ca.com/be/support/
http://www.dlink.com/business/test-drive/
http://www.broadberry.co.uk/
http://www.stormhosting.com.au/
http://tophostrankings.com/ecommerce_hosting.php
http://www.borderware.fr/produits/#6
http://www.deletec.fr/default.aspx
http://www.wdc.com/de/products/index.asp?Cat=2&Language=de
http://online.quickcert.com/index.cfm
http://www.eagleonline.com/Website/EagleWeb3.nsf/page/Job+Seekers!OpenDocument
http://www.backupdirect.net/about.htm
http://www.tfsla.com/infraestructura.php
http://www.leanux.ch/cms/index.php?home
http://careers.uecomm.com.au/jobDetails.asp?sJobIDs=399036&stp=AW&sReferrer=home
http://www.alertra.com/
http://www.saphelec.fr/?menu=offre_data

The best one, I think, is this. Being featured on the front cover of a MySQL database book is quite a feat.

If you are under the age of 18 or find this photograph offensive, please don’t look at it. Thank you!

Picture (NOT ASCII) worth seeing: http://www.goatse.cz/hello.jpg

Just 1 more sentence: FRAK CENSORSHIP!!! Good day. Cya.

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In this post I'll show you how to create an expanding/collapsing menu like Slashdot left menu used to be, using the YUI library and Dav Glass YUI effects widget.

Preview of the script we are going to build.

The HTML markup for our menu is :

 
<div id="menu">
<h1 id="menu-title">Menu</h1>
<div id="menu-links">
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>About</li>
<li>CSS</li>
</ul></div>
</div>
 

We use 2 div tags, one for holding the menu itself and the other one which contains the links in an unordered list and 1 h1 tag for the title.

The CSS for the menu :

 
/** width of the menu */
#menu{
				width: 180px;
			}
 
/** the main title */
			#menu h1{
				line-height: 35px;
				color: #fff;
				/** simulate link */
				cursor: pointer;
				font-weight: bold;
				/** background image will change when menu expands/collapses */
				background: #666 url(images/block-arrow-expanded.gif) no-repeat scroll 30px 13px;
			}
 
/** the links */
			#menu-links li{
				line-height: 35px;
				border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;
				background-color: #eee;
			}
 

Please pay attention to the background for the #menu h1. It contains the image, which will change when the menu collapses or expands. When the menu collapses we'll be using the block-arrow-collapsed.gif image and when the menu expands we'll be using the block-arrow-expanded.gif image. You can find the images in the sample demo file in the images directory.

To do the collapsing/expanding effects, we need to include the following javascript files beforehand :

 
<!-- js -->
<script type="text/javascript"  src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/combo?2.5.2/build/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js&2.5.2/build/animation/animation-min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/tools-min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/effects-min.js"></script>
 

We use Dav Glass YAHOO.Tools package and his effects widget along with yahoo-dom-event-animation aggregate file which are hosted on Yahoo servers.

Finally the javascript to do the magical stuff goes like that :

 
<script type="text/javascript">
			YAHOO.util.Event.addListener('menu-title', 'click', function(){
				if(YAHOO.util.Dom.getStyle('menu-links', 'display') == 'block'){
					new YAHOO.widget.Effects.BlindUp('menu-links', {seconds: 0.2});
					YAHOO.util.Dom.setStyle('menu-title', 'background-image', 'url(images/block-arrow-collapsed.gif)');
				}
				else{
					new YAHOO.widget.Effects.BlindDown('menu-links', {seconds: 0.2});
					YAHOO.util.Dom.setStyle('menu-title', 'background-image', 'url(images/block-arrow-expanded.gif)');
				}
			});
		</script>
 

In line 3 of the above listing, we wait when the user clicks on the menu-title container and we check the display attribute of our links. If the links are not currently displayed then we display them by using Dav's BlindDown effect with a duration of 0.2 seconds ;-).

 
new YAHOO.widget.Effects.BlindDown('menu-links', {seconds: 0.2});
 

We also change the background image for the menu title by using the YAHOO.util.Dom.setStyle method:

 
 
YAHOO.util.Dom.setStyle('menu-title', 'background-image', 'url(images/block-arrow-expanded.gif)');
 

If the links are visible then we do the contrary, i.e we use the BlindUp effect and use the collapsed gif as background image.

Download sample demo