Tag: News

Gov.mu changes to Govmu.org

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www-what

As you know by now, the Mauritian Government Portal, formerly located at http://www.gov.mu, will now be found at http://www.govmu.org.

Edit: For some reason, http://www.gov.mu is still operational. I have no idea what’s happening. Let’s just consider the points below as theoretical then, if ever the domain name does change.

If you’re not currently aware of the change, you can read this article and if you’re wondering why this change was required, the Mauritian Government refused to be held hostage by an individual. Lol.

Now let’s see, what consequences could such a change have? Surely there cannot be many big changes! It’s just a name after all! Uh huh…

1) Mauritius is now one of the rare countries whose government portal does not end in its associated ccTLD. Singapore (gov.sg), UK (gov.uk), India (gov.in), South Africa (gov.za), Japan (japanportal.jp), China (gov.cn), France (france.fr) etc etc… You get the idea. It so happens that the “cyber island” ‘s government portal does not end in .mu. Ouch, straight in the reputation!

2) You have to go through every page of every department of the Mauritian government and change everything on these pages to point to govmu.org like “Contact Us” pages (which funnily enough list emails in the mailto: format, a treasure for spammers!). I hope a “search and replace” will do the job for them, although verifying the changes might be a little more difficult. When you are done, change every application form (printed or PDF), brochures and posters to use the new addresses if they include references to other documents or literature.

3) Email addresses have changed. It was mail.gov.mu. Now it’s mail.govmu.org if I’m not mistaken. So? You simply have to change every business card of every government officer to incorporate the new address. Oh and all letterheads too. And a variety of other documents. And every contact details of every ministry, department and parastatal of the Government portal. Then tell your contacts to use the new email address too, once you’re done. Don’t forget to reconfigure every mobile phone, tablet and random devices of users, ministers and the rest to use the new email servers. Remember how the new website cost like Rs. 50 million to develop? Wonder how much this will cost to change all that.

4) You have now broken every search engine link or references to the Government portal… Google and other search engines indexed gov.mu web pages. It will take them time to rebuild their databases with the new links. This could take anywhere from a days to a few months, given how many pages are accessible from the portal. None of these links would work. So whenever people are using Google to search for government forms or documents, they will see broken links. Other websites that point to gov.mu URLs will now point to broken links. An SEO nightmare, basically. At least GMB accounts can be managed easily as they use the best software for automatically posting to Google My Business.

5) Your Government / country now looks like an organisation. Who got the bright idea of using a .org TLD?! Was it the cheapest offer available? At least it could have been http://www.mu.gov, which would make more sense, even if it uses the .gov TLD (US-based mainly), if the latter was available for negotiations.

6) Once the domain gov.mu expires, the owner is free to do whatever it wants with it. Like park ads on it. Or worse, naughty pictures! Basically, the old and respected gov.mu could now host any kind of content depending on what the new owner fancies!

7) Building on the above point, if a malicious user decides to buy the gov.mu domain name, they could in theory, intercept emails that are sent to old mail.gov.mu addresses by redirecting the requests to their own mail servers.

These are the changes I can think of right now and I’m sure there are many more cascading changes that will be happening soon. Keep your eyes open and remember to update your bookmarks!

What MBC needs to learn from NDTV

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Long time no posts. I’m sorry, readers. Exams took all of my time. Now, it’s over and I’m free to entertain you again. Let’s begin.

Like the rest of the world (excluding the terrorists), I’m appalled by the Mumbai attacks. It’s simply inconceivable how a group of terrorists could wreak such havoc! My sympathies to the people who have lost loved ones in those attacks.

However, the point of this article is not to debate about the attacks. It’s not fitting for me to comment on such tragic events. What I would like to point out however, is the fantastic coverage of the events that NDTV (New Delhi Television Limited) has provided, which will put our national broadcaster, MBC, to shame. I usually don’t talk about politics on Geekscribes since I’m not a fan of the subject, but this is going to be a rare exception.

How I managed to know about NDTV? MBC was ripping redirecting the broadcast from India to the country yesterday, or so I think. This allowed me to follow the events in live, and I must say, flooded with details and information.

  • NDTV listed the names of the hostages rescued and at which hospital victims wereThis is impressive. They managed to get a list of rescued hostages and broadcast them to others with the hope that they might find in there, their families and friends. A very good move I must say, and it will definitely help others who are unable to communicate with the people involved there. This list was kept on screen at any point in time as a scroller. This is the news people want to know, and I am sure, if it was the MBC covering those events, we’d just be having images and commentary.
  • NDTV had the courage of cutting a politician mid-speechIn my opinion, this is a “feat” that the MBC will never be able to achieve. I don’t know who the politician were, but here is how it went: There was a reporter talking live from in front of the Taj hotel, interviewing a person whose family member was in there. Then, the studio reporter interrupted the guy because of a politician was talking live. After a while, the studio reporter switched back to the Taj hotel guy and said something along those lines: “We have no time to debate politics in this situation. Unfortunately, this is what our politicians usually do. We prefer to switch back to the Taj Hotel” and the image swapped back.This is just awesome! Something like this is never going to happen in Mauritius! If this happened, the reporters would probably be fired the next day, for “daring” to interrupt a “very important” politician! But in times like these, politics is not what is most needed, and NDTV did just the right thing.
  • NDTV presenter criticizes politiciansI kept the best for last. This definitely will NEVER happen in Mauritius. At some point in the coverage, an NDTV presenter made some comments after a series of videos depicting the day’s events, and the people that lost their lives in trying to save others’. Those comments were like this: “The events of today remind us that Indians now don’t care what PM is in power or the petty politics. The mood can be summarized in simple words: Enough is Enough! Today, [reporter names 2 politicians] promised they would go together to Mumbai. Finally, they went separately. Even on a day like this, they were unable to unite! The people of India needs them united, and they can’t go to Mumbai together. [comment continues]”This is what I call unbiased news! And that’s how things should be done. I can agree that MBC is government-controlled, even if it tends to call itself “independent”. But if you are the national broadcaster, it is your duty to bring unbiased news to the people, and make criticism where needed.

NDTV showed me what professionalism is today. Their reporters were always on the scene, sometimes even in the line of fire. In short, they made a fantastic coverage of the events, and I am sure are still doing a fine job even now. They were helpful in their reports, providing lists and interviews where possible. They covered politicians and military personnel to try to gain more information. What’s more? As soon as a new piece of information became available, it was immediately presented on screen in the “Just In” section at the bottom of the screen.

I can only hail their performance today. I hope the MBC and other broadcasters in Mauritius can learn from them, and provide us with better news, instead of just coverage of what our politicians did, or what they inaugurated. Who cares about those anyways? I doubt any Mauritian loves to see politicians’ faces every evening on TV after they leave a tiring day’s job. No we don’t. And that’s just what the MBC feeds us everyday.

Hell, the other day, the lady even read the WHOLE sympathy message the PM sent to India. Did we really need to know the full contents? At other times, we get a 20 mins coverage of our PM’s speech in a 30 mins news. Talk about professionalism!

As if it was not enough, now the JT is being re-broadcasted after 23h for us to have another look at our lovable politicians’ faces again, if ever we missed them.

Let’s hear your views now. What do you think about MBC? What can they do to improve? Can they even improve?? And what about the Mumbai attacks? Do you have any relatives or close friends there? Any news?

Jumpy start for UoM 2008 academic year

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Student Union\'s Interview

Cancelled Courses at UOM

Mismanaged Cafetaria

Hello readers! I found 3 interesting articles in Le Mauricien newspaper of today. Guess what? They all talk about UoM, our dear University of Mauritius. Two of the articles do not flatter UoM, and the third is the interview of Miss Aartee Beekharry, actual president of the Student Union.

I’m sorry for the lack of quality of the pictures, it’s due to the crappy quality of my camera. I couldn’t get the article about the management of Cafeteria due to the page layout. Quite a good article, try to read it.

Alright, so my point is this: University has not even started, and it’s already receiving criticism! This is rather humorous, considering all the claims of “we are ready” already said by UoM management. Now, I’m eager to see what will actually happen when all the students flock in on the 11th. Let’s see!

As students, many of my friends and myself are not too reassured as to how the management will cope with the increase in students. It was estimated to have around 40% increase, but not this article comes and says that courses are canceled due to… lack of students. Lol?

Canceling courses is an abomination. Many students work through their HSC years with a view of what they want to do at Uni, and just as they set foot in there, they find their course canceled. Their options? Go to another university locally, or go abroad and add to the brain-drain of Mauritius. What about their already-paid fees? Who knows…

Another comical issue. If you read the article, apparently UoM needs to wait for orientation day to know “how many students registered for a course”. Ok, I may agree that O-Day represents the actual number of students that will attend the course, not those that registered and went elsewhere. (“mass registrations to land one uni seat, UoM as backup” strategy) But it’s still weird. I wonder what the “not enough students” mean. What’s the minimum number of students for a class to run?

Next, the cafeteria issue. I gotta agree, cafet sucks. No truly! There is nothing for me to eat there! (I’m veg). I’m not even sure if the “pain au chocolat” is actually veg, even if it’s mentioned on the window-display thing. There is still some vegetable pickles and bread, but still nothing much. There are loads of French cakes, gotta admit, but I doubt anybody will have a lunch on French Cakes, are they? (Napolitan lunches… *drool*). They could at least provide some good, hot meals. This would mean less students eating at MIE cafet, and more at UoM cafet. Let’s wait and see.

Note that the article actually deals with how the cafeteria is actually managed, not what food is served. You will see mentions of how the caterer and the VC are “close together”, and some other matters. Note that the complaints were made by the SU “viva voce” as commented by Le Mauricien.

The last article is about SU president’s interview. Makes a good reading material if you want to know a bit about what student union was doing, is doing and will do. Nothing really detailed, but ok, you still have some more info about SU. Happy Birthday SU, 37 years huh? (old!)

That’s the end of this post. Drop us some comments please, specially UoM students.