Tag Archives: mauritius

Splitting a large text file on every blank line

I had a file of about a thousand lines containing the full description of multiple products (audio plugins from Plugin Alliance in my case). The file starts like this:

249
19.99
Mixland
Vac Attack★★★★★
A warm harmonically-rich optical limiter for compression with tube saturation that’s great on vocals, drums, basses, and your stereo bus.
Hardware EmulationsHidden GemsPA MembersSale

89.99
29.99
Woodlands Studio
VOXILLION★★★★★
A stunning and sophisticated, and complete vocal chain in one streamlined workflow. Featuring a high-end blend of a tube-driven preamp, two types of compressors, Nasal Dynamic EQs, Harmonics and more
Hidden GemsLimited Time OnlyPA_EXTSale

279
39.99
ADPTR AUDIO
Metric AB★★★★★
The mastering engineer’s best friend: Compare your mix to your favorite reference tracks. See,hear and learn even more with new expanded features.
Hidden GemsMasteringSale

and ends like this:

FreeDownload
PA FREE
bx_shredspread★★★★★
Intelligent M/S width for doubled riff guitars. Auto-avoid common phase problems, and sound extra-wide and tight!
FREEGuitar & BassHidden GemsM/S InsideMade by BX

FreeDownload
PA FREE
bx_tuner★★★★☆
Accurate tuning for guitar & bass with useful features like volume dimming. Tune up right before you hit the record button.
FREEGuitar & BassMade by BXSale

FreeDownload
PA FREE
bx_yellowdrive★★★★★
Warm to crunch to shred with this classic “Yellow” pedal in plugin form.
Creative FXFREEGuitar & BassHardware EmulationsMade by BXSale

What I wanted to do was to split the long file of a thousand lines into smaller files, each containing the lines corresponding to one plugin only.

Fortunately, the plugins were separated by an empty line. After some searching, I stumbled upon a Stackoverflow post of someone having the same issue and I settled on this solution enhanced by this comment:

gawk -v RS= '{ print > ("plugin-" NR ".txt")}' plugins.txt

As explained in the solution, “setting RS to null tells (g)awk to use one or more blank lines as the record separator. Then one can simply use NR to set the name of the file corresponding to each new record”. As explained in the comment, this will fail with the basic version of awk as it cannot handle too many open files at the same time (only 252 files were created with awk). Switching to gawk works great and now I have 277 files which I can further process.

Ubuntu Mauritius 🐧

Last week, Chittesh and I were discussing about Ubuntu 20.10 and we shared how things are effortless and boring. I installed Ubuntu on my personal laptop the previous week-end. I was indeed impressed by the out-of-the-box experience with the drivers and codecs.

For a long time I had forgotten that Ubuntu has the tendency to keep things as "human" as possible; and therefore adhering to their motto, "Linux for human beings!"

Out of the discussion, we then decided we will put some energy into the dormant Ubuntu Mauritius LoCo Team. The latter was created in 2011 and we organised a few events around those years, such as the Ubuntu Global Jam and Installation Festivals. Later on, I continued to focus on my experiments with openSUSE and spent less time at the Ubuntu activities.

In 2021, we are going to sort out a few things and make the Ubuntu Mauritius group active again. Chittesh has agreed to take on the reign. He is already the team's go-to person. Expect to see more purple desktops next year!

Ubuntu Mauritius

For a long time I had forgotten that Ubuntu has the tendency to keep things as "human" as possible; and therefore adhering to their motto, "Linux for human beings!"

Developers Conference 2021 – Call for Speakers announced

The Call for Speakers for the Developers Conference 2021 has been announced. Yes, DevCon 2021 is knocking at the doors already. Preparations have begun and if you would like to be a speaker at the most awaited tech conference in Mauritius, then head to sessionize.com and submit your proposal.

Save the dates

DevCon 2021 is scheduled for the 18, 19 & 20 March 2021 (if all is well in the country).

We are keeping fingers crossed that the pandemic does not worsen globally, that our friends from outside Mauritius are able to come attend, present and participate in good health, and that the COVID-19 situation on the island remains under control, so that there aren't any restriction on public gathering. All that said, we know we should continue the usual hygiene practices and apply proper social distancing measures if we are in a group of strangers.

Tips for submitting presentation proposals

Provide a clear and concise presentation title
Provide a proper description to give the attendees an idea on what they could learn or may gain from your presentation
Specify the difficulty level
If you intend to do demos and would like the audience to participate using their devices (e.g laptops/mobile phones) please specify the same in your description
Leave notes for the organisers if you require any specific material
Put a proper profile picture so that people may recognize you
Don't use fancy nicknames
A short bio about your work and other activities would be very helpful

You can submit several presentation proposals but please be reasonable, don't spam! 😉

Developers Conference 2021 – Call for Speakers announced

Save the dates

DevCon 2021 is scheduled for the 18, 19 & 20 March 2021 (if all is well in the country).

Tips for submitting presentation proposals

Provide a clear and concise presentation title
Provide a proper description to give the attendees an idea on what they could learn or may gain from your presentation
Specify the difficulty level
If you intend to do demos and would like the audience to participate using their devices (e.g laptops/mobile phones) please specify the same in your description
Leave notes for the organisers if you require any specific material
Put a proper profile picture so that people may recognize you
Don't use fancy nicknames
A short bio about your work and other activities would be very helpful

You can submit several presentation proposals but please be reasonable, don't spam! 😉

Hacktoberfest Mauritius 2020

Saamiyah pinged me a few days ago about the Hacktoberfest event that she was organising and asked whether I would be free to present a topic. Sure, why not?

As many tech meetups at the moment, the Hacktoberfest event also was virtual. It was hosted on the Jitsi instance of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community. The event was scheduled to start at 19h30 on Friday, i.e last evening. I was late to join but "luckily" so was everybody.

Local hacktoberfest is live 😊 #mauritius pic.twitter.com/qFoNmFDn78
— Saamiyah 🇲🇺 (@smearthelove) October 23, 2020

As the event started, we had some small-talk before the presentations really kick-off. We talked about flexi-time, work-from-(home|anywhere), and how they compare to being full-time in office.

Saamiyah did the first presentation in which she talked about the concept of Hacktoberfest, a month where open source software is celebrated. Sandeep spoke about local open source projects on GitHub.

I spoke about Flatpak and how to set it up on openSUSE. I concluded my presentation with an observation on the rise of Flatpak fuelled by the idea of having immutable & maintenance-free systems such as Fedora Silverblue and openSUSE MicroOS Desktop.

The presentation slides are available at speakerdeck.com.

The next speaker, Alan, spoke about Docker Swarm, followed by Pritvi who talked about software licenses. It was 22h00 by that time and I could not stay longer. I bid goodnight on the chat room and wished everyone to continue having fun!

Top websites visited by Mauritius and the compromised cyberisland

Alexa top 10 Websites visited by Mauritians

Alexa is a web statistic tool which is very useful. The problem in Mauritius, is that we do not have much statistics. I was expecting facebook, yahoo, and youtube. One site (ask.com) immediately drew my attention and I knew that something was very wrong in Mauritius !

Ask.com or how a lot of computers are compromised in the Cyberisland

The ask toolbar is generally found on computers that have been compromised, and installed surreptitiously. At the 10th place, we have ask.com, which is a malware that infects a lot of browsers. I saw it on a few laptops of my co-workers, and friends. However, I never imagined that it was so widespread in Mauritius! Widespread enough that it's the 10th most visited website by the island ! ask.com is typically accessed via browser toolbar that generates bad search results, and is notorious to remove completely.

Ask toolbar slows down the computers on which it is installed. It is very difficult to remove completely. The computers that have ask toolbar installed are very likely to contain other malware. Those computers tend to slow down entire corporate networks due to excessive traffic. Microsoft rates it as high, in terms of security severity: Microsoft Advisory. I went to check with CERT-MU which is the in its own terms "... Mauritian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-MU), a division of the National Computer Board (NCB), Mauritius, to educate and enhance the awareness of the general public on the technological and social issues facing internet users, particularly on the dangers of getting online." and found nothing concerning ask toolbar.

WWL: Work with Linux, it’s already reality.

The Sony Bravia LCD TVs run Linux

11 Replies

20090623-sony-bravia

How many of you would like to get an LCD TV for Christmas? A lot, I bet. How many of you know that the Sony Bravia LCD TVs are powered by Linux? A lot fewer, I guess.

LCD TVs have a lot of pixels. When displaying a normal-resolution programme (say from the MBC), the TV must use extremely complex image processing algorithms to generate the missing pixels. For example:

SECAM @ 720 x 576 = 414,720 pixels every 1/25 of a second (I’m simplifying…)
HDTV @ 1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels every 1/25 of a second

So the TV must digitally create 5 times as many pixels as in the original frame 25 times per second. As you can easily guess, this requires a lot of horsepower hence the use of a powerful computer inside the TV. Sony has chosen Linux to power that computer (specifically Linux kernel 2.6.11)

For the more curious, have a look at http://products.sel.sony.com/opensource/source_tv.shtml

Back to the future

10 Replies

20090615-back-to-the-future

I’m happy!

After years and years of inactivity (let’s be honest!), the LUGM website is alive again! As you can see, this is a blog and I expect you to make it become alive with a lot of insightful and passionate comments. Of course, we’ll also participate in the discussions.

As you all know, the Linux User Group of Mauritius has a number of objectives namely (i) advocate (ii) support (iii) educate and (iv) make people meet. During the coming months, we will make a number of important announcements concerning events that we intend to organise… with your help! Stay tuned.

The past

When LUGM started 10 years ago, Linux was still a curiosity… especially here in Mauritius.

As a matter of fact, I got into Linux myself par hasard. I had a Windows NT server around 1999 and it was tough to configure (in fact, a lot of things were not working properly.) I stumbled upon a copy of the PC Quest magazine with Redhat Linux 6.2 as cover disk. Little by little, I migrated all the services from the NT box to a Pentium 133 with 32 Mb running the Redhat Linux 6.2 and everything worked great. I then decided that life was too short to care about NT and became a Linux addict.

Of course, things were not always rosy. I fondly remember having to fight with the X-Window configuration files on a daily basis. And a lot of services could only be configured after read documentation and HOWTOs thoroughly. But, at least, they worked as expected…

But Linux was fun! I really enjoyed learning about the UNIX way of doing things. It is then that I decided to share my passion with others, first by announcing the launching of this Linux User Group then by introducing my students to Linux. I remember deploying Linux to the Mauritius Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the University of Mauritius to great effect. Many of the students loved Linux as it allowed them to explore areas of Computer Science that they were not really aware of.

On the commercial front, we did a survey on the use of Linux in Mauritian companies in 2003 and the results are still interesting to read.

Now

Linux is now a common occurrence in Mauritian companies. And this is true for a lot of open source software too. Of course, most of the desktop computers still run Windows (and I expect this to continue for some years until everyone becomes mobile) but a lot of the largest servers in the country are powered by Linux.

Interestingly, a lot of devices being used by Mauritians all day long (e.g. the Mauritius Telecom Livebox and the Sony Bravia LCD TVs) run Linux.

As far as I know, the rate of adoption of open source software is increasing (simply because, for most of them, they work great!)

There is one thing which I don’t like though, the Mauritian Linux community is still largely fragmented and I hope that this new website will enable us all to work together (and also have a lot of fun together.)

The future

It all depends on you. What do you want us to do?

Avinash Meetoo