Marouen Bloggin' his Life

If I'm not wrong, I won my first Personal Computer in the year 1991 after participating in a writing contest in french and winning the first prize. It was the famous Commodore 64 like in the picture with a tape reader and few tapes containing some games and programs such as the main Operating System (I remember only the Ninja Game I used to play with).

I miss my C64 which I had to exchange few months later to get my first PC with a mouse, The Amiga 500. Check the details of the C64 in this link

I think you've already heard about the famous voice/Speech recognition feature that will be included with Vista. Let's try it !

It seems that the famous search engine Google is using a new technology very close to the human's sixth sense to guess what internet users are really needing and show them the results as a sponsored link. I discovered that while trying to know if Typo3 (a content mangement system) supports the arabic language or not, google gave me this result on the right side in my mother tongue (click on the picture):

Translation : The right girl ? look for free for a wife.

After my previous post about Tunisiana's launch of EDGE service, I think this may be Tunisia Telecom's answer :

Alcatel has been awarded a US$61 million contract to extend the GSM/EDGE mobile network of Tunisie Telecom, the incumbent fixed and mobile operator in Tunisia. Under the terms of the contract, Alcatel will provide Tunisie Telecom with its Evolium multi-standard radio access solution which integrates all GSM-based mobile technologies, from GSM/GPRS to EDGE and 3G/UMTS. Source: http://www.cellular-news.com/story/16613.php

I hope that this will not take a long delay to be provided to the customers (like me).

After reading this post about the abnormal results of 'http' query in famous engine Google, I decided to try it and I had almost the same result with Microsoft on the first line. At least Yahoo! Is giving a more reasonable result as you can see here (click on image):

I went today to the opening of the first tunisian outrsourcing fair Outsourcing 2006 in Tunisia. This fair is organised by the consulting company 2CW in partnership with Enrnest & Young and StelFair Tunisia.

After a fast walk in front of all the stands, the most important one (at least for me) was Tunisiana (the first private GSM operator in Tunisia) because I had some technical questions about their SMS platform and when the MMS will be opened to service providers. But thanks to a nice guy in charge of «Marketing watch » for added value service (a nice position), I knew, with a live demo as proof, that GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) will be launched in few days, as long as EDGE (Enhanced Data rate for GSM Evolution known also as EGPRS) with a practical bandwith of 120 kbps and will be available to all Tunisiana's subscribers with a free activation by a phone call to the hotline. And the billing will be done according to the transfer size not to the connection duration. But the price is not available yet.

Now, people with mobile phone supporting GPRS/EDGE will be able to check their inboxes and « blog » from anywhere in Tunisia through the equipment or using it as a modem for a laptop. Tunisiana will sell also PCMCIA interfaces supporting the SIM to be plugged directly to the laptops.

Any answer from Tunisie Telecom ?

This post is a kind of answer to Sup’cominan life’s inquiries about the reasons of having expensive ADSL connectivity prices in Tunisia comparing it to the situation in Europe. I’ve been thinking on the same way five years ago. But day by day, while entering into the IT field and discovering the professional world, I understood that it is more complicated than what we can imagine.

I had the opportunity to answer to this question many times, when I did introductory presentations on Internet Governance, few weeks before the WSIS week, in two computing universities in Tunis. And since I have often this question at the beginning, I always ask the person asking to wait until the end of the presentation and I’ll be back to him. Then, when I did that, he told me he get the answer. Internet governance is one of the mojor topics of the WSIS and I don’t think it would be if it wasn’t a very complex issue involving many actors including governments, telecom companies, ISPs, IBPs (Internet Bandwith Providers) etc… . And all these actors are responsible of the digital divide they are trying to bridge.

I’m not going to defend Tunisie Telecom’s pricing policies but I want just to remind you that this “BIG” company (at least for Tunisia), still having the monopoly in wired connections, is just the last link a long chain (on the technical and international level). It’s not fair to compare xDSL rates in Tunisia with rates in Europe or North America because we don’t have the same levels of opportunities. Many variables at the national and the international levels are deciding this price (ie: IBP rates, contracts with “carrying” companies, peering between countries, ITU laws ….).

At the end, I want you just to compare what happened 4 years ago in France concerning the issue of ADSL between France Telecom and the other operators/ISPs with what is happening now. The same with Morocco and Tunisia. Things are changing smoothly …. but at least changing.

Today I did something I’ve been thinking about it since I saw the ad on a daily newspaper 3 weeks ago. Finally I decided to go to my ISP office and give back my ADSL modem.

The reason is not because I’m not satisfied by the bandwidth or the quality of the service which are very good and I don’t remember I had any troubles with internet since July when that same modem has been connected to my computer. The problem is that, having 2 computers at home, one on dual boot Linux/XP and the other running “often” Ubuntu Linux (my experiments machine), I’ve been trying several times to try to install my USB ADSL modem on Linux without success because my Italian made modem is “designed for MS products” (what I found after “googling” internet for many weeks). So I had the idea of making the XP one a proxy server for the Ubuntu one, but I never felt myself comfortable with this solution.

Today I had the best solution. My ISP Company (T…… to not promote it even if they deserve it) is renting ADSL/Router/Wireless AP (Access Point) modems for 5 Dinars per month (about 3 euros). I think it’s a good price to solve all problems with a lot of new features to gain. You can check all these features having a look on the manufacturer page (sorry only in french).

Tonight I felt myself like a child discovering a new toy while installing the modem and trying all the features and even setting up again all the connection parameters that the ISP technicians refused to let me do it the first time.

I think that this modem/router will open the way for a lot of other discoveries in these cold nights. But the first thing I have to try is the wireless network …. I don’t have any wireless network adapter

Today I had an interesting discussion with a seller in a computers shop in “Avenue de la liberté”. I’ll try to write here what I can remember:

• Me: Hello, do you have 12 inchs laptops ?
  
• Seller: No, why do you want it 12 inchs ?
  
• Me: for many reasons !
  
• Seller:Yes, tell me !
  
• Me: Well; I want it only for work, and the weight is important too !
  
• Seller: About the weight, we have good ones….
  We have this Acer, it’s a Celeron M so it should be less heavy.
  
• Another Seller: No, it’s 2.7 Kilos.
  
• Seller: Oups, anyway it’s not expensive at all. About 1100 Dinars
  
• Me: Linux inside it, cool. Do you know which distribution is installed ?
  
• Seller: Emmm, no ! I know only one thing, I’m used to format and install MS Windows when I find linux.
  
• Me: Why ?
  
• Seller: Costumers do not want Linux. And it’s only for experts. About the “type” of linux, it should be written printed on it like Windows.
  
• Me: I doubt of it. (After checking) I’ve told you. It cannot be written.
  
• Seller: Why ?
  
• Me: Because ACER is already making enough trouble to MS by selling computers running Linux but they still have other agreements for other computers sold with MS Windows. So they are avoiding problems with MS and for sure they should be paid for printing “Designed for MS Windows XP” on the other products.
  
• Seller: I see, but since it’s installed, it should be indicated on the constructor’s CDRoms.
  
• (After looking for the CDRoms)
  
• Seller: Well, it’s not written
  
• Me: Can I have a look ? … It’s written in Chinese and English, it’s including LinPlus Linux …. I’ve never heard about this distribution. But it’s funny anyway.
  

After, we started discussing about Linux and I guess he was a old user of Unix systems and he missed all the Linux revolution since was comparing Linux to Alpha systems and MS DOS …. Maybe he was on another planet on the meantime but I think he’s back to the IT world and with his communication skills, I’m sure he’s selling a lot everyday … of “MS Windows designed” computers.

Related to this information in ZDnet MS Internet Explorer 7.0 will be based on the famous "Security Engine" Windows XP SP2 and so users of Windows 2000 will not be able to use it. Especially because MS will not longer support windows 2000 by the ned of June 2005 unless when users can pay the support. I think it's the best occasion for all the users to move to Mozilla FireFox And I think that the problem of web developpers wishing to test their websites and applications under MS IE can use FireFox plugin allowing to see the pages like on IE. Clever no ?