Author: Nayar

Published on by Nayar

World of Tanks

Been playing this new Free-to-Play Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game. Very nice game and especially the graphics. Here’s some screenshots.

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What i like:
– No long loading time like League of Legends
– Graphics are nice and doesn’t lag at all. The screenshots above were taken with standard quality. I’m currently downloading the HD assets.

Dislikes:
– Games are short: around 7 – 15 minutes.
– No respawn when dead.
– Some tanks have to be bought with “real money”
– Experience is very slow to earn to be able to do more in-game “researches”.
– Not available on Linux

Download it here

Published on by Nayar

CoDel Intro by Loganaden Velvindron

Hosted at the University of Mauritius (UoM), Logan made a presentation explaining the “bufferbloat” problem in our network equipment [1].

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Buffer is a memory where data is stored temporarily before being transferred to another place [2]. For example, the conveyor belt at the supermarket can be thought as a buffer. Imagine a person buying stuffs for his family for one month and you are waiting for him to finish checking out for you to buy your single pack of chewing gums.

Source: carrotsncake.com

You just wasted an enormous amount of time. You’d feel pretty much pissed about it.

Reducing the amount of articles a person can put on a conveyor belt to let’s say 10 articles max will prevent you from waiting excessive amount of time as compared to being behind a person with 100+ articles.

This is what CoDel wants to achieve from what I understood from the presentation. Reducing the queue length of network equipment to allow more dropping of “elephant flows” to allow reduce serving time of “mice” and “ants”.

Logan Bufferbloat

I’m not sure what CoDel does more than just reducing queue length. And yeah, CoDel drops packets from the front of the queue rather than the end of it.

Does it make sense? I think yes. Let’s say you are on Mauritius Telecom’s MyT LaFibre when your 50GB allowance is over. Internet becomes a pain. Facebook is taking more than 2 minutes to load. You press the reload button 5 times. When the packet of your first request is reaching Facebook server you already refreshed your page making the request stale. The server still processes the first request and sends back. Meanwhile you are waiting packets from the 5th request. If the server just drops packets from the front, the latest flows will be served. Still doesn’t make sense?

Queue Drop
Source: what-when-how.com

Anyways, from a hacker’s point of view, doesn’t it become easier to do Denial of Service (DoS) attacks? Let’s say Mr X just send a packet to a server. I just flood the server queue so as his request gets dropped. Sending burst data to servers can result in some sort of “VIP” service since all requests before the queue is dropped. Maybe Logan can enlighten me in the next presentation.

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CoDel however is currently being designed and tweaked for latencies not more than 100ms Logan says. Will it work in the Mauritian context where latencies are around 300-350ms? Students from universities are invited to study the mechanism and improve user experience for Mauritius and African countries.

[1] http://logan.hackers.mu/2015/08/linux-meeting-29082015
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_buffer

Published on by Nayar

MyT’s LaFibre is a Tortoise

Companies make you stay 9hours in their offices: 8 hours work, 1 hour lunch break. On top of that, 3 hours lost in bus travel. You want to relax a bit when you return home, the Internet just sucks.

Orange Mauritius Speed

Orange Mauritius Speedtest

The page wouldn’t even load sometimes. Downloading a file through wget suck at 5%

wget Orange Mauritius stuck

We pay fortunes per month to ISPs in Mauritius for a service like this? Lot’s of people are complaining about Emtel’s Airbox is not delivering the promised speed on Facebook. Well, MyT’s LaFibre is a pain too after the 50GB limit has been reached.

Orange promises a better life with them. The joke.

Published on by Nayar

All they want is to legalize slavery in Mauritius

Well, you must have heard what is going on in this country. Promise of billions of jobs. Jobs like waiters, belly-dancing and carrying bags.

Recently, OTAM (Outsourcing and Telecommunications Association of Mauritius) wants the government to removed restrictions for importing IT workers from abroad [1]. OTAM says the Mauritian Textile industry is a “success”. It’s a joke right?

“Take, for example, the textile sector. If we were to rely solely on Mauritians, the industry would not have encountered such developments and rapid growth.”

I guess “a successful industry is defined as an industry which makes huge profit”. For instance, if a company A employs 100 people with a Rs 30,000 salary per month and makes Rs 5,000,000 as profit is OK. But if company B employs just 10 people with Rs 2,500 salary and makes a profit of Rs 100,000,000 over their heads, the government and the “petit-copains” would be happy.

OTAM Mauritius Vision

The people of Mauritius want companies like company A. Mauritian politicians and “petit-copains” love companies like company B.

The government wants to legalize slavery in all industries. This article by l’express states [2]:

“En fait, explique-t-il, les Mauriciens sont moins enclins à travailler jusqu’à des heures tardives”

Logan, a Mauritian blogger, writes a fictional news report which might happen in 2020 in Mauritius [3]

“That (the promised 665 dollars) is big money in Bangladesh and I was prepared to make any sacrifice for it,” Amin told slashslash who visited him at Ebene, in northern Mauritius, where he lives in a container provided by his employer, SmartCities Inc.

But, today, the Bangladeshi worker earns little more than a quarter of that amount. “I have been cheated,” he said.

40 hours per week is already too much. They want people to do overtime and get paid peanuts just to be able to stay alive. Even if it is in a vegetative state. Winter is coming. Slavery is coming. Slavery is already here!

Published on by Nayar

Review: Alcatel POP 2 (4.5)

After being greatly impressed by the Alcatel POP D3, I thought why not get another Alcatel greater speced Alcatel phone; I bought myself an Alcatel POP 2 (4.5) Dual Sim edition.

CPU: Quad-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A53
RAM: 1 GB
Coupled with a Quad-core ARM CPU and a 1GB RAM, the performance is awesome. Multi-tasking is very feasible. Navigating between opened apps is fast. I have no complaint at all performance-wise. Surpasses my needs actually. I don’t use the phone as a desktop due to the small screen and no keyboard 😛

Camera: 5MP Back, VGA Front
The rear camera is quite decent. As compared to the previous Alcatel POP D3, the current phone camera has auto-focus included. The rear camera also can record decent 1080p videos.

Front camera is full crap though. Maybe I’m just too ugly for it 😀

4G LTE with Dual Sim
Haven’t tested LTE yet as it is not yet deployed fully in Mauritius and I think my current SIM card is not supported too.

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To be noted here is that only 1 Sim slot is 4G,3.5G and 3G. The other one is only EDGE capable, i.e. speed is about max 384kbps theoretically. You can’t really browse the web on EDGE.

Android Dual SIM Choose

The other thing to note is that the SIM card is a Micro SIM one. Had to cut my current sim to be able to fit in the port. Operation successful with help of dad :3

OS: Android 4.4.4
Damn the phone software is buggy.

1. When the phone is on silent or vibrate only mode, when a call is received, the phone automatically goes on loud mode and rings! Bad bad.Can’t bring your phone at meetings or at work because of this.

Alcatel POP 2 (4.5) Ring Level

2. In the camera view, swiping left brings you to the gallery. You’d expect to see your latest photos taken but you see the oldest photos in your memory card. Not even limited to the DCIM/Camera folder.

Alcatel Camera Swipe to Gallery

3. Changing volume during a video or game is a huge huge irritation. The volume meter takes the whole screen and it present like for 5-7 seconds. Who the hell thought of this?

Changing Media Volume on Alcatel Full Screen

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4. When ear phone plugged in, sometimes when a call arrives, can’t use the phone inbuilt microphone and listen in the earphones provided the earphone doesn’t feature a mic. But sometimes it works.

5. Google keep widget doesn’t seem to be working despite the app updated itself numerous times.

Google Keep in Widget Menu Android

Google Keep Widget Fail

Verdict
Great hardware for the price. But software is buggy as hell. I wouldn’t recommend buying it unless Alcatel releases a firmware update with the latest Android. Don’t buy with the current firmware. Don’t.