The year started off sweetly. I had joined Accenture Mauritius on December 2006 and I could not help from enjoying my new job as a Software Engineer. It was fun, just plain and simple java programming. No fancy “obscure” stuff. Had a great team, little or no overtime. The true fun I guess was the challenge of creating stuffs, devising simple logic and translate the lot to code. That was cool, I could even miss lunch once or twice just for the sake of programming. Loved that! This said I also enjoyed lunch time with friends when I had little or nothing truly challenging to do at work.One cool milestone would be the buying of my first car. A toyota Platz. Half of my monthly pay went into repaying the loan but I was happy. I had gained mobility, I could go wherever I wanted and at any time.

Then came in May 2007, my letter of offer for a scholarship to do mphil/phd at the University for 4 years. Had applied for the same before joining Accenture and there it was. It was a difficult decision to take, I always liked to study, learn stuffs, it was long haul nevertheless. I was settled at work. Then with the encouragement of some of my family members I took the leap. It was a complete shift in the beginning less friends, most of the time spent alone, lack of focus and nowhere to go for lunch. But things started to settled slowly and I could get a grasp of things. But the fun was missing. Sigh!

Careerwise the end of year was hectic, with different commitments taken.

Another major but sad event was the passing away of my grandma in May. It was a hard time for the whole family. I personally cannot help from missing her. She was always kind to me and always helped/protected me. Sometimes I regret all the times I was not closer to her.

The family was barely starting to appease their griefs when my uncle suffered a heart stroke. It was as if the nightmare would start off again. He had bypass surgery and which thank god was successful.

Lets hope for the better in 2008.

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I think that 2007 was a good year for Mauritius.

The economy is doing better even if there is an increase in inflation and public debt. For the first time since a long time unemployment is decreasing. The inflation is attributed mainly to exogenous factors, the price of oil and droughts in our food suppling countries. The textile industry has overcome the challenges and tourism is set to expand further.

Without  taking sides really, I would say our finance minister is doing a great job. Keep it up!

Bought myself a new router today.

I was fed up carrying wires around and trying to find power points for the nomad and my laptop. Messy it was.

Then I made up my mind this morning, I need a wireless router. Zaheer to the the rescue. My pal from CompuSource was quick to find a cheap but efficient router for me. A Netgear Wireless ADSL Firewall Router DG834G. Cool to find a copy of General Public License Version 2 in the docs.

Spent quite some time trying to configure it, mainly related to internet connectivity.

By default the Router assumes a standard ADSL connection from the telephone line. My nomad has an ethernet connection. Had to tweak a bit the default config but succeeded finally.

Here I am, in my bed with my laptop in front of me and no wires around writing the blog! I am happy!

Just been through an interesting article from eweek.com.

In essence SpringSource (aka Interface 21)  the company behind Open Source Spring Framework is planning to release its projects at the same time in March.

Spring consists of several sub projects which I had the chance to use.  Spring Framework, Web flow, Web Service etc..

The basic idea behind the release train is to have a readily working and tested system of these different sub projects available at the same time.

SpringSource is also actively working on a .Net version of its framework.

The company is also involved in  a tool suite for its platform, involving Eclipse, Spring IDE and Mylyn.

Mylyn tries to help the developer manage their different tasks with integration of  Bugzilla, Trac and JIRA.

All this sounds nifty. I cannot help from missing the good old days!

Ruby on Rails 2.0 is finally out after almost a year of development.

Check it out: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/12/7/rails-2-0-it-s-done

Ever since I had this blog featured on Mauritius Blog Tracker, I feel less creative. I start to think that people actually are going to read this shit. What would they think of me? And I ended being impotent… of ideas of course.

Right now I can see the list of stuffs I started to write on but somehow, I left incomplete. Overwhelmed by myself, Life of a girl, Living in paradise.. I am not even sure I am going to publish this one..

Anyone knows the procedures to opt out from Mauritius Blog Tracker? Stephane?

So long!

Hmm I wonder would that spur some comments on my blog? hehe