When a friend posted on facebook that the Mauritian Government Portal (www.gov.mu) is down, I couldn’t stop myself from checking. This is one moment when you are allowed some more naked-eye observation on the so-called highly-secured system.

Luckily customErrors mode was OFF, otherwise a lot more interesting information would be have been displayed. The website took slightly more than an hour to be back online. I’m not being a prick but having worked as a backend engineer one hour is a lot.

Anyway, I could not stop being curious, so once it showed up again, I went for a troll visiting the various pages. Oh! Let’s meet the Prime Minister’s Office webpage. Scroll down to the footer.

This ugly footer deserves a #facepalm. First of all, the font quality sucks hard. Then the text/links are scattered. Aaargh! To add more to the frustration Libraries and Lists prompt to an Access Denied page after asking for login credentials. Now, what the banana is that? If the pages are restricted to public, why even put them in the footer?

Let’s move along. I visited the Cabinet Office. Font size becomes tiny for no reason. However, it’s good I visited this page & checked the Cabinet Decisions taken on 29 August 2014. Now, I know Infotech 2014 will be held from 27 to 30 November 2014 at SVICC (^^,) …

I checked the Calendar of Activities and « oh my God​ » look at this colorful mess (/_^) …

Last I checked the tenders page and clicked on the Flipping Book link. Oops! It looks like the PMO’s trial account on the FlippingBook Cloud has expired (^^,) …

Click on the Ministries link & the URL shows a funny typo.

View the rules and regulations pages and they will show an expired notice too. As for the policies page it displays « Sorry, there are no items »

Even after more than a year that the Government Portal has been running, a lot of the stuffs are useless or do not work as they should. Yet, these same people are jumping enthusiastically at modernizing the country with biometrics. Come on pal, fix what’s not working first then you come asking for fingerprints.

As for the Related Departments page, it displays only one link « Ministry1 » and that too opens up Google.com as weird as it might sound.

I am tempted to write more, especially on the Microsoft Sharepoint blunder but I am drowsy. The penguin needs sleep. We gonna talk Sharepoint tomorrow. Good night folks!