Aravinda's Orderly Clutter...

Eclair to Froyo - Mission Accomplished!

2011-04-14T10:34:00.000-07:00

With the craze to get hold of a new mobile and jump on to the Android band wagon, I got myself a Samsung Galaxy S I9000 few months ago. I bought this from Abu Dhabi on my way back from a US tour and since then I've been pretty much in love with the phone. The mobile came with the Android 'Eclair' version of course with many awesome stuff running on top of it.

However, once I got word of the Android 'Froyo' upgrade being available for the Galaxy S, I was impatient to get hold of it, mainly due to the tempting reviews of Froyo being pretty faster compared to Eclair and also the new feature set it provided.

I have a buddy (Sandu) who also got down a Galaxy S from UK, and one fine weekend, he did the Froyo upgrade like a breeze. Now that the guinea pig was through, I wanted to do this too (No disrespect bro! :) ).

But, when I tried to get on with it, I came across all sorts of obstacles, probably due to the Middle Eastern version of the device (I could be wrong here). Samsung Kies is the application that is 'supposed to' connect my mobile to the PC. But, despite how many Kies distributions I tried, I could never get my device connected to the machine. Perpetually the software was trying to recognize a device. Also, I heard from Sandu that the Android version, build number etc were different on his mobile. With a heavy heart of having to stick with Eclair for longer, I started my research on reasons for this and possible solutions.

Thanks to the power of Google, I managed to come across the second way of doing the upgrade using the simple flasher software - also release by Samsung called Odin. This looked like a very elegant way of doing it compared to Kies because i could use the downloaded firmware file and use it offline in contrast to Kies which performs a long download.

The tutorial by Neal Pradeep is what I referred to and this had the clear guidelines on how to perform the upgrade. If you are someone waiting to do the Froyo upgrade, do follow this tutorial. He also has many other Android tutorials which are really handy.

So, once I got hold of the pre-requisites specified in the guide, I backed up all my data (sms, call history, contacts etc) and applications using a neat backup tool called My Backup. Then I started to perform the upgrade step by step as specified with my fingers crossed becasue I had no idea if I was about to throw hundreds of dollars away.

It was a matter of less than 20 mins, and voila!!! My Galaxy S was upgraded to Froyo!

Few things I noticed when I did the upgrade:

In my case, Odin connected my mobile on 2 ID:COM ports. This is ok. If this happens to you just continue.
The PIT file we should download did not have the valid .pit extension. Add this manually in case you are not able to navigate to the file via Odin (should be trivial)
Be patient once the phone gets restarted. The long first time boot up is really long! I had to wait for about 10 minutes.
based on my experience, if it about flashing the phone, Odin seems to be a very elegant way of doing it.

	Previous	Current
Firmware version	2.1-update1	2.2.1
Baseband version	i9000XXJF3	I9000XXJPY
Kernel version	2.6.29 umts_scm@S1-BUILD05 #2	2.6.32.9 root@SE-S608 #1
Build number	ECLAIR	FROYO.XWJS7

Now if you'd excuse me, I have to attend to my Frozen Yogurt! :)

R.I.P Timmy

2011-02-20T03:31:00.000-08:00

They say that a dog is man’s faithful friend, and my pet dog Timmy was someone who really proved me that, being with me for 13 long years. It was quite feeble for a while and today around 10.00 a.m. it had died a silent death bringing sorrow to everyone at home. This post is a small tribute to Timmy and I would like to recap some of the memories I have.

Timmy came in to my life in 1998 when I was in year 8. This was a time when we were taken from the school for the Junior National Badminton Championships. On the way back we stopped at our master in charge’s wife’s house and there were the cutest Lion Pomenarians I’ve ever seen. Having the need to own a puppy, I immediately decided to take one of them and I noticed this brownish pup that had a unique color. When I picked it up, I got to see the mother’s love in the dog world too. I remember how Timmy’s mum growled at the rest without letting anyone else come closer to me when I was holding Timmy, and when we got in to the van, she came closer looked me in the eyes as if to say “take good care of my kid” and then left. So, Timmy had the longest journey of his life on that day, from Homagama to Bandarawela which is close to 200km. Tough puppy, eh? :)

The first few weeks were not so exciting coz you know, I had to clean up half of the house each morning. Ah before I forget, there is a reason why I named him Timmy – I once had another dog named Timmy, and after a while we lost him. Maybe it was stolen or it wandered off. So, I named this pup Timmy to remember the previous dog.

Slowly time passed away, and Timmy grew to be a playful puppy, and my evenings were filled with playful moments with him. When teeth started coming out it was quite hard to keep the slippers coz Timmy bit in to each of them. However, after few months, it got quite sick and apparently it had got a phlegm problem. So, for few days we had to feed it milk and porridge along with the medicine. I remember how Manjula - my classmate back then – came and helped me do this drill after school. Fortunately Timmy made it through and from then grew to be a healthy dog.

After I taught him fetch we had a different consequence. He started thinking that it needs to bring back everything we throw away. So, every morning we used to have a pile of garbage at our doorstep coz Timmy used to fetch everything from the garbage pit. Anyway later on he got to know what exactly we needed, and became a very good fielder when my dad and I played Cricket at home.

Timmy was very intelligent. He is always the first to greet when any family member comes back after a journey. Even when my father came home in a different vehicle he had the instincts to run up and greet. Also, he was very particular about the meals he got. If he didn’t like it he used to topple the food over with his paw and fill the plate with sand using its snout. It wasn’t very fond of the bath and we had a tough time when he started understanding the Sinhala word for having a bath. Whenever he heard the word, he used to either run in to the kennel or go and hide under the car. So we used to set the bathing environment and lure it in to it by placing a biscuit trail like Hansel and Gretel found their way back :) . Anyway once it got the first splash of water it used to become cooperative.

Timmy has bit me twice. The first was during a vaccination. The needle might have hurt him, and it kept on gripping to my hand while the vaccine was injected. The second was actually my fault where I went and pulled the bone it was gnawing on.

Time went by, and once I left school and went to Colombo for studies and work, I missed the companionship. But whenever I got home Timmy was always there to welcome no matter at what time I got back. I remember how it runs up to the three wheeler to greet me, even when I reach home around 2.00-3.00 in the morning, and kept jumping up to me while someone opens the gate for me to get in. It is during these times that I was at home, it got a good brush to its coat and the occasional hair trim. We never had to chain him or prison him in the kennel for long hours because despite being a good watch dog he was extremely obedient and knew his boundaries very well.

The post can go for on and on with so many memories I have which keep flowing in to my mind on this sad day. Timmy wasn’t just the guard dog or our pet. He was like a family member to us, and in the alms giving we had in our house couple of months back we wished him good health and got the blessings too. I am sure that will have an effect and result in a pleasant afterlife for Timmy.

I wish I’d meet him one day as a friend – only if I could know it is him!

A true friend is tough to lose...

Specially when they leave a paw print in your heart forever..!

QR Codes - Embrace!

2011-01-22T11:40:00.000-08:00

Being away from my blog for some time (around 5 months) I felt like giving it some new life. Even I was bored with the old template which was filled with graphics and thought of going to a simpler standard one – and hence this dark theme which will load faster and... oh well, will at least save some power :)

Anyway getting back to the topic, seeing these 2D bar code around, I was enthusiastic to investigate more on them. Among the types like CM , PDF417, MaxiCode , DataGlyphs etc I was really interested in one category I have been seeing around quite often which encodes data in the form of squares.

This type I am talking about is officially known as QR Code (Quick Response). A code can store up to 4,296 alphanumeric characters of arbitrary text. Since it stores a bunch of characters, this text can be anything, ranging from a name, URL, contact information, or even a geeky way to represent of a short romantic poem! This has been mainly used in the Japanese automobile industry to track production line elements. But, today its utility has expanded to a broader scope and is being used to store different types of information in different domains - specially marketing.

Here’s my contact info in QR Code (basically ‘MY’ QR Code) :

As you would have already seen, my blog already has its own QR Code.

ZXing’s neat online utility to generate your own QR Code can be found at http://zxing.appspot.com/generator/

The google visualization API has all what you need to embed QR Codes in your web content. The chart API will show you all the options available. The following is the simplest form of getting what you need embedded.

<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=WIDTHxHEIGHT&chl=YOUR DATA STRING" />

I already added the ‘QR Droid’ android app to my mobile and I am loving it already. This allows me to embed all sorts of info in QR Codes and also retrieve them pretty effectively.

Happy QR Coding!

Going LED!!!

2010-07-19T08:58:00.000-07:00

This weekend was a rather industrious one for me since I was in a mood to fix stuff at home. It started off with fixing a damaged component of the car which would have cost over 15k LKR if went for a replacement. After this, I was eager to fix something else. Then I remembered that the fluorescent light based emergency lamps at home were giving trouble all the time, without serving the purpose. Their light was so dull and the emergency lamp was gradually becoming a decoration.

Then I thought, “hey, why not replace the dull tube with LEDs?!” Without a second thought, I got to work and formulated a quick and dirty plan. The lamp already has a chargeable 6V 4.5 Ah battery. So, my job is going to be really easy if I connect the LEDs properly without drawing out too much current from the battery and also without letting a high current flow through the LEDs which would bust them off instantly.

So, it was shopping time! Well, there’s nothing to exaggerate here. I simply bought 40 white LEDs, some circuit wire, soldering lead and a switch.

The light panel was the crucial element of the project. So, I took a thick cardboard and marked where the bulbs would go. My plan was to have two arrays of LEDs 20 on each array. 6V across two series LEDs seemed fine. Therefore, the entire light panel became a set of parallel connected two series LED units.

In this entire endeavor, I had an assistant who was very eager to help – my little sister :) . Since she also wanted to help, she was given the task of testing all LEDs to see whether they were working and she also helped to hold things in place while I soldered.

Once the light panel was made, I had to open up the lamp and make the connections to the power source. Since I had a rep to maintain, I needed to have something up and running before I left back to Colombo. So, my plan was to have the basic functionality up and running. Without any fancy stuff, I gave a direct connection to the battery and attached a new switch on the side of the lamp since the original switch was acting more like an insulator :P

And Voila!!! There’s my simply DIY project to make the emergency lamp LED powered!

This is not yet complete. I am yet to make the surface of the panel reflective and also need to run some tests to see if I can improve the power utilization. Let that be phase 2.

I know, this is not rocket science, but it was fun to get my hands on something ‘non-binary’ after a long time :)

Here are some snaps of the intermediate stages.

Watching a Java app die!

2010-07-12T15:02:00.001-07:00

When you start living with Java, and extend that to eating and drinking java you start realizing amazing similarities between the language/paradigm and life. You start seeing java as a living organism which breaths and eats.

Once you hook up a java application for a monitoring tool like JConsole, you start seeing wondrous things. Analogically speaking this is similar to hooking up a person to an ECG machine. Once you get to analyze how the heap space keeps on increasing and how the garbage cleaner frees up memory from time to time it really starts looking like the ECG output. As a part of my geeky investigations, I felt like checking out whether I could recreate the ECG representation of a dying person on the JConsole using a dying Java program.

So, I chose one app which was throwing out of memory exceptions randomly, and decided to crank up the environment to the max and let the app run with probably the most resourceful environment. So, I turned on the –XX:+AggressiveHeap option which greedily expands the heap space and sets other relevant parameters. Then I also turned off the overload detection for the garbage collector. This latter was done by setting the -XX:+UseGCOverheadLimit option. This evaluates the proportion of time spent on GC and if it is significantly high, throws an out of memory error since it is very likely that it will run out of memory anyway.

After firing up the application, the awesome started to happen. I could see how the application started choking for life, until the heap space could not be expanded anymore, and the GC could not clean up anything further. After a tough battle, the application just died…!

Have a look at the JConsole output below.

Isn’t it fascinating? :)

FYI, here’s a list of VM options which you might not try out everyday.

Long live Java!!!

The UNnecessary intervention and our response...

2010-07-09T22:32:00.000-07:00

Every Sri Lankan knows by now, or should know what this country went through over the last 30 years and how we got over that curse, despite the stereotype that the fallen villain has put on us saying that we remember something only for 2 weeks. When we are trying to remove the ‘developing country’ tag and move forward, it hurts the Western powers who were eyeing on SL’s bad times to hook in and take advantage of the extremely strategic location in the Indian Ocean. They would love it very much if we as a nation become a debtor to them eternally and cry and suck up for them to survive.

But when the ball starts rolling the other way, they panic. The UN is supposed to be an elite organization which is aimed at “facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and the achieving of world peace” – at least that is what has been coined as its objectives. I agree that it has helped the member states significantly. But, again that is why it was created. How good the intentions might be, it seems to be in evil hands right now, and I have no hesitation is saying that the current secretary is tarnishing the UN’s reputation and obscuring our country’s rights as a nation.

The last few years in which the war came to an end thanks to the gallant efforts of the forces and associated leadership, it was visible in black and white how the so called saints tried to rejuvenate the terrorists who were falling day by day. There are so many atrocities taking place throughout the world by their own leading member countries, and yet they are ignored and these guys are chasing after our country with all sorts of awful charges. I need not go in to details.

So, how do we respond? At the end of the war, every one of us joined hands and hailed as one nation. It was a treat to see the national flag flying high in all corners of the country and how festivities took place in the island. A question is to be asked as to whether we still have that unity. The default answer would be ‘politicians are to be blamed’! I agree to a greater part of it. But, we are not idiots. We have brains to think and figure out who the bad guy is. When Mr. Ki-moon and his committee is trying to trample down our country, what are we doing? I know we all can’t go and declare war with those guys. But, at we should have a heart to backup the efforts taken by the government to defend us. Afterall, who has to go and face this in the end? It is not you and me. It is the government of the country who will be the interface. So, no matter whether you like the people in it or not, at a point like this everyone should ‘back em up’. Everyone can give their opinions on stages and thorough media. But, it is just a small set of people which has the ability and most importantly the spine to do something for it.

One person had the spine to walk up to the UN office and start a death fast. How realistic or not that might be, at least he had the guts to do it for the country. And it is extremely heartbreaking to see how he has become a joker on the face of many. Some guy who is excreting in cyberspace has even started a competition to predict the day that this person dies. Should we look at these and have a hearty laugh? Or should we condemn such treachery?

Think about it… This is not Iraq or Afghanistan! This is Sri Lanka!

We have only one country and the choice of everyone matters...

Disclaimer : This is a generic thought of mine as someone who loves the country which has nurtured him up to now, and is not aimed at promoting the government, a person or anything like that :)

Reminiscence of beautiful Colorado

2010-05-02T11:20:00.001-07:00

Thanks to the awesome company I work for, I got an opportunity to visit the United States for the first time in my life. And where was it all set to start? The beautiful Colorado! Now, that is one cool place to start it off!

First things first! Well, the flight to the US was itself a totally ‘unique’ experience. Having the route set up as Colombo – Dubai – Houston – Denver that was one long journey! Specially Dubai to Houston it was over 17 hours and the entire journey went on for about 30 hours! Yeah. That’s right! The cycle of eating, watching movies and sleeping continued for hours and hours until I finally reached Houston – the entry point to the country. Now that was one huge airport I must say! Being in this 6^th largest airport in the world, I really felt its size when I had to go on a train, a bus and walk for like another 15 mins to catch my plane to Denver. Anyway, after all the plane travel, I finally got in to Colorado once I came out of the Denver airport, and that is where the entire Colorado/US experience begins.

Colorado itself is a big state which is the 8^th largest state in the US. It has an area of 269,837 sq km (Sri Lanka’s area is 65,610 sq km). So, although I say I was in Colorado, I really was in a city called Broomfield which is home to the client I was visiting – one of the largest Communications companies in the world, being a Tier 1 network and operating one of the largest backbone networks of any Internet service provider. I settled down in a cozy place called Towne Place Suites operated by Marriott Hotels, and I must say that I really loved the 2 weeks I spent there.

So, how did being in Colorado/US feel? Let me summarize;

Friendly atmosphere

I was really impressed by the friendliness of the people I met on and off. Probably it might be partly because Broomfield being kind of a laid back area opposed to a big city with hustle and bustle. A good natured ‘hi, how are you doing’ is something that is built in to the DNA of the people here. I am not saying that people in my country are not courteous. But, being a complete alien in a new environment, I noticed this to be far beyond my expectations.

Huge roads and landmass

The highway system here is really impressive. The combination of freeways, arterials, collectors, and local roads seem to have been put together with a lot of thought. In a way, this can be expected owing to the vast land mass they have. With all these roads and buildings, they still the mount of free land space is more than the occupied space!

Where did all the buses go?

Well, I was asked to get ready for the travel in a hurry, and therefore the amount of research I could do before my travel was bit limited. I realized this when I started noticing that there is no means of public transport in the area. Why is that? Simple answer - everyone has a vehicle! Luckily my colleague from India knew what was coming through experience, and had reserved a rental car and that made our lives easier. Being used to roads filled with buses and trishaws, it was pretty weird at first to see just personal vehicles on the streets. Thinking about it, I just felt the implied message of this observation is, ‘if you can’t afford a vehicle, keep out of Broomfield’ :)

Remarkable discipline on the road

Now, this is the most important thing I noticed as someone who has been battling with the rest of the vehicles on the way to work using the weapon called ‘the horn’. Everyone was extremely concerned about road rules and the discipline shown on the road was really striking. Here, priority is given to the pedestrian. If a person is crossing the road anywhere, vehicles stop a good 50 yards away to let the person cross the road. I was finding this too good to be true. The usage of the horn is virtually zero, and if one is to blow the horn at some point, it is considered to be a sign of extreme irritation.

No policemen?

I’m sure they might be around at least for the sake of having them. But, I didn’t see a single police officer within the city. I just saw a police car parked outside a McDonalds, and that was it! But, I am sure this doesn’t apply to the entire US. Looks like citizens of this area are ‘self disciplined’ enough :)

Never step out without your maps

When you are on the road, you are on your own! That is a disadvantage we have here. Back in my country I could just pull down the shutter and ask someone the direction to get to any part of the island. But, not here! If you get on to a freeway by mistake, there’s no turning back until you catch the next exit. Even if you manage to get out of the freeway, you need to figure out how to get on to the freeway again on the other side of it. Now I get the point of features like the compass appearing on the iphone and why integrating GPS for mobiles was so much sought after. Anyway, when you drive here you need to know where you are going, and ‘when’ you get lost (like it happened to us few times) you also need to know where you have ended up. So, maps are a ‘must have’ here. After all, it is good to get used to that structured way of navigating :)

The never ending natural beauty

I really loved starting my US experience in the state of Colorado, since this is one of the most beautiful states in the US. It was a treat for the eye to see snow capped mountains every morning as soon as I wake up and gaze out of my window. During the two week’s stay I was fortunate to get the chance to see two highlights of the state – Eldorado Canyon State Park and Pikes Peak.

The Eldorado Canyon state park was an amazing creation of nature which was made up of thousands of rocks. This is said to be one of best location for climbing, and it showed! It was bloodcurdling to see so many climbers clinging on to vertical rock faces 100s of feet above the ground. I simply enjoyed the natural beauty of the area and headed back :)

More pics >>

Pikes peak was a different experience. As a matter of fact Pike Peak region itself has so many attractions like the Garden of Gods, Cave of Winds and so on. But, due to the time limitation we chose the Pikes Peak Cog Railway. This is a unique ride on a rain which goes to the peak which is 14,000 feet above sea level. Unfortunately we traveled only about 70% of the journey since the train could not go further due to the heavy snow on the top. But that partial trip alone was so great. The views were magnificent and traveling in a train which sometimes climbs gradients as much as 25% (possible due to the drive mechanism involving cog wheels meshing in to a toothed line on the track) was pretty exhilarating.

More pics >>

Rapidly varying climate

All these days I thought the climate in my hometown had a fast changing climate. But in the area I was, the changes were pretty dramatic. During the two weeks stay, there were sunny days, rainy days, gloomy days and to top it all, a day with a pretty heavy snowfall out of nowhere! Walking in a snowfall was awesome for me for the first few minutes. But, the fact that it is still heavy, frozen chunks of water makes all the difference in a while :).

- Finale -

Although I was supposed to fly back to my lovely country Sri Lanka, my stay got extended by 3 more weeks where I was to fly to the state of Ohio. The start I got at Colorado was extremely pleasant and I would love to explore the rest of it someday.

Anyway, let’s see what Columbus, Ohio has in store for me!!!

Chakithaya – the sizzling release by Nemesis!

2010-03-12T02:38:00.000-08:00

Nemesis – one of the hottest rock bands in town led by my good pal Mackie is out with their debut music video – Chakithaya!

Ever since their inception in 2006, Nemesis has thrived through thick and thin. A major achievement was them bagging the victory in TNL OnStage 2008 – The most grueling test for unorthodox music excellence in Sri Lanka.

With Chakithaya they sure have set another milestone in their career!

This blog post is a tribute to you Mackie! Awesome feat among you academics and professional career! The combo you have with Losh, Mayya and Sithija is superb! Super track! Super music! Super first video! It's all simply S-U-P-E-R!!!

Well, this is the best I can do in terms of writing right now coz I am no longer with the paper :(

(Btw, saw that the article I did for you guys is among the references in your Wikipedia page. Awesome!!! :)

Keep rocking guys!

Looking forward to your next video ;)

NE-ME-SIS!!! NE-ME-SIS!!! NE-ME-SIS!!!

It's time to 'buzz'!

2010-02-10T08:51:00.000-08:00

When I started using twitter and was thinking of the how social networking can flourish further, I was thinking how nice it would have been if we had a twitter with multimedia support. It slipped off my mind after that, and Voila! Look who’s in the news! It’s Google again! And I was amazed to see what I thought in a little way was what Google has actually made a reality, of course taking it to greater heights than I was thinking.

Earthlings, say hello to ‘Google buzz’ - the latest, most revolutionary, groundbreaking integrated social networking solution by Google!

It lets you post updates in the form of text, video, photos and few other feeds. With the massive integration Google has within its components, this connects you to your contacts as and when buzz is activated, and resides in Gmail. I am yet to see all the good stuff of Buzz, but I can already feel how rich real time social networking is going to be.

Anyway, here’s a little heads up for getting buzz working for those who cannot see Buzz in Gmail. There are few pre-requisites.

You need to have a Google profile.
Fill it up and keep saving until it says that your profile is eligible to be caught by searches.
Subscribe to a couple of Google services (you would generally have these already)
Do some activity on one of them (Like sharing a post on Google Reader)
Log back in to Gmail and say hello to the Buzz tab :)

Check out what it is all about....

Do we have what it takes?

2010-01-24T01:15:00.000-08:00

We, being children of the 'Pearl of the Indian Ocean' are descendants of a proud heritage which was able to construct engineering marvels, export grain to other countries and have highly civilized societies when the Western world was still evolving.

But, where are we now? Since we got independence in 1948, what was the direction we headed to as a country? How could Lee Kuan Yew once look at our country and say "I am going to bring Singapore to this level", and to see that now Singapore is thousands of miles ahead of us? Being a country with so much of natural resources and low probability for acts of God, why have we encouraged a mentality geared towards aids and free rations? Why do we always tend to overlook the integrity of the country and have the nerve to complain about everything that happens in the country which has an inconvenience for us? Why do we consider Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Nehru to be true heroes and yet ignore the valiant efforts taken by our own people to bring peace and integrity to the country?

We have claimed pristine independence after a 30 year old terrorist crisis, and are in a position to take our country from the 3^rd world to the 1^st world. No one can argue that despite the war, world economic crisis and food crisis we pulled through as a nation without much of a hassle. Now is the chance for us to take our country to where it really should be. But are we ready for that? Has each and every Sri Lankan understood that each one of them has a role to play other than futile commentary?

The answers to all of these, lie within what Dr. Abdul Kalam has stated in a speech he has made in Hyderabad. I think we all must read it with a Sri Lankan abstraction over it and realize the relevance it has to re-condition our nationalistic attitudes.

Here goes…

“Why is the media here so negative?
Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why?

We are the first in milk production.
We are number one in Remote sensing satellites.
We are the second largest producer of wheat.
We are the second largest producer of rice.

Look at Dr. Sudarshan, he has transferred the tribal village into a self-sustaining, self-driving unit. There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed in the bad news and failures and disasters. I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had the picture of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed his desert into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news.

In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime. Why are we so NEGATIVE? Another question: Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? We want foreign T. Vs, we want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology.

Why this obsession with everything imported. Do we not realize that self-respect comes with self-reliance? I was in Hyderabad giving this lecture, when a 14 year old girl asked me for my autograph. I asked her what her goal in life is. She replied: I want to live in a developed India. For her, you and I will have to build this developed India. You must proclaim. India is not an under-developed nation; it is a highly developed nation. Do you have 10 minutes? Allow me to come back with a vengeance.

Got 10 minutes for your country? If yes, then read; otherwise, choice is yours.

YOU say that our government is inefficient.
YOU say that our laws are too old.
YOU say that the municipality does not pick up the garbage.
YOU say that the phones don’t work, the railways are a joke, The airline is the worst in the world, mails never reach their destination.
YOU say that our country has been fed to the dogs and is the absolute pits.

YOU say, say and say. What do YOU do about it?

Take a person on his way to Singapore .. Give him a name - YOURS. Give him a face - YOURS. YOU walk out of the airport and you are at your International best.

In Singapore you don’t throw cigarette butts on the roads or eat in the stores. YOU are as proud of their Underground links as they are. You pay $5 (approx. Rs. 60) to drive through Orchard Road (equivalent of Mahim Causeway or Pedder Road) between 5 PM and 8 PM. YOU come back to the parking lot to punch your parking ticket if you have over stayed in a restaurant or a shopping mall irrespective of your status identity… In Singapore you don’t say anything, DO YOU? YOU wouldn’t dare to eat in public during Ramadan, in Dubai. YOU would not dare to go out without your head covered in Jeddah. YOU would not dare to buy an employee of the telephone exchange in London at 10 pounds ( Rs.650) a month to, ’see to it that my STD and ISD calls are billed to someone else.’YOU would not dare to speed beyond 55 mph (88 km/h) in Washington and then tell the traffic cop, ‘Jaanta hai main kaun hoon (Do you know who I am?). I am so and so’s son. Take your two bucks and get lost.’ YOU wouldn’t chuck an empty coconut shell anywhere other than the garbage pail on the beaches in Australia and New Zealand .

Why don’t YOU spit Paan on the streets of Tokyo ? Why don’t YOU use examination jockeys or buy fake certificates in Boston ??? We are still talking of the same YOU. YOU who can respect and conform to a foreign system in other countries but cannot in your own. You who will throw papers and cigarettes on the road the moment you touch Indian ground. If you can be an involved and appreciative citizen in an alien country, why cannot you be the same here in India ?

Once in an interview, the famous Ex-municipal commissioner of Mumbai , Mr. Tinaikar, had a point to make. ‘Rich people’s dogs are walked on the streets to leave their affluent droppings all over the place,’ he said. ‘And then the same people turn around to criticize and blame the authorities for inefficiency and dirty pavements. What do they expect the officers to do? Go down with a broom every time their dog feels the pressure in his bowels?

In America every dog owner has to clean up after his pet has done the job. Same in Japan .. Will the Indian citizen do that here?’ He’s right. We go to the polls to choose a government and after that forfeit all responsibility. We sit back wanting to be pampered and expect the government to do everything for us whilst our contribution is totally negative. We expect the government to clean up but we are not going to stop chucking garbage all over the place nor are we going to stop to pick a up a stray piece of paper and throw it in the bin. We expect the railways to provide clean bathrooms but we are not going to learn the proper use of bathrooms.

We want Indian Airlines and Air India to provide the best of food and toiletries but we are not going to stop pilfering at the least opportunity. This applies even to the staff who is known not to pass on the service to the public.

When it comes to burning social issues like those related to women, dowry, girl child! and others, we make loud drawing room protestations and continue to do the reverse at home. Our excuse? ‘It’s the whole system which has to change, how will it matter if I alone forego my sons’ rights to a dowry.’ So who’s going to change the system? What does a system consist of ? Very conveniently for us it consists of our neighbours, other households, other cities, other communities and the government. But definitely not me and YOU. When it comes to us actually making a positive contribution to the system we lock ourselves along with our families into a safe cocoon and look into the distance at countries far away and wait for a Mr.Clean to come along & work miracles for us with a majestic sweep of his hand or we leave the country and run away. Like lazy cowards hounded by our fears we run to America to bask in their glory and praise their system. When New York becomes insecure we run to England . When England experiences unemployment, we take the next flight out to the Gulf. When the Gulf is war struck, we demand to be rescued and brought home by the Indian government. Everybody is out to abuse and rape the country. Nobody thinks of feeding the system. Our conscience is mortgaged to money.

Dear Indians, The article is highly thought inductive, calls for a great deal of introspection and pricks one’s conscience too…. I am echoing J. F. Kennedy’s words to his fellow Americans to relate to Indians - ‘Ask what we can do for India and do what has to be done to make India what America and other Western countries are today’

Now tell me how the essence of this speech is not applicable to Sri Lanka!

( On a related note, if we look around more attentively, visionaries with such patriotism can be found within our country too )

A ‘kitty’ Saturday

2010-01-09T06:32:00.000-08:00

Friday night is a welcome night for most of us since we have the liberty of having a rather long sleep. Whether you wake up at 7 a.m., 8 a.m. or 10.00 a.m. it won’t make a huge difference since it is Saturday, and that is a holiday! This is the default rule for me as well. But, just imagine, you wake up on a Saturday morning to see new born kittens in your room! Especially when you don’t have any cats at home! Jeez! That’d be a shock! That’s what exactly happened to me today. Anyway, what started as a shock ended as a very touching experience and I thought I’d type it in.

Unfolding…

As some of you know, I am staying in a temporary place in Mt.Lavinia. I am on the top floor of a house and my room opens to the balcony. Over the last few days, I was noticing a white cat with few black spots lurking around the house. However, I did not think it was a big deal since there were anyway few cats around this place. But, I noticed that it was trying to get in to my room from time to time. Apart from that, whenever I open the bathroom door (which is across the balcony), it used to race in from wherever it was, and try to get in there. I thought it was a spoilt kitty and just made sure that it stays away from me (coz I don’t like cats :) ). Once I caught it in my room as well, and chased away. I was little annoyed coz no matter what I did, it was very reluctant to leave. This was like 2 days ago.

The morning shock…

Yesterday, like many Friday nights I snuggled in to my bed hoping to have a long night’s sleep. Everything went on fine, and I woke up around 9.45 a.m. Yes, I know. I am not proud of waking up that late :).

I was just booting up my systems, when I suddenly noticed a fluffy thing move over the far end of the bed. Aha! It was that cat again!!! It had come in through the window which I keep open at night. I was in such a rage and jumped off the bed. But, instantly I realized something. The cat looked rather skinny. Then things started to fit in like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

I realized this cat has actually been a pregnant cat, and the reason why it was trying to get in to confined spaces was to find a safe place to give birth to the kittens. With that deduction, the next thing that came to my mind was, “Oh lord!!! Did she lay the kittens in my room?!!”. But, things were rather quiet, and I thought maybe she just came in to find some food or something. However I saw that she was continuously mewing looking at me and was not going away for more than few feet away from my door.

Anyway, I thought “whatever!” and finished my morning chores and got back to my room. Just when I opened up my laptop and started to read some news, I started hearing a faint squealing from under the bed. It was the moment of truth! There were new born kittens in my room!!! A number of questions started to run through my head. “How many freaking kittens are there?”, “where exactly are they?”, “Gosh! Have they dirtied the place?” etc.

Compassion in action…

With all kinds of weird things whirling in my mind, I started clearing out things under the bed, expecting the worst. I pulled out things under my bed one by one and I constantly kept following the squealing to figure out where they have really ‘settled down’. There was one tall box on its side, in which my fan came. And there they were! I tried to see inside the box through the opening on the side, and mommy kitty was in the far end of that box.

Anyway my room is like 10’x15’ and living with a kitty family inside this is not going to work for me. So, I gently pulled the box out and pushed it over to the balcony, hoping to let them have that as their shelter. I put my stuff back under the bed and was waiting to see mamma kitty’s next move. Anyway she came out of the box in a while, and seemed to be looking for something. At one point it came up to me and started mewing looking at my face (like I understand ‘cat’ :P) . Probably since it did not get the answer from me, it ran off down the steps. Being inquisitive, I peeked in to the box to see how many kittens there are. Aha! There was one tiny little kitten like mouse which hadn’t even opened its eyes.

In a while mommy kitty came running up the steps. And guess what she was carrying in her mouth! Another kitten! Now the kitten count went up to 2. After settling them down in there, the mommy came out again and started saying gibberish to me. And it was very keen to get in to my room. So, I thought maybe it has another kitten and is trying to find it. And of course I knew that it would definitely find one if one was left in my room. So, it came in, went in to all corners of the room, but seemed to find nothing. Then with lost hope it went out again.

At this point I was rather touched since the mommy kitty was cleaning the kittens, making them warm and cozy and feeding them. Anyway now that they have a home, I left my place to do some things I had planned to do.

When I came back in the evening the first thing I did was to peek inside the box and see how they were doing. Just as I expected the kitty mommy was there while the two kittens were cuddling to her. Since night was coming and this is going to be the first night for the kittens, I pushed in an old piece of cloth I was having for them to use to keep warm. Prepared some milk and gave mommy kitty as well.

All’s well that ends well…

It was a weird start for a weekend. But, it was a pleasant change and it was nice to see the motherly love in the animal world. However, I must make sure all theses good treatments would not backfire, by the entire feline family trying to start treating me as their master. I have captured some moments of the experience and you can have a look at the photos ( and the video which I will be posting soon ).

Ah, before wrapping up I must say that one truth still holds despite what happened - I still hate cats! :)

Rise of Netbooks and Ubuntu Netbook Remix

2009-11-27T21:58:00.000-08:00

My initial idea was to do a little blog on UNR. However, the more I put off publishing it, it seemed to drift out to other related areas and get lengthier. So, before this blows out of proportion here I go... :)

The proliferation of netbooks and associated technologies

With Web2.0, person to web based application interaction has become richer and easier. In addition, due to concepts of Green Computing, organizations are trying to go for systems like Cloud Computing, virtualization and more centralized processing thus bringing the total number of processing entities to a minimum which would result in a smaller carbon footprint and significant cost savings. Therefore, the current trend is headed towards us going back to the area where processing happens in a ‘cloud’ of which we do not know much other that how to get the service. Loosely speaking, we are going back to the days of the good old main frames and dumb terminals with of course many differences in terms of performance, user experience, richness and complexity of operations and services.

Due to all of the above reasons, notebook manufacturers started coming up with low power, low cost devices which were coined as ‘netbooks’ by shrinking localized performance and improving connectivity, robustness and user interfaces. Ideally these devices had screen sizes of 5”-9” inches, 1GB RAM, Few GBs of Solid State Disk space and an Intel Atom processor. Furthermore, it is easy to use slight variants of the Oss we currently have, since these too are based more on the x86 architecture.

The Asus Eee PC was the first commercial success for Netbooks and the different netbook brands and models of that followed have become more compact and better in performance. Personally speaking, based on the configurations and features currently available in netbooks like the Eee PC, I would feel happier to start using one of those for my day-to-day computing needs.

The Wikipedia article about netbooks has a pretty comprehensive explanation worth checking out by any enthusiast.

UNR at a glance

Ubuntu has been talking for ‘remix’ versions of their products for a while, and now we have such a ‘remix’ up for grabs. Remixes are specials editions that have been created targeted at a specific purpose. Therefore, Ubuntu Netbook Remix(UNR) is an optimized variant of Ubuntu which is targeted to run on low power low cost devices like netbooks and other low power laptops.

Below is a couple of screens from the UNR I tried out.

Features of UNR

Being pretty aggressive when it comes to modernization, Ubuntu took steps to come up with a respun verison of Ubuntu geared towards these kind of devices. This is pretty similar to the approach taken by Xandros Linux which is a customized Linux OS that was shipped with the Eee PC. The Easy-Peasy OS is also similar to this.

Underneath UNR can have Ubuntu 8.04 or higher, but the UI is optimized to run on smaller screens. I took hold of the 9.10 version of it, which was released about 2 weeks ago, and tried out on a virtual PC on my Virtual Box instance, and it was pretty striking in the first go.

When the UNR initiative kicked off, it was few packages that made this all happen. You can simply get hold of the special packages that give life to UNR and install them on top of your existing Ubuntu instance. So, basically it was more of a UI related optimization that had been done in contrast to a whole new optimization done in the kernel level to achieve performance and efficient resource utilization on low end devices.

Windows7 boasts of its heavily efficient resource usage and ability to track energy hogging applications and although Fedora has managed to keep the energy meter at a lower level, Ubuntu has had some issue when it comes to retaining battery power. PowerTop can be used to track the energy utilization of your Linux system. However, guys at Canonical are working hard on that collaborating with the Mobilin project which aims at forming a resource efficient OS and application stack for mobile internet devices. This is essential since resource efficiency would be a key factor when Ubuntu or UNR is to be a mainstream OS on low power devices (Canonical is taking steps to ship UNR preinstalled on most netbooks). Xandros Linux which comes with Eee PC claims to be pretty efficient on power consumption, but I did not find any statistical evidence for that (I didn’t search much J ). Anyway it is cruel to ask for too much from UNR since it is a ‘remix’ and not a ‘netbook edition’ as such.

However, when it comes to UNR 9.10, the there seems to have been a significant leap. The packages that used to power previous UNR version are deprecated, and it has been built from ground up to take the best of the speed and power features of the chipset.

Minimum Hardware Requirements:

• Processor: Intel® Atom™ processor

• RAM: 512 MB

• Storage: 4 GB Flash disk (SSD) or hard disk

Let me summarize some features of UNR I came across. Some features are present in the Ubuntu 9.10 standard edition too.

• A vertical left nav menu based user interface: This is an optimal way of producing output in small screens. The ordinary desktop is replaced with a set of tabs on the left and the context content appearing in the remaining space. The applications are categorized in to these tabs based on the utility.

• ‘Ubuntu One’ access : This is an awesome option which gives the user access to his personal cloud with 2GB capacity for free (capacity can be increased if you are willing to pay for it). With this, backing up, synchronizing and sharing data becomes ever so easy.

• Empathy IM : Pidgin has been replaced by Empathy IM which additionally has better audio/video support as well as built in SIP support.

• OpenOffice 3.1 : The good old open office that all of us know of.

• Rhythmbox : A simple yet fully fledged player inspired by Apple iTnes which has comprehensive support for a gamoot of audio formats, sync capabilities with devices, rip and burn capabilities and support for Internet Radio and podcasts.

• And many more…

Looking forward to get hold of a netbook and join the hype ASAP!!!

Reporting from Chennai...

2009-10-02T03:44:00.000-07:00

After being within the oceanic boundaries of my dear motherland Sri Lanka, I finally got a chance to travel abroad since I had be part of a two man team to work onsite on a client engagement of Virtusa. Anyway, this was not far away. It was just Chennai, India which is so close to us, geographically speaking and the 4th largest city in India. By the time I type this is, it has been 11 days since we got here and there a loads of interesting stuff to talk about despite the fact that Chennai does not have many tourist attraction compared to most of the other main cities in India.

First of all, I must say that the stereotypical view of Chennai as a very dirty city is not totally true now. There have been some serious development projects that have taken place over the years and they seem to have really paid off. You can see gigantic buildings coming up in huge vacant lands in the city as well as in suburban areas. The development in the IT sector has happened big time here. Apart from the many BPO companies in the city (including Virtusa :) ), Chennai has also reserved a 25km stretch along one of their trunk roads as a complete IT park. Our client (Standard Chartered Software Solutions) is also located in this park, and this area has thousands of acres of free land and the sight is simply amazing!

However, Chennai is more famous for its automobile and mechanical industry. It is known as the ‘Detroit of Asia’ and produced 30% of India’s automobiles. Although we were expecting to see Ambassador, Maruti and Tata cars, about 50% of the vehicles comprised Chevrolette, Ford, Hyundai and Toyota vehicles. These are all produced in Indian plants.

Apart from that, Chennai has an impressive outlook towards public infrastructure. After landing on the 21^st September when we headed to the city, the first thing we came across was the giant butterfly flyover. This is an amazing piece of engineering and it gives a warm welcome to anyone who enters the country through the Chennai airport. This is known as the Kathipara flyover and earlier it has been just a huge roundabout which had been a major reason for the traffic build-up.

See how the old junction looked and how it looks now!

One more thing that overwhelmed me was the size of the city and the amount of free space they have in suburban areas even after doing mega constructions! The place is huge!!! No wonder India can house so many organizations and manufacturing plants.

Anyway, after I got to Chennai I started respecting the drivers in Sri Lanka. These guys here drive like insane!!! The traffic lights barely manage to keep them from messgin up the junctions. Even if two cars brush past each other, they would just yell “Ei!!!” and move on. Most cars do not have side mirrors, and even the cars that do have side mirrors have retracted them. On every commodity vehicle you can find the wording “sound horn” written on the rear of the vehicle. The simple interpretation for this is, “I will not give any signals, I will drive as I want. If you need to overtake me just blare the horn!”.

One great memory I am going to carry home is the scrumptiousness of the South Indian food. Still the food keeps surprising me daily and I am really enjoying the authentic biryani, parota, puri, chapathi and the list can go on! (Yummy!).

The people I met so far in Virtusa Chennai ATC, Standard Chartered and in the places where we stayed were very hospitable. It made my life very easy to move around with the little amount of Tamil I knew J

With all this said, I still cannot resist saying, “I love Sri Lanka and I miss it sooooo much!!!”

'Chicken Ala Carte' - A bitter truth!

2009-07-06T06:06:00.000-07:00

It is not something new to hear that millions of people in the world find it extremely hard to find a slice of bread or drop of water to survive. Here are some statistics to emphasis the extent of the issue.

963 million people across the world are hungry. [ref]
Every day, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes. i.e one child every five seconds! [ref]
Around 27-28 percent of all children in developing countries are estimated to be underweight or stunted. [ref]
In 2005, almost 1.4 billion people lived below the international poverty line, earning less than $1.25 per day. [ref]

Statistics can go on for pages. But, until you see something like what is shown below, you would never actually feel what it is like.

This is a short film which was directed by Ferdinand Dimadura, that won the Short film Competition of the 56th Berlin International Film Festival. Once you watch it, you'll realize if this could not win, what will.

Quoting a synopsis about short movie, "this film is about the hunger and poverty brought about by Globalization. There are 10,000 people dying everyday due to hunger and malnutrition. This short film shows a forgotten portion of the society. The people who live on the refuse of men to survive. What is inspiring is the hope and spirituality that never left this people."

I'd generally say "enjoy" when sharing a video with anyone. But, with this I'd say, "try not to end up with a tear in your eye". I'd rather not comment on any content in the video since you should see it for yourself. This is the most touching video production I saw in the recent past.

Google Wave – The next revolution on the web!

2009-07-04T06:47:00.000-07:00

When you hear the word Google, it has probably become yet another WWW with its amazingly broad range of web based product stack. What started off as a highly versatile search engine has turned out to be a multi million dollar company. Google search was its first hit. Then it was continued by other initiative like GMail, Google Apps, Google Chrome etc. The next big thing from Google is just around the corner – GoogleWave!

What is Google Wave? Simply put it is the next generation real time communication and collaboration solution from Google. With everything moving to the web space, real time, high quality collaboration was increasing becoming a crucial requirement. There have been many initiatives which were focused on enabling collaboration for more focused aspects. However, with Google Wave, it seems to be a total solution which combines an amalgam of collaboration mechanisms spanning from email through IM, web chat, wiki, social networking to project management. This is a brainchild of the brothers Jens & Lars Rasmussen, the creators of another magical app - Google Maps. Their initial step for Google Wave was a project codenamed 'walkabout' which aimed at eliminating the boundaries between different types of communication methods.

The most interesting features of Google Wave include real-time operation, embeddability, playback functionality, extensibility and obviously being open source. Now you might be thinking what the word ‘wave’ means. Is it just a catchy word for marketing? Well, not really. A wave is the highest level of abstraction in this platform. Along with the term ‘wave’ there is a small jargon which contain some other terms as well. Let me put them very briefly as I understood. Starting with a ‘wave’, a wave is one threaded conversation which can be of any form like a multi-person chat, a collaborative whiteboard etc. A wave is made up of ‘wavelets’ which are also threaded conversations like waves, but they form a subset of a wave only. The next level of granularity is a ‘blip’, which is a single message. This would be like one line in a chat. Next comes the term ‘document’. This is what bundles in all the content of a blip. Next, there are ‘extensions’ which work within a wave, which are accessible for the participants operating in the wave. Extensions are twofold – ‘gadgets’ and ‘robots’. Gadgets are applications like Facebook apps, and robots are autonomous participants within a wave. Finally, although it may be obvious ‘Embed wave’ is the action of embedding a wave to your own web application.

Learan more about Gadgets and Robots.

The Google Wave Federation Protocol is the underlying protocol which makes the concept works.

This video taken from Google I/O explains what it is all about.

When it comes to Google, they have really played their cards well. Just think for a moment the work they did. First they conquered the web space. Then took the desktop apps to the web, through Google Docs, Google Calendar etc. Now that they have the communication channels as well as the tools that need to be collaborated, basically, it’s matter of consolidating them and enabling real time communication between them. However, with Google Wave, they have really taken it to the limit and all the stuff sounds really interesting. This is said to be opened for public access by the end of the year, and I am soooo looking forward to it. I’m pretty sure these ‘waves’ are going to make a tsunami in cyber space!!!

T20 World Cup - Being the bridesmaid for the second time…

2009-06-22T08:27:00.000-07:00

So ended the World T20 Cup finals of course in a way that does not bring much joy to our hearts. Being unbeaten and inventive throughout the series, our lions were the favourite team to win the finals and bring the second world level trophy home. But, what happened at the finals? Just like the ODI World Cup in 2007, we turned out to be the runners-up.

I am no expert in cricket. But, at least I know the difference between black and white, and such incidents were seen in the final. First of all, what has always been biting me is the question, “what on earth is Mubarak doing in the squad?”. Seriously, I don’t see any value addition he does to the team when required. It is true that he has a handful of pretty interesting contributions. But, I’m sure Sri Lankan cricket has better resources than that. For an example, Indika De Saram had to just hang around in the bench throughout the tourney as if he was taken just to get rid of the media frenzy surrounding him being ignored by the selection committee. I really admire Dilshan as a player, but I don’t think it is wise to try to depend on the ‘Dilscoop’ so much. Specially not as a shot to open scoring like which made him go back to the pavilion for a duck in the T20 finals, when at least a contribution of at least 20 from him would have saved the game for us.

Anyway, my point is, the unwanted influence on the sport as well as embracing unorthodox stuff too soon is very likely to hold back Sri Lankan Cricket. The politics looming above the selections should stop and make way for Cricket to flourish.

Anyway, with that said I am not going to stop by just being critical like most of us would do. There are many good things that happened during the tournament. As always our team played like real gentlemen, and although Sanga needs more experience to get that extra edge as a captain, his drive so far has been superb! Not only as a cricketer but also as an ambassador for the country and cricket. It is extremely inspiring how he uplifts the morale of the players and the spectators through his eloquent speech and I really loved the way he thanked the Sri Lankan supporters in his mother tongue in the end. The performance shown by all the players throughout especially Dilshan, Malinga, Mathews, Mendis, Sanath, Murali was amazing and it was a real treat to watch the ball soaring past the boundary line and wickets being smashed off by the bowlers. Furthermore, we were able to chase away the giants in Cricket like Australia and the West Indies. Therefore, we actually we totally rocked the show out there in England although the ending was not as colourful as we expected it to be.

With the new air of freedom in the country, I wish our lions to get a warm welcome once they reach Sri Lanka despite the fact that they could not win the cup, because, after all we should have the temperament to accept victory and defeat alike. Anyway, the new T20 champs will be here soon. So let’s return the favour, shall we?

Bravo SL Cricket!!!

Independence v2.0 - Released

2009-05-23T21:42:00.000-07:00

This post should have come few days back. But, I was having problems hooking up to the internet. Anyway, it’s late better than never. So, here goes…

Getting to the point, all I can say is “Whoopee!!! Good Riddance for bad rubbish!!!”. The monster that brought chaos to the country and the region is finally gone to rot in hell! It is not only for the thousands of lives he killed, thousands of people he made homeless, thousands of children who were made fatherless or motherless or the millions of dollars worth of damages he did to the country. It is also because of the mess up he did to the mindset of the entire world bringing disgrace to the country and the Tamil community which he claimed to be the soul representative of. Finally, the barbarian who was supposed to be invincible was eliminated and the millions of sighs of relief shed irrespective of the nationality, religion and political party, and the thousands of national flags which were hoisted in all corners of the country vouched for the true feeling of Independence V2.0 of the country.

With all the high spirits about the elimination of the ruthless LTTE, the leadership and courage shown by His Excellency the President was truly incredible. A million ‘thank you’s for you sir for being a true Sri Lankan and showing the so called International Community that we can stand tall as one nation. Furthermore, I am ever grateful to the Secretary of Defence and Commanders of all forces for the amazing dedication they put in to bring the country under one flag. Most importantly, I bow down to all the soldiers in the line of duty not only because of the valiant efforts made by them to get rid of the LTTE, but also because of the professionalism and care shown in rescuing the displaced people. Hats off for all of you!!!

So, with the path cleared, what do we have ahead of us? It is nothing else but sheer development, and show the world that a phoenix is in the rising! It is time for all the nationalities… umm... let me rephrase. It is time for all ‘Sri Lankans’ to get together and march forward for the sustainable development of the country with harmonious co-existence across diversities. Who knows, we might start off beating Singapore! It is not impossible! :)

Bravo mother Sri Lanka!!!

PS : I was trying to focus only on the positive side of this, but anyway as a final note to all those national and international scoundrels who tried to spoil our nation I’d like to say: “I don't consider you all vultures. I consider you something a vulture would love to eat.!!!!”

‘Milli’band adds to the Mega pain…

2009-05-02T03:47:00.000-07:00

Let’s start with a fact. LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran is a bloodthirsty terrorist who created enough havoc for this country as well as the region, and should be eliminated!!!

With that said, I find it pretty surprising and disgusting to see how the so called ‘world icons’ are partnering with the LTTE to protect it when it is at the verge of being erased from the face of our country. The most recent stunt was pulled off by the UK Minister of Foreign Affairs Mr. David Miliband, where he held hands with his French partner Bernard Kouchner and came to persuade the GOSL to go for a ceasefire due to the ‘humble’ and ‘pure’ intention of making safe passage to the innocent civilians trapped in the war torn area. Now, this seems rather paradoxical since all these guys are asking the government to stop eliminating the terrorists while the terrorist leader is using a human shield to protect his ... you know what.

The govt is doing a tremendous operation out there rescuing over 200,000 people and when ‘Milli’band walks in and tries to be the ‘Angel of Salvation’ that looks an absolute joke. This doesn’t end there. Even the UN Secreatary General is not doing his job right. From the beginning he has tried to point the finger at the govt, and even now when there are enough other burning issues in the world where his attention is needed, he comes and says to find the murderers of Mr.Lasantha Wickramathunga which is an indirect pressure put on the govermnment. Take the The US-led ‘Tokyo Co-Chairs’. What a nerve they had in asking to provide amnesty to the LTTE!!! Why can’t they provide amnesty to Bin Laden?! When Prabhakaran killed so many innocent civilians, no foreign minister came or put pressure on the LTTE. Where were Mr Miliband, Mr. Moon or the Tokyo Co-Chairs? Were they hibernating? They are just wasting time to fulfill their own electoral political dreams.

Although they have smartly registered the phrase ‘ethnic conflict’ for the problem in SL, it is really not an ethnic conflict any more. Now it is an eradication of a deadly terrorist group. I myself know that multi cultural and multi racial people can peacefully co-exist since I’ve been in such a school, a University and even my current workplace provides a peaceful environment to all employees where your capabilities become the only factors that signify you from another. So, it is just a matter of breaking out of the shells that we are trapped in, and embracing the fact that the significance is in what you say and do and not in the social division or group that you belong to.

The President, Secretary of Defence and the Army Commander of the country are being commendably strong amidst the ruthless forces which are trying to benefit out of the long lasting conflict of this country. We have been also unfortunate to have hundreds of leg pullers in the country itself including some top ranking players in the so called opposition party.

However, as a final note I have to say, this is the last chance we have to bring a definite end to this burning issue, and if the leadership of the country backs off now, there’s not going to be another chance. My plea for all the factions who have been devouring out of the ‘ethnic issue’ is, please stop being vultures. You’ve had enough of your share. Please let this country prosper and reach its true heights at least now.

MOINC - Yes. It Scales!

2009-04-04T06:23:00.000-07:00

The MOINC gang was in high spirits after the successful completion of presentations and a fully set up demonstration of a MOINC deployment as part of our final year project evaluation. We were so overwhelmed by the way things went and we were certain that what we tried to achieve by coming up with the architectural prototype - MOINC was definitely going to drive future web services deployments big time!

With that highly ambitious perception, we wanted to try and press MOINC to its limits in a small environment within our control and actually see how scalable it can be. So, once the final year exams were over and before we set off on our industrial career paths, we thought to give it a shot using a number of computers from a lab of our department – the Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), University of Moratuwa.

By the way, in case you are new to MOINC, in the most concise way I can put it, “it is an attempt to blend Web Services with Grid and Volunteer Computing concepts in order to make future Web Services deployments highly available and scalable while bringing the computing costs down and making use of unused computing power.” Hmm… I guess that covers it. :)

We got together on 13th March 2009 and managed to get access to the Advance Computing Laboratory of CSE which houses around 60 computers. In this phase our plan was to make as much as concurrent requests to a highly computationally intensive web service and see how the web services deployment can scale to cater the requests. We used a web service which performs an Insertion Sort on a collection of 75000 numbers.

We installed the MOINC Agent application on 20 computers in the lab, and ran the MOINC Server and service client on one laptop, the default WSAS node on another laptop and the URL repository and Server Manager on another laptop. The we gradually increased the number of concurrent requests and at the point of total failure to respond, we increased the grid size and restarted sending in requests in an increasing order.

The results were amazing, and turned out just the way we wanted!!! It was really electrifying for us to see the MOINC screen saver running on all monitors when the deployment was running on full capacity. We collected a set of statistics and will be coming up with a research paper about our working prototype pretty soon.

Check out what Hiranya has to say about our test session in his Tech Feast.

Here are few snaps of what happened on that day.

- MOINC Agents running...

- default WSAS node (running on my lappy ;))

- Just about to join the grid.

- 50% of the team. (L to R)Dinusha, Isuru, Rusiru, Aravinda (me) & Hiranya

Take a look at how scalability increases with the size of the grid.

My heartiest thanks go out to all the MOINC team members who turned up for the test and I would also like to thank Mrs. Vishaka Nanayakkara – Head, CSE and Mr. Ananda Fransiscu who is in charge of the Advance Computing Lab for all the support given to this test session.

MOINC has proven its capabilities, but this is not the end!

It has a long way to go. A VERY long way…! Oh yeah! ;)

Complimentary review of my portable pal…

2009-03-13T23:26:00.000-07:00

The mobile phone market is a maze today. Finding the right phone to fit your needs has turned out to be a true gamble. After losing three phones within a couple of months, there came a point where I had to buy a phone and make it my next best buddy. I am very keen on the overall performance of a mobile phone and especially expect the audio playback quality to be of top quality since I am a little bit of a music junky on the move. In addition, I prefer to go for wacky and unconventional designs when it comes to tech stuff. Thinking of all that, I finally chose to buy a Sony Ericsson W550i on one fine day in October 2006. Being a phone of SE’s Walkman series, its music capabilities really swung it for me.

>>> Manufacturer's overview

As at now it has already been under my hard usage, and despite the fact that it has been tortured to its limit, it still continues to rock on!!! I don’t care what others have to say about this, but the performance is simply amazing considering the time which it was launched.

This was just the second walkman released by SE, and they have given it the wacky swivel action to reveal the keypad. I still enjoy it when people who get hold of my phone try to open it like a slide-up or flap phone since the usage is not obvious. Well, yeah. It is quite bad in terms of UI design principles. But, what the heck! I like it that way :)

Let me point out what is really awesome with this phone. The sound quality and bass enhanced by MegaBass^TM was simply amazing when used with the ear plug type earphones. No matter how old the phone is, it beats the hell out of the Nokia NSeries phones and even the ExpressMusic models. Specially in terms of bass. It is also noteworthy to mention the quality enhancement by Stereo Widening, which gives a real 3D feel. The W550i has a ‘music only’ mode of operation, which transforms it in to a pure walkman. So, if(when) I am to switch to another phone one day, I will still have this running in the music mode as my walkman :)

Next comes the battery. This houses a more robust Li-Po (Lithium Polymer) battery which was an innovative step taken during the time this was released replacing the Li-Ion batteries. It has amazing battery life and even today it can run for over three days after a full charge with my normal operations.

Display – totally cool. Most displays cannot be viewed under direct sunlight because they tend to turn dark. But, this has a reflective panel within it, which uses the sunlight itself to show the contents quite similar to having the backlight. Moreover, the display cover is scratch proof which still remains smooth and clean when the rest of the phone has been scratched and ‘bruised’ and looks like the surface of the planet Mercury at a distance.

Convenience never ends! This was one of the few phones which could be charged via USB by the time I got hold of it. I still remember the few times I charged my phone off my laptop while travelling home by bus coz I needed to notify my father to come pick me up. However, I have been mainly using this feature to annoy my friends using Nokia mobiles ;)

There are many other good things about it like the dedicated keypad lock toggle switch, stereo speakers, enhanced web browser inspired by the browsers on Symbian, VideoDJ, Remote Control, Java support etc which I’d not comment on simply coz I don’t want to make this too long. With all the good things it has to offer, there are definitely areas to improve. But, we mustn’t forget that we are paying nearly peanuts to get all these practical features from the W550i.

However, don’t get me wrong. I am not recommending anyone to buy this right now; simply because there are enough feature rich phones in the market, and this was a kind of a gracious review for the W550i for being with me throughout, and I don’t see the death of it anywhere in the near future ;)

Viva El W550i!!!

Nemesis Rox Onstage 2008 Finals...!

2008-11-29T21:03:00.000-08:00

TNL Onstage - The premier hunt for unorthodox music of Sri Lanka, launched it's 9th season this year. As they say, "No other concert is ever produced to such an international standard in Sri Lanka and no other music event offers such an eclectic celebration of local talent. Onstage has seen rockers hit Britney one more time with an electric guitar, chant in bohemian honor long live the Freddy, and take the streets of Colombo to the Ghetto."

With prelimineries starting on 4th October, it had its semi finals on 8th and 15 November and the grand finals were held on 29th November at the Sri Lanka Exhibition & Convention Center (SLECC), Colombo. It was a magnificent event which broaught together the finest metalheads and new soloists of the country, and also which drew a vast majority of rock fans of the country. What's more? The unprecedented Chitral Somapala (Chity) with his 'Civilization One' made a guest performance and that totally rocked the house to its limits!

So, why am I blogging about Onstage? :)

Let's get to the real deal. Among the six bands which competed for the Onstage band of the Year title, was Nemesis, which had a rise form the ashes few months back after being stalled for a while. Led by my good friend Mackie (he likes to use Mackie Mathew as his tradename :) ) who is the Manager and Lead Guitarist of the band, Nemesis made a great come back and made it's way to the finals of TNL Onstage with a enormous fan base to cheer it through out the event. Rightfully, although playing as the last in the line up, Nemesis jammed up the strings n drums along with Myya's vocals and they conquered the first session of the competition leaving behind the Cadenced and Zilch at a distance and having a minor competition from the other three bands, namely Love Me Dead, The Rebels and Ethereal. Next it was the Acoustic round, and guess what they chose to play! The hallmark song of Chity himslef - 'nadee ganga tharanaye'! Amidst the cheer of the crowd, Myya's vocals filled the house while Mackie and Losh tortured the string of their guitars to bring the best of it. This was played also as a tribute to Chitty and at the end of this round eveyrone knew Nemesis is going to carry away the half a million worth audio equipment and many goodies.

Around 2.15 a.m. it was the moment of truth! the comperes started announcing the winners for the night. They started saying, "The most outstanding musician of onstage finals 2008... drumrole please...", and it was won by none other than our good old buddy Mackie himself!!! he seemed rather surprised to receive it; but we wern't surprised to see him receiving it ;) Anyway I guess after this, Mackie would surely be a chick-magnet as was 'foreseen' in the write-up I did one year back when Nemesis rose from the ashes ;)

Next was the ultimate moment where they announced the winners of the night after announcing The Rebels as the runners up. Amidst the drumrole as soon as the sound 'N' left the compere's mouth, the house burst to a roar of NE-ME-SIS, and there was Mackie, Losh, Myya and Sithija running up to the stage embracing each other with the joy of victory, to receive their awards!

Apart from Nemesis, I was also thrilled to see one of my Collegemates (Damian) also playing in The Rebels. Proud of you too bro!

It was an awesome night at an awesome event, and it was enhanced by the amazing achievement of my buddies! Proud of you guys and I'm sure you might be setting up the high end audio equipment you won, to jam up some really rockin' music in the days to come by. I also remember Losh saying "Sri lanka, we are gonna jump at your face" when I had a chat with them to do the write-up about Nemeis, and yes! You surely have done that this time!!!

As Mackie would like the crowd to yell, let me wind up with the cheer to Nemesis - NE-ME-SIS... NE-ME-SIS... NE-ME-SIS...!

Digsby - The new legend in multiprotocol IM

2008-10-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

IM has probably become the most sought after communication medium in today’s internet driven communication paradigm. There has been a monopoly of IMs among MSN, Yahoo and GTalk along with their own client applications. However, by now the trend has been to go for multi-protcol IMs rather than having different clients running on your desktop which can be extremely cumbersome with all the switching in between them. It is true that when each IM provider comes up with its own client, it can come up with a set of features that are optimized for the underlying protocols, security implementations, QoS etc. However, if you look at these hallmark IM clients, you'd see that most of the features are just gimmicks rather than actually useful features. For an example, the yahoo messenger has a load of additional features, which would at times overwhelm the resources and affect availability of the basic feature - the chat. MSN Messenger and GTalk client are simpler on comparative terms. However according to my experience the GTalk client consumes a lot of resources compared to the domain of functionality it addresses. I really admire all the technology that is used behind these IMs, but the extensive richness itself devalues the experience of a layman user at times.

So, multiprotocol IMs! What are the options we have? Recently, Meebo has come forward as the dominant web based multiprotocol IM, and it stands as the lone wolf in that arena. In addition, in the standalone application series, Pidgin and Digsby have become prominent. So, I thought of sharing my experience on Digsby which has caught up hype quite recently.

Pidgin, which was born as 'Gaim' is currently leading the race in the multiprotocol IMs. However, Digsby is giving a good fight to it, mainly through its gimmicky equation, IM + E-mail + Social Networking = Digsby. So, additional features on a chat client! If I start favouring Digsby, you might say that I am contradicting what I mentioned earlier about other feature rich chat clients. However, Digsby is different. It has ensured to offer only the features that cover a specific domain. Chat is obviously the key feature, and in today's context, e-mail goes very closely with it. Probably that's why we have chat modules integrated to the web-based e-mail portals. And social networking is supported big time in today's world, and it is also all about communication. Therefore, Digsby seems a very effective all in one package as an IM client. Even the latest Pidgin also has facebook chat integrated. But, Digsby takes it to another different level by having updates, notifications etc from the Social Networking applications such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter.

On the face of the Buddy List, Digsby is nearly identical to pidgin apart from the difference images used here and there. Therefore, this interface ends up in rather a tie among Pidgin and Digsby. The listing of different IM accounts in a sequential manner and the sorting methods available in both are the same. However, Digsby has more advance sorting mechanisms which allows to sort in a multilevel filtering process. Digsby's buddy list generally stabilizes faster than Pidgin, and the customizability seems greater.

However, what really swings for me in Digsby is its simplicity in configuration. Pidgin's interface is rather tech oriented, and a generic user would get confused seeing the protocol preferences, server choices etc. Digsby also has these. But they are quite hidden under the hood and during the creation of an account only the username password combo is expected in the UI, which can turn out to be rather comfortable to a layman user who consequently would not have to waste time trying to figure out whether to ignore certain settings or not. Even the preferences are really simplistic with a traditional left navigation menu and relevant components opening in the right.

Another cool feature is the pop-up that appears on the screen for chats, mail updates and various notifications if Digsby is out of focus. This is very noticeable, and the chances of missing out on something even for a short while are minimized. Apart from that, you can reply on the pop-up itself. This can be extremely convenient if you are multitasking. In addition, the snapshot view of mails becomes highly handy to get a quick idea. The chat window is simple and has all the basic operations visible. Pidgin follows the Firefox extensibility style and is extended using plug-ins. This is an important feature, and Digsby does it by widgets. Moreover, the ability for Audio/Video chat puts Digsby in front of Pidgin in that aspect.

However, with all the might, it has some shortcomings. The most obvious one is the memory consumption. It is understandable with the feature set. But, still with GTalk and Yahoo chats logged in while Gmail is active, 25MB seems pretty expensive in terms of memory. Although it did not matter me much with my 2GB memory, it can be an issue and Pidgin can easily handle the above two IM accounts well under 15MB or memory in the same kind of test scenario. In addition, Digsby requires an account to be created upfront, and this central account has access to all the credentials of our accounts. Therefore, a security threat can be a possibility unless extra care is taken by the Digsby community. In addition, it does not provide support for some protocols supported by Pidgin such as IRC, Gadu Gadu, GroupWise, SILC etc. Since I installed Digsby, Firefox has crashed few times without even having the ability to restore. I wonder whether this is a direct consequence of Digsby. However, if it is, a patch better come out soon :) Apart from all these, still it does not have a native Linux version out yet, although they've announced that a Linux and Mac version will be coming soon. So, Pidgin is still going to keep ruling the Linux domain.

Simply put, my conclusion is, for a person who values convenience over other techy things like performance, extensibility etc, Digsby is the ultimate choice. With all due respect to Pidgin as the leading multiprotocol IM client, I believe Digsby will start a legend of its own.

MOINC - A new epoch of Web Services

2008-10-23T08:09:00.000-07:00

Web Services has become the ultimate choice for modern organisations to harness the power of network based computing. However, the the original Web Services model faces two inherent shortcomings despite all the good things it has to offer. Firstly, the traditional implementation finds it hard to scale up with the rising number of service requests, and thus 'scalability' is at stake. Therefore, the service providers are forced to go for more hardware oriented solutions to facilitate high scalability, investing fortunes in most of the cases. In addition, when the requests overwhelm the service provider, he is forced to reject further requests. This results in the decline of 'availability'. Web Services and SOA have definitely created hype, and have already become dominating technologies in the enterprise arena. But, when scalability and availability are threatened, how is the paradigm of WS going to survive?

The answer lies in the field of distributed computing which also has become prominent and interesting technological breakthrough. Projects like SETI@Home, Folding@Home and middleware technologies like BOINC have become hallmark technologies in this respect, especially in the field of Volunteer Computing. Therefore, a novel idea is to integrate a touch of the above techniques to enhance the availability and scalability of Web Services by distributing the load subjected to Web Service geared service providers over a cluster of computers. This innovative idea was given by Dr.Sanjiva Weerawarana, Chairman & CEO of WSO2, when we were in the quest for a problem to solve as our final year project of the Computer Science & Engineering course of the University of Moratuwa.

So, here we are! A group of ten comprising myself and nine of my friends at CSE are currently in the development stage of the platform which would solve the above two issues in the days to come by. Our project named MOINC (Mora Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) tries to give a solution by creating a cluster of computers made of volunteer computers which are connected to the World Wide Web, and distributing the load among all these nodes to get the processing done. Simply put, if things go well (which we are very keen to see happen :) ), a single application of this would give rise to a fully cranked up distributed super computer facilitating Web Services with high availability and scalability. The extremely generic nature of this project would give the users of this platform the capability to implement virtually any Web Services based application on top of it - even systems like SETI@Home.

The magic happens with the fine blend of the following four components.
- MOINC Server - The core component which is a self contained entity that manages the cluster, accept service requests, perform default WS processing etc.
- MOINC Client Agent - The component that will run in each and every node computer in the cluster, which will communicate with the Server and take care of all the activities in the node end.
- MOINC Server Manager - The component which gives a range of additional features to the MOINC platform for improved Quality of Service with features like credit management, trend analysis, social networking etc.
- Thisara Communication Framework - The Apache MINA based communication protocol which will be used for internal communications of the MOINC platform.

So, we claim that it solves two issues in the Web Service paradigm. But, the problem solving does not end there! This becomes a solution to make good use of idling computer power and electricity wasted during the time that computers are up and not doing any productive work. Hence, two birds are killed with one stone!

All the necessary information is available in the official project web site, and we have already done an alpha release of the Thisara Communication Framework. The source code can be checked out from our SVN repository as well. The team is high spirited, MOINC is rapidly progressing and the world of future Web Services seems a highly scalable and available place :)

Google Chrome - A re-thinking of the browser

2008-09-05T22:09:00.000-07:00

When I heard that Google was about to launch their own browser, I definitely knew that they had something really cool, wacky and BIG in store for the world.But,it was only after I got hold of Google Chrome and tried it out that I realized how the traditional browser design could be revolutionized!

On the phase of it, it looks as if it is yet a Firefox underneath, but that is a mistake. The Chrome team has entirely built the browser from scratch with a host of performance enhancing steps. The main issue we had with our traditional browsers was the fact that the browser ran as one process in the Operating System and different threads handles the irrationalities. So, even with all the management, the user always had the risk of crashing the browser if something went wrong. This became more evident with the tabbed browsing approach since multiple web pages appeared under tabs in the same browser window. So, if a page got hanged in one tab, or got crashed, it was time to say 'good bye' to all the tabs and start from the beginning. Still it was a load of inconvenience despite the fact that there were recovery measures taken.

However, with the rethinking with the Chrome browser, they have taken things to another level by making each tab act as a separate process in the OS. When the browser starts up, it starts up two processes which I believe correspond to the parent process which done all the administrative tasks and the one corresponding to the active tab. Thereafter with each tab creation, you can see a new process being created. With this approach, the resource utilization is independent among tabs since they are now processes. So, at the worst case, only one tab would crash and vanish while the rest of the tabs will be 'merrily singing along'. This is just one major optimization in terms of the browser design.

In addition, what main swings it for me is the amazingly simple interface with just seven utility buttons, tab list and 'omnibox' which gives a nearly full screen view of a traditional browser.

The good stuff;

- Fully Open Source
- Chrome's own Task Manager
- A VM for Javascript
- 'Omnibox' for URL entry, suggestions and searching.
- Sandboxing for security
- Separate plugin processes
- Gears

The 'Google Book' which contains all the design decisions can be found here, and this is the most awesome technical walk through I saw after the 'Head First' series.It's just a simple comic book at a glance and yet has all the technicalities associated with this wonderful browser. So, it's time you spend some time and go through the Chrome Google Book if you haven't done alreadys :)

This link contains some cool tips to harness a considerable potential of Chrome. With all the breakthroughs, there seems t0o be room for some more improvements. Check it out...

The web is sure to be flooded with tricks and spins related to Chrome in the days to come by, and the browser market is sure to be full of hustle and bustle...

Glory all the way

2008-06-08T23:35:00.000-07:00

"The University of Moratuwa (UoM) ranked as the best University of the country, and the 11th best University in the South Asian region, has made yet another significant achievement in the international arena, to add to its glamour.

The caliber of its students enabled the University to top the participation in the Google Summer of Code 2008 (GSoC 2008) programme, both in terms of proposal submission and acceptance of proposals among all participating Universities...."

...and the story goes on. My University became the global top in the GSOC2008 venture, and man!!! Am I not thilled of that?! So, I felt that it was my duty to do my part as a student of UoM, CSE and also a freelance writer, and did quite a comprehensive write up to the 'Sunday Observer', the State English Newspaper regarding this achievement.

>> http://www.sundayobserver.lk/2008/06/08/plus02.asp

And what's more? Right now the article appears as the first hit in Google for the search key 'GSOC UOM'!!! Now, shouldn't I be elated?!

I'm truly proud of all my buddies who became proud partners in this achievements, and quite happy about me for raising the application count from 89 to 90 though I could not contribute to add one to the 24 successful application count :)

Anyway, simply put UoM and CSE would rock forever!!!

Welcome to the ‘Virtual Barber Shop’

2008-05-29T19:36:00.000-07:00

I got hold of this audio track – ‘Virtual Barber Shop’ and it was so awesome… !!!

This is one great piece of thinking by the creators of it. They have simply exploited the capability of the human brain to analyze and identify a considerably accurate location of the sound source by analyzing the tiny variations of the sound pressure level.

As it is mentioned in the track itself, the recording has been done by using two microphones, having them in an orientation similar to that of a human’s ears while taking in to account the sonic peculiarities of the way the ears perceive sound. This is known as 'binaural recording' and it differs from stereo since stereo do not factor in natural ear spacing or 'head-shadow' of the head and ears.

Just grab this clip, put on your earphones correctly (Generally, the correct usage is in small print on the earphone as L(Left) and R(Right)) , close your eyes and listen to the entire track as recommended below, and let it take you through the experience of being in a pretty weird barber shop (where they tend to put grocery bags over your head.. :) No more tips about the content than this… ;) )

Having earphones and having the correct earphone in the correct ear is a MUST…!

Recommendations for best experience:

* Use earplug earphones (Like the ones given for SE W series mobiles ;)) rather than ordinary FM stereo earphones
* Keep your eyes closed during the entire playback.
* Be seated in an orientation similar to what you’d have in a barber shop when you get a hair cut.
* Be in an environment free of vibrations and other sounds.

I haven’t tried this clip on a 4.1 or above audio system. I guess the surround effect would still be there, but the greatest and most realistic experience would be with a simple pair of earphones coz it gives the sounds of ‘near-ear-occurrences’ in such a realistic way.

The recommended method of perception gives the best experience... and it is guaranteed…

Try it out…!!! It’s going to be breathtaking…

Tip of the post :

It is really fun letting others listen to this and see how they react when they hear certain things. I really enjoyed letting my parents and little sister listen to it and observing them. Believe me… Some reactions are worth capturing on video and publishing in YouTube… :D

::DOWNLOAD::

UoM tops GSoC 2008...

2008-05-18T22:15:00.000-07:00

The University of Moratuwa, as the premier establishment for tertiary education of the country, has made yet another significant achievement in the international arena, to add to its glamour. Being ranked as the best university of Sri Lanka and the 11^th best University in the South Indian region, it topped the list of successful applicants of the Google Summer of Code 2008 programme.

The programme which has become an icon as a global coding venture, has attracted a galore of students from all corners of the world including countries such as USA, UK, India, China and Canada which are in the pinnacle of programming expertise. The University of Moratuwa which took part in the first Summer of Code venture in 2005 with the participation of four students, has made few giant leaps over the successive years and made it’s name stand out as the institution with the highest number of successful proposals in this years endeavour. The list boasted a count of 24, leaving the Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland and University of Campinas, Brazil in a shared second place with a count of 10 successful proposals each to their credit. And what’s more? The University of Moratuwa also turned up to be the institution with the highest number of applicants with a staggering count of 93 whereas the immediate follower was the University of Campinas, Brazil with 29 applicants.

Google Summer of Code is a programme conducted by the Internet search-engine and open-source giant Google, aimed at inspiring young developers to contribute to the open-source software community while gaining valuable experience in real-world software development. Students from all over the world are invited to apply for the programme, where successful applicants are awarded stipends to write code for various open source software projects of renowned organizations. Google, in collaboration with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the GSoC programme has brought together over 1,500 students from all parts of the world with over 130 open source projects to create millions of lines of code.

When this remarkable accomplishment is concerned, another noticeable fact is that the Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering has bestowed 18 out of the 24 successful applicants.

This success with the Summer of Code programme has avowed the fact that the Department of Computer Science and Engineering has been renowned as a trendsetter for its innovative approach to undergraduate education, aimed at producing not merely employable, but globally competitive graduates. Its efforts have resulted in maintaining supreme standards in academic activities while placing much emphasis on the soft skills development of undergraduates.

Days will pass, the sun will shine and clocks will always tick. But, with this feat, the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering has added one more certainty that will be an unblemished tautology for the rest of the future. That is, the high calibre of its students geared by the inspiration of all professionals of the academia will keep on adding more world’s firsts to the UoM icon in the days to come by, while having itself as a key shareholder of the glamour.