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.
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.
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!!!
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?
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.!!!!”
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.
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! ;)
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.
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 MegaBassTM 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 ;)
