Bandos’ Arcade

Today I got holidays. yeah I know some of you might be wondering whether am still schooling (Yeah I got the same feeling first lol) !!! !@#$%^& But yeah we got a super awesome two whole weeks to have some fun, go some where, anywhere out from checking mail, and doing the stuff we do day to day. Had the last-office-day party at flag and whistle dressed up like pirates, doing some crazy games and enjoying nice food. Dr. Sanjiva gave an inspiring speech, talked about what we achived as a team at WSO2 in 2009 and what we should do in the coming year.

I am still 5 months old at WSO2 and all these things inspires me, the friendly open culture (with a very Geeky backdrop), the challenging work, friendly people with an amazing passion and team work. All those make me think how great it is to be apart of it all. So now its holidays for us, till Jan 4th we take a break from work and enjoy with everything else but work. My plan is to sleep about two days, Going on a trip to North (Yeah north since there NO WAR any more) for like 3 ~ 4 days, visit some old friends and la..di..da..di..da… So yeah until then HAPPY HOLIDAYS

Yesterday (16th Dec) WSO2 Gadget Server graduated from its beta status and announced its release. WSO2 Gadget Server is designed to serve as a presentation middle-ware product in the SOA space to smoothly display chunks of service oriented data for the end users.

The solution architecture is based on portal / portlet concept but making it far more simpler. Since the enterprises are more and more leaning towards the cloud and service oriented mashups, visualizing those data should not be complicated. Hence the Gadget Server provides a simple platform to write the data visualization code just in HTML, JavaScript and XML the implementation of the presentation logic cannot make more simpler. It is exactly similar to writing a Google gadget (hosted in iGoogle / Gmail / orkut) to Tweet .

As far as it goes the Gadget Server’s applicability for the enterprise is somewhat an enterprise dashboard that can be customized according to the user’s need and governed by the authorities. For an instance if you are a manager of a bank, wouldn’t it be great to have a dashboard forecasting and displaying current and future bank transaction stats and predications, while at the same time in a deferent view having your business schedule, calender, mail/IM, and news as small but clear and interactive portlets.

Yeah so thats, what the Gadget Server does, and the interesting fact is, its simplicity and extensibility, What all you need to know is some HTML and JavaScript. (no need to consult Java / .NET / PHP / SOA experts). So Download it !! Play with it !! Give us some feedback !!

We are about to release The long awaited WSO2 Gadget Server within few days of time. These few days I was doing some documentation and content writing about the Gadget Server, Apache Shindig and Google gadgets specification. My 1st article about authoring gadgets is now published on WSO2 Oxygen Tank as a help/Tutorial for Gadget server users. You can also download the Gadget Server release candidate 2 and play with it. Also Paul had written an interesting article about portals and Gadgets Server’s role.

As I have mentioned in some previous post, today I did a talk about Apache shindig and its use cases (WSO2 Gadget Server) at Apache Con 09 with my Colleague Tyrell. So without writing about the whole talk let me share the presentation slides. The Talk turned up great, audience were quite interested, too bad we had very limited time and missed to do a demo.

Today I was at Apache Asia road show 2009 at Colombo, and feeling good about myself of attending . It was a great session with many valuable tech talks and more of a valuable community gathering. Am not writing this post to talk about Apache and all the open source movement but about a specific talk which made me thinking.

Today, the 1st of 3 days event, the keynote speech was given by a remarkable Sri Lankan Scientist Prof Mohan Munasinghe on a topic if I remember correctly, “Making Development More Sustainable Will Help Address Climate Change“. I know !! It doesn’t sound much like open source or rather ICT in that matter, but the way he made most of the things related to ICT was quite remarkable. His solution to address bigger problems seems simple. His solution was to address the small problems, change the things what you can change at no cost, exactly quoting “Use electricity carefully, eat less meet ”.

Thinking it through, its the old method in solving the big problem, its just break it in to small problems and try to solve those small ones. The facts Prof Munasinghe talked about climate change was quite terrifying. But however his conclusion was optimistic, he believed as a community that we will stand up against these challenges, be less greedy and help the poor.

P.S : If anyone of you did find the presentation slides of the keynote speech please do link in comments

Nothing much new to write, was busy with work, WSO2 Gadget Server is about to release in the coming weeks, (I’ll be writing a whole story about it in a coming post). Apart from all those, my first article was published today in the diGIT magazine, which is a free online IT magazine run by a bunch of Sri Lankans. For some time I wanted to write about SOA and my findings in my final academic year, I thought I will blog about it. But never got a chance or rather, who will read about SOA in my blog . For many of such reasons I thought of contributing to diGIT mainly about SOA. With its December issue, my first article about SOA got published. you can check it out at http://digit.lk/09_dec_soa2 and leave a comment here

Other than that, The Apache Asia Roadshow 2009 is happening in town Dec. 3rd, 4th and 5th. On 4th morning I will be talking about Apache Shindig and our experience in WSO2 Gadget Server along with Tyrell. So pay a visit on the event am sure it’ll be awesome.

Last night was the long awaited day, My graduation, We were suited up, dressed with black academic gowns and hats, Its all fancy and well, quite formal . There is alot to brag about, How Important this day is, The hard work we did to achieve it, but well I guess you all know the backdrop of a graduation. So without much words ill post some photos, of this important day of my life and Why I said its a SPARKLING Graduation is that I won Dr. Gamini Wickramasinghe Gold Medal for outstanding achievements. My parents were happy with tears in their eyes. Thank you guys, to all of you, in helping me to achieve greatness last night.

Today was “THE Workshop Day” for WSO2 folks, an event organized by WSO2 with an intention to make an awareness of SOA building blocks. I was (proudly ) among the audience as a WSO2 crew member, listening to all the tech talks of my collogues. It was a great session we had today, starting from Paul’s introduction to SOA and until Asanka’s talk about enterprise SOA pattern’s. The whole set of talks took me back in time where I was reading about SOA concepts for my bachelor’s thesis. If I had experienced this workshop then, life would have been much easier .

Guys,.. cheers !! for a job well done

For few days I was involved with WSO2 Mashup Server 2.0 release documentation, giving a hand to the mashup team. Documentation is a painful task, but when comes to open source what matters mostly is documentation .
Last night I had to convert a bunch of html files (some Java Api Docs) to xml in-order to port into maven site. Formatting 30+ html files to xml !@#$%^&*@% . So I was googleing for a tool to automate the task. With few clicks here and there I found a nice article in Big Blue’s developer works site, a tool called “Tidy“. When I tried to download and use I figure out that you can straight away apt-get the package and use. So,

sudo apt-get install tidy

and your box is now equiped with the tool, and can be accessed via the shell.

tidy -asxhtml -numeric < index.html > index.xml

but who wants to convert file by file when you have such a nice tool, so I spent few minutes in writing a tiny shell script to get the job done, the snippet is,

#!/bin/bash
for file in $(find $1 -type f -iname '*.html'); do
	myf=`echo $file | sed 's/html/xml/g'`
	tidy -asxhtml -numeric < $file > $myf
done

All looked good, worked fine. However in my Api Docs I had, had few special tags, custom to our Mashup Apis (<imconfig>, <yahoo>, <mail:config>). Tidy gave error for these files since the tags are not recognized.

In such a case you can train Tidy for new tags, by adding few lines to the tidy configuration file. (/etc/tidy.config – You can also give your own config file at the prompt)

new-pre-tags: imconfig, yahoo, msn, aim, icq, jabber, username, password

There are whole bunch of tweeks you can do with tidy, [1], [2] and [3] are some useful links that you can read up when using the tool.

[1] : http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-tiptidy.html
[2] : http://tidy.sourceforge.net/
[3] : http://tidy.sourceforge.net/docs/tidy_man.html

Terminator was running in four segments, top left was a maven build, top right was a svn update, in one of other two an apt-get was running and I was playing on the smaller one left in bottom right. My notebook was running on battery power and I forgot to plug it in to AC, before the box got hibernate. Once I reboot it with AC power my X-Server was gone !! I couldn’t see the log-in screen and it just left me with the console in full screen.

I am not a linux guru, but i tried few commands, “startx / dkpg -reconfigure / nvidia-config / etc”. I had to run to our sys admin since he is considered the guru . with few commands at flash speed he got the x-server running again. but it was all broken here and there. couldn’t hear sound, installed apps were not working and above all when I reboot, I had to type “startx” each time to see the display (Which was a pain and made me itchy ). Chamith’s idea was even if he could get the x-server running in normal mode, some errors that am getting wont be able to fix. so the best option to make all smooth is to re install the OS and he said “No probs ne machan (sinhala way of saying dude / bro ), ur home is in a different partition right ? so its a matter of ten minutes to restore the root in the other partition.” – OH CRAP NOOO my /home was also in the same partition and I only had one single big partition.

SO yeah I had no other option left, I had to back up 20GB of my /home dir and re-install ubuntu 9.04. (Coping 20GB from here and there is a crappy and a messy job) I was struggling with the fix till today morning and finally got everything smooth again.

SO the lesson from all of this is. keep your /home mounted in a different partition. I learnt the lesson, the hard way.