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

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

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.

Its like this, I am not a huge cricket fan, the matches make me bored along the game. One guy balls, another guy slowly hits and 8 people try to send him to bench (but should mention, when the batsmen hits hard or when others send him to bench its always fun ). Being in Sri Lanka one thing you inherit is the cricket fever, from your grand dad to siblings, they all watch (or maybe play) cricket. The Wills world cup (1996), I just rem from here and there, (I was in grade 5 good times) is one nice memory I have, Sri Lanka winning the big cup and we all were staring at the TV with great joy.

Anyways with all that background story, yesterday I happened to be there at R. Premadasa international cricket stadium to watch the Sri Lanka vs New Zealand T20 match. Folks at work made plans to watch the match for weeks and finally 12 turned up. (This time the numbers were low coz there was a rumor that SL lost the SL vs Pakistan match coz they were there that day) however I took a ticket (Dumindu Threatened me to buy ) and was there few minutes before the game started.

New Zealand batted 1st and the game became fun, with all the cheering, shouting and screaming. The foreigners were good they played 141 for 8 wickets and it was the time for the home players. I was amused, I was not bored in fact I enjoyed it so much and was waiting till our innings start.

The SL inning started after about half an hour with some drops of rain, but it was all good. The fans were shouting.. “Go SRI LANKA”, “Common SANGA / SANA / DILSHAN” and I was among them too. The 1st half of the innings was great, Dilshan played well with a 50 in 23 balls lifting the SL run rate. My hopes were for Jayasuriya coz he was my hero since 96, but he was out with 1 run and it was disappointing. With Sri Lanka’s 3rd wicket (Sangakara) the batsmen kept falling. and there was no one to carry on Dilshan’s run rate. but until the last over we had the chance to win, it was 9 runs with 7 balls, then 8 with 5 and finally 3 with 1. So we lost.

I saw the faces of people around me, all their happy faces are turned dark, and it was sad indeed. But well for me I was happy, (Not for we lost) I enjoyed the match, the time I spent, even the defeat, we gave a good fight. So yeah it was one great experience for a newbie cricket fan.

Hi folks, Its been awhile, huh almost 5 months since my last post. I was so darn busy with university finals, my thesis and some extra curricular activities . So yeah its about time to blog again. In few of my older posts i have written few things about SOA (little things i know), UDDI, Web Services and about the ESB concept. I did my bachelor’s thesis in the area of SOA, ( BACKBONE – A Service Oriented Architecture for Public Infrastructure and Service Governance) proposing a SOA reference architecture for maturing governments. For the past nine months of time I’ve been playing with technologies such as Axis 2, Apache CXF, WSIT/Metro, WSO2 ESB, JSF, Spring, Hibernate etc. etc. (All those J2EE stuff )

While I was working on my prototype, composing the services, developing UIs to consume them, connecting the two ends with the WSO2 ESB, resources like IBM library, IEEE explore, ACM library and most importantly WSO2 Oxygen Tank helped me immensely. I was fascinated by the papers and materials offered by WSO2 OT and IBM library for no cost. So Thanks to them I got my thesis done with caliber.

As for any one in their final year of university I my self was looking for a great starting point for my career. I was looking for some deference, not the ordinary software development which exists in many software houses. I was looking for some challenge, where I can explore new things, do research and importantly be part of a great community. For me that starting point was WSO2 (The Open Source SOA Company), and frankly it was a dream come true

Yeah I am living the dream

It’s been a while. Didn’t have time to blog or rather didn’t have much to blog about. Its the final university year, work is crazy. Too much report writing, formatting references and researching about almost everything related to IT. I started my thesis, and was super busy with catching up all those new technologies, testing and code cutting. well its all about SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) yeahhh its hot stuff around these days, and mine was to introduce a better architecture with new technologies for public infrastructure re-engineering and service governance.

So yeah guess I will be posting on SOA for a while, and yeah mostly JAVA stuff.

Well, not hoping to write about my dreamy vacation, so will just tip off the few productive days. Yeah so i was doing some work for Archmage last few days, gave life to a dead project, played with joomla, wordpress and osCommerce.

After much research and hacking me and few of my friends at Archmage thought of using Joomla and Wordpress as core CMSes for our web development tasks, to make the work more rapid and easy. So yeah am hacking and looking for plugins and modules that i can use on joomla. Since last two weeks i was working on a real estate project and an e-commerce one. i was looking for resources on them. so yeah if you are looking for something similar try Estate Agent Improved for real estate and Virtuemart for E-Commerce. both are nicely made, Joomla plugins. With a little bit of customization they can be used like a charm.

OH and yeah today i gave a new look to my blog. last night i updated to Wordpress 2.5.1 ( yeah I know FINALLY!! ) Edit: I updated it again today (16th June) to WP 2.6 .  Many thanks goes to Andrayogi for a pretty neat template. Added some plugins, had some problems with the DIGG IT icon. My firebug started giving a javascript error “unterminated string literal” and finally found a fix.. well its simple just edit the plugin and add

digg_bodytext = '<?php echo trim(preg_replace('/\s/', ' ', get_the_excerpt())); ?>';

instead of

digg_bodytext = '<?php get_the_excerpt(); ?>';

That will fix the error. yeah so the site looks pretty neat. am sure many over the net uses this theme. even tried some different colors and combinations but thought this is the best combination so kept it in original.

Soo yeah will write some thing with more value soon.

cheers !

This is my 1st post after 15th February. I was away from most of things i was doing and was doing some serious thinking. Had to take some important decisions in my life. I realized everything around me is so rapidly changing, and above all shockingly i have been changed. Well yeah this post is also a crappy post with no much importance, but well thought of writing something before i go to my usual articles from tomorrow onwards (Hopefully ) After all its my own blog, and am not making money out of this. so its my world i write all what i want.

I finished my Internship in Germany and am back in Sri Lanka, enjoying the warm weather , mocking at politics, freaked out about the inflation and of cause surviving from the random blasts, Then again its home, no place like home isn’t it? At the moment am entirely jobless, not doing anything productive. sleeping most of the time (Dreaming ). Oh but soon after i came i wanted to fix a nice geeky work station to start my University final year with. Yeah so last week i bought a nice 19inch Wide screen LCD, a comfortable MD chair and resembled my old PC with some new pieces. so now it looks neat and looking hot and with all theHAHOO about the Original Software I just switched to Ubuntu hardy without a hesitation. so yeah now am 100% Linux. hope I’ll stay that way.

So yeah I don’t intend to write much about myself, as i said i took some important decisions which is more or less life changing (maybe a bit life threatening too at the moment, yet am really happy about how everything turned out to be). So finally what i really want to do now is to scream out so loud, SO LOUD AND SAY HOW HAPPY I AM.

cheers !!

Thought of writing another post under NO category / general (I do this when I don’t have anything useful to blog about yet when i have alot things to blog about.). Last couple of days I was pretty busy with work. (Was playing with some Ajax frameworks for JSF.. and yeah I will write about that in my next post… it was pretty fun using Ajax in your Java EE app). So anyways as my topic says.. this Post does not contain anything important.. well maybe about movies if you are a great fan of All kinds of movies

Valentines day

Yesterday morning after i woke up and checked my mail…. (Well yeah i do that before having a morning tea…in-fact first thing after opening my eyes not that am getting thousands of mails that I should reply, but it had been a habit, which i cannot get over with). My Girl Friend had sent me an email saying
“…..oh btw…i knw we dnt celebrate but happy vals day..muwaaaahhhh…my valantine <3″
I was like WHAT ?? OH Crap the Valentines day… that’s how I knew that yesterday is the so called lovers day.. For last couple of years 14th February was just there… as she said we never used to HAHOO about it.. one reason, we were having more important stuff to worry about, and we never saw a point in that idea (same as Mothers’, Day Fathers’ day, That Day and This Day but accept the Birthday LOL )… But any how This time I thought of sending something to her.. Not that I suddenly saw a meaning in that idea, But by the end of the day i felt like i want to send something… well i do believe in doing things without a meaning.. (am talking about the Day.. not sending something to her ).. Anyhow yeah for the 1st time later that day night, I ordered a valentines Gift to be delivered to her… !!!

Blogging

Last week with the 1st release of the project i was working on, I got some time to surf around the net and do some reading..Specially about blogging, SEO, Micro Blogging, Pod-casting etc, etc, (Yeah my last post also a result of this reading). I was reading quite alot of blogs, Mostly Sri Lankan (Through SLBlogs and Kottu), and i found pretty interesting ones not to mention there were some Sri Lankan Blogs which discuses some serious topics in charming way (its a complement).

When I started Blogging back in 2007 i didn’t have a clear reason, the only reason I started was that I had a server to play with and a DOT COM domain was not so expensive. The reason that am doing it still is… well I dont know !! maybe i will stop it tomorrow…. !!! Anyhow still am enjoying this..its nice to see the graphs in Google analytics, and some times when some of your posts come in googles’ 1st page of search results under java or Linux hacks.

Another thing I came across last week was some thing called Micro Blogging.., well its not a new thing (Was new to me).. but well Its a pretty strange way of blogging.. because when you read one of those blogs, It doesn’t make any sense Why you do it.. !! Then again I celebrated the valentines day didn’t I !!

With my last article (The criticism about a criticism) I happened to do some reading on this So called HOT topic SEO. After reading some articles i actually wondered, Whats there to talk about this much. SEO for me is all about good content..!! infarct 99% of the Google page rank is directly depending on the valuable content, its The valuable content which makes back links (Organic links).. All other gambling which is done is just a matter of 1%. And that 1% can never make you site go more than 2 in PR. One of my friends last week said, doing SEO is like we are putting few bugs when we program. . But i must also say before 1998 (before Google born) SEO was a big deal. Meta tags and keywords made a huge difference, But with the Goolge’s Algorithm the story took a different turn. So Don’t waste time in gambling for back links. write valuable content it will surely make a deference.

Movies

After i started my Interns in Germany since last July, I guess my Bit-torrent client is running nonstop (well maybe few days of a rest on my notebook). Soon as i landed here my 1st wish was to experience, at-least more than 2Mbps DSL line (That’s the best we can have in Sri Lanka). Making my dreams come true for few euros i took a DSL connection of 4Mbps . and was being fond like a child with a candy bar. My room mate those days said… “Dude now you can download movies faster than you watch them.” apparently making that statement true. I had a to buy a bigger hard drive after not more than one month. So yeah I took a 500GB external hard Drive, in august, and yeah 90% of it is now filled.. !!

Okey so I guess the above lines says that I have downloaded almost all the rated movies in IMDB… so for the all types of movies fans… there are few good stuff i wanted to tell..check release log every day.. It contains almost all the releases up-t-odate…maybe you feel its too much information, and yeah true..yet its a valuable site.. I found it through Kasun.

And check out the torrentfive.com this a good site where they publish new movie torrents with good quality. One drawback is you have to register before downloading torrents.

Talking about some TV series, I got to write about Band Of brothers, this is an awesome war story. Not a new one yet then again I found it recently. Jericho 2nd season is out and casting on every Wednesday, but with the strike of the writers guild i am missing some pretty good stories these day, Office, Heroes are among them.

So yeah I will not waste time writing about my 430GB movie collection, just visit release log and download what ever you like.

All sort of other crap.

Well other than above… when i stared writing this post i wanted to write some Sri Lankan politics and some philosophical stuff, but after writing the above… i think i am done jabbering about crap for the day. So this will be my last post on general or “No Category” category. (At least for some time )

So…am sorry for wasting your time !!

cheers !!

Since i didn’t have much work at the office today,  thought of writing an about page in the blog… so yeah I wrote my 21 years of life story… you don’t really have to read it…