WSO2Con 2011 is a technical and IT-Biz conference organized by WSO2 inc, and 2011 is its second consecutive time. Last year the conference concluded grandly and it discussed many technical topics such as enterprise computing, cloud, web services security, enterprise data etc. It concluded with a great panel discussion on the topic “A Walk Down Memory Lane: XML, Web Services & SOA from 1990 to 2010″ and the panelists were some of the renowned personalities in XML Web services space.

So the conference is back this year, and it will be on September 12th to 16th at Waters Edge Colombo, There will be two tutorial sessions (12th and 16th) and the conference will span for three days (13th, 14th and 15th). The agenda was recently announced officially, and it surely looks interesting. I guess if you are into Distributed Computing, SOA and Cloud this would be the right place to and the event to be apart of.

Also am quite proud to blog about that I will also be one of the speakers in the 2011 conference, The topic I submitted was “User interfaces in distributed environments” and later I altered it to “Users: The SOA Last Mile” to make it broader.

Main reason for this topic is that I have done some resent work close to the Users of information systems and about delivering information to users effectively and efficiently, I believe I can talk about it, and maybe give some insight about How important the “Last Mile” is. Anyhow I don’t wona write about What I will be talking, coz mainly its still a blank paper for me too

So yeah what I wanted to say is that WSO2Con will be happening on September in Colombo, and I have no doubt that it will be one great tech Conf with a great set of talks and workshops, so hope to see you there soon !!!

Well its been awhile; I was ashamed to look at my blog. I used to blog more often, about something came up to my mind or something interesting I have done. But for few months I didn’t even look at my blog. Okey so am trying to reason it out here.

For me writing is like meditating, its wired that I couldn’t find one solid peaceful half an hour for last couple of months. Anyhow I was thinking, if I should close down the blog; and forget about it all to gather. It was not that I wasn’t doing anything interesting, or that I didn’t wona share what I found. Its simply I was busy (Very busy ) and I had a social media at my disposal where I can share my thoughts in 140 characters.

Yeah so I guess twitter is the culprit. , I found some interesting reads at merebagatelle and at shanenickerson; second one is funny and if you tweet alot you know its quite true

Any ho, I wont abandon the blog; guess I cant; its like my identity on the web, Ill find some time, and before I ruin the idea on twitter I’ll try to write a blog and tweet that for a change.

Cheers

Its been awhile am writing a post, was busy, was traveling mostly was lazy. Lot happened during the past two months, I started reading for my masters in Management & Information Technology. Yeah I know !! “Management”, I wanted to explore that side of the story, since its with IT, I thought it will might come in handy at some point. Maybe I’ll be completely wrong

I was in California (In San Francisco to be specific) for almost two months, providing consultancy for a customer. Was able to visit Google head office in mountain view and I was fascinated. Even I am back in SL and almost a month has passed by, I still couldn’t get back into writing. First I thought its my busy schedule, and that I do not have time, But then I got vacation. Now the one week long vacation has almost come to an end, and all what I have done is sleep, watch movies, read, tweet and sleep.

I visited my blog once in awhile, and immediately closed the tab, with a guilty feeling for making it’s post calender so empty. So even this post contains nothing valuable, I wish it will make me start writing again.

I should Tweet less and blog more !!!

This is a post that should have been written few days back, On April 29th Ubuntu 10.04 – (Lucid Lynx) was released, and I was counting days till it did but couldn’t try it out because of the release work I was doing in my machine. Last weekend (even the work wasn’t quite over) my anxiousness couldn’t rest. I installed the new beast keeping my /home safe. To tell you the truth, the installation process was hardly “linux like”. There were no screens showing any commands executing, nor view of the terminal. What you see is a breath taking slide show (very much windows like, but much sweeter) trying to show off the beauty and market itself.

Ubuntu - 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)

Well I know many of you already have tried Lucid, and there is nothing new for me to mention, hence I thought of writing few words about Ubuntu’s slogan “Linux For Human Beings”. My history as a Linux user is not that ancient, even though I have used it side by side with a  Windows OS, I’ve never gone total Linux, There were reasons behind. {1} I was afraid it will all break down in the middle of something. {2} It looked like a dark cave with alot of never ending tunnels {3} It was hard for me to troubleshoot on my own (I was a novice). But thanks to Sandaruwan and the never ending virus problems, performance degradation with time in windows, I jumped in to the deep-end. Ever since am a happy man

Before Ubuntu, I have tried Debian and Suse, but with Ubuntu I felt quite safe. There were number of reasons, among them, Canonical released frequent updates and bug fixes (mainly fixes related to hardware drivers). Ubuntu’s is doing major release twice a year with a considerable amount of improvements, and nevertheless its Virus free, ultra fast and very stable for a software development environment.

Being those my reasons, I believe Linux is the answer for many 3rd world countries, to obtain a high IT literacy rate. When Microsoft and other proprietary software vendors are investing in millions and billions to put a full-stop to software piracy (Which as a software engineer I encourage), and when personal computers are sold with these proprietary software pre installed (Ofcause not for free) with prices automatically goes sky high, resulting a normal user to look at a computer as if it is a Jet plane .

But for some (many) reason free and open source software is hidden to the normal user world. Of-cause there are few myths associated, One popular myth is that Open source and free software doesn’t come up to the standard of proprietary software, If we forget for an instance that I work for a 100% open source company , and look at Apache software foundation, where there are plenty of great products (Apache HTTP server, Tomcat, Maven, Synapse et al.), but normally the argument is “A normal user doesn’t care about the server space. What does free software offer for them ?, to listen to music, edit some photos, check email and browse internet” ? And as far as I see this is where Ubuntu places itself. I believe this is why it displays a pretty screen while its being installed and I think so far Ubuntu had done a great Job, and it is ready with a strong and shiny armour, to battle with any proprietary operating system and make it’s mark.

So if you are a normal user reading this article, try new Ubuntu, and when you are buying your next personal computer, ask you computer supplier to give the machine with Ubuntu. I promises you, you will save a hell a lot of money, and it will set you free.

I had to blog about it

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

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.