You may already know, may be not till now.

Please register your self in my private club! Amazing benefits to members!!

Your email :


Password :

In many web sites (specially in public forums) you may have request to enter the email and password (as I've asked above). Many of you (Non IT and IT professionals) give your email and your password, which is the one you use to log in to your email. Am I correct? If your answer is "yes", I'm very sorry to say that the owner of the particular forum or the web site might have access to your email account (cos you have provided the user ID and Password) .

I did a small research regarding this matter using 20 users. (just the people in my office) And I found that 19 out of 20 Internet users were doing this mistake. It's obvious that one tend to enter the email and it's password by the way that it's being asked. So I thought of posting this for the sake of others who still does this mistake. :-)

Social Engineering is a very beautiful art. One can use it for good, one can use it for bad. The above trick is used by some people to get other's personal information. And you will become a victim by being unaware and careless. Your email will be accessible to the out sider, and will be used to spam others, and will do various other bad things "as you do it".

So never ever enter your email password (you may type the email address) in any other web site except your mail box login page. Your email password should be used only with your mail account, any thing other than that, give a different phase as the password. Be aware. Don't be a Cyber victim!

Software Freedom Day 2007

Sri Lankan FOSS community is organizing the SF Day 2007 in parallel to the global SFD event. This event will happen in three areas in the country, Colombo, Kandy and Matara. This will have awareness programs to the school, university students and to the general public. We wish to hold the event on both 14^th and 15^th September at these three areas.

The general idea of these event is to advocate and promote Free and Open Source software, GNU/Linux, and also to encourage people to use those, etc. I will update my blog about this event time to time.

Feel the Force - Read the Source.

Seven/ Seven/ Seven

Humm... after a while... today is a very nice day. it's 07/07/07. Some people says it's too bad to have a day like this, ( හතේ හත ), but for me today was a very good day from the morning.

From last week onwards I started to cram for my semester exam. Well, you will be surprise to hear about my academic work, yeh, I know I'm an idiot. I'm doing this degree from year 2003. :-( I'm doing BIT. I had to finish this by year 2006, but, I'm still in my second year, last semester. I paused my academic work due to some idiotic reasons, which are unacceptable and unreasonable. But now I'm back. Have to finish this degree by next year. So even though it's bit difficult to balance the work-family-degree, I'm trying my best to be a graduate!

Humm.. while that in mind, I went to see the movie, Live Free or Die Hard 4.0. Me, Madhu, Suchetha went to the Majestic Cinema, which has a dolby digital sound system. After I reserved the tickets via the eticketing service I was expecting to enter the hall without a hassle. But case was different, even it says "You can save the time and money by reserving the tickets via Internet" in the web site, we had to stay in a cue for about 20 minutes till the ticketing people receive the list of online reservations. Then after a small "rugby battle" I managed to get my three tickets.! Then come the next joke in the Majestic cinema bar, "Beer is not allowed to take in to the theater" F**K!!!, we were supposed to drink the beer at out side and then go to the cinema. humm, by that time, the movie would have reached the end. I find it very hard to understand the importance of existence of that bar inside the cinema. People have no time to drink their beer!!! F**k the beer, we got two Red Bulls, Coke, Cream Soda, Pop corn, Chips and went in. Movie was very good. එල කිරි.

Humm after stretching the brain and ears, came home safely. Have to start the studies again now. So see you later.

Have a nice 07/07/07.

Ubuntu 7.04

I'm upgrading my Ubuntu 'edgy eft' to 7.04 code named 'feisty fawn'. I've been using Ubuntu for an year and I'm getting more and more into the distro cos it's getting better and better in Computer Desktop world. Recognition of new hardware is excellent. And I love the neat Gnome Desktop. I'm enjoying my sunny Saturday with Ubuntu at home!!

If you are interested in Upgrading to 7.04, just issue the below mentioned command. No need to edit your /etc/apt/sources.list, Update manager will automatically replace the 'edgy' with 'feisty' and will comment the third party repos temporary. Issue the command as a normal user. Not the super user. It will ask for the 'sudo' password when needed. And mind, you need a broad band connection if you use the Internet as the upgrade medium. Follow the on-screen instructions. Please read the released notes too. ;-) Enjoy the Power of Ubuntu Desktop.

$ update-manager -d

P.S. You can only directly update to 7.04 from 6.10. Older version users have to upgrade the distro to 6.10 before you begin.

Answers to comments..

I saw several comments left for some of my posts. Some are questions. So here are some solutions to those problems.

To Milinda :

In order to pair you phone with the PC you need a passkey. normally it's '1234'. We need to install the relevant packages in our linux box to deal with the keys. Since I'm using ubuntu edgy eft with gnome (of course beryl on top ), I'll stick to the debian way of doing this.

you need to install these two packages. (bluez-pin and bluez-passkey-gnome)

# sudo apt-get install bluez-pin bluez-passkey-gnome

check your /etc/bluetooth/pin file and verify whether you have your passkey in that.

# less /etc/bluetooth/pin

# /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart

After restarting the bluetooth daemon try pairing. It should work. The PC also will show you a notification saying your phone try to connect. Click on the notification and enter the key. That's it!

Good luck.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To chaar~max :

Check your graphic card supports direct rendering.
# glxinfo |grep "direct"

if you get
direct rendering: Yes

your card is supported and you can go ahead with installing beryl.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To genesis:

I see several errors in your installation. (on reading your comment). you have to check your repositories for errors. You are having many broken dependencies. and make sure you have to correct repos for ubuntu edgy eft.

# apt-get upgrade -f

this might help to fix the broken dependencies.

after that try to follow my post again, you might get it work. You should give it a try, beryl is kicking off every thing.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm sorry I will not be able to answer all your questions but I will try to do my best.

Cheers!

Bluetooth Remote Control (BT MOUSE)

I felt sleepy while reading a book and wanted to try some thing funky. I wanted to try out the remote control feature in my new mobile phone. After 15 minuets of work I manged to get that feature working with my Ubuntu GNU/Linux notebook. And of course, I wanted to share this experience with my pals around the globe. So here I go...

My Phone : Sony Ericsson K510i
My Notebook : Compaq Presario V3000
My OS : Ubuntu edgy-eft (2.6.17-11-386)

You also can try this with your phones if your phone has the bluetooth remote control feature.

Prerequisites

• Bluetooth enabled PC and a Phone
  
• Bluez-utils

A simple editing of the /etc/default/bluetooth is all you need!

#vim /etc/default/bluetooth

Find and change HIDD_ENABLED = 1 (initially it is set to 0)

This will let you use your phone as a mouse. And some key board strikes also worked but have to check on that later. But mouse features are working perfectly.

#hcitool scan
This is to get your phone's MAC address

#hidd --connect your:phone:MAC:address

You will see the notification on your phone "enable remote control?"
press "yes" and you are ready to go.

End your connection after you're done.

#hidd --unplug your:phone:MAC:address

Use your phone's joystick to move your mouse pointer and default OK button on the phone to use as click function, other buttons also working for some key board shortcuts and i was really impressed when some of my beryl features also working well with the remote control. You will be able to conduct your Open Office Impress Presentations very effectively with this feature.

Hope you find this post useful. Have fun...

FOSS-ed On Wheel 2007 in Kandy.

FOSS-ed on wheels is another community service conducted by the Sri Lankan FOSS community. Google, Intel, ICTA, Lanka Software Foundation, The Linux Center, LKLUG (which I'm also is a member in) has backed up the event. This time the organizers was Computer Society, University of Peradeniya. The only different in this event from the other FOSS events is that, We get into a bus and travel across the country to reach people. If any one wish to have an event on your Village, school, University, organize it, inform us bit early, we will do the best to come down to your place.

I joined the event from Kandy on the Saturday the 3rd March 2007, (Day 01). Me, Suchetha, Raj, Mifan, Gayal, Lohitha, Bud, Kanchana, Lasantha, Dr. Nimal and few others (sorry I don't remember the names) were suppose to speak about FOSS and FOSS related topics. And of course many other were there who support in various areas. Crowd was up to the expected level and we had a combination of many categories such as Schools, Universities and general public. I'm happy to say that this was my first speech for FOSS. I was a speaker for Windows and some other proprietary software back at a time.

FOSS-ed on wheels is one of the awareness programs to the public, to educate them that, there are better Free and Open Source Software alternatives to the proprietary software. Which most of Sri Lankans are not aware of. I will come up with a separate blog post regarding that matter. Any way, we did a nice seminar and we are happy. :D
After the event (2nd day evening) on the way back to Colombo we went to Mifan's place at Peradeniya University. It's not that Pera Uni is Mifan's house, his father is a professor in physics, so they are in a quartos in the Uni. Mifan's mom treat us with snacks and a nice tea. Thank You. And you know, guys got crazy on the way back and started singing, shouting,etc in the bus.

After a successful event, we returned home with lot's of fun and of course, with a nice plaque gifted to us by the Computer Society, UoP. Thanks guys.

Ubuntu Edgy and Beryl 1.3

Last Thursday, afternoon, I got a buzz in my IM from Anuradha. And he said “Anu shall we do a small thing? will take only 10 minits”. I was bit free in the office at that time and I've started off with him. he's telling me to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf and I'm following the exact steps he's typing in the IM. After a couple of minits (and ofcourse emailing the xorg.conf after edting by Anuradha) I've managed to Install (from Anuradha's repository) and run Beryl window manager with Emerald Themes on my Debain Gnu/Linux (etch) system. And I got pretty impressed with it.

Since I have an Ubuntu Edgy Eft installation on my notebook, I thought of Installing Beryl on Ubuntu too. Wow, very nice and smoothly I've install the Beryl Window Manager and Emerald Themes. I googled to find an ubuntu repository to get the Beryl binaries.

Steps I've followed are below in this post, and it's pretty easy to install Beryl on Ubuntu Edgy. Since Edgy comes with an AiGLX inbuilt xorg, you don't need to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

My graphic card is Intel Mobile Integrated graphic controller, and the driver is i810.

Take a terminal.

# sudo su -
# vim /etc/apt/sources.list

and put the following line in your list

deb http://ubuntu.beryl-project.org/ edgy main

and you have to get the GPG Key.

# wget http://ubuntu.beryl-project.org/root@lupine.me.uk.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

# apt-get update

# apt-get install beryl

This will install the Beryl Window Manager, but you need the Emerald Theme Manager to make decorate it. ;-)

# apt-get install emerald-themes

This will install a set of thmes. BTW if you find any error on installing these with apt-get, then use

# aptitude install beryl emerald-themes

This will install all the recommended packages.

Then restart the xserver, just to refresh. ;-)

Then at the run command box, type,

beryl-manager

that's it!


Here I have 2 screen shots of the effets, you will enjoy the cool features on this once you have installed it!

NOTICE

This is just a quick notice to all the viewers of my blog. I've got few mails from some freinds through the anonymous-comment@blogger.com ;-) . Thanks for the comments and questions you've asked, BUT I can't reply to some of those who hasn't provided me an email address. So in future, if you want to query about a post, or/and if you wish me to reply you, please add your email with your comment.

Cheers!

Perfect Mistake

I have heard many of my friends who had erased their Hard Disks by mistake, when installing Linux on to Windows installed computer, etc. But I haven't heard of a friend of mine who have formatted his/her Windows partition when he/she supposed to format a pen drive. But my friends listen; I did that mistake just two days ago. Ye..h I know what you thinking. You think I'm a chronic careless boy. 5% correct. Yes I'm careless, sometimes.

My friend at office, Henry gave his USB Pen drive and asked me to format it. This story have 4 steps and two paragraph.

1. Hooked in the pen drive to my notebook.
2. Took a root shell (got the great power)
3. Entered the command mkdosfs -v /dev/sda1
4. Confirmed (are u sure? y)

After successfully completing the format, I opened the Pen drive to verify. Humm... data is still in the drive. Good, then what I have formatted? Quickly did a #ls /media/sda1 . No data. Thank you very much.

I did this in my new notebook which has a SATA HD. And at that particular time I was bit busy with some other work too. My Win partition was labeled as sda1. Pen drive was sdb1. One letter mistake. Story Ends.

Next day morning I got out of the bed and ran to the Wash room to start my day. Bath room is the place where I get many great ideas. So same as usual, I got this idea of Quit Dual Booting Win / Linux in my notebook. If I have a Mac Book running Mac OSX (I've seen Windows running on Macs too) Will I use dual boot? Will I install any other OS? No. No. I'll use Mac OS in Mac Book and if I want to use other OS, I'll simply get another PC running that particular OS. So why can't I apply that with my notebook. Do you think I'm still in the wash room? No I came out. (he hee). So I didn't install Windows again in my notebook. Kept my flavor of Linux. Since I'm having two more PCs at home running windows + One Desktop and another Laptop (my good old Toshiba Satellite A50p) at office doing dual boot I'll not miss Windows.

Conclusion:

1. Some BIG mistakes we do will lead us to a great ACHIEVEMENT.
2. With great power there must also come -- great responsibility!
3. Bath room is the best place for you to plan your future. (as far as you are alone in there)

See you in a while.

My Phone - GPRS - Bluetooth - Notebook - Internet

I have a Sony Ericsson Z600 mobile phone. I bought it 3 years ago. I had the GPRS enabled in my Mobitel Connection and used my Phone as a GPRS modem, to browse the Internet via my old notebook (provided from the office) using IR port. I did it in Windows, no worries. But after I installed Linux I couldn't configure my IR port and unable to connect to Internet via GPRS. But with my new notebook, Compaq Presario V3000 (Intel Core Duo) I had bluetooth inbuilt. After installing Ubuntu Dapper I gave it a try to connect via bluetooth. Bingo. Succeeded. After lot of Googling, I should say. So for the sake of people who need to connect to the Internet using their notebooks and Bluetooth phones, I thought of blogging my experience on that. You may find many good how to s related to this scenario though.

This is more adoptable for Ubuntu Dapper, but general configurations are same for other Distros too.



Prerequisites

• Latest 2.6 Kernel.

• bluez-utils.

• ppp.

• openbox.

• Bluetooth & GPRS enabled phone that can be used as a modem.

• Bluetooth enabled PC/notebook. (those who don't have an inbuilt bluetooth port can use a bluetooth doungle instead.)

Install software.

$ apt-get update (just to update the packages in the source list)
$ apt-get install bluez-utils
$ apt-get install openbox
$ apt-get install ppp
Take a Terminal and become root (or sudo). I prefer to keep the root privileges rather than sudo. Turn on both phone's and PC's bluetooth service.

Discover the bluetooth phone from your notebook

$ sudo su -
$ hcitool scan

This is my phone's MAC address. You may copy the MAC address because you gonna need it few more times in this process.

00:0F:D9:BC:EA:C0 Dassa.Z600

Now pair your phone with notebook

$ hcitool cc 00:0F:D9:BC:EA:C0
$ hcitool auth 00:0F:D9:BC:EA:C0

You should put your phone's MAC address here.

Now you have to configure your device{modem (rfcomm)}

Get your channel number for your phone's dial up service

$ sdptool browse 00:0F:D9:BC:EA:C0
Check for “Service Name : Dial-up Networking”. And check and remember the Channel number. Mine it was “Channel : 1”

Now edit the /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf
$ vim /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf

Mine it was like this, you should replace your MAC and Channel No.

# RFCOMM configuration file.
# example:
# rfcomm0 {
# bind yes;
# # Bluetooth address of the device
# device 11:22:33:44:55:66;
# # RFCOMM channel for the connection
# channel 1;
# # Description of the connection
# comment "Example Bluetooth device";
#anuradha edited this.

rfcomm0 {
bind yes;
# Bluetooth address of the device
device 00:0F:D9:BC:EA:C0;
# RFCOMM channel for the connection
channel 1;
# Description of the connection
comment "Bluetooth Dialup";

Save and close frcomm.conf file.

Please note; I always keep the original file and work on a copy of that. Since I'm also a new linux guy, probability of going things wrong is very high.

Now create a peer file. This will create the peer to peer connection with the Notebook and phone.

$ vim /etc/ppp/peers/BluetoothDialup

connect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/chatscripts/BluetoothDialup"
/dev/rfcomm0 115200
defaultroute
crtscts
lcp-echo-failure 0
#=======
/dev/rfcomm0 115200
connect '/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/chat-gprs'
crtscts
modem -detach
noccp
defaultroute
usepeerdns
noauth
ipcp-accept-remote
ipcp-accept-local
noipdefault

This is how my peer file looks like.

Now you need to create a chat script for the connection.

My /etc/chatscripts/BluetoothDialup file look like this.

TIMEOUT 40
ECHO ON
ABORT '\nBUSY\r'
ABORT '\nERROR\r'
ABORT '\nNO ANSWER\r'
ABORT '\nNO CARRIER\r'
ABORT '\nNO DIALTONE\r'
ABORT '\nRINGING\r\n\r\nRINGING\r'
'' \rAT
OK 'AT+CGDCONT=2,"IP","wap"'
OK ATD*99***1 #
CONNECT ""

Note: You have to replace the “wap” with your APN, and ADT number with your service provider's dialing number.

There is another thing to specify here, if you are using a PIN (pass key) to pair bluetooth devices you need to create a file containing the pin. I use a pin and I created that file as below.

$ vim /etc/bluetooth/pin

1111

This is a sample, you have to put your pin number here.
save and close.

Check whether you have a user that have the privileges to use the modem, else create a user that have the privilege.

$ adduser username dialout

Now get connected. Brows the Internet.

$ cd /etc/chatscripts
$ pon BluetoothDialup

Note: Some times you might get an error related to proxy server, if that problem showed up, go to edit – Preferences, under General tab go to Connection Settings... Select Auto Detect Proxy Settings for this Connection. Then give it a try.

After surfing, you have to close the connection.

$ poff BlutoothDialup

It's always good to close the peer connections too.
$ /etc/init.d/bluez-utils stop

Good Luck!

For me this setup was suitable. But what I have experienced is, sometimes one person's settings will not 100% suite for another one. I used several howtos to get my work done. This is the set of settings which worked for me. Can't say this will work for you too.

Hello... How are you?

After a little bit busy but enjoyable two weeks in AIT, Thailand I returned home on 2nd October. Well... I should say something about AIT. Asian Institute of Technology, is one of leading Institution / campus which mostly provide Master and Ph.Ds. If any one of you wish to follow a master's degree in Engineering or any other field, and if you wish to follow it in a South Asian country, I like to suggest Asian Institute of Technology without a doubt. Even though I'm a GNU/Linux Lover I went through the course without a problem. I played around a lot with Windows Server 2003 two years ago. Actually Win Server 2003 was in beta those days. I have created Intranet/s, Domain Controllers, Web Servers, etc, with Windows. But after I got my self into GNU/Linux I changed my Web Sever OS from Win Serv 2003 to Linux. I'm not going to stick in to one OS or Platform, but I will use Linux and Open Source Solutions at my work as much as possible. Because Linux created a new chapter in my life, and I like the freedom which comes with it.

Humm,.. after my last post again I was silent for a while. Actually I was off line for the last two weeks. I got married. Shocked? don't be. it's a normal step in our life cycle. I also have completed that step. I have realized about human life cycle, a long time ago. Birth, spending the life and death. We say “SPENDING” the life, why we say spending? Think for your self. You spend it, you never get it back. The time you passed is past, we can't drag it back. So we should live this moment joyfully, and harmless to others, and helpful to others and to the society. And not to forget to love your love ones. Life has no UNDO s like computer applications, But life have REDO s. You can repeat the good things you did through out your life.

See you all in a while...

Enter --- >>> Kingdom of Thailand

It’s being a some time since my last post. My friends calling me and check whether I’m alive after the last post. Because it is against LTTE. But I’m still alive. This post ensure that!. I found my self a chance to visit Thailand. Actually this is a fully sponsored tour from my Faculty where I work at present. Right now I’m in the AIT (Advanced Institute of Technology). I came here to learn about Windows Server 2003. I will be here until the 2nd October.

When I tell everyone I’m going to Thailand, many of my friends told me to beware of prostitutes!!! They talked like as soon as I get down from the plane prostitutes will surround me. But I found this country much different than that. Many people are polite, and honest (to some extend) there might be bad people like every where in the world. And if you want to have sexual pleasure, then you have dedicated places and people for that. It’s not fair that we call this Buddhist country as a country of prostitutes. There are much more you can observe in Kingdom of Thailand.

My self and Pubudu (my friend) came to the AIT around 1430. It was Saturday the 16th. And AIT staff was kind enough to arrange us two nice dormitories for the training period. First thing I did was had some bread we brought from Sri Lanka and crashed on the bed. After couple of hours of sleep, we got up and went to meet some of Sri Lankan students in the campus. So we met several MSc. And PhD. Students, and we were happy to see some of our own people here. Next day morning went to a shopping complex near by the AIT. I was shocked. Electronic items, phones, notebooks, ipods, etc, are much cheeper than SL. So I thought I must by my self a notebook computer from here!. In 18th September we started the course peace and quiet.

That’s it for now. Will put something into this later. More photos will be soon on my flickr galary.

Secure Sri Lanka ?

I don't know how much knowledge I have to discuss these problems. But I always wanted to express my ideas about some cases, openly. This is also a moment that my mind opened to the outer world. Before you read this any further please keep in mind few things. I'm not against Tamil nation. I have many friends who are tamils from SL and from other countries too. I'm not encouraging people to fight. I hate war. I'm not representing or promoting any political party or any organization. I don't like the polluted politics here in SL. No one told me to blog this, no one except me responsible for this ideas.

Still Reading.... ? Good. :-) Sri Lanka is a beautiful country. I love it. But because of this LTTE rebels this country have become a battle field for the last two decades. Prabakaran is trying to succeed his personal goals by sacrificing innocent Tamil, sinhala, even other nation's lives. First question I asked from my self was, why some tamils here in SL don't understand this and join the LTTE carder? When I move with the time I found that very few people join that rebel force by their desire. Most of them were taken in to their unit by forced and they brain wash those people. We hear from the media of kidnapping young Tamil people by LTTE. Which made me think, "my god.. Few people's (Prabakaran and his friends) war, is dragging by thousands of innocent people. LTTE leaders are not fighting for the democracy of the tamils. They just practicing what they are capable of. Killing. Since they have failed by their own, now they have put others in to the war and watching the show. I personally know tamils are very intelligent. So I hope at least the new people will end this game. All tamils, if you want the democracy, just say "no" to Prabakaran. My parents says, they co-op with tamils peacefully in many terms, before this LTTE born. Think of this, a Tamil person (Non LTTE) comes from Kilinochchi or Trincomallee to Colombo or Gall, the person may go shopping, visit people, etc and person can go back without any problem. But can we (sinhala guy/gal) go to Kilinochchi and return alive? I don't think so. So Tamil's freedom is not violated in Sri Lanka, but Sinhalease freedom....?

Every Tamil person == LTTE member? No. Tamil is not LTTE. LTTE is a collection of Tamils, Sinhaleas, Europeans, etc. Some groups joined with them to do underworld trading. (weapons, drugs, etc). Some are trying to get the ownership of some parts of the country. Some are trying to achieve cheap political goals by promoting LTTE. All I can say is, this is a collection of people who are educated to kill people, have no responsible for what they do, and have no clear goal+ No future.

I will say something I know and you may already know this too. This war could have ended a long time ago, when general Densil Kobbakaduwa was in the battle field. But there was some high class people who wanted to continue this war. So they let the LTTE to raise there power. So this war never ends and those people can survive. Unfortunately there were few people inside the military who needed this war to go on. I feel some of them are still inside. The are like Trojan horse computer viruses. Pretend to be a soldier but a terrorist in real. We can't say "this guy is a terrorist". But they are among us.

But now the time has come. This war should be stopped now. But if we want to live peacefully, LTTE should be eradicate. So now our three forces (Army, Neva, airbrush) are counter attacking to defend and clearing the areas in danger. We all should give our fullest support to them.

There is another thing I always feel upset about. The media culture in SL. The media is being a threat to the National Security. They publish what ever they want without thinking of the bad side of the news they publish. Take an example. If a military person or a Policeman done a great duty, they are highlighted in the news papers and TV, Radio., with all there details (Registration Nums, Full name, etc). Yes it's good to appreciate people on their good work. But you are automatically providing some sensitive information of that person to the terrorist too. How many of you know people in the intelligent forces? I know some of you know them. But is that the way it should be? There are some information that should kept as secrets. Media guys should think that terrorirst also read news papers, they also watch TV, they also have Internet. So I'm begging from you media guys, please don't publish sensitive information of military personals in any term. They will not get upset with you for saving their lives. Be more responsible.

Guys/ Gals we all have to think of this case seriously. We talk about Freedom all the time, even related to software :-), but do we really have a freedom in this country? Can we walk in a town without praying for god to keep us safe? Bomb blasts, Gun shoots, kidnapping, has become a part of the culture.! Hey I suggest you to carry your NIC with you. Always cooperate with the military. Respect them too.

I think if all the political parties and people can come to a plan to stop LTTE, that would create a new chapter in our country. This can't be done with that high class people, they will not allow others to end this. But now the Army, Nevy, Airforce is doing there duty just fine. If nobody from the government or any other authority block there way, they can finish this war soon. They can stop the LTTE.! And there are few organizations and people who try to justify the LTTE. I suggest they better stop it now. Stop feeding the TIGER!

The LTTE might kill me for blogging this too. :-) But I have expressed my idea to the world and I'm happy. Soon or later I will die, only thing is I don't know how I die. I wish I can see a Sri Lanka that all the Tamil, Sinhala, Muslims, etc live like a one family.

This is it. This is only a few things. But I will not say more. May be in future.

So Boring...

I was little bit busy for the last two months. In the office as well as at home. Any way I think I did some productive work in the last two months.

Today I feel very lazy to type, I don't know why....

Last month, I went Kandy to attend the School Linux Promotion. I joined with Suchetha and Bikku Mettavihari at Swarnamali Girls College and Rahula College. Both teachers and students were there for the training. I taught for teachers for the first time in my life. In the beginning, I felt little uncomfortable when they call me “Sir” (In Sri Lankan Schools “Sir” is referred to Teacher). Because I still feel like a student when I go to my school or when I meet my teachers. Any way, that was a fun filled two days.

I'm sorry i couldn't take my camera with me, so no photos from that event.

LKING CAMP

I got a fellowship to attend the 2nd LKING (Lanka Internet and Networking Group) camp held at Sarvodaya Head Office Rawathawatta, Moratuwa, Sri Lanka (24 – 25 June). When I go to the location I saw so many familiar faces and also many of my buddies at LKLUG.

In the first day, we had few presentations at the Conference Hall, and Dr. Ashoka, My good old pals Anuradha and Bud delivered some presentations. Anu talked about Scientific Application for the next generation, and Bud talk about Educational fun with computer networks, which mostly related to computer network games. :-). We all had a good discussion sessions and gained some knowledge in areas of networking. And there was participants from Moratuwa University, UCSC, University of Ruhuna, and also from some institutes and business organizations. So we had a representation from several areas in Sri Lanka.

In the middle of a discussion, I heard the words Wifi in Sarvodaya. So Since my Debian installation is not ready to go wifi at that time I tried to hook in with the Windows XP. I was connected!! without any prob! But I was not happy cos this has to be done with Linux. I thought okay, I will get the tools download to the Win and install them later.


But in the afternoon when Anuradha came to the camp, we had a chat and saw my notebook connected and with windows. I asked him to configure the wifi in debian for me and he managed to download packages needed and he did the work for me!! :-) I also felt happy due to two reasons. First is that now I'm in Wifi and the second thing is that I'm still having a working wireless card even after I droped my laptop (Toshiba Satellite A60p) while I'm riding my Bike (Honda Custom CBX 125) at the speed of 80 KMPH. I couldn't connect to the Wifi at Excel world last time so I thought my wireless is broken due to the drop damage. It was not in the laptop case, it was in my office bag and the belt broke out. It felt on the road and thrown towards the road for about 15 meters. That's an old story. Many people knows about it.

Day two in the camp, we discussed about Internet in our native language, Internet security, Video Conferencing, VOIP, etc. Dr. Gihan Dias, Suranga, and a person from Millennium IT did some presentations. Then Chamil from IT Ambalama did a presentation about blogging and other community base Internet stuff. After that fellows gave some speeches about there situation in their Institutes. In the evening the General meeting took place. New members elected, and all went home with certificates obtained for the participation. A happy camp.

FOSS in Paddy Fields

I went to Ampara to attend to a wedding. I represented the bride's side. The wedding was in Ampara city, but bride's house was in a village called Uhana (8Km away from the city). They had a nice big paddy field. So I wanted to take a photo like this. :-) Please notice that the little brown bottle next to me is not BEER.!!! (Zoom and see the name).

I always talk about taking FOSS to the rural areas. But still couldn't succeed. There are only few people who use FOSS in Ampara at the moment. But I haven't quit promoting FOSS in Ampara, actually my self, Kunchana is the Only active people out there. Kunchana is advocating, and actively promoting Linux and FOSS among friends. He managed to install Linux on few Destops and Laptops which belongs to our friends. Actually we are not in a try to inject (by force) FOSS to the community, because we want only those who are interested and find a value in FOSS to be join with us. But advocating is important.

By the way, I didn't forget to visit my good old buddies (Manju, Kassa, Kunchana). This time we couldn't have a beer out, cos I was little bit busy at the wedding house.

I kept my self silent for a while.

I was thinking and thinking during the past couple of months, about this world. Of course I did many things apart from 'thinking' as well. Never mind about them. When I look at this fast moving world, I see people loose their human qualities day by day. Many of us may not notice that we also have lost our qualities.

What do you need to have a quality life? If someone questioned from you, what is your answer? If we asked this from ten people, we'll get ten answers. Having a good education background would be one answer. being wealthy is another one, having many girl/boy friends would call people as a quality life. But I think combination of all those would help to have a quality life. Yet there are some other things we should consider as well. We should build a good faith in our heart. We should be honest and transparent. I don't say we should tell all over personal stuff to outer world. We should be the person who truly sees by outsiders.

When we growing old and old, we become more and more selfish. We don't tend to help others, we don't like to see other peoples success and happiness. We don't want want others to pass us! (I don't like when people overtakes me when I'm riding my bike, how ever I try to overtake the other vehicle, he/she tries to overtake me, this creates a street race.). Which is not good.

No need to fill this blog with my boring ideas. But one thing is true. That we all have to leave this world soon or later. At that day, what we all take with us is the goodness and badness we collected during the life span. I'm trying my best to live a balanced life, and also I'm trying my best NOT to become a trouble to other people.

Live a useful life to you and to everyone.! And die leaving a good name among living ones.

Don't use pirated software

I didn't know I was doing some thing wrong...
I was just sitting infront of a Windows XP computer...
Didn't even touch it...
But suddernly MS agent and Police broke in and grabed me...
And I was under arrest for using a pirated Win XP copy...
Don't use pirated software...

Disclaimer : All these are my ideas and my own activities. And those doesn't have any relationship with any other party.

FOSS-ed

February 13 – 15 was some action filled three days for me. I was representing The Linux Center at the FOSS-ed conference held in the Excel World Colombo. The conference was held to bring awareness to Free and Open Source to the public. The event went well from the very first day and we all (LK-LUG) had a busy but joyful event.

There were some speeches and some presentation from various key note speakers (local and International) and also from our own LUGers. I had the chance to talk to the Confounder of the world's most popular web server Apache, Mr. Brian Behlendorf. He was a key note speaker in the event. The crowed we aimed was mainly business people, universities and other educational institutes and any other party who wish to come! :-) Well we had a reasonable number of participants.

As a third world country (still developing) we should think about the Free and Open Source Software more and more. We can save more money by using this FOSS alternatively to the Proprietary software. But still in Sri Lanka all the software can be purchased under LKR 150 .00. So still people are like 'crabs in the boiling water'. And due to use of illegal software, we will need more prison chambers for the future Sri Lankan IT Professionals. :-)

Conclusion : Migration to FOSS is need in deed!


FOSS-ed After effects:


Janaka and Suchetha...

Janaka became a 'she male'...

Janaka had a high demand after the event..