Raspberry Pi First Impression

Raspberry Pi is a revolutionary piece of gadget that introduced to the computer arena back in 2006. Even though the concept was there from 2006, the actual commercial board was available from February 2012.

The board is little bit larger than a credit card. Currently there are two types of board available, Model A and Model B. Key differences of the two are as below:

Model A	Model B
256MB RAM	512MB RAM
1 USB port	2 USB ports
No Ethernet	On Board Ethernet
200MA Power	700MA

It contains an ARM11 processor that'll operate in 700MHz. A GPU (which shares memory from RAM) that capable of playing HD quality video. A HDMI port as VGA technology is getting old now ;).

Couple of my friends were doing a superb demonstration of WSO2's product stack running on a R-Pi cluster during the WSO2Con 2013 London. It was a cool project. That's the first day I saw R-Pi in action. I was so interested and wanted to get on hold of a one soon. After couple of months of WSO2Con, I went to Azeez and got one of the boards he used for the demo with a pre-installed SD card.

I did not have a USB Keyboard at that time. But the Pi's network were preconfigured by Azeez and I could see the IP of the Pi. Managed to ssh to it by connecting directly via a Cat 5 cable. By just doing a 'startx', I could start the graphical display too. Well, that was easy.

Then I managed to share the Inernet connection from my Laptop with the Pi with IP Forwarding and iptables. Then wondered around Raspberian OS. My first impression of this gadget was awesome!

I will be preparing another SD card from scratch to experience the process and see what more this tiny can do.

Back to Two Wheels After a Long Time

My life began with two wheels, I still remember (the very first years that I remember in my life), I used to sit on the handle bar of my father's "Hunter" foot bike. Father was paddling many kilometers with mom and me per day. Then from there father had a Honda CB 125 and a Honda CD 50. Yeh, father was not going towards big bikes, he just focused on saving some money on fuel. I only had a mountain bike during my school days :).

I start riding motor cycles in my very little age, where my legs were not long enough to touch the ground. My father used to give me the handle bar while we riding, so I had an idea of controlling the bike from my age of 5. After I grow a bit, I start to learn riding in my father's CB 125, but he does not know it. When father is asleep, I pushed the bike away from home and start it i fell many times burned my legs touching the engine and exhaust can. But my desire to ride never fade. when I reach my age of 8, I was a confident rider.

I got my driving license in my age 21. But I was driving cars and riding bikes without license for many years. My usual trick when traffic cops shows up is, stop before they stop me, switch off, get down from the bike, push it passing them, till they don't see me, get on and ride back. Cos, I knew, I don't need a license to "push a motor bike". There were many times I got caught by cops in town, but being excused as I sell the names of my uncles and the grand pa (was a D.I.G by that time).

I got myself a motor bike in 2004, I still have it. It's a Honda CBX Custom 125Cc. It was a very good bike and I have lots of memories tied to that bike. Road it across the country and now retired.

The recent machine I bought is bit bigger than the previous one and also gives a different riding experience. It's a Honda CBR 250RR (MC22). A 249Cc, 4 cylinder bike which can do a 0 to 100 Km/h within 8 seconds. In Sri Lanka, the legitimate max engine capacity is 250Cc. But we even have 1200Cc bikes on the roads registered under 250Cc category. But, in case if we met with an accident or, being checked properly for the capacity the bike it's gone and you'll have to pay a big fine too. I did not want to take that risk. So instead of looking at 600Cc or a 1000Cc bike, I bought this. When  the law is open for bigger engines, I'll surely buy a 600Cc. People say there are no proper roads to ride in Sri Lanka, but many of those have not seen the open roads out side Colombo. And when you talk about the danger, my stand is, it's no matter whether you are on two wheels or four wheels or ten wheels, if you hit properly you are a dead man!

My mother passed away suddenly and before she close her eyes for ever she told me "putha bike eka genawada? parissamin padinna". Mean, "Son did you brought the bike home? Ride carefully". She passed away after the followed by surgery. She knows I love bikes. I miss my mother today! :(

In Sri Lanka, it's very hard to buy a brand new bike like this. There are many brand-new small Japanese, Indian, Chinese, Korean and many other bikes , but no big bikes like CBR, Ninja, Hornet, Ducati, etc. You either have to import it or buy a second hand one. And you'll have to accept the quality of the bike as it is at the purchase. We don't know much of the history of the bike we buy. So it's a risk. You might get a junk! And when you import, you have to pay a huge tax which is more than the actual value of the bike, this is common for any vehicle. And even the old bikes we buy are expensive than the brand new Indian bikes in the market. I had to save money for a long time to buy this bike.

Second thing is, some small business folks who import the old bikes and sell are taking a long time to deliver bikes, I had to wait one and a half months to get my bike. Had to do a paint job and change the fairing kit. They waste your time and some times money. So be careful and always follow up with the seller until you get the bike in your hands. My experience is very bad with the particular seller of the bike. (I wont name his business details in public). Overall, I'm happy about the bike. Have to ride for a week to test every thing and check on any issue.

Having a CBR was a dream for me from a long time. Finally I could make it a reality. Let's see how it goes.

Some photos : http://on.fb.me/JDQCsv
A video clip taken at Fingara car park : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRJupGGM2MI

Build VirtualBox in Ubuntu 11.04

 

What is VirtualBox?
VirtualBox is a general purpose cross-platform virtualizer. It can be run on Linux, Mac, Windows and Solaris systems.

Purpose of VirtualBox

• Simultaneously run multiple Operating Systems in a single machine
• No hardware virtualization needed
• Test systems, software without effecting your running system
• Pack complete solutions as a virtual image to save the burden on configuring systems from scratch
• Save cost on hardware, power and other infrastructure needs to run multiple systems to achieve a purpose. 

Read the Complete features list.

Some Terminologies:

• Host OS : The system that runs the VirtualBox application
• Guest OS : Systems run inside VirtualBox application
• Virtual Machine (VM) : This is the environment which your Guest OS is running
• Guest additions: Some features to improve the functionality of VMs running in VirtaulBox

This post is about building VirtualBox 4.1.51 from source in a Linux (Ubuntu 11.04) host.

Prerequisites:

• Java Runtime Environment 
• Several packages and libraries for the Linux distribution
• Subversion client

Prepare your system:

• Installing necessary packages

$ sudo apt-get install gcc g++ bcc iasl xsltproc uuid-dev zlib1g-dev libidl-dev libsdl1.2-dev libxcursor-dev libasound2-dev libstdc++5 libhal-dev libpulse-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev python2.5-dev libqt4-dev qt4-dev-tools libcap-dev libxmu-dev mesa-common-dev libglu1-mesa-dev linux-kernel-headers libcurl4-openssl-dev libpam0g-dev libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev libqt4-opengl-dev makeself subversion

If you run on 64bit machine (As I'm now) you'll have to install the following 32bit packages too.


$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs libc6-dev-i386 lib32gcc1 gcc-multilib lib32stdc++6
g++-multilib


(Note:I've copied the packages from VirtualBox web site but practically I've installed them one by one checking what that package really does. And some times the packages are named differently in other systems.)

• Install and setup Java RE 1.6.x

Check whether you have the Canonical partner repository is enabled in your sources.list

$ sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre sun-java6-bin sun-java6-plugin
sun-java6-fonts

• Setup the Java home in your system into environment variable. 

Append the following to the ~/.bashrc

export JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.26"

Checkout the source code from VirtualBox SVN


$ svn co http://www.virtualbox.org/svn/vbox/trunk vbox

Building the VirtualBox

1. Navigate to vbox directory and run configure script

$ ./configure --disable-hardening

2. To build the VBox you need to source the generated environment script
$ source ./env.sh

3. Build the package

$ kmk all

4. Build and install the VirtualBox kernel module

$ cd out/linux.x86/release/bin/src 

$ make 

$ sudo make install 

$ sudo modprobe vboxdrv 

$ sudo chown user:group /dev/vbodrv 

Once the kernel module is installed and loaded in to the kernel, navigate to "/vbox/out/linux.amd64/release/bin" and you can run the VirtualBox by issuing the following command.
$ ./VirtualBox

 

That way you can build the Oracle's VirtualBox from source. For the easy of running you may create a local alias or a menu icon to run VBox.

$sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/virtaulbox ~/vbox/out/linux.amd64/release/bin/VirtualBox

VirtualBox source code is under GNU GPL V2.

Great (Presentations, knowlege sharing, entertaining, conference)

Past week was the biggest event we (WSO2) had in 2011. WSO2Con 2011. It's a successor of the WSO2Con 2010 and was 100 times improved. It wasn't a typical boring conference where attendants fall asleep after settling down in the hall. It was a dynamic and thrilled series of presentations and events lined up in two tracks.

In summery:

• Great keynotes from various speakers across the world
• For the first time, "Google" spoke in Sri Lanka
• Panel discussions were amazing where audience and panelists had hot discussions on various technologies
  
• It's not only WSO2 Products people interested about, they also impressed about our culture too
• At live demonstration on StratosLive, in few minutes the conference hall turned in to a hands on workshop (where folks fired up the laptops and started to work on SLive)
• It was great to hear how people use our products in their business, education and research
• People realized that, being an open source company does not mean being looser
  
• WSO2 is not a startup company any more!
• #WSO2Con was in the 70th position in trending topics in Twitter
• We don't settle, we are an agile company, we go where our customers takes us
• Pre and post conference tutorials helped the attendants to get some deep understanding in some areas of our technologies
• Sri Lankan cultural dances and Elephant rides gave an insight of our heritage to the foreign participants
• WSO2 Music Jam session showed that WSO2ers are not just bunch of geeks who married to computers - They got other talents too!
• It's not the technology that does magic, it's people who make the technology.

Looking forward to the WSO2Con 2012.

WSO2Con 2011- learn : share : middleware

If you are interested to know how enterprise grade middleware plays a major role in today's businesses and also in IT world in general, WSO2Con 2011 would be the ideal conference for one to be.

With the boost we got from last year conference, this time we have lined up speeches from more than 30 experienced speakers from more than 10 countries, tutorials by experts from WSO2 and Apache committers, and interactive panel discussions.

This will be a great opportunity to build your networks with different communities in the technology spaces like, distributed web application development, PaaS, SaaS, Cloud computing, Governance, Business process flows, etc. And also communities from government and corporate sectors.

Above three para's are the high level view of the event. For more details visit WSO2Con 2011 Event page.

Become an early bird and enjoy discounts and more great deals. - "REGISTER NOW".

Important Info :

• Agenda
• Venue

Happy Birthday Son

Today (27th March 2011), my little son celebrated his first year birth day. It was a fast year filled with joy and love. We went to the temple early morning, observe pansil and our son was calm and trying to control his noise and the active actions. We offered a tea session for an orphanage and we thought of making it a habit to offer some thing in our capacity to help them. (They also need all the things we need in our lives). And I want to set this example to my son, when he enjoys his life to maximum always think about those who don't have and care for them as much as possible. And there is a fine line to think when it comes to actually care for them. You should not treat them as a different person, it's not sympathy, it's actually equality and treat every one as humans. There is only two categories of people. "Good" and "Bad". He needs to identify those two types.

We arranged a simple dinner for our close relatives and every one had a good time with my son. He got lots of presents kisses and he enjoyed the day to the max!.

I wish a happy birthday and a bright future for my son Saveen.

Amma and Thatta loves you a lot!.

Enterprise Ready and Open Source, join WSO2 community

The term "Open Source" has a wider meaning. It's not just about making Open Source Software. It's about making any of your work/idea/software/handcraft (any thing shareable) Open to the public with permission to read, modify, improve and also redistribute. In coupled with Open Source, Open Standards also play a key role on standardizing the processes with Open Formats. Computer software industry is one of the major industries which uses Open Standards and also Open Source Software.

WSO2 Inc is an award wining Global Open Source SOA Middleware company. All the software delivered from WSO2 are 100% open source under Apache License. The business model is basically selling the services such as 24x7 customer support, on site, phone, on-line support and training. And we have all our products on cloud platform too. If you want more details, please visit the corporate web site.

This post is not about how we sell our services. It's about another important mission we drive for the benefit of the Open Source Software community. Most of the time, the community edition of software are not the actual product that's being sold out to customers. And some times, the source code is not fully open sourced. Our mission is all about sharing a set of fully functional enterprise ready software with the global community and make a platform to work, communicate, collaborate and get paid for some of your work.

Interested? OK. The place to start is WSO2 OxygenTank.


WSO2 OxygenTank is the developer portal for the projects hosted by WSO2 Inc. It's a one stop resource center for source code, discussions, documentation, issue tracking, Wiki, articles, tutorials, KBs, Webinar recordings and many other resources. All you got to do is register (it's free) and start working on projects!

OxygenTank consist of the following main sections.

• Downloads
  

You can download the source pack, binary pack and documentation pack of each project from there. All packs are digitally signed to ensure the trust.

• Forum

This is the place for technical discussions. Your questions will be answered by an Engineer who actually working on that project or some one from the community.

• Library

You can find SOA web services related content from OxygenTank Library. These content (Articles, Tutorials, KBs, Videos, Pod-castes, etc) are written by current and past Engineers of WSO2 and also some enthusiastic community members. If you need to read some thing more than the product documentations, this is the place for you.

• Mailing Lists

You can subscribe to any of the mailing lists based on your interest of project. You'll be able to discuss about project architectural matters and also about all the project development related matters through each channel.

• SVN
  

Code base is maintained in a Subversion system. You can become a part of the community and check out the source code of the products, and become a contributor.

• Webinars

WSO2 conducts regular webinars on many areas of SOA, Web Services and also about all WSO2 Products. These Webinars are useful to get an understanding of the projects as well as WSO2 as a whole. You can view/download past webinar videos, slides as well.

Apart from being a code contributor, you can write content (Articles, KBs, Tutorials) for OxygenTank Library. We have a payment scheme for content contribution. You need to follow the standards/templates and we are doing a thorough technical review before publishing. Your content must be genuine and your unique work!

We have the Public Issue tracker to track the project's activities. You can use your OxygenTank credentials to log in to that.

This would be a great opportunity for those who are interested in joining with enterprise ready Open Source SOA projects. And many of our projects are related to Apache projects too. And most of our developers are Apache Contributors. So you'll be able to work with many great Hackers who build great software.

So what's stopping you from being a part of this community? Join Today!

WSO2- We are 5!

WSO2 Inc became five years on 4th August 2010. We had a small in-house birth day party. :-). With all fun and excitement we had throughout August, we are organizing a conference targeting professionals and University students on this month at HNB towers. It's called WSO2Con 2010. Well known Industry professionals like Sanjiva Weerawarana, Ph. D, Founder, Chairman & CEO, WSO2 Inc, Paul Fremantle, Co-Founder & CTO, WSO2 Inc, Jonathan Marsh, VP, Business Development & Marketing, WSO2 Inc. Prof. Rohan Samarajiva, Chairman & CEO, LIRNEasia, James Clark, Father of XML & Founder, Thai Open Source Software Center will be delivering keynotes and there are other professionals willing to share the insights of Web Services, SOA and Cloud technologies. Event is a two day conference starts tomorrow (14th Sep 2010). We'll be doing a live streaming of the speeches too. You can access the webcast by going to http://wso2.org/events/wso2con-2010-colombo-sri-lanka. Be there or watch online and get involved!.

Follow WSO2 on Twitter : http://twitter.com/wso2 and also on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/WSO2Inc

The Art of Community by Jono Bacon

I'm in the transition period of being a Tech to Semi-Tech guy. I was looking for some resources to read on "Community Management" and found this great piece of work done by Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager. I was reading the e-book version of his book "The Art of Community" until Lavi gave the actual book to me as a present. The book was autographed by Jono and Lavi has got it at a Global event (not sure what). Thanks to Lavi, now I'm reading the actual book and will write about it once I finish reading.

Every body out there in to Community Management, I recommend you read this book!. Thanks Jono for writing this!.

Family ranks upgraded

Yesterday was a day which falls under the category of "Unforgettable days" in my life. Every body wishes to have a promotion in some way during the life time. So all of our family members got their promotions yesterday.

Person	Then	Now
Dasunpriya Anuradha (Me)	Husband	Father
Madhusha Shirangika	Wife	Mother
M.D. Weerasinghe & P.G. Piyarathne	Fathers	Grand Fathers
Sunanda & Jayanthi	Mothers	Grand Mothers
Chanusha & Umesha	Daughters/sisters	Daughters/Sisters/Aunties

The reason for this upgrade is our new born son. He started a whole new chapter in all of our lives. Another interesting/challenging chapter. Okay this post will be very short. cos, I have to go to my Son and Madhu. Will update more details and some photos in the following days.

I wish all the best for my son. Be a good person, not just a "Person". Live a simple life with a deep understanding of it. And my wife Madhu, you are the most beautiful mom and the strongest women in the world. Every woman is a mother, respect them, love them as you love your own mother.

New Decade New Life

After couple of months silence, I thought of doing a blog post. My life has being an active and dynamic one since I've born! :-). It has come to this state passing various stages. Once I turned back and look at my life, I don't have any regrets! I've done almost all the good, bad, fun, adventure stuff that a boy could do. I heard most of the people answer the question in TV etc, "if you want to go back to a state of your life, to which part you would go?" and they answer "My school life". If I would have to answer that question, I would say "I don't want to go back, I just want to move forward and end this life happily". It's because I've done all the things in my capacity and have enjoyed the life to the maximum, gained lots of knowledge and experience. I haven't missed any thing! Those who missed certain things in their pass wishes if they could go back and do those things!.

Now that I'm 30 years old, and going to be a father soon, yeh my wife is 7 months pregnant as at now. I'm a happily married family guy! Now I'm enjoying being a husband, father and the total family life. We should not postponed the good things we need to do. Since I'm following a middle path and living a simple life with basic needs it's bit easy for me to do good things, like going to a temple, keeping fit, taking my family on a trip, etc.

In this 2010, I thought of changing my career from being a high-tech to a semi-tech and more human oriented. I had this concept of being a "Human Oriented IT Person" for a while and I got a golden opportunity to move in to that level. Last month I joined WSO2, one of the world's leading Open Source SOA Company runs in US, UK and Sri Lanka, founded by a great Sri Lankan scientist Dr. Sajiva Weerawarna. I joined WSO2 as the Community Manger and the Editor of the Open Source Community Developer portal called OxygenTank. With this new role, I'll be able to get more closer to the Open Source Community as a whole and specially around WSO2. Since I have experience in Network/Systems Administration, Engineering, Project Management, Training, Consultancy, FOSS Advocacy, public speech, etc I have a good understanding in IT, Business and Community.

Well... It's a new decade, and a new life! Have to do lots of new/good things. Catch you all soon!

Apache hitting the road!

If you were dreaming of meeting Apache (World's No 1 web server) big shots Greg Stein, Justin and our own Sri Lankan Apache contributors, this will be the best opportunity for it. Apache Asia Road Show is a 3 day event with 2 days Conference and a single day hackerthon. Hurry!!! reserve your seat now before it too late.

My house for Sale

This is not a spam. :). Yes I'm selling my house. Here's the details.

Location: Ampara, Sri Lanka.

Directions: 1.3 KM from Ampara Town, 1KM to Ampara Base Hospital. ( Located in a Residential area)

Description : 3 rooms, 2 bathrooms (one attached to master bedroom), Living room, Dining hall, Kitchen. Full ceiling, fans in every room, 24 hour water supply, electricity, overhead tank Land is 43 perches and have 5 coconut trees (grown for 30 years), 2 King-coconut trees, Jack tree, Mango, etc. You have enough room to park more than 4 vehicles in the garden area. Fully covered boundary wall.

Price : 5, 000000/- (Negotiable) US $43555/-

Those who are interested please call

Weerasinghe (My Dad) : +94 714446404
email : mdweerasinghe@gmail.com

I'll put some photos later. Still couldn't find time to visit Ampara as I'm stuck in Colombo.

It's 09/09/09

Life has many patterns. And we always like patterns. For example, many people love to have a phone number with some kind of a number pattern. (688688, 566566, etc). We can pay some extra cash and get a vehicle registration number with a pattern, like PP-1111. In another hand, some numbers have some value to it, like "Lucky 7", "Hero Number 1". Even our Postal Department have issued 9 new stamps to remember today. Same way in Sri Lankan culture many people consider the number 9 as a bad number. (නවය නපුරුයි). But personally I don't believe such things. But I like patterns. So this blog post is to denote the pattern of the day, 09/09/09. September 09, 2009. Wish you all a bright future. :).

Using iPod Nano (3Gen) with Ubuntu

Couple of years ago, using Apple iPods with GNU/Linux was not an entertaining experience for most of people. But now the FOSS world is more promising on that and also in many other apps on cross platform interoperability. Earlier, My wife asks me and I used to sync the movies, music vids, mp3 to her iPod using gtkpod. I had to do it because i used ffmpeg to convert the videos to MOV format and then sync them to the iPod via gtkpod. But here after she's going to do it by her own. So I had to find some "click and go" way to covert the files and had to teach her on using gtkpod.

YouTube and google video are the main search repositories for music videos. The best tool I found for this was DownloadHelper extension for Firefox. The version I'm using here is 4.3. It can download videos and convert them to many formats as single files or as a batch. And the extension is actively developed and updates are released frequently.

After converting the downloaded video you can put them to the iPod using gtkpod. Using gtkpod is not a big deal. It's simple and any one can catch the features within a half and hours time.


Click "Save Changes" to write the changes to the iPod. And you can use Sync Directories or files options in the File menu of gtkpod. In order to perform the tasks smoothly you need to have some software pre-installed in your GNU/Linux system.

• ffmpeg
• libmp4v2-0
• All other multimedia codecs

If you have a movie file (avi, wmv, or any other type) you can use ffmpeg to convert them easily to MOV and can be used with your iPod Nano. Haven't try it with iPhones and iPod classics, cos I don't have those with me yet. ;-).

This is the basic way to use the iPod with gtkpod. You can try out other stuff like online music syncing when you have time. :)

Cheers!

King of Pop, no more

Yesterday I lost another "one of my legendary characters". I have few favourite entertainers, namely; Bruce Lee, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Michel Joseph Jackson, Dr. Dre, Eminem and few others. But among them, there are very few who I call " A Legend". Bruce Lee was a legend. And Michel Jackson.

I still remember when I was 8,9 years old I didn't know that was MJ who dance like that, sing like that, but I liked the moves he make and the accent. I started to immitate him by wearing cloths like him and shout "aauww" like him. As I grow with the time, finally I managed to catch the moon walk and some other dancing movements he made by watching his videos. I started to collect the lyrics, CDs and sang alone with the CD. No one told me he's the king of pop but he was a king to me. No one told me nor I didn't have Internet or Sat TV to get to know about his unmatched skills, but I thought to my self no one in this earth can do break dance as he does. Finally today he leaves at his 50th year of life, leving my childhood memories with me.

Dear Michel Jackson, you were the hero of dance world to me. And you'll always be in my heart till I die.

"There's a place in your heart
And I know that it is love
And this place could be much brighter than tomorrow
And if you really try
You'll find there's no need to cry
In this place you'll feel there's no hurt or sorrow"

Dear King, thank you very much for the joy you gave me from my childhood and for the unbileiveable contribution to the music world and for helping many of the helpless people in the world.

Image from celebrity-blogger.com

Welcome to new Sri Lanka

By now we know and believe Velupillai and Other terrorist leaders are killed by our Armed Forces or they have suicide. We knew this will end soon. I like to give my sincere gratitude to our Three forces, Police, Civil security forces and Mr. President for scarifying their life for the future of Sri Lanka and for our lives.


I salute you all!!.

A disaster happened, what should we do?

As at today, the war is officially over but rescue missions are still undergoing in Sri Lanka to securely rescue Tamil civilians trapped in LTTE barbarians. This is the final few days of Prabhakaran and his followers. So I'll not talk about him or LTTE here now.

We saw hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from LTTE to safe zone controlled by SL government. All of them are residing in refuge camps. They need food, water, cloths, medicine, sanitary facilities and many other general human needs. And the great thing is people around the country were organized and collected many essentials and quickly sending them to those areas with the message "We all are a one big family, we love you". This has being the one and only humanitarian war ever happened in the world and will be on the history books for sure.

Now that we had a disaster, and we see the aftermath too. But on the other hand, we are getting lots of goods and services to this affected areas from all around the country and globe. We need a proper Disaster Management plan to handle the received donations such as food, water, cloths, medics, etc. This remembers me the Tsunami 2006. We did not had a proper disaster management plan or a system (manual or computerized) so we wasted lots of valuable goods received for afforded areas. And distribution of the donations were highly disorganized where some areas receive excessive amount of donations and another area had nothing at all. So we had that experience, no need to repeat that same process.

We need to mange the donations (all types) properly so that each and every one gets the proper benefit out of those donations without wasting them. Here it comes the need of a well structured computerized Disaster Management System. Ok... do we have to spend another million rupee on this? Absolutely not. There is this free and open source software system call "Sahana" (www.sahana.lk) developed by Sri Lankan FOSS community, where you can use for these kind of scenarios. You can download it for free, use it conjoining with any number of donating organizations and government. I know most of the organizations using this system today. But this is a reminder for those who still not aware of such system. Next question would be support on using this software, and make it work in your organization/group on the double. There is a strong community support through mailing lists, IRC. And if you want fully featured professional/commercial service you can contact Respere, the Sahana Company (http://www.respere.com/). They provide island wide commercial training, support for Sahana Disaster Management System.

So now that we have donations, and human resources to handle them and a Computer Software System to help manage those donations and also to maintain missing persons registry, where many people are missing and to be found. So I request all the donors, organizations, to be wise, and manage the peoples hardly earned donations so that each and every family member in north will receive the goods and services equally and minimize wastage.

I can see clearly now the war is gone...
I can say all the problems will fly away...
And there will be safer life for all our friends...
It's gonna be a bright, (bright) bright Sunshiny day......

Sri Lanka or Tamil Eelam?

This post is dedicated to all "Tamil Eelam" fans...

Velupillai and his friends started an Ealam war before I born. But I couldn't stay away from it by saying "I'm not a part of this war". We all in Sri Lanka suffered from this war, and still there is a little more to suffer. I came to know by reading the history of the crisis, in late 70s Velupillai's initial idea of fighting against the majority of Sri Lankan Sinhalease was truly liberal, that he was standing against for step-mother treatments for the tamil minority (quantity wise) in Sri Lanka. Those early rulers in the country have done some thing really wrong in ruling the country and Velipillai triggered this liberation fight pointing that. But the country changed with the time, rulers changed, political views were changed. And poeple wanted to end this fight and stay together as one nation. But, Velupillai did not want to see a happy ending of it as he has nothing else to do (killing) if this war ends. So he gathered as many people as possible (mostly by force) and kept killing and disturbing the people's life for the last 30 years. And there were many helpers, money donors in Sri Lanka itself and some other countries around the world who financially supported this terrorists. Many of them were doing illegal business like drug dealing, arms dealing, robberies, kidnapping, hijacking, etc. So now think , what has happen to the liberal fight? where it has being leading to? Finally, the innocent Tamil people were aside suffering from the business work of Velupillai, but he did not give a shit. He holds the banner "We are freedom fighters", but kills hundreds of innocent Tamils who have not obey him. Now every body knows that Velupiiai is not the "leader of Tamil union", but the "executioner of Tamil union".

Separate a part from the Sri Lanka and having an Eelam is not an effective solution in the long run too. The land is too small and when the population grow the land will not be sufficient for the crowd, so a new war will start in addition to the ongoing one. And if Velupillai creates a native land for Tamils and kill all the Sinhalease in that area what about the Tamils who live in Sinhalease areas? Shall they all be killed as Velupillai does for others? Is that the solution for this problem?. NO. There is no ethnic problem in Sri Lanka, there wasn't for decades. Sri Lanka have a one BIG problem, it's this Velupillai's LTTE Terrorist problem.

Here is the map that Velupillai draw for the Tamil Eelam.

He thinks, this small land can occupy all the Tamils in this country, and make this is the heritage land of "Tamils". Why he want to cage the Tamils in to a small area while the whole Sri Lanka is wide open for all Sinhalese, Tamils and every other one? Now see for your self, look at the Sri Lanka map, which has more space to live, have access to more resources.


Any one can see that Tamils have more land now than before, and Sri Lanka is a country were many raises lives peacefully and care for each other. People in most countries are very narrow minded and raises. They don't accept the humans as a one kind. But here in Sri Lanka, people don't care of the skin color or the language a person speak. They only care about sharing and living a happy life with each and ever one together as a one country.

Velupillai brought death and fear to every one in this country by many means. Now it's time for him to end his life inside his own dream. So Eelam fans, I think it's better stop dreaming now. You will never see that Eelam within Sri Lanka, try to find a different country for that. Ask for a land from a country that really support your crazy ideas. But in Sri Lanka, there is no space for you. We (Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, etc) live as a one nation, under one flag, singing "Sri Lanka Matha" national anthum. No one will be able to change that.!. So Sorry Velupillai, so sorry Eelam fans all over the world. Your dream ain't gonna be a reality...

Good Bye Tamil Eelam, Go to Hell LTTE...

Peace.!

Instant Internet Connection Sharing

Today I came Kandy for 5 days stay due to some functions lined up to attend. My office provided me a HSPA dongle to keep my self online during the stay. Nah.. it's not about the dongle. ;-). I wanted to share the Internet connection with another computer at home. I only had a crossover cable with me, which I always carry in my backpack. So I connected the two Laptops with it and shared my primary PPP connection with the guest Laptop. Both Laptops are runnung on GNU/Linux. The simple setup I had is as below.

Host PC Settings.

I already received an IP for my ppp0 connection from my ISP. So I only had to assign an IP to my LAN card (eth0)

# ifconfig eth0 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0

(Don't need to set the default route in the host, cos it's already set to ppp0)

Enable NAT in Farewall and IP forwarding.

# iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
# iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ppp0 -j MASQUERADE

# echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forwad

Guest Settings.

Set up the Interface.

# ifconfig eth0 10.0.0.2 netmask 255.255.255.0

Set the default route of the GUEST to HOST eth0 IP

# route add default gw 10.0.0.1

Put the name server IP which received to the HOST PC from ISP in the GUEST /etc/resolv.conf

# echo nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx > /etc/resolv.conf

That's all. I simply enabled Internet Connection Sharing in my Laptop.