Expecting the Unexpected

Hopes, expectations, goals and targets are some of the key factors that keeps us motivated to do what we do and overcome the daily challenges in life. On the other hand, the above factors are key contributors to increase a person's stress level and push in to depression. Sometimes hopes, expectations, goals or targets are fragile and we do not have much control over them. And we will experience failures along the way. Loosing hope, not meeting expectations, missing a goal or a target can easily lead a person to a high stress and finally become depressed. This situation can be observed in careers, relationships, education and in the life in general.

What if we can have hope, expectations and all above mentioned without being stressed or depressed? In my experience, we tend to build lot of stress around the things we care the most. We do not think something bad can happen to our family, career or other expectations that we have set high values in life. We do not expect our love ones to die, to loose the jobs, to fail an exam, etc. But in real life, these things can happen at a time that you never expect them to happen. So if we expected these things to happen rather than avoiding the reality we can control the level of stress and keep calm while working the way out of those situations. It also gives the right energy we want to operate in a critical situation.

For an example, when we drive on the road, instead of not expecting, we should expect that some one will jump to the road or some vehicle will drive carelessly and hit on ours. So you are constantly focused and ready to take the best effort to avoid a clash than a person who drives without expecting it. People have plan A, B, C to Z because they expect the unexpected and want to be prepared. We can enjoy the life to the fullest capacity with all the hopes and expectations while being ready to expect the unexpected. That way, at each failure, we have the strength and mindset to collect our life together and move forward without worrying on what we lost. Just a small thought yet have a powerful positive impact on life. 

Catching up Blogging

After being silent from blogging for almost two years since last post, it's very difficulty to write something now. Lot's of ideas are there but all try to come out at once and can't focus on anything. This is what happen when I lose the consistency on posting. This is an era where video taking over the content leadership and text getting a back seat on the Internet. And I'm loosing my writing skills as well. In such situation, I'm writing this post as a warming up post.

During the past couple of years, my life also took few turns. After obtaining the MBA, took a new role in a software company to head the business operations. And then there was a new addition to our family. Birth of Dwayne, my second son on 13th January 2017. Life got more excited and busier then. Responsibilities on both work and family kept me fully occupied. I'm going to stop this post soon because, there is no value addition to the time spent on reading this. But, I wanted to break the ice.

Career wise, I was fortunate to start as a IT Technical person and moved to the IT marketing and business operations domains as the technical background gave me a good foundation to bridge the gap between technology and customer need and help the product teams to align the software they develop to meet the business requirements.

And I thought of taking risks/challenges in my life time to time. That keeps me moving and kick me out of my comfort zones and help me to excel. It can be career, it can be personal life, what ever I feel like need to tweak or change. Sometimes, I get closer to my inner thoughts of life as a whole in a philosophical way. It helped me to understand the importance of being happy about yourself, staying closer to your loved ones, staying healthy and young in heart while keeping a tie with the Buddhism to learn to let go at the right time.

Like I said in the beginning, this is an ice breaking post. I'm sorry I could not add any value to your time if you red this thus far.

Cheers!

Customer Focused Technology Innovation - A Simple Yet Powerful Thought

If we go thousands of years back and look at how trading began, you'll notice that it was about fulfilling a need of some one. Before money was introduced to the world, people used to trade an item for an item. Most trades did not have the similar values but fulfilled the need of each person. For an example; A person in need of a piece of cloth - might exchange some honey with the other person to obtain a piece of cloth. I think buying and selling started by one person accepting something useless for him at that moment but kept it for future trade. That's just a thought.

When Information Communication Technology (ICT) was introduced for business, it was considered as a "Business Support Service". Whenever a finance crisis hits an organization, ICT was in the cost cutting side of the budget. This is no longer valid in the world of integrated enterprise. Today, ICT is not a business support service, it runs the business. Every business today, whether small, medium or large are thinking beyond their geographic boundaries and also think in innovating, growth and being competitive. Organizations need business intelligence; data-to-information to make real time decisions which helps their strategy and its execution in a continuously successful flow. Big data analysis is essential in any business today. Knowing your customer well is not well enough to survive in the competition, you got to do more.

Technology is innovating in its own way is not helping the business to sustain and make use of technology in large scale. That is one reason for many businesses to stick with their trusted legacy systems. For an example; a technology company may have a great platform integrated very well, inter-operate well, highly optimized and beats the competitive platform in speed, etc. But, what if they do not solve the business problems effectively? What if the company do not have the empathy for the customer? They might be having a world class technology platform, but they will start loosing customers in the long run. Technology companies should cater for the best interest for their customers. Technology companies should innovate around the customer and serve better by making their platform a unique experience to the customer and make them winners.

Mr. Chris Kariyawasam, Key Account Manger Nestle Lanka PLC and an MBA lecturer in marketing strategy told "Everything begins and ends with the customer". That's where I first heard the phrase, but it carved in to my thoughts and changed my thinking pattern from technology oriented marketer to customer oriented marketer. Most of the technology companies are marketing their product to beat the competition. But they are missing the focus on customer. They keep innovating around the technology but a high percentage of customers are with a competitor who has both the technology and customer centric product or service. Companies such as Facebook, Google, SAP are technology innovators with a great empathy on customer. They build great platforms that makes the end user's life easy. Once you make the customer successful, your success will follow with that. 

Final thought to carry is, customer is the essence of all we do as a company. Technology is not something that keeps updating and systems are not just software upgrades you do in regular basis. They are part of the business ecosystem that helps the customer to do what they do better. Make the customer a winner and help them to become successful in what they do and your success will follow with that.

Entution: A Journey based ERP on Cloud

ERP is a very scary term for many corporates. For some organizations, it is a huge expense and a sunk cost. As per the Panorama Consultants 60% of ERP implementations are challenged projects. The main reason for this is the complexity of the entire ERP domain.
Bileeta is an ERP development company which has more than 15 years of experience in ERP development and its business models. They provide a tire II ERP solution for businesses who are in the sales and distributions, projects & services and finance verticals. They list the following as the complexity formulating factors for ERP implementations.

Software products are not visible until you use them. ERP no difference. No matter how many pre sales meetings you have the end user is not getting the actual picture of what they are getting. Demos help to clear the picture a bit, but still the end result is not clear.

Lack of visibility then leads to a situation where you are unable to map your business requirements with the system you are getting.

This results a system that has loads of functionality you may or may not use. This makes the system bulky and difficult to use.














An ERP system is heavily used by the operational staff of an organization. The new system is challenging the current status quo of the staff. This makes the staff resistance to use and making the organizational change management process a challenging one.

 

This user resistance in turns results a huge amount of customizations to the product and long running training and consulting program to get them to adopt the new system in day to day work. This results exceeded project time. Time is money, so it increases the implementation cost too.

Bileeta came up with a brand new concept called "Journeys" to reduce this complexity which in turns will reduce the time and budget that need to spend ERP implementation. 

 "Journey" is basically a combination of functionalities across the modules to cater a business process. In traditional ERPs, you need to get bunch of modules to get a single functionality to work. The end user knows their business process well, but they do not know the "Modules". Journeys are these exact functionalities they want. 

This concept helps an organization to start using the necessary functionalities of a system to start with and add more journeys as they grow. This gives the flexibility for the organization to slowly adopt the entire ERP system without going through the hassle of a complicated change management process within the organization to adopt the ERP solution.  

Since this is a cloud based solution, all the journeys are available in a journey pool and can be imported to the existing system without any disturbance to the ongoing processes. 

All these are bundled in to the new product named "Entution" The product it self is designed in a easy to buy, configure (3 steps configuration) and use. Also it is offered in public cloud for general users, public cloud for industry specific users and public/private cloud for large organizations.

Entution has won the Gold award in the NBQSA 2014 under the category of e-logistic and supply chain management. It also won the overall Gold award for the year 2014. This has proven its disruptiveness in the domain and stability of the product. 

Check out this video to get a quick feel of Entution.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Note: Images used in this post are copyrighted to Bileeta (Pvt) Ltd.

References

Panorama Consulting. 2014. 2014 ERP Report. [ONLINE] Available at: http://panorama-consulting.com/resource-center/2014-erp-report/. [Accessed 21 October 14].

The Concept of "Connected Marketing" in Short

The world is never going to be a simple place. People's requirements are complex. Not only human beings, even animal's requirements are more complex than before. Marketing also have passed several iterations of changes but the core of marketing has not being changed. I liked one of the quotes a lecturer in my MBA mentioned which is, "Marketing is common sense, common sense that is not so common". It is indeed understanding people, needs, community and trying to cater the best product or service. Also, to sustain the connection you had with the individual or community by keeping them nurturing. Another angle would be to understand human psychology and influence on it to create awareness and help them to success their goals. There are tools to help marketing products or services, but if you think clearly, it's really the common sense that help to achieve the actual results.

Today we are connected with the world in many ways. That itself brings a big challenge to marketing our product/service/brand/etc as the competitors also have the same amount of resources to connect with the customer. Connecting with a customer for lifetime would be the ultimate success of the business in the long run.

It's obvious that now days we use Internet to connect with the rest of the world more than other conventional method such as snail mails, postcards, telegrams, etc. A Computer is now a house appliance and Internet is the connecting medium. Well, with all the information we've shared, many entities know almost all the details of individuals to a greater extent. Eg: Pizza hut maintains a detail level records of what you ordered, when, delivered locations, etc.

In business we use connecting technologies to connect with Customers, Partners and world around us. We use TV, CD/DVDs, cell phones, fax, web, virtual reality displays, etc to communicate about the product or service. Not like in past, organizations now segment the market and connecting with selective customer base to talk about their product/service.

Connecting for a Lifetime

In today's marketing, companies being more selective about which customers they should serve. Companies dig deeper to customer needs and trying to build a long lasting relationship. Not like in mass marketing, this effort is to ensure that the selected customer will retain for a longer period, by managing the lifetime value of a customer. When a business do better in keeping old customers happy makes the competitors very difficult to find new customers. As the loyalty of the customers increases credibility of the business also increases. Hence, businesses now days trying to grow the "share of customer" instead of "share of market". They try to find needs of existing customers and provide products or services to satisfy those needs. If you look at Amazon (http://amazon.com), they started as online bookseller and now sells many other things to keep their customers engaged.

Connecting with Stakeholders

Stakeholders includes people are from inside and outside of the company (Staff, partners, board, customers, community, etc). In default scenario, marketing folks helps to bridge the consumer and a particular product team/department to coordinate the need and supply chain. Also in some organizations almost everyone is playing a marketing role to some extend. Eg: Software companies like WSO2 Inc have people who plays cross roles. Engineering team helps a lot in Marketing where they attend in Webinars, writing blog posts about products, etc which are not directly related to Engineering. So it's all connected, Marketing, sales, manufacturing, engineering and list can go on.

Strategic alliances have become a need in most of the companies. For example, most of the big companies are at least have a single partner. Strategic partnerships are playing some sort of an role in any type of business in a given time. A business to grow successfully the connection with stakeholders have to be strong and long lasting. Poor communication with stakeholders also a huge indirect cost to an organization.

Even though we think we know all the fancy theories of marketing we fail most of the time because we have not focused on the "common sense". Understanding how world is changing and filling the need gap is going to be one of the big challenges for Marketeers. No matter how good your marketing/corporate plan is, if you don't have the common sense and do not have the understanding of connected marketing, the probability of failure is very high. Marketing is not just sending bunch of mails to a set of email addresses in a database, street promotions, advertising or fancy conferences. It includes a challenging task of understanding human needs and connecting with them for lifetime (B2B or B2C).

This post is just to scratch the surface of the whole Connected Marketing concept. This does not cover the methods on how to successfully market your product/service. As one of the basic principles in marketing, if you understand that "Everything in marketing starts and ends with the customer", you can go a long way as a successful connected business.

Happy year 2014!

Transform your Organization into a Connected Business - Learn by attending WSO2Con USA 2013

Is your organization a connected business? The following points will give you an idea of a "connected business" environment. 

• Integrated - Does your organization has a smooth and effective interactions within and with outside world?
• Accessible - Does it facilitate the interactions by reducing conflicts and cost?
• Collaborative - Does it support collaborations within and outside world to enhance productivity of the business?
• Adaptive - Does it sense the ever changing business needs, technology and automatically adapts them to your environment?

If your answer is "Yes" to all the above, you're already in the connected business environment.

WSO2 always being in the business of enabling all those factors for almost 8 years. WSO2's biggest technology conference, WSO2Con is going to focus on how to make your organization a connected business by overcoming current technological barriers at hand.

The Conference includes a set of Pre-conferance tutorials, which will conducted by our own experts who actually wrote the code in many of the products. Attending the tutorials will give you a detail level understanding of how WSO2 Platform really does the trick of making your business a connected business. Also, the conference will help you to get to know more about the all new WSO2 Mobile Platform too.

The two day conference is where the Architects and CxO level people will find more insights on how can an organization become lean and agile, how to transform your current organization in to connected business, clear out any doubts they had before about this transformation, get to know how big organizations such as Stubhub, Boeing, Spectrum Health, Trimble, T-Systems (and many other) benefited by joining hands with WSO2.

The conference is held from October 29 - 31 2013 at Mission Bay Conference Center, San Fransisco.

If you really need to transform your business in to a "Connected Business" and enjoy the benefit of the lean and agile enterprise environment, Register Now!. (There is a 25% discount till September 10th)

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. :).