The music lover in me was heart broken with the famous Amarok screw up waaay back then. I then used Cmus for a short period and then came across MoC (Music on Console) on crunchbang forums IIRC. MoC was my primary music player ever since. In MoC I would just browse to my music directory [...]

You would think in 2003 that the Internet would be fast and reliable. Not so much where I live in Sri Lanka. The major and only wired provider Sri Lanka Telecom’s (SLT) ADSL is unusable as I write this. Around the end of the month the SLT ADSL line starts to suffer. Usually when I [...]

I’m back on Linux, back in trouble as well. Ok so downloading and installing the latest deb file for VirtualBox doesn’t work out of a box. I found this in the VirtualBox forum. It turns out you need to install these packages first. sudo apt-get install dkms build-essential linux-headers-...

Usually I just update OSX to the latest. But I came across this after a quick search. Skype 6.3 crashes on Mac OSX 10.8.3 – Skype Community I use Skype quite often so I’m going to hold off for a bit longer until things are sorted out.

I got a LinkedIn request from a guy I know I should know. I have probably worked with him as well. But since he doesn’t have a profile picture I really can’t tell. So I can’t add him. Please add profile pictures if you want to connect.

Somebody has to say it. Being a professional in Sri Lanka is hard work. Most of the time you have to deal with people who don’t know what they are doing. Without ranting on let me lay down a few cases and try to offer some advice (even though it might not be my job [...]

My menu bar was getting crowded. So I went in and disabled almost everything I could find. And now it looks like this. I found a solution to hide the DropBox icon as well, but I figured I can live with these for now.

This is what happens when my 4 year old gets hold of my phone for 5 mins.

Aaron Swartz has committed suicide. That news struck me hard. I only know him from his web presence but when something came up on my radar with Aaron’s name tag on it, I expected it to be good if not great. I thought he was a wise old man until I found today that he [...]

Don’t do your thinking at the computer. There are just too many things to distract you. Find your sweet-spot sitting in traffic or with pen and paper at a desk.

Its hard. If you are not 100% sure you are going to make it, don’t do it, because once you are in there is no going back. Keep your day job, start on the side if possible. No one is going to lend you money at first but when things are picking up investment will [...]

Going through my messy blog posts for the last 5 years I realised that I need to become a better writer. Although it’s not my current job to write well, I think it needs to be better so I can improve my life. All this time I thought this was a coder’s blog, one that [...]

I was always worried about having to go up in a unix directory tree with cd ../. Then I was introduced to this project at work where I noticed that I was doing so much cd-ing around. Sometimes I went so deep in the directory tree I had this scary feeling inside that I’d get [...]

I am pleased and proud to announce that I have been accepted to speak at the MySQL Connect and Zend Conference this fall. The MySQL Connect conference is being held Sept 29-30th in San Francisco and I will present on my beginners journey into NoSQLand with MySQL?s NoSQL implementation . Much of the ...

MySQL statistics are used by the optimizer for query plans. Having up to date statistics helps the optimizer “choose” the least expensive way to execute a query. I know that if I have a query using an index that it should not be and/or performing poorly, I can always run ANALYZE TABLE to...

Those who follow me on social media might have seen me go on about this "ZoomBA" thing and may have some idea about it. For others, in short, it's our own Cloud SaaS meant for Small Businesses (or SMEs as it is called elsewhere). But I thought of sharing the story of ZoomBA (which at this point soun...

Wow how time flies when you’re having fun! I first thought of writing this post back in January, when I was on a roll with writing blog posts. But it never materialized beyond notes I collected in preparation. Come several months later with a lot more experience on what I am about to tell you,...

For all the people that were looking for the presentation I gave last night to the Jacksonville PHP user group – I have uploaded it to my presentations page as a PDF. Included are all my speaker notes and references as well.

I pleased and proud to announce that I have been accepted to be an Oracle ACE for MySQL. For those not familiar with it, Oracle ACEs are community members that are nominated and eventually chosen for their (in my case) MySQL community involvement. To learn more about the Oracle ACE program, check ou...

Our ultimate objective is to make programs that learn from their experience as effectively as humans do. We shall?say that a program has common sense if it automatically deduces for itself a sufficient wide class of immediate consequences of anything it is told and what it already knows. John Mccart...

The greatest thing about the internet is the fact that it belongs to all of us! No matter who you are, where you are from, We all have the freedom to choose where we're headed! But now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could seriously damage the fundamental structure of the Internet...

Compared to other new years where I would spend some time cleaning up my room or upgrading my gear, this year I did none of that! Instead I invested some time cleaning up my online space starting with a brand new distro. I’m a big fan of MacOSX’s Lion desktop and wanted to bring some of ...

Here's to an exciting year that brought great opportunities and amazing experiences! :)

I know, I know, it?s a bit of a cheesy title to promote my Open Source project but here me out - it really does work. Though I didn?t really write it to track my new year resolutions (I?ve never found them effective beyond a week), I did write it out of constant frustration with not finding a TODO p...

We are in the era of clouds, and at the moment AWS is the Zeus among public clouds. With its scalable and flexible architecture, cheap rates, secure PCI compliant environment, wide array of loosely coupled services and boasting of 99.95% availability, they may deserve the crown. However they are not...

The passing of Steve Jobs came in as an instant shock that morning as I was reading the news on my phone. While it wasn't as much of a surprise as when MJ passed away, mainly because I had seen that one photo of Steve wearing a black gown coming back from the hospital, something inside me felt empty...

You were the father of C which definitely changed the world. You created Unix with Ken Thompson and it was probably the most important piece of technology for practical computing. some great people are great because they make their greatest contributions to the world and leave silently. You good sir...

As the whole world is mourning the passing of one of the giants in this era who has contributed to shape the tech world to where it is now, felt like I should jot down my two cents of the man in my diary. Even though he is best known for his creativity, vision and [...]

Dear Steve Jobs, I never used an Apple product. Perhaps never will. But that is not really the point. The point is that you were an inspiration. A big one of those. Yes I respected the other Steve better (Fuck, I even called him ‘the other steve’). But you kept making the world talk abou...

It’s still early morning here in Sri Lanka; I was just starting the day passively glancing over my Twitter feed. In a stream filled with rants over iPhone 4S’ form factor and predications on how Siri is changing the world, seeing this tweet just shocked me. It feels like the passing of s...

If there’s one thing certain in life, it is the uncertainty. As you go higher up in the ladder of life, the fall grows steeper, risk becomes greater. Same rules apply in the digital world. In the process of building and maintaining software, there are plenty of accidents, ways to screw things,...

As some know I left MySQL Support last week and started working for Kaplan Professional as their MySQL DBA. To all my old colleagues at MySQL Support – I miss you. You have been my friends, teachers, mentors and co-conspirators. Thank you for everything and don’t be strangers. To my new ...

Recently I've been looking for an alternative to docbook, which I've used for most of my tutorial handouts and internal developer documentation at Thinkcube. But the more I used it docbook the more I wanted a simpler solution which didn't require me to make sure my XML was in order. Naturally, at f...

I don’t get to hear this so often. But when I do, I really try to reason and understand how it could happen. Despite my efforts, I haven’t been successful yet. Is the demise of android possible? Yes. Remember why we don’t get to ride dinosaurs these days? yeah?. Shit happens, right...

Recently, I’ve been working on improving the performance of CurdBee API. There were certain highly consumable end-points which also had tight coupling to external resources. I wanted to extract these endpoints out of the main app to cut the cruft and improve the throughput. This require to tur...

So it's been a little over a month since I switched to MacOSX Lion as my primary desktop after running Ubuntu and before that Gentoo on this Macbook. So why'd I finally switch? Well I'm sure it comes at no surprise to existing mac owners who mostly run OSX anyways. I'm different! I owned two Mac'...

Today my blog marks five years of existence. Half a decade!. That’s so much for me, because I lose interest of things pretty soon. Blogging somehow stuck on the wall. And I’m happy about it. I honestly can’t believe that I kept doing it all this long. Yes I know it’s not with...

Is not an easy task. Anyone who has tried their hand in the job knows this very well. We all have been a part of some community at some point of our lives. If you can’t agree with the last sentence and your life is not horrible, I’d really like to know more about you [...]

There's an old quote, "Reading makes a full man". I'm not quite sure who said it but I know it's got to be at least a couple of years older than myself because I was introduced to the concept early on by my dad. Despite the early infusion of such words of wisdom, I really never turned out to be a go...

Greeting fellow bloggers and no I'm not dead. Blogging for me has got to a point where its a post or two per year! So at this point it doesn't matter what I say because I doubt any of my old followers are going to read this any time soon.As usual, I would have blamed busyness (a result of %s/y/i/) a...