Ars technica lit the haystack. It was ready to make a fire. And there were little sparks time to time but ars technica apparently did the job this time. At least in the community I follow. So in brief, Ars says that ad blockers actually block their well being. They have good points to back their [.....

??I watched Sherlock Holmes (2009). No I’m not gonna blame the movie. And no I haven’t had read the story before. But it was not _exactly_ the Sherlock Holmes I know. Before I proceed I should mention that the movie was pretty good and it disturbed only a very little to my Sherlock Holme...

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??Sometimes I hate people in my country. For not loving the nature and acting like idiots. It always occurred to me people acting like loving nature is a matter of shame or hating nature is a matter of heroism. They keep the water taps open. They crush nice innocent plants. Cut off trees. Scare away...

I have been/will be a bit busy with life. We have a lot of changes happening all at once so it is not that I am ignoring anyone – I am just a bit busy. Some stuff in no particular order on the recent todo list: 1) Acquisition went through so get to do [...]

An year ago I found this service called getsatisfaction somewhere on the internets. And unfortunately I wanted to check that out. And I created an account. And for some dumb reason I created another account for a project I believed it would help, at the time. And it all was pretty much abandoned sin...

On deciding the web framework to build Realie, one of the main considerations was should I move to a totally asynchronous framework? Most established web frameworks, including my favorite Rails is built in a synchronous manner and follows a call-stack based model. Real-time web apps needs to be asyn...

So Buzz came out with little buzz. I said little buzz because it didn’t buzz as much as wave did. I checked Buzz but it didn’t have anything special for me. So I disabled Buzz. There was so much bad buzz about Buzz but I was not exposed to much when I first tried Buzz. I [...]

Last couple of days, I found some time to work on my individual research project for the degree course. The topic area I selected for my project was on “Real-time Web”. Real-time Web is just the opposite of the current way we use the web. Rather than we checking (polling) content provide...

Its been almost an year since I last blogged and what can I say, micro-blogging killed blogging for me. Even micro-blogging has got to a point, I don't do as much as I used to. Perhaps the end of web 2.0 or perhaps I'm getting too old for this :)Anyhow, getting back to the subject of this quick pos...

Happy Independence day everyone! I’m the worst guy to write this post. At least according to super patriots we find in bunches these days. I’m totally screwed up with foreign ideas that don’t match the culture the patriots trying to frame my mind in. I won’t find it interesti...

The kid will be graduating from High School this year. Been quietly and gently pushing her to get ready for it and to prepare for college. She of course has been ignoring me for the most part. Well this past weekend we attended a local colleges seminar on admissions and financial aid [...]

Found it interesting to watch Coca Cola Opening Happiness commercials in different regions. By the way, this is not a paid advertisement :-P.Sri Lanka - SinhalaSri Lanka - TamilSingaporeChinaIndonesia - "Buka Semangat Baru"USA (I guess)Go ahead, open up some happiness. :-)

The state of Java and MySql are changing. In case you missed it. Sun bought MySql and Oracle bought Sun. I’ve been working on Java for over 10 years and MySql for over 5 now. I’m not happy with what is happening. The Java and MySql websites have changed. On the mysql.com site there is no...

Though its been two days since the announcement of the results, still there is no end to the spread of speculations & rumors on the concluded Presidential Election in Sri Lanka. I don’t have any strong political bias to either of the main two candidates and didn’t want to accept any...

Please don’t email me prayers or jokes with hundreds of people CC’ed. There is a very high likelihood I would delete them without even opening it. I’m serious. You wonder how you get spammed so much its because you forward very free iPod giveaway email to all our buddies and get th...

Results released so far indicates that the so called [un]believable change is not happening after all.On the other hand, analysis at Sri Lankan Elections web site shows that there is is some change when compared to the 2005 Presidential election.Another notable change is about almost all major candi...

I still can not figure out what made me to write this blog post. "Oh damn!, I must blog more often!" - saying out loud most of the time when I visit my own blog. However, that state of mind lasts no more than 10 minutes. It is better to write down all the significant events occurred since my last b...

According to Mr Ranil Wickramasinghe, General Sarath Fonseka as the "service commander" was only "executing orders given by the government", and under a timeframe set by the government.He made this comments during a recent interview with the Global Tamil Vision (GTV) TV channel.This interview was co...

So I finally bit the bullet and took my courage in hand. I submitted 2 talks to the MySQL User Conference with Raymond Deroo. All that is left for me to do now is hope I am *really* lucky and that god of conferences decides to shine his benevolence on me. If you [...]

The first thing you notice in Mac Finder is there is no way to show hidden files. In Windows Explorer or Gnome this is in the menus. On mac you need to set a environment variable called “com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles” to toggle the state of hidden files. I manually changed this a co...

I plan to “Go Pink” this October for Breast Cancer. While doing some basic research for the blog post I found the website “Pink for October“. The Pink for October campaign is about blog and website owners showing their support for breast cancer awareness by turning our site...

Was speaking with a friend today about a question they had on how to copy a part of a table including the indexes. It had been a while since I had used those particular quirks of the CREATE statement so I could not recall how to do it off the top of my head [...]

I learn something new every day at work. Some of the stuff I learn is pretty big – but the real humbling ones are the small. A couple of little things that I learned recently: 1) Did you know that NULL and empty string “” can be valid elements of an ENUM [...]

I’m not that savvy on the BlackBerry yet but I’ve discovered these few shortcuts on the BlackBerry Curve 8900 which are super useful. alt + left shift gets you into number mode shift + scroll selects messages alt + scroll scrolls pages Related posts:Quick Message Marking On Nokia E71...

Wow has another year gone by already. So much has happened that it is hard to think of it all. Lets see if I can recap. For 2009 I was supposed to try and meet a couple of personal and professional goals. Some of the goals I like to think I have met [...]

I think I have the blog mostly set up and the links working again now (I had forgotten how much I had customized my last theme). I will still be altering the style the next couple days to better reflect my tastes and preferences but that will come with time. For now I [...]

I did blog when I was on facebook, and Twitter too. You should be thinking I am hyped by all this “Social Network thingy” (I don’t say no :D ).  And also you might have realized that Dailybooth should be a social network, if not you already knew it. So here’s the most frequen...

One thing I like about GIT, among others, is that it creates a repository locally. This makes simple things easy, still not disallowing complex things.A good use of GIT is to manage the configuration files in a GNU/Linux system. This article describes the way I do it.In this example, I will use th...

This is a just crazy tech rant. Not even remotely a tech post or how to :D So here’s how to do it. Install Dropbox. Share a directory with a friend and create a text file inside it. Now open the text file with a text editor. (I use Gedit). Type in what you want to say. ctrl+s to send [...]

We are already into the 2nd decade of 21st century and it is very evident that this would be the decade, where Cloud Computing, Realtime web and Mobile Web will start to rule! As per some buzzword fanatics, this year (2010) will be the transition year from web 2.0 to web 3.0. Buzzwords aside, as [....

Umm – is this thing on again? If not I can always ramble a bit to myself – nothing new or different there. I think I have finally managed to get my blog up and running again (only been about a year) since I keep being told by people that “it doesn’t work” and well [......

Here is my list for 2010, its always good to have a list. MongoDB sounds promising The mobile web/app space. Android will kill the iPhone star Yet Apple will keep making products we want to buy Virtual private servers and cloud services Ruby on Rails is too significant to ignore for PHP/Java folks ...

Maybe this is the first time I seriously thought of a new year resolution (My memory is against me anyway). This morning I watched this program called Sandakada pahana on sirasa TV (ok, TV can be useful at times). There was a Buddhist monk and a guy called Ajith Jayawardena. Their talk actually made...

I use a plugin to post to twitter every time I post a blog post. I also have Facebook pull in my new posts and notes. This works reasonably well and I get some traffic from them. You can also use twitter tools to post your tweets on your blog after a certain threshold. I don’t [...] Related ...

Hope you enjoyed my moving to Australia posts, cause just after posting those I moved back to Sri Lanka. I won’t get into “moving back to Sri Lanka” cause its pretty painful and I’m sure no one will want to read it. Why move back? Well although its a bit crappy here most of t...

Election times are upon us…. well, not that there weren’t enough in the past few years, but only that an election which people care at least a dime is nearby and thus some changes to the Sri Lankan social behaviour. Larger than life political faces materialising in every nook and corner...

Story Once I was at an ATM machine, of course to get some money for a gift to a friend of mine. I keyed in the amount & was waiting for money. The machine took a while, printed the receipt, gave out the card. Yes that’s all. I got no money but a receipt saying that [...]

This morning, I came across an interesting article in Forbes titled ?Why Introverts Make the Best Leaders?. It gives some really good reasons why introverts could lead better than their extroversive counterparts, who are normally considered as the natural leaders. Being an introvert myself I know, ...

There was a firmware update for my Nokia E71. Remember to backup using PC Suite before doing an update, and restore your settings after. This has been my primary phone for just over an year and I must say its been great. Its fast and gets the job done. This was my first QWERTY [...] Related posts...