Story time. A few weeks back I was sitting in AMW’s garage waiting for an invoice for a repair on my car. While I was sitting there, there was an old guy there in pant straps sitting next to me. I hadn’t seen pant straps in a while. That is probably the reason I even [...] Related post...

I’m looking to hire a PHP and or Java person with about 2 years experience. Also a Linux admin / QA Release manager Related posts:Selling out SimpleXMLElement attributes iPad Hype Related posts:Selling out SimpleXMLElement attributes iPad Hype

Gmail got a face-lift today. The main sections Mail, Contacts and Tasks are links on the top left. All actions are buttons so Compose was changed to a button as well. Small changes but have a look at this line in the change log. A smaller header area puts the first message in your inbox [...] Rela...

It was just after the time cellular phone began to leak in to the middle class Sri Lanka. My father became a victim of a contract too, sharing the destiny of many others in his social circle. I was amazed by it’s powers but not as much as the other non tech savvy people were. [...]

It’s 2300 right now. I should finish this soon and go to sleep. I wanted share something I use with you guys. It’s actually two Firefox features (probably on other browsers too) combined with some nifty web tools. So the two features are keyword bookmarking and %s variable. Check the fol...

I was using gnome-do as my application launcher through out last year with my ubuntu 9.04 installation. I installed it right after installing 10.04 recently too. But I kinda needed a change. I realized I wasn’t using the launcher THAT MUCH so it better be lightweight. So I found dmenu. A nifty...

Usual Chanux crap I always used SCIM input method with sayura sinhala input scheme. But it had weird bug that screws up almost all the text input areas (My friend @gaveen pointed out it’s SCIM related). So the people who new about iBus told me to try it but as always I didn’t have time [...

I have never been to a barcamp so far – though I have been wanting to go. As far as I know my local Jacksonville doesn’t hold one so I have to go further out to try and find fellow geeks. Up until now I have either heard about the barcamps after they occur or [...]

“Who is the biggest role model of your life?” My answer to that question would be Muttiah Muralitharan. I know that answer would confuse most of you. You would expect a geek like me to name some one like Linus Torlvards, Yukihiro Matsumoto or Sergy Brin and Larry Page as a role model. B...

Ya unless you work on PHP SimpleXML that title won’t make much sense. But if you do and you need to mess with SimpleXML as I have been lately to parse some Media RSS feeds you will need to use this function. I was using it to store some urls in a drupal job queue [...] Related posts:Facebook...

I like Command Line Interface. Maybe I’ve been saying this earlier on my twitter if not on this blog. Since I started with GNU/Linux I was so fascinated with the CLI. The first reason was it’s something not everyone preferred. The next it’s the preferred way of all the hackers I re...

I am proud that I have been selected to speak again at the Zend Conference. I will again be speaking on MySQL topics including ‘MySQL Server Performance Tuning 101′ and an ‘Intro to MySQL EXPLAIN’. I look forward to seeing everyone there!

There are 3 essential weapons every developer should have in their armory. A text editor, a terminal and a source code management system. Picking powerful, flexible and personalized tools will make your workflows more productive. As a developer, I use Vim for text editing, bash as the terminal and G...

Recently, I was going through some data visualization frameworks as I work on our own visualization framework at WSO2. Initially, we aimed to develop a gadget framework which would make it easier for users to develop their own gadgets for WSO2 Business Activity Monitor (WSO2 BAM). However, now it ha...

Ever wondered why we have so much of crappy and bloated software? The root cause they are built just to impress one person. This is a widespread disease in software industry. At the academic level, you will find students writing software to impress their mentors and get the required credit. Then yo...

Few months ago, I mentioned I’m developing a real-time collaborative code editor (codenamed as Realie) for my individual research project in the university. Since then I did couple of posts on the design decisions and on technologies I experimented for the project. After some excessive hacking...

TekX was held last week and again it a fabulous conference. The conference started out with the typical day 0 – Tutorials Day. I only attended the MongoDB talk mostly to learn a bit about it. Kristina was a wonderful speaker who really knew her stuff. And as a MySQL geek, I have to admit [...]

In the 1980s, Apple jumped out to an early lead in personal computers, but then got selfish. Steve Jobs, a notorious control freak, just could not play well with others. Along came Microsoft, with Windows, which was a knockoff of Apple’s operating system. Microsoft partnered with everyone and ...

I have uploaded the slides for my talks at this year’s TekX conference. You can find them either at slideshare or off my Presentations page. The talks this year included the intermediate to expert level 5.5 Performance and Scalability improvements talk and and introductory talk to MySQL’...

So this last Saturday I attended the local SQL Saturday event. I have to admit I was a little concerned about attending an event based around SQL Server. After all it is not my normal RDBMS and I have no connections into that community. But it was recommended to me by my friend Joe Healy [...]

Warning: This is  going to be totally personal bullshit. So you may not want to waste your precious time reading it. I mean, seriously!. I just wanted to do something forget the emptiness. I feel so damn empty. It was like bearing a huge burden on my back all this time. But apparently I’ve bee...

Web Sockets are one of the most interesting features included in HTML5 spec. It would open up a whole different paradigm in web application development by allowing asynchronous, long-lived connections between client and server. As Web Sockets were supported in Google Chrome’s beta release, it ...

I had the opportunity to get selected for Google Summer of Code on the freshman year itself in my academic life. The experience I gained in that summer working with SilverStripe project boosted my self confidence and helped me immensely to shape up my career. This year, which happens to be my final...

There were several claims about the maximum "percentage votes" obtained at the General Election. But I don't think that those calculations make sense.Here is an example to show why: Let's say I make a one person party, find some names just to fill the nominations, and our unpopular party gets only ...

The iPad is here. Well not here in Sri Lanka yet. Give us a few years to catch up will ya. Its a couch computer you use on your knees. Tablets have been around for years but this is not a tablet with a pointy pen device. This a full hands on experience. If I [...] Related posts:My Current WordPres...

I have been lucky enough (or found the right bribe) to be selected to speak at this years TekX conference up in Chicago. I have to admit, they have a fantastic lineup again this year and can’t wait to get there to see old friends and make new ones. Every year I go it just [...]

I have been a fan of Frets on Fire for quite sometime now but I had enough time playing it with my laptop's Keyboard. So I bought a toy guitar and a USB Keyboard and I just had to wire the guitar's push buttons correctly to the Keyboard's tiny (not so tiny though) circuit board so tha...

These are some photos of a new Media application developed on iDisplay. It demonstrates the capability of having live and natural interactions between the real world and the virtual world. A virtual face of a person is rendered inside a defined area by a plastic frame and that virtual face is ...

I always hate my school. No I don’t completely hate. But I hate a lot. School gave me a lot. But whatever it gave me came in change of things unique about me. Today I was going through SICP book and came across the algorithm that finds the square root of a number. It specified [...]

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 [...]

??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...

There is a "Medin Poya Day"  Live Web Cast (Sinhala) from "Amawatura Mahamevnawa Asapuwa", Malambe, Sri Lanka. If you have a low bandwidth connection, there is an audio only (Sinhala) version as well. Grab something meaningful to your life today. :-)

(click on the image to enlarge)

??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 all [...]

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...

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...

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 that really ope...

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. :-)