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,...

When I was compiling my last post I wanted to embed a tweet in my blog post. I found a nice plugin for that called Twitter Embed. Getting a Tweet’s permanent link wasn’t that straightforward, so I made a small … Continue reading →

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 had a few months worth of photos on my phone that needed to be imported and sorted. All I wanted to do was move the photos into monthly folders. So I found exiftool that had some options that did … Continue reading →

You can’t run Silex apps directly on Dreamhost yet. After a bit of digging around I came up with this. You need to create a file ~/.php/5.3/phprc in your home directory, not under the website directory and put these lines … Continue reading →

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...

Indi is asking: What kind of taxi do you usually take? I think he is building some kind of social app for taxis. At the moment on his poll meter taxies are winning. Here is what I think about that. … Continue reading →

Sri Lanka is a great place for used stuff. Cars and phones are in the top bracket here. But these days there is a problem selling. Although there is a demand once you sell you can’t afford to buy the … Continue reading →

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...

Scientists Discover That Tiny Fractal Trees Could Hold Key to More Efficient Solar Cells Hmm sounds familiar. I have heard something like this before. There was a kid called Aidan Dwyer talking about solar cells in a tree pattern last … Continue reading →

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...

MySQL Workbench doesn’t work out of the box in the latest Ubuntu. These steps will get it working until Oracle gets around to updating the official package sudo add-apt-repository ppa:olivier-berten/misc sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install mysql-workbench-gpl Source: http://bugs.mysql.com...

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...

I like the Aptana PHP formatter. Its the only one that works well for me. I used to my one liner tags messed up a lot like this. What I noticed was that the ones with the semi-colons in place … Continue reading →

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 you are still using CVS and Subversion or moved on to something distributed its a good idea to keep in mind how to commit. Commits and commit messages are pretty important. I’ve had single user repos for years and … Continue reading →

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...

I know I should have blogged more. But then I was busy working. Now that I’m out of work do you think anyone following this blog would notice and hire me? Lets find out http://www.linkedin.com/in/dilantha

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...

So then there was Google+. Big brother Goog sure has cried long nights about the miscarriages that were wave and buzz. Being beaten up by facebook and twitter in the then coolest thing in the block should’ve hurt the search giant a lot. But now it’s time to see the light spread. I mean, ...

Currently I’m so out of social media madness. It was nice when I was already mad. It was awesome, actually. But then I got work. Became a busier man (The office doesn’t block a single thing. We have sensible people here.) and kept moving away from social media (Just Twitter for me). Ever...

I’m writing this post from 30,000ft above the ground, in a Qatar Airways flight on my way back to Colombo from Vienna. I came to Vienna last month, as per an invitation from GENTICS Crew (the company behind awesome Aloha Editor) to hack on a really interesting project. I will not reveal much d...

It rekindled that habit. The habit formed in me when I still was a kid. The habit that made me understand good lessons about life without actually having to go through all those hardships. The habit that let me leave reality for a better imaginary world. Amazon Kindle did what once seemed impossible...

Man time goes by fast. Only about a week left before Tek. I have to admit to being rather excited about it. I will be giving a tutorial on Optimizing MySQL Essentials that will cover many areas including queries and the server. I also have a regular session called “Why be Normal” that wi...

Crazy but true – I am on Voices of the Elephpant this week. I had a great time talking with Cal about PHPWomen, so be sure to check it out! And if you know someone who is one of the unsung members of the PHP Community, be sure to nominate them for an interview at [...]