Geek with an attitude

That's right! I am leaving Debian Linux for Gentoo . After more than a year, flirting with Woody (stable branch) and then later Sarge (testing branch of Debian), running it since they day I bought by notebook, I decided to make the switch. Now don't get me wrong, I love Debian. The change was motivated buy several reasons, among which... I want to learn Gentoo a bit more extensively. I used it here and there, but now feel its time to goto bed with it. My batteries on the notebook are dying (about 30-45min), so I don't mind the extra stress that a compilation puts on power management anymore. Debian is fast (say compared to RH). Gentoo feels even faster. Gentoo has some cool non-free apps in portage (repository). I'd still be using Debian both at home and office anyways It all started last week as I struggled to download the two Gentoo CDs on our slow, highly congested office network, only to find the packages CD didn't have the proper MD5sums matching. This called...

Finding the auditorium, dubbed "nawa rangahala" meaning "the new hall", wasn't too difficult with Suchetha around. Being an old boy of Royal College, he showed the path while enticing us with his misfit school boy activities. When we go there the presentation had already been setup on another laptop with Power Point. Fortunately there was enough time for me to boot up my linux box and replace it with Koffice. Soon is was time to start the proceedings, and the first item on the agenda was the lighting of the oil lamp. It felt quite weird when I heard my name being called to light the oil lamp. believe or not, I don't recall ever having to do that! After a small introduction to the event by the school's principal, it was time for the BCS presentation. It was agreed that I would operate the transition of slides as Ruwan Mali would gave the presentation. This was going to be tricky indeed, as I soon learned it wasn't easy leaning against the table and ...

Tomorrow will be an exciting day for me. Its the first time I will be talking to a bunch of scouts consisting of school children ranging from about age 8 to 18, on GNU/Linux. I am very excited and at the same time slightly nervous, after all I've never talked to a kids gathering before. Remembering my self, growing up at the age of 8 - 13 back in Michigan, calmed me down and made me feel somewhat comfortable. The event was organized by the British Computer Society , Sri Lankan section (BCS) and I got involved accidentally. Both Ruwan Fonseka and Anuradha Ratnaweera had done most of the ground work for setting up the event on behalf of LKLUG , but were unable to attend due to other commitments. Ruwan had translated part of the presentation that was to be done by Ruwan Mali of the BCS, into Sinhala using a Unicode font. The idea was to display the English slide followed by the Sinhala slide on a GNU/Linux platfor using OpenOffice . Since OpenOffice support for sinhala is inco...

It's 1:30 AM in the morning and I'm having fun. I've just setup a wireless radio station in my house. Ok, before you start to park your car outside my gate to tune in, take a deep breath and chill. Its awesome but no big deal! All you do is install something called an icecast server, which is supposed to be better than the original Shoutcast server by the folks that brought you winAmp and then sold it to the devil (aOL) ;) Ice cast server version 2.x can stream both mp3s and ogg vorbis (better quality and patent free). A small vague run down of the steps keeping in mind this is a blog and not a howto! First I installed icecast2 on debian # apt-get install icecast2 You need to modify the configuration file, the main setting being setting a password and then start the server. # /etc/init.d/icecast2 start Next you need a client streaming application that will connect to the icecast server and stream a live feed such as from a mic / soundcard loopback or in m...

Ok I know the title is a bit misleading, not to mention intriguing for those who know me. Is this guy capable of such a thing? So before you start substituting my life for a sitcom, let me clear thing up by saying my double date was for two B' day parties at two very different locations. Who's B' day party you ask? Shame on you! It was mine! If you forgot then I guess you weren't invited, so that makes us even. Anyway, I didn't really plan for two B' day parties to take place simultaneously. I invited a couple of my friends (just couples ;)) to Delimarket at WTC. Delimarket isn't my favorite place but at the time it was convenient since Kanchana and I were working late and that seemed the closest. Anyway as the party progressed (in a very cheerful, talkative mode might I add), I got a call from home saying my uncle/aunt [aka. loku thaatha (big daddy), loki amma (guess ;))] had shown up. I guess its not a total surprise, since they usually do show up b...

What can you do when more than 100,000 people are dead and more than a million displaced with little food, clothing or medical care at hand? Coping with a tragedy of such massive scale is not something that most of us have prepared for. I guess different people have their own way of coping. May be its by going to the affected areas and giving a helping hand. Or perhaps collecting donations and other goods and handing it over to those efforts. I can even imagine some, who might just be glued to their TV sets, switching channels to catch the latest news and programs on Tsunamis'. So while the rest of the world was coping with this tragedy in their very own way, I got involved with a project that has helped me to somewhat cope with it as well. It all started just about a week ago, when we met at ICTA to discuss about building an application to find missing persons. At the time Dr. Gihan Dias from the University of Moratuwa had already setup a simple system, called findthe...

Today I got to learn that Philip Nicholas too was an unfortunate casualty of the tsunami title wave that hit Sri Lanka yesterday. At the time of his death, he was holidaying in Arugambay (located in Pottuville) spending Christmas at the Star Dust Beach Hotel . The wave that struck the area had completely destroyed the hotel. Phil was the founder and lead developer for Hibyte Co. , a UK based web development company. He came to Sri Lanka in 1999, to work on the Star Dust hotel's web site, and directly gone there at a time when going to Pottuville was unthinkable do to terrorist activities. Ever since then he had fallen in love with Sri Lanka and had worked and lived here since then. I met Phil towards the end of 2002, when my former company ITABS formed a partnership with Hibyte LK. I worked with him a little over an year on a few projects. He was a perl and DHTML genius. I would say most of my current perl writing styles and even some PHP generic functions were greatly ...

It started just like any other day.. I got up in the morning, burned a few calories on the road (road rage!) and made it to office. Fast forward roughly 8 hours -- it was time to go home, or was it! (This is where your supposed to hear the siren like sound from horror movies) I was never scared of the dentist. The sound of the drill nor the injection, which I now refer as to “Lethal Injection!”, didn't bother me. But my ignorance towards the dentist, has finally caught up with me! I finally share the sympathy, and plead forgiveness for I have laughed at you, while you were rightfully frightened to go to THE DENTIST! Removing my wisdom, took a little over an hour and a half, which is a bit longer than usual. Except for the pain of having to tilt my head slightly back for the whole period, the operation didn't really hurt much. There were some complications, as expected, since it is said that wisdom is difficult to obtain as well as remove :) My tooth was surgically r...

Welcome to virtusa is a phrase I kept hearing all day from many who gave me a warm welcome. Today was my first day at the new office. A new machine was already allocated with a sticker containing my login details. The machine boasted a 2.8GHz processor and 1GB RAM which made me quite content. It was as if they had been waiting for me. I spent the rest of the day remove that other OS, and reinstalling Debian Sarge Linux. The new Sarge installer , which is still beta, turns out to be very user-friendly when comparing with the previous Woody installer. Within a couple of hours I got a very good desktop linux running on KDE 3.2.3. There was a problem with Xfree86 probing the correct monitor frequency for the Samsung SyncMaster 753DF, so I was stuck with 60Hz at 1024x768. Now I must admit a secret. I have super powers which enable me to view 60Hz flicker. This also makes give me a headache so I decided to get the proper frequency values for the monitor. I was too lazy to go around and se...

Couple of us were invited for a warm Christmas lunch at the Hiran's residence. Myself, Asanga along with Kanchana had decided to meet up early to get a card and a gift since that's usually the hard part. But when I saw the Lava Lamp staring at me, I thought this is all that's missing from Hiran's high tech home! I mean after all how can a solar/wind powered, wireless, broadband home with a sound space system not have a Lava Lamp? Everyone else agreed so we got that and rushed off. When we got to Hiran's, Marlon and Andre had already arrived with a can of beer in their hands. Surprisingly we weren't that late as thought since these guys had also arrived few minutes earlier. I got myself into a cozy beer, while Kanchana sipped on a delicious home made Anoda drink by Maneesha, of which I too was lucky to have a sip. More guests soon arrived which, included Hirans beautiful sister, who'd come down from UK and Thilani who is sometimes called a crazy girl, if ...

Today is the last day I'm officially spending at ITABS, but I'm not feeling nostalgic nor sad today. After all this is the end of the week and the weekend is coming up right! But more than that, it's because I was feeling sad and nostalgic yesterday ;) Yesterday was my unofficial last day at ITABS, only because today some guys were supposed to be somewhere else and so they decided to do something yesterday instead. Yesterday, I was busy the whole day at a client's location and was hoping to come back to office in the evening for a Linux class. I've got a call around 3:00pm, as I was entering the network server room at the client, from Lakmal asking an odd question "which type of DVDs my writer supports?". Without thinking twice I answered "any type, plus or minus". He then immediately kept the phone. For a second I thought it was odd, but then thought may be he is researching again on the net for a good DVD writer to buy, and got back to work....

That seemed to be the tone coming out of some of the security guards patrolling the "takaran" gates of CR&FC. Though I would have much liked to use different title for this post, considering the vibrant concert that followed, I can't help myself! If you weren't living under a rock, you would know that Air Supply is in town. I some how managed to squeeze a few minutes to go out and buy two 1,000/= tickets. Like most sensible people I couldn't afford paying 5,000/= a ticket even though Air Supply is such a wonderful band. Apparently the organizers hadn't anticipated that people who bought the 1,000/= rupee tickets just might need to use the restroom. When this scenario cropped up it was just sheer panic! The guard said "You have to go out of the gate and get in from the 5,000/= gate but once you come back we can't guarantee that we'll let you in. You might have to buy another 1,000 ticket". One of the organizers with a tag hanging ...

By now most of you reading this blog already know that I will be exiting my current work place to join Virtusa at the R&D dept. If you didn't know, well now you know why I was making various hints on previous posts! My appointment date at the new place is from the 20th of this month so there really isn't much time left. Today began the handover of things to friends who worked with me. I spent the whole morning with Janaka explaining him the firewall config tool that I was building over the last couple of weeks and getting him up to speed with it. I'm also working on setting up some infrastructure to streamline some of the redundant operations we currently have. Last week I setup a CVS server and today I started to install RoundUp an issue tracking system. I'm still going through the feature list and leaning to use it, but I'm hopeful we can track software bugs as well as customer issues with this. That way I wont have to install a separate bugzilla which ...

Today was a busy day for myself and the other guys. I was busy at the UCSC, preparing few lecture notes that I didn't have time to do over the week, as well as conducting lectures and instructing the practical. The other guys were busy at BMICH explaining and demonstrating to the large crowd that turned up for the last day of the ASCIO exhibition. I got a call from Nadeeka around 6:00p asking me when I'd come over there. We had planned to meet up after the exhibition to go out and eat, drink and chit chat. "I'll be there soon" was all I could tell him. The class had just finished, but my good friend Vinesh had come over to UCSC and was trying to setup MRTG , a network monitoring tool for his new office. He had gotten some weird error on Redhat when he had tried it and now I was getting a similar error on a freshly installed Mepis (Debian like). Ah! it suddenly hit me... the FIREWALL, stupid dog ! Turning off the the Guard Dog firewall rules seemed to fix i...

I've really been busy the last couple of days and didn't have any time to write my blog. But in any case except for a few developments, nothing exciting did happen.. that is until now! Asian-Oceanian Computing Industry Organization or in short ASOCIO is an exhibition that is usually held else where, and its the first time they are holding it in Sri Lanka. There was a BIG marketing campaign on the media announcing it as the BIGGEST exhibition in South East Asia, with big names like Intel, PC House, Suntel and oh.. almost forgot that company from Redmond sponsoring it. Yesterday I was running around to help setup the LKLUG stall, at SLECC (Sri Lanka Exhibition and Convention Center). I lent them my Wi-Fi USB gadget, a wireless Keyboard and Mouse, Sound Blaster Live 5.1 card and a power extension cord. Today was my day at the ITABS stall, which is located at the BMICH. Yes you heard me right! Its same exhibition, but held in two places. We've got a small corn...

1999 was the year! I was only 22 and boy did I party like "It was 1999!" One boat, Forty Sri Lankans, One Sri Lankan band, Three good friends, Two crazy girls, One hot mother and unlimited liquor, December 31, 1999, Long Beach California, somewhere in the middle of the lake where you'd least expect to be hit by Y2K. Ahh the good old days! When we working our butts off, sometimes 48hrs+ straight, on a novel project called Menus.com. Those were exciting times, when an idea can easily end up being turned into a dot com site, billboard everywhere displaying some new dot com name, which ultimately ended with the dot com crash back in 2000. Keith is in town and I was invited with a couple of other old friends to Hilton Colombo for lunch. I got a bit late getting there after the Python group presentation, but made it just in time to start lunch. It was nice seeing Keith, who I thought had got slightly thinner, and Manik (daughter) who looked pretty much the same excep...

My office is a MESS! There I said it! With the amount of people we now have, being packed in to a small lecture room, means I usually have to get up from my seat when who ever is next to me has to go out. To make things worse finding a network cable that works, power source or a decent place to keep my notebook is sometimes very difficult. I've really found it very hard to concentrate on work, especially programming every since we moved in here. The only success I had was while wearing the ear phone and listening to some personal music :) The solution... welcome to "Work from home". Ok this isn't really a solution that I've even mentioned to my boss, but its something I've been doing the last 2 days. I went to office late while I worked on the project from home. I found that I was really able to do a lot of work, since I was planning to go and show some progress in the evening. I got up at around 7AM and first started working on my openOffice presentation (...

Such a boring and wasteful day it was! I got up late at 9AM and was slightly late to go for a meeting with our marketing guy, but luckily he had managed to set the meeting at 11:00, we made it just in time. After getting back and having a boring lunch, I decided to go for a small walk down to Tasty's and had a caramel. The walk wasn't much fun since it was drizzling through out and the sky was all gray. The rest of the day of the day sort of flew of the day sort of flue by till about 6PM. It was only after about 6 that I really got around to doing something for one of the projects that I am working on with another guy. So eventually we ended up working late till about 10:00. It really shouldn't have taken so long for the stuff I was working on but hey what can I say.. my brain was way underclocked! One thing I did managed to start on was dowelled a lot of gentoo sources. After failing to compile a kernel (that booted) with the genkernel utility, I opted to ...

After typing the previous blog, and having failed to fall asleep, I got up and ended installing some goodies on my Mandrake box. By about 3AM I managed to get a beta version of Suns Looking Glasses 3D desktop, DVD watching, CD burning and a 3D demo of UT2004 working. The next day (or shall we say after a couple of hours of sleep), I went over to the Narada center, where I heard Anuradha's and ven. Mettavihari's voice. Ven. Mettavihari suggested I bring the barebone and show it to Anuradha just before we left, and a good thing I did! It didn't boot. The most peculiar error was reported by LILO about some date problem. Oh well tried using the Mandrake CDs to recover the automatic method but that didn't seem to work either. Now time was running out, so Anurdha just opened a shell and installed the boot loader the old fashion way :) - using the Command line! Unlike the previous day,we did managed to get to ICTA on time. When we got to the conference room, there awaite...

Today was an interesting day for me, as I was very much looking forward to joining with the LKLUG crew, to go and convince ICTA effort headed by Riza, that Linux was the way to go for their 100,000 Home PC initiative. Though nothing is official at this point, ICTA is planning to offer 100,000 personal desktops at a very reasonable price to Sri Lankan families in an effort to increase computer literacy among the population. It is rumored that after approaching Microsoft , and seeing their lack of enthusiasm to provide a cost effective and attractive price solution for Windows/MS Office suite, ICTA had decided to go with OpenOffice as the Office Suite and possibly Linux as the Operating System (OS). It is also rumored that once news got out of the possibility of going with OpenSource, Microsoft had decided to cut prices and reapproach ICTA. If these rumors are true, then it is really a good fortune that ICTA, despite the influence from one of THE biggest software giants (a.k.a monop...