Tech goes Crazy

Google - You aren't always correct!

2010-08-28T15:52:00.000+06:00

I'm terribly disturbed today with some annoying Google attitude.

Google is our good old friend. No doubt of that. But yet, I think it is over confident sometimes.

Okay, here's the story. There's a Android powered Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 which was bought only a couple of weeks back for a good $400+ but is already a brick. I cannot repair it either with Sony Ericsson Update Service nor with Sony Ericsson PC Companion. I have been doing some research on how to unbrick it and tried various different ways to unbrick it with no success. I had 100's of tabs open in my browser and at least 90% of them were important tabs. Then I thought may be I should talk to Sony Ericsson customer service in USA so I got the number and decided to make the call with google voice. Though I had google voice in mac, I was working on windows so i had to download it again.

Once downloaded, it prompted me with this dialog box.

It's true that I'm living in Bangladesh. But how the hell am I supposed to read Bengali? I can hardly speak Bengali and I don't even know numbers in Bengali so you know the rest.

So I was confused, and then I did a tak-tik-tuk and pressed the nice blue first button. And the next moment, without a warning, my browser was closed and it was restarted with 0 open tabs :( I guess that's what this message box was all about. (and no, there was no clear way to choose any english installer)..

Google does good things.. But Google deciding if we can read some language? I'm not at all comfortable with the idea..

Google - Next time if you are putting some language bundle into an installer, ship English language bundle as well (and an option to select the language). Please? Thanks.

Cheers!

Roshan Amadoru

Ignoring the Ignorance - HTML/JS/CSS/Photoshop

2010-08-27T01:57:00.000+06:00

I'm a programmer.

Well.. That describes inner me.. It doesn't 100% describe my day-to-day work because now I have to do lot of things around the clock related to my business, but yet my passion is still there in programming, and I code something every time I have a chance and a need..

Through out the 10 years of my life in software field, I never bothered to design a simple web page (oh well.. except for some dumb web pages which I had to do to get credits for my degree).. It's true that I have fixed some of css and java script issues in some of the projects.. But I never designed one.. The simplest reason being that I didn't know much of HTML/JS/CSS/Photoshop stuff..

Not trying to boast myself but I can manage programming in Java / .Net / Objective - C/ RoR / PHP / Flex and even the ancient languages like Basic / FoxPro / Pascal.. But when it comes to HTML/JS/CSS stuffs, I start shivering.. And then starts sweating and my heart fills up with this weird feeling that I would wet myself in fear for web designing.. For some reason, I never understood those web designing things and I never thought of learning them too.. It's weird.. But it's true.. It's like I have been taught somet lesson by some terrible teacher and now I never feels like attending to any lesson on that subject anymore (reminds me some of my school teachers)..

HTML/JS/CSS never felt right for me.. But whenever I talk with someone about web designing stuffs, they always talks like that's something pretty cool, sexy and easy to learn thing.. In short this is what they show me in different terms.. Sexy and easy going..

Web Designing as others described it

But no matter how hard they tried to convince, this is what I always saw in it.

Web Designing as I saw it

However, yesterday I got up on the wrong side of the bed... I got up early in the morning at around 12.30 noon.. And then I had a feeling.. I wanted to learn something new.. I wanted to design a website..

I had no clue where to start.. Started with our good old friend.. Google.. Browsed through some of the websites.. Studied their designs.. Opened up TextMate.. Started coding HTML/JS/CSS and little bit of JQuery.. Opened up Photoshop and designed buttons and backgrounds (I took some time to study how photoshop works though. Was not easy to learn like MS Paint :D)... Took some stock photo and used it in a banner..

And that's what I have been doing during last 24 hours.. And during that period, I've designed a new website.. And I have to say, the site I just finished designing looks far more better.. And that's also completed within a day.. And checked it against W3C validators and viola! it's XHTML1.0 Strict compliant and CSS3 compliant (except for a couple of warnings which I fixed later)..

And now.. After Ignoring the Ignorance, Web Designing looks sooooo sexy for me.. Just like this...

Web Designing as I see it now...
Anyway, she (megan fox) is sexy, isn't she?

Cheers!

Roshan Amadoru

p.s. now all the web designing folks out there.. you better watch out.. because a new player is in the field :D

p.s.s. did you really think i will stop programming stuffs in favor to web designing? really?? :S No comments.

Redmine on Linux

2010-08-25T16:37:00.001+06:00

Hey Everyone,

So today, I'm writing something I did today.. Nothing fancy.. Just a little bit of technical stuffs..

As some of you may have noticed on twitter, I have migrated all my corporate project management tasks to the open source project management tool called 'RedMine'. Though it's been about 2-3 weeks since we have been using it, all this time we were running it on the port 3000 (because redmine is written in ruby and its now running on the Thin server and 3000 is the default port for thin server :)). I was laaaazy to integrate the thin server with the existing apache server, so i let it stay the default way. However yesterday I thought that I should re-config this, and I thought it would be best to have this project management tool running on a sub domain of my domain. Since my domain name is controlled by .lk domain registry (www.nic.lk) I wrote to them asking to add a new sub domain to the DNS. However, unfortunately they have responded to me saying that I already have 3 resource URLs mapped (2-A Records and 1-CNAME Record) and that's the maximum they can allocate per a domain name. They informed me that I will have to drop an existing record to have this new record in the DNS. I have no clue why they are using such a small limit. But anyway, now that's not an option.

So I thought may be I can use something like www.mydomain.com.lk in the domain name since i have bought those second level domains for my domain as well. But then for some reason I didn't like it.

Then I thought "May be I should map the thin server to a virtual directory of apache like www.mydomain.com/manager". And then... The experiment begins..

One thing I should confess here now is that I am not a Linux power user. I'm only a standard linux user. So I had to spend about 30 minutes on this to figure out how to do this.

So, my first question was, how can I map a virtual directory in apache to a different server.. Then comes to my mind the most awesome "mod_proxy" apache module.. I have worked with mod proxy only once before and I had very vague understanding of how to configure it.. But apache httpd documentation clearly saved me :)

Here's my encounter.

1. Enable mod proxy

Running "a2enmod proxy" command on ubuntu did the trick.

2. Adding proxy routing to the Virtual Host configuration

Opened up the webmin conf file in /etc/apache2/sites-available/ folder and added proxy details.

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /var/www/mydomain/
ServerName www.mydomain.lk
ServerAlias mydomain.lk
CustomLog /var/log/mydomain_log combined
Options -Indexes

#Following lines have been added
ProxyPass /manager/ http://localhost:3000/
ProxyPassReverse /manager/ http://localhost:3000/
</VirtualHost>

3. Visit www.mydomain.lk/manager ...

Nope.. Not working as expected.. I am getting an access restricted message from apache..

4. Allowing proxy requests from my domain
Now curious me went to /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ directory and checked for a config file for mod_proxy. and yeah!!! There it is... proxy.conf.. Opened it up, and there I find some configurations.

ProxyRequests Off
<Proxy *>
AddDefaultCharset off
Order deny,allow
#Deny from all
#Allow from .example.com
</Proxy>

So I changed it to

ProxyRequests Off
<Proxy *>
AddDefaultCharset off
Order deny,allow
#Deny from all
Allow from .mydomain.lk
</Proxy>

and saved.

* Now all of you who is going to try this should make sure that you keep ProxyRequests off in order to prevent spammers from using your server.

5. Visit www.mydomain.lk/manager again..

Nope.. Not yet.. Now it is giving me an internal server error.. It is saying proxying to the requested protocol might not have been properly configured. What the heck.. Went to the mod_proxy documentation and realized I need to enable http proxy module.

6. Enable mod_proxy_http

Just running "a2enmod proxy_http" did the trick.

7. Visit www.mydomain.lk/manager again..

Awesome!! Page loads nicely.. But... Images are not loading in redmine :S.. Now what?
went to the redmine documentation and figured out that I have to do a small configuration change.

8. Adding relative url root to redmine.

Add following line

Redmine::Utils::relative_url_root = "/manager"

at the end of config/environment.rb file of redmine.

9. Visit www.mydomain.lk/manager again..

Awesome^2!!! It works!!!

10. Block traffic to port 3000

Now everything is fine, I thought I should block traffic to the port 3000.
But yet, I need to be able to access it from within my server because otherwise who the hell am i supposed to get access to redmine :D

So I've added a rule to my server's iptable.

iptables -A INPUT -j DROP -p tcp --destination-port 3000 -i eth1

(here, eth1 should be changed to whatever your network interface is)

and yeah.. I am done!!!

11. For the safe side, visit www.mydomain.lk

woah!!! Everything is fine and port 3000 is blocked..

** now for those of you who wants to remove the iptable rule simply run

iptables -D INPUT -j DROP -p tcp --destination-port 3000 -i eth1

and you should be fine.

Yeah.. so that's it!! and that's it for today :).. I've got work to do now..

Non-Alcoholic Cheers!!
Roshan Amadoru

Breaking News: Sri Lankans are Prohibited from Developing Applications for Palm

2010-08-09T00:21:00.000+06:00

Some of you guys might know that these days Palm hot apps developer competition is underway and I kinda thought of putting an entry and thought of getting myself registered as a Palm Application developer. So I did the initial registration form and proceed to the second step of the registration in where you have to select the country of yours. I have looked for Sri Lanka on the list but i couldn't find it at the first glance. So i went through the entire country list top to bottom just to realize that Sri Lanka is not in the list. I have been following up with Palm customer support ever since and to my horror, I was informed that Sri Lankans are not supported to get registered in the Palm developer program. This is a response from them.

"We don’t support registration from your country at this time, and unfortunately, I don’t have a good workaround for that, so I don’t know what to suggest.

This is something that we’re evaluating and may change in the future, but at this point, I don’t have a timeframe when it may happen.

Sorry."

In a subsequent mail, this is what I was told.

"It’s an issue with our interfacing with tax authorities in the various countries. It’s something we’re reviewing and it might change at some point, but at this point, we have no way to support Sri Lanka in the system."

This is very confusing. Because almost every other online competition in this world supports Sri Lanka for the registration and I wonder how only Palm has this issue. Is Sri Lanka banned from being participated in International Competitions? Have they misunderstood that Sri Lanka is a part of Iraq or something ? This is bloody confusing!! They should consider stop dealing HP and Palm products in Sri Lanka in this case. Screw you HP and Palm!!!

- Roshan Amadoru

AppStore Battle... Who's Winning?

2010-07-30T09:15:00.000+06:00

I'm pretty sure a lot of you are familiar with the term "app store" specially in the context of mobile applications... Though there are app stores like the LiveScribe Store, SplunkBase, for today's topic lets just focus on mobile phone market...

As per my knowledge, this whole thing with mobile app stores started when apple opened up their iTunes app store in july 2008, exactly 2 years back.. Since then other mobile phone venders started moving into the concept of "app store" because everyone saw the potential behind the app store.. Now most of the leading venders are in the battle of appstore, i kinda thought of gathering some statistics to get an idea of where they stand in terms of the number of apps in their app store. Here's my finding which I believe to be almost correct. Note that these are rough figures and rounded up.

iTunes App Store - 250,000 Apps
Android Market - 70,000 Apps
BlackBerry App World - 2000 Apps
Windows Marketplace for Mobile - 1000 Apps
Vodaphone Apps Shop - 62 Apps
Samsung **BADA** App Store - 60 Apps
Nokia Ovi Store - ???? (I couldn't find the statistics anywhere but i'm sure there are hundreds of apps in it because it records a download rate of 22 apps per every second world wide)

So clearly with the head start of 1 year, apple is without no doubt the top in this battle with android being the runners up. And clearly there is no other close rival to these two market places.. At least for some few years..

Nokia Ovi should certainly be the most widely used app store in the world due to the number of Nokia hand held devices being sold around the world, but for some strange reason Ovi store has not attracted many app developers..

So if you are stepping into the app development market for mobile devices, all I have to say is it's always better to start with iPhone and Android..

Cheers!
-Roshan Amadoru

P.S. On a side note - All you developers can take part in Samsung Bada developer challenge which is underway and win prices :) Bring some prices to Sri Lanka :)

How Nasty Do You Really Think ASP.Net Can Be?

2010-07-27T20:39:00.000+06:00

Hey folks,

Well.. Yesterday's concern is finally solved.. I've decided to go ahead with J2EE stack as I found it's kinda promising.. Thanks for the IM feedback guys.. (The guys who gave feedback knows who i'm referring to :))

Well.. Today's post might sound kinda offensive for some hard working ASP.Net Gurus.. But really, there are number of times that I have realized how sucky language ASP.Net is... I've kinda been doing some hardcore development of some plugins for DotNetNuke CMS portal for some specific need.. Today I have been banging my head on the wall for several hours because I've been going on loops with one nasty issue I came up with... I've been doing this implementation with Linq-To-SQL, because everyone talks big about it and for me also it was kinda promising solution at the first glance... I've been getting some weird error with the following linq data source ..

<asp:LinqDataSource ID="LinqDataSourceImages" runat="server" ContextTypeName="MINews.MINewsDataContext"
    TableName="MINewsItemImages" OnSelecting="LinqDataSourceImages_Selecting"
    EnableDelete="True" EnableInsert="True" EnableUpdate="True"
    OnSelected="LinqDataSourceImages_Selected"
    Where="GUID== @GUID && MINewsItemId == @MINewsItemId && Deleted == @Deleted && NewDeleted == @NewDeleted">
    <whereparameters>
        <asp:parameter name="GUID" type="String">
        <asp:parameter name="MINewsItemId" type="Int32">
        <asp:parameter defaultvalue="false" name="Deleted" type="Boolean">
        <asp:parameter defaultvalue="false" name="NewDeleted" type="Boolean">
    </whereparameters>
</asp:LinqDataSource>

I was dead sure there is no problem with the datasource (Well mind you I didnt rely on the datasource configuration wizard for this one), and I was convinced there is nothing wrong with the event codes I've written... But yet, I was keep getting this weird error over and over again..

After couple of hours wasting on this trying to analyze the code lines one after the other, some weird feeling struck my head and I went back to the database and changed a little thing..

If you know Linq to SQL, from above code you can obviously tell that there is a field named "GUID" in my table... Well I went back to the db and changed the field name in the db and then came back to the dbml file and re - generated the context file..

Bingo!!!

Just changing the db field name from GUID to something else just made the error correct..

Hey!!! Since when microsoft started deciding on the field names that we should be using the database ? This is a shame.. This may be just one occurrence of hundreds I haven't unveiled. I just wasted more than half of my day simply because someone at Microsoft thought they shouldn't let the app work properly if the field name is "GUID".. Damn you IDIOT!!!!

Cheers
Roshan Amadoru

J2EE vs Ruby-On-Rails!!! What do you think?

2010-07-26T11:24:00.000+06:00

Hello World!

So as most of you already know, I'm terrible at blogging.. This is the first blog after more than a year.. yeah :D I've had a kinda creepy time.. and yeah that's about it..

So, since I left my awesome job at Zone24x7 (www.zone24x7.com) couple of months after my last blog post, I have ended up doing something of my own after a very desperate-short term (4 month) career as a project manager for some small software firm which I thought who had a great potential, which I indeed miscalculated.

So Since then I've been doing couple of stuffs.. I screwed a lot.. But you never know whether you succeed or fail until you try things out.. And now I'm better well aware what things can go wrong and I believe I have a good vision now on how to make things NOT wrong :)

So I've kinda been working on an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system together with someone who just quit very recently due to some personal matters, so now I'm kinda on my own. So I guess it's my time to re-think through the system and do a proper re-design of the system.

I've always been a Java enthusiast.. (But that's not the only place where my passion lies in programming..) I have had a great experience playing around with various aspects and frameworks of Java/J2EE over the years... I can just say i'm pretty much good at all those J2EE Hibernate / Spring / ActiveMQ / Tiles / etc etc, on different platforms like websphere, jboss, tomcat,... (No I have never played with glassfish.. i know i should :) )

Though I never really had the chance to do much of a Ruby-On-Rails stuffs, last couple of days i've been seriously considering to re-do the ERP's backend to be a RoR backend rather than the existing J2EE stack with hibernate/spring/ehcache/jersey/jsersey-json bindings/Quartz/mysql etc. (Oh yeah MySQL.. why not? - Its proven to handle much larger record sets though we get limited functionality than other sophisticated DBMS's like Oracle or DB2)... I kinda like the agility gives by R0R.. But at the same time, I like the strong set of components and the strong community around java and the surrounding frameworks.. But now I'm running low in the number of developers to work on this product, I sometimes feel RoR with ActiveRecords would be a better option than having to bang the head on the desk sometimes with J2EE.

Whatdddddaaaayaaaaaaaaallllllll think??? I can seriously use some help here to make a decision :).

Cheers All!!!
-Roshan Amadoru

Thinking Ahead - Being What You Wanna Be!

2009-06-10T23:44:00.000+06:00

First of all I would welcome all my old readers + several new readers of this blog!!! Good to have you all here so I have a reason to write... ;)

So... I have a question for you guys... How many of you have really thought what you are going to be in another 4-5 years... I know I have about 10-20 readers for this blog at this moment and I'm pretty sure 90% of you would say that you really haven't thought about it (or may be you don't even give a shit about it!)... (Do you want to bet!!! I can set up a poll if you want!! But it's just you have to be honest ;))

If someone ever asked me that question, I always have an answer... Because I always dream what I want to be... Some may say that dreams doesn't come true... But I have a contravention with that... I wouldn't say that dreams doesn't come true... But what I say is Dreams can come true... Let me first explain it...

How many of you actually dream (literally, not metaphorically) at night?... I'm kinda pretty sure that most of you are seeing dreams in your sleep, unless of course you know how to get into the more relaxing alpha sleeping state... (ok.. I'm not going to explain what alpha sleeping state is right now.. May be you can do your homework ;)) So going back to subject "dreaming", you may have experienced situations where you experience something in your real-life, but you are pretty sure that you have seen that very same situation in your dreams at some point of the time... You may think I'm just insane, or I have just watched some mythological TV series... But I myself have experienced this very situation couple of times, including once today... :) (ok.. now you think i'm really insane.. dont ya? :D ) So this is one place where your drams have really come true... So dreaming is not really a bad thing.. (In this case there's no good even :))

I think i'm deviating from the original topic... :) Lets get back to the topic.

One of the main problems in most of the human is that they don't think about their own future... If someone gets a fair amount of salary with fair facilities, he may be satisfied with his achievement so far and be stick to that particulars for some time, may be for years, until that individual realize that's not what he wants and he moves away looking for something better than what they have already achieved... If something is found, then that will be their new destination and they will be satisfied for that achievement and will stick their and cycle continues... But is it really what you call "Thinking ahead!!!".... Nah!!! That's what I call "dumping yourself and bitching around"... Seriously, You should have your targets in your life... If someone asks me what my target is, I have a precise answer to give... If someone asked that same question two years back where I finished my university time and stepped to the industry, I had the same goal.. Same vision.. If someone asked me the same question about 5 years back, I had the same goal, Same vision... (I wont be telling it to you right now.. But there are a few who knows what it is)... So I have an aim in my life (in terms of career progression and entrepreneurship) and there are lots of objectives that i have accomplished in order to achieve that particular goal..

However I am pretty much surprised with the vision of silicon valley based software engineers vs. Sri Lanka based software engineers... If we take SV based SE's, at least 40-50% of them really knows what they want to be... They dream about themselves and they just don't let that be a dream, but really works hard towards achieving that goal.. But in contrast, if you take a Sri Lanka based (or South Asia rather) software engineers, more than 95% of them haven't really thought of what they want to become in their lives... If they get a Rs.50000 up salary, that's it!! They wouldn't bother about it at least for sometime... But this is where you've got to change.. This is where you really gotta think... Give sometime for yourself.. Get yourself organized.. Think ahead!! and think what you want to become!!! Who knows.. you may become the richest tech entrepreneur in the world.. :)

Ok.. did you really think I would just keep writing, writing, writing, and writing today till it become tomorrow morning!! duh!! I'm not a robot... I gotta get some sleep... :)

anyway, I have one thing to say...

"Dont settle for less"!!!

Cheers!
-Roshan Amadoru
The MadGuy

Doug Mccune & his way of "Augmented Reality

2009-06-10T00:25:00.000+06:00

I was a little bored a little while back.. Have a hell lot of things to complete.. But I'm just bored and sleepy.. So.. I thought of stumbling around to see what's happening around.. So here I found some videos of Flex|360 Indy.

I was browsing through some of the videos.. Virtually all the videos I've watched were great.. But.. There was one video... Which made me laugh for minutes... That's from Doug Mccune's (http://dougmccune.com/blog/) "Cool Shit" session @ Flex|360 Indy... Man.. This dude is crazy... I have met this dude several times @ SF and he really is a nut case!!! :D (Cheers Doug!!!)

I guess you'd enjoy it too!!

Cheers!
-Roshan Amadoru
The MadGuy

Past Present & Future!! (Bonus: M$ Dumbness)

2009-06-07T21:40:00.000+06:00

Alright folks.. I'm back on blogging after some real shitty time!!! I've not been able to keep up with my stuffs so had to spend a freaking lot of time ironing out what I have messed over the last couple of months.. Now I'm back!! Hell yeah.. I'm not gonna stop writing my blog this time!!! No.. I wont!!! So you all the readers out there who have been reading this shitty blog, make sure to read the shit i'm gonna write now on too!!!

It's been a crazy time!! Believe me... I know i'm crazy.. But this is like double crazy!!! or shall I say it is more!!! Work, lecturing, thinking about the future, dreaming to buy ... ehm... ehm.... a car, building my parent's house, etc kept me buzy all this time!!!! Few plans are on the table.. It's just I need to find some time to execute 'em... There's no fucking reason why I should not be executing those plans!!! No offence!! But I gotta live... I mean it!! gotta live strong... I'll keep you all posted what I'm gonna be upto in the near future!!

Some of you might know I've been reading geekherocomics (http://www.geekherocomic.com/) since some time. (Ok Salvatore, Now I gave you some more traffic.. ;) ).. There was one killer stripe which pointed out the dumbness of M$.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168702

You gotta read that... To solve the given issue (ok.. you still didnt checkout the link did you??), this is their workaround...

Method 2: Move Your Mouse Pointer
If you move your mouse pointer continuously while the data is being returned to Microsoft Excel, the query may not fail. Do not stop moving the mouse until all the data has been returned to Microsoft Excel.

They really are dumb!!

So for now... I gotta get back to some work... Oh boy!! I gotta mark some twenty odd courseworks... and yeah i have to catch up with my facebook updates and twitter updates.. So, I'll catch you all around.. Keep in touch.. And hey, leave some comment... At least just say Hi. :)

Cheers!!!
-Roshan Amadoru
The MadGuy

Catch me on Twitter - http://twitter.com/amadoru
On Skype - roshan.thushara

Home sweet Home

2009-04-13T08:03:00.000+06:00

Ok, some of (or most of - I don’t know) you might know that I’m not from around Colombo.. In fact, I'm not quite sure where I’m from.. however, my parents live in hill country – Bandarawela – since sometime.. I have to tell ya, You gotta love this place.. Awesome weather, quiet neighborhood, makes me feel that I don’t wanna go back to Colombo.. In fact, who doesn’t love to live with their parents.. At least, I myself do love to live with ‘em. But can’t help it, given the nature of the work I have to go back to Colombo and work and no way of live my life with my parents, unless, of course I decided to become a farmer or something.. :)

It’s the New Year. The most awesome time of the year. You get to eat all the foods you ever wanted to eat.. :D maaan.. I’m a food lover… Kokis, Dodol, Ashluwa (Aluwa), I’m starting to go crazy… :D.. My mother is a great cook.. And she makes sure that I have my stomach full all 24 hours.. hehe… Too bad I’m missing my eldest brother this New Year. He can’t make it to SL this time so I wouldn’t get to see him, sis-in-law or the nephew for real. But thanks to internet video calling, life is a little easy even with remote family members :).

Alrighty, ciao for now.. I have some sweets to finish off… :D

Cheers,
-Roshan Amadoru
The MadGuy

Back to Life from Death

2009-04-01T04:05:00.000+06:00

It's been a while since my last post.. Even I haven't read my Google reader for like 2-3 weeks and it has several thousands of unread posts... It was a crazy time you know.. But now I guess I am back on track... So "Back to Life from Death"...

It is strange to see even most of my friend's do not regularly maintain their blogs nowadays... VPJs (www.xvpj.net) last post was on Feb 7th.. Spooki's (www.spookik.info/) domain has expired.. Sanda's (www.sandaru1.com/) was on 24th December 2008.. Whaaaaaat???

So I thought of breaking the loop and putting myself back on blogging... At least.. It's fun... In fact, you get yourself writing something you like, not something you are being asked to write or you are forced to write...

Today is going to be a strange day... Believe me... I have started the day at 2 in the morning today and here I am writing a blog post early morning... There were hell lot of topics that I was thinking of writing about over the last few weeks but didnt really get a chance to... But here I am right now writing BS.. :D.

Apperently VideoLan player has changed their logo today.. And also it appears to be that Google has introduced a cool football today in Australia, which gathers all your playing statistics.. Dont forget to check them out today at http://www.videolan.org/ and http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/gball/..

Dont forget... Today is the first day of April... ;)

Cheers!
-Roshan Amadoru
The MadGuy

You Rock!! You Rule!!

2009-02-07T14:08:00.001+06:00

While going through some of my mails, I saw this drawing somewhere middle in an email and i couldn't resist posting that drawing here.

This is about literally Rocking and Ruling.. ;)

Cheers!
-Roshan Amadoru
The MadGuy

Finally on Twitter

2009-02-07T11:01:00.000+06:00

All this time I was thinking whether or not to put my step into twitter.. I thought it might not be very exciting comparing to facebook.. But apperently I'm wrong and that's all BS.. Twitter is cool and it may be a way to get rid of facebook and still keep in touch with others.. hehe.. (no offense facebook, myspace, or hi5)

Anyway, if you guys are on twitter, be sure to follow me there so we could stay in touch.

http://twitter.com/Amadoru

Dont have much time to write here... I've got a design document to prepare and release at least today before I put myself in trouble.

See ya laterz.. Be Good!!!

Cheers!
-Roshan Amadoru
The MadGuy

Life

2009-01-31T19:15:00.000+06:00

There is no bitter experience than loosing someone close to you forever. Let it be a friend of yours, relative, or you pet doggy. Death is a common experience to any living thing in the universe. Everyone knows that they die but doesnt know when.

I'm a Buddhist. I grew up in somewhat more than average religious background. I used to remember lots and lots of 'pirith' and 'gatha' by memory when I was a teenager. I still remember most of those but since I'm not attached with temple much anymore, I cannot recall some of them. Anyway, as a Buddhist I believe that we should not feel sad when someone dies. Since my childhood, I really didn't shread tears on anyone who died, even they are close to me. It is true that I felt sad all those times, but shreading tears doesnt bring them back and it would make others feel sad too.

One of my uncles were suffering from cancer since about two years.His mother and my grandmother were sisters. He's not a rich person. He used to be a bus driver at CTB for the last 25 years. But he had to say bye bye to his carrier when he found out that he's suffering from a liver cancer two years back. He was treated for his cancer at Karapitiya hospital and his liver was removed because doctors couldnt control cancer being spread. Because of this, for the last two years, he had to carry a speacial bag tied down to his body which is used to unload all his urines.

But things were alright and he was fine until he felt a huge pain in his body about four months back. He was admitted to Maharagama cancer hospital and he was treated there four months. But only after 3 and 1/2 months doctors realized that his cancer has been spreaded all over his body including few spots in the brain. The situation was critical so doctors has done 2 weeks of treatments in 2 days including electric shocks. When i went to see him on the weekend two weeks back, he was just a skeleton covered by a very thin skin. He had not eaten anything for last four months and he was surviving with the help of water and saline. He was having such a terrible pain.

Last weekend he passed away. :| he left the world forever. After a long long time, I've shreaded tears at a funeral, just for him. I was feeling bad. really bad. I was feeling bad becuase only once I went to see him to the hospital for the last four months. I was delaying and delaying visiting him and I could make him only once. Yet, I'm glad I made it before he died. When we visit him he had lost some of his memory. He could not recognize my parents for sometime. But I'm glad he could recall who I am. He loved us alot. Yeah. We loved him too. When he see me he could recognize me just like that and he could even recall where I work and what I do. But now, he's not here. I'm sad. I'm praying for him wishing that he will find the Nirwana soon.

Loku Maama.. We all loves and misses you alot..

-Roshan Amadoru

It's been a while but I'm starting to blog again

2009-01-24T20:19:00.000+06:00

Hm.... It's been a while since my last post.... I'm not quite sure why I didn't write anything.. But somehow I just didn't... anyway, I'm glad that I have readers (at least a few) for this blog... :)

Today I was reading a book... ( ok .. ok .. don't be surprised... aite ? ) there was a nice quote which was taken from something called "The Devil's Dictionary"...

Web 2.0, Proper Noun

The name given to the social and technical sophistication and maturity that mark the— Oh, screw it. Money! Money money money! Money! The money’s back! Ha ha! Money!

That's crazy and stupid.

Cheers!
-Roshan Amadoru
The MadGuy

I should be the worst blogger ever :D

2008-10-06T22:32:00.000+06:00

I'm terrible at keeping up with blogging... Last 2 weeks was like a hell... So many things going on + travel back to Sri Lanka from San Francisco... It was a tough 2 weeks... No break at all since 8-9 days back.. No break even after i reach Sri Lanka... Went home on tuesday midnight and work at office from Wednesday... I'm a terrible human being... :D

Nothing new during last few weeks... Saw some interesting thing which has been done by some of our Zone24x7 folks. They have deployed Google Android on a Nokia 810... Superb...

Ah.. one another thing.. Thanks to Sandaru1, i got enough trouble from Customs at Singapore Changi airport... I had to give a "ane budu sir! " talk to them to convince them to let me walk away with all my heavy hand luggages... (Limit is 7Kg and I had around 20 Kg of hand luggages :D)...

I'm back to work.. Man.. I have enough work now... Will write... Sometime...

Laterzzz...

Cheers!
-Roshan Amadoru
The MadGuy

Oracle Night - The worst party ever

2008-09-24T05:45:00.000+06:00

I like parties… Well… Why not… I guess everyone likes parties… What about when you get to go to a party organized by software kings… Lets say Google ?? Oracle ???

Well.. Google’s party is history now.. They just had it last month or month before… I lost the track… But… That was a one awesome party in the silicon valley… I’m glad I could make it to that party this time…

Anyway, I’m feeling lucky… :D… I found my way in to the Big Bang Oracle party… “Oracle Tech Night” A.K.A. OTN… I was so excited… Yes I was..

OTN happened last night at Hilton Hotel San Francisco… All the Oracle Openworld conference attendees were invited to the party… So I could go there… If you don’t know what Oracle Openworld conference is, check it out @ http://www.oracle.com/openworld/2008/index.html

Back to story… So… The party was happening at 3 ballrooms in the hotel... In one ballroom it was a competition about comic book heroes and Oracle… The host was doing a good job and of course, people who were watching this competition going on gave a good help to competitors by shouting the answers loudly.. Ultimately this competition has become more of a "how good cheater you are" rather than "how much do you know"... :D.. That was great...

There was a game zone in another ballroom... People were playing with PS3 and Wii consoles... What the hell... They were playing some boring games man… Such a stupid crew of cowards... Those games were boring.... Well… at least for me… I believe I have a good taste when it comes to games…

I was bored so I thought of trying out the DJ which was happening in another ballroom... Oh man… I should definitely keep a note about the DJ… DJ Solomon… I don’t know where the hell he came from… But… He didn’t do a good job at all… He could mix the songs very smoothly… But yet, what’s the point of playing songs if you can’t dance for them… His song collection simply sucks… Such a pity… They should be very careful when they are getting a DJ for a big party like this… DJ @ Google dance was awesome… I wish someone like that was there to do DJ…

After wrapping up the party @ 11, everyone was invited to join the after dark party at Vessel club, close to Union Sq. SF. That DJ was wayyyyyy better than the DJ Solomon dude… DJ at Vessel did a good job but… The crowed there was all 40+ aunties and uncles… :D… Well.. yeah.. there were some hot chicks too.. But the ratio is very low… Am I in USA or Egypt ? Damn…

Anyway… That’s all about the OTN… That was B… O… R… I… N… G… But what to do… I wish I stayed over at the apartment and watched the Heroes season premiere on NBC-HD in high definition… Should give a try to watch the repeat on Saturday night… :)

Cheers!
-Roshan Amadoru
The MadGuy

HTC is Dreaming

2008-09-21T04:26:00.000+06:00

Around 1 month back HTC got the FCC approval for the world's first Android based mobile phone. "HTC Dream". As per my knowledge, Tilt was the all time best product from HTC. But Dream has already become a big buzz and i would predict it will become more popular than iPhone. But I'm not sure whether the Dream can beat the iphone sound quality considering the fact that apple is so much fine grained with its sound quality.

However Android is a fully customizable OS. So people get a high flexibility over other products around. After all, it's opensource.. So you can do whatever you want with it when you have a proper device.. However I'm not quite sure HTC is planning to provide the network lock features for Dream.. Because anyone with linux knowledge will be able to re-port the OS into the device.. This sort of puts T-mobile in trouble.. But I guess that should be alright becuase no matter if someone use the device in T-mobile network or in another network, T-mobile is going to get the monthly fee for the respective mobile/data plan. So no worries..

And the best thing here is you dont have to pay money to anyone to publish your application. With iPhone that's not the case. You have to get a API key for some hundred bucks.. (may be thousand.. i'm not sure the upper margin. but lower margin is $100 if i'm right)..

From the apperence also I sortta like Dream rather than iPhone.. In fact, Dream has got an qwerty keyboard :D... That really helps when you need to type something like an SMS or whatever... when it comes to typing sortta thing, iPhone sucks.. litererly... it does.. at least for me..

Anywayz.. We'll see how Dream would go.. Lets wait till this Dream become a reality.

Cheers!
-Roshan Amadoru
The MadGuy

My Old Blog

2008-09-09T00:16:00.000+06:00

I just thought I should link my old blog here.. I simply believe the content of this blog is so childish.. hehe :).. But.. I guess I should appreciate my past... :).. Past is not that wonderful.. But I feel happy about myself today when i look back :)...

http://developerparadise.blogspot.com

Cheers!
-Roshan Amadoru
The MadGuy

Facebook... A platform for intruders??

2008-09-06T10:06:00.000+06:00

Today ZDNet report news about facebook and it took the attention of so many people. ZDNet today reported that facebook has some flaws which the intruders can used the platform as a platform to DoS botnet.. (Well.. DoS is Denial of Service).. This report says that researchers at ICS (which I don’t know what) were able to develop a proof of concept facebook application to show that facebook platform can be used as a botnet...

This proof of concept is an application called "Photo of the Day" which shows images took from national geographic. So for you, what this does is, it simply displays an image in your profile.. But behind the seen, it proves how malicious a facebook app can be... Of course they do not make any harm to you or your profile. But what they do in this POT is they behind the scene calls a 3rd party server and request larger files..

Well... You might think... "What the heck... Why do we bother and would it be a problem at all? "... Well yes… it is a problem.. Let’s say it there's an application with 100,000 users… and this application is a botnet and requests a 500kb file from someone elses server each time… Each user one profile view per month would cost a 50GB of bandwidth to that server... even without your knowledge about that request and that server host doesnt get anything out of that 50GB request… and these social networking models work in such a way that obviously a single page makes more hits than 1 per month.. even though you dont login to your profile, someone else would be looking at your profile... so that person will be making requests to that 3rd party server and likewise, the wasted bandwidth of that 3rd party server would be magnitudes of what has been calculated, which would basically bring down their business and since these requests happens though the social network users, they become unable to trace a particular individual who makes these requests to server so they'd basically have to kill themselves.. What else?

And knowing this fact, facebook appeared to be in a denial of fixing this issue with their API, which is I would say insane.. If you are famous enough and you provide several services, you should make sure other's don’t utilize it in a malicious way to bring down some other rivals..

Facebook.. You better take this issue into the account and fix the API.. Or else, if the word spread around the globe, people might tend to not use facebook application no more.. You'd better rewrite a more restrictive API than you currently do..

Cheers!
-Roshan Amadoru
The MadGuy

~~~ I've got hoes ~~~ In different area code ~~~ (Just the song i listen right now ;) )

Chrome - Google's take into the browser war - I like it... I like it not....

2008-09-03T03:11:00.000+06:00

Just few hours back Google released their latest product, Google Chrome (http://www.google.com/chrome) and officially entered to the browser war, which would definitely scare other leading browser vendors.

The development of Chrome was under cover until the Google announced yesterday that they will be releasing Chrome browser today... This has become THE news in all over the internet and of course virtually everywhere...

Let's see what's Chrome got and what's not! (the versino number is 0.2.149)

What's cool with Chrome

It has the sexiest UI I've seen in a browser. In fact, it's sexier than the Apple Safari.
There is no title bar. So you save the real-estate of the browser to see more contents.
Faster JS engine... This is a good news for AJAX dudes...
Faster searching of browser history.. However they should introduce real-time filtering of browser history just the same way browsers like Mozilla Firefox does... Pressing the enter button may not be very interesting...
Incognito - personal browsing - no history records made - ideal for browsing **** stuffs.. hehe..
After all... It's opensource.... :)

What's missing with Chrome

Search bar.. I really miss this.. I know that by typing the thing in the address bar does the search but there are times it is not suitable. Since there is more real-estate left in the address bar field, I believe they can easily introduce a search bar.
Plug-in development API. This is seriously missing... There going to be no plugins for Chrome??? Damn....
Where the heck is status bar ?? Looks like they've forgotten about it... With Chrome, there's no way that you can figure out which link you are pointing to in a page.. you have to click on it to figure it out.. or atleast right click options... that sucks...
Renderer is based on Webkit project which is under LGPL. I believe this sort of reduces the flexibility of enhancing the browser rendering...
I'm not sure if it has a configurer such as "about:config" in the firefox. I only found a page called "about:memory", which would show the memory consumption of each tab... But still, they seems to have forgotten to remove some debug information. :D
Open all bookmarks ??? Dont click on it... It is too much at the root level of bookmarks.. I have more than 50 bookmarks and i clicked on this button and you know what.... it opened all the tabs.. Guess what... It didn't stuck... Really.... I mean really really...

What's the catch with Chrome ??? Did you think that ?? If you check the windows task manager you can see it yourself... Chrome runs a single process per tab, where as with firefox, it's just a thread in the same process... So you know how it's faster... But yet, I can see Chrome is eating up my memory with multiple tabs though it didnt get stuck yet.. hehe...

Oh one other thing.. Right now I accidently closed down the tab on chrome which i was writing this post on blogger... That's the time i noticed it doesnt publish all the event and in fact, even blogger didnt know it's closing the tab... hehe... But with firefox, it gives me a warning if i try to close down a tab with a post while i'm editing it... Also it didnt notify me when I was closing the entire browser with multiple tabs open.. I can't find a way to customize it either.

I'm not really confident about Chrome yet... I guess it's time for me to get back to the GINI NARIYA!!! The Firefox!!!

Cheers!
-Roshan Amadoru
The MadGuy

Google Lively - Next Generation 3D Chatting

2008-09-02T08:29:00.000+06:00

Today I was browsing through the latest stuffs out from Google labs and I have noticed their latest chat application, Google Lively...

http://www.lively.com

It is still in an interim period and yet to be graduated from the Google Labs, so still a beta... Lively is a modern 3D chat, I would say something similar to Second Life, but of course something different... I believe sooner or later this would be highly popular but at the same time I'm getting this weird feeling that this will become a sort of mess with the growing number of users.. I dont know.. My thinking may be too little...

However, It seems like this is consuming a lot of CPU and network bandwidth... I'm not quite sure coz i don't have a way to monitor the consumption of network with my broadband dongle...

Anyway, There's no point of explaining this to you.. Just get your hands into Lively and experience it yourself.. You can use your regular google account for this as well...

Anyway, today is a holiday for USA... I'm gonna chill ;)...

Cheers!
-Roshan Amadoru
The MadGuy

Damn.... I missed it....

2008-08-31T22:01:00.000+06:00

Just yesterday or day before I found that that there is a some crazy event in San Francisco.... Guess what.... That's called "World Naked Bike Ride, San Francisco"......... :D..... I was just Googling for something when I found this link and I was like Man.... I missed it... Their website says it happens every year and this time, it was in mid June, just two weeks prior I came to San Francisco this time... Too bad :(..

Here I'm putting the link to that website, but if you are underage, don't click on it...

http://sanfrancisco.worldnakedbikeride.org/Gallery.html

I'm surprised this event happens at so many places around the world but this is happening in San Francisco is not very surprising.... San Francisco is known THE weirdest city in US.. (well... at least for CA)... You can find all the weird people around here.... I mean it... And there's no wonder this is the Gay and Lesbian capital in the world... there's a whole area little bit away from downtown, called Castro Street, which is sortta reserved for the gay/lesbian community... This is horrible....

On the other hand, TV stations have programs for Gay/Lesbians as well... One or two weeks back, I was watching a tv show on MTV and you know what was the show? .... Well... The program was built around Gay guys and in this program one Gay dude has to blind date mothers of 3 Gay guys and depending on that date, choose the Gay dude he wants to date... Oh man... This is insane and horible... World is weird now...

Cheers!
-Roshan Amadoru
The MadGuy

Burning Man Project - Will you do it

2008-08-30T01:00:00.000+06:00

Well... Majority of you may not know what Burning Man project is... Let me give you an introduction.

Burning Man is a very famous event in California, Nevada and some other states in United States... It was initially started in 1986 in San Francisco and due to the high number of participants and some other reasons, it was moved to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada (of course, what else you would expect in Nevada rather than desert and Casinos :D)... If you need more info, of course they have a website.

www.burningman.com

As per the project organizers Burning man is something dedicated to radical self reliance, radical self expression, and ART. Innovative sculpture, installations, performance, theme camps, art cars, blah blah blah.... Well... Something missing here is of course about the considerable number of naked men and women in the playa... hehe... (This year there are about 40000 people that's gonna participate on this)..

Burning man 2008 is happening this whole week and the man burns in another day. Burning man is something which I believe is quite cool to witness, but yet I doubt I should go there to experience it... I will probably watch it on TV or on a website...

IMHO, Burning man is just for psychos.. You might be thinking that I'm a psycho too.. That's alright.. I'm trying to pretend I'm not... :) So anyway, Im not gonna go into that stupid desert for the playa.. I dont wanna live a week there with hardly some water... Instead, I would go to Valejo and do Rollar Coasters... :D

Cheers!
-Roshan Amadoru
The MadGuy