Dilantha.info

No Cheques

Dilantha — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 08:31:31 +0000

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 remember this story.

So this guy was also trying to pay for a repair as well but he hadn’t brought enough money. So he was saying he could give them a personal cheque but the cashier wouldn’t take those. Only cash or credit card she said. Then the old guy says “I was the governor of the central bank you know …” smiled and sat down.

In his day a personal cheque would have been good as gold.

Times have changed. I don’t think anyone in Sri Lanka now accepts personal cheques as payment for immediate goods. I mean you could pay a bill or something but you can’t take your goods until it becomes cash.

There is zero trust because people bounce cheques all the time. When one bank kicks you out there are a half a dozen more to take you in. When one company fails you just shut down and make another. There is no credibility, trust or honor in business or individuals.

When I’m looking to buy a long term product or service I wonder if that company will be there in 5 or 10 years to honor my guarantee.

Fix this if you want to move ahead and do ‘good business’.

Hiring

Dilantha — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 04:35:58 +0000

I’m looking to hire a PHP and or Java person with about 2 years experience.

Also a Linux admin / QA Release manager

Gmail Update

Dilantha — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 16:07:39 +0000

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 about 16 pixels higher on the screen.

Now that’s the kind of detail most people don’t bother with. These days sweating the small stuff seems to be the way to keep above the competition.

SimpleXMLElement attributes

Dilantha — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:50:40 +0000

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 and it was dropping in serialized SimpleXMLElement objects rather than urls.

If you go to the relevant PHP manual page you will find a comment that explains that you need to cast these attributes as string to get the value I was looking to store.

What was more interesting was Googling php SimpleXMLElement shows the solution on the second result as a summery.

Damn they are good.

iPad Hype

Dilantha — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 16:32:25 +0000

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 had one I could have written this post with the latest WordPress app for the iPad.

Selling out

Dilantha — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 06:55:01 +0000

The state of Java and MySql are changing. In case you missed it. Sun bought MySql and Oracle bought Sun. I’ve been working on Java for over 10 years and MySql for over 5 now. I’m not happy with what is happening.

The Java and MySql websites have changed. On the mysql.com site there is no prominent link to get to the community edition. If you go to mysql.org to redirects to dev.mysql.com where you can find it.

This is not good for me or a country like Sri Lanka. Most of the solutions I’ve been involved over the years have used open source foundations. So we were able to deliver solutions to clients at a very reasonable cost. If things get too commercial I’m a afraid the licensing costs will far overtake the implementation costs.

I’m sure there will always be open source or free to use versions of Java and MySql, but with a large commercial entity backing them profit comes first then community. I don’t know I think its time to look at some alternatives.

Update: They got to VirtualBox too.

Crazy Emails

Dilantha — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:01:02 +0000

Please don’t email me prayers or jokes with hundreds of people CC’ed. There is a very high likelihood I would delete them without even opening it.

I’m serious. You wonder how you get spammed so much its because you forward very free iPod giveaway email to all our buddies and get them in the spam ring as well.

Think about it. When was the last time anyone you know really got a free iPod?

Show/ Hide Hidden Files In Mac Finder

Dilantha — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 12:22:04 +0000

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

I manually changed this a couple of times, but its annoying to do all the time. So I thought of adding it to a bash script to make things easier.

#!/bin/bash
 
SHOW_FILES=`defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles`
 
if [ $SHOW_FILES = "FALSE" ]; then
	defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
else
	defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
fi
killall Finder

References
Mac OS X – Show / Hide Hidden Files in Finder

BlackBerry Shortcuts

Dilantha — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 11:33:14 +0000

I’m not that savvy on the BlackBerry yet but I’ve discovered these few shortcuts on the BlackBerry Curve 8900 which are super useful.

alt + left shift gets you into number mode
shift + scroll selects messages
alt + scroll scrolls pages

Twenty Ten List

Dilantha — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:19:42 +0000

Here is my list for 2010, its always good to have a list.

MongoDB sounds promising
The mobile web/app space.
Android will kill the iPhone star
Yet Apple will keep making products we want to buy
Virtual private servers and cloud services
Ruby on Rails is too significant to ignore for PHP/Java folks
Linux will not take over the desktop market
Mac will continue to grow into the desktop market. With a pretty enough GUI and a Unix like back-end I’m not missing Linux
Linux will continue to grow in phones, TV’s, media players and everywhere else
Content aggregation, filtering and personalization
Sri Lanka as usual will be like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.

That’s it for now. Got any more?