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A Sixth Grade Mobile Applications Developer

Imesh Gunaratne — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 06:20:00 GMT

This is fascinating! Thomas Suarez is a 6th grade student at a middle school in the South Bay of Los Angeles. This a talk he did at TEDx on his current work and future plans on mobile applications development.

Two Kodak Moments - 11 11 11 - 11 11 11

Imesh Gunaratne — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 09:12:00 GMT

Today is 2011 November 11th and it is written as 11 11 11. So there are two kodak moments for the day.

1. 11 11 11 - 11 11 11 AM

2. 11 11 11 - 11 11 11 PM

All About Steve Jobs

Imesh Gunaratne — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:36:00 GMT

It's all there!! Steve on stage, at work, at home and key people he loved. You may read your self.

http://allaboutstevejobs.com

This is a private web site written by Romain Moisescot and has no affiliation with any of Steve's companies. A great job Romain!

Just one thing to think about. If you just look at his pictures page, you will see a series of his photographs shown on the top from his younger days to the days just before he died. For me this shows the ultimate truth of life.

Play MKV HD Video on Your Sony Bravia TV

Imesh Gunaratne — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 17:47:00 GMT

The Sony Bravia CX520 does not play HD video files in MKV format. May be there is no codec in the TV. However there is a fix for this. What you need is a network router, host pc , network cables and Serviio DLNA media server.

Solution:

Connect the TV and the PC to the network router and install Serviio DLNA media server in the PC. Serviio is one of the best free DLNA servers available. It seems like that even Sony recommends Serviio. Once this is done start the Serviio service and the console in the PC. Then share your MKV files via the media library in the Serviio console and enable Transcoding. This feature will stream you HD MKV video content to the TV in a playable format. That's it, just browse the media server in the TV and enjoy your media content.

TrackID

Imesh Gunaratne — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 07:34:00 GMT

This is simply amazing. TrackID is an online service provided by Gracenote (formerly called CDDB and has acquired by Sony in 2009) which can identify songs just by listening to part of it. This application comes with Sony mobile phones, latest TV sets and many other entertainment products.

Whenever your device is playing a song (may be on radio in your mobile phone or on TV) you can ask TrackID to track it. It sends a sample (or may be several samples) of the audio to the online service and returns a list of songs that matches the audio clip. The accuracy of the predicted song list is very high. Pretty amazing, this process happens within seconds.

According to Sony, Gracenote currently has more than 2.5 million songs in its database. The concern is, how can TrackID traverse through 2.5 million songs and match a song within few seconds? May be with a cloud with high computing power.

Using Amazon EC2 .NET SDK for Openstack

Imesh Gunaratne — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 08:45:00 GMT

The Amazon EC2 .NET SDK can be used to access Openstack. However the current version (1.3.13.1) has a bug. It does not consider the port when preparing the Signature for the request. Therefore you may see the request being failed in the Openstack cloud controller with a signature mismatch error.

There is a patch released to fix this problem. Basically what it does is, include the custom port number if the IsDefaultPort property is set to false when preparing the signature based on the parameters.

How to apply this patch:

1. Download source files of the EC2 SDK from http://aws.amazon.com/sdkfornet/

2. Open the project in Visual Studio.

3. Open the AWSSDKUtils.cs file found in Amazon.Util folder.

4. Add the below code block just after data.Append(endpoint.Host); line in CalculateStringToSignV2() method.

if (!endpoint.IsDefaultPort)
{
    data.Append(":" + endpoint.Port);
}

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Imesh Gunaratne — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 08:33:31 GMT

One of the visionaries of our time passed away on 5th October 2011.

"Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple."

http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/

This shows how much Steve has done for Apple and the rest of the world.

Digital TV Channels in Sri Lanka

Imesh Gunaratne — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 15:11:00 GMT

DVB, Digital Video Broadcasting is a new term for Sri Lankans may be except for people who use Satellite TV receivers. Currently all most all the local television channels are broadcasted in Analogue format.

Very recently I tuned my television's digital receiver and found 8 digital channels:

Rupavahini
Channel Eye
ITN
Channel C
The Buddhist
CSN
City Hits
A Tamil Channel (Couldn't find the name)

These channels may be still in testing stage (not so sure). Except for Channel Eye all other channels are very clear. The good thing about DVB is it does not require a special antenna.

According to dvb.org there seems to be a plan to make all the local television channels in Sri Lanka into digital by 2017.

DLNA - A Protocol for sharing Photos, Music & Video

Imesh Gunaratne — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 07:17:00 GMT

DLNA, Digital Living Network Alliance is a non profit organization established by Sony in year 2003. DLNA defines a protocol for sharing Photos, Music and Video among difference types of electronic devices. Most of the electronic device manufactures today has joined DLNA to enable this technology on their products.

Scenario 1:

Sony has included DLNA in their latest TV sets to let the consumers to browse media content from the home network. This is simply amazing. Today's TV sets are not just boxes that display pictures and output sound. They are almost like very user friendly computers. The ingredients needed to enable this setup are; a Sony Bravia TV with DLNA technology, a network router, a Windows PC with Windows Media Player 11 or higher, and network cables (even the TV can be connected with WiFi). Once the PC and the TV are connected to the home network and media is shared from the Windows Media Player all shared content can be watched from the TV. How cool is that? :-) No need to copy media content to a portable storage device and connect it to the TV.

Scenario 2:

Nokia had enabled this technology sometime back in Nokia N Series phones. In this setup media files can be shared using Nokia Home Media Server and those can be browse from a N Series phone by connecting to the home network via WiFi.

Lions Roar To The Finals

Imesh Gunaratne — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 17:12:00 GMT

Very well done guys!! :-) Today Sri Lankans fielded and boweled really well against the New Zealands at the Semi Finals of ICC Cricket World Cup 2011. Upul Tharanga started the batting order with some smashing hits and Dilshan and Sanga played their innings really well. It was Murali's last ODI match in his home country. Everyone was wishing him and appreciating his contribution to the world of Cricket.

At the middle of the game there was a small confusion when few wickets fell for around ten to twenty runs. Finally Mathews and Samaraweera reached the wining score with confidence. It was a great captaincy by Kumar Sangakkara, we should really appreciate his words in Sinhala at the presentation ceremony.

Great work guys!! Wish you all the very best for the Finals!!