Kavinda Munasinghe's Blog

Brighten up your day

Kavinda — Thu, 07 May 2009 03:57:10 +0000

Two emails “From my inbox” to jump start your day; a bit of humor and video guaranteed to bring out a smile.

Always trust history. In the USA, it was said,

“When a black man becomes President, pigs will fly.”

Just 100 days after Obama’s election…….wham!!

Pigs flu!

Laugh, and now now smile. I have no idea what she’s singing about, but you gotta love the expressions!

Behavioral Advertising huh?

Kavinda — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:43:20 +0000

Advertisers are watching what you do - It's called behavioral targeting

Did you know that you’ve opted in to behavioral advertising programs when you decided to browse the internet?

What’s behavioral advertising anyway? Advertising companies say it’s their way of Making ads more interesting. It simply a method of displaying ads based on the information collected on your web surfing activities such as the web pages you’ve visited or the search activities done by you etc. Using this information, the ads will not only be contextual to the content on the page, but also to your other browsing activities.

That’s all good.

But, maybe we’d like to have a say in this. Perhaps know that we’re being tracked? Visit the NAI website to find out who has been tracking you and to also opt out of behavioral advertising if it bothers you. Thanks Seth for the link.

Suba Aluth Avruddak Vewa! Say it in a SMS

Kavinda — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:17:25 +0000

Suba aluth avruddak vewa - Sinhala and Tamil new year 2009

Althought I havent posted anything since Jan 1 2009; this is a post I’ve always been making with the exception of 2006. The good ol Sinhala and Tamil new year greeting.

This year, I thought I’d post some of the Sinhala Tamil new years greetings that were sent vai SMS. Got any good ones you’d like to share?

———-

Thrivida Rathnaye ånubavayen labuwawu aluth avurudda,Bathin, Bulathin, Kiriyen, Paniyen uthurana SUBAMA SUBA ALUTH AVURUDDAK VEWA…!!!

———-

Labuwa wu sinhala aluth awrudda obatath pawle samatath Suwadayaka samaya sathuta piruna wasanawantha awruddak wewa.

———-

K€€p Th€
Smil€
L€av€ Th€
T€nsion
F€€L Th€
Joy
Forg€t Th€
Worry
Hold Th€
P€ac€
L€av€ Th€
Pain
Wish u n ur family a HAPPY NEW YEAR!

———-

33KOTIYAK ROGA
84DAHAK DOSA
9KOTIYAK APALA
EKI NOKI
ANAVINA KODIVINA
DURRIN BUTHA VU
KIRIYEN PANIYEN
ETHURUNA NIROGIMATH
SUBA ALUTH AURUDDAKATA
AU BO VEVA !

———-

Pathum ituwana waasanawantha nawa wasarak wevaa

———-

Kalu kaputa sudu wana thuru, mol gahe dalu lana thuru 120 ta 220k awada ayubo wewa. Siri suba aluth awuruddak wewa.

———-

Sampath Sapiri, sith Pubudu karana,Maxma Max,Hitma Hit, Professionaly Pragathiya karayana,Heta sathuta Ada sithata labena,Samaya Poliwena,Saubhagyaya Bonus Poliwena ekama Sanhindak pamula,HETA DINA ELIYA KARANA Nawa Wasarakata asiri.

———-

Words
begin
vth..

A
B
C

Numbers
begin
vth..

1
2
3

Music
begins
vth..

sa
re
ga

Bt
nw year
begins
vth..

My greetings..
Happy new year!!

New Year’s Wishes – 2009

Kavinda — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 03:03:29 +0000

May you get a clean bill of health from your dentist, your cardiologist, your gastro-enterologist, your urologist, your proctologist, your podiatrist, your psychiatrist, your plumber and the I.R.S.

May your hair, your teeth, your face-lift, your abs and your stocks not fall; and may your blood pressure, your triglycerides, your cholesterol, your white blood count and your mortgage interest not rise.

May New Year’s Eve find you seated around the table, together with your beloved family and cherished friends. May you find the food better, the environment quieter, the cost much cheaper, and the pleasure much more fulfilling than anything else you might ordinarily do that night.

May what you see in the mirror delight you, and what others see in you delight them. May someone love you enough to forgive your faults, be blind to your blemishes, and tell the world about your virtues.

May the telemarketers wait to make their sales calls until you finish dinner, may the commercials on TV not be louder than the program you have been watching, and may your check book and your budget balance – and include generous amounts for charity.

May you remember to say “I love you” at least once a day to your spouse, your child, your parent, your siblings; but not to your secretary, your nurse, your masseuse, your hairdresser or your tennis instructor.

And may we live in a world at peace and with the awareness of the beauty in every sunset, every flower’s unfolding petals, every baby’s smile, every lover’s kiss, and every wonderful, astonishing, miraculous beat of our heart.

[Original Source Unknown]

With all that said, wish you all a very happy new year!

2009 Sri Lanka holidays for Microsoft Outlook

Kavinda — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 06:33:39 +0000

The New Year is just around the corner, and it looks like some folks just like to prepare for it in advance. So for the pleasure of those of you who like to have your Microsoft Outlook calendar ready for the next year, I’m posting the 2009 Sri Lanka holidays list a little earlier than usual.

I made this list based on the desk calander published at http://documents.gov.lk with the exception of treating Poya days as mercantile holidays; the gov.lk calander does not show any of the poya days as holidays. Maybe thats a change for 2009?

If you don’t know what to do with the following list, please see the 2008 Sri Lanka Holidays post for instructions.

– – – – – – – – – Start Copy – – – – – – – – –

[Sri Lanka] 26
Duruthu Full Moon Poya Day (BPM),2009/1/10
Tamil Thai Pongal Day (BPM),2009/1/14
National Day (BPM),2009/2/4
Navam Full Moon Poya Day (BPM),2009/2/9
Maha Sivarathri Day (BP),2009/2/23
Medin Full Moon Poya Day (BPM),2009/3/10
Milad-Un-Nabi (Holy Prophet’s Birthday) (BPM),2009/3/10
Bak Full Moon Poya Day (BPM),2009/4/9
Good Friday (BP),2009/4/10
Day Prior to Sinhala & Tamil New Year Day (BPM),2009/4/13
Sinhala & Tamil New Year Day (BPM),2009/4/14
May Day (BPM),2009/5/1
Vesak Full Moon Poya Day (BPM),2009/5/8
Day following Vesak Full Moon Poya Day (BPM),2009/5/9
Poson Full Moon Poya Day (BPM),2009/6/7
Esala Full Moon Poya Day (BPM),2009/7/6
Nikini Full Moon Poya Day (BPM),2009/8/5
Binara Full Moon Poya Day (BPM),2009/9/4
Id-Ul-Fitr (Ramazan Festival Day) (BP),2009/9/21
Vap Full Moon Poya Day (BPM),2009/10/3
Deepavali Festival Day (BP),2009/10/17
Il Full Moon Poya Day (BPM),2009/11/2
Id-Ul-Alha (Hadji Festival Day) (BP),2009/11/28
Unduvap Full Moon Poya Day (BPM),2009/12/1
Christmas Day (BPM),2009/12/25
Duruthu Full Moon Poya Day (BPM),2009/12/31

– – – – – – End Copy – – – – – – –

Always use https now in Google Apps Standard Edition

Kavinda — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 04:10:20 +0000

Gmail users have been able to configure Gmail to use SSL for their email accounts since July, and then in August, SSL enforcement available as an administrative setting for Google Apps Premier Edition users.

I’m not sure when the Google Apps team did this, but as of day I see that my Google Apps Standard Edition email account also has this setting! Cool!

Whats more, there is also a domain wide setting for all apps (Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Sites) available in my General Domain Settings.

With the settings enabled, now when I even forget to type https in the address bar for email, I get automatically redirected to https. That’s one less thing to think about.

Migrating from DasBlog to WordPress

Kavinda — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 11:38:16 +0000

I finally made the jump and moved on from DasBlog. This is something that I’ve been wanting to do for sometime now. I’ve been on DasBlog for around 3 years and it was great. But now it was time to move on, try something else.

I choose WordPress. For any of those who may be interested, here is my summary version of a how to on migrating from DasBlog to Wordpress:

Migrating from DasBlog 1.9 to Wordpress 2.6.2

Setup a new WordPress blog
Exported data from DasBlog; posts,comments
Imported data to WordPress
Other stuff: Redirect old posts, Feedburner, Statcounter Statistics, Google Analytics, Google Webmasters tools, Google Adsense

Installing WordPress:
It included only a few steps suchs downloading WordPress installation, editing a configuration file, uploading all the files to a web server, opening up the install web page on the browser, and the next thing you know, WordPress is installed! You could say that I had the perfect experience of the famous 5 minute install. But if you get into trouble there is always help http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress.

From my experience I’d advice to configure you’re desired permalink structure if you so wish to customize it. This should be done before importing the posts.

Exporting old blog data:
This was the tricky part, unfortunately the default WordPress installation does not come with an option to “Import posts, comments, users, and categories from DasBlog”. Yet.

Enter BlogML. The XML format for blog content. You could say that this is what made the migration possible.

I knew that it was possible to export all my blog data into a BlogML file. Merill did this sometime back when he migrated from DasBlog to BlogEngine.Net. Also, he’s now gone ahead and created a little windows app based on Paul Van Brenk’s code to make things easier.

Imported data to WordPress:
Aaron lerch had done all the hard work by creating the import module for WordPress for BlogML. I downloaded its updated version that had been modified to work with WordPress 2.3 when Rob Walling migrated from Community Server to WordPress.

This did not however work exactly how I would have liked, but with a minor tweek here and there the import module to worked like a charm with the WordPress 2.6 installation I had. Here is the updated file (and the required XPath Class - XPath.class.php v 3.5) for the BlogML to WordPress import module. All you need to do is to drop these files into the WordPress Imports directory (/wp-admin/import/).

During the WordPress installation phase I suggested that you configure your required permalink structure.Here is why, Aaron’s import script also gives you a CSV file with all the old permalinks and the corresponding new permalink. This file can be used to create all the 301 permanent redirects for all your previous posts.

Other Stuff:
Redirecting posts was easy because we’d already have a mapping of old permalink to new permalink from the previous step, I only needed to add these into my .htaccess file.

The other places that I needed to update to reflect this change of blog engine was in Feedburner; where I needed to update the feed URL and Google Webmasters Tools where I needed to submit a new site map and delete the old. WordPress has a nice plugin that would create a decent site map.

Then as the last step, I added all the Statistics, Analytics, Advert javascript codes.

..and with all that, here I am writing my very first post on WordPress.

How to change the Symantec Endpoint Protection DB Backup Location

Kavinda — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 07:28:15 +0000

I shouldn’t have had to write this post, but the Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 database backup and restore utility sucks. There is no straight-forward way to change the backup destination folder!

First of all, there is the official version of how to change the location of the database backup folder created by “Database Backup and Restore Wizard” in “Symantec Endpoint Protection”, it can be found on the Symantec Support Knowledge Base.

In summary what the article explains is a work around method where the scm agent root directory is changed from the default location, to our desired location i.e. where we want the backup to be created. One thing to note is that since this configuration value scm.agent.root is not only solely used by the backup software, it is after all it is the SCM agent root directory as the name suggests, therefore after we change the value from its default and do what we need to do by taking a backup or restoring from a previous backup, we need to remember change the settings back to what it was.

All this changing and re-changing is all alright for one manual backups or a restore, but isn’t really of any good if we wanted the scheduled backups to also go to a new location.

Here is how I did it on my Microsoft Windows Server 2003 box; It may or may not work for you, so read only as a guide or an idea.

Since the time of Windows 2000 there has been support for directory symbolic links known as NTFS junctions; making it is possible to graft a target folder onto another NTFS folder or “mount” a volume onto an NTFS junction point transparently to programs. Using NTFS junctions it is possible to have the C:\Program Files\Symantec\Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager\data\backup directory can serve as a symbolic link to the other location where the backups need to be created in.

The only problem now is that Windows does not come with any tools for creating junctions. But, Mark Russinovich has given us one free tool, in the form of his SysInternals Junction v1.05 :

Usage: junction.exe [-d] []

So after we download and extract the junction.exe program, we can move the Symantec Endpoint Protection backup location by simply typing the following at the command prompt:

Example:
junction.exe “C:\Program Files\Symantec\Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager\data\backup” “F:\SystemBackups\Symantec\data\backup”

Junction Directory: C:\Program Files\Symantec\Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager\data\backup
Junction Target: F:\SystemBackups\Symantec\data\backup

Things to note in the above example:

Junction directory needs to be empty before running the command.
Files will actually be in junction target in terms of disk usage etc.
Files will be visible in Windows Explore in both folder locations. Deleting Files from either location will actually delete the file.
Deleting junction directory will only delete the junction. The junction target will still be available
Deleting junction target will delete the folder and its files leaving junction directory without a target. i.e. broken

Read the KB article How to create and manipulate NTFS junction points especially the usage recommendations.

Google Chrome says: I know the internet.

Kavinda — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:30:47 +0000

Firefox says: I can take you where you want to go.

Internet Explorer says: I can take you where you want to go. I’m not sure what I’m doing, would you like to navigate to ‘http://3639557480.com’ instead?

Google Chrome says: I can take you where you want to go. I know the internet.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with IP addresses:

3639557480 = 216*256³ + 239*256² + 61*256¹ + 104*256⁰ = 216.239.61.104
So, http://3639557480 and http://216.239.61.104 are both the same.

I switched from Firefox and set my default browser to Google Chrome after using it for two days. Firefox was great, it still is, and I’ll still be using Firefox and IE occasionally. But my default browser is going to be Google Chrome; at least for now.

Only in Sri Lanka

Kavinda — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:50:49 +0000

I recently got a forwarded email titled “Longest initials’. Only in Sri Lanka would there be a guy who has 15 initials to his name. I know what each of those initials stand for too.

It’s just another email forward right? Wrong!

This email contained scanned copy of a National Identity Card and a
scanned pre-paid mobile connection application form of Dialog Telecom. Therefor I also know what he looks like, his date of birth, place of birth, address, mobile number along with his SIM number, and I also have a scanned copy of his NIC! That’s just disturbing on so many levels. I certainly would not like even the idea of my NIC or any other confidential document being scanned and sent out as email forwards.

It seems most likely that this happened at the place where this dude went to get his phone connection. If not, it’s certainly a good place to start looking for the place/person that had the bright idea of circulating these documents. Since the agent ID’s are also on the form they won’t be too difficult to find either

Now that this has happened, who should be responsible for this? What should happen next? What should be done to make this not happen again?

What’s likely to happen?