For more information check the following links:
https://www.studera.nu/studera/1499.html
https://www.studera.nu/aw/courseGuide.do?lang=en

Applications can be submitted online at:
https://www.studera.nu/studera/1374.html

Last date for online application:
August 16, 2010
Last date to post certified copies of the certificates:
September 1, 2010

Also I guess there will be no English requirements according to this:
https://www.studera.nu/studera/1663.html

Masters in Sweden (Last semester for free education) is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

Is it one where there are no differences? Is it one where only one kind of people (sex/race/religion/language) live? Is it one where there are no small groups or divisions? Or is it to merge all the differences and create a new soup?

I don’t think so…!

I think it’s natural for humans to form into small groups. When there are so many differences between us, the one big united society is too remote from reality.

So how can we create a united society?

A united society starts from its differences. It is based on how all these differences work together and create an ecosystem where each of these can complement and coexist. Unless learn to appreciate the differences we will never make it a united society.

It’s the cluttered one that we need.

Uncluttered Society is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

When I came here in April I was excited for being in a new place, that excitement is no more as I’ve started feeling ‘home’ in Brisbane. But when I met family and friends in Colombo, that was really exciting this time than before.

So what made the difference?

It’s the same people and places. So is it ‘time’ that made the difference? I’m not sure. But I think, how small it may be, ‘time’ plays a big role in how we see things in life.

Back from Home is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

Thursday 22nd April

Leaving Sri Lanka: It’s always emotional when leaving home for a long period, but I was able to handle it without making it too dramatic. Many friends came to send-off, and even helped me in carrying my 40kilos + 10kilos.

Friday 23rd April

To Singapore: The flight to Singapore was so empty that I could sleep on 3 seats after eating the inflight dinner (the parata and chicken on Singapore Airlines is good… ).

12 Hours in Singapore: Landed in Singapore at around 7 in the morning and Praitheesh came to receive me at the airport. After messing up with the terminal, went to his place in train for breakfast. Then came to city again at around 11 and spent some time roaming around and searching for the Merlion.

The whatever coffee at BurgerKing was a mistake, but we later had fairly good lunch with another friend Bala. Spent some more time around the city and got back to his place at around 5 on bus via Little India. We took the airport bus at around 6 as I had to be at airport at 7.30. Had a light dinner at McDonald’s at airport as I had to keep some room for the flight dinner.

To Sydney: The flight to Sydney was on a Airbus A380, and I was on the main deck (which is the lower deck of the double-decker). The flight was full and the dinner was OK. It was a 7 hours long flight, but I couldn’t sleep much except for the 2 hours before breakfast. The in-flight breakfast was fairly good.

Saturday 24th April

Landed in Sydney: The flight reached Sydney at around 6 in the morning and I was received by my uncle and cousin at the airport. We went straight to his place and I feel asleep till afternoon. Went out for some shopping in the evening.

Sunday 25th April

Anzac Day: It was a long weekend and the shops were closed in the morning. So went out in the evening, to Homebush. It is known as an Asian suburb and famous for its spice shops and many Sri Lankan shops. The funny thing is they even sell the Sri Lankan soft drinks such as Cream Soda, Portello and Orange Barley here. I also bought a pre-paid SIM (Lebara Mobile Australia gives cheaper international call rates, almost same as the calling cards), so now I have a Australian mobile number.

Monday 26th April

Day out in Sydney: Went to UNSW and met Sanchayan, Went to Coogee Beach and spent nearly 3 hours and enjoyed photographing around, Went city and Opera House, Met Hesavan near Darling Harbour, Return by train.

Tuesday 27th April

Lazy Day: Got up late, Went to another suburb with many Tamil shops, Online check-in and additional baggage on Qantas, Went to airport early, Board at 8.45pm take off at 9pm from Terminal 3.

Queensland: Land in Brisbane Airport at 10.30pm, Pick up by Pathmanathan Uncle at around 10.45pm and reach his house in Samford by 11.30pm.

Wednesday 28th April

QUT: Slept a little longer, Went to QUT by 10.30am, The ID card machine was not working, Meet ISS counselor, Went to QUT Higher Research Degree office and filled up the enrollment forms, Went to Information Security Institute (ISI) and meet main supervisor and some other staff, Return by train to Ferny Grove and to Samford.

Thursday 29th April

Travel from Samford: Went to QUT on train via Strathpine to Central, Meet accommodation officer, Meeting with supervisors at ISI, Bought a Go Card ( It’s a travel card which can be used to travel seamlessly on bus, train and ferry services in Brisbane.), Got my QUT Student ID Card, Found a contact accommodation from the Accommodation Services web sire and arranged for seeing the room on Friday, Return by train to Strathpine and to Samford.

Friday 30th April

Accommodation in Brisbane: Went to Brisbane on train via Strathpine to Central, Saw two rooms in Petrie Terrace and St James Street and gave advance for the later, Got money from HSBC ATM from my Sri Lankan account (good thing is the ATM fee is much less and this seems better than bank transfers considering the fees), Meet some UoM seniors who are doing their PhD in Structures, Walk around the city in the afternoon, Return by train to Strathpine and to Samford.

The One Week Diary – From Samford, Queensland is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

I’m not very much used to the idea of planning for life, especially in long-term. I never had a yearly plan before in my life, and for 2009 I thought why not give it a try. Towards the end of 2008, I had an idea about what I would want to do in 2009. When I put those on writing, it was a list of items spread across of my interests. It was a so long and scattered, I ordered them in three categories, prioritized and created “My To-Do List for 2009“. Now towards the end of 2009, it time for me to look back, and see if having a plan had helped me.

My final year exams were in February, which I did fairly well and ended up getting a first class. Exams at university were not so exciting to me, but when I look back them at now it feels like a good experience. We had a lot of group study time just weeks before the exam at Mayuran’s place. Usually it would be Kathees, Mayuran, Nishandan, Praitheesh, Ramanan, Shayanthan, Tharshan and me. It was studying the fun way, with Mayuran’s mothers tasteful lunch (and sleepy afternoons).

I completed my undergraduate final year project, Project eID, successfully. It was a group project along with my teammates Anuradha, Ramanan and Shayanthan. I got the chance to be the leader of the team, which was more like a project manager role. Most of the complex parts of the project were handled by my teammates, yet I gained a great amount of experience. We became one of the many good project among our peers. I traveled along with my project team to Turkey and Malaysia, and we participated in international project competitions and exhibitions. We also published two conference papers related to our project.

I also started working on a Google Summer of Code project with Creative Commons enthusiastically, but I failed in halfway mainly due to poor time management and couple of foreign tours I had to undertake. It would be one of the main things I would regret in 2009.

Dr. Chandana Gamage would be the one teacher I would say who has guided me the most. He was my final year project supervisor and at first he seemed like the hardest person to work with. But after more than one year closely with him, he now seems totally the opposite to what I was thinking. Even after the completion of the project he helped me enlighten myself and guided me through out my grad school applications.

Just after completing I joined WaveNET International, Colombo as a Software Engineer on April 1st. But even before joining I had decided that I should go for graduate studies preferably in 2010. So I did IELTS, prepared SOPs, and applied to 5 universities and now I’m waiting for their responses.

I wanted to do certain things for a personal satisfaction. Blogging in English and Tamil was something I wanted to do for a long time and I planned to blog more frequently with quality posts. Thought I moved my English blog to my own domain, nothing much was written here lately. I even stopped writing in my Tamil blog.

I had planned for a trip to India in 2008, but that didn’t workout as planned so I wanted to do some traveling in 2009. And indeed I was fortunate enough to travel to two countries in 2009. Turkey was in May, with Shayanthan and Ramanan. I was a great week at Istanbul, with students from 12 countries with diverse cultures and a city that’s a meeting point of Asia and Europe, Modernity and Culture. Then Malaysia was in July, it too was a nice experience and a small shopping trip with Malalasena.

I bought a new camera, a DSLR, a Canon EOS 1000D (yeah… it’s what I could afford) in Malaysia. I started experimenting here and there, tried landscape, street, events, portrait and still figuring out what I could do. Got into Flickr, and an uncompleted photoblog yet to be launched.

Leo Club activities was something I wanted to focus more in 2009, but it didn’t happen as I expected. I became the Secretary of Leo District Council 306 B2, and I was doing is the job of a designer and a photographer. Yet this has given me a window to lookout from my all analytical work style into creative and aesthetic work.

This is just a long summary of what I did in 2009 and how much of my plans I could achieve. I think having a plan helped me in many ways to keep me some what in a direction and focused. Thanks for reading this very long post (if you have upto here)…!

Looking Back 2009 is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

I grew up in an environment with less friends, and I could not recall a single day from my childhood playing with any friends, but my cousins. It has been the same during my school and I was never a popular boy around. I had few friends, mostly guys with similar interests in hacking a computer or making some music or making a smoke bomb. Beyond that I even my existence was barely known.

It was with the Internet, the unsocial boy with the name Nimal, became the social animal with the avatar TalkOut. It was my chance to redefine who I am socially. I started writing, I started making new friends an I started communicating through emails and IM, and all these thing I rarely or never did before. The major change here was the mode of communication, that shifted from the “voice and me” in the real world to “text and the cropped image” in the online world. It was still the early 2000s, a time when telephones were not my favorite.

Then came all the social networks, and started using many of them in the order of hi5, MySpace, Orkut, and Facebook. They came as the right tools for me, and I became as social animal at the end. I started communicating with my classmates and colleagues more often. Then came mobile phones, SMSs, Twitter and a lot more. Thought I was an early adopter of many of these communication technologies, the only thing that was never exciting for are the vocal communications, telephones or VoIP.

Few days back, I was just thinking about how I use my mobile phone and realized that it would be one of the rarely used phone based on talk time, among my colleagues. Did a small calculation for the last two years, and my daily talk time average is less than 4 minutes. This includes my home phone, my office phone, my two mobile phones, Skype and all VoIP communications. If I ignore all the official calls related to my work, this would be even less.

Am I spending time talking to friends in any other way? Do I hang around with friend? Except to couple of colleagues at office and few friends who are my “free”lance clients, I haven’t talked much to any other friends lately.

Thus the point I want to make here is, I’m still unsocial when it comes to vocal communication, thought I used to think I have changed.

[Now I'm thinking of doing few experiments, may be from early next year, which would mostly like based on abstinence from vocal communication. I am yet to find out how this could be done, with my job and other professional interests. I'll be posing any updates if I happen to proceed with this.]

Silent Mode – An Unsocial Experiment is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

“Peace on earth will come to stay, When we live Christmas every day…” – Helen Steiner Rice

May the beauty of the season brightens up your life with joy, love & smiles…!

Merry Christmas is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

“Buried Alive: The True Story of Kidnapping, Captivity, and a Dramatic Rescue” is the story of Roy Hallums, an American civilian (albeit ex-military) contractor who was kidnapped while working in Iraq and spent almost two years in captivity. The very material that is covered means that you will be reading about a unique experience.

This book is well written and with a consistent narrative flow. The narrative is in first person and flows quite easily. Unfortunately, the same conditions that make Roy Hallums’ experience horrific, make its retelling less interesting. It does feel at times that this conversational style of narrating events get in the way by becoming too wordy, but on the whole I felt that it makes the book better.

Overall, I felt the book was educational, but I wouldn’t be likely to recommend it as a must read.

Disclosure: I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive/negative review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Buried Alive – The True Story of Kidnapping, Captivity, and a Dramatic Rescue by Roy Hallums is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

A short message from Bhagi on Facebook was the start. He suggested a photography trip during the last weekend of November. First plan was a one day trip to Bundala and Yala, and as my new DSLR was sleeping in my closet for sometime, I instantly said “I’m in”. But due to some reason, it didn’t work out as planned. I called up Bhagi on Friday and we decided to go to some place along the Southern Coastline of Sri Lanka, but we didn’t finalize on a place that day and as usual I went to sleep around 3am on Saturday.

My got up on Saturday with the wake-up call from Bhagi around 10.30, and he asked, “Shall we go to Unawatuna or Hikkaduwa, we can take some good sunset shots there?”; “When?”; “Today, around 11.30…”. I was not sure about this instant trip plan, but thought at-least I could spend a Saturday without sleeping all day. When it was 12.30 we were on a C0lombo – Kataragama (yeah, its no more Katirkamam) bus, from Wellawatte to Unawatuna. According to Chamin, whom I talked in the mean time, it would be a 3 hour journey on road.

Unfortunately we had to stand for 3 hours with our backpacks, and when we reached Unawatuna little later than 3 in the evening. We had no plans whatsoever, and didn’t know where we could find lunch. So I called Chamin and he asked us to meet him near Wella Devalaya. It was a 10 minutes walk towards the beach and we waited there till 4, and clicked few shots of the beach in the meantime.

One important fact I noticed is that Unawatuna is a pretty expensive place for locals, specially with food. We couldn’t find a good place around for lunch, so we went to a small restaurant in Magalle with Chamin. And when we came back to the beach around 5, we almost missed the sunset…

We spent another 2 hours there, until its too dark, and took some photos around the beach. Bhaghi managed to take few good shots of the sunset, and I experiments with manual modes. We had to comeback that night as there was a assignment for Bhagi.

Though it was an unplanned trip, and we didn’t do much there, it was a good chance to learn few things. One, even unplanned trips, plan to some extent. Two, I know too less about my camera. Three, learn and practice night photography. May be I should plan for another trip down south soon…!

Bhagi’s Photos from Unawatuna // My Photos from Unawatuna

An afternoon trip to Unawatuna is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

PHP has got and extensive set of functions that can be used to manipulate XML (RSS feeds or even HTML) files. PHP DOM library is one of the handy libraries that can be used to parse RSS feeds in PHP. DOM (Document Object Model) is a standard way for accessing and manipulating XML documents. XML documents can be represented in tree-structure (a node tree), with the elements, attributes, and text defined as nodes.

Below you can find the script for parsing a standard RSS feeds:

// Create a new DOMDocument object
$doc = new DOMDocument();
 
// Load the RSS file into the object
$doc->load('http://feeds.feedburner.com/talkouttrojans');
 
// Initialize empty array
$arrFeeds = array();
 
// Get a list of all the elements with the name 'item'
foreach ($doc->getElementsByTagName('item') as $node) {
	$itemRSS = array (
		'title' => $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue,
		'desc' => $node->getElementsByTagName('description')->item(0)->nodeValue,
		'link' => $node->getElementsByTagName('link')->item(0)->nodeValue,
		'date' => $node->getElementsByTagName('pubDate')->item(0)->nodeValue
	);
	array_push($arrFeeds, $itemRSS);
}
 
// Output
print_r($arrFeeds);

The getElementsByTagName method is used, within the loop of the item nodes, to get the nodeValue for the title, description, link and date tags. The nodeValue is the text within the node. An array is used to store each set of values and each array represents an entry in the big array that holds our structured RSS data. At the end of the script all the data will be hold by the $arrFeeds array, which is well structured and can be used to display or further manipulation.

One drawback of using the DOM library is that it reads the entire XML document into memory, and then we use the functions for manipulating the data. Thus this method is that is not recommended for large XML documents, which would take too much memory to build the model of the document.

Anyway, usually the feeds we are dealing with are of normal size, and this won’t be an issue at most occasions.

Parse RSS feeds with PHP is a post from: Nimal's Weblog