Recent Posts

DIY Docker on Apple silicon M1

When Apple announced the transition to Apple's own ARM-based silicon, I was ecstatic! I've always enjoyed tinkering with ARM based single-board computers su...

Alternate VIM Reloaded

A little over 6 years ago, or just 2 posts below :), I wrote about how I use VIM from the command-line to invoke a GUI version of VIM, where each file would ...

VIM Reloaded

It’s been a really really long time since I last blogged so bear with me while I try get a little bit of my mojo back :) I’ve been busy changing countries,...

A New Desktop for a New Year

<p>Compared to other new years where I would spend some time cleaning up my room or upgrading my gear, this year I did none of that! Instead I invested...

Remembering Steve Jobs

The passing of Steve Jobs came in as an instant shock that morning as I was reading the news on my phone. While it wasn’t as much of a surprise as when MJ pa...

Getting Down With Markdown

Recently I've been looking for an alternative to docbook, which I've used for most of my tutorial handouts and internal developer documentation at Thinkcube...

There’s something about Lion!

<img style=”float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 218px; height: 320px;” src=”http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eC6np1G_DHk/TkM-hK-...

Why read when you can listen?

There’s an old quote, “Reading makes a full man”. I’m not quite sure who said it but I know it’s got to be at least a couple of years older than myself becau...

It’s true, I’m on a Lion

Greeting fellow bloggers and no I’m not dead. Blogging for me has got to a point where its a post or two per year! So at this point it doesn’t matter what I ...

The Linux Speed Boost!

Oh my, it has been a while since I visited my Blog. While there were few worthy posts which I should have blogged about, that never happened. Recently, when ...

Splitting a git repo

Its been almost an year since I last blogged and what can I say, micro-blogging killed blogging for me. Even micro-blogging has got to a point, I don’t do a...

Fedora 11: First impressions

Fedora 10 (F10) was one of the best fedora release I’ve come to use. I liked it so much that I made it the default OS on my Mac Mini PPC. So naturally I was ...

Lights, Camera, Action!

SinhalenFOSS, the audio podcast we started a little over an year ago is now available as a vidcast. A couple of months back, I got a call from Dr. Ajantha an...

Birthday gift

Kanchana, my wife had an old P4 machine from back in the days before we met. It was a PC House branded G-Max. Anyways, she’s been wanting to fix it up and gi...

Pulling along …

Considering it's been exactly 1 year since my last post, I pondered a bit on a title for this post. "The comeback", "Still live and kicking" or "I'm back!" s...

Best Last place to listen to Music

If your a music lover and also inclined to discover new (&old) music then last.fm is the place to be. I’ve signed up a couple of months back and have rea...

Sinhalen FOSS Blogcast

Recently I’ve been trying to start a Blog and Podcast as a means of reducing the language barrier when it comes to learning and playing around with Free and ...

Good bye Gentoo - Hello Leopard

The following post was an April Fools Hoax :) While bits of it are true such as I did finally move away from Gentoo as my primary distro its got more to do w...

Our first IEEE paper has been published!

Dr. Ajantha came back from the “International Conference on Advanced Communication Technology” after submitting what appears to be our (that is myself and Wa...

OLPC coming to Sri Lanka

Last Friday, I had the privilege to attend a workshop on “One Lap Top Per Child” or OLPC as they call it, at HNB Towers. The OLPC is a marvellous piece of te...

RMS events in Sri Lanka

I’ve just come back from UCSC’s roof top, where RMS came to say hi to the many geeks, students and staff as the last event before he heads back tomorrow noo...

Christmas came early for me this year…

My command center went through a major overhaul this year a couple of weeks ahead of Christmas as I upgraded my 19” LCD monitor for 32” LCD TV. This was goo...

Why KDE4 (might) suck!

I’ve been a kde user for very long time, since from before version 3.0. I vaguely remember being excited with version 3.0 to the point I was using the beta r...

Hacking the iPod Touch / iPhone - Part 2

Previously on Part 1 …Just kidding! Scroll down and read it your self.Its been a while, and I think I’m falling into the “Oh twittering is so much more easie...

Hacking the iPod Touch - Part 1

So now that I had a little time to play around with this cool gadget, I think its time that I shared some of fun in hacking the iPod Touch. But first a frien...

Its been 3 years…

And I’m still here! That’s right, its been exactly 3 years as of today (31st) since I got into the world of blogging. For the curious here is my first blog p...

iPod Touch turned out to be the one!

so I had my reservations about the iphone mainly due to the lack of 3G but also other reasons. Instead what wanted was really a good PDA device thats flexib...

This could be the one…

So I’ve been thinking of getting Nokia’s Linux tablet PC ever since the 770 was released a couple of years ago. When the N800 came that was a major improveme...

SFD 2007 was HUGE & Hot!

Software Freedom Day concluded on the 15th with several events happening around Sri Lanka and the world ofcourse.The Excel World event, which I helped organi...

Be an Open Source Guitar Hero!

Undoubtedly one of the best games that came on the PS2 and more recently on the 360 is Guitar Heros II. Ever since I got my hands on this came, I haven’t as ...

myPhone - Waiting for my kinda iPhone

Photograph by: Eliya SelhubThe iPhone is a pretty good looking phone and functional phone by the looks of it and it might actually end up being a hit in the ...

“FOSS-ed on Windows” is on tomorrow

They didn’t think we’d do it. We didn’t think we’d do it! But we’re gonna do it … tomorrow. For a change, we are gonna temporally hold off on telling you to ...

Goodbye Prof.

Yesterday I attended Prof. VK Samaranayake’s funeral proceedings which took place on a gloomy onset, as if the sky was about to break down and cry but was h...

Hey Micro$oft…. Sue me!

Desperately seeking Micro$oft makes some dubious claims when it accuses that GNU/Linux and FOSS violates some 235 of M$’s patents. With each passing day it i...

Finally got a Flickr Pro Account

I was wondering how many photos I had on flickr. Because with the free account, 200 was all I could see. The first time I tried to fulfill my curiosity, a co...

Honey, I sunk the ipod

It was the worse day of my (ipod’s) life. It drowned a feet under water for god knows how long. What probably was 5 - 10 minutes must have felt like an eter...

Screenshot of my new (shiny) desktop

I’ll let the screenshot speak for itself.But just in case your wondering this is Gentoo GNU/Linux running the beryl Window Manager (WM), on top of KDE deskto...

Watching the Worldcup over WiFi

Sure it doesn’t beat watching the match on the big screen. But wouldn’t it still be cool if you could didn’t have to always sit in front of the tv all time a...

FOSS project: Sahana wins an FSF award!

The Sahana project, a large scale disaster/relief management software developed soon after the Asian Tsunami and subsequently used during several other disas...

My iPod now runs Linux…

Inspired by my favorite Linux podcast, “The Linux Action Shooooooooow” (thats how its pronounced), where each week Chris would talk about some new cool gadg...

Previously on FOSSEd Kandy …

Last weekend, we had our first FOSSEd on wheels event in Kandy. It was organized by the faculty of science, University of Peradeniya and was held on the 3rd ...

Dell should be punished!

When I read the, once “Highly Confidential” - but now public (as a result of the Iowa anti-trust case), email thread from Redmond, it just cracked me up.Soun...

The Darker side of Vista…

There is a darker side to Vista, one that far exceeds, beyond the dark theme that greets you after login in!Vista has taken, “Restricting the user’s rights t...

Sleeping on the net

Well, I can finally fall asleep, (in bed) while browsing the net on my PSP over wireless. Thats right ADSL has finally come home. I was waiting for it to com...

My first post for 2007!

Been really really busy the last couple of weeks at work that I really wasn’t in the mood for blogging. But what better way to break the ice, and kick off bl...

The geek is back…

Been a long time since I’ve last blogged. Kept my self extremely busy at work and home, and I guess been a little lazy to blog given a couple of newer develo...

Buttala, we made it!

FOSS on Wheels got on to a lazy start yesterday. We waited for the bus (though it made it on time - 4pm), waited for people (LSF guys were late!) and then we...

Freedom LOST at Software Freedom Day!

Last Saturday, 16th of September, the Sri Lankan team geared up to celebrate the Software Freedom Day (SFD). As part of the day’s events, it was decided to h...

Linux booting at 30,000 feet…

My good friend Iranga, had taken this photo (on his way to SL from UK) of the Linux kernel booting on the on-flight personal entertainment system of a First ...

FOSSSL 2006 bill board

Well you haven’t made a mark until your up on a billboard, so they say and that’s what I saw yesterday as I was driving my way to the ApacheCon conference.Ma...

Blogging from ApacheCon Asia

I’m currently at ApacheCon Asia, the first ever ApacheCon in asia which is also a part of a week long FOSS event known as FOSSSL2006.You can catch all the pi...

Door-to-Door marketing FOSSSL 2006

We are not your average sales people. We couldn’t be… had we even tried to. We shouldn’t be… because we are already selling just fine. We ought to be… beca...

Swap (old_monitor, new_panel);

Liquid Crystal Display(LCD) Panel prices have come down considerably, perhaps partly driven by some competition from plasma displays, though I feel the LCD ...

BabyTux Digest, probably the first…

The babyTUX Digest came as an idea to some of us to create an online magazine that covered Free & opensource software(FOSS) and related technologies. It...

NIBM LUG invites LKLUG

I was quite impressed the other day when a few of us from the Lanka Linux User Group (LKLUG) visited the National Institute of Business & Management (NIB...

My new Cybershot!

After the last foss-Ed event and seeing the quality of the pictures taken from my (6 year old) Kodak 3600DX camera, I decided it was time to buy a new one.Wh...

Ubuntu [Drapper] Launched in style!

Many geeks turned up at ExcelWorld on last Sunday for the launch of the much waited and anticipated version of Ubuntu, codenamed Drapper. Drapper, aka Ubuntu...

Foss-Ed for geeks [Day 1 & 2]

[day1]Listening to Prof. Lawrence Lessig speak was like listening to a continuous flow of harmonic notes resonating ever so smoothly and flawlessly, you’d wo...

ASUS center launch

Today I dropped in at the newly opened ASUS center and checked out some of the coolest hardware around. They had, what they proclaimed “The fastest desktop i...

Switching art students to GNU/Linux

I usually don’t blog about other articles (usually I just talk about me, myself and I), but after reading about an art school that completely wiped off their...

Bleeding on the Bleeding-Edge :(

The unthinkable happened today – My hard drive crashed! The machine stopped booting with scary looking messages I don’t recall ever seeing. I looked desperat...

Yahoo! Xgl works on my redeon card

While the title of this post isn’t affiliated with Yahoo Inc., that was my reaction soon after I re-emerge Xgl and compiz with the paint_patch enabled.Now it...

The fascinating cases of amnesia

It’s been a while since a movie has got me thinking beyond the post 30 min day dream session. But that’s just what happened when I watched “50 first dates”, ...

Some success with Xgl…

Well.. after messing up my system with broken packages and then fixing it by unmerging or recompiling them, I managed to get everything installed (thanks to ...

Trying to get Xgl working

After a good Foss-Ed event and having met the 3/4 of the people who were founders’ or co-founders’ of LAMP stack, I was ready to get back to dangerous life l...

Fullhouse @ FOSS-Ed

After a long long break from blogging, I am back. So where was I, one might ask? Lets say I was too busy having fun :) I’ve pretty much upgraded my life wh...

Obsessed with Mac - on Linux

What can I say, I love the Mac GUI and some features like the drag on drop approach to installing software in the apps folder. Its not just me; there seems t...

A Trip to Mac OSX on Intel

Its been a long obsession ever since I heard the existence of the x86 port. Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or an msn umbrella), chances are that yo...

The Mango party!

A new distro sweet as Mango was (un)officially launched by our very own Arunan, who is celebrating his B’ day today* happens to be one of the youngest Slack...

My quest for the perfect wireless world

So after my unplesent experience with CDMA, and the difficulty of carrying a full fledged phone around all the time (I even took it to Blue waters last week...

LiveCD from scratch workshop

Just came back from a long day workshop organized as part of the IITC 2005 Conference. Myself, Anuradha and Chamath undertook the almost impossible task of a...

More Firefly please…

Just finished watching the 13th episode of the Firefly, to discover, I’ve run out of episodes :(. About a month back Suchetha handed me a stack of DivX CDs ...

Home sweet home

Though its a little sad leaving Islamabad and the folks here, who has really taken good care of us during our short visit, I am looking forward to get back. ...

Pakistan’s Big Brother

Today we visited the Nadra (not to be confused with the more familiar Narada center), which stands for the National Database and Registration Authority. They...

Boom shakala

This morning I woke up with a sudden gasp! I thought some one had jumped into my bed. After looking around and under the sheets, I went back to sleep a bit l...

Taprobane Sahana Edition

Started remastering Taprobane GNU/Linux to include the Sahana phase I as a LiveCD. Taprobane has a really neat feature which makes remastering quite easy jus...

Pakistan meets Sahana

We managed to catch an early flight at 5AM as opposed to the originally booked 7AM one and make it to the hotel early on. Though we made it to the hotel earl...

Blogging from Pakistan

I’ve just arrived at the Pakistan airport in Karachi, trying to kill some time till the next flight at 7AM. Even though my search for wireless networks throu...

Mini bug squashing CodeFest

Today a few of us got together at the UCSC to work on fixing few bugs as well as add some features to the next version of Taprobane. The plan was to get to a...

Taprobane hits Distrowatch!

Today is a happy day for all of us who started working on our very own GNU/Linux distribution, appropriately named Taprobane GNU/Linux, as it gets accepted a...

Colombo goes crazy over books!

Reader discretion: This post is long. Try not to fall asleep and crash your monitorYes! It certainly has to be the biggest exhibition in Colombo, if not the ...

Phew… Did we pull it off?

After months of going to planning meetings and running around organizing “The biggest FOSS conference”, ever in SL, well the FOSS week has finally come to en...

De ja vu at the Installfest

Today was the last day at the Installfest and my first day attending it. Yesterday my time was totally killed repairing my car A/C and then I had to conduct ...

Chillin’ with the Stars

Picture of me posing with MySQL(David Axmark)/(me) and PHP (Rasmus Lerdorf)The last two days have been absolutely wonderful hanging out, driving around, chit...

The Code Fest

The codefest got on to a somewhat good start with people showing up pretty much on time. WHat we are stuck with now is what problems to solve. Some of the mo...

I went Digital and now I am back..

I’ve gone silent on the blog since I got DVB cable, and been falling a sleep watching cable more often than not.But during the day, I have been extremely bus...

I went Digital!

Finally, I’m on a two week holiday working :) I expect most of my work to be done from home for the next two weeks and so decided I need some quality TV time...

RedHat Launch party….

Just came back from the RedHat launch party that was held at the Ceylon Continental. By the time I had arrived to the event, it had already begun. The Minis...

Learning the GIMP

Just came back from the GIMP class, which Arunan kicked off today. Though I never considered my self as a GIMP user, nevertheless I was able to do simple tas...

Upgrading to kde 3.4 – differently

I’ve been waiting to upgrade to kde 3.4 some time now, ever since it was released. Kde is one of the most popular desktop environments available on GNU/Linux...

One small step to organizing my life…

The new year holiday break was indeed refreshing, simply because I had missed “sleeping all day” and “working all night”. I always find my self working or st...

I am back…

Its been ages since I last blogged and I think I’ve gotten a bit rusty. Been busy with office work towards the end of the financial year and then to find tha...

A taste of Eye Candy …

I had a good weekend not doing much work except for playing around with my gentoo box adding some eye candy for a sexier desktop. It all started on Saturday ...

LKLUG @ the EDEX exhibition

The EDEX (creatively abbreviated Education Exhibition), was held last week from the 4th to the 6th. Although the highlight of this exhibition was undoubtedl...

Goodbye Debian - Hello Gentoo!

That’s right! I am leaving Debian Linux for Gentoo. After more than a year, flirting with Woody (stable branch) and then later Sarge (testing branch of Debia...

Scouts get a Linux insight

Finding the auditorium, dubbed “nawa rangahala” meaning “the new hall”, wasn’t too difficult with Suchetha around. Being an old boy of Royal College, he show...

WiFi radio..

It’s 1:30 AM in the morning and I’m having fun. I’ve just setup a wireless radio station in my house. Ok, before you start to park your car outside my gate t...

My Double date!

Ok I know the title is a bit misleading, not to mention intriguing for those who know me. Is this guy capable of such a thing? So before you start substitut...

Code for Relief

What can you do when more than 100,000 people are dead and more than a million displaced with little food, clothing or medical care at hand? Coping with a ...

Farewell Phil :’(

Today I got to learn that Philip Nicholas too was an unfortunate casualty of the tsunami title wave that hit Sri Lanka yesterday. At the time of his death,...

Ooooouch!

It started just like any other day.. I got up in the morning, burned a few calories on the road (road rage!) and made it to office. Fast forward roughly 8 ho...

A new day has come!

Welcome to virtusa is a phrase I kept hearing all day from many who gave me a warm welcome. Today was my first day at the new office. A new machine was alrea...

A Christmas LAN party…

Couple of us were invited for a warm Christmas lunch at the Hiran’s residence. Myself, Asanga along with Kanchana had decided to meet up early to get a card...

Last Day…

Today is the last day I’m officially spending at ITABS, but I’m not feeling nostalgic nor sad today. After all this is the end of the week and the weekend is...

The Handover..

By now most of you reading this blog already know that I will be exiting my current work place to join Virtusa at the R&D dept. If you didn’t know, well ...

Exhibition Ends we Get-2-Gether…

Today was a busy day for myself and the other guys. I was busy at the UCSC, preparing few lecture notes that I didn’t have time to do over the week, as wel...

Its Exhibition time again

I’ve really been busy the last couple of days and didn’t have any time to write my blog. But in any case except for a few developments, nothing exciting di...

Walking down memory lane with Keith

1999 was the year! I was only 22 and boy did I party like “It was 1999!” One boat, Forty Sri Lankans, One Sri Lankan band, Three good friends, Two crazy gir...

Working from home…

My office is a MESS! There I said it! With the amount of people we now have, being packed in to a small lecture room, means I usually have to get up from my ...

Gray Monday …

Such a boring and wasteful day it was! I got up late at 9AM and was slightly late to go for a meeting with our marketing guy, but luckily he had managed to s...

Sri Lanka to flirt with Desktop Linux

Today was an interesting day for me, as I was very much looking forward to joining with the LKLUG crew, to go and convince ICTA effort headed by Riza, that ...

Fun @ millennium Park

Today was one of those 24 (TV series) days – started out one way, ended in a totally different way. To begin with, today was my last MSc first semester paper...

A walking day it was …

It’s been a while since I started walking a bit more than usual. Back in the days before I had a car, walking was something I did more often since I hated go...

RAIN, RAIN go away!

Last night on my way home after a long idle day (office is still under construction), I experienced one of the worst rain storms in a long time. With my car ...

Struggling to find the M in Msc

Today was as expected a bad exam day. It was data structures and algorithms.. Considering I hadn’t studies anything yesterday soon after the exam I knew what...