Camping at Horton Plains

Horton Plains (Nuwara Eliya, SRI LANKA) is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. Even though I have been there couple of times staying a night in one the camping sites was a dream. During my stay I felt the beauty of the nature to my heart. Staff of the wildlife department of Sri Lnaka is doing a great job there to keep the beauty of the place forever. Keeping the place clean and providing the services required to local and foreign visitors is a massive job and they have done it up to a very good standard.
For all you read this I recommend you to visit the place even once, but please don't forget your responsibility to protect it for the future.
Few moments from the camping tour to Horton Plains on 16th Jan 2010 ...

Rotterdam Erasmus bridge

Another nice dutch architectural design.

Nobel prize for Obama

Why? For What?
Is it because hes black? He just stepped in right? I guess it's too early. He should be honered someway but this is too big for the moment.

Using MSN Messanger on a remote desktop connection

All of my office PCs are running M$ Windows and I used to have MSN messenger on my PC. Today I noticed some strange thing while working on my PC remotely. All of a sudden my messenger was displaying the status 'Away'. Then I tried to change the status to online but it was not changing to the status 'Online'. Then I went to my PC and moved the mouse a bit. Guess what ... the status was automatically changed to 'Online'. I don't know whether there is a configuration parameter for this but it seems that it does not respond to the remote mouse and KB.

First experience with Kubuntu 9.04

I just installed Kubuntu 9.04. Even though I have tried KDE 4.2 earlier this was a fresh installation and become a fresh experience.
Installation was usual no problems at all. But the connecting to Internet from the newly installed system was not that smooth. The package wvdial was not installed by default but networkmanager was there with a plasma widget front end. There was no way to put my Huawei E220 in to business.
I had two options to bring it back to business which I was familiar,
1. Install wvdial manually with all it's dependencies
2. Install knetworkmanager which has a GUI
But both options required Internet access to download the required packages which led me to go with (1) and download all required packages from a different PC and move them manually to the newly installed system.
Following post was very helpful to get the wvdial installed,
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=846522 (reply #8)

End of Semester II

Oh it was tough !!
Just finished the semester II exams of MSc in CS (UOM) reminding me that keeping every thing to study at the last moment is not the best way for exams. Printing lecture notes at 2.00 AM (paper was @ 9.00 AM so 7 hours before the exam) was a nice experience though :)
Happy about the week before the start of Semester III. A short break to enjoy the life with a long weekend.

Process Maker on Kubuntu

Process Maker is another application running on top of LAMP.
Following are few steps which I followed !

sudo apt-get install openssh-server mysql-server php5 apache2 php5-mysql
(install LAMP, actually AMP)
cd /opt; sudo wget {link to the latest tar}
(download)
sudo tar zxvf pmos-.tar.gz
(extract)
sudo a2enmod expires
sudo a2enmod rewrite

Copy /opt/processmaker/etc/pmos.conf to /etc/apache2/conf.d/
Open /etc/apache2/conf.d/pmos.conf
and change all the occurences of your_ip_address to 127.0.0.1
and your_processmaker_server to localhost

restart apache!

open the browser and go to http://localhost !! your there but with some problems.
(I had to change the MySql password, and issue some grants)

KDE4.2 has a default MySql instance (which I can't remember the root password)
Reset the MySql password (follow the below steps)

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop
sudo mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables &
mysql -u root
mysql> use mysql;
mysql> update user set password=PASSWORD("newPW") where User='root';
mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> quit
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start

Happy modelling & fun !