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 !

The cheerleader effect

Kinda important principle by Barney Stinson, even though a group of woman seems hot, when you look at them individually the hotness disappears.They look hot only as a group!
This is also known as 'Bride mate paradox', 'Spice girls conspiracy' :D
-----









from : "How I met your mother S04E07" !!

First experience on KDE 4.2

After a huge struggle I managed to upgrade KDE to 4.2
Even though the Kubuntu forums & all other sites explained the upgrade as a few step smooth process, mine was not that easy due to a strange KDE mess-up. I guess still I'm not in a position to handle this kinda thing in the proper way.
Anyway thanks to the developers, my desktop looks like this now, plasma widgets are amazing!

Still I couldn't find a way to bring the native application forms to the plasma widget style. Anyway the new version of Adept-manager (which is now called Adept installer) is not that cool, I like the way it was. Other than that so far so good. Again hats off for the developers!

Canon Power Shot A460 on (K)ubuntu

After migrating to Kubuntu, one problem I faced was downloading the pictures to my PC from the camera (Canon Power Shot A460). Did some googling but could not find a simple understandable solution. Rather I found a lot of Canon camera users face this problem, When I plug the camera PC does not detect it.

I found a cool simple solution for this, digiKam/KDE3 !
All you need to do is just install it and go to the menu, Camera> Add Camera and press the button 'Auto Ditect' while your camera is plugged. It will ditect the camera and there is a lot of cool features that you'll try after that.

Lonely Hills - Buluthota

Decided to explore the lonely hills of Buluthota during the holidays of week 50. Sri Lanka is considered as a flat island with most of its surface is between 30 and 200 meters above sea level (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Sri_Lanka), center is a highland surrounded by ridges and valleys.
Buluthota is a loneny small (compared to the center) situated in the south west of the center. One border of the Sinharaja rain forest is this mountain range. Even though this is a very nice part of the country due to lack of development of the infrastructure still this area is not famous among the tourists.

~ Sudu Redi Horu ~

Jayalath Manorathne @ the end of the paly, Pic. by: Imesh Gunaratne

Truly amazing !
It was a nice plan for the Sunday evening and the John de Silva Memorial theater was full.
I'm not going to criticize anything here because it not my job, but this is how I enjoyed it.
Liveness of the play was there till the end, all the actors/actresses performed really well but Rodney & Manorathne was the best among the best. Music was perfect for the scenes, I guess that was another amazing job by Nawarathne Gamage. I enjoyed the individual scenes very well but not the flow of scenes, I guess I have go for more plays and learn to feel it the correct way. Play was build up on "Sadesha Kaawya" and some of the poems reminded me the grade 11 sinhala literature book.
I guess this would be really cool if the audience was true stage play lovers. John de Silva is also not a perfect theater to highlight the full outcome of the play, there were no AC and some of the lights were not switched off during the play. Parking was really a headache, If it is John de Silva be there before 30+ minutes to make the parking easy.

Install Java runtime on ubuntu

I wanted to install JRE and the browser plugin to make some Java made sites work in my PC. As a habit first I go for the Adept GUI and console will always be the second option. Adept downloaded the required files (all of them) and just after starting the installation Adept got stuck, when I press the 'show details' button there was a license agreement which needs to be accepted by pressing an OK button. Focussing the OK button (which displayed on a text area) was failed, tried pressing tab, enter, F12, etc etc ...
I gave it up @ the moment and, my Adeept GUI mode was not usable anymore. Received the error, "There was an error committing changes, bla bla".
Executing the below command solved the issue,
sudo apt-get -f install (again the license agreement shown up, but tab, enter did the job in console)

Pain of Payne ...

Even after reading some 'bad' reviews, went to see Max with office buddies. There were only few ppl @ Liberty cinema.
From the beginning it was out of the track. IMDB says its a 5.9/10 but mine is <5.
I was expecting the John Moore's action in 'Behind Enemy Lines', but I have to say this stays a big step behind. Honestly I was expecting much more from the guy with the big blade, unfortunately BB took him out. Is Mr. Moore trying to clone 'Bourne'?

The main point 'the drug' why do they take that, if it is so painful? The s...l...o...w - m..o..t..i..o..n of shooting @ Max with a machine gun... why is that so slow (even I may shot him down without looking @ him).. and all 3 (or 4) bullets hit the same drug container which was far away from Max.

The Hero

Words can't express anything more ... just see ...

They all talk the same language...

Read the original news article @ DailyMirror.
http://www.dailymirror.lk/DM_BLOG/Sections/frmNewsDetailView.aspx?ARTID=30476

When they do it, it is "War on terror", when we do it "we violate human rights..."

Another way of interpreting....

MT Logic

The ultimate car stereo system made in PRC mute itself when I receive a call. Amazing, anyway this should be enabled (not enabled by default) you may read the 100+ page manual to find it out.

Its cool!

The TRUE "big step"

The true big step is, Kubuntu migration. (Yes I just migrated to Kubuntu).
So far so good!

I have to thank dummy for his help to set this up specially the modem.
Also TONS of thanks to Anuradha for his post (http://anuradha.sayura.net/2008/04/mobitel-3g-with-huawei-e220-on-debian.html) on configuring Huawei E220 HSDPA USB modem on Linux with a Mobitel connection.

The "Big Step"

Finally, I started a blog !
A BIG STEP for me.