How I see the world

An unpleasant experience!

2011-11-14T00:44:00.001-05:00

I've had my share of really mild forms of racial discrimination (several cases of being talked to in an unfriendly tone and observing that the 'friendliness' of the conversation changes with the color of the skin!) but nothing in the magnitude of the encounter two weeks ago.

I was in Portland OR, pariticipating in SPLASH (a premier computer science conference). The motel I stayed was several blocks away from the conference hotel, next to Portland State University and a two minute commute on the Portland light rail (Trimet Max). My regular schedule was to come back to the motel later in the evening around 8 pm [SPLASH has many events, going on till later in the evening and I did not want to lose the opportunity to network with others].

On Wednesday, when I boarded the train, there were two men, visibly drunk, on the seat next to the door. I did not sit, but stood well away from them. One of the guys who boarded the train with me, possibly a student (guessing from the attire, ipod, backpack), went and sat in front of the two men. One of the guys looked at the student for a while and asked "hey we are short of some money for drink, do you have any change". The student slowly removed his head phones, replied 'I'm sorry, I don't carry cash' and continued to listen to music. The man shook his head, continued to stare at other people for a while, turned to me and asked the same question. I said the same thing - "I'm sorry, I don't have any cash either" [ This was in fact true. All I had in my wallet was plastic ].

The reaction of both men were sudden and loud. One of them blurted out saying 'They are not here to help us. They are just here to take our jobs'. Their loud ramblings continued till the last stop (thankfully only 2 or 3 minutes away). Both of them kept on saying about foreigners taking jobs, interracial marriages and other things. One of them even said 'I feel like putting something in his backpack and calling the cops" (as I heard it - the words were not clear). I was scared but kept my cool. There were plenty of other people in the train. I made sure not to look their direction and played dumb, as if I had no idea what they were saying. At the last stop there is a transit cop on duty so I made sure I note where he is and jumped out as soon as the train stopped. I heard one of them yelling "yeah you better run" as I was getting down. The motel was just a few steps from the train stop and I literally ran to my room.

This incident made me change my schedule and my habits for the next few days of my Portland stay. I would not stay out till too late and always made sure that there are no unsavoury characters inside before I get on the train. While nothing would have happened, these incidents are always unpleasant and I would avoid them as far as possible.

What surprises me is that given Portland is a truly multi cultural city, even its natives still can't seem to accept that America is indeed a land of many ehtnicities. In fact, heart of Portland is more multi-cultural than any other city I've seen; I went to French, Iranian, Lebanese, Japanese and Chinese restaurants (all managed by people from the respective countries, except may be for the French) within a walking distance from the city center during my stay.

I'm sure this is an isolated incident, two drunkards trying to yell out their frustration. However I can't help the unwelcome feeling!

SA-REST and schema.org : Friend, not Foe

2011-06-09T16:28:00.001-04:00

The latest buzz about schema.org has been amplified by the conversations at semtech ( Premier conference for semantic technologies, going on now at San Francisco). While I'm somewhat skeptical when big organizations come together to produce and push their own standards [ I'm not the only one thinking this way. Checkout this excellent article for a good overview of the dark side of schema.org ], there is definitely an advantage to Web content producers. In my case, this seems an excellent opportunity for SA-REST, a W3C member submission of which I am also a co-author ; a reason for me to fire up the rusty blog engine :)

SA-REST was born as an annotation scheme for RESTful Web services (thus the name REST), as part of the Masters thesis of Jon Lathem. There were several incarnations of SA-REST afterwards, once as a microformat (hRESTs) and then finally as a generic annotation scheme by its original name.

As the W3C submission states "Meta-data from various models such an ontology, taxonomy or a tag cloud can be embedded into the documents. This embedded meta-data permits various enhancements, such as improve search, facilitate data mediation and easier integration of services.". This simply means that SA-REST does not force a specific model format to be used for annotations, nor force a specific interpretation. We have emphasized the flexibility of this approach, arguing that Web resources would need annotations from a variety of models of differing granularity. This point became clear with schema.org. i.e. they put out a shared markup vocabulary rather than a full fledged ontology (This vocabulary was translated to RDF formats hours later by other researchers, now hosted at http://schema.rdfs.org. The original publishers however prefer to stick to their simple name shared markup vocabulary). SA-REST is simply capable of using schema.org concepts in annotations and can be readily translated between other competing formats such as Micordata.

Here is an example of annotating a XHTML block, extracted from the wikipedia page on hCard.
disclaimer : I have not validated the RDFa or the Micordata annotations.

Plain XHTML

<div>
   <div>Joe Doe</div>
   <div>604-555-1234</div>
   <a href="http://example.com/">http://example.com/</a>
 </div>

Annotated with hCard microformat

<div class="vcard">
   <div class="fn">Joe Doe</div>
   <div class="tel">604-555-1234</div>
   <a class="url" href="http://example.com/">http://example.com/</a>
 </div>

Annotated with Microdata (using schema.org concepts)

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
   <div itemprop="name">Joe Doe</div>
   <div itemprop="telephone">604-555-1234</div>
   <a itemprop="url" href="http://example.com/">http://example.com/</a>
 </div>

Annotated with RDFa (using schema.rdfs.org concepts)

<div xmlns:schema="http://schema.org/"  typeOf="http://schema.org/Person" >
   <div property="schema:name">Joe Doe</div>
   <div  property="schema:telephone">604-555-1234</div>
   <a  rel="schema:url" href="http://example.com/">http://example.com/</a>
 </div>

Annotated with SA-REST (using schema.org concepts)

<div class="domain-rel" title="http://schema.org/Person" >
   <div class="sem-class" title="http://schema.org/Person#name" >Joe Doe</div>
   <div class="sem-class" title="http://schema.org/Person#telephone">604-555-1234</div>
   <a class="sem-rel" title="http://schema.org/Person#url" href="http://example.com/">http://example.com/</a>
 </div>

Apart from the apparent difference in verbosity (SA-REST can in fact follow the namespace rules and the above markup can be shortened. However our current parsers do not support such optimizations and hence I have used the verbose mode for illustrations), these markups are functionality equivalent.

So where does this take us ? We have already built some tools that use SA-REST as the core annotation scheme (see Kino) and will continue to integrate schema.org concepts and SA-REST in our tooling. While SA-REST has not found wide adoption, our original philosophy, that a flexible annotation scheme which does not force a specific model or a particular interpretation is required for Web resources, has been proven correct. This philosophy will also hold for the future - as long as the world wide web remains an open communication platform.

A Geeks Rant - A Reason not to blog ?

2010-11-09T00:04:00.005-05:00

Its more than a year since my last blog and a lot has happened in between. Democrats lost in midterms, Sarath Fonseka made a failed bid for presidency in Sri Lanka and ultimately got imprisoned and most of all I got married !! Things have changed for the best (for me) although I wonder why I don't feel the strong urge to blog anymore.

This was a short discussion in Facebook a few months ago and perhaps the rise of the social media is the reason. For example none of my Facebook friends missed my wedding since I shared all the pictures there. My twitter/Buzz/Facebook followers (all accounts are connected, i.e. when I tweet, its automatically Fb'ed and Buzzed) know about all the interesting stuff I've come across. My (not-so-deep) thoughts get tweeted and receives instant feedback. So at this time and day, one would wonder why bother to blog at all when you can easily disseminate your vibes, 140 characters a pop :)

While there are still good reasons to blog, for me its more of a sentimental attachment than a necessity to socialize. Fb and Twitter have proven to be much easier avenues for me to share content. I would still blog once in a while but that is not going to be as frequent as it used to be !

Blogging for ACM !

2009-10-27T17:58:00.003-04:00

Thanks to the recommendation from Max, I've been given the opportunity to be an official blogger for CACM. My blogs appear at BLOG@CACM and the first post on the OOPSLA cloud workshops ,Taming the Clouds at OOPSLA, is available now.

IBM, Linux and Research

2009-08-16T10:52:00.008-04:00

My internship at IBM Research came to an end about two weeks ago (on July 31st). It has been an exceptionally good one and I've enjoyed every minute of it despite the fast moving schedule. I have been given great opportunities [Like being featured in the home page of W3, IBM's intrarnet :) ] and I am really happy about the outcome of this internship in terms of the result and the future collaborations we managed to forge.

From Random

This is the memory of the last day, just before leaving where I had to submit my badge and the laptop.

In summary, following are my observations on IBM, the environment and the culture. IBM here onwards refers to IBM research, particularly the Almaden Research Center when not explicitly stated.

Linux @ IBM

My computer in IBM ran Linux (Ubuntu 8.10). Last time I had to do a similar thing, (in 2007) I struggled for 2 days to get Lotus and other IBM productivity software installed and configured. This time to my amazement, all I had to do was to download a single shell script and run it! it updated my repositories, installed all required IBM software, provided hints to configure them and installed shortcuts to help and support groups for the flavor of Linux I am running. Linux has become one of the mainstream operating systems for IBM and there is ample support inside IBM if you decide to live the Linux way of life.

There were some pain points though. Wireless drivers for T60 thinkpad I had [Atheros IIRC] sucked big time. IBM internal wireless uses LEAP and I was never able to configure LEAP or EAP to work properly [ WEP and open networks worked fine ] . I had a wired network so most of the issues came when I was in meetings.

The ATI graphics drivers did an ok job but that could have been improved. There is no support for ATI chips [ Well not from AMD ] for Ubuntu 9.04 and I did not want to upgrade primarily due to the fear of losing my nice dual screen setup.

Research @ IBM

In terms of research, IBM is an excellent place to be. Apart from the diversity of researchers, there is always this niche area that you can work on and there is the freedom to collaborate with other groups.

If you are used to academic style research IBM might present a difference for you though. While researchers are free to do exploratory research, that freedom is not 100%. At the end of the day research for IBM is all about improving their products and gaining/maintaining their market share.There is this expectation(implicit and sometimes explicit) that research would contribute to that cause. For example the cloud related research project I was part of, gained a lot of interest from all tiers of IBM since it seems to have the potential to put IBM ahead in the competitive cloud provider market. I cannot imagine that the same success would have been there if we were to do a different project that is of not so much business value, even if there was significant scientific value to it. On the other hand there is the need for constant marketing of your research idea among peer researchers and convincing executives that your idea is worthwhile which takes similar time and effort to writing grant proposals in academia. However I understand the need for this. At the end of the day money just does not drop from the sky :)

Culture @ IBM

One word description - "excellent" :) Being in the silicone valley, I suppose some of the habits of the young startups could have seeped through :) The freedom of working hours and location, the coffee hours in the evenings [ No free food though. Even the evening free coffee is meant to produce a social gathering ], constant list of guest speakers and experts delivering excellent lectures , great research library , there is nothing you can complain about :) [ to tell the truth here, some IBM veterans complain about the food. There is no restaurant you can reach without driving for 10 minutes and you end up eating at the cafeteria for the most part. The cafeteria people try hard to introduce variety into their menu, I've seen Italian, French, Mexican and even Indian entres. I personally did not have any issues with food, except for the fact that sometimes its too much to eat :)]

Last but not least, IBM Almaden is located in the middle of the mountains, a place with breathtaking scenary (see the map and some of the pictures I've taken) and somewhat ironically reminds you everyday that there is this vast space for you to explore as a researcher.

View Larger Map

From Random

Getting America to embrace the new age

2009-07-24T16:57:00.002-04:00

I'm happy to see this news, the car exchange program to encourage people to buy newer (and more fuel efficient) cars. It is hard to imagine that US oil consumption would go down without such programs. For example I regularly see very old cars on the road [no not the modified hot-rods that have a thirties shell and a 21st century drive train :) However the new configuration may be worse than the original in terms of fuel consumption ] and the truth is after a certain time period, a car becomes seriously inefficient if not maintained properly. So a newer, more fuel efficient car is always a better thing for the planet.

Another important thing to note is that these cars are going to be scrapped. Some countries that have age restrictions for vehicles (such as Japan) just push the cars out of the country and let them be sold in other countries. This is exactly what happens in Sri Lanka where many cars are imported from Japan. The laws have been revised to restrict older cars from coming through however and I hope the situation changes soon. Anyway, the point is that once you take a gas guzzler out of the road, this program makes sure that it'll not be used again since it does not matter where you emit the fumes.

Year of English and IT

2009-07-18T21:57:00.004-04:00

I was impressed by the following video, when I stumbled upon it in facebook [ Thanks Chinthaka for posting]

Not having a money sucking war anymore lets Sri Lanka focus on economic development now and getting such a complement from Bill is extremely valuable. I have great respect to Bill (Gates) for what he has been able to do with the software industry [ Apple's Steve Jobs, famously complemented Bill on building the first software company when the world did not see software as the driving force]. As I've mentioned before, although I have an ideological disagreement with Microsoft model of business, it is not a reason to discredit Bill or Microsofts innovations in software. This video statement however includes a slightly worrisome piece although the overall message makes me really happy.

My concern rises from "Microsoft will fully support this effort". Following the footsteps of my mentor, Sanjiva Weerawarana, I also believe that the model that apparently worked for India does not work for Sri Lanka. Why ? India has a huge advantage of man power and we don't ! What would work for us as a smaller but highly literate (thanks to the free education system that I am also part of) country is the Irish model. Irish are known to provide high level, specilaized software services (see their software portfolio) and known to have a highly skillful workforce. When I was still an undergrad, Sanjiva did a presentation on this and what immediately grabbed me is this idea of having high quality specialized services. I suppose WSO2, my old employer, achieved some of that success for SOA since right now if you are thinking SOA, WSO2 stands out as a major player [ Guess who Microsoft selected to demonstrate their SOA interoperability ? Not IBM, Oracle or SUN but WSO2 ]. WSO2 primarily consists of Sri Lankan talent. I still affectionately remember when we used to be a one floor office and you could point to experts in any of the WS-* spec areas , like "that's the WS-RM expert, that guy on the corner is the WS security expert" etc :)

Anyway - what is my concern ? I believe Free and Opensource Software (FOSS) has a great role to play in pushing Sri Lanka as the IT capitol. Having a Sinahala enabled Vista version is great, I would even consider getting that for my mom and dad who struggle with the english menus. But an influx of native language enabled Microsoft software that needs to be paid is not necassarily the best path to success. I believe that native language enabled Linux and other FOSS based software development methods would be the key in this effort. Why ? It comes free of cost, no strings attached and doing so will create a whole new specialization for us. Microsoft being a major support in the IT effort (and the introduction of the native language enabled Windows version) makes me think that the government could lean towards focusing more on Microsoft specializations. FOSS not having a strong financial backing [We all know "money talks"] would make things harder also.

In the same light I remember a discussion I had with James Clark years back. He was telling us what happened to one of the Linux popularization programs his Thai Opensource foundation did. They distributed linux preinstalled laptops at subsidized prices and people who received them just wiped out Linux and installed the Thai version of Windows (in many occasions pirated). According to James, the Thai version of Windows is pretty good and dominates the OS market in Thailand. I'm not saying something like that will happen in Sri Lanka but surely we will have to think of similar consequences if a serious imbalance is created.

We learn that relying on one cloud provider is bad - Once again !

2009-07-14T21:24:00.003-04:00

yes - Many have predicted this and many others anticipated a similar scenario. However it happened when no one was expecting. I'm talking about the Google cloud outage that happened on 2nd July :)

There has been thorough investigations about what happened. There is a very detailed email in the user group [ read it here. Need to be part of the group though ]. Here are few things that got my attention. Here onwards sections in italic are extracts from the post mortem :)

8:07 AM --- The App Engine primary on-call engineer attempts to update
the System Status site with information describing elevated datastore
latency and error rates. However, the Status Site is only
intermittently available and returning errors on all updates.
Investigating the problem, the primary engineer discovered that the
isolated servers supporting the Status Site were running in the same
data center as the primary App Engine serving cluster. Thus, the site
ultimately depended upon the same GFS instance as App Engine itself.
The cause for this error in the Status Site was determined to be a
configuration error in the App Engine datacenter failover procedure.

This tells me no matter how deep we've been in handling large volumes of data, we are still not good at dealing with disasters! Such configuration errors come to light only in dire circumstances and its usually too late !

10:00 AM --- GFS SRE advises that the GFS engineering team has
identified the cause of the crashes as a "query-of-death" against the
GFS servers. Another user of GFS in the same primary datacenter as App
Engine is issuing a request to the GFS servers that reliably causes a
crash. The client was sending an improperly formed filehandle which
was not safely checked and sanitized by the server, and which caused a
stack overflow when processed. Now that it is known that the bug is a
malformed query from a client, GFS SRE identifies a MapReduce process
that is triggering the GFS bug, and the process is disabled. GFS
Master is no longer failing and GFS Chunkservers, which hold the
actual needed data, are starting to come back up by 10:30 AM.

Google is one of the most test oriented software companies. To understand how serious they are with tests you have to step into one of their rest rooms [ I personally have this experience twice ]. No matter whether you stand up or sit down to do your thing, there are well placed notices that tell you about the importance of testing and even little quizzes about "where is the bug". One would expect such test obsessed folks to generate near perfect code. An "unsanitized file handle" ? How could that have slipped through ? What this tells me is that we still have not perfected the art of creating software !

Most importantly this incident underscores what we have been talking about for some time. Dependence on one cloud provider. Google just proved that depending solely on them is bad !!

Twitter, Ruby on Rails and Jack Dorsey

2009-06-10T15:04:00.008-04:00

Jack Dorsey [@jack] gave a talk at IBM research today. He came 'plain' with no slide deck but it was a great talk and Jack is an exciting speaker [ at least for me, he has the geek appeal :)].

IBM Research Talk with Twitter's Jack Dorsey from IBM Research on Vimeo.

Jack talked about the history, his obsession with couriers and dispatchers etc and gave an exciting answer to one of the questions I asked :)

Question: Do you think that your initial choice of technology effected the progress of twitter ? in other words If you were to do it again would you use rails or something else ?

Answer: [Not in the exact words but the intent and meaning is not modified. I did take a look at the recording. The time in the video are from 53.31 onwards ]

Yes. For example the use of Rails made the application accessible to people withing 2 weeks! The fact that people saw the application and reacted to it with such a short time was very important. Florian Weber , One of the Rails core committers was in the team (with close ties to DHH) and that also was enticing in choosing the framework.
The mistake we did was putting it all out there. We did not follow a controlled expose methodology and that is what came to bite us.
As for the technology perspective I would not have changed anything! We would be cautious and expect explosive growth but the platform would have been the same.

--

Obviously the actual answer is longer and the above is just the gist of it. However given that Twitter is the poster child for Ruby on Rails and Twitter reportedly had so many hiccups, it was surprising to hear Jack say this. His point was that because of the technology they were able to get the look and feel and the functionality rapidly and that made what is Twitter today.

The importance of this statement is that it is a realization of the wonder of rapid development with agile frameworks :) I have friends who believe that everything need to be done with basics without using packaged functionality. Also I've seen many efforts in the early phases of projects (sometimes simple ones that may not even go beyond a proof of concept) that focus on premature optimization and finally result in horrible code that is extremely difficult to comprehend. The sad part is that sometimes it is deemed that such complexity is necessary ['How are we going to efficiently use our memory then ?' ]. Jack answers all these 'fallacies' [ that is exactly how I see them ] by endorsing rails :) His point is that what is important , especially in socially driven applications such as Twitter is agility. Agility comes with more abstraction !

These days I work with Rails everyday and given the complexity of the application suite we (Max, Roy and me) are building, if we did not have Ruby on Rails, we wouldn't have done even half the stuff ! Its amazingly productive and given a good rails tool set (I use Eclipse Aptana studio - free version of course) it becomes a really good competitor to any Web development framework. And Jack just polished the chrome making rails shine more :)

How much is it gonna cost ?

2009-06-02T21:21:00.010-04:00

While listening to a recorded interview with the defense secretary of Sri Lanka, I built the curiosity to find out what kind of funds are needed to sustain a war. We hear about terrorist organizations every day. What we don't hear or don't understand is the cost of sustaining their activities.

Amazingly it takes an enormous amount of money to sustain a war. From a quick search I gather that an RPG costs around $300 per unit and the launcher costs around $500. Given that terrorists can't just go to a store and order 100 RPG's they'll be paying much more than that in the black market. Let us double the price and count it as $600 for one RPG. Even a Westerner would just twitch on this number but you have to really consider the third world to see the enormity of these values. For example the gross national income per capita in Sri Lanka in 2007 is $1540. In other words one RPG costs a little less than half the yearly income of an average citizen!

These numbers come into perspective when you see the weapons caches the clearing operations turn out everyday in Sri Lanka. This report for example states that nearly 30 RPG weapons (which I presume launchers) have been recovered. From our calculations the launchers alone would have cost them $30,000 ! There has been numerous reoveries of weapons caches and they not only turn out RPG's - guns, ammo, satellite and communication equipment, explosives (claymore mines) etc are common findings. I'm sure if one is to count the complete cost of these weapons (I meant cost - not value - since when an illegitimate organization acquires such weapons I assume they have to go through the black market and pay more than the actual value) that were recovered, it'll easily dwarf millions of dollars.

Where can all this money come from ? As for the LTTE most of the funds came from extortion, drug trafficking and other illegal activities. I would assume for other organizations such as Al Qaida, it will be more or less the same means of fund raising. What most people don't realize is the enormity of these funds when they sum up. The Sri Lankan army once reported that the terrorists use a higher grade RPG (obviously more expensive) than the army version. The Sri Lankan forces never had the ZPU-4 type anti aircraft weapons that were recovered from the terrorist stronghold. So simply the terrorist challenged a government (of a country that ranks at 78th position in GDP, So Sri Lanka is poor but not dirt poor) in terms of their financial power, a power that came from summing up a number of illegal activities!

Shotgun Diplomacy

2009-05-21T17:11:00.007-04:00

I don't know anything about international affairs or what and what not to do in foreign relations. The bit I know tells me diplomacy is the opposite of tactlessness and diplomats are supposed to be respectful people. The following news articles however , made me question my understanding of diplomacy.

One is David Miliband's diplomatic catastropy, according to the Brits themselves. The other is Hillary Clinton urging for reconciliation. it seems all rules of diplomacy comes into play when there are other interstests. If a poor third world country that has no natural resources of interest [ like that black gooey stuff, mmmm.. what do they call it? Black gold may be ;) ] becomes entangled in a matter that requires diplomatic intervention, it doesn't matter whether protocols of diplomacy were preserved or not. The so called diplomats can do anything and just get away with it. it doesn't really matter to them since they are dealing with someone who cannot make any impact on their way of life, at least that is what they think.

This has been the case regarding Sri Lanka all the way. David Miliband for example (who has become an extremely unpopular character in SL) reportedly tried pushing his agenda as if Sri Lanka is still a British colony, an agenda that completely sidelined the Sri Lankan government. United states has also been misled and plays the policemans role ( as always ) saying over and over about reconciliation, holding an IMF loan hostage [Hmm... I in IMF stands for International as far as I remember]. I have great respect to Obama and (Hillary) Clinton [ in that order] so it makes me extra sad to see them being misled and being dropped into the same bag as their predecessors.

I started this post few days earlier and many things happened since then. UN secratary general (UNSG) coined his new word ,'appalling' that every news agency reiterated, often giving no mention of what else he said [There are reports that show UNSG having two tones during two news conferences] . New news reports popped up suggesting an enormous death toll that fuelled a dying fire. The sad part of all this is the apparent ignorance of all the facts . No one seems to be concerned about where all the questionable numbers come from or their validity [ thank god there are no more anonymous satellite phone calls ] . The civilian casualties of American, British or Israeli military ordeals are conveniently termed collateral damage. No agency writes or asks for immediate intervention about human rights for Gitmo detainees. Don't get me wrong. I'm not angry , just frustrated about this serious imbalance. All these makes me wonder whether the first world everybody believes in is really a first world!

Independence 2.0 for Sri Lanka

2009-05-19T03:15:00.006-04:00

Sanjiva has a great blog post on the second version of independence in Sri Lanka. It is indeed a rebirth of the independence for us. In case you are totally unaware of what is happening in the world and wondering what in the world I am talking about, the 30 year long civil war in Sri Lanka is officially over.

When I look back I have lived almost entirely during this conflict. I can't remember a war-free country (until now) and I have never been able to travel to the northern tip of my small country even though I've traveled around the world. It was interesting (and annoying) to see the so called bipartisanship of the Western media, the variety of efforts to hinder the effort to finish a ruthless terrorist outfit, the real intentions of the so called 'protectors of human rights' and the incompetency of some of our own who did not want to see an end to this conflict. A year before, no one (including me) believed that we would ever reach this success this soon. However proving that 'if there is the will, there is a way' the Sri Lankan armed forces, the political leadership and all Sri Lankans were able to push it to the end.

Mahinda Rajapakse , His excellency the presdient of Sri Lanka really deservers his title. I have been under the reign of all the (Sri Lankan) executive presidents during my lifetime and Mahinda is the best real leader. He had the guts to push the efforts till the conflict came to a conclusion. Some say he is corrupted - I don't care. He gave the right leadership to end the conflict and that shadows everything else. I have faith in Mahinda that he will bring a lasting political solution to this conflict and he clearly expressed his intentions by actions.

He is capable of addressing the nation in all three national languages including Tamil. I don't know how he managed to pull that off but none of the past presidents have taken the effort to learn Tamil let alone address the nation. In fact when I was in SL a few months back I saw Mahinda addressing the nation in Tamil and stood up in amazement! To me, having a leader who can address the nation in all the national languages is itself a sign of unification.
The presidents first address to the nation after the war started in Tamil! That fact itself is an enough answer to Western media that say Mahinda is a hardliner.
One of the most significant statements he made was about minorities. He basically stated that [ not an exact translation ] 'there are no minorities in this country, there are only people who want or don't want to see the success of Sri Lanka'. Very true

However We as Sri Lankans cannot just push all the responsibility over to Mahinda and wipe our hands on the next phase. All of us have a resposibility in doing our part in making Sri Lanka succeed. Mahinda has given the start, all of us should do our part in getting a lasting solution and making sure we reach prosperity.

Across America - Day 3

2009-05-08T23:18:00.016-04:00

The earlier part of the story are in Day 1 and Day 2.

Monday May 4th - 9.00 am {Mountain Time}
Car needs an oil change and I've already driven about 200 miles over the oil change millage. The hotel clerk pointed me to the Walmart next door [ Now thats convenient :) ]. There was a line for lube and tires, and most were cross country travelers like me ! Time for breakfast and stock up the coffee.

Monday May 4th - 10.00 am {Mountain Time}
Having driven across two thirds of Wyoming under darkness, I never realized how breathtaking the scenery is. Wyoming has an interesting terrain, its flat towards Nebraska and becomes hilly towards Utah. Western Wyoming is absolutely gorgeous in terms of scenary.
I've learned a new lesson about cruise control, primarily when I crossed over to Utah. Cruise control is great when you want a controlled descent at highway speeds. However when on the climb, the transmission automatically downshifts halfway through and cruise control kicks up the engine speed , in my case from 3000 rpm to 5500 rpm. There is not much of a jerk but this sudden speed change is bad for the engine, given that the car has some miles on it. So far I had only few such situations and I've driven 99% of the trip on cruise. As a note of warning, it is not recommended to use cruise control during rain. If there is danger of hydroplaning, cruise control might throw you off to an uncontrollable speed. So far I haven't had serious rain or any signs of hydroplaning conditions.

Monday May 4th - 12.30 pm {Pacific Time}
Salt Lake City at last. I've been here two years back but never got to go to see the salt lake. Its extremely huge, white and totally unlike what I expected. The road is flat again :)
One interesting item that I took note before reaching SLC is a 'runaway truck exit'. Its basically
a sand dump that helps to slow down a fast moving vehicle, probably a truck with failed brakes.

Monday May 4th - 2.30 pm {Pacific Time}
Nevada is unlike anything I expected. My impression of Nevada is a big, flat, hot desert. But hey, northern Nevada is completely the opposite. Snow covered mountaintops, winding roads and signs that say "frequent deer crossing when flashing" ! [ The lights were actually flashing though I didn't see any deer] There are numerous signs that mandate the use of chains [ For the unknown, during heavy snow, vehicles put in chains around their wheels for traction. Its rare in the mid west but when it comes to the mountains such as the ones in Nevada , certain sections of the highway mandates the use of chains, primarily for heavy vehicles.]

Monday May 4th - 6.30 pm {Pacific Time}
I stopped at Winnemucca NV for a late lunch and some more coffee. The stop was completely unplanned but it turned out to be the halfway point between San Francisco and Salt Lake City. To my amazement when I exited the almost deserted highway ,I was suddenly in this nice little town with old buildings and lot of people. Winnemucca is also the point where the highway turns south west.

Monday May 4th - 8.30 pm {Pacific Time}
While crossing the Sierra Nevada mountain range I faced the worst of conditions that can occur at once. It was raining, pitch dark, the road is twisty and the highway is under repair for about 50 miles. It is harder to drive with all those big trucks going by since when they pass you, there is a fine mist of water that completely blocks the view. This is specially difficult when you are in a low profile vehicle such as a car.
My little GPS has been an immense help throughout the whole trip and specially in this area. I always observe the GPS to get an idea of the road ahead,like whether there is a sharp curve, an s curve etc. Whatever the gizmos you have, its still not possible to navigate a car in zero visibilty. So I followed the best safety procedure of all - slowing down !
This slow driving did cost me though. I expected to fill up in Sacremento CA but with the gas I had in the tank , I was not sure whether I'll make it. It would have been a disaster to run out of gas in these conditions so I stopped by in the first gas station I came across in the middle of the mountains. Car got gas and I got coffee. The rain seemed to have died down and hopefully I'll get more visibility.

Tuesday May 5th - 1.00 am {Pacific Time}
Reached my hotel in South San Jose. It's been 3 days of nonstop traveling and I am finally back where I am supposed to be :) It's been an easy drive from Sarcemento onwards with no rain.

Here are some tips for the cross country travelers from my experience.

Take a GPS unit. I have a Tomtom one 3rd Edition , a cheap but extremely functional unit which I bought right after I got the car. One can pickup one of these things for about $70 now and their value is immense when you are traveling through unfamiliar areas. It is always a good idea to have a map with you in case the GPS fails [ It happened to me once , right after I did a software upgrade to the GPS. I've been careful to keep the running version of the navigation software unchanged after that]. This advice might not work with everyone though. Even among my collegues , there are hard core GPS non believers! . Topher for example always questions the directions given by the GPS and trusts the road signs more than the GPS instructions :) Unfortunately for such non believers [sorry Topher ;)] almost all new cars [specially the German ones :))] come with in-car naviagation systems so you get one whether you like it or not!
Eat lightly and take more coffee. Replace coffee with whatever keeps you awake. The idea is keeping your senses alert.
Make sure your car is running clean and well. Wiper blades, filters,brakes and tires are a few things that you should look at before making a long trip. If you do regular maintenance then this is not really an issue.
Make the trip in the Summer(late Spring / early Fall) if possible. I can imagine how it would be during the Winter !

It would have been nice to have Dharshi by my side :) She would have enjoyed the scenery and I would have planned for a longer, less hectic drive. However on the bright side there is no one to complain about my taste of eighties music [ Again Topher is the right guy to ask about my choice of music specially during long drives], nor my undiscovered vocal skills :D

The summary of my carbon footprint (Thanks Chinthaka for giving me the idea)

Total distance driven (according to car odometer) - 2581 miles (4153 Kilometers)
Total Gas consumption - 85.43 US Gallons (323.37 Liters)
Average mileage - 30.21 miles per Gallon (12.85 Kilometers per Liter)

The map follows. I might have not placed some pictures correctly - specially the ones taken in Nevada.

View Drive - 4th May 2009 in a larger map

Across America - Day 2

2009-05-06T18:05:00.014-04:00

If you are wondering about Day 1, its the previous post.

Sunday May 3rd - 10.00 am {Central Time}
Left Independence MO heading north. My original plan was to go via Denver but thought it would be good to avoid the mountains at the last moment. GPS told me it is shorter to go via Nebraska so I decided I'll just take my chances (?) and head north [I'll anyway have to head north at some point]. I also decided to keep the camera out so when I see interesting stuff I might just point to that general direction and shoot.

Sunday May 3rd - 1.00 pm {Central Time}
Stopped just after passing Omaha NE for brunch and coffee. I didn't realize that one needs to enter Iowa before reaching Omaha. Interesting enough, there is significant wildlife along the way [which translates to many roadkill, specially Deer] Some such roadkills are so gruesome which makes me think that driving in these parts of the world may not work out for the faint hearted :)

Sunday May 3rd - 8.00 pm {Mountain Time}
Stopped for dinner and gas right before Cheyenne WY. What ? There is no "Welcome to Wyoming" sign when entering Wyoming ? I've completely crossed Nebraska and was looking for the welcome sign to note when I am entering Wyoming. Sadly there was no sign [Even I couldn't have been that blind :)] and I only noted the change in the road signs. I've hit rain in the middle of NE but its flat land and nothing much to worry about. The scenery is amazing but I did not want to break the momentum by sightseeing.

Monday May 4th - 1.30 am {Mountain Time}
I decided to stop for the day at Rock Springs WY. The original plan was to reach Salt Lake City for the night but its still about 200 miles (at least 3 hours) away. I could have gone further, at least till I reached the state line, but the car was due an oil change. Human settlements have become scarce [ It was usual to see signs like "next exit 10 miles"] and I was afraid I might end up in the middle of nowhere 100 miles later [ use the GPS you dummy :)]. Thank god these guys have working wireless.

Total distance for the day is 954 miles (roughly 14 hours). The images are placed approximately since I don't have a geo tag enabled camera. Await the story of the day 3.

BTW I always wanted to say this. Coffee in Missouri, Lunch in Nebraska and Dinner in Wyoming :)

View Drive - 3rd May 2009 in a larger map

Across America - Day 1

2009-05-05T17:12:00.010-04:00

I'm in California at IBM research once again and this time I decided to bring my own car now that I have one here :) However Dayton, OH to San Jose CA is not a short drive, it's 2457 miles (3954 kilometers) and its not a drive that one can make it one day. So I decided to do one of those things that I always wanted to do, drive across America ! [ Well the original plan was to do it on a Harley. An aged Honda Accord is hardly comparable to a Harley and Dayton OH is 'mid west'. I might do the original someday but this is good enough for now : ) ] This is the story of my great American crossing , split into 3 posts. I would have blogged/tweeted from the road but after 14 hours of driving there is nothing else you can do but sleep !

Friday May 1st 2009 - Midnight {Pacific time}
I leave San Francisco airport [Why I could not drive to CA on the starting day is a long and irrelevant story here] . The plane was supposed to leave at 11.15pm but got delayed repeatedly. I hoped to catch some sleep but there was an interesting movie, 'Yes man' that got me hooked so I watched till the end. Probably got 2 hours of sleep before reaching Chicago.

Saturday May 2nd - 5.30 am {Central time}
Landed in Chicago IL. Walked nearly a half a mile to the next gate, played with the new HP touch smart things in the airport lobby, had breakfast and fell asleep on the chair. Good that I found the gate before falling asleep.

Saturday May 2nd - 10.30 am {Eastern time}
Landed in Dayton OH. Kats, Meena and Cartic (all three ?) came to pick me up (all in one car of course)

Saturday May 2nd - 2.30 pm {Eastern time}
All packed for the journey. I already took my essential stuff so these are mostly 'nice to have' things [extra clothes, comforters, few cooking apparatus] and car stuff [Toolkit, extra coolent ] . In the hurry to leave I've brought the wrong charger for the laptop (IBM charger instead of the old gateway one) but managed to find the previous (burnt) charger and fixed it (A lot can be done with a few drops of solder and duct tape. Gateway replaced the faulty charger with no questions asked so I never got to fix the old one :)) so hopefully I can be connected where ever I decide to stay. An oil change is due in 1500 miles but the local Midas is packed so I decided I should just hit the road. To the gas station to fill up, check the tire pressure, buy a map book (in case the GPS fails) and I'm off.

Saturday May 2nd - 8.00 pm {Central time}
Made a food break in the outskirts of St Louis , Illinois. I've driven across whole of Indiana and almost all of Illinois. I've underestimated the effect of caffeine on my body. I've had very little food but double the usual amount of coffee and water but I'm fully awake with no fatigue at all. GPS estimated its 269 miles (4 hours) to Kansas City, Missouri and I decided to buy more coffee and hit the road again.

Sunday May 3rd - 1.30 am {Central time}
Reached Independence Missouri, 10 miles from Kansas City. I picked the motel that seemed the cheapest (looks are deceiving though) and decided to do a quick "I'm ok" transmission to home. To my dismay the hotel wireless network is not within the reach of my room (I find that after taking a shower and changing :() so I walked to the lobby (carrying the whole bunch of gadgets including the laptop, mic and the camera. Reminds me that I should get a new one that has all these things integrated) after grunting with the front desk but the wireless network still refuses to connect! The hotel clerk offered his advice but looked blank when I told him that "the problem is in your DHCP server"! There is no use in arguing with these people but I decided to make a formal complaint later. However when I was about to fall asleep I remembered that my phone has Verizon wireless data connection that I never use. I managed to send a 5 word email home [ the definition of who represents home is now modified ;) ] after fumbling with the numeric keypad for 10 minutes. Its 2.00 am and I should get some sleep before starting in the morning.

I've done 598 miles driving from Dayton OH to Independence MO. See the map for details. Click on the icons to see their relevant descriptions.

View Drive - 2nd May 2009 in a larger map

While in Transit...

2009-03-21T15:56:00.006-04:00

Having to spend 10 hours in transit and London Heathrow, Here are some of the random thoughts that crossed my mind.

1. Thank god they have power sockets for laptops everywhere in terminal 4. Last time (just 3 months ago) I wondered why Heathrow is so backwards, only having power sockets near restrooms :)

2. Things are so expensive here! Once one of my good friends who lived in UK for a while said "if something costs x dollars in US, it will cost x sterling in UK" (regardless that one sterling is about $1.50). Now I understand what he meant.

3. I have a ton of ASF emails to read. It's interesting how much chatter we do in mailing lists, even the ones with limited participation (such as members@). Even if I select to read threads that I assume 'important' there is a lot!

4. Why do some airport authorities want to earn money with wifi ? Interestingly airports are like motels. All cheap/small motels offer free wifi but big named ones always ask you extra to connect. Dayton airport (DAY - called International since a few of the planes cross the border and fly over to Canada :D) offers excellent free wifi where as IAD / LHR wants to grab a piece of your hard earned money just to get online !

5. We are talking about touchscreens, gestures and colorful UI's but still the airline reservation systems have the ugly blue screen and a function key driven menus ! [Reminds me of GW-BASIC]. What the ????

My Google shortcut laiden keyboard

2009-02-28T12:11:00.004-05:00

From Random

The truth is out there!

2009-02-24T11:35:00.006-05:00

I'm not talking about X-files ! This is about actually getting to the truth and perhaps a thought about how we define bipartisanship, especially in reporting.

Recently the Sri Lankan civil war (Notice the bold word) has become intense and there are many media reports that sometimes contradict and often seem biased. My view is biased too since I am a Sri Lankan but assuming that I don't know anything about this and try to be a centrist, here's what I see.

1. The Western media, always emphasizing their neutrality seem to have prejudice about certain parts of the world. If a third world government makes a statement its taken with utmost uncertainty, highlighting the conflicting nature of such a statement with other information sources, often coming from questionable parties ,say condemned rebel groups.
Mind you, this happens only when a third world government. For example [Warning - hypothetical situation] if Al-Qaeda and US-government makes (conflicting) statements about some incident in Afghanistan, the backing would definitely be on the government. If there is photographic evidence from the government side the trust goes off the roof and there is nothing else to talk about. If the same situation involved the Pakistani government then the view becomes drastically different. There would be long reports questioning the credibility of the Pakistani government and the media would always try to show they are unbiased by splitting the blame 50/50 among the two parties. ["Its a third world government. We know for a fact that third world governments are corrupt so they can't be telling the truth. Forget what our reporters say or how nasty the other party is. Lets just drop the blame on everybody to be on the safeside"]
Unfortunately this seems to the the case in reporting the latest incidents in Sri Lanka. There is prejudice that Sri Lankan government is bad, trying to cover up things and everything the government says is looked at with doubt and uncertainty. The photographic evidence has no bearings. The LTTE repeatedly showing their unwillingness to commit to peace has no bearing. All suicide attacks has no bearing.The blame splits 50/50 between the parties and sometime the questionable statements from the rebels gets more PR than the rightful fact. The sad part is that such reporting causes more harm than good.

2. There is a senate hearing about the current developments in Sri Lanka today (Feb 24 2009). I can't help but wonder where is the bipartisanship in this hearing when I see the list of witnesses. Where is the current US Ambassador to Sri Lanka ? [ probably the most well versed US official in this matter. His views are in contrast to the current views of the government but still there is valid reason to ask his opinion]. Where is the Sri Lankan ambassador to US ? Isn't he a valid authority to update the senate with the current situation in Sri Lanka ? [Perhaps embassies should just deal with passports and visas]

I can go on and on with this but I suppose I made my point. What is the point of talking about bipartisanship when you can demonstrate it by actions ?

Skype, a Dell Mini and falling in Love

2009-01-24T21:13:00.015-05:00

Interesting combination, you would say. At least this combination makes a lot of sense to me. I never anticipated for things to happen this way but hey, no one can predict the future :) Anyway I'm in love and this is my love story :)

Before we begin, a word about marriages from where I come from. Arranged marriages exist there! However the extent of the arrangement is different from what you probably read in the history books. Its become just like the modern eharmony or match.com process but in a low tech way where the intent of the arrangement is to make the parties meet. Whether they should take things further is up to them.

My parents were quite concerned about me being a bachelor for a long time and not showing the slightest intent to settle down. So mid last year (2008) I had to become a participant to a meeting, a video conference through skype to meet someone special. I would say it went 'ok' , just the general things that first timers talk about :) However that was the start and we began talking over skype and email regularly [Unfortunately she did not have IM at work so no real time chat]

For the geek in me, I was hesitant to believe that falling in love can happen without a physical face to face meeting. There were tell tale signs of an obvious connection after a few months [twice a week 15 minute call became an everyday 40 minute call] but now that I look back at it, both of us ignored the signs :) When I went to SL last December (of course with the primary intention of meeting her) the spark became a fire and the rest is history :)

Now for the Dell Mini. I bought a laptop for my sister (a Dell Studio 15, quite a nice machine I should say) and got a special $99 offer for a Dell Mini. This gave me the idea of taking a netbook as a present to her which would definitely help her to keep in touch with me. The mini did cost me about $100 more since I added a few extras but it was still a bargain and made a very nice surprise gift. Now we make video calls everyday (3G internet is still jittery sometimes but its not that bad)

Credits ? Obviously my mom and dad for their intervention [My mom, who is quite traditional when it comes to certain things (such as cooking :) I can write a book about her hesitation to incorporate technology in the cooking process) is surprisingly modern in these things ] and of course skype. Without skype, cost effective video conferencing would not have been possible for me and things might not have worked out. Anyway its all in the past now - I'm looking forward for a lovely future :)

Dell mini

2008-12-15T23:56:00.007-05:00

I got a Dell mini 9 for two weeks recently (How and why is out of the question. I will keep it a mystery (soon to be demystified though) for now:)). But I absolutely loved it. Its excellent for traveling, extremely light and durable. I love the preinstalled Ubuntu (thank god for Dell for having all the drivers and also packing it up in a CD. Getting them into the machine in case of a reinstall however is tricky since the mini does not have a CD drive :)). I did feel that few things can be improved though.

1. I love the solid state disk. However the fact that it is only 8GB [I ordered an upgrade. The default is 4GB] bothers me a bit. The OS and related files take about 40% of the space and you are left with only 4GB to play with. That is not enough at all if you want to take your movies along to watch in the plane. Attaching a power draining external disk may not be an attractive option.

2. Although the keyboard looks ok it takes a bit of getting used to. It is understandable though since they had to fit a fairly sized keybaord into this tiny frame and I can live with that.

3. The camera is optional. I got this one with the camera but they could just make it one of the defaults. If the purpose of a netbook is to be a travel companion then I would say the camera is part of the standard tools.

I absolutely love this mini and am planning to get one myself sometime later. Hope Dell can give an option to get a larger SSD atleast:).

Update -
1.The latest edition of Linux Journal has a similar review and I have to whole heartedly agree to all of it.
2. Dell is shipping larger disks with the Mini now.

American Cars - Should they be left to rust out ?

2008-12-15T05:18:00.003-05:00

Thanksgiving is a special holiday in US, probably a celebration of a very unique kind where the European settlers threw a huge party to the natives. Of course the the dynamics changed later and things turned ugly for a while but the tradition lives on and Americans celebrate thanksgiving in grand style every year. We being foreigners don't feel this significance that much but I've been in a very traditional thanksgiving with an American family last year and this year we (lab mates and old friends) had our own thanksgiving. This post is not about the good time we had in the Florida sun but something about American cars. What made me specially think about this is the on going debate about American automakers and their plight.

We rented a car for the journey and got a Mercury Grand Marquis, a huge (at least in my scale its more of a truck than a car) hunk of a machine. I did discover why everybody gives me advice not to go with American cars.

1. It has a v8 and according to my calculations the mileage was about 24mpg (highway). This is not considered really bad in American standard but if this was Europe or Asia, people will freak out (I can imagine the reaction of my dad when he hears this. He drives a diesel Sprinter that does about 30 mpg in city. For the auto ignorant, the milage in highway and city changes drastically since city traffic is stop and go and highway is more steady speed. The highway milage is almost always higher than the city for a conventional car). The point is that in US such gas guzzlers are still considered acceptable. Why would a regular car that would not do in excess of 75 mph [most highways have speed limits of either 65 mph or 70 mph depending on the state. Legally it is a tickatable offense to exceed the speed limit by 5 mph. People however drive faster when cops are not around :)] would need a the v8 ? If the point is having enough power to accelerate even then there are ways to make things fuel efficient (such as active fuel management from GM!). The point is that American automakers mostly think about power and performance without the fuel efficiency. This is what nearly wiped them out during the seventies oil crisis and they did not learn their lesson properly, best example being GM's hesitation to widely adopt their own (above mentioned) AFM system.

2. The Grand Marquis is termed luxury. Sadly it is nothing but luxury. No climate control, no gadgets and there was evidence of shoddy build quality. For example the seats, even though they were cushy, had their hinges jutting out (luckily its only cosmetic. The jutted parts never touched the occupants). Topher (who's probably in the 200lb range) complained about a hard 'thing' touching his back and commented that his 10 year old Audi, even with the beating of being driven around for nearly 200k miles, still feels comfy. The passenger airbag light on the dashboard was literally a 'hole' where you can put your finger in (if you fancy doing such things :D). These things would have killed the market for any car maker, specially when you have tough competition from Germany, Japan and even South Korea for high quality cars.

The car indeed was easy to drive and reliably served us through the nonstop 16 hour and 20 hour drives (the return trip took 4 hours more due to traffic). The point is that a Honda or a Audi or any other foreign car would do the same with lot less fuel and none of the above drawbacks. The fuel factor will be very important (if not the most important) in the near future and buyers are likely to look at the overall cost of running than anything else. [The current gas price drop is temporary and should not be taken to be something that'll last]

So what is the verdict ? Should these car makers be forced to rethink by letting them go bankrupt ? Many of my friends think so. Some say its time that the big three learnt their lesson [in par with the extreme republican view]. Others express concern over the impact on the economy if the auto makers died. Its more like an iceberg, 90% is underwater and all you see is the top. If the American big three went down many other industries may go down as well, perhaps permanantly.

For me, I think the latter makes sense at this point. The banks are down and if the automakers go down as well, things will turn really ugly. Although we've studied economics for a long time , we still don't know the right buttons to press in a situation like this. What we do understand is that its gonna be worse if the automakers go down. I would play it safe and keep them alive but making sure that they really learn their lesson this time.

Daycon

2008-10-11T21:10:00.003-04:00

I am in daycon II,a so called hacker conference. Unfortunately (?) when this post comes out I'll be in the luxury of my home since the wireless in the hotel is not free and I did not want to pay any extra :) In any case the word 'hacker' is not to be misunderstood here. These guys are well respected professionals and they are not demonstrating how to break into pentagon. Instead this is a focused conference, primarily on security and I've been in a few very interesting talks that has exposed me to very different fields of thought and ideas.

Few of the interesting talks I found are the following

1. Chris Hoff - Securing the virtualization environment
One of the best perspectives of the security aspects in a virtualized environment. This has a tremendous importance in todays hype of the cloud computing since the software is provided as a service and no one seems to care as to how the services are provided. Given that 'elasticity' is way too easier to provide using virtualization, many clouds are likely to use viirtualization under the hood. However as Greg very clearly pointed out, certain security measurements cannot be put in a viirtualized setting. The worst of all, even when you spend a ton of money in network security infrastructure, it does not gurantee that there will be secured virtual instances. On there notes, Greg had the most interesting slide decks.

2. Greg Conti - Lawful evil to Chaotic good
Greg is a professor at the NY United States Military and his talk is primarily focused on the information security on the Web. He talked about the AOL dataset disclosure and how 'Googling' can expose your personality to others, even when you are not knowingly giving out anything. This is one of those talks that I found as a contrast to my way of thinking. Yes I do take privacy seriously but I've been an avid user of Google for the past few years. I maintain my email accounts in Google, use Google checkout and try out every new thing that they come up with. Gregs talk was focused on showing how vulnerable this can be. I might not change the way I work right now but things do look differently now.

3. "The Ninja Show"
Interestingly the presenter, Yamada did not speak a single word but typed on notepad and used the built in TTS (and took questions via IRC). Not to mention that he was in a full ninja suit complete with a sword . He types fast and it probably made sense since he would type faster than he would have spoken English. Nevertheless the content is very interesting. He talked about the insecurities introduced via the bios where technologies such as Intel AMT carry a threat, even to computers that are powered down.

All in all it was a good experience. Some of the talk abstracts are here. Angus (the organizer) has promised to put the videos up soon and I will update the blog then.

IKE and its after effects

2008-09-15T14:47:00.001-04:00

Texas is the state that faced IKE head on. I live in Ohio, roughly 1,200 miles away from Texas. However remnants of IKE passed through Ohio yesterday (14th Sept) and I can only guess how the real thing would have been.

1. The winds reached roughly about 60mph. Many trees fell (some fallen trees blocked the entrance to the apartment complex I live) and a lot of people lost power. Given that most of the households depend on electricity to cook and heat water, people were left without lights, hot water and food! (Luckily we were left without power only for a few hours. Our apartment complex runs underground cables and that probably saved us from having a blackout for days)

2. Many things that were left outside showed how brutal the wind is. Roof tiles, the decorative wooden shades around the windows and plastic garden chairs are a few things that were scattered among the debris.

3. Transportation became a hazard! Not because the roads were damaged but because most of the signals are not working. Some of the signal lights were turned so that they don't face the right directions (the most notable being the one at the entrance of the school, which turned 180 degrees and is facing the opposite direction) so even when they are working it did not make sense. There are temporary stop signs erected at certain intersections but still its dangerous to drive on certain roads.

If a died down IKE could do this much, I can only imagine how devastating it would have been at its full power!

Google Chrome - First Impressions

2008-09-02T22:31:00.003-04:00

Just tried Google Chrome. Looks cool and I definitely love the functionality of dragging tabs to create new windows. From the looks of it (taskmanager) it seems to spawn a new process only if the tab is made into a new window.

1. I love the interface. Simple and elegant and a whole lot of area to view the pages without obstruction.

2. CSS confirmity seems to be good. In fact I doubt whether they used the mozilla components for CSS since it seems to work exactly the same as FF3.

3. Most visited tab is cool and pretty much useful when you start the day :)

There are some glitches though

1. No Linux version ! This means I'll be sticking to FF for 90% of the time. [ I understand the mindset of giving the first place to Windows users (there a whole lot of them) But why not even a simple alpha/pre-alpha on Linux and Mac ? ]

2. Its noticeably slow. FF3 is blazingly fast (perhaps I am used to it too much) but loading of javascript and certain flash plugins seems really slow compared to FF3. There are visible glithches in rendering plain html pages. This is somewhat conflicting because there are reports that say its javascript rendering is really fast! My connection is working fine and I have no clue why it seems surprisingly slow to me.

3. Single box for search and url is a double edged sword. It makes the interface simple but the usage somewhat tricky. For example I am used to type just google in the address bar (in FF) and hit enter to go to Google. In chrome it searches Google for 'google' and displays the results.

I'm sure Google will soon fix these (except for the Linux release. I'm not sure whether Google will take the trouble to release a version for the handful of (?) Linux users out there. For example there is no equivalent to gmail notifier in Linux officially released by Google to date. There is a third party one but its another frustrated geek doing his own handy work). We know at least M$ is scared so let us see what others have to say ;)

What's it got to do with your brain ?

2008-08-31T03:04:00.006-04:00

Well Everything :) I learnt an important fact today and its well worth sharing.
During one of our usual summer gatherings at tophers place, I met Dr Catherine Harrison, a neuropsychologist working at the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL). We had a very interesting conversation about how the human mind and brain works and how one affects the other.

1. Physiological changes in your brain changes your psychological behavior.
This is evident and most people have witnessed such things with wounded soldiers and accident victims. Apart from the loss of the use of some sensory organs, brain damage definitely affects the way you think and behave.

2. Psychological changes causes physiological changes in your brain.
This is the new bit and seemed somewhat weird to me. Being a nerd I always thought of the linkage between the brain and mind as similar to computer hardware and software. The brain being the hardware and the mind being the software. Obviously a hardware failure will render the software useless but the software cannot make changes to the hardware. Seems it is not so simple when it comes to the human brain. According to Dr. Harrison your psychi causes the neurological connections of your brain to change. If you suffer from a psychological disorder it is very much likely that your brain gets hard wired for it after some time. The analogy Dr Harrison gave was a canyon. An occasional flood will not leave a mark in the canyon but a river flowing through it would make permanent changes , even to the hard rock.

The problem is that most people (at least in Sri Lanka) do not see psychological disorders as things that can be (or should be) cured by a doctor. Yes, the extreme cases of insanity will definitely find their way to the mental institute but other common cases such as stress or depression are rarely identified and brought to the attention of a psychologist [Instead there are a number of other 'methods' that they believe to bring a cure, such as getting the help of unknown forces] . According to Dr Harrison even a case of stress, if left without a remedy for a few months, would make almost permanent neurological changes in your brain. In fact the remedy in such a case can be a few sessions with a counsellor and it is easy to find and talk to a psychologist since all major hospitals have one [ Unlike in US, health care is provided by the government and free to all citizens in Sri Lanka. Inevitably there is some level of bureacracy (after all, its a government institute) but almost all hospitals are well equipped and capable of providing a good level of service. unfortunately health care being a free commodity has made people not realize how valuable it is]. Despite many attempts to improve the public knowledge about psychological disorders its still an often ignored branch of medicine in Sri Lanka.
The most important take home message for me is that both physiological and psychological illnesses have similar importance to your health. It may not be obvious but its always good to a keep a good mental health and seek the help of a professional if the need arises.

Keeping your sanity while saving the Green

2008-08-13T17:03:00.010-04:00

I've been in a dilemma for a while. Motivated primarily by the barrage of (government sponsored) advertisements about conserving energy that erupted in American TV recently, I've been wondering whether our mere existence is a threat to the world.

Here is my reasoning. When I wake up in the morning the first thing I do is check email (Yes - it sounds geeky but I really spend at least 15 minutes skimming through my mail right after I wake up). Starting from that every action I do comprises of a threat to the environment.

1. The computers are made of plastic / silicon / ceramics and other heavy metals. They won't run forever and one day they'll have to go. Due to their design its extremely difficult (if not impossible) to recycle them and the most probable place they'll end up is the landfill. The effect is doubled since I usually have two computers running.

2. They consume electricity. My power company (DP&L) primarily uses coal and I contribute green house gases (despite the best efforts to reduce emissions by DP&L) per every clock tick.

done with email! I walk over to the washing basin and open the tap for hot water. The moment I do so warm water starts flowing, kept hot by an electric heater, which contributed much more green house gases than my beloved computers.

Then I walk over to the kitchen, fill a bowl with my favorite cereal (Honey bunches of Oats), pour some milk into it and put it in the microwave to heat for 1 minute.

3. The cereal is made of primarily corn and wheat (and also oats as its name suggests) which has been grown in large farms, farms which were built on natural pastures and add a startling amount of pesticides and artificial fertilizers to keep growth to a maximum.

4. Same goes to the milk - which did not come from a 'friendly neighborhood farm' but the nearest supermarket.

5. The microwave, fridge that kept the milk, they all consumed a hefty amount of kilowatts pushing out more greenhouse gases.

I didn't even walk out of the kitchen yet but I've contributed lot to emitting a bunch of greenhouse gases.

The point of this somewhat funny (nevertheless true) account of my daily routine is to show that the sane way of life is not possible without effecting the environment. Unlike some extremist environment groups who think that progress should have zero effects on the environment, our mere existence effects the environment significantly.

So what ? Is there anything we can do about it ? Obviously we cannot make it zero and some of the counter measures we plan to put in place don't change things a lot. [ This reminds me of something I noted in a public rest room in Berkley CA (yeah - odd place to find interesting slogans ;)). The usual paper towels has been replaced with a electric hot air blow dryer with a boiler plate saying 'save the environment, use less paper'. Next to the boiler plate written in a marker pen 'yeah, and burn a lot of coal to generate electricity']. It is amply clear that we cannot go back to the untouched state of the earth and we should accept the fact that we cannot exist without being a significant effect on the environment. But at the same time we as humans should not act as we don't understand the importance of the earths balance. For the most part of it, majority of us (including me I should confess) did not take this seriously. Yes, I switch off the extra lights and use CFLs everywhere in our house but I did that in thoughts of less electricity cost than less impact to the environment.

However things are taking a slow change (primarily due to the rise of oil prices). Here in US, there is a lot of interest in using power saving appliances. There are plans to do more power generation with environmentally friendly technologies such as geo-thermal or wind power. Wind farms are coming up everywhere (interestingly the state of Texas being one of the leaders)and there is major initiative going on to reduce dependency on oil. Oil companies are now known as energy providers and market themselves as environmentally responsible enterprises [Though I have suspicions about how responsible they are]. All in all we are seeing good changes in the way things are being done. It does not mean by any way that you should jump into everything that has the green label. (Electric blow dryer being a naive example)

If you've cared to read until now and not tired of my rambling, here is the message to take home. 'Save the green but don't go to extremes'!

Gmail down ?

2008-08-11T17:46:00.002-04:00

Being a gmail user since 2003, this is the first time I've experienced a server error ! Don't believe me ? See the image

Microsoft and opensource

2008-07-25T10:06:00.003-04:00

After reading the recent post from Sanjiva I was tempted to write this bit down. I've been debating similar points with my friends, specially Karthik who has become an avid Mac/OS-X fan over the last year or so. For the record I'm primarily a Linux user (in fact I'm using one of my Ubuntu boxes right now) but I do use windows (XP though) to run my iTunes and an occasional office product. So here are some of my observations.

1. Microsoft is a good technology company. If you look at the world with the researcher hat on, the best place to work right now is Microsoft research (MSR). They do really good research and come up with great technologies (not to mention the good pay :) In fact my personal experience in M$ during the interop in 2005 is a very positive one regarding the technology they have. Its not really a surprise since they have the best brains working for them). If you look at technologies like .Net and Silverlight, there are many merits over the other prevailing technologies. However M$ has a bad track record and known for their extreme focus only on their (winxx/MSSQL etc) platform and the public looks with skepticism when it comes to using their technologies. I've met Mac/Linux geeks that are interested in M$ technologies but are not getting into them simply because its from M$. However it is not a reason to discredit M$ of their technological perspective.

2. There are tendencies towards moving towards a more open environment. Port25 is a very good starting point. Open specification promise is a good gurantee. I see these as signs of blending in with the opensource culture that is blossoming. In fact one of the recent moves to offer facilities for certain opensource foundations to test their software on Winxx platforms (sadly of which I am not at liberty to discuss the details) is an indication of their realization of the strength of Opensource. However just as Sanjiva and others mentioned we are not gonna see an open windows or community MSSQL soon (or may be never!). Purely in my POV its unrealistic to assume so. Do we see any other big company (IBM/Oracle/Apple/Google) opensourcing their core products ? No, not even true for a company like Google whose motto is 'Don't be evil'!

3. Microsoft will always be a strong presence in almost all technological fronts. Contrary to the popular geek beliefs, I don't assume M$ to go bankrupt soon. Yeah, Apple is doing well but if you consider global sales, Apple is still miles behind. XBox is doing well (despite Wii beating it to the first place recently). Their enterprise / back office products are doing fairly ok. They have a ton of money in the bank and most of the best brains still work for them. These guys are not gonna be wiped out from existence just like that.

4. Their size makes them a prime target. I think of this as the case of the bright, big, nerdy kid in school. They constantly get teased just because they are noticeable. There are many cases where M$ has become the victim of attacks just because they are the most visible player (Note that they are no saints. There are cases where M$ pushed their own agenda. But at the end of the day it comes down to business and any other software company in the same place would have not gone a different way). For example in the Operating System space Apple gets a lot of attention and a lot of people would pick M$ as the bad guy if you put Apple and M$ side by side. Think about it. OS-X is as proprietary as Windows, only runs on Apple hardware (which you pay a fortune to get) and go to extremes when it comes to protecting their assets. Why are they not perceived as evil then ?

I am not white washing M$. But I believe they wouldn't just go away and a (apparently) healthy relationship is coming up with the Opensource world. They are already supporting Opensource software vendors, build on top of open protocols and start taking small steps towards living in harmony with the others. We should not jump into conclusions :)

My first car in US !

2008-07-19T19:20:00.004-04:00

After about 2 years living in US I got my first car here (I've had cars before but this is my first in US). Its a Honda Accord and the pictures will tell the story :) Bunch of thanks goes to Meena and Karthik for helping me out in my car hunt.

Cool gmail feature

2008-07-11T11:50:00.001-04:00

being an avid fan of gmail and its browser interface I'm ashamed to say that I missed this feature. In fact I've no idea when it was added. it simply tell you how many gmail windows are open at the moment and from what IP.

Sri Lankan Conflict makes into American TV Drama!

2008-06-29T22:35:00.002-04:00

I'm a fan of crime drama and a show I regularly watch (many thanks to the DVR:)) is Law and Order : Criminal Intent. The episode aired in USA network at 9.00pm today (06/29/2008), named Assassin is centered on an American educated female leader figure who undergoes house arrest in Sri Lanka and then becomes target of an assasin who is after her life! [spoiler warning - the story ends with a twist and the victim becomes the suspect] Here are some of the places where Sri Lanka is mentioned.

1. Det.Logan mentions that 'She's being in house arrest in Sri Lanka ... ' at the crime scene.
2. The captain says 'Sri Lankan hard liners, Tamil tiger terrorists, in short there's a lot of people after her life'
3. The Hudson University president says in his introduction 'A young student from Sri Lanka'

I understand its fiction and all made up. But my concern is that you guys could've done a better job in getting the facts straight. Looks to me this character was made up by mixing features from other female political figures in the Asian region such as Benazir Bhutto who studied in US and wears a dress with a scarf and Aung San Suu Kyi whose being under house arrest for a while and also won the Nobel peace prize. See my reasoning below.

I. The name of the center character is 'Bella Kahn'. That's probably a very alien name for a Sri Lankan.
II. She is educated in US. There are many foreign educated political figures but very few are American educated.
III. There is no record of a female leader figure being on house arrest during the recent past in Sri Lanka AFAIK (Apart from Sirimavo being kept under house arrest in the early 80's). Non of such people were named for the Nobel peace prize (except for Dr.Mohan Munasinghe who is part of IPCC and shared the peace praze with Al Gore.)
IV. The lady wears something that looks like a north Indian/Pakistani dress with a scarf!
V. Her family has a trust fund of millions of dollars which is not normal for even the wealthiest of Sri Lankans.

Mootools is cool and I'm moving to scribfire

2008-06-28T02:27:00.002-04:00

After some time I've decided to move to scribefire (an awesome little plugin for firefox) so that I can manage my blogger account and my own websites blog as well. Scribefire integration is amazingly smooth, works super well with both blogger and Drupal.

So here is the note of the day :) mootools, an amzingly well written javascript framework. I've been doing some serious javascript stuff (and I do admit that GWT rocks and YUI! is a cool set of widgets. I've worked with both drilling down to a considerable level. And sorry the stuff I'm working on is a kind of 'hush hush' at the moment ;)) and I'm amazed to see how well structured mootools is. Its definitely something that a serious javascript developer should check out.

This also brings us to the interesting case of framework lock-in. It's not a vendor anymore (since stuff like GWT/YUI/mootools are completely free and comes with no strings attached) but the framework. We've seen this happen with the Java Web application space where frameworks like Struts and JSF(MyFaces) were initially well received but later the interest died down. Why ? Yes struts makes the initial development easy and lets you keep things neatly seperated but you are bound to struts for eternity ! If there is anything that struts cannot do - well , either you can't do it in your webapp or you'll have to find a really ugly hack to work around it, possibly violating most of the best practices established for struts. This becomes a serious issue when your app grows beyond the capabilities of the framework. You've come too long (so that rewriting is not an option) but you cannot go beyond the framework.[Subsitute struts with any other framework of your choice and the story will be the same].

The javascript space is becoming the next framework playground and things are getting muddy already.From the top of my head I can name at least half a dozen (dojo,YUI!,mootools, GWT, script.aculo.us,openrico, sproutcore etc. In fact I see that I did name more than six. I did write them in one go - honest :)). I'm not sure whether we'll come to the same conclusion as the Java Webapp space because Javascript is primarily client side and the limitations imposed by the framework are primarily on the devlopment resources and have small or no consequences with the performance or scalability of a Webapp.

Let us wait and see :)

Web Services Interoperating

2008-06-20T10:14:00.005-04:00

Recently my old employer WSO2 participated in a public interop event with Microsoft in their TechEd 2008 conference. Jonathan Marsh from WSO2 showed how the Axis2 C and Axis2 Java based components (specifically a PHP frontend and a Java based backend) working seamlessly with the .net components. [See the video {wmv stream.Confirmed to work in VLC media player in Linux. The interop demo is from 0.25.30 to 0.32.30} and the transcript].

IMHO this is one of the best interop demonstrations of Web Services. Of course the grand vision was there from day one (which makes some people ask the rhetorical question "So what is the big deal ?") but even with an agreed set of specifications, it is extremely hard to get full interoperation. Myself , Ruchith and Dims were at Microsoft in 2005 for one of the first interop events and it took many iterations to get everything running smoothely [ This is not only the basic client to service interaction. WS-Reliable messaging, WS-Security and most of the other important WS-* specs are in action ].

I'm proud to say that I am part of the Axis2 / Apache Web services team and specially happy to note that open source software is indeed enterprise grade when it comes to Web services :)

Collective Intelligence - pitfalls of mass collaboration ?

2008-06-12T10:25:00.011-04:00

A few days back we (primarily me and my lab mates Chris and Karthik) got into a discussion about collective intelligence. I am yet to ponder over this ( Thi s seems to be a good book to read) and get more into it but here are some initial ideas before I drastically change my views :)

1. Trust and credibility is going to be the most important issue. All systems that are anonymous as the Web are prone to distrust and the validity of the information comes to question. Here is one example that seems analogous. Take email and the trust on emails you have. Today if you receive a (very legitimate looking) email stating that the widowed wife of a Nigerian oil tycoon wants to do business with you, there is a good chance you'll not read it past the first few words and you won't hesitate to push it to trash. However if this happened 10 years back [I got my first email account about that time :) ] there would have been some responses - and even I might have answered it [saying "I'm sorry - Don't have that much money" ;)]. The point to note is that this happens solely due to the trust we have on the medium which transfers to the credibility of information that medium brings to us. The trust is definitely influenced by the experience of the user - for example my mother who is somewhat new to email would tell me that some Nigerian person has emailed her and what she should do about it if she finds this email in her inbox. It may not occur to her immediately that this could be something like mail spam. (Luckily gmail does a great job in spam filtering and only a few of these would actually show up in her inbox. Also when I explained the analogy of snail mail spam and email spam she immediately got the picture)

The point of the matter is that the WWW is becoming (or has already become) a place of mistrust. When I come across something I do not know , I immediately Google for it - but I perceive the information very carefully ! As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts - the only way to make an honest opinion is to understand that information has their mutilations.

2. "History is written in the eyes of winners" This is an issue even with traditional media. In fact one can argue that the Web has diluted the bias towards the winners view point. But still what gets hailed and accepted is the popular fact which may not necessarily reflect the truth. For example (disclaimer - contraversial example. Does not reflect authors view point) let us say that Genetically Modified Food (GMF) has been found not to have health consequences. [ I believe that knowingly or unknowingly we consume GMF every day. But that's a separate discussion :)] Since this is not the popular belief these facts gets labeled 'bogus','questionable' or just 'made up' by others - even if they reflect the rightful state. Ultimately more people will end up forming wrongful opinions. Unlike with traditional media, it is extremely easy to promote the popular view in the Web!

I think what this drills down to is the human psychology. Even when it is not so obvious - Web is a human web. The Web reflects what we as humans do and think as groups/societies. All that applies to human societies applies to Web as well.

How does all this relate to mass collaboration ? Well the point is that harnessing knowledge from the Web (which has been put up there by collaborating humans. Usually a very large number as opposed to a traditional collaboration group which may not exceed a handful of people) runs into these obstacles. Is this the right knowledge ? Do I know the right things ? - These are the questions that gets asked with mass collaboration (rightfully so I would say)

Other opinions welcome :)

Funny :)

2008-05-16T10:12:00.002-04:00

In the light of the Debian - Openssl bug (which made me regenerate all my keys I use to login to known servers, including the Apache people server), I found the following to be interesting ;)

(image courtesy of http://xkcd.com/)

Mora at number one in GSoC

2008-05-12T15:28:00.000-04:00

University of Moratuwa, (Mora in student lingo) my undergrad college, became the school with both the highest number of applicants and the highest number of acceptances in GSoC 2008. I myself was a mentor for GSoC twice (2005 and 2006 IIRC) and I should say GSoC has come a long way in becoming the premier opensource event of the year. I'm glad to see that we Sri Lankans are leading the way in Opensource :)

Ubuntu 8.04 - Second Impression

2008-05-10T14:34:00.002-04:00

If you are wondering what the first impression is - its here
Anyway the second impression is slightly negative than the first ! I've had some unforeseen problems while upgrading my office computer (An HP DC7700 desktop). Here is the list.

1. The Kernel started messing up with the USB. I kept on getting the 'connect debounce failure' all over the place (the consoles and dmesg output flooded) . This is a known bug (See the bug report) and there seems to be no clue of what is really happening. I compiled the kernel without bluetooth support (since most ppl reported this problem with the bluetooth enabled. The DC7700 has some bluetooth hardware which I never use) but still the problem is there. For now I've unloaded the ehci and uhci modules (thus disabling the USB support) and waiting to find a cure !

2. The ATI graphics drivers were a mess. However I found this great piece of software called envy (apt-get/synaptic for envyNg) that solved my driver problem for good. fglrx started working for the first time (couldn't get it to work with Gutsy) and enabled compiz - works great. However it took a while for me to figure out that using aticonfig to generate the xorg.conf is not the right way to go !

3. I had a compiled version of FF3B4 and the Hardy upgrade did not change it. However it started grabbing too many resources too quickly and I had to change the symlink manually to point ot the FF3B5 that came with Hardy. Not sure why the installer did not change it automatically but it gave me a headache about a day later!

All these are not so big issues (except for the first one) and I still love Ubuntu :)

Mashup camp - videos

2008-05-01T10:23:00.003-04:00

During the last mashup camp, Michael 'Max' Maximilien, my mentor for the last summer internship described the IBM sharable code platform. It was mostly me and Max and I can't believe we've come so far!

Also Jonathan Marsh from WSO2 gave his perspectives on the WSO2 mashup server. Pity that I never got a chance to work with him (I was already gone when he joined WSO2)

Ubuntu 8.04 - First Impression

2008-04-29T07:41:00.003-04:00

Great :)
I just updated my Thinkpad T60 to 8.04 LTS through synaptic (from 7.10 Gutsy) and all went without a hitch. I am yet to see whether everything is intact but from the first look all seems fine (except for a few useful extensions that broke in FF3 - that is fine since I've been using my own compiled version of FF3 for few months)

My brother upgraded his (almost) brand new Vaio to 8.04 a during the weekend and he had no major issues. It even picked up the Vaios built in webcam (which Gutsy didn't) as well. We found a bit of a trouble getting skype to work (it was working alright - but the pictures were blurry and no sound) but apart from that things seem ok. I had trouble with the ATI binary drivers (suspend/hibernate stop working when I enable the binary drivers) but that is fixed in this version (hooray !!). I see that others find it nice too :)

I have my office computer still on Gutsy but a bit hesitant to upgrade it since I have a custom kernel and reconfiguring might take a few hours. However since this is an LTS version I guess investing time on putting up Hardy Heron may be good for me in the long run :)

Faceted search

2008-04-25T15:40:00.003-04:00

I wrote a blog on one of our upcoming project websites (apihut) Thought may be useful to post it here (Original entry is here).Note that I've not modified any text so may seem a bit odd here and there. All are welcome to comment and share your thoughts :)

There has been a lot of talk about faceted search and this is high time to give all the enthusiastic readers a hint of where we are heading with this. The research crowd will immediately know (or at least remember of vaguely hearing about) Faceted Search but its too much to expect from the common man :) So here goes - a quick take on faceted search and what it brings to us.

Imagine that you are looking for something to do over the weekend and decide that you want to go for a movie. There are a lot of movies and searching through the movies and deciding what you would enjoy is not so easy. If we put on our analytical hat, you'll see that we can look at this problem of selecting a movie in several angles. First lets decide what makes you like a movie. some people (like me :)) love adventure/action/thriller type movies. There are others who enjoy other genres (say horror, romance, comedy etc). Some like movies because of the cast. Some like movies by a certain director. What is important to remember in this is that all of this happens over the same data. You can say 'Bourne Ultimatum' is a action/thriller movie as well as a Matt Damon movie, and each point of view would be interesting to a different party. Each of these so called angles is a facet.

Here is one of my own examples. Think of a crystal cube (No not a crystal ball - a crystal cube. Similar to the ones that a fortune teller would use :)) This crystal cube has a some blob inside it and each face of it is of a different color. When you look through the red face - you see the blob as a sphere. When you look through the blue face, you see the blob as a cone , similarly rest of the faces giving a different perspective of the blob inside. Now let us rewind back to our movie example and think of the blob as movies. One face shows you the movies categorized by genres. The other face shows you the movies by the cast and so on. This is exactly what faceted search is. It gives you the ability to look at a data set through a facet..Forgive me for my crude drawings but the following image should drive the point home.

Why is this important or interesting at all ? Going back to our movie example, I would immediately go for the genres and look under action. namelessnerd might (?) go by the director (he is a big fan of Stanley Kubrick). But this is not as simple as filtering using the director column. Let us say you want to see the user ratings of the movies also. To make sense of it when you look through the genre facet you should see ratings of people who liked the movie because of the genre. Same applies to other facets. This makes decision making so easy and you can quickly get to what you want. Another interesting thing you can do with facets is to cascade these facets. First look for the genre and then the cast and so on.

Ok - Now to the important part. We want to apply the same concept to searching for Web API's. Any geek (or anyone who would have played with any of the Web API's out there) would know how hard it is to mix and match different API's (of course the situation has improved a lot. But still things are not perfect or seamless). Given that it is inevitable to avoid a bit of manual labor (:)) we think that a faceted search for API's would make the life a lot easier for people. For example you would be able to say "show me all the services that support RESTful invocation" or "Show me all APIs that provide image manipulation". Things don't stop there and we have a whole line of neat tricks up in our sleeves ;) Hopefully this gave all these interested people a glimpse of where we are heading.

Now how serious is that :)

2008-04-12T00:34:00.002-04:00

Well done :)

2008-04-08T13:34:00.002-04:00

WSO2 WSAS has been named the product of the year 2007 - Gold award for data service Integration. This is indeed great news and comes as recognition of what WSO2 has contributed to the world of SOA.

Conspiracies, Lies and misdirections

2008-03-26T12:37:00.013-04:00

I've had many arguments with my friends about certain conspiracy theories that pop up once in a while. This stuff varies from "Did man ever land on the moon?" to the age old question of "Are there aliens here on earth?" and to controversial topics such as 9/11 . Power of the Web brings us the opinion of a large number of people within a few clicks and it is easy to mislead or come up with plausible explanations to the unexplained and make others believe. Here is my take on it.

Public media does not always tell the truth. period. There is no guarantee what you hear in your favorite news channel is true. But there is no choice! Even when we have thousands of bloggers, it is still the giant public media organization that becomes the credible source. So if the public media says 'a plane crashed at pentagon' then a plane must have crashed at pentagon!. A relatively unknown blogger saying that the 'debris are unlikely to be from a plane crash' is not taken seriously and will soon die down as noise.

There is a different side to this story as well. Say that someone wants to deliberately make a situation look different than what the public media has reported, even when the reported facts are true to a great extent. The current environment of alternate media gives anyone the freedom to do so. I've seen this happen with many terrorist groups where they portray a completely different picture, typically in a manner that is advantageous to them, on their respective web spaces. The bottom line is we cannot be sure who is telling the truth, or to be more accurate, whose story has a greater truth in it.

So as laymen what should we do ? Are we to question everything that comes up in public media ? Are we to condemn everything that others say or vice versa ?
If it is to be so how do we asses the state of the world ? The answer is not so straightforward since the absolute truth (if it ever exists) is really hard to get at. However I think the key here is to understand that everything that you hear and see are mutations of the truth to different degrees. Once you know that then it would be possible to form some opinion (if you need to) of what concerns you by considering a number of sources. Your opinion may well be biased based on your background but that is fine since each of us are entitled to form our own opinion (as long as we don't go about intruding into other peoples lives to force our opinion on them). If you are a policy maker, then you have to be careful in forming your opinion since it may have a greater impact on the world (for example my opinion of aliens only matters to me where as the American Presidents opinion of aliens may well be important to a much larger group of people)

Since the above statement may be a bit cryptic, here is an example. Do I believe that there are aliens on earth ? Given the information I have access to, I see an overwhelming number of unproved reports of alien encounters and an equal (or greater) number of scientific explanations (psychological effects, physical phenomena etc) that explains these alien encounters. Being a man of science I tend to bias towards the scientific explanations and form my opinion to say 'no, I don't believe there are aliens on earth'. As always opinions are not carved in stone so it may not stand forever.

Stylesheet bug(?) in firefox ?

2008-02-26T18:22:00.005-05:00

Quite by accident I stumbled upon the issue of firefox not honoring the stylesheet tags in an RSS document. I along with Wes [One of the guys I work with] spent at least 30 minutes to find why the page does not render properly in FF until we figured out this. There is a long running discussion in the mozilla dev Google group about it and the final decision is to keep the existing behavior of not honoring the stylesheet tags in the first 512 bytes of the feed xml !!!!!!
I've read through most of the discussion but the decision by the FF guys does not please me at all. It clearly seems like a bug to me.

Again it brings back memories of a similar issue in Axis2 where there was an argument against the code generator being strictly compliant with schema definitions. That is when a schema defines a sequence of elements some users reported interoperability problems with Axis2 due to their frameworks not providing the elements in the right sequence. The discussion was whether we should relax the parsing of sequences (thereby ignoring the semantics of the sequence construct). XML schema spec of course provides an alternative construct (all) but not all schema developers are keen on using it (Axis2 honors both sequence and all in the rightful way). We called it as trying to be 'bug compatible' which in my mind is out right wrong.

The FF issue is very similar. To me saying "IE and SAFARI does it so its ok to ignore certain processing instructions" is unacceptable!

Eclipse!

2008-02-21T00:06:00.005-05:00

No this is the real thing :)
This is the best I could do with my Canon SD1000 (night mode, infinity focus, full 12x zoom) and just a touch with picasa for cropping and sharpening.

Yahoo, Microsoft and Google

2008-02-07T15:53:00.000-05:00

Given all the haahoo about Microsoft's huge bid on Yahoo, my friend Prateek pointed me to this one that puts things in perspective ;)

I'm actually surprised that it came up in MSNBC :) [Original article is here]

Web 2.0 directory

2008-01-30T16:24:00.001-05:00

I stumbled upon this Web 2.0 directory quite by chance. The user interface is one of the nicest I've seen :)

Sun and MySQL

2008-01-18T16:29:00.000-05:00

Now the deal is done. Sun has acquired MySQL for one billion dollars. There are many speculations of what this means (and of course the future of MySQL). As an avid user of MySQL and also a believer of opensource software, I'm somewhat confused as the where this would lead!

On one hand you have this really good opensource database engine that almost every one uses (mostly without any obligations). It's actually a good thing to see all those missing features being implemented with the vast ( how 'vast' is a question though ) resources Sun is able to provide. However the flip side is that Sun may decide not to give out everything :( [ Which would be one of those nightmares to all the LAMP/WAMP people including me]. It seems that MySQL would continue to provide its free version but you have no clue how all these corporate decisions would turn out! One thing that arouses my suspicion is the Apache Harmony case where Sun did not act in a faithful way to the Open source community.

Let's wait and see what happens :)

Sri Lanka ?

2008-01-08T23:37:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since my last visit to the country and it was really nice to be with family and friends. I'm back in US now, with research,classes and snow :) However this post is not really about how good it felt to see mom and dad, rather about the facts that lay right in front of me which I did not see !

I've lived in Colombo for several years but yet this time when I visited Colombo things felt a lot different. Besides the fact that certain roads are made one way ( Which many of my friends say is a good thing :)) I suddenly felt this drastic difference in the people's attitude. Here is my case. Anyone who is in Colombo know how many new cars are there. We are not talking cheap Malaysian or Indian economy cars [ yep they are in abundance too ] , but beemers, Audis, Jaguars and even Porsches, which probably shows how well the economy has developed [ some of my friends would not agree about the 'developed' part. But at least the numbers on paper have improved ] What I am trying to get at it here is that with all this huge pile of glittering metal boxes, getting around in Colombo is a frightening exercise, not because of the number of cars, but because of how people drive!!

I know - I used to it do it myself. But it felt really bad to see cars jumping the red light, not keep to the correct lane or just ignore the pedestrians. Mind you, most of these are high end expensive cars [ To say a bit about how the car market works in SL, Cars have a really high tax on them, specially when the engine capacity goes above 2 liters. For example Jeep Wrangler that costs about $15,000 in US costs at least $50,000 at the dealer due to it's engine being huge. So its really a big deal to own a Beemer, Merc or even a new Toyota]. After getting a job that lets you have a good car, You would expect the guy at the wheel to be a little decent but ooops! that is the biggest mistake! The better the car, more chaotic the driving. Having a better engine gives you all the power to jump ahead and cut across the guy in the next lane and nobody seem to miss that opportunity. Looking at how people drive here in US, given that there are a lot more cars here (and obviously a lot more roads too) its surprisingly different. There are traffic jams but how many people cut across and bully their way across traffic ? [Sorry guys - only movies have hairy car chases :)]. How many people cut through red lights ? To me that is a direct reflection of peoples attitude. True that Sri Lanka does not have great roads [ In fact there isn't a single highway despite the attempts of many governments to build one ]. Still "being poor in resources is not an excuse to be indecent". This is one of the things that we need to learn from the west.

Given the facts there is another side to this story. My home is roughly 100km (63 miles) from Colombo. Any westerner would think that this is roughly one hour drive on a 70 mph highway. But sadly it is as twice as much. Even if I keep myself disciplined by sticking to the correct lane and do not violate any light signals, I would still be violating all the speed limits in every suburb I pass to make my trip in two hours! Every populated area has a limit of 50km/h and it is extremely difficult if not impossible to adhere to this ridiculous speed limit and actually go somewhere. To top it all police is strict on speeding and issue speeding tickets at the dumbest places one can think of [ I was once ticketed for exceeding the speed limit by 10km/h on the slope of the baseline road flyover. This is one of the two flyovers in the *entire* country!!]. I would say the time is right to rethink all this and move to the new century.

Finally the intention of this is not to put down Sri Lankans. I am proud to say I am a Sri Lankan and would never forget where I came from. However it is sad to see that such simple things hindering our nation and I guess someone has to point it out :)

Another bubble ;)

2007-12-06T09:48:00.000-05:00

Its hilarious but honest :)

Linux around the world

2007-09-23T14:47:00.000-04:00

Here is something interesting for any Linux fan - this map shows some of the largest known Linux usages around the world. I do use Linux on a day to day basis but has to occasionally boot into windows to use certain Windows only software.

Bourne Ultimatum

2007-08-05T01:27:00.000-04:00

I usually don't go to a movie unless I feel that I would enjoy it. My tastes are very much inclined towards action and suspense so I have been thrilled by the arrival of the next in Bourne series - The Bourne Ultimatum.

I was so crazy about this movie and I wanted to go to see it the first day it hit the screens - Aug 3rd 2007. The first attempt was a disappointment - Century theaters Oakridge suddenly lost power when they were about to start the 9.20 show and canceled the show! All my friends went home to come back the next day but I was so determined to watch this movie, I made myself to Camera 12 at downtown San Jose and secured a last minute ticket to the 10.20 showing. It was so worth the effort and anticipation. I can easily watch it 10 times without getting bored for a second. It is that exciting :) [ I've to confess that I already watched it twice and was (literally) at the edge of my seat for the whole time :)) . I can't wait to get my hands on the DVD]

For all the crazy Bourne fans (like me) out there, the official movie website is a great resource for all the goodies like images, film clips and details about the cast and the crew. Itunes store already has the OST and it is also well worth the price tag of $10 [ Frankly I think the music is well matched with the suspense factor ] . I strongly recommend this one for all the suspense junkies.

Last but not least, hats off to the cast and the crew, specially the director Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon for making one of the best thrillers of all times (at least in my book ;))

Google Developer Day

2007-06-03T22:02:00.000-04:00

it's been three days since the DDay ( Hmmm.. what does that remind me of ;)) and it has been one of the most wonderful conferences I've been to. My chance to secure a registration was quite by chance - since I got in the waiting list about 5 days before the conference and then they changed the place to a bigger convention center in San Jose (The one I pass everyday !) allowing everybody to participate. And in the usual Google fashion they had it in ten (10) locations through out the world !
There was an amazing crowd and the sessions have been great (most of them - there were a few boring ones here and there but overall all of them were quite good). Google unveiled a few important products, specially the mashup editor which has a special significance to my research and work.
There are tons of posts around the web, but don't forget to check out the Youtube channel for the developer day where all the videos are hosted.

WS - 'Death star' ?

2007-05-29T01:16:00.000-04:00

Its been a while since my blog saw fresh text. Things have moved on while I was silent and now I'm in California , doing an internship with IBM. So far its been really great. Since I'm a bit relieved from the academic pressure, I've a bit more time to hang around the web, read blogs and do a bit of blogging myself :) (And play around with my latest fascination - Ruby on Rails!)

Being a WS fanatic (!) I've seen the meaning of the WS maze a long time back - primarily due to the insightful influence of Dr Sanjiva. My current work again puts me close to the world of services but closer to the crowd that questions WS-* rather than partnering with it. It is interesting to see how some arguments are valid on their side - just as it becomes bluntly obvious that some of the WS-* practices are not so user friendly (Hence the acronym WS-'death star'). So here is a small account of what's been questioned about WS-* and what I see as possible explanations.

How come there are so many WS specifications ? Unfortunately this is the nature of the evolving landscape. Just as XML gained the popularity of the masses after a number of revisions and competing standards, WS is passing that stage where many competing (and overlapping) standards exist to fill out various aspects of the WS landscape. We will eventually see the mess being cleared up . It is worth to note that specs such as WSDL have become very stable and accepted (despite its own problems) to be 'the description' framework for Web services. We should see a similar convergence in other specification efforts too.
Why are they so complex ? I can't even make the head or tail out of the most basic WSDL description of a web service !
Oops! True that WSDL is complex and hard to follow unless you know the ins and outs of it. But all these specifications are meant to be 'machine readable' rather than being 'human readable'. In other words if humans are to make sense of the WSDL description, they should be using a tool to inspect the WSDL (which could be a nice graphical interface with icons representing various items or just a simple text only document). It would not make sense to look at the raw WSDL. This argument applies equally to the process of authoring WSDLs where tools would be the primary means of creating and modifying WSDL (and other WS related specification documents)

Since this is somewhat cryptic here is an analogy which I think brings a lot of sense into this argument. Think of HTML. While it is perfectly possible to write a simple HTML by hand and similarly to read and understand the raw code, almost all of todays HTML requires you to look at it through a browser (and the authors rightfully assume so). Some of todays well known web pages such as yahoo or Google home pages are not at all human readable in their raw form. This however has posed no problems since the perception is that HTML is supposed to be viewed through a browser. The other side of this argument applies to authoring Web pages where serious web sites are not developed by just hand coding the HTML but by the use of sophisticated tools such as Adobe Dreamweaver. This analogy should be easy to understand now. WSDL (and other WS-* spec documents) are not to be handled in their raw form. They are to be machine handled ! The unfortunate argument of complexity of specs arise due to the lack of the perception where these specifications are supposed to be machine-handled rather than man-handled.

There is a very valid argument about the level of tooling though. I have to agree that WSDL(and WS-*) tooling has not reached the user friendliness nor the ubiquity that it is supposed to have. One of the reasons could be the view that WS is a geeky thing and geeks look at such visual tooling as just 'eye candy' and nothing else ! This is something that needs to be taken with much importance if Web services are to be of wide use and appeal to masses.
Why do I need all this when I can do what I need with a simple HTTP call ? This is probably the most important question of all this and requires an elaborated answer. The view taken when designing the WS stack was a transport protocol (i.e HTTP/SMTP etc) independent mechanism of message exchange. The transport independence was seen as a key requirement since assuming a particular transport meant less portability of messages. Due to this view certain qualities a transport would have provided (such as delivery assurance) could not be assumed in WS specifications. Hence most of the WS specifications became complex but this complexity is not seen as a downside since the ultimate goal was that these complex messages will all be handled 'under the hood' without requiring any intervention from the helpless human :)

A counter argument arose (specially from the REST side where Roy T Fieldings thesis sparkled a new breed of RESTafarians, some who look upon WS-* as all evil nonsense!) primarily due to the complexity of the specs and the desperation of not getting enough tool support to handle WS related documents (which ultimately led to the hand crafting of difficult documents such as WSDL's). In the heart of this movement is the fact that the current infrastructure of HTTP/XML/HTTPS and such is sufficient to provide what WS aims to provide without the added complexity. in other words it makes simple things simple!

This is very true in some sense. There are many tasks that do not require the complexity of WS-*. However there are tasks that do require WS-* where simpler techniques are not at all adequate. If simpler solutions are to be adopted for such scenarios (eg complex B2B data transfers) one would ultimately end up building a similar stack to the prevailing WS-*! Just as Dr Sanjiva comments on unrealistic single silver bullets it is worth noting the differences and their applicabilities.

So to really answer this question, you have to ask back "what are you trying to solve ?" Is it a sensitive B2B scenario ? if so you are better off with WS-*. Is it the public API of your latest social networking portal ? if so you are better off with a RESTish API.

Golly - this post churned out way more text than I expected to put in :) So I'll wrap up with Mike Champions eye opening post on WS-* and the Gartner Hype cycle. WS-* is not looking bad after all :)

I can do meta !

2007-01-20T23:05:00.000-05:00

My good friend Karthik pointed me to this interesting article about Charles Simonyi and his famous vision. Amazing!

What is the best 'language' out there ?

2006-12-26T16:18:00.000-05:00

I found this Philosophy of Non-Competition in the Oreilly blog. It's a very good explanation of how diversity actually makes things better rather than worse:)
BTW Don't miss out the comments from the others, specially the one from Simon Phipps

How Google Works (/ed ?)

2006-12-22T22:52:00.000-05:00

While casually browsing the web (:)) I came across the original publication about Google by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page . Interesting !

GWT Rocks!

2006-12-20T00:48:00.000-05:00

I wanted to wait till my application is over but no - I can't wait :) I HAVE to blog this.
I just managed to port one of my toy java swing applications [To tell the truth its not really a toy - it does contain a bit of nifty code] to ajax using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and it's simply awesome. Yes I had to rewrite a bit of the UI code but the core remained unchanged except for a change in the XML parser. The UI code ended up being smaller and more readable than the original swing code !
I've done a bit of javascript based development earlier so I know how painful it is to address certain things like browser compatibility. GWT takes cares of that, getting the hang of it takes only a few hours and I can actually debug my code inside the IDE!
This is one tool I would definitely say 'cool' :) I would say anyone who's thinking of serious ajax deveopments should consider GWT.

Axis2 1.1 is out and Dr Sanjiva gives a phenomenal tech talk in Google

2006-11-18T22:51:00.000-05:00

Its been a while since my last post so I guessed the best 'bloggable' event I missed was the Axis2 1.1 release a few days back. I know all the Axis2ers around the world worked hard to make this release a success and things are looking very good indeed. So if you are middleware guy, you are welcome to give it a try :) [ http://ws.apache.org/axis2/ ]
One of the tech talks given by Dr Sanjiva in Google is in Google videos right now. Its one of the best tech talks on Axis2 and Web services as a whole (Oh yeah - His tech talks are phenomenal). I would recommend it to anyone who's interested in Axis2 and Web services.

Indian Scooter in Athens!

2006-11-04T01:01:00.000-05:00

Yep. I was surprised too but it really is true. Several weeks back my freind Prateek had a glimpse of a Bajaj scooter down the road and I did not believe it. But its true and Bajaj scooters do have a presence here. I even found the website of the dealer in Athens!
Bajaj scooters, specially the Chetak, has a special place in my heart. My father bought a brand new Chetak 26 years ago (in 1980) and I'm proud to say it is still with him in perfect working order. It is the first ever automobile my family owned and I still remember how much I loved riding it. I still do but now I'm far from home to go for casual rides in the old Chetak.
Anyway a little search in the web showed me how far the indian industries managed to infiltrate the global economy . Bajaj has a strong international presence with dealers in US and Europe (They are very strong in South Asia - I know for a fact that you will encounter a 'bajaj' in any region in Sri Lanka). With exports in the rise Indian automakers such as Bajaj will surely be dominant players in the global auto industry. Even though I am not an Indian I am proud of their achievment. Technical superiority was majorly accredited to countries such as Japan or Germany, who are doubtlessly the major players in the auto industry but it is nice to see South Asia (which is perceived to be 'under developed'!) also playing a significant role in global auto industry :)

Power users - Are they evil ?

2006-10-20T23:59:00.000-04:00

Its been a while since I blogged (Did I mention that I am writing another more 'geeky' blog which gets updated frequently than this ? - Well I wanted a place to put all the nerdy things that I come across and this blog seemed to be somewhat inappropriate for that!). Inspiration to this blog comes from a blog post by Tim O'reilly where he questions whether things are moving away from being customizable to 'tinker proof'.
Obviously I have to agree to his car example. I personally know that older cars were simple and easily 'hackable' since my father had a late model Morris Minor for sometime. These cars were results of simple and honest engineering and roadside repairs proved to be quite easy (I should also mention that they had terrible brakes). It also had impressive gas milage for a car that was nearly 30 years old (I'm not sure about the exact year of the make of the car we had but assuming that it was made in the late sixties). However modern cars are so sophisticated that to reliably do any repair you would need a bunch of electronic gadgets to be plugged in here and there - definitely not a roadside job. I'm not saying its bad at all - modern cars are very reliable, comfortable to ride and easy to control (and they definitely have good brakes) . The point is that they are less 'hackable' and you definitely need a wealth of knowledge to modify (at least do repairs) to your car. Things you need to know to repair a car now is significantly higher than 30 years earlier.
The same point can be extended to software taking the 'product' perspective. Earlier software products (Say Windows 95/98) were easily hackable and power users could exploit that to do what they want (not to mention they were gold mines for hackers). More recent products emphasized on security and obviously became less 'hackable', with the expense of cutting down the power user.
Now we come to the important question. Is this good or bad ? I'm a geek and I like to keep things my way, specially in my computer. I always admire a system that I have control with rather than a one that behaves the way it wants. For example I remember all the irritating plugins that mysteriously install themselves in IE until I became a loyal firefox user. (IE was a buggy product but I believe most of the vulnerabilities came through extension points that were made available) It is natural for a company to reduce the number of plugpoints so that things are less hackable (at the sametime reducing the possible customizations). This looks like a dillema since a compromise needs to be made! Or is it ?

Take a look at Firefox. If you visit the Firefox extension archive you'll find so many extensions - simple color changers to java script debuggers - all made possible by the rich extension mechanism provided by Firefox. But still Firefox is one of the safest browsers available!

The secret here is 'Opensource'. While it is true that nearly 99% of the browser users are not intersted in reading the complex pieces of code that actually does the job, there are enough good hackers with sharp eyes around the world capable of noticing possible errors in the code. Even if a vulnerability is discovered thousand brains ponder on the code and solutions are found at lightning speed! Source being available opens doors to the power user and the possibilities become endless. This is even true for the less sophisticated power user since there will be more sophisticated power users that will make sure things are in order.

For me Opensource is the ultimate answer for the power user. Things are safer but also customizable. Just to make it a point - Power users are not evil :)

Search Jar files in Web! Awesome

2006-09-27T19:22:00.000-04:00

This site allows me to search for jar files that contain a given class name. The best thing is once I subscribe, it automatically pops into action if I do a google search for a fully qualified java class name ! Cool :)

Java Vs Other languages

2006-09-24T19:05:00.000-04:00

One my friends,Dinesh mentioned that google Directory for programming languages is a good place to find whatever you need about a programming language. Well it definitely seems to be.

Here is one of my quick observations ;) The number of Java resource links is nearly 3500, where as C++ has a mere 929 and php hangs around 1600! I'm primarily a java programmer myself, almost all the projects I am working on right now are based on Java (except for one which is based on JavaScript). But I never thought it is this popular :)

Right - time to put up the thinking hats. Why is java so popular ? (Ok let's assume that the number of resource links available in google directory is an indication of popularity). I would say

I. Platform independence - "Write once - run anywhere" capability
As a matter of fact you cannot run a java program 'anywhere' unless there is a virtual machine. But its as good as anywhere. Also I know some folks who would say its "write once debug everywhere" but any such platform dependent bugs are probably VM issues. All in all this platform independence is a huge plus point for enterprise development saving tons of cash and effort in porting products.

II. Ease of use
I'm not really sure how many hard nut programmers would agree with me but programs are easy to visualize when they are object oriented (once you get the hang of it). After the concept is built, it becomes much easier to realize it in code.

III. Free runtime/compilers/tools
This was one of the best moves by Sun. The runtime is free, the developement kit is free and now there are a ton of other tools built with java for java that are free. This makes java development easy and affordable.

Any more ?

What fuels research in Computer Science ?

2006-09-16T00:38:00.000-04:00

A few days ago there was an intersting discussion among myself and my lab mates Katz and Prateek. What fuels the research in computer science ? Is it possible to make the existing algorithms /technologies better or are there any interesting problems in other domains that challenge computer science ?
Well, the latter is definitely true. Take the field of bioinformatics for example. One interesting thing with biology is the vast amount of data that it provides. This itself is a challenge to computer science and provide grounds to look for better ways to handle large amounts of data efficiently. There are other fields such as geology that provides similar problems to computer science.
However it can be seen that computer science itself provides fuel to research in computer science. For example the research on computer networks has made them faster and efficient, opening up a number of other interesting research areas such as Web services. Increase in computer power (due to the research in processor technology) enables newer algorithms and computer technologies to be explored. So computer science itself opens up new avenues of research.
Is there any specific path one should take ? Well it's upto the individual :)

News from US - Part 1

2006-08-31T20:59:00.000-04:00

It's been three weeks (almost!) into my US stay and here is a my report as promised :) This is what I've experienced and felt throughout my stay so far. Note that I am in Athens Georgia and US is a huge country ;)

1. People are friendly and helpful. I've heard many times that American people are arrogant and selfish but so far all the people I've met have been friendly and helpful. Specially the folks in the university are very good to people.

2. The infrastucture and facilities available to people are amazing. I come from a country which has lesser resources so that could be the reason to my amazement :) But I can't help it. I still get amazed that when I see the highway network.

Well that is not all. It's not all good that I have to say ;)

1. If you don't have some sort of automobile (car/SUV/motorbike) then you are in a lot of trouble. There is a bus service to the apartment I stay but it is not there in public holidays and limited in weekends. All shops are miles away and you cannot just rely on your feet to take you around :) I've been in US a few times before but I had 'corporate backup' and could afford to hire a taxi when needed. But now I have 'financial concerns' that leads me to think twice before doing such a thing :)

That's all for now. More things later :)

Interesting!

2006-08-29T23:18:00.000-04:00

Friends in the Lab introduced me to meebo today. interesting indeed :)

Apachecon Asia

2006-08-16T00:31:00.000-04:00

Apachecon Asia (The first one !) is in progress right now in Colombo. I am sooo unlucky to completely miss that event. Rich Bowen, one of the Apache veterans who've been for almost all the Apachecons has just mailed to the Apache conference planners saying "The conference is going great, and I am *so* glad I made it here. The talks have been good, and well attended. The attendees have great questions, and appear to have really prepared to be here. Folks get the Open Source concept in ways that are interesting and different from the ways they get it in the US and Europe"
Now that is what I call a testimony :)

Ahoy from Athens!

2006-08-13T22:43:00.000-04:00

A significant change in my life occured last week. I've transfered from being a professional to a student and now I'm literally halfway across the world from where I used to be!
To all the new readers, I moved to Athens, Georgia (yep - updated the profile too :) ) from Colombo,Sri Lanka and I'm pursuing higher studies in the field of computer science.
Things were a little hectic but now I guess everything is moving at the right pace. I've settled down and got used to the system here in University of Georgia (UGA). I've been in US several times before but this is the first time I am in for a prolonged stay by myself. I'll be writing more about my US life soon. Stay tuned!

Ethics against money - Who should I write for ?

2006-07-13T11:50:00.000-04:00

A few days ago I was having a dilemma. I have a certain unique knowledge about Axis2 of which I have worked on for almost two years. On one hand I can write an article about a certain Axis2 feature to any one of the eager publishers, which gives me fame and fortune (Well 'fortune' for the most part). On the other hand I can contribute that bit of writing to the particular projects documentation since documentation is one of the weak areas of opensource projects, without any 'fortune'. It is somewhat difficult to separate these two option into either black and white - certainly option one has a clear financial consideration although the articles are open to anyone. Option two brings immense satisfaction to the mind (you know - my-contribution-to-make-the-world-a-better-place sort of feeling) but we have to accept the fact that without money you are going no where in this world. So what is it gonna be ? Do I write articles in my extra time (or what is left of it :) ) and earn an extra buck or do I contribute my work to the open source community being modest ? It is not an easy decision since you have a 'monopoly' on one side (there is nobody else that knows it better than you) and the moral obligation you feel towards the community on the other side !
This issue has disturbed me for a few days and after a bit of thinking I've decided to be a true buddhist. Lord Buddha said not to go to extremes but to take the middle path. The most rational decision I could come up with was to do both but not going to extremes. I'm in love with the opensource world and although I have contributed a lot, my contributions would not mean a thing unless there is the usability factor - documentation. I will contribute documentation to the community. At the same time I can use my knowledge to write an article or two and get it published, and possibly get a financial reward that should fill up the 'financial' need.

Leisure World - It really is fun :)

2006-06-03T09:04:00.000-04:00

After a successful release and an unintended holiday spree, we all made an adhoc tour to Leisure World, a newly built theme park in Kaluaggala, Hanwella, Sri Lanka (probably the only one of its kind here in Sri Lanka). Having visited one of the greatest theme parks in the world, The Disney Land, I would say Leisure World is pretty much in standards with any modern theme park. Of course there is plenty of room for improvements but in Sri Lankan standards it is quite the place to have fun :)
Now I've seen several angry comments from certain visitors but hey all things are not perfect. I would certainly recommend Leisure world if you care for a day full of fun (if you want to really enjoy the place, go on a week day. From what we've heard, the place is literally swamped with people in weekends)

A Look back!

2006-05-30T11:13:00.000-04:00

I've been one of the team members that worked hard to put out Tungsten, a bundled Web Services framework that enables easy administration of services and QoS (BTW its free and if you are interested you are welcome to download a copy and try it out :) ). It has been one of the most difficult and labor consuming tasks that I was involved in but at the end it brings up tremendous satisfaction. Also every such project release leaves all of us with new lessons and enlightenment that makes subsequent releases better (and less troublesome)
As for this release the biggest lesson for me was the impact of last minute changes. As soon as the release build is made and tested you suddenly notice a small glitch in the code, perhaps an inefficient loop, a variable that can be inlined or even a misspelled file name. However if any attempt is made to alter these mistakes, even when things apparently look wrong the way they are, they should not be touched! The lesson for team in this release was the renaming of the WSS4J library that broke Tungsten in a Windows environment. I've not understood the problem fully, probably some funny class loader issue in the Windows JVM, but the bottom line is that we had to revert to a slightly older build to ship. So how funny it may seem,we come back to one of the most famous principles in software engineering, "If it ain't broken, don't touch it!".

Intellectual property - a Summary

2006-05-28T01:52:00.000-04:00

I was there for the lecture by Professor Lawrence Lessig (creator of creative commons) as part of the lecture series set by ICTA last Tuesday. It has been one of those great lectures and I regret being late. However the content is very much valuable and I am compelled to write a summary of it for the benefit of all the people who were not there :)

The basic idea behind prefessor Lessigs lecture is the concept of property. The concept of property was applied to the commons with the view that the use of commons need to be controlled. The mechanism of control is property where people were granted the right to use a portion of common resources, where the concept of ownership began. This may sound a little unclear so here is an example.
Take an empty pasture pursued as a common resource. A shepard comes and grazes his cows there. Soon there is another shepard with his cows that wants to use the same pasture. Step by step the pasture becomes congested and the need for control becomes essential. In this case the answer is clearly the concept of ownership (or property) where each shepard is allocated a portion of the land.

Well, what is wrong with this concept ? As far as tangible or "rivalrous" commons are concerned, this is the right concept. However it is not the right concept when it comes to dealing with intangible commons. One such intangible common is the language. If the concept of property that governs rivalrous commons was applied to language certain words and phrases can be "propertized". This is such a hilarious and impractical thought that Professor Lessig came up with a funny example of the calculating word processor to illustrate how impractical it is. The bottom line is that even if someone manages to apply the property concept to language, it'll severely restrict the use of language and hinder creativity.

When it comes to ideas, they are classified as intellectual property with the same view that use and dissemination of ideas need to be controlled. However ideas are a form of intangible commons that should not be restricted or controlled. Free flow of ideas is the right way for the next step of our civilization! Professor Lessigs view is that free flowing ideas would be the best strategy for a developing nation.

This standpoint raised a few interesting questions. The most important question was whether the free flowing ideas would effect adversely on the developing nations. Developing nations are low on natural resources that are required to capitalize on an idea. When ideas are freely available a developed nation can always take ideas from developing nations and capitalize on those which would increase the economic gap. The answer was that while it is certainly possible to happen it would be better to have the "open" way rather than the "closed" way. Professor Lessigs example was that Internet giants including Google,Yahoo and hotmail were all results of such open ideas.

The conclusion is that it is better not to control the flow of ideas. Ideas are too valuable to be locked and restricted.

One other point that was raised during the discussion was the importance of the policy maker. The policy maker needs to be knowledgeable in these facts and then only this will be practical ! In other words if the policy makers are not visionaries then there's little hope of such open policies being adopted.

w.blogger - a nice offline blogging tool

2006-05-27T08:15:00.000-04:00

I always wanted a tool where I can write the blogs offline and publish them later. After a bit of searching look what I've discovered ! w.blogger is a free tool that is quite neat and allows publishing to multiple blogs. Cool!!!

Around the world in errr .... 2005

2006-01-17T09:05:00.000-05:00

Inspired by Both Sanjiva and Chinthaka, I also thought of calculating my air miles for the past year. It's 52121 miles starting from mid June till mid December with one trip to Europe and two trips to US. Not bad :)

After a Looooong silence !

2006-01-03T07:14:00.000-05:00

Oh My, Look at this. my last entry was on 25th of October (2005) and I haven't even tried to write a single thing in my blog after that. Pathetic (:(). I've been busy as hell, but so many things have happened in this period, I've travelled to US twice, delivered a tutorial at Apache con and bacame a member of a W3C working group. One of my hopes for the new year would be to continue this blog from today onwards :)
The new year just started and Dr Sanjiva has a great blog entry summarizing the last year. I'm not really good at concising things (Dr Sanjiva ofcourse does a great job at it) and I don't like to talk about politics ( it sucks !).
Here's something to think about in the new year - An article about adopting java as a major course in Universities .I teach OOP at the University (Based on Java ofcourse) and I have been asked to express my opinion on this. When I went through the article I felt that the author tends to prefer much more theoretical/fundamental approach towards computer science (which ofcourse is better for an academic setting) rather than looking at the practical aspects of computer science (which the industry looks forward to). It ultimately boils down to the more general question; should University education be aimed at producing professionals or academics ?
Will comment more on this soon!

Deception Point

2005-10-25T08:25:00.000-04:00

A few days age at 4' o clock in the morning I finished Dan Browns 'Deception Point'. (boy I'm getting insomnia or what). It's a great story, with remarkable pace and wide reach into science,politics and adventure. I quite liked the story except for a glitch here and there (You know, a senator who has no Idea what so ever of science looking at a soanr photograph and instantly identifying what it is :)) but hey the story is quite ok anyway.

Once again back in Sahana

2005-10-17T00:36:00.000-04:00

I was one of the volunteers that helped to architecture and build 'Sahana' and unfortunately (??) I am one of the people who has enough knowledge to manipulate the J2EE backend (Sahana phaseI is a collection of PHP and J2EE web applications. Somewhat messy but it was the best we could do in a week!). This horrifc earthquake in Pakistan (presumably a greater disaster than the tsunami!) required a disaster management system and Sahana seemed to be a good candidate. Chamindra and Bud are already there and introducing the system, and I helped them to retune the backend/frontend of the J2EE side.
The retuning basically involved removing the barely functioning security stuff and replacing it with basic authentication. I managed to make the webapps functional and made up the war files and sent them along to Bud to be placed in the Demo linux box, with the humble assumption of any developer, "it works on my machine, so it should in yours" :). However I forgot one major issue! MySQL on Windows has case insensitive table names and MySQL on Linux has it completely opposite. You can have two tables with the same name but different case (say 'table1' and 'TABLE1') in a MySQL server on Linux (I guess this is a well known issue. Actually we realized this in the early stages of Sahan phaseI developement1). Since I was doing my development on Windows, the script had table names in lowercase but some of the table names in the SQL statements inside the applications were in upper case. This caused the system not to function in certain instances and resulted in an interesting debugging session!
I was 2/3 of my way home (roughly 60km away from Colombo) when I got this call from Dr Sanjiva. So I parked the car (in the middle of nowhere!), pulled out the laptop and went through the code, with the phone on my ear. Amazingly after about 15 minutes of head scratching we found the cause and the system was back on it's heels in 5 more minutes :) As Dr Sanjiva said, "This is one such incident that you shouldn't miss to blog" :)

Information and trust

2005-10-16T01:35:00.000-04:00

The advances of the Internet has placed a vast amount of information on our hands. However I wonder whether it has deteriorated the trust we put in the information at our hand, even the ones that we get from seemingly trusted sources!
Here's a small incident that would be a fine example for this. A couple of days ago there was a mail in our university batch mailing list. It read "An Indian programmer found this. You cannot make a folder called "CON" in Windows and even Bill Gates can't explain it". Even my immediate response to it was trying to make a folder and rename it to 'CON', which obviously failed miserably. I did not pursue it further but there were some more mails in the same thread, things like "Oh. You can't make 'com' either". Finally there was a reply from one of the .net guys (obviously these are the guys that literally 'live' with Windows :)) with a link to MSDN library
that explained the situation!
What made me think about this simple incident is that since we do 'dig deeper' some times, we'll be misled. In this case, unless there was this explanation, certainly I wouldn't have bothered to find out more on this, and I would have continued to believe that this was indeed a problem with Windows!

Adam - How correct you are !

2005-10-07T02:32:00.000-04:00

I've listned to the presentation by Adam Bosworth in the morning. During a discussion in the afternoon about JAX-RPC (and a lot other things) I felt how correct Adam is!
When the API designers are far away from the users, things become so inflexible that people don't use them anymore. My hunch is that computer software will undergo a mentality change soon. Just like in the consumer market where "customer is the king" we'll be saying "user is the king" pretty soon in the software industry!

Life's like that :)

2005-10-07T02:13:00.000-04:00

Dr Sanjiva gave us a party at his place yesterday and thanks to the techinical advancements of digital photography (and of course the web), images are all over the place already. It's slightly embarassing (Can't help the feeling. Lucky that I'm not a hot head) to see myslef playing with the bunny! (it's actually the bunny we brought for Dr Sanjiva's youngest daughter).
It's a lot more fun to see how the guys are so focused on interpreting the image :)

Colombo book fair

2005-09-15T09:05:00.000-04:00

There's a great book fair in Colombo. If you are around you should definitely pay it a visit :)

Women and Software

2005-09-15T07:59:00.000-04:00

FOSS is over and I'm back in the office working in Axis2. Chinthaka has uploded some pictures of the FOSSSL events so all the die hard picture fans can have a peek at his blog.

Ahum... About the gender issue that I promised my readers I'll be commenting on. Well I blogged some time back about this gender thing. In short my broad view on gender is that men and women are somewhat 'hard wired' that makes them good in certain things and bad on certain other things. (Read the pease book if you haven't already) Standing on this psychological base, let me show you what I think about 'women in software development'.
First of all I don't see a particular barrier for women to enter the IT field(or at least the field of software development. As long as you know how to write good code nothing else really matters! ). Especially the Apache way of development (remote code bases,communication over mailing lists, nobody sees them face to face, etc) is ideal for women to get involved. Who wants to know whether a certain 'jean' who've submitted good patches is a girl or a boy? Yet there are critics who say field of software development is dominated by men!
If you think of the field of software engineering (or for the field of engineering as a whole) the female presence is much low. I can rememeber that while we were back in the University there were only 8 girls doing computer science and engineering as opposed to 40 guys. it was far worse in mechanical engineering where there was only one girl! Now I'm pretty sure this is no coincidence or any result of the mistreatment of gender. It is how things are! I mean only few girls do mathematics for higher studies in schools and as a result, only a few go into the university to study engineering. The pease explanation ( :) ) for this that male brains are hard wired to do better math and as a result generally more males get into math oriented stuff than girls. This also explains the higher enrollment rates of women in arts and aesthetic study courses since women are much better in communicators and artists. It also explains that many of the famales doing SE are actually not code crunchers but technical writers.
What I'm trying get into is that the community of software engineers don't pose any barriers on "geeky women" (I don't know whether there's a female version of 'geek'. perhaps 'geekess' or something :)) ). It's just that most women are not really interested in sitting infront of a computer and geeking.
As far as the open source effort of attracting more women, I'm not sure whether it'll be effective. My view is that there will always be a strong male presence in the world of computers, mostly because they love to geek!
Oh BTW, most of the ladies I knew back in the university doing computer science were excellent code crunchers. It is perfectly possible to have exceptions :)

FOSS

2005-09-11T23:57:00.000-04:00

The FOSSSL has been glorious and oh yeah, the tutorials and the talks have been fun and really informative. It's like a dream to see all these guys we just heard about, Michael Tiemann (creator of G++ and extraordinary compiler writer) , Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) ,Greg Stein (chairman of Apache Software Foundation) and so on.
For the people who are not so familiar with the theme of FOSS, here is a little intro.
FOSS stands for Free and Open source software. Note that 'free' in the statement should be interpreted as free in Freedom rather than free in free beer. Freedom really applies to the use, where the user of the software has the freedom to do whatever he wished with it.Sri lanka has taken a great step to promote free and open source software by declaring a week for it (Which we named FOSSSL).BTW this event was slash dotted and caused a lot of havoc. One reason was that some people didn't get what it was meant for. Sadly there were harsh comments arising from the true ignorance of the geographical facts about Sri Lanka. I wonder how this could have possibly happend, since there are hundred odd sources in the web itself and if someone bothered to google for it for five minutes, they'd have got the picture.Ugh.. What to do!! At least the leaders in FOSS has the correct picture.
Ok enough about the worlds ignorance. let's focus on the FOSSSL again. I've been in for four tutorials and the main conference (there were some other related events such as a codefest, A conference for CEO's and so on) and I feel it's a great event. There were two discussions at the end of each day which in my reckoning brought out the most important non technical facts.Guess I should write it down with my opinion for the benefit of the others.
The second conference day ended with a discussion 'Developing countries - Should they be consumers or producers of FOSS'. The panel that discussed this consisted of the invited speakers, Namely Danese Cooper (Intel), Bruce Momjian (postgresSQL), Sam Ruby (IBM?), Rasmus Lerdorf (Yahoo), David Axmark (MySQL), Greg Stein (Google) and Martin Michlmayr (former debian project lead). Here's a digest of the discussion.

1. The nature/attitude of the person is very important. The mentality of 'tinkering' needs to be there (a totally selfish mentality would not promote open source at all :))
2. The required hardware seems(?) to be there (at least for us. When asked who have computers at home, almost all hands went up!). However as Danese stated, Only a very small percentage of the Indian IT work force has a home computer and that seems may well be a reason why only a few Indians participate in open source development. (After all, you find very few people who get paid for developing Open source software like me!)

As solutions to these two major problems, here are the solutions that were mentioned.
1. Target the schools/Universities. Change the mentality of the learning generation so that they understand what is free software and learn to appreciate it.
2. Do some advertising. Improve public awareness. This should get the mentality of the public in the right direction which should increase the investments on computer hardware (increasing the number of home computers). BTW as one slash dotter commented, Sri Lanka just passed the $1000 income limit and the investment on a computer is roughly the 50% of it.

There were some issues about the culture and I'm with Rasmus on it. When the culture issue popped up, Rasmus just said "Well I'm born in Greenland and the culture that you get there is pretty much ice". Culture has only a very little fraction to play in this game.
There were some issues raised about the female contribution and quite a bit of conversation arond it. I've my own opinion on that and would be writing a seperate blog in it.

So as it stands, we have to have some long running projects to promote FOSS here. Yep, a week on FOSS is a cool idea and definitley a good starting point. But things should move on from here.

2005-09-10T05:04:00.000-04:00

Right now I'm in the Google tutorial done by Greg Stein and Wow! It's way too cool to say in words! Greg is doing a great job here and I'm totally amazed at how thoughtful and creative the Google people has been.
Since this is my second blog (my other blog is in bloglines) I'll be linking the blogs (This linked to the bloglines one) and doing my blogging here. No offense to the bloglines people but blogger has this neat feature of comments.
Will be doing some more blogging soon. Await some cool photoes :)

How I see the world

An unpleasant experience!

SA-REST and schema.org : Friend, not Foe

A Geeks Rant - A Reason not to blog ?

Blogging for ACM !

IBM, Linux and Research

Getting America to embrace the new age

Year of English and IT

We learn that relying on one cloud provider is bad - Once again !

Twitter, Ruby on Rails and Jack Dorsey

How much is it gonna cost ?

Shotgun Diplomacy

Independence 2.0 for Sri Lanka

Across America - Day 3

Across America - Day 2

Across America - Day 1

While in Transit...

My Google shortcut laiden keyboard

The truth is out there!

Skype, a Dell Mini and falling in Love

Dell mini

American Cars - Should they be left to rust out ?

Daycon

IKE and its after effects

Google Chrome - First Impressions

What's it got to do with your brain ?

Keeping your sanity while saving the Green

Gmail down ?

Microsoft and opensource

My first car in US !

Cool gmail feature

Sri Lankan Conflict makes into American TV Drama!

Mootools is cool and I'm moving to scribfire

Web Services Interoperating

Collective Intelligence - pitfalls of mass collaboration ?

Funny :)

Mora at number one in GSoC

Ubuntu 8.04 - Second Impression

Mashup camp - videos

Ubuntu 8.04 - First Impression

Faceted search

Now how serious is that :)

Well done :)

Top video in youtube ?

Conspiracies, Lies and misdirections

Stylesheet bug(?) in firefox ?

Eclipse!

Yahoo, Microsoft and Google

Web 2.0 directory

Sun and MySQL

Sri Lanka ?

Another bubble ;)

Linux around the world

Bourne Ultimatum

Google Developer Day

WS - 'Death star' ?

I can do meta !

What is the best 'language' out there ?

How Google Works (/ed ?)

GWT Rocks!

Axis2 1.1 is out and Dr Sanjiva gives a phenomenal tech talk in Google

Indian Scooter in Athens!

Power users - Are they evil ?

Search Jar files in Web! Awesome

Java Vs Other languages

What fuels research in Computer Science ?

News from US - Part 1

Interesting!

Apachecon Asia

Ahoy from Athens!

Ethics against money - Who should I write for ?

Leisure World - It really is fun :)

A Look back!

Intellectual property - a Summary

w.blogger - a nice offline blogging tool

Around the world in errr .... 2005

After a Looooong silence !

Deception Point

Once again back in Sahana

Information and trust