Rainy Holiday

Going Home
After a few months of work, I thought it's time to get some holiday.. So, I went to my home town Wahacotte, (quite famous for the Portuguese colony and the 15th century St Antony's Church). Well, the bus wasn't very crowed as it wasn't really the holiday season yet, although it will be on next week (Christmas holiday).. It is about four hour journey from Colombo, however, since it was a poya day, plus I got up late, so the crow had already vanished and
it took bit more than 3hours to my place.. As I move closer to the destination the rain was pouring heavily.

Adventure I (Roller Coaster Ride And Free Fall)
Once I got down from the bus, I thought I'll catch a three wheeler.. That was a loud one, I should have got on to a bus instead. I had a quite a ride up hill.. This guy was turning to the left and the the vehicle was sliding to the other side. First it was scary, coz' with a little over slip, I could have been experiencing the free fall for about 10 seconds and then I do the triple Summer salt and tasting my own feet that wrapped around my neck. I thought, that something might have been wrong with the usual break system but turned out one of the tires' had very little air.

Adventure II (REDBULL)
Anyway, I didn't know that there was another adventure ahead of me. well, this time it was a big, fat, ugly, wild bull on loose whos apparently bit angry thinking that I'm eying on his lady friend, plus I'm wearing RED.well RED and BULL doesn't really go together, (wonder how they
come up with the name redbull). Now, this was a quite a scene. Bugger's on my way to the house which is about 30 yards. Well, nothing else to do, so, I got a big stick and giving a big shout I went charging at him. Naaahh!! what do you crazy?! although, I did give a little shout and threw some rocks at the bugger.. Well, bugger gave a very nasty look and walked off.
Turned out that wasn't the big bad bull, this one seems like an innocent little bugger.. ah! well...

Peace At Last
As it was raining I couldn't go anywhere, so I spent time roaming in our little estate.. Well, that was the most beautiful site that I've seen in ages. Too bad, as I don't have a good camera, I took the photos from my phone, hope Santa will give me a "HandyCam" this time :-D

Path to Enlightenment

I tried, tried and tried compiling the cvs checkout of E17 on FreeBSD-5.4 and I had many problems, firstly the gnulibtools, automake, and autoconfig were missing. So, I got them installed.
Then there was this issue with the configure file,

ltconfig: you must specify a host type if you use `--no-verify'

So, I manually edited configure file and remove the `--no-verify' . Then it looked all okay till I got to edje, it gave some compilation errors. After few attempt I gave up :-( . However, I manage to install the same cvs checkout in my linux box :-D . So, not that bad.

After few months, still really interested on installing E17 on my FreeBSD box. I found that once I did the cvsup on ports , I had a new directory called enlightenment-devel, yippee yippie. That's the baby.. But I knew that with the mess I have done with the manual installation this might not be an easy task. Yeap, I was right as I have already installed the libraries like eet, ecore, evas, embryo etc; the "make" failed.. Ah! now I'm really pissed.. Well, not to worry, had a look around and found the FreeBSD package of the E17 in their ftp site (enlightenment-0.16.999.018_1.tbz) . With my fingers crossed, I did a pkg_add enlightenment-0.16.999.018_1.tbz , of cause I had to remove the E16 as the name was getting conflicted. And yippee, yippee I got it working. (Although crashes when I try to install any theme)

Isn't it beautiful

Anyway, now it is time to develop something. So, first thing, I want to put some icons to the iBar, so I read the fine manual and wrote a small Perl GTK app to do that, and yeah now I'm on the path to Enlightenment.

This how My Little EAP Editor Looks like

First Select The icon file (png ;-) )

Ah! it gives a preview ;-)

And you can fill the rest

This is before

And This is after

Sahana Workshop - How to create add-on Modules

We had a successful workshop on The Development of Modules for Sahana, on 10th-Nov-2005 at the UCSC & LSF Lab, Colombo. University students, IT employees and LK Luggers were among the participants.

Our main objective was to educate them on sahana framework in which, they will be able to develop and maintain modules.

Chamindra started the workshop with an introduction to Vision of Sahana and continued on to high-level architecture, framework and design patterns. I followed up next and explained about the Sahana coding convention, database abstraction layer, sahana SQL conventions and Template handlers.

Ravindra, started his session on security aspects, authentication, authorization, and session managements in Sahana. Saumya and Sudheera lead the next session on CSS/XHTML standards, Localization and Internationalization along with the version controlling of the source. Mifan took the Camp registry module as an example on how to build modules on Sahana.

We've ended the workshop by showing them the availablity of modules on http://reliefsource.org/foss/index.php/Sahana and ask them to develop, contribute or maintain any of the listed modules as well develop their own modules which will be used in the disaster management process.

Chamindra explaining about the mission.


After a long talk by me, the audience looks exhausted.

FOSSSL Week

(Yeap.. That's Rasmus[Father of PHP] and Me )

Schools and Uni Event

FOSS Week was held from 05th-10th. 05th evening I manage to attend to the schools and unvercity event organized by our LK LUGGERS. We had some cool topics like GNU/Linux for desktops(Sanjeewa and Mifan), Traprobane (Anurada), Debian Process(Martin Michlmayr) etc; etc;

As I'm new to the lk luggers, I don't quite know all of them. we have chinthaka, kapila, pardeeper, sudheera, anuradha, chamindra, mifan, sanjeewa , NIIBE (Kernel hacker from Japan) , half of Martin


Ah! there we have full martin , deep, buds,viraj and I think suchetha did take this photo :)

Codefest And Conferece
06th and 07th we had 40hr non stop coding.. There was a project on porting taprobane to 64 bit and they were doing a cool cross compilation... some of the jap guys were doing input methods. Anuradha was working on optimising the Taprobane boot up process and we actually had a contest between the Knoppix and Traprobane. Taprobane booted one miniute ahead of the Knoppix. Well... as for me, I made lot of friends eventhoug I didn't do much productive or creative work, I manage to promised that I'll give a hand with the Traprobane installer which will be in perl-gtk2 .
(need to get some pictures)

next day went home and slept slept and selpt.. and missed the php tutorials done by the father of PHP (Rasmus)..
wednesday, I ran to the conference, just to get a picture with Rasmus..

I meet lot of my classmates, aprently chanka got a new car although he didn't let me take a picture of him in his car.. The bugger thinks I might misuse it.. I don't know where these guys are getting weird ideas like that..

Good old buddy chanka and me

Final day at the conference.... I met Steve Leach a scientist, father of mill script (implementation of open spice), big chatter box and good friend of Rob bamber.. Apparently he was telling us about his days in HP and how he got people fired (ooops! hope he won't be in trouble) He's currently working for Openword.

Kapila, me, Thilan, Gayan, Steve Leach, Martin , Sanjeewa, Deepthi (Director of OW) and Chamindra (Sahana Project Manager) and of cause the bold guy behind Kaplia is Dr Sanjiva (lot of descriptions but I know very little about him, co-authour of WSDL, SOAP and Project manager of Apache Axis, member of OSI Board)

Misc Pictures

Hmm.. interesting picture. Sam Ruby and Rasmus wearing sarong :-)	That's /dev/sun with greg
That's OW Gang with martin	mysql /dev/sun php

First Step

Any journey starts with a first step.. and this would be my first step..
Not sure about the final destination tho... but this week I'll spend time on kernel modules...