Anuradha's Diary

Percentage Votes

2010-04-10T20:28:00.004+05:30

There were several claims about the maximum "percentage votes" obtained at the General Election. But I don't think that those calculations make sense.

Here is an example to show why: Let's say I make a one person party, find some names just to fill the nominations, and our unpopular party gets only 10 votes! Being the supreme leader of the party, all those voters have given me a preferential vote. ;-)

So here I am, getting 10 preferential votes out of 10 votes cast to my party. My percentage is 100%, even if there are tens of thousands of others who didn't vote for me! It only shows I am good at preferential vote fight in the party.

So obviously this is not a good way to calculate the "percentage preferential vote".

A better statistic is the number of preferential votes as a percentage of total valid votes. Otherwise, someone with a very low vote count can still claim a high "percentage vote" relative to the party votes.

Here are some percentage votes calculated with respect to total valid votes:

Basil Rajapaksa: 45.8%
Namal Rajakapsa: 53.0%
Ranil Wickramasinghe: 24.8%
Sajith Premadasa: 26.8%
Sarath Fonseka: 10.5%
Wimal Weerawansa: 29.9%

So where is this Change thing?

2010-01-27T06:34:00.005+05:30

Results released so far indicates that the so called [un]believable change is not happening after all.

On the other hand, analysis at Sri Lankan Elections web site shows that there is is some change when compared to the 2005 Presidential election.

Another notable change is about almost all major candidates usually winning their "home" polling divisions.

Hopefully the last few months were only a simple pause of the progress our nation was making during the last four years.

SF Was Only Following Government Orders, Says Ranil

2010-01-23T11:06:00.005+05:30

According to Mr Ranil Wickramasinghe, General Sarath Fonseka as the "service commander" was only "executing orders given by the government", and under a timeframe set by the government.

He made this comments during a recent interview with the Global Tamil Vision (GTV) TV channel.

This interview was covered in yesterday's Island Editorial. The Defence ministry web site also has an article.

Here is the Youtube link if you can't see the video below.

Using GIT to Manage Config Files

2010-01-04T22:46:00.005+05:30

One thing I like about GIT, among others, is that it creates a repository locally. This makes simple things easy, still not disallowing complex things.

A good use of GIT is to manage the configuration files in a GNU/Linux system. This article describes the way I do it.

In this example, I will use the Squid proxy/cache server configuration as an example, but the principles apply to any configuration.

Ok, so here are the steps.

Zeroth step is to install GIT. ;-) On Debian/Ubuntu systems, install the "git-core" package.

First create a git repository in /etc/. On Ubuntu systems, you may have to use "sudo", or become root with "sudo -s" before running the following commands.

# cd /etc
# git init

This will create a GIT repository in /etc/.git/. This step needs to be done only once. Any recent version of GIT should accept the "init" command, otherwise run "git init-db".

Now add and commit a file, so GIT will create the "master" branch. We add the "hostname" file in this example.

# git add hostname
# git commit -m "Initial commit." hostname

If you don't use the "-m" option, GIT will start an editor to enter a comment.

I prefer to use three branches.

master: This is the branch that holds the working configuration of the running system.
stock: This branch contains the "default" configuration files as installed.
play: This branch is used for experimenting.

Now that the "master" branch is already created, let's create the other two.

# git branch stock
# git branch play

You can always use "git branch" command to see available branches with active branch highlighted.

In this example, we install Squid, and manage its configuration file /etc/squid/squid.conf using GIT.

Let us switch to the "stock" branch, install Squid, add the config file, commit it, and switch back to the "master" branch. Switching to a branch is called "checking out".

# git checkout stock
# apt-get install squid
# git add squid/squid.conf
# git commit -m "Adding stock config file." squid/squid.conf
# git checkout master

It is always a good idea to switch back quickly to the "master" branch, as we need to keep the "stock" branch clean without any of our changes going there accidentally.

Now you will notice that the "squid/squid.conf" file has gone missing, because we added it in the "stock" branch, not in "master".

To get the config file to the "master" branch, we need to merge it with the "stock" branch.

# git merge stock

I do all my experimenting, however small, in the "play" branch. Before starting an experiment, I switch to the "play" branch and merge it with "master", so both "master" and "play" will be identical at the beginning.

# git checkout play
# git merge master

Now the experimenting begins. I would change the config file, start/restart Squid, and 1001 other things.

During experimenting, it is very useful to view the changes I have done by using the "git diff" command.

Even if the experiments are not successful, I would still commit any partial work to continue later. There is nothing to worry as we are in the "play" branch. Use the "git branch" command to verify this.

# git commit -m "Partially finished experiment." squid/squid.conf

To get the system back to its previous state, we can always switch to the "master" branch.

# git checkout master

Make sure to commit the changes in the "play" branch before checking out the "master" branch. Otherwise, those changes will be lost.

Once the experimenting is successful in the "play" branch, we can merge them to the master branch.

# git checkout master
# git merge play

When backing up the system, make sure you include /etc/.git/ to save the history of your configurations.

Use "git log" to view the history of commits.

Happy gitting!

A Rare Video of SWRD

2009-05-24T13:17:00.005+05:30

In this recent blog post, Sam reminds how S W R D Bandaranaike changed national language in 1956, something most people in the present generation [wrongly] call a "Sinhala-only" policy.

English was the Language in Sri Lanka until Bandaranayaka changed it in to Sinhala “with reasonable use of Tamil” (the part everyone forget to mention when they talk about this), and later on, Tamil also considered as national language.

This rare video on youtube is an interview with SWRD, where he states the "reasonable use of Tamil" part. He also admires Tamil as a "rich language with literature and so on".

How "Free" Media Create Hatred

2009-05-21T20:40:00.002+05:30

Here are two reports on the resettlement of displaced people in Sri Lanka: one by the BBC, and another by the Associated Press.

The BBC report talks about "most of the 250,000 Tamils displaced", while AP talks about "the fate of the ethnic Tamil civilians".

WTF?

In my eyes, they are Sri Lankan citizens, be it "Tamil" or not, our brothers and sisters who desperately need help after going through so much. I am sure that I am not alone.

But some media reports continue to highlight ethnic prefixes. Does someone, or more than one someone, want to stop our country from unifying under a single Sri Lankan identity?

Even if they have an excuse to add an ethnic prefix, how do they say for sure that all the 250,000 displaced people are in fact Tamil? It may be true, but can those reports be so authoritative without even a sample survey?

Here is another news item from Reuters, which talks about just "refugees". No prefixes.

Interestingly, BBC conveniently forgot the "Tamil" prefix when headlining the assassination of Lakshman Kadiragamar and Jeyaraj Fernandopulle but not when pro-LTTE persons got killed (e.g.: here, here and here).

The war is over, but we now have more reasons to be vigilant. Not just about LTTE sleeping sells, but also about those who subtly create and extend ethnic hatred to stop us from uniting as Sri Lankans.

I don't expect every media organization to positively contribute to peace and harmony in Sri Lanka; being neutral is just fine. But if they positively and systematically contribute to create hatred among us, that's where we need to take a stand. By "taking a stand", I don't mean that we should ban them here, but educating ourselves and peace-loving fellow citizens of perils much more dangerous than armed terrorist organizations will go a long way.

We Salute You!

2009-05-20T13:46:00.002+05:30

Our country has finally become a truly unified sovereign. Last time it happened was in the 1500s (no, not in 1948).

I salute all our armed forces, those who have sacrificed their lives for the betterment of others in our nation, for making this happen!

Our country is lucky to be blessed with a President like Mahinda Rajapaksa, at the right time, if not later, complimented by great military leadership. A leadership that didn't become pawns of some other intrusive nations who call themselves the "International Community".

We also should be thankful to the nations who were with us during these hard times. Such times are invaluable to figure out who our true friends are.

In this defining moment of history, I think it is important for all of these to happen.

Victory celebrations. Peaceful celebrations is a good way to bring our nation together. It is important not to spend a lot of money, next two items in the list needs them. Serving milk rice, hoisting national flags, rallies are all good, as long as they don't grow violent. I noticed Police presence in most of these events, which is good, so things won't go out of control.
Helping disabled/fallen heroes, and their families.
Contributing to help displaced people.
Get rid of ethnic identities, and treat everyones as "Sri Lankans". Just getting rid of the adjectives marking ethnicity is all we need to do. We don't need "Sinhala Villages", "Tamil areas" etc. We have only Sri Lankan stuff. We may use "Sinhala-speaking" or "Tamil-speaking" when necessary, but there is no need to label people in ethnic terms anymore.

I am hopeful and optimistic that this will be the beginning of prosperity to our country!

How to become a Superhero

2009-05-16T07:43:00.001+05:30

There is Superman. There is Catwoman. There is Spiderman. And a few others.

There was a time I could count the number of superheros with my fingers. Not anymore. They are now everywhere!

And you can become one, if you like; simple.

Join an NGO to become an "aid worker". Become a journalist. Become a doctor or anyone that can be called an "official", or just call yourself one.

That's all it takes to become a superhero these days. And you will be much more powerful than the handful or traditional superheros!

Whatever you say will be fully trusted by "international" media. Even if they hear your (claimed) voice over the phone, or an email. No cross checking. No verifications. How very convenient?

Your judgment powers will become objective all of a sudden. Your previous relationships, your religions and political beliefs and aspirations, your former affiliations, will never affect your decisions. All that will be past. If others can't make head or tail of something, they will ask you. You will always be treated as "independent".

You will never take sides. Even if you did so in the past, you will make sure to leave such allegiances in the past. You will not merely transform into a superhero; you will be re-born!

If harm comes your way, judgment will have be fast-tracked and accelerated. Justice for other human beings can wait. After all, you are super-human, right?

You will get full immunity. Since you are very objective in thinking, you will never do something wrong. So no one can arrest you. Even if they did, you will have a stream of fans who will do everything in their power, and possibly more, to set you free. Laws made by ordinary humans for themselves cannot apply to you, even when you are not acting in the capacity of a superhero.

And you will be allowed to go to any dangerous place, and any other place, too, for that matter. But unlike for Superman, you will not have to look after your own safety. Others will have to make sure that you are safe, even if that makes their job much more difficult and dangerous. It's their problem; not yours.

And last, but not least, Superman will feel very jealous of you, because he doesn't get paid! ;-)

iPhone 3G for 800+ USD?

2009-02-03T08:52:00.004+05:30

In this WWDC 2008 keynote, Steve Jobs said that the iPhone 3G will sell at 199/299 USD in almost all countries around the world.

Today I saw an email passing around which said that Dialog is selling the iPhone 3G for Rs 89,000, more than 800 USD! Few months ago, BT Options, the local Apple agent, was selling iPhones at Rs 120,000!!!

Congratulations Shilpa Sayura

2008-05-23T21:18:00.004+05:30

Sri Lanka's Shilpa Sayura project has won the Stockholm Challenge 2008.

The Jury had studies 400 projects from around the globe and selected 145 finalists in six categories. Shilpa Sayura won the first place in the Education category.

Congratulations Niranjan and the team for this great achievement!

I once had the opportunity to see a Shilpa Sayura event at Kandiyapitawewa village. Pictures from that event are here.

Mr Donald, Please Correct the Alphabet First!

2008-05-06T15:44:00.005+05:30

I have already replied to Mr Donald Gaminitillake's mudslinging campaign against Sinhala Unicode, which he wields through akuru.org web site and by hijacking discussions on various blogs and forums.

Mr Donald's motives are quite clear. He claims that every Sinhala character shape needs an individual "code point", and has applied for a patent for this "invention". With Sinhala Unicode becoming mainstream, avenues for making money with his pending patent are going thin.

So he is doing what any desperate human being (or animal for that matter) would do; try everything to remove the "opponent".

One of the examples Mr Donald always uses is the absence of character "du" in the Sinhala Unicode codepage.

Of course he conveniently forgets to mention that "da" and "papilla" are in fact available. Well, it requires a bit of brains to put them together. ;-)

Mr Donald, there are lots of missing characters in the Sinhala Hodiya (alphabet), including your infamous "du", let alone "yansaya" and "rakaransaya". If you love the Sinhala language so much as you claim, please start a campaign to "fix" Hodiya!

I have previously pointed out this similarity between Hodiya and Sinhala Unicode, and why "du" + "papilla" is as good as "du". This blog post discusses technicalities in detail including the matter of "yansaya" and "rakaransaya".

Unfortunately for Mr Donald, his "opponent", namely Sinhala Unicode, is growing stronger day by day. Implementations are maturing, more standards compliant fonts are beginning to appear, and as I wrote earlier, more web sites and blogs are now Unicode compliant (e.g.: Sinhala Bloggers, Sinhala Wikipedia, Sinhala Blogs and of course our own Sinhala GNU/Linux).

External Projectors and GNU/Linux

2008-05-03T12:12:00.007+05:30

Some GNU/Linux computers seem to have problems connecting to projectors. While my earlier ThinkPad R51 always obeyed Fn+F7 combination to turn on output to an external projector, recently acquired R52 did not.

After some research I found that XRandR has good support for output hotplugging. Although graphical tools are available to do this, I found the following commands useful.

% xrandr --auto
% xrandr --output --auto

The first one usually works, and it has to be issued as the same user running X, and not root.

In rare cases when parts of the screen is cropped due to the projector having a smaller resolution, use the -s option to reset the resolution:

% xrandr -s 1024x768

Running xrandr without options would show what is going on with the screen modes.

Why Native Language is Important for Web

2008-04-21T19:02:00.004+05:30

After reading this blog post about blogging Sinhala, I felt like writing my thoughts about the topic.

There are very few "yes" or "no" answers in life, so I don't think it is correct to rule "blogging in Sinhala is a good idea" or vice versa. Most answers can begin with an "it depends", and I think it is true here, too.

In certain circumstances, using in English on the Web is a good idea. When addressing a global audience, or selling to a product on the Web to the global market, not using English will definitely not serve the purpose.

A key argument for using Sinhala is about addressing certain audiences who are not fluent in other languages.

I think there is a more important reason. Certain things can only be done in Sinhala, and this argument holds for any other language.

A blog post is not always a piece of information to be transmitted to a maximum audience. Sometimes it is a work of art. Works of art are diverse, and this diversity is not only limited to language.

Sinhala is not only a communication medium. It also has a very rich literature: poetry, writings and what not. Being a living language, new Sinhala literature is made every day. And if Web is the medium for such literature, obviously, Sinhala has to be the language.

Check out this blog post for example. (You may need to enable Unicode support). It is a collection of Sinhala poetry from an online "hitiwana kavi maduwa", where people used poetry to communicate. I am sure there are lots of readers who appreciate such work. I can hardly imagine how such a blog post can be in English.

So I think the answer to most questions of life applies here as well: it depends. ;-)

LaTeX and Sinhala Unicode

2008-04-20T18:00:00.005+05:30

When we met at Excel World on last 17th, Bud, Srimal and myself started talking about using Sinhala Unicode in TeX / LaTeX.

It didn't occur to me that Chamath, who also created one of the first Sinhala FOSS keyboard drivers, has already created a preprocessor for LaTeX called sintex which reads Sinhala files in Unicode/UTF-8. In fact, not only had I replied to his announcement, but also sent a patch to Debianize it! Life is too complex, and I am too human to keep track of all these.

But that forgetfulness turned out to be a lucky incident, as our pursuit lead to something more useful!

So we started creating a preprocessor for Vasantha Saparamadu's Sinhala TeX package which uses Samanala transliteration scheme.

However, Bud pointed out that the generated PDF files will have ASCII characters instead of Unicode, making it a problem for search engines that index them, and convert them for "HTML view" pages.

After some research, we found XeTeX, a Unicode enabled version of LaTeX.

XeTeX uses ICU for text layout, and ICU versions after 3.6 supports Sinhala out of the box. However, latest stable version 0.996 of XeTeX uses statically linked ICU 3.4. I managed to patch the "tetex-xetex" package that comes with Debian and make it recognize Sinhala. The patches were also submitted to Debian.

XeTeX font changes are always manual, which made the source look ugly. After a bit of research, I found zhspacing package, which among other things automatically sets fonts for Chinese characters. But it is a complicated package, but I managed to get an idea of how it uses character class feature in the latest XeTeX version 0.997.

Downloading the latest version of XeTeX from SVN repository and building for Debian was not difficult, except I had to edit debian/control files to replace tetex-base and tetex-bin dependency to their texlive counterparts. I had to first get xdvipdfmx. Here is a rough sketch of the work.

% mkdir xdvipdfmx
% cd xdvipdfmx
% svn co http://scripts.sil.org/svn-view/xdvipdfmx/TRUNK
% cd TRUNK
% chmod +x debian/rules
# dpkg-buildpackage -b
# cd ..
# dpkg --purge dvipdfmx
# dpkg -i xdvipdfmx...deb
% cd ..

% mkdir xetex
% cd xetex
% svn co http://scripts.sil.org/svn-view/xetex/TRUNK
% cd TRUNK
% vi debian/control
% chmod +x debian/rules
# dpkg-buildpackage -b
# cd ..
# dpkg --purge texlive-xetex
# dpkg -i xetex...deb

As the XeTeX web site had warned, the Debian build files provided by vanilla XeTeX were not up to date. After installing I had to create a /etc/texmf/fmt.d/10local.cnf with the following two lines:

xetex   xetex  -             *xetex.ini
xelatex xetex  language.dat  *xelatex.ini

and then run the following commands:

# update-fmutil
# fmutil-sys --enablefmt xetex
# fmutil-sys --enablefmt xelatex

to make "xelatex" command to work properly.

After getting latest version of XeTeX working, the last remaining step was to create a small style file, which I called "sinhala.sty", to make automatic font switching for Sinhala.

% sinhala.sty version 20080420
% Typesetting mixed Sinhala documents in XeTeX
%
% Copyright (C) 2008 by Anuradha Ratnaweera
%
\ifx\XeTeXrevision\@undefined
  \errmessage{XeTeX is required to use sinhala}
\fi
\ifx\XeTeXinterchartokenstate\@undefined
  \errmessage{XeTeX 0.997 or above required to use sinhala}
\fi
\ProvidesPackage{sinhala}[2008/04/20]
\RequirePackage{fontspec}
\newfontinstance{\sifont}[Script=Sinhala]{LKLUG}
\newcommand\latinfont{\fontfamily{lmr}\selectfont}
\XeTeXinterchartokenstate = 1
\newcount\cnt\cnt="0D80
\loop
  \XeTeXcharclass\cnt=10 \ifnum\cnt<"0DFF \advance\cnt1
\repeat
\XeTeXcharclass "200C = 10
\XeTeXcharclass "200D = 10
\XeTeXinterchartoks 0 10 = {\sifont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 255 10 = {\sifont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 10 0 = {\latinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 10 255 = {\latinfont}

So, all you need is XeTeX 0.997 and sinhala.sty to write LaTeX files using Sinhala Unicode.

Goodbye xorg.conf!

2008-04-15T07:40:00.002+05:30

After reading this article on xrandr, I wanted to see how total autoconfiguration works on X Windows.

As a start, I tried removing xorg.conf file completely and restart X. The sky didn't fall down! In fact, I didn't notice any change. Everything from USB hotplug to OpenGL continued to work as before.

The only tweak needed was to the old font system. Unlike fontconfig, the old X font system seems to depend on the "font path" set in xorg.conf. This was a problem for using my custom SUN22x12 font in xterm. After adding the following lines to ~/.fvwm/preferences/Startup, this problem was gone, too.

AddToFunc InitFunction
+ I Exec exec /usr/bin/xset +fp /usr/local/share/fonts

Yes, I use fvwm-crystal, a "polished" version of FVWM. Old school, so what?

Simplifying Digital Camera Access on GNU/Linux

2008-04-14T22:20:00.007+05:30

Digital camera access is simple enough on GNU/Linux, but with a couple of tweaks here and there, it can be made even simpler.

Summary: I keep my photos in directories named "yyyy-mm-dd" by the date taken. When I plug in the camera, photos are automatically downloaded and sent to correct directories. If you like to know how I did it, please read on!

Accessing digital cameras has always been simple on GNU/Linux. A large number of digital cameras are supported out of the box. When using the shell, arguably gphoto is the most convenient. Running gphoto with the "P" option autodetects the camera and downloads all the photos in it.

% gphoto2 -P

I keep all my photos in a "photos" directory with subdirectories in the "yyyy-dd-mm" format indicating the date taken.

First step of simplification is to automatically put each image into the correct location. Digital cameras put a lot of Exif information into each image, so extracting the date taken is quite straightforward. I use a simple tool called exif to do this.

Both gphoto2 and exif are available on Debian.

# apt-get install gphoto2 exif

After some trial and error, I figured that the images taken with my Canon PowerShot S3 IS have a tag 0x132 indicating the date each photo was taken.

% exif -t 0x132 IMG_0416.JPG 
EXIF entry 'Date and Time' (0x132, 'Date and Time')...
Tag: 0x132 ('DateTime')
  Format: 2 ('Ascii')
  Components: 20
  Size: 20
  Value: 2007:10:22 06:05:49

What we want is in the "Value:" line. After filtering that line with grep, and using sed a couple of times, we can get the date in yyyy-dd-mm format.

% exif -t 0x132 IMG_0416.JPG | \
    grep 'Value: ' | \                           # Filter the line with "Value:"
    sed 's/.*Value: \(....:..:..\) .*/\1/' | \   # Get the yyyy:mm:dd part of the value line
    sed 's/:/-/g'                                # convert ":" to "-"
2007-10-22

If you want to understand exactly what each step is doing, try the above pipeline by adding one filter at a time.

Then I put together a small script to move each image in the current directory to ~/pictures/yyyy-mm-dd/ subdirectories where I want them.

gphoto2 -P

for i in *.JPG
do
    date=$(exif -t 0x132 $i | \
        grep 'Value: ' | \
        sed 's/.*Value: \(....:..:..\) .*/\1/' | \
        sed 's/:/-/g')
    dir="/home/anuradha/pictures/test/$date"
    mkdir -p "$dir"
    mv -f "$i" "$dir"
done

Notice that I use a test directory. I saved this in ~/bin/, and made it executable.

Now comes the fun part. After connecting the camera to the computer, I used "lsusb" to find out its vendor ID and product ID are 04a9:311a. The following udev rule in /etc/udev/rules.d/010_local.rules invokes the above script whenever this camera is plugged in.

ACTION=="add", BUS=="usb", \
    SYSFS{idVendor}=="04a9", SYSFS{idProduct}=="311a", \
    RUN+="/home/anuradha/bin/pictures.sh"

Well, matters are a little more complicated. Udev seems to invoke the script multiple times. So I added two extra "features" to stop that.

Adding a lock file to prevent multiple simultaneous running of the script.
Use a "timestamp" file at the end of the script, and not run again "too soon" (60 seconds turned out to be ok).

These made sure that the script is run only once when the camera is plugged in.

I used the number of seconds since the Unix Epoch given by the stat and date commands. If the timestamp file was created less than 60 seconds ago, the script aborts.

So here is the complete script:

#!/bin/bash

set -e

user=anuradha
group=users
pictures="/home/$user/Pictures"
download="$pictures/.download"
logdir="$pictures/log"
log=$(date +"$logdir/%Y-%m-%d");
cooldown=60

lock=/tmp/.pictures.download
lasttime=$lock.time

# Avoid multiple simultaneous runs
ln -s $lock $lock || exit 0

# Abort if we had run less than $cooldown seconds ago
if [ -f "$lasttime" ]
then
    t1=$(stat -c '%Z' $lasttime)
    t2=$(date +'%s');
    dt=$((t2 - t1))
    if [ $dt -lt $cooldown ]
    then
        rm -f $lock
        exit 0
    fi
fi

# Take it slowly ;-)
sleep 3

mkdir -p $download
mkdir -p $logdir
rm -f $download/*

# Get the photos, all of them
cd $download
gphoto2 -P

for i in *.JPG
do
    date=$(exif -t 0x132 $i | \
        grep 'Value: ' | \
        sed 's/.*Value: \(....:..:..\) .*/\1/' | \
        sed 's/:/-/g')
    dir="$pictures/$date"
    if [ ! -f "$dir/$i" ]
    then
        [ -d $dir ] || mkdir -p $dir
        chown $user:$group $i
        chmod 644 $i
        chown $user:$group $dir
        mv -f $i $dir
        echo "$date/$i" >> $log
    fi
done

cd
rmdir $download

# Add a timestamp
touch $lasttime

rm -f $lock
exit 0

Network Traffic Accounting

2008-04-09T23:36:00.005+05:30

After totally automating my Mobitel 3G connection, the next natural step was to setup some kind of a traffic accounting system. I wanted to avoid tools that monitor individual packets, because that was an unnecessary overhead. vnStat turned out to be a perfect match.

Here are the steps in setting up vnstat on Debian. Good news is that vnstat in Debian comes with proper crontab entries and network up/down hooks already in place.

First step, obviously is to install vnstat:
```
# apt-get install vnstat
```

Create a new configuration:

# vnstat --showconfig > /etc/vnstat.conf

Edit /etc/vnstat.conf and set the default interface to "ppp0".
Create an empty database for ppp0:
```
# vnstat -u -i ppp0
```

Now vnstat starts counting network traffic. The default crontab seems to run "vnstat -u" every 5 minutes.

Then I installed this simple web based frontend called vnStat PHP frontend. Installation is just a matter of unpacking:

# cd /usr/local/src/
# wget http://www.sqweek.com/sqweek/files/vnstat_php_frontend-1.3.tar.gz
# cd /var/www
# tar -xzvf /usr/local/src/vnstat_php_frontend-1.3.tar.gz
# mv vnstat_php_frontend-1.3 vnstat

Then I had to edit /var/www/vnstat/config.php and set the following values.

$iface_list          = array('ppp0');
$iface_title['ppp0'] = 'Mobitel 3G';
$vnstat_bin          = '/usr/bin/vnstat';

Pointing a browser to http://localhost/vmstat/ showed that everything is working fine.

I also have the following .htaccess file in vnstat directory to avoid access from remote hosts:

Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128

Mobitel 3G with Huawei E220 on Debian

2008-04-09T10:30:00.012+05:30

Finally I decided to shift my mobile Internet connectivity from GPRS to HSDPA by getting a Mobitel 3G broadband connection.

The package includes a Huawei E220 HSDPA USB modem (Wikipedia article), SIM card and connection, connection fee and first month's bill waived, a Rs 5k deposit which shall be refunded after an year.

Huawai E220 is known to work out of the box on Linux after 2.6.20. However, some of the most recent kernels seems to have a conflict with the USB mass storage driver. It means, the disk drive in the modem with Windows drivers get detected, but not the modem. I am presently running Linux 2.6.24.4, which also exhibits this behavior.

Bud suggested a quick workaround: to start the computer while the USB dongle is plugged in. This worked, and the modem was autodetected as /dev/ttyUSB0.

The sales person at Excel World Mobitel outlet told me that the APN has to be statically set to "mobitel3g" and the number is "*99***1#". It was easy to find the AT commands to do this. I created the following /etc/wvdial.conf file and running "wvdial" afterwards took me to the Internet. Username and password was just to stop wvdial complaining.

[Dialer Defaults]
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Baud = 1843200
Modem Type = Analog Modem
Init2 = ATZ
Init3 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init4 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","mobitel3g"
Dial Command = ATDT
Phone = *99***1#
Username = foo
Password = bar
Stupid Mode = yes

Going with the "get it working, then make it better" philosophy, then I looked at the conflict with the USB disk. There are couple of suggestions to the kernel usb-storage driver discussed on the above thread - which didn't work for me unfortunately, but just running this huaweiAktBbo utility did the trick. So I copied the binary to a standard location.

# apt-get install build-essential libusb-dev   # just to be sure
# cc -o huaweiAktBbo -lusb huaweiAktBbo.c
# cp huaweiAktBbo /usr/local/sbin/

Then I created a small script to initiate the connection:

#!/bin/sh

lock=/tmp/.mobitel.lock
if ln -s $lock $lock
then
    [ -c /dev/ttyUSB0 ] || /usr/local/sbin/huaweiAktBbo
    sleep 3
    if [ -c /dev/ttyUSB0 ]
    then
        cp -f /etc/wvdial.conf.mobitel /etc/wvdial
        /usr/bin/wvdial
    fi
    rm -f $lock
fi

exit 0

Lock can also be created in /var/run, and notice that I have not done a "set -e", because if wvdial stops with an error, we still need to remove the lock. The lock is there to avoid multiple invocations of the script.

Then I created a simple udev rule to automatically connect whenever the E220 is plugged in. You can use "lsusb", among others, to find the vendor ID and product ID. I created a new /etc/udev/rules.d/010_local.rules file with the following line.

ACTION=="add", BUS=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="12d1", \
    SYSFS{idProduct}=="1003", RUN+="/usr/local/sbin/mobitel.sh"

That's it! Now I am on the Internet automatically whenever the device is connected to the computer!

The only remaining "problem" was hal which was still trying to automount the USB disk. As suggested in ArchLinux wiki, creating a file /usr/share/hal/fdi/preprobe/20thirdparty/10-huawei-e220.fdi with the following fixes this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
 <device>
   <match key="usb.vendor_id" int="0x12d1">
     <match key="usb.product_id" int="0x1003">
       <merge key="info.ignore" type="bool">true</merge>
     </match>
   </match>
 </device>
</deviceinfo>

The connection is fast and way cheaper than GPRS when it comes to volume. HSDPA costs one rupee per MB, while GPRS costs 20!

Update: I noticed that udev runs the script multiple times, so as a quick fix I have added a test for /dev/ttyUSB0 in a couple of places in the script to make matters better.

HDR Imaging on FOSS

2008-03-30T14:33:00.004+05:30

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging is an interesting aspect of modern photography.

Today I demonstrated HDR imaging and panoramas at AG School of Business and Computer Studies, Negambo. Here are some resources I listed during this session.

Wikipedia HDR imaging article
Home page of qtpfsgui
Home page of Hugin
Home page of GIMP
HDR group on Flickr
Photos tagged qtpfsgui on Flickr (hint: click on "Most interesting" to see good images)
Photos tagged HDR on Flickr (hint: click on "Most interesting" to see good images)
Photos tagged Panorama on Flickr (hint: click on "Most interesting" to see good images)

More Sinhala Web Sites Using Unicode

2008-03-07T17:53:00.007+05:30

Use of of Sinhala Unicode on the Web is slowly, but steadily, growing.

Two years ago, our good friend Niranjan Meegammana started the Sinhala Unicode group to bring together all those who are involved in the development of Sinhala Unicode to communicate, and to use Sinhala itself to do so. Today the group has become one of the very active forums on the topic, and provides a living example for the success of the standard.

Although some newspapers are still reluctant to move from legacy font tricks to Sinhala Unicode, Dinamina and e-thalaya online newspapers made a bold move by using only Unicode in their web sites, providing fine examples that the implementations are mature.

This Sinhala blog sindicator aggregates dozens of blogs written in Sinhala.

My previous posts on this topic are here, here and here.

The Old Order Changeth

2008-02-06T21:50:00.003+05:30

"The old order changeth, yielding place to new" [said King Arthur] -- From Morte D'Arthur by Lord Tennyson

And so again the time has come for a change. I decided to spend more time in the wilderness where I came from, and move away from this city life, to which I will never get used to. ;-)

I started working as a freelance consultant starting 1st of February, 2008. Initially I am focusing on software/IT, but hoping to expand to CNC sooner or later.

I will also continue to work for Virtusa as an external consultant.

You can reach me at anuradha at taprobane dot org. If you forget it or loose it, searching Google for "anuradha" or "anuradha ratnaweera" should find my home page with contact details and links.

FBI on LTTE

2008-01-11T18:55:00.000+05:30

The FBI site has this article on how to stop helping terrorism while living in the US. It is also the top story on the site as of today.

My Photo Blog

2007-10-16T07:53:00.000+05:30

I'm featuring selected photos in my photo gallery on a photo blog.

FVWM-Crystal Windows Manager

2007-07-22T13:07:00.001+05:30

I always liked to have FVWM as my window manager. However, it lacks three important features I need on my desktop:

Taskbar
Notification area (AKA system tray)
Application launcher

The FVWM-Crystal window manager adds exactly these features to vanilla FVWM, along with other subtle goodies all over.

Lack of desktop icons has never been a problem to me. Launchers are best left in a corner, so there is no need to "show desktop" or "hide windows" in order to use icons.

Another nice thing about FVWM-Crystal is the ability to start a terminal just by right-clicking anywhere on the desktop. Even blank areas between launcher, workarea switcher and notification area would do, so there is no need to resize a maximized window to do this. Another nice thing is the ability to start a small terminal by pressing Alt + grave(`).

I know several users who have switched to FWVM-Crystal and are happy. :-)

Unicode and Sinhala Alphabet

2007-05-29T16:34:00.002+05:30

There is a great deal of similarity between Sinhala Unicode (~ SLS 1134) and Sinhala Hodiya (alphabet).

Sidath Sangarawa, one of the oldest texts on Sinhala grammar written over 2000 years ago, lists 10 vowels and 20 consonants (see footnote 1), but the book also uses two unlisted vowels ඇ and ඈ (see footnote 2).

Sanskrit influence increased the number of characters to over 50.

Actual number of shapes, known as "glyphs" in modern typographic terminology, needed to write in Sinhala is in the range of thousands, due to derived and joint forms of basic characters.

Listing all these thousands of glyphs was never a popular practice. Students learn basic characters and modifiers, and common sense takes care of generating the thousands of other shapes. For example, after learning "ispilla", you can add it to basic consonants and generate all the "i" forms such as "ki", "gi", "ji" etc.

Hodiya doesn't have any of these extra characters such as "ki" or "du". Hodiya doesn't have rakaransaya nor yansaya. But nobody complained. Everybody knew, and still know, that the Hodiya is only a basic guide to generate more complex glypls.

However, this didn't work when Sinhala texts started to be printed on printing machines. These machines don't have brains and couldn't learn how to "generate". Therefore every possible glyph had to be given.

Walk into an old press to see a large "matrix" or such glyphs.

Then came the age of computer based typography. Computers can be taught to do things, and that is exactly how standards like Unicode and SLS 1134 generate shapes. We can teach computers to generate thousands of glyphs using less than a hundred of basic shapes. For example, we can generate "du" by adding "da" and "papilla", so a seperate "du" is not necessary.

How about "yansaya" and "rakaransaya"? They are generated by sequences including the zero-width joiner (ZWJ). For example, "pra" is represented as "pa", "hal kireema", ZWJ and "ra". ZWJ also is used to represent joint and touching letters.

Gone are the days of brainless matrix-based printing machines.

We need two things to view Sinhala on a computer. A font containing Sinhala glyphs, and the computer programs should knows how to generate glyphs using sequences of basic characters. Let me explain using an example.

Step 0. Here is how a sample web page looks on a browser when it cannot find a Sinhala Unicode font. The "boxes" indicate unavailable character numbers:

Step 1. After installing a font, the browser will show some Sinhala, but if it hasn't "learned" how to generate glyphs, only basic characters and modifiers are shown independently:

Step 2. Now I have enabled the "shaper" in the browser, which is the part that knows how to generate Sinhala glyphs using basic characters:

All is well!

So where exactly is the similarity?

Students learn less than 100 basic characters in the alphabet and modifiers, and use their brains with some support from teachers to generate the rest of the 1000+ shapes.

Computers can be programmed - and some computers have already been programmed - to generate 1000+ Sinhala glyphs using less than 100 basic shapes in Sinhala Unicode / SLS 1134 standard.

As the standard is platform independent, we use it to communicate with people using diverse platforms in the Sinhala Unicode Group among others.

Footnote 1. පණකුරු පසෙක් එද ලුහු ගුරු බෙයින් දසවේ, ගතකුරුද වේ විස්සෙක්, වහරට යුහු හෙළ බස

Footnote 2. Notice the use of ඇ and ඈ, both independently and in consonants: පසැස් ඈ සරලොප් නැතද සර ගතට පැමිණවූ බැවින් සර සඳ නම්.

Ages of life

2007-05-25T20:53:00.001+05:30

While chilling out at home a few weeks ago, a colorful "Dothulu" tree caught my eye. After clicking some photographs I totally forgot about it.

When I later checked the photos on a PC, the tree turned out to contain five different types of seeds at five different stages of life! Six if you count the one inside the next branch about to come out.

Manifestations of impermanence are everywhere, but I find this one fascinating, because it fitted into just one colorful photograph.

Orbitrek vs Orbitrak

2007-05-23T11:15:00.001+05:30

Recently I wanted to buy an aerobic exercising machine.

After doing a lot of research on the Internet and reading user reviews, I finally settled to buy an Orbitrek Platinum. One of the key decision factors was that it's yet another implementation of well known Ellipical Trainer.

The original Orbitrek had some scary reviews: that it is falling apart. Probably this may be due to poor assembling, but still good enough reason for me to be doubtful. However the newer version known as the Orbitrek Platinum, which also has been around for a while, didn't seem to have this problem and the reviews were good.

So here I am, looking around to buy an Orbitrek Platinum.

First I went to Teleseen Marketing in Majestic City. They were offering the Orbitrek Platinum, but the old one was also available. Then I checked with Himalayas, which was only a few blocks away on the same floor, and to my surprise they also were offering both the old one and the Platinum, but the price of the latter was several thousand rupees lower (about 60% of the one at Teleseen)!

The cheaper one at Himalayas didn't have any reference to "Thane", the company that made the Orbitrek. By some luck I happened to notice a subtle difference. It was not Orbitrek, but "Orbitrak"!

I didn't buy either and did some more research to find out that the "Orbitrek" is the real one and "Orbitrak" was probably a fake.

So I went ahead and bought the Orbitrek Platinum from Teleseen.

Later I noticed so many advertisements and signboards selling the "Orbitrak"!!!

If cost was a problem to buy the "real" product, and if I have a choice between a fake product and a lower quality product, I would go for the latter. Why? Because the fake product developers try to get the looks right to match the real one without much attention to the inner workings, while the low quality product may have done some research to get the inner workings right.

FWDC web site goes mobile

2007-05-16T10:26:00.001+05:30

Finally managed to get the mobile version of our Four Wheel Drive Club (FWDC) web site done. The mobile site, m.4x4.lk, has a very lightweight theme, smaller thumbnails, and most external links point to mobile versions of relevant sites.

The difference is best seen by comparing similar pages on the two sites. E.g.: www.4x4.lk/node/29 and m.4x4.lk/node/29.

We would like the new site to be tested on as many mobile devices as possible. Please send your feedback to info@4x4.lk. Thanks in advance!

Missing the point

2007-04-24T18:01:00.000+05:30

Ian Chappel and Arjuna Ranatunga, along with many other media, have expressed their concern about the Sri Lankan team resting some key bowlers during the World Cup super-eight match against Australia. But they are missing the key point: Sri Lanka rested some key bowlers. But the team lost mainly due to not-so-good batting. And every critic/pundit seem to miss this simple point! So even if Vaas and Muralitharan were playing, will it have helped Sri Lanka to change their score on the board? Not likely. By the way, here is one great answer by Sangakkara.

Running AIGLX and Beryl on Debian

2006-12-12T14:57:00.000+05:30

After seeing some eye candy on Bud's desktop last Sunday, I wanted to try AIGLX and Beryl on my Debian Etch notebook. To get a preview of what this is all about, try searching for "aiglx" and/or "beryl" on YouTube or Google Video. Debian Etch now has xorg 7.1 with built in AIGLX, so there was no need to install anything. I "enabled" AIGLX by following "Prerequists", "xorg.conf" and "AIGLX" sections of this blog entry. Just that easy! Here are some important sections of my xorg.conf file. My video adapter is a Radeon Mobility 7500 on an IBM (not Lenovo) Thinkpad R50. IMPORTANT: This is not the complete xorg.conf file!

Section "Module"
  Load    "bitmap"
  Load    "dbe"
  Load    "ddc"
  Load    "dri"
  Load    "extmod"
  Load    "freetype"
  Load    "glcore"
  Load    "glx"
  Load    "int10"
  Load    "record"
  Load    "type1"
  Load    "v4l"
  Load    "vbe"
EndSection

Section "Device"
  Identifier  "Radeon Mobility 7500"
  Driver      "radeon"
  Option      "RenderAccel" "true"
  Option      "backingstore" "true"
  Option      "EnablePageFlip" "true"
  Option      "AGPMode" "8"
  Option      "AGPFastWrite" "true"
  Option      "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"
  Option      "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
  Identifier  "Default Screen"
  Device      "Radeon Mobility 7500"
  Monitor     "Generic Monitor"
  DefaultDepth    24
  SubSection "Display"
      Depth       24
      Modes       "1280x1024" "1024x768"
  EndSubSection
  Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
  Option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
  Mode    0666
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
  Option "Composite" "true"
EndSection

Then I installed Beryl 0.1.2 by using the DEB packages by following this link, started KDE and ran "beryl-manager". Everything started working as expected! Then I wanted to upgrade to 0.1.3, but couldn't find any DEBs around. So I built some myself using the distro specific build files provided by the good Beryl developers. Thanks! You can get my Beryl/Emerald 0.1.3 packages for Debian Etch (without XGL support) by adding this line to your sources.list file:

deb http://www.linux.lk/~anuradha/beryl/etch/ ./

and installing "beryl" and "emerald-themes" packages. The latter is not installed automatically when installing the "beryl" package. Here are some insteresting things to try:

Press left/right arrow keys with ctrl and alt.
Press ctrl and alt and drag the mouse.
Open few windows and move the mouse to the top right corner (Mac users will scream at this ;-)).

The sad part is that none of these work on my FVWM Crystal desktop. :-(

Sri Lankan Photography Group

2006-08-28T14:52:00.000+05:30

Flickr photostreams with tags `lanka' (latest / interesting) and `sri lanka' (latest / interesting) indicate that the tropical island has always been a heaven for photographers. Now there is a Google Group to "discuss photography in Sri Lanka (locations, tips, equipment etc) and share pictures".

Canon announces EOS D400

2006-08-25T17:42:00.000+05:30

Canon yesterday announced the successor to its popular EOS 350D consumer SLR, commonly knows as the `Digital Rebel XT'. It is likely to compete with Nikon's recently announced D80. However, Canon's pricing of the new camera at 800$ is more attractive when compared to 1000$ of the Nikon D80. See Canon EOS article on Wikipedia for more details on the EOS series.

FOSSSL 2006

2006-08-22T19:07:00.000+05:30

Last year, we organized a successful week of FOSS activities, and we decided to make it an annual event. This year, we named the whole week to be `FOSSSL 2006', as opposed to FOSSSL being one of the events during the 2005 FOSS Week. The events of the week were FossCode, FOSSSchool, ApacheCon, FOSSEnterprise and Geekout. FOSSCode was organized in a similar manner to Google Summer of Code. I was mentoring Mahangu's project for Taprobane. Five more students took part implementing various projects. FOSSSchool, held at the University of Moratuwa, was for introducing FOSS to students. Morning session was for schools and the evening session for university students. I did an introductory session in each. Interestingly, I had to make the one in the evening more `serious' as the students already had a good understanding of what FOSS is. Ken Coar had already arrived, but as a bomb off targetting a Pakistani diplomat, we suggested him to stay at the hotel. However, all the other speakers turned up as planned. The ApacheCon was the first of its kind in Asia. The participation was over expectations. A `Hackerthon' also was held along the conference. The last confernce-like event was the FOSSEnterprice held at WatersEdge. The sessions were moderated, 15 minutes each, and a panel discussion followed each 3 sessions. I followed James Clark on FOSS evaluation, and Bud was the other panelist in our group moderated by Ken Coar. On Friday evening, we left Colombo for the Geekout. I will post seperately on that. :-)

Jeep Outdoor Quest

2006-07-19T19:03:00.000+05:30

The 4x4 Club of Sri Lanka and Dimo Lanka jointly organized a unique outdoor sports event at Waters Edge on the 16th. This was different from the "usual" 4x4 events as it included three stages - cycling, rowing and driving. Me, my brother and Anuradha Weeraman were at Waters Edge by around 8:30. The climate was very sunny and bright. Soon it became very hot, but Waters Edge is much closer to the nature than the rest of the city with lots of greens and water, and the effect of the bright sun was not that bad. Also, it was much easier to take sharp photographs with lower shutter speeds. I had borrowed a Fuji FinePix S5100 from a friend, as my Canon was no longer working. Its 10x optical zoom proved to be very useful. The first stage of this outdoor triathlon was to to cycle round the lake. The course was somewhat "off-road", but not difficult. Lanka Sportreizen had provided mountain bikes and other cycling gear. The second stage turned out to be diffult for competitors who were new to rowing. Some teams already had rowing experience while some others quickly got the hang of it. But there were still a few teams who found it extremely diffult to get the steering right, including one team whose canoe went all over the lake... :-) An organization in Kitulgala had provided the boats (can someone please update me of the exact name?). Lifeguards were also on the alert, but no incident happened for them to take action. We were mostly interested in the third stage. Two Jeep Wranglers were provided by Dimo. Both were equiped with automatic transmission (yuk) and powerful 4l straight-6 petrol engines. The co-driver of each team was supposed to hold a 2 letre jar of water and each mililetre spilt reculted in reduced points. Therefore drivers had to be very mild in maneuvering. Obviously Dimo didn't want their new Wranglers to be harshly handled... :-) The course was nicely laid out, but not very difficult nor challenging when compared to usual 4x4-only events. Most notably, the presence of mud was limited to one shallow crossing. I'm sure it should have been loads of fun for the participants, but after some time, it became a bit boring to watch. So we started checking out various Jeep models parked for observation including Commanders, Charokees and Grand Charokees in addition to another Wrangler. The event was good in general and unique, and we had a good time. Photos are in my flickr gallery as usual.

4x4 at Nuwara Eliya

2006-05-30T18:15:00.000+05:30

The Four Wheel Drive Club and the Nuwara-Eliya Motor Sports club organized the anual off road challenge on the 17th of April at Nuwara Eliya. We (me and my brother Sanjaya) missed the last similar event organized by the Land Rover Owners club at Waters Edge, so we were very keenly looking forward to this one. And we also made arrangements to provide a live update of photos over the Internet. We drove to have a look at the driving range in the late evening of the 16th. Some members of the club were doing final preperations. We had a brief survey of the area with the dim streatlights from across the lake, and returned to my uncle's place where were were staying. We got to the rally area at around 8 next morning. A long row of "jeeps" were already lined up. The climate was sunny and bright, but the general trend was to rain in the evening. We also met Asantha, our friend in the 4x4 club, who hooked us with Lasantha, the DJ of the event, and we could share the electricity supply with him. Lasantha was very talented at his job, and was always willing to give us a helping hand throughout the event. I connected the laptop to the Internet through GPRS/IR using the IR drivers in the Linux kernel, irda utilities and GPRS Easy Connect. The connection was not very fast, but satisfactory. The Flickr plugin in KIPI used by Digikam was a very convenient way to upload images. Sanjaya was taking photos, and I was uploading selectively as they arrived. It was difficult to capture all the interesting things hapenning all over, so he ran from one place to the other, and back again, and so forth. My Canon PowerShot A70 was faulty, so this time we had borrowed a Fuji (don't remember the exact model) from a friend. It was also not an SLR, but had a 10x zoom which was very useful. We had two memory sticks, and could swap them without keeping one of us waiting for the other. By the way Sanjaya's photograph shown here was taken on the next day, as the ones I took during the event was not very clear. :-( The morning continued to be bright and sunny, and the event progressed merrily. The obstacles were of varying degrees of difficulty, and carried points accordingly. Sanjaya was worried that still photos didn't capture the dramatic effects in clearing them. For example, a Nissan Patrol, which was doing really well, was airborn for a second or so at an unexpected moment, and Sanjaya found himself too late to capture it while in the air. A video, on the other hand, whould have done justice in capturing everything that came to pass. By early afternoon, the sky started getting darker, and eventually rain set it. The organizers first decided to select the "top 10" from the already finished obstacles and hold a timed event, but later that plan also had to be cancelled. We stopped uploading images and started wondering around to see closely how the competitors were showing off "freely" on the track. And what a showing off it turned out to be! The attaction was a muddy hole. One after the other, competitors started attempting to clear it in different ways. Some were successful, and some weren't, and the (friendly) reaction of the audience was in compliance with the outcome of each attempt. ;-) Slippery conditions in the middle of rain added another layer of difficulty, but the sheer courage of the competitors was amazing. By late evening, we remembered that both of us didn't eat nor drink anything for the whole day and hunger and thirst started setting in. So we decided to return home at around 6 in the evening, and had a refreshing meal. After a short nap, we started to drive to Colombo at around 9. Then we had the last, and the worst, adventure of the day. Our petrol tank was far from empty, but we knew that we can't make it to Colombo with what was left. So we wanted to fuel the Jimny as soon as possible before it becomes a crisis. But the gas stations in Thalawakele, Kotagala and Hatton were all closed, and the matter was alowly becoming a crisis. By about Ginigathhena, we could travel only about 10-20 kilometers more before we start going on the reserve. So we had to make a decision. We knew that the distance from Ginigathhena to Nawalapitiya was 12km, and we would definitely make it to Gampola from there. But if we can't find petrol in Gampola, then the journey from there to Peradeniya, where Sanjaya was certain that we can find the gas station to be open, was a risky one. But we decided to take the risk. We also first tried to contact some friends in Gampola to find a bit more petrol to reduce the risk, but later decided not to wake them late in the night. And we were lucky. We could reach Peradeniya, and the gas station was open. And it was around 3 in the morning when we finally reached our lodgings in Colombo. Images Sanjaya captured during the event are available on my flickr gallery.

Look ma, it's a leopard!

2006-04-14T15:55:00.001+06:00

I always hated visiting the zoo. It is quite depressing to see caged animals, who otherwise would be freely wondering in their favourite habitats. Once Chamindra also mentioned that he doesn't visit the zoo for the same reason, so I am not alone nor sick... ;-) And there are better alternatives to see `real' animals, if watching National Geographic or Discovery channels is not what one wants.

Last month I realized that I had greatly underestimated those jungle trips that are commonly known as `safaris' when I was a part of four safaris during a trip to Yala organized by Virtusa's Global Enterprise Business Unit.

More than fifty Virtusans and their family members joined the trip. Punctuality was remarkable, and we could start early on the 24th as planned. Except for a few who joined later at Yala, everyone traveled together in a huge Fuso bus whose phenomenal pulling power came at the expense of one liter of Diesel every couple of kilometers.

We had the lunch at Tissamaharama Rest House. The weather was quite good for photography, and the camera in my Nokia 6020 phone proved to be quite handy.

Yala Villege Hotel. Managed by John Keells Holdings, Yala Villege Hotel is very nicely maintained as an eco friendly dwelling. It was not physically seperated from the National Park, and we were advised not to wonder alone as wild animals sometimes used to come closer. The top floor of the three story restaurant had a great view of the area, the great jungle on all sides and the sea far away.

The tusker. Although it feels great to talk about it later, being in the front seat of a window-less jeep when a huge tusker is coming towards you during your first safari is not a very comfortable feeling... ;-) Obviously, the driver, who was sitting by a window-less door himself, knew what he was doing. Going towards a wild animal instead of running away, something against conventional wisdom, was something I took some time to get used to.

The hunt. Crocodiles were plenty throughout the Park. Either quietly floating on the water, or motionlessly waiting with open mouth for someone to come closer. Once we saw a floating crocodile slowly moving towards some feeding deer. However, its hunt didn't work out, as there was no good place to come out of the water.

The single elephant. Saturday's morning safari ended with another interesting encounter. This time we saw this huge single elephant on the road. Our driver did the right `safari' thing, to stop and turn off the engine. The elephant slowly moved towards us, closer, closer and closer, until it was standing right in front of our Defender. However, after some serious though, it decided to move into the jungle rather than continue to walk by us.

The leopard. Seeing a leopard was considered by most to be the ultimate `thing' of a safari at Yala. This turned out to be statistically rare, as we saw leopards only during my third safari.

While slowly traveling on one by road, one of our group suddenly bursted: `it's there, it's there'. And there it was, a big and beautiful leopard, less than five meters away. Unfortunately, it stayed there only for few seconds although we turned off the engine and kept quiet.

After wondering few more kilometers watchfully, we saw a big group of jeeps moving slowly with people looking towards something. This time it was another leopard, which slowly moved to an open area and didn't want to leave any time soon. Although it was too far for my not-so-good camera to take a good picture, we did have a good view of the beautiful creature moving here and there and finally settling down comfortably on the top of a short hill.

The desert rally. Being an off-roading fan, notably the Dakar Rally, I greatly enjoyed the last part of Saturday evening safari. We got late after watching the leopard, and not leaving the Park by 6:45 risked a penalty of our Driver's safari license being temporally suspended. During the next 45 minutes, our Land Rover roared through the bumpy and dusty main road through the Yala National Park. There were so many other jeeps doing the same, and it eventually became a `desert rally'. Finally we managed to leave the Park just a little later than the timeout without a penalty.

Elephant family, friendly deer and dancing peacock. The last safari on Sunday morning was quite eventful, too. Although we didn't see a leopard or a bear, there was a big elephant family that crossed the road few meters away, a group of deer who didn't run away when we passed them by very closely, and a peacock dancing with fully expanded feathers.

The beach. The beach in the Park is massive and very scenic. This area had been severely damaged by the Indian Ocean Tsunami. The forest had recovered very fast. Except for few fallen trees here and there, it was difficult to find traces of destruction. In fact, it is well known that none of wild animals at Yala had been killed by this massive natural disaster. A sixth sense seem to exist, although it is lost to humans once they started `leaving' mother nature.

A selected set of photos I captured during the trip can be found here.

Is Sinhala Unicode Incomplete?

2006-03-20T18:58:00.001+06:00

"The SLSI 1134 is incorrect & incomplete and it should be corrected immediately.", claims Mr Donald Gaminitillake, who is trying to ignite a campaign against Sinhala Unicode standard through www.akuru.org (history of the site), and frequent newspaper articles.

We of the Sinhala GNU/Linux project think otherwise. And we are not alone. Language Technology Research Center of the University of Colombo School of Computing, research groups from the University of Moratuwa and Arthur C Clarke Center for Modern Technology, Microsoft, Microimage, Science Land also think that the standard is correct. A full list would be quite long.

GNU/Linux was the first platform to implement Sinhala Unicode rendering. We dind't find any issues about encoding or displaying those characters Mr Donald claims are impossible - yansaya, rakaaransaya, reepaya, joint letters and all that. Then Microsoft also released a "Sinhala Enabling Kit for Windows". Most vendors today support Sinhala Unicode. None of them, who actually got their hands dirty by writing actual code to implement the standard, see any missing "letters" in the standard.

Implemenation is proof for most poeple. But for some not-so-obvious "reason" Mr Donald continues to say that certain characters are missing!

Our first encounter with Mr Donald hapenned when I wrote an open letter to him which became a lengthy debate (more, more and a seperate archive) on our project mailing list. Harshula, our standards expert, tried to explain to Mr Donald how the basic Unicode code-page and cartesian products of various "sets" create the complete Sinhala character set. However Mr Donald never tried to cooperate with us in "understanding" it, and the discussion led to nowhere.

However, Mr Donald selectively quoted some parts of the discussion on his site... ;-)

Recently, Niranjan Meegammana, creator of kaputa.com, started a Google Group to communicate in Sinhala - using Unicode. This group has now grown to a very interesting community of a unique, intellectual and polite culture. Although the group members use diverse technologies to write and read Sinhala Unicode, we find the standard quite functional and interoperable. And we use yansaya, rakaaransaya and other "special characters" every day.

Most of us on this group have a great passion for language and literature, and therefore the discussions are very interesting and intellectually rich.

This Google group was meant to communicate in Sinhala Unicode to popularize it, and to act as a test bed for implementations. Mr Donald recently joined the group, not to communicate in Sinhala Unicode, but to start another debate. He continues to repeat the same old story and conveniently ignores some of our questions.

Here is a couple of Mr Donald's claims and what I think of them.

Donald G: SLS1134 doesn't contain all the Sinhala characters

Wrong. Here is why:

Most of Western languages contain simple alphabets. Even with the upper and lower case variants, and some "odd" characters with bubbles and hats, the number of character don't exceed 50-100.

However, Asian languages are different. Most characters have different "forms", either phonetically (e.g.: Sinhala, Tamil and Hindi), or by the location of the word (e.g.: Arabic). Therefore, it's impractical to allocate characters for each variant.

Think of atoms and molecules. There is a limited number of atoms, and molecule names can be formed by putting together the names of atoms. I have never heard of a "Chemists' Revolution" demanding a symbol for each molecule....;-)

Unicode is very similar to chemistry in that sense. Each language is assigned a "code page", typically containing 128 "code points". They form the basis to build more complex character variants, i.e., actual characters seen by the eye, sometimes referred to as "glyphs".

In Western languages, "characters" and "glyphs" and "code points" are the same thing: because they don't need variants. For example, english character, or glyph, "A" maps to code point 65 - one to one.

For complex languages, only basic characters are represented by code points. Variants are produced by sequences of code points. For example, character "da" (as in "dambana") is directly mapped to code point 0DAF, whereas "du" (as in "dumriya"), which is a variant of "da", is produced by the sequence of two code points 0DAF ("da") and 0DDF ("papilla"). More complex characters (glyphs) are formed by longer sequences.

Most modern operating systems have rendering engines that can display proper glyphs from these sequences of code points (e.g.: Pango, QT, ICU on GNU/Linux, Uniscribe on Windows). Therefore, each glyph not having an individual code point is not a problem.

In Unicode, some characters are directly mapped to code points, while others are produced by sequences of two or more code points.

Deciding which characters should be basic code points, and which characters should be produced by combining code points is a different question, and is obviously dependant on the language, and likely to be subjective. Input from several Sinhala scholars and experts have been taken into account to decide that repaya, rakaaransaya and yansaya should not be basic code points, but should be produced by using sequences of code points, as they are linguistically alternatives forms. In other words, they are there as sequences of code points, not as single code points. Nevertheless, they are there, so the claim is wrong.

If Mr Donald's claim is "yansaya, rakaaransaya and reepaya should be individual code points", that would be more valid. However, somebody has to eventually decide what's basic and what's not, and it has already been done. Technically, this is not an issue at all.

Donald G: Unicode can't produce a matrix of 1600+ characters needed by OCR etc

Wrong. Here is why:

I am not an expert on OCR, but if Mr Donald claims that OCR requires a matrix of 1600+ characters, that's exactly what Sinhala Unicode is. Only it doesn't list all the 1600+ characters, but defines the basic code points (not characters) and the way to generate all the other characters by using sequences of them.

Even a primary school kid can understand something like this: "ka and paapilla produces ku, and this rule applies to all the consonents." It would rediculous if the document describing the standard includes a 1600+ table listing each variant (ka + papilla = ku, kha + papilla = khu...la+paapilla=lu and so on)... ;-)

Showing the basic code points and claiming "not all the characters are here" for the first time is fine. Second time is still fine, IMHO. But 100+th time is definitely a joke... ;-)

Donald G: SLS 1134 doesn't consider Tamil

There is no need.

Character representation in SLS 1134 almost identical (if not identical) to Sinhala subset in Unicode. As the only country that has a major Sinhala speaking population, it's SLSI's responsibility to contribute to Sinhala in Unicode, and SLSI does this through SLS 1134. Developers eventually use Unicode. To my knowledge, none of the FOSS packages found in a typical GNU/Linux system refer to SLS 1134. In other words, SLS 1134 more of an intermitent standard.

India has a much bigger Tamil speaking population, and the Unicode code page for Tamil has already been worked out. Therefore, there is absolutely no need to create a seperate standard for Sri Lanka. Sinhala Unicode is not a Sri Lankan standard either.

Donald G: Sinhala Unicode doesn't have yansaya on the keyboard

Wrong. here is why:

Unicode is about representing characters. How they are typed using the keyboard is completely upto the keyboard driver. There are different keyboard drivers, some are classic Wijesekara, some modified Wijesekara, and some are transliterated (somewhat "singlish"). Some driver authors include yansaya etc on the keyboard itself whereas others provide ZWJ as an alternative to type them.

Whatever the keyboard is, yansaya, rakaaransaya and repaya can be typed, and eventually represented and displayed in the same code point sequences.

Other claims

There are so many other claims on akuru.org. For example, Mr Donald from time to time challenges that certain words can't be "written" in Sinhala Unicode (latest being the name of the President). When we send him screenshots to show that it's possible (with and without joint characters), he claims that they are fake!!!

Hidden agenda?

There is a saying that it's easy to wake up a sleeping person, but it's very difficult to wake up someone who pretends to sleep.

Mr Donald has applied for a patent for his "system". Although he doesn't seem to have implemented it, he has promissed to deliver results if given an "opportunity" (as far as I know, nobody is holding him). And as Sinhala Unicode is becoming mainstream, his "pending" patent is going to be worthless, unless... oh, well!

Update: 2006-03-21 08:00

There are "valid" articles on akuru.org. Some are about the history of characters, and some are good articles by others authors. For example, articles written by Mr Aelien Silva, one of my favourite writers and linguists who has created so many good Sinhala technical words (e.g.: "manu", "thekala"), brings out very good points about technology localization. In fact, I have often quoted Mr Aelien Silva on the Sinhala Unicode list and elsewhere (need to enable Sinhala Unicode to read it, instructions are here for GNU/Linux and here for Windows, not sure how to do it on Mac... :-( ). However, I belive that hosting such articles is just an attempt to make akuru.org more authentic, which would otherwise be totally useless.

Sinhala Unicode on GNU/Linux

2006-03-13T13:47:00.002+06:00

Update: in almost all GNU/Linux distributions released in the last two years, most if not all of the following settings are already done. You have only to install the font and an input method. Please check this page for more details.

Here are the steps to get Sinhala working on GNU/Linux. If you are running Debian or Ubuntu, there is an easier way. Most of the steps will have to be skipped on modern distributions, as Sinhala is mostly `enabled' in them.

Also, this guide assumes reasonable experience in using the GNU/Linux environment. If you think you are a newbie, please get a Guru involved... ;-)

Sinhala/Sri Lanka Locale for Glibc

This is a file `si_LK' in /usr/share/i18n/locales/. If it's not there, download it here.

If there is a /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED file in your system, make sure that there is an entry `si_LK UTF-8' in an alphabatically suitable place.

If you are using a recent version of glibc locales (e.g.: locales package on Debian Etch / Sid), si_LK is included and there is no need to download it. Hopefully, other distros will begin to ship it, too.

Aliases for Glibc Locale (Optional)

Add these lines to /etc/locale.alias so that you can refer to si_LK.UTF-8 locale as si, si_LK or sinhala. If this file is not there, skipping this step is harmless.

sinhala  si_LK.UTF-8
si       si_LK.UTF-8
si_LK    si_LK.UTF-8

Generating the Glibc Locale (Debian based systems)

Non-Debian users should skip this step.

Run `dpkg-reconfigure locales'. Select si_LK.UTF-8 locale and other UTF-8 locales (e.g.: en_US.UTF-8, en_GB.UTF-8). Make sure to select a UTF-8 locale (not necessarily si_LK) as the default locale.

Generating the Glibc Locale (non-Debian systems)

Debian users should skip this step.

Generate the si_LK.UTF-8 locale by running:

localedef -i si_LK -f UTF-8 -A /etc/locale.alias si_LK

X-window Locale

Most of the X window programs used on GNU/Linux (GNOME, GTK, QT and KDE apps) are using Glibc locale, and there is no need to add a full fledged locale to X. However, if X Window system doesn't know about si_LK, X programs will complain of it as an unknown locale. A common practice is just to alias such locales to en_US.UTF-8 to avoid this.

If you are running xorg 6.9.0 (or later) or a recent version of XFree86, this is already done, please jump to the next step.

Otherwise, locate the files locale.dir and compose.dir in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/ and add suitable lines. Notice that you need to add two lines in each file, one without a colon:

en_US.UTF-8/XLC_LOCALE       si_LK.UTF-8

and one with a colon.

en_US.UTF-8/XLC_LOCALE:      si_LK.UTF-8

Lines in compose.dir are similar, except `XLC_LOCALE' is replaced with `Compose'.

Sinhala Unicode Fonts

It's good to see more and more new Unicode Sinhala fonts are being released. Unfortunately, the FreeFont project includes sinhala characters that don't have correct rendering tables, and sometimes this font takes precedance over other correct unicode fonts, making wrong rendering of kombuwa and other specially handled glyphs. A quick workaround would be to remove freefont package (sometimes called ttf-freefont) if it's installed.

Downloading the LK-LUG Unicode font and copying it to .fonts/ directory in your home directory is sufficient for most cases. Copy it to /usr/local/share/fonts/ to make it available globally.

I have written a more detailed description about fonts in X Windows here.

Sinhala Rendering in KDE/QT

If you are using a version of QT later than 3.3.4, Sinhala should be working fine. There was one bug in old version of of QT, which is now fixed, both in QT 3 and 4 series.

Sinhala Rendering in GNOME/GTK

If your Pango version is later than 1.8.1, Sinhala should be working fine. 1.8.0 also supports Sinhala with a bug, and Harshula's fix went into 1.8.1.

Touching letters are also now supported.

Firefox

Firefox renderes Sinhala properly only if it's compiled with Pango. 1.0.x needs a patch, but Pango comes standard in 1.5.x series. If you are using Firefox in RedHat / Fedora, it comes with the Pango patch, and there is nothing extra to be done.

The easiest is to upgrade Firefox to 1.5 (hoping that it's compiled with Pango support) and set the environment variable MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO to 1.

Sinhala Input

Earlier, we used seperate input method modules for GTK and QT, but now they are obsoleted by SCIM and M17N input methods. Here are the steps to install them.

Install SCIM
Install SKIM if you use KDE
Get SCIM transliterated input method for Sinhala and install it
If you like to use Sinhala input method modules from M17N project, install SCIM-M17N bridge, and M17N input method modules.

Running skim in KDE or scim in GNOME should create an icon on system tray that can be used to select the language. After that, you can use ctrl+space to switch between normal ASCII (English) input and SCIM input.

SCIM 1.4.4 doesn't have a Sinhala catagory, so Sinhala input methods are listed under `Other'. It's fixed now and a seperate menu for Sinhala should be available in the next version.

Running Debain on Desktop

2006-03-12T12:45:00.000+06:00

Warning: I might change this article depending on feedback. This warning will be removed when I finish with such edits. After hearing some recent reports from users who tried to run Debian GNU/Linux on their desktops, I thought it will be useful to list some guidelines to avoid some common pitfalls. Debian is great to run on the desktop and with the recent udev/sysfs stuff, hardware detection works great, and apt has always been an excellent, if not the the best, package management tool... :-) Which version? Use Debian `testing' (`Etch' at the time of writing this post). Period. Debian `stable' (`Sarge') doesn't get new versions of software, but only bug and security fixes, which is a great for servers; not for desktops. Debian `unstable' (`Sid') get latest versions of software before `testing', but it breaks dependencies from time to time, which is also not desiarable for a general desktop. How many CDs? If you have a good Internet connection, getting the small `netinst' CD is good enough. Otherwise, first 2-4 CDs are all what you need. If you'll ever need more, then you won't be reading this guide... ;-) You can use jigdo to download the official weekly builds, or less preferably download the ISOs (CD/DVD) here. There were problems with some of the `unofficial' CD/DVD builds, so I recommend getting the official builds. Linux kernel 2.6 If you want all the bells and whistles of the latest Linux kernel, instead of just hitting ENTER when booting the installatoin CD, type `linux26'. Partitions For a desktop, it's sufficient to have three partitions. One swap partition (about 512 MB - 1 GB), one root (/) partition for the installation (2-10 GB, depends on the amount of software you plan to install), and one home partition (/home) for personal files (size of this partition depends on your needs, if you are going to have a lot of audio/video files, this will fill up soon). By having a seperate /home partition, it's possible to play around with the installation in the root (/) without loosing the personal files. If you are planning to have databases and other servers, they will consume space in /var, which is in the root (/) in the above settings. Consider increasing the size of the root partition, or creating a seperate /var partition if this is the case. Personally, I use a single root partition (not a seperate /home), because once you install Debian, there is absolutely no need to install again, as you can keep on upgrading... :-) This installation I am using right now has survived three laptop migrations!!! Filesystem Use a journalling filesystem. I personally prefer reiserfs, as it has good indexing capabilities, and excellent when there are lots of small files. If you have a much larger files instead, consider xfs or jfs. Ext3 is also not a bad choice. What to install? With Debian, it is best to finish the basic install as soon as possible. Therefore, don't select anything extra (x windows or gnome etc), and don't add any additional CDs. Just use the first CD and get over with the installation. Now what? Once installation is over, login as root, and add any additional CDROMs with apt-cdrom tool.

# apt-cdrom add

Repeat this for all the CDs available. Consult /etc/apt/sources.list if you want to verify. Now add X windows, and KDE and/or GNOME desktop(s). Again, if you prefer any other desktop (fvwm or windomaker), you won't be reading this guide... ;-)

# apt-get install x-window-system-core
# apt-get install kde
# apt-get install gnome-desktop-environment

You can play around with /etc/X11/xorg.conf to tweak your X window settings (or alternatively, try the `dexconf' tool). Use the `startx' command to start X windows. Once you are happy with the X window settings (resolution, depth and refresh frequency etc), install a graphical login manager (e.g.: kdm).

# apt-get install kdm
# /etc/init.d/kdm start

One last bit of advice: always login as a normal user, not as root. Open a terminal and run `su -' to become root if necessary. This will reduce possibilities of you harming the system, ensuring long life of the installation. I am hoping to write another howto on installing multimedia stuff and Java. Disclaimer: I am sorry if this makes you forget what `installing' is, because it's very unlikely that you will do another installation ever again... ;-) By the way, happy Debianning!

FOSS-ed Conference - Day 1

2006-02-13T19:10:00.000+06:00

The first day of the FOSS-ed conference went really well. The focus of the event is to bring awareness to Free and Open Source Software to the general public. In addition to a keynote from Manju Hathotuwa, there was a series of presentations on various aspects of FOSS usage. Unfortunately, I couldn't listen to Bud and Mifan on distros and desktops. Suchetha did a really good one on web development tools. In the late morning, I did a short presentation on "Dispelling FOSS Myths". The time was too short to talk about legal aspects in detail, so I covered a few "myths" lightly, including "FOSS is not user friendly", "I have to give all my code away", "FOSS should not cost" etc. In the evening, I moderated a panel on "Challenges to wider adoption of FOSS in Sri Lanka". Reshan represented the ICTA, and Dinesh Fernandopulle of DFCC, Sanjiva, Chamindra and Bud were the other panelists. Most of the questions were along the lines of support and the government's role in wider adoption of FOSS in Sri Lanka. One good thing that Reshan mentioned was that the ICTA and the government are going to mandate the use of open standards, while giving implementors the freedom to choose specific technologies. Although a little bias towards FOSS would have made things even better, I still consider this as a very progressive step for the country in gaining "independance" in terms of software.

Dialog Self Service Sucks

2006-01-23T17:51:00.001+06:00

The customer care call center of Dialog GSM has always been excellent. The staff is well trained, polite and efficient. However, it turned out that their self service, activated by dialing 687, sucks.

Recently, I wanted to change a number in my frequently dialed numbers list (the "family and friends" call list). Everything went well, but I felt very uncomfortable as the system did not give me a chance to verify the new number. I was "told" that it was changed immediately after I entered it.

I felt the need to verify that the new number is correct, so I went to the main menu again and tried to list the new set of numbers. It looked like the last digit of the new number was missing. Oops... I had done a mistake by starting the numeber with a "0777", instead of a "077".

Every other system I have come across either allowes the user to verify before changing an important piece of information (e.g.: password dialog boxes) OR allows reverting a mistake either through the system itself or some other means. Unfortunately, it wasn't the case here.

I called the customer care call center immediately, and explained that I made a mistake, and asked if anything can be done to correct it. I also mentioned that this happened few minutes ago and that I made no other calls, to show that this is not an attempt to exploit the "friends and family" feature. The executive was very polite as usual, but apparently this was a call beyond her authority. I asked her if I could speak to her lead - hoping to reach someone who is authoritative to make a decision - but while she was trying to transfer the call, the line got disconnected.

I called them again, and told the customer care executive (a different person) that I need to talk to her lead. She said that her lead may not be in a position to make the decision, but gave me the names of two people in another department. I managed to reach one of them, but he said nothing can be done, but also told me to try and contact the Billing Manager.

I made another call to try and contact the Billing Manager, but the phone was never pick up.

I gave up. Not only was I charged Rs 100 for the "change", but I couldn't "correct" it until the next billing cycle.

On a positive note, this is the ONLY bad experience I have ever had with Dialog GSM. Unfortunately, as all my attempts to give them constructive critisism failed, I was forced to blog the incident.

Update: Dialog GSM is investigating into the insident, and hopefully will improve the system in question. Very nice of them to take customer feedback seriously.

Kohomba Kankariya

2005-12-24T11:52:00.000+06:00

After a long silence in the blogosphere, I am back again... :-) I happened to be in Kandy on the 23rd to attend the annual alms giving in rememberence of my grandma. My eye met, somewhat accidently, a notice about a `Kohomba Kankariya' is to be performed at the University that very evening. It was a long time since me seeing one for the last time, so I jumped at the opportunity. We arrived at the uni in time. It was great to see some of the well known faces in the group of performers. During the introduction it was clearly mentioned that this is not a performance to cure someone, which is a Kankariya is officially meant to be, but rather a cultural exhibition, so that the timings of some events were to be `edited'. The dances were longer, and unusually better. There were many `competitive' encounters where dancers used to recite drum-verses, simple to complicated, and drummers played them flawlessly, and dancers danced to them. It is very interesting to see this works so well, considering that there is no rehersal, and some of the performers, who come from different schools and backgrounds, have not even met each other before.

University of Peradeniya

2005-10-12T16:49:00.000+06:00

During the vacation, I visited the University of Peradeniya. Unlike other visits for `official' purposes, this was a purposeless visit, just to meep people and see around. I spend the morning at the Faculty of Engineering and met a lot of old friends and lectures. Also spent a short while at the `server room' where LK-LUG server lives, and fixed a small problem with the network card driver after a recent upgrade. In the afternoon, I visited the newly built IT Center. Chinthaka Kumarasiri of LK-LUG was there, and I met Thusitha, a very old schoolmate of mine, who also happened to be Chinthaka's roommate. I spent the afternoon `sight-seeing' and on photography. Some of the `selected' photographs can be found here.

Taking a Break

2005-10-11T20:37:00.000+06:00

After the FOSS week and 1001 other things, finally I decided to use some of my leave. However, I decided to deviate from the usual practice of using leave for non-work related activities and trips, and just spend some time doing one of the most relaxing things in the world: nothing. Well, not exactly nothing, but to sit by the flowing waters and watch swimming fish, or listen to birds sing, looking for changing patterns of clouds, or a pleasent mixure of them all; no deadlines, no commitments, no responsibilities. I choose week days to travel so to avoid traffic. I went home (Kotmale) on Tuesday the 4th through Avissawella. The road was very scenic and it was a treat to drive by misty mountains and flowing rivers. I decided to go through Nawalapitiya (instead of Hatton), but the road between Ginigathhena and Nawalapitiya is being reconstructed and will have to be avoided for the next few months. The holiday was nice and calm, and I didn't make any major trips except to the University of Peradeniya on the 8th. Apart from sleeping late and just hanging around the garden, I also found a bit of time for some photography. My mother helped me with selecting scenic angles. She also happily `forced' me to go to a car wash to clean the otherwise ignored exterior of the Jimny... ;-) The number of cats had grown to three this time, with the new addition of two kittens. However my mother doesn't like petting them too much, although she is very keen to feed them and advocates their `freedom'. So me and my brother had to do a bit of `training' for them to stay in human hands and one such training sessions ended up with a bleeding finger. I returned on Monday the 10th and it was also a pleasent journey which took only a few hours.

Mini Code Fest

2005-10-02T21:57:00.000+06:00

Following the Asia OSSS Code Fest, we had a miniature version of it on Saturday, partly for everyone to get the hang of it, and partly to close out urgent pending items on Taprobane. UCSC kindly provided logistics, in addition to a lot of encouragement. There was a quite a number of known faces including Anuradha Weeraman, Bud (his blog entry on the event is here), Chamindra, Chamath, Deep, Kosala, Mahangu and Tharindu of UCSC. Many others joined from the UCSC (don't rememebr all the names, may be next time), including Gowri who maintains the network. We managed to get the infrastructure setup within a couple of hours, including an apt-proxy. Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out a neat way to go out of the network and connect to IRC or SSH, and this forced us to use a local ircd instead. Anuradha Weeraman was working on the installer, Mahangu on the Taprobane documentation project, and Bud and myself worked on closing bug reports for a quick 0.4.2 and close out this branch. Lot of interesting work was going on all over including installing, testing, remastering and so on. There was a wired set of IBM machines with some strange CDROM drives, and booting Taprobane on them was impossible. However, Tarindu managed to install Taprobane on one of them over the network by manually copying files and running grub. Dr Ruwan, director of UCSC, visited us in the afternoon. Being a hacker himself, he has been a big supporter of FOSS activities in Sri Lanka. We are planning on the next codefest on the 15th. If anyone is interested, contact me or ask on the Taprobane list.

Virtusa Motor Rally

2005-09-28T20:03:00.000+06:00

Annual Motor Rally organized by the Virtusa Club was held on Saturday the 24th. The 50+ km route was was in the Colombo city and suburbs, starting from Virtusa's Trans Asia (TA) facility and ending at Keith's place near Bolgoda lake. We named our team the `Tux Racer', and had Anuradha W, Dihan and Nipuna of the KM team. 32 teams were lined up for the Rally. All the other teams were to be driven in cars, and my Suzuki Jimny turned out to be the only SUV. This was a mixed blessing, as we had to travel through bumpy terrains where it could do better, as well as good roads with sharp corners where cars are superior. External participants were also allowed as long as the majority of a team remained to be Virtusans. The `clue list' was long, but not very difficult. Teams also had to find answers to questions such as the number of red lines in a railway gate and times of watches shown on advertisements. Some activities were difficult; for example, we had to buy something prized between 18-20 Rs and two 500 ml bottles of soft drink from a named super market, and later when we reached a checkpoint, one member had to drink the whole one liter of drinks in a given time, all by him(her)self. This drinking part was not mentioned in the instructions and came totally unexpected! The event was fun, and apparently the pedestrians also were aware that something is going on as we were asking for certain landmarks. The course went through the Fort area, Slave Island, Borella, Parliament area, Athurugiriya, Homagama and ended up in Bolgoda. I was driving fast till the end expecting to finish in style. However, the very last bit was wetter than expected with grass and gravel, and breaking resulted in a 10-15 meter skid, and the Jimny stopped just less than an inch away from a big lorry parked right in front of us. It was a big lesson in estimation for me, luckily non-destructive, but unfortunately `Anuradha's entrance' also happened to be a discussion topic of the afternoon. Keith's place was located in a very scenic location by the lake. One part of the garden sloped towards the lake. After a pleasant lunch, the winners were announced. We turned out to be the 4th overall, and our team, along with many other teams, had been severely penalized for speeding between certain checkpoints. Being an event on the public roads, we were strictly supposed to maintain speed limits and adhere to all the other traffic laws. The organizers are expected to revalidate the calculations in due time. I once read an article about the `Paris-Dakar Syndrome', the participants looking forward to the next one at the end of each Rally. It turns out to be universal, not just limited to big rallies such as Paris-Dakar, for most teams were making plans for the next one. But more than everything it was such a fun filled event.

We Need Mirrors

2005-09-23T16:23:00.000+06:00

"Mirror mirror on the Web, who is the fastest of them all?" We are badly in need of HTTP/FTP mirrors, just like the Ancient Mariner who desperately wanted water: `Water, water every where, not a drop to drink!'. Our Swiss mirror is being throttled after Taprobane appeared on Distrowatch. There are many well wishers who are kindly offering gigabytes of bandwidth left in their sites to host Taprobane. Unfortunately, considering the terabyte of downloads from the Swiss mirror yesterday, we need more heavyweight hosting for the ISOs. We are trying some potential options, and any offers would be greately appriciated.

Taprobane on Distrowatch

2005-09-22T14:37:00.000+06:00

Distrowatch has added Taprobane to it's long list of GNU/Linux distributions. The waiting list is long and there is a 90 day waiting period to make sure that only sustainable projects get added, but apparently we have made it early. Wow! It's interesting to see that someone has taken the trouble to study what's in our first public release (0.4.1), and put that all information into a release page. I wish to express our sincere thanks to the folks at distrowatch and its contributors for their efforts. Also, the Taprobane team and everyone at LK-LUG should be commended for the hard work and support in contributing, distributing and advocating our own GNU/Linux distribution.

There and Back Again

2005-09-14T18:26:00.000+06:00

After the FOSS Fair events on Sunday, me, Suchetha and Sanjaya went to meet Rasmus and Sam Ruby, returning from their trip to Habarana, Minneriya and Sigiriya. David Axmark's flight was somewhat early in the evening, and the plan was for him to directly return to the Airpot. We met Sanjeewa Wijerathne and Rasmus at the Airport Garden hotel. The discussion over the dinner was quite amusing. There were some interesting comments about Slackware from Rasmus, which Suchetha didn't like of course, such as `Slackware is dying', `I have five years ahead of you for not using Slackware' (during a discussion about each one's age), and `like slackware?' in reply to a comment about a dying nation... ;-) It was very unfair for all of us at the table to bash a singled out Slacker, but I am sure everyone, including Suchetha, enjoyed the whole affair, and there wasn't anything personal. The matter came to a climax when Sam Ruby, who joined us after the dinner, commented in a mild serious tone `What's Slackware, we don't hear about it' and added that he used to hear many good things about Slackware years ago, but that has ceased lately. We bid farewell to Sam and Rasmus, and drove straight to Suchetha's place. It was a very scenic setting by the Bolagoda lake. After weeks of hard work, we crashed and slept tight, and woke up quite refreshed. After enjoying a fabulous breakfast prepared for us by Suchetha's mother, we made a relatively early start towards Kandy. The journey was pleasant and the drive was nicer with less traffic. Sanjaya was fast asleep at the back, while Suchetha and myself had a conversation which wondered all over the place. At once point, we started singing. In fact, we managed to sing `Mage Raththaran Helena' to completion, and a variant followed. Later we started a bit of `Panamure' as a part of an elephant discussion, but neither of us was successful at coming up with any more song suggestions. We met Greg Stein and Bruce Momjian at Kandy, had lunch at Senani, which was high up at Rajapihilla Mawatha with a great view of the city. Greg and Suchetha had a lot in common to talk about, and the discussion over lunch was a lot of education for the rest of us... :-) In the evening, we went to see a cultural dancing show at `Avanhala'. It was nicely done as a pleasant mixture of all three variants of Sri Lankan dance and music. At the end was a fire walking session. After the show, Sanjaya insisted that he wanted to try out fire walking himself, as he had done it few times before. But as the fire they had setup there was much hotter than a typical session, he took our advice not to go ahead. However, we made friends with the organizors, who turned out to be somewhat neighbours during our long stay in Kandy years ago, and one of them gave us the news of a funeral of a close aquaintance of ours in Ampitiya that took place on the very same day. Then we visited Dalada Maligawa in good time for 'Tewawa', the ritual of offering sounds. Among many things and people we showed Greg and Bruce was the old gentleman who was playing `Horanewa' for decades as his `Rajakariya' (King's duty). When the LTTE bombed the Maligava (which me and Sanjaya witnessed few minutes afterwards as we were in Kandy at that time) he was known to be performing the morning ritual. He has been thrown yards away by the bomb, but it is said that he picked up the horn (Horanewa) and completed the Thewawa in the midst of everything. The King's dury is generally taken very seriously. Greg and Bruce got a chance to peek inside the inner chamber as it was the time for the evening offering. We also went to the library of ancient books at Paththirippuwa and I showed Greg the place the King used to judge his subjects. Suchetha accompanied Greg and Bruce back, while I went to the funeral house with Sanjaya. It was nice to see some old places there, despite the sadness of the occation. After dropping Sanjaya at IFS, I joined Suchetha and Greg in the midst of a merry discussion. Our topics were very diverse, but we rarely got to anything technical. Next morning, Suchetha and myself joined Bruce for breakfast and afterwards Bruce went on to do some shopping. We followed with Greg later, and in the city I got a parking ticket, and one of my tires was loosing pressure. So I drove Greg and Suchetha to join Bruce at the place where he was shopping and returned to Kandy, paid the fine, got my driving license back and pressurized the tyres. After a couple of hours drive, I joined the others at Pinnawala elephant orphanage for lunch. The elephants were out for bathing, and we had a good view of all the hapennings from the table. It was interesting to watch one elephant that was chained to a rock in the river (probably due to violence induced in elephants in mating seasons) `learned' how to remove the chain from the connection and set itself free. However, this didn't create any dangerous sitation. A farewell dinner was sponsored by OpenWorld at the `Vadiya' seafood restaurant of the Mount Lavinia Hotel. After some tedious driving towards oncoming traffic with lots of lights, we joined Sanjiva and Shahani (Mrs Sanjiva), Deepthi and two others from OpenWorld. One thing I hated was the killing and cooking of sea animals right there, which I had seen only once before at a Chinese restaurant at San Fransisco. After the dinner, we bid farewell to Bruce and Greg. We also briefly met Himira, my group mate at the University and great contributor to the LK-LUG behind the scenes. I came back to my lodgings around the midnight, completely exhausted by weeks of work followed by a nice trip, and of course looking forward to work the next day.

The FOSS Fair

2005-09-12T14:21:00.000+06:00

To complement the FOSS Week events that happened as seminars and conferences where participation was by registration or invitation, we also organized a `FOSS Fair'. The name, and also that of FOSSchool, was coined by Suchetha. There were public demos at Crescat and Majestic City shopping complexes, and an install-fest and seminars at BMICH on the 10th and 11th. The dates were selected to coinside with the Software Freedom Day. Martin, Danese and Micheal were to leave soon, and other speakers went on a trip to Habarana and Sigiriya over the weekend. There was a dinner for all the sponsors and speakers at the Havlock Lodge, to which I dropped in for a couple of minutes to say goodbye to Martin, David (who was to leave on Sunday evening after the trip) and Danese, and drove straight to Narada Center to join others on the BMICH events. The install fest happened at the `Restaurant Longue' of the BMICH, which was behind the committee rooms. There were booths from some sponsors such as RedHat, Neat, Suntel, IBM and Intel. After helping transport some of the machines to the install fest, me and my brother went directly to the Committee Room C reserved us for the seminars. As the Colombo International Book Fair was happenning at the main BMICH, we managed to get a fair crowd. After a while, Bud also joined to `load-balance' the seminars. During Saturday night, we got hold of some the banners used at the other FOSS Fair events, printed some direction signs, and started very early on Sunday. We maneged to put up banners all over the place, and direction signs for people to easily find the seminars and install fest. The turnover was much better. Dr Nandalal also did a few presentations at the seminars. After winding up the events, I started the long drive with Suchetha and Sanjaya to join the FOSSSL speakers. The details of that trip will come as a seperate post.

Arthur C Clarke

2005-09-11T18:26:00.000+06:00

I was about to enter the FOSSSL Conference on Friday to listen to Bruce's presentation, when Sanjiva stopped me asking if I can take David and Sam to see Arthur C Clarke (`Dr Clarke', as we normally call him here in Sri Lanka). I had seen him many times, but had never `met', so I jumped at this and said `yes!'. Four of us, David, Sam, my brother Sanjaya and myself, managed to pack ourselves into my little Jimny, and headed towards Dr Clarke's residence. It wasn't difficult to find the place, and apparently we were expected. The office was in the 1st floor (if one start counting from 0, or `ground floor'), and there was an interesting 'road sign' in the middle of the staircase which had an arrow pointing upwords: `Mars, 30,000,000 miles'. Prof Sam and Danese had already arrived. Dr Clarke was very cheerful in his ways, although he was affected by post-polio syndrome. He looked at the `GNU/Linux' sign on my T shirt while shaking hands, and commented `so you are one of the Linux guys' (or something to that effect). He also came up with a funny joke popular in the FOSS circles. We spent about an hour with Dr Clarke and the discussion was diverse. David took pictures of almost everything in the room. When Danese asked Dr Clarke if he believes in god, he was quick to reply `No, but I hope she believes in me'. We all got copies of a reprint of Dr Clarke's famous 1945 article on Wireless World which led to the invention of satellite communication. He asked us to bring along the copies to his table to be autographed, and while doing that, he said in a perfect street-salesman tone `ten rupees, ten rupees!'. At the age of (around) 85, he is still active and cheerful, and is looking forward to dive again.

FOSSSL Conference

2005-09-11T14:54:00.000+06:00

The FOSSSL Conference was a major event of the National FOSS Week. It was Sanjiva's idea to get two key persons for each letter of LAMP. We wanted to consider the broader meaning of each word, so L stood for the whole GNU/Linux platform, M for the database component, not just MySQL, etc. Martin Michlmayr, former DPL, and Micheal Tiemann, creator of G++ represented `L', the OS component. `A' was represented by Greg Stein, president of ASF, and Sanjiva, who is also a member of the ASF and OSI boards, and leading the Apache WS project. Database component was obviously MySQL and PostgreSQL. Bruce Momjian of PostgreSQL and David Axmark, co-founder of MySQL represented the letter `M'. As letter `P' has many sub-components, not just Perl, PHP and Python, but also upcoming Ruby on Rails. Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP, and Sam Ruby, contributor to numerous projects including Perl 6, together represented `P' it at FOSSSL 2005. Danese Cooper also was a speaker at the CxO conference and was present for the panel discussion at the end of the conference. The main conference was held on the 8th and 9th. Each day, there were four 1 hour keynotes, each followed by another 30 minute speech. I had a slot on the first day to talk about Taprobane GNU/Linux, just after Martin's Debian keynote. Bud, Pradeeper and Chamindra also spoke. There was a dinner for the speakers on Thursday at `Akasa Kade', on the top (11th) floor of the same building where `Raja Bojun' is. The view of the sea from the top was fantastic. The sea side of that floor was kind of calm and quiet, and watching the great waves, looking small but numerous from afar, to meet the shore was a soothing site under the dim moon. At the dinner, Michael Tiemann explained, in reply to my question if he did any coding lately, about his pet project to calculate the lences he need to carry around by analyzing his past photographic records, and another to visualize some of his reports at RedHat. In addition to the main conference there were 4 hour tutorials by keynote speakers to cover technical stuff in detail. Two of them were on the 7th, and the others on Saturday the 10th.

The Codefest

2005-09-08T13:18:00.000+06:00

The AsiaOSS codefest was hosted by Virtusa at its Trans Asia advanced technology center. Most participants were from Japan and Sri Lanka. We had Niibe, Kazuki Ohta, Masayuki Hatta from Japan (among others), and Bud, Anuradha Weeraman, Pradeeper and members of the Sahana team from Sri Lanka. I started working on Kudzu optimizations (which is yet to be blogged somewhere else), while Anuradha W started writing the installer for Taprobane using gtk2-perl. I did a short presentation about Taprobane. We also tried timing Taprobane bootup with Knoppix. Taprobane took nearly 2 minutes, while Knoppix took 3. But the win is not exactly 1 minute, because we didn't have pcmcia and scim starting. Me and Anuradha W finished the coding at around 5 a.m. and went home. The next day (7th), we were a bit late, and it delayed the starting of the `key signing party'. It was a nice experience. Martin Michlmayr also joined the party. The official innaguaration of the week was at Trans Asia, but didn't have time to join. Another very important outcome of the codefest is the SCIM Sinhala input module by Kazuki. He converted my GTK im module to SCIM and Niibe uploaded it to Debian. Me and Bud left the codefest in the afternoot for few hours to attend Martin's FOSSSL tutorial on `Contributing to Debian'. Rasmus Lerdorf did a parallel tutorial on PHP (obviously). In the evening, most of us joined the AsiaOSS dinner at Ceylon Continental. We met Bruce Momjian, Greg Stein, Sam Ruby, Rasmus Lerdorf and Danese Cooper outside the hotel. I also had a brief chat with Manju, CEO of ICTA, who had used Taprobane for his presentation despite it's still tagged `beta'. Overall, the codefest was very successful. We did get a lot of interruptions on organizing stuff, but neverthless managed to some good coding. We are looking forward to the next one and also to host a few local codefests. Devaka Randeniya and Tyrell Perera of Virtusa R&D did most of organizing behind the scene. Suntel provided Wifi and wired Internet connectivity, and Virtusa MIS helped with other IT logistics.

Grand Start for the FOSS Week

2005-09-06T20:04:00.000+06:00

National FOSS Week made a great start on Monday (5th) with the FOSSchool event organized by LK-LUG / UCSC. The event was at the UCSC auditorium which could host about 250 people. It was a pleasent surprise to see delegates from CICC and several hackers from Japan, including Niibe, at the opening ceremony. The morning event was for schools. The auditorium was full, and we had to put extra chairs to host everyone. Each participant got an Ubuntu pack and a Taprobane CD. Prof Sam and Dr Ruwan of UCSC introduced the week and the event to the participants. LUG presentations included various aspects of FOSS including desktop, development and education. Evening session was for the grad/undergrad students studying CS related courses. Again, it was a packed house. In addition to our LUGgers, Martin Michlmayr, former DPL, and Dr Shahani Weerawarana (Mifan used the name `Dr Mrs Sanjiva Weerawarana' instead, while thanking everybody) also spoke. The event was considered a huge success and a great start for the FOSS week activities. After the event, Bud and myself joined Martin for dinner at Chamindra's place. Except for everyone's attempts to get Ranusha, Chamindra's little `fellow', call me `uncle Anuradha' instead of `Anuradha aiya', we had a nice time.

Perception vs Reality

2005-08-29T11:11:00.000+06:00

Our FOSS Week has finally been slashdotted. With all due respect to Slashdot editors, was a bit disapointed by the original title "Sri Lanka Declares a FOSS Week" being changed to "Sri Lanka Declares an Open Source Weak"! The spelling mistake resulted in replies such as "Microsoft declares Open Source weak". However, this has been corrected now - after much damage has been done. Most comments implied a perception that Sri Lanka is far behind in terms of technology. I was disappointed to see comments questioning how a "small developing nation declaring an open-source week" becomes newsworthy on Slashdot! Cost is a very good reasons for a developing country to use Free and Open Source Software. But a small country like Sri Lanka, there are other more important motivations: flexibility and independence. It's extremely difficult to convince big software companies to customize their products (e.g.: localization) for Sri Lanka because our market is too small for them. By the way, Sri Lanka is one of the very few developing countries that can boast 90%+ literacy rate (check this and this) which is very high when compared to other developing countries. For the last decade or so, we have steadily been improving the FOSS penetration in the country. With the formation of LSF, we are now becoming a big contributor, too. Apache WS work, and the Sahana Project which started to help manage the Tsunami releif errorts and now becoming a generic disaster management system, are some recent developments in Sri Lanka in terms of contribution. Not to mention independent contributions such as Prozilla or Dr Nandalal's contribution towards OIO. Anyway, those perceptions are not easy nor quick to change. I don't care either; there are more useful activities to spend energy on.

Loadavg Exceeds Unity

2005-08-22T19:29:00.000+06:00

Time has become a sparse resource with the upcoming FOSS Week and Taprobane. Managed to release Taprobane 0.3 with a script to simplify remastering.

Dr Nandalal agreed to create a Medical companion for Taprobane, and Tyrell, Kamal and Ojitha will [naturally] create a Java companion. Owners for Games and LAMP companions are yet to be defined.

Came across SquashFS which seems to be superiour to zisofs and cloop. Spent yesterday's late night converting Taprobane to SquashFS and results are impressive. Apart from a minor tweek to linuxrc (not the shell scipt, the new parallel one I wrote in C) transition was smooth and the results are remarkable. Compression was higher and booting was faster. Anyway, more testes need to be conducted before making a decision to move.

Asia OSS codefest is going to be bigger than expected. Hopefully, we should be able to sort our some issues with localizations and live CDs.

Torrents of Bits

2005-08-15T20:02:00.000+06:00

Finally managed to release 0.2 of Taprobane. Bittorrent turned out to be a far better mechanism than I even imagined. Used Linux Tracker to track the torrent, but The Linux Mirror Project also became a seeder with considerable bandwidth. Got the installer somewhat working. Gtk2 Perl became handy again. Bud pointed out that the Artistic License makes more sense for the distro, and the licensing question at the beginning of the installation doesn't make sense. As FSF had ruled out the original Artistic License as non GPL compatible for its vagueness, we decided to use Artistic License version 2.0 to be used in Perl 6.

Getting the hang of this

2005-08-10T20:49:00.000+06:00

Looks like I am getting the hang of this. It feels like I am writing a diary again, with the primary difference that anyone out there can read it, and comment that it's crap. It was a bit shocking in the morning when Suchetha broke the news that the Cinema Lounge of BMICH we "booked" for the SFD event was given to someone else. It turned out that we had to fill the official form, which I through was only a formality. Anyway, Dr Ruwan and Prof Sam managed to get a committee room and the restaurant for the events. Managed to do some late evening Plonning on the new LK-LUG site (which is penguin.linux.lk for the moment). After getting the raw mbox archives of the mailing lists and running mhonarc, managed to convert some of our recent work into news items. Taprobane 0.2 is almost ready, a cloop file is being made while this is being typed. Only change today was to install alsa-utils. Now Debian depends on hotplug/discover to do the needful and the startup script in alsa-base is almost bogus. However, alsa-utils still has the old initscript. Until we figure out a way to restore mixer level and all that, this initscript is going to be there. Chamindra was proposing some analogies between Alice in Wonderland and real world, and thinks he is the Gryphon. I strongly disagreed with him, for it's very clear that he is the White Rabbit. However, I he quite agrees about me being the Chechire Cat and Harsha Zen as the Mad Hatter... ;-)

So it begins!

2005-08-10T14:08:00.000+06:00

After a lot of waiting, finally I decided to follow the trend for a change; blogging. And so here I am, typing keys into a WYSIWYG editor, for a change again. Let's wait and see how this whole thing turns out.