The stages of a programming language

Every programming student is taught the four or five generations of programming languages. Well, here's a new system of categorization that some kid with too much time on his hands came up with. :D (Note that this was just done for kicks, and doesn't claim to be factually correct or anything)

Stage 1:

Assembly language

Stage 2:

C

Stage 3:

C++, Objective C, Vala

Stage 4:

Java

Stage 5:

Python? IDK really.

Why Fill T is the best rapper in Sri Lanka

Here's what his YouTube description says:

Chamath Perera better known by his stage name Fill T, is a Sri Lankan entertainer, rapper, record producer and actor. Fill T is best known as an MC in the West Coast hip hop scene, and for being one of Sri Lanka's most notable protégés. Fill T was a CMB Crip gang member while in Colombo.

To which a commenter replies:

CRIP gang member????? Aney Huththo! Panadure godey Kariya....

But YouTube comment battles aside, Fill T has produced some of the most memorable lyrics by a Sri Lankan rapper ever. This is a clip of him rapping drunk:

I've taken the clip and turned it into a few easy-to-follow strips:

The Twitter Cycle

I've been meaning to do a comic on this blog for a long time, and comic turned out to be a loooong one too, so long that it had to be broken in two. :)

Disclaimer: The events depicted in this comic are entirely fictitious. Any similarity to any person living or dead is merely coincidental.

Politics and apathy

The coming general elections might be the most apathetic we've had in quite a while. The general public doesn't seem to give 1/100th the shit the candidates are giving when it comes to voting. People are still facing hardships: the cost of living is high, wages are low, and the Maharagama cancer hospital has run out of drugs and has to reuse catheters because the government isn't properly supplying them. Yet candidates are building massive campaign halls (reminiscent of what MR had built at Temple Trees during the Presidential Elections) all around, and spending massive amounts of money on campaigning. In the Colombo district Pachaayudaya, R. Duminda, Boggles and Wayima (a.k.a. Ayomaya Shakthiya) seem to be ahead on the spending. Where the money comes from is anybody's guess, but why the public isn't more concerned about this extravagant spending is even more worrying.

The fight for preferential votes do provide us with the laughs though. Pachaya had a huge cutout in front of the Pannipitiya flyover, and some Duminda supporters had decided to plaster posters of their candidate over Pachaya's mouth! And I wouldn't trust anyone who tells me that they didn't laugh when they saw Niroshan Padukka's poster, where he's posing like a flower girl! ;) At least the level of violence in Colombo seems to be close to nil, whereas in areas like Rathnapura (where Premalal Jayasekara, a.k.a. Choca malli, is running a campaign of terror) even candidates from the ruling party have found it difficult to campaign, so you can imagine what the situation is for the opposition.

The outcome of the election is not apparent at the moment, but I'm willing to bet that the UPFA will win. My best case scenario is that the chauvinistic elements in the government (the NFF and the JHU) as well as those in the opposition (the JVP) are eliminated in the election, and the centrists change the constitution to something with a more decentralised power structure and a weaker President and stronger parliament. The government doesn't need a 2/3rds majority to achieve this, since everyone will support a good constitution. Teamwork and bi-partisanship will produce better results and achieve a solution that's acceptable to all segments of society, instead of just the UPFA voter base...

meh

random post #61

I haven't written one of these since this, and that was ages ago.

So, you know, I have too much time on my hands! ;) So I conducted a quick survey this morning, going to 25 blogs at the top of my blogroll (my blogroll is ordered according to time of latest posting) and looking through their archives for their first post. I put the month they started out and the year separately. This is not a scientific poll or anything, the sample size is too small. But it was fun looking at the results nonetheless!

Here's the date of first posting, categorized by year:

(Ignore the parchment-like colours. I did some shtooopid image manipulation on them to make them look old! lol)

I also categorized them according to month:

So, in conclusion, more people tend to start blogging at the start of the year than at the middle of the year. The explanation that I've come up with is that the start of the year brings many changes: New schools, new places of work, etc. and this leads to bloggage! :O Anyway, should do a proper survey someday with all the blogs on Kottu or something... :)

***

I also wanted to get rid of these two photos that I've had but didn't get a post to tack them onto. They're vertical panoramas (stitched together from multiple images).

***

I shall finish off with this. I had to, absolutely HAD to, include this in the post...

A Softer World: 539

I hope you'll excuse the randomness! ;)

The one after that

I'm terrible at this form of writing, but I hope everyone will forgive me for writing this little n00bass tale! :)

"Do you remember the first time we met?"

The girls giggle.

"You were soooo bigheaded, man!" Penny says, in her jovial tone.

"Was not... we were really normal kids" Will replies.

"Haha, were we?" James says, barely concealing his laughter... "The others might have had a different idea about how we looked"

"I still remember that shy smile you put the first time you talked to us" Lily says, looking at James.

The girls giggle again.

***

It was their first major test after joining. The kids were streaming out of the classroom, but Kim just lay there, face hidden behind cupped hands. It was obvious to Chris and Will that she was crying.

"Go and tell Sean", Will told James.

An hour later, her tears were falling down harder than ever.

"I can't do this anymore guys. He doesn't want me to continue... He says we have enough money to last 5 generations now, he doesn't want me to finish this..."

***

It was a warm and sweaty March afternoon, much like the early March drought of 2010.

"You guys sure you want to do this?" Sean asked.

"With pleasure mate" replied Will.

"There, her car's coming in. She's getting down!" James points at the black Mercedes Benz.

The boys cross the Galle Road, and what happened in the minute that followed will forever be remembered by everyone in their batch. In one swift move, Sean punched the Groom in the face, took her hand, and in a flurry of Wedding gown, they were on the run. Running down Galle Road in the midday sun, hailing down a 100 bus, and making a dash for it. Very reminiscent of 'The Graduate', yes. But Kim hated that movie, and her smile faded far quicker than Elaine's did.

***

It was indeed a miracle that they were graduating together on that day, but their time was up. They walked out of the little room, Kim and Sean with their hands intertwined, and Will looking at Penny in the weirdest way possible. But that, my friends, is a story for another day! ;)

Hello 'sphere, how have you been?

It's a beautiful sunny Thursday morning, and I don't have any lectures today! :D YAY!

I wanted to write a post about everything that went on, but was just utterly exhausted at the end of the past few days to get around to it. My posting frequency has gone down a bit in the last few months or so, and I need to get it back up to something acceptable like 10 posts a month, at least...

So anyway, last Sunday I got onto a 255 (always a bad idea) to go to Mount, and the busdriverkakkiman took 1 hour and a lazy 15 more minutes to get there. Why go to Mount on a Sunday, you might ask. Well, it was to go see TRALE, which would be ending on Sunday, or so I thought. A quick walk from the bus stand took me to the Small Club grounds, but when I got there I found out to my utter horror that it was empty, there was a Cessna which was partially covered up and a Helicopter on a truck waiting to be taken away. The poster that I had put up had it's dates wrong, you see, and the supposed 3 day event had been reduced to a 2 day one. It was one of those epic *facepalm* moments, as fell down on my knees and started wailing like a baby. Or not.

Anyway, the day's adventures were far from over. It was Paparé Boy's birthday and the wonderful bunch of bloggers had decided to throw him a surprise party, since he was all emo and going to slit his wrists and kill himself one of these days! hahahaha ;). So anyway, I went up to ODEL and happened to see Jerry walking out, I shouted "JERRY", "GERALDINE" and "BOB THE BUILDER" but alas, my uppercase shouts went unheard. So I did what every stalker at his first stalker blogger meet-up does and followed the poor boy, ambushed him right in the middle of the road and stabbed him in the back with a bottle of Apple Soda. And then waved, said hi and smiled my sweetest little smile. What a way to introduce yourself, right?! :D Anyway, the meetup was fun, everybody was really fun to listen to. And that's what I did. I mean, it was too much fun to just watch them interact and listen to stories of how Paparé Boy did unmentionable things to fellow male bloggers and how oceangirl- errrm, nevermind! :D Anyway, in the middle of all of this I got a mad urge to shout "Wordpress SUCKS!", but it was just me and Paparé Boy against like 9 highly muscular Wordpress users so I kept my mouth shut! ;) The night ended with Makuluwo and Foxy discussing how best to kill babies with your bare hands or something sick like that, and then beating the crap out of each other Foxy. All in all, it was awesome to finally meet the people behind some of the best blogs in Sri Lanka and I can't wait to do it again! :)

Annnnnnyyyyywaaaaai, I'm really bored now. It's 11:21 and if we had uni today Y, Me-shak and I would be sitting at a table in the canteen, doing our customary ritual of cut-the-lecture-and-sip-tea. Well, they sip the tea and I sip a Milo. I never really got the concept of tea. I mean, boiled leaves and sugar? :/ And I come from a family involved in this whole tea racket also, such a traitor! lol ;D

Don't stone me plz!

The following post is just me practising writing, and does not reflect my personal views. Srsly! ;)

Man loves burning stuff. Ever since the earliest days of civilisation, they have held the ability to burn stuff in high esteem. Greek mythology speaks of how the humans stole from the gods this rare treasure called fire. Fire burns. Food on election night, the opponent's offices the day after. But I digress.

Humans have been burning stuff from the beginning of time. Chopping down trees. Burning down cities. Driving entire species into extinction. Some may call this 'destruction'. But *some* may call this 'cultivation', or 'progress'. Humans have evolved, from burning wood on an open fire, to burning coal in a stove, to burning petroleum inside sealed engines. They will progress, in due course, to burning Hydrogen into Helium, in a process known as fusion, but till that process is perfected, we're stuck with oil.

Then, there's our Facebook generation. Discontent with not being able to do anything worthwhile with their lives, they play Farmville instead. The whole anthropogenic climate change debate is like big old Lake Baikal in the middle of their lifeless desert. Hence the activism, and the need to 'make a change'. The generation before them went to the Moon. Now it's their chance to shine. How could anyone claim that climate change isn't happening, or that it isn't caused by human activity?! How unscientific, and even more importantly, how uncool! To dash the dream of an entire generation. A dream to stop humans from progressing and moving on to something more sustainable. Nooooo, don't do it man!

But take my advice son, you can't turn back 500,000 years of 'damage' in one or two decades. And when an issue becomes too big for you to solve, do what we islanders do when things don't go our way. Sit back, relax, and think about how everything is not as bad as it could be as you doze off in the new, improved, and definitely warmer Planet Earth! ;)

And Mr. Hippie, next time you're sitting there smoking some good 'Mother Nature', think about the Carbon emissions man!

Ciphertext

Err, this exam I sat for about a week ago had a section based on cryptography... it was easy to crack, basically the order of the alphabet had been advanced by 2 or 3 letters (?) so that A became C and B became D and C became E and so on... so ACE would be spelt CEG... I dunno about the other guys, but me being the geek that I am had fun with that part! Too bad I could only complete 40-odd out of the total of 50 within the one hour time limit! ;) lol

Anyway, I've been using ciphers for a long time... this one is particularly easy to crack for anyone with basic knowledge of the Greek alphabet... except moi! I can't decipher most of the stuff I write down in this, and recently burned a diary that was entirely written in this code because I was convinced that anyone but the intended reader (me) could read it... :/ funny noh?

A thousand apologies for murdering the Queens of England, Greece, and any others due to this! lol ;)

p.s. check out today's xkcd! I think it's brilliant! :D

Last Night...

was horrid! The beautiful 'oooh I feel like running around naked in this' (ok a bit of an exaggeration so...) rains of August and September have passed, replaced by the 'I wanna fry your brain' electrical storms of October... I dunno if it was the divine chocolate biscuit pudding that I had had earlier in the night or whether the good break we had enjoyed from lightning (and exploding buses for that matter! hehe) had made me soft, but I felt as if my head was going to explode because of the thunder... I.Hate.Lightning!!! -_-

But the highlight of the whole night was seeing a Lifehacker article which said that Firefox 3.6 Beta would startup in under 3 seconds... but this was proven to be a dream when I woke up this morning and Firefox was PMSing on me again, and took like 5 minutes to start up! -_- Oh Mozilla! Do you not want me to use your amazing browser? :/

The New Post button...

...is just plain annoying, waiting there on the Dashboard, all big and blue, assuming that you've got something to write! :/

:D

I complained sometime back that I hadn't written anything properly for quite some time... it's just that I've never been a natural writer, writing always seems to stress me out and take waaaay too much effort (unless I have exams, coz then posts seem to flow into my mind fully formed and ready to be published! lol)

But I'm tired of seeing the same old posts on the top of the blog so here I am, clicking on that 'New Post' button! Very little blogworthy stuff have been happening on this end of the line, unless you want to read a boring post on washing the car or spraying hormones onto bananas... (ok that sounds a biiit wrong! lol)

I'm talking about boring stuff that I can blog about, but this post is turning out to be even more boring! :S I'll stop now, and leave you with my excuse for not blogging:

;)

random post #59

random post #57 can be found here
random post #58 can be found here

I didn't have much to write about recently, well I did, but I chose not to on the blog, since the whole thing is kinda a fluid situation. Once it resolves itself (peacefully I hope! lol) I'd be really happy about it and then forget about it really fast as well! :D

Ok, I know that paragraph didn't make any sense but I'll keep it anyways for future reference... ;)

since this is a random post, it doesn't really have any topic, but looking at the last random post, I dunno, I feel like it's gotta have one, so here goes:

Blogger is finally growing up!

My favorite blogging service turned 10 just 3 days ago, and it's rolling out some impressive stuff to celebrate its birthday. Already we've seen hubbub (an impressive new feature that will turn your RSS feeds into real time streams! or in non-geek language: deliver your blogposts to your blog's readers lightning fast!), one click sharing of your favorite posts on Google Reader via blogger or twitter, and a new label cloud feature, but non of them have been as impressive as I anticipated. Plus, my flash based moving tag cloud (does anyone over at Wordpress.com have this? no? hoo hoo! :D lol) makes the label cloud redundant...

So here are my bets on what they're going to roll out in the next few weeks (or rather what I want to see them roll out!) -

• static pages (w00t! w00t!)
• better (ok ok Wordpress-style then) comment moderation (not that I'm going to use it! I don't delete comments... EVER! - unless they're spam)
• nested comments
• aand greater Google Analytics incorporation (something like a traffic info gadget...)

A complete list of suggested improvements can be seen here.

This was a useless post, but I'm going to publish it anyway! ;)

Footnote: just found out that the people who first created Blogger at Pyra Labs, went on to create Twitter... interesting! :)

I dunno what to call this...

OK, I just woke up early morning and this was twirling in my head and I just had to put it out there:

dude let's overthrow the government!

OK, now I know that your either laughing, closing this tab (DOOOOON'T!!!) or calling the Army HQ to tell them about a possible Coup attempt or something... :S ok I really don't wanna be dragged away in a white van so I'd keep this short and in-(or un-?)subversive as possible...

So I assume everybody's watched at least one movie about America's "War of Independence" right? It was one of those grassroots movements where people of all castes and creeds and professions (from the fancypants New York lawyer to the farmer from Virginia) got together, took their muskets along and overthrew the colonial government. After they did that, they wrote the most perfect constitution in recorded history... how perfect you ask? it has been amended only 27 times in the USA's 233 year existence. (in comparison ours, which is only 32 years old, has been amended 17 times already!)

Now let me get to the point. The people who wrote that document were the same that had fought in the war. And they were basically everyday people, who understood the problems that everyday people go through. That's why the constitution was begun with a "We the people" not "We the Barons" or "We the Noblemen" or stuff like that... And that's why the constitution itself provides Americans with freedom from government and basic rights that nobody can take away from them. It emphasizes "Individual Freedom" over "Government Intervention" and that instills that "I don't want the government messing with me!" attitude that ordinary Americans have, and makes America the "Land of the free", the world's most Libertarian country...

Now compare the situation here. We were basically a feudal society till 1505 (1815 in the Kandyan Provinces) and when the colonial powers took over they continued with that excising framework of control... basically why fix something that's been working for like 2000 years right? And when they gave us Independence in 1948, they gave it to a bunch of Elitist Noblemen. Who's the biggest savior of the peasants? Bandaranaike? oh didn't you know, he was like the richest and most powerful of them all! and the man who wrote (or should I say enacted?) our present constitution (which gives downright dictatorial powers to the Executive President I should add) was a part of that government that got us independence in 1948... man! like how cool is that??!

Now that you've got the background, here's what we're missing out on: citizens who give a damn about their rights, and who'd take it up with the government if they thought that their freedoms and way of life were at threat. And what have we got in this country? peasants who just go "Keep your head down son and the government will fix everything someday"! I hate it! I want a proactive citizenry who'd have tea parties and demonstrations, who'd ask tough questions from their Senators at their local town halls! I want a freaking government that UNDERSTANDS that it's only in power as long as the people consent to it and is hence kept in check. Is this all too much to ask for?

Yeah, you may go ahead and dial the Army now... :P

Design Changes for Summer 2009

Yes, I have an exam tomorrow...

Yes, I missed the match last night! :( Daaaaayummm!!!

Yes, I've been spending way too much time combining BTemplates' 2 Plus and Floral Concept themes into the one you see right now...

Yes, I love the fact that red, white and blue have become the main colours in the blog... Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité! :)

Yes, I've managed to make myself a twitter blogroll of sorts! I dreamt that up in my sleep last night... :S If you're not on it, then prolly means your account is protected... sorry!

Yes, I'M A BAD BAD BOY! Going off to study now... :(

Murals

He was your average 5-year-old boy, turning the walls of his home into one giant canvas, much to his mother's displeasure. He drew what other 5-year-old boys drew: Techy stuff mostly... Dams and Power stations, Pylons and cables. One of his mother's cousins once remarked that the stairway wall had the whole Laxapana Complex sketched on it.

Among these carefree drawings, one curious sketch stood out. In the back wall near the fuse-box, hidden from view almost. A long straight road led to a tall building... a burning building. A side-road led to another building, which wasn't in flames. Seeing his parents puzzled looks, the boy explains, pointing at the building on the side-road: "That's where mama works!" with a look of innocent relief on his little face.

***

He remembers that sound... deafening, metallic, very very scary. Louder than the loudest thunder. The teacher was getting a bit nervous... "Madam, sounded like a train collision..." she tells the other teacher. They both stare out the window, at the railway tracks and the greenish Indian ocean. All they see is black smoke, menacing black smoke, rising from the distant Fort.

And just like that, school was over! Although school looked more like it was having the concert, because everyone's parents were there!! His parents put him into the back seat of their car, and till they got to Park road, his mother was constantly on the cellphone. "I can't get to him, the lines are all jammed..." she said to his father, lying the phone down. What a wierd combination of words? "Jam in the lines"? He chuckeled at the insanity, yet he chuckeled silently, to himself, a mental chuckle. There was something very very worrying about his mother's tone...

The first thing they do when they get home is switch on the TV. A dazed looking news presenter keeps mentioning a lorry and a bank. A fire leaps out the windows of a tall building. A couple of firefighters on a lift pull a man out a window. There's utter chaos, bodies, glass shards everywhere, people lying on the ground, bleeding like water fountains. The boy can't get the images out of his head. He wakes up suddenly that night, the burnt corpses won't go out of his head. He walks up to his parents bed, and cuddles up between his mother and father. No creepy corpse can get to him in his mother's warm arms.......

.hopefully.

10.31 seconds...

...that is the amount of time it takes to load my blog, bypassing the cache (without doing that the time comes down to 2.76 seconds) according to numion.com/Stopwatch

Check it out, pretty cool site. And remember to bypass the cache. :)

Funneh Pic!

I'm not sure whether I'm violating a copyright or something by posting this up, but it sure grabbed my attention and is kinda funnier than most of the "tag your friends" pics that people upload on FB these days...

Mada Greetings

One of the fastest growing applications on the Sri Lanka network [ok... citation needed here] is the "Mada Greetings" and "Sinhala Flirt" apps. Although the code is nothing new (you can even make your own gift application using the program used to generate these apps) the content is fresh and 100% Pure Sri Lanka!

I especially like the fact that they've included some of the most memorable characters from Sinhala dubbed cartoons of the past, most notably from Doctor Hondahitha! :)

Here are a few screenshots:

adding applications should be done at your own risk. most of the apps on FB are data mining apps used to buildup a hude database with your personal data! consider yourself warned! :P

-_-

I was going to write a post about how scared I was of lightning, and even made some equations for the post, but *yawn* got a little bored with what was basically a physics lecture disguised as a story. hmmm... :)

parts of what I was working on:

R = ρl/A

I = V/R

nice no? hehe :P

Edit: Found this out just now... Sri Lanka's pretty much a lightning hotspot.

I screwed up 69% of my teenage life!

This was floating around in Facebook, but I decided to fill it up and post it here coz Facebook is truly screwed up now that it's become a twitter clone or something. As someone aptly put it "Facebook's got a personality disorder!" ;D

[x] Gotten detention.
[ ] Gotten your phone taken away in class.
[ ] Gotten suspended.
[ ] Gotten caught chewing gum.
[ ] Gotten caught cheating on a test

Total: 1

[x] Arrived late to class more than 5 times.
[x] Didn’t do homework over 5 times
[x] Turned at least 3 projects in late
[x] Missed school cause you felt like it.
[x] Laughed so loud you got kicked out of class.

Total : 6

[x] Got your mom / dad etc. to get you out of school.
[ ] Texted people during class.
[x] Passed notes.
[x] Threw stuff across the room.
[x] Laughed at the teacher.

Total : 10

[ ] Pulled down the Fire Alarm.
[x] Went on Myspace , Facebook , Xanga , etc. on the computer at school.
[x] Took Pictures during school hours.
[x] Called someone during School hours.
[ ] Listened to an iPod , CD , etc... During class.

Total : 13

[x] Threw something at the teacher
[x] Went outside the classroom without permission.
[ ] Broke the dress code.
[ ] Failed a class.
[x] Ate food during class.

Total : 16

[x] Gotten a call from school.
[ ] Couldn’t go on a field trip cause you behaved badly.
[x] Didn’t take your stuff to school.
[ ] Gotten a detention and didn't go.
[x] Stuck up your middle finger at a teacher when they were not looking.
[x] Cursed during class loud enough so the teacher could hear

Total : 20

[x] Faked your parents signature
[x] Slept in class
[ ] Cursed at a teacher to their face
[x] Copied homework

Total : 23


MULTIPLY BY THREE : 23 x 3 = 69%

I don't think any of those were screw-ups! I was just a boy being a boy!! :D and yea, I am regretting getting detention and not NOT going! ;D hehe