I'm tired of seeing that monstrosity on the top of my blog

Is it safe to assume that no one reads these anymore? That Kottu has finally moved on to the netherworld. That the old blogger crowd, now probably married and old enough to have multiple grandkids, no longer cares?

Good.

I love being busy, because it keeps the mind occupied, but I recently had quite a long exam season (abridged with Avurudu) and this left some time for thinkingz. Uh oh.

Profundity pundits on social media these days love to throw out phases like "if you love her, let her go know", but maybe sometimes the best course of action is to run away like the wind and let the ambiguity of "what if" keep you comfortable in those long, lonely nights?

Sappy shit, I know. This is why people lost their appetite and the blogosphere died in the first place. Oh well.

Silence is snuggly

It really is, though.

You know how the best friends are the people with whom you can share long silences and it would be the most comfortable thing in the world?

Or how, in a conversation, you find yourself learning a lot of stuff and letting it all soak in, and you don't want to say anything because you'll add nothing of value to the conversation and "WHOAAA, DUDE" sounds wrong in the modern world of always-assume-sarcasm?

Or that joke about how light travels faster than sound, and some people appear bright before they open their mouths?

Silence is cool, yo. I wish more people were comfortable with it.

Histeria Colectiva

It's just another day in paradise when everyone gets worked up over *something* again. I mean, really. They say life on this island is chilled out but we need something to be collectively indignant at every now and then right? So I've decided to come up with a helpful list of things people are butthurt about and how to be less butthurt about these things. Yay!

The Sinhala Buddhists

Oh my. You guys are my favourites, maybe because I'm supposed to be one of you? You're 70% of the population, have held power since the "great revolution of 1956", but still have to put up with bad roads, bad education, contaminated medicine, corrupt politicians, and your daughters getting groped on the bus.

Butthurt Claim #1: Nobody Respects Meeeee!

This has been circulating over email recently too. If you ever find out a blog carrying said email, please link in the comments. Email is titled "Sinhalayage Hinamanaya" and is supposed to written by the JHU's Udaya Gammanpila. It is spot on in many regards.

The Sinhalese don't respect their culture, their language or their heritage. No, getting worked up when someone invades your cave temples isn't real respect. Girls think it's cool to speak in broken, accented Sinhala. Say a few words of English and you're the man. Are we really this bankrupt?

See, we used to have a lively, beautiful cultural scene going on. Then the JVP and the Government death mobs colluded to kill and destroy everyone and everything. Sinhala cinema is dead. Our greatest authors and songwriters are dead. Will there ever be another Premakeerthi De Alwis? Highly doubt it. Why?

Butthurt Claim #2: Our Education System Sucks!

Who runs your education system again? Oh right, the most incompetent government ever! Well done.

See, when Ceylon was still a colony, the Brits introduced missionary education to Sri Lanka. To get somewhere in life, and enter for example the prestigious civil service, one had to pass through one of these centres of Christian learning. This left the Sinhalese Buddhists out of good schools and good jobs. A lot of kids entering these institutions were pretty much forced to embrace Christianity.

And then a Buddhist revival of sorts happened. Henry Steel Olcott (the less I speak of his influences on Buddhism, the better) founded a number of Buddhist centres of education: Ananda, Mahinda, Dharmaraja etc. Piriven (institutes for monastic education for monks) such as Vidyodya and Vidyalankara flourished.

Then independence happened, the Sinhalese Buddhists had their people in government, and decided that the government was going to look after these institutions. And we know how that goes, right? Today Vidyodya and Vidyalankara are normal civilian universities and monks often follow normal degree programmes. This has led to a deterioration of the monastic standards of this country. The prestigious Buddhist schools are often battlegrounds between old boys seeking to preserve their status and traditions, and government appointed Principles and other administrative officers trying to enforce their will. Who stands to lose from this other than the Sinhalese Buddhist?

Butthurt Claim #3: We're Losing Our Majority

When half your kids are in Melbourne and don't intend on returning: of course you are. Fix your damn country!

Butthurt Claim #4:  They're RAPING MY DAUGHTER!

From Sinfest

There was a saying in old times that a girl dressed in ornaments and carrying a large gemstone in her hands could walk from one corner of the island to the other in the middle of the night and just arrive at the destination safely.

I mentioned Olcott up there. Look, the importation of puritan Victorian values has fucked up our moral compass. It didn't matter how long a girl's dress was, or even if she was topless.

"Still Not Asking For It"

The birth of a girl was celebrated. Unmarried girls had a share of their parents' inheritance equal to what a boy would get. Women were not property. Women *held* property. What happened?

Butthurt Claim #5: I'm Offended 

From Akon, to Buddha Bar, to tattoos. You guys are indignant at the slightest of things. It's like you're trying to emulate somebod... oh wait.

Look, nobody is obligated to tiptoe around your religious beliefs so as not to offend you. That's NOT how the world works. To quote Rowan Atkinson (widely known here for playing Mr. Bean):

To criticize a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous, but to criticize their religion, that is a right. That is a freedom. The freedom to criticize ideas, any ideas - even if they are sincerely held beliefs - is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. A law which attempts to say you can criticize and ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed.

If the Buddha flipped out every time someone tried to offend him, he would never have gotten around to preaching the Dhamma. Similarly, if you flip out every time someone "offends" your beliefs, you will never have time to practice the Dhamma. If you want to reply, reply with respect and loving kindness. Or just plain ignore it if they're just taunting you. Your actions in self-restraint and kindness speak more for the Dhamma than your words of defence ever will.

Think about it. What's more insulting to Buddhism? A tattoo of the Buddha or this:

Image from here

---

So, I think I'm done here. I could go on and on and on, but Ain't Nobody Got Time For That. Originally planned to cover the Muslims as well, but yeah. No. So for balance I'll finish with a joke:

A Muslim DIDN'T randomly get offended over something. 

There. Pitchforks are in the first room on the left. You can light up your torches in the kitchen. :P

Things left unsaid

I haven't even touched this thing in ages, have I? I miss the days when I could write something stupid and get a million comments. I miss being anonymous, being able to speak your mind, you know? There are so many things I want to shout out about, so many things that the blogosphere circa 2009 would've been able to help me with. Everything was so much better back then, and I'm not just saying that for nostalgia's sake. We were family, even though scattered around the world and never having met.

Getting back to the present, I've been done with the first semester of my last year for about 3 weeks now. The batch is all back home, de-stressing. Some of us (a tiny fraction, really) even went on a pretty awesome hike, more on that in another post. :)

By the way, I'm no fan of modern pop, but I rather like this "Call Me Maybe" tune. I'm even more of a fan of the memes that it has spawned.

There's even an epic one for the bronies (via Chathura):

Ah, on the topic of bronies, I don't think I mentioned this on the blog earlier, but I'm now a die-hard fan of the show. It's all Gehan's fault, really. :P And before you get into insults about my masculinity: the dark ages called, and they wanted their bigots back.

And in other news, I think that certain people need to be reminded that nothing pisses me off more than people who shove their religion in my face. See, I've avoided discussing topics of faith on this little blog of mine because I absolutely loathe discussing things like that in public. Nothing is more personal than your beliefs, and I respect people who understand that. Reminds me of this awesome SatW comic:

Anyway, I'm off for now. It was good to let all of that off. Hope I can continue this. :D

Highway to Hell (not!)

December is almost over, and what a December it has been... most of it has been spent on the road, away from home. With the Southern Expressway opening up, the long journey up to Delwala has been shortened to a 2 hour cruise along scenic routes. The stretch of road between Agalawatte and Kalawana must be one of the most beautiful and naturally set roadways in the island. And the land surrounding the expressway isn't hard on the eye either (for now...)

A few snapshots of the expressway:

...the Kalawana road:

This is, I believe, the famous "Akasa Bokkuwa"

Delwala Valley, from the Kalawana - Thiruwanaketiya road

We even caught a fleeting glimpse of Siri Pada
(faintly appearing in the middle of the picture)

A bridge on the road during a normal day...

...and on the day we got caught in a storm :D

But to be honest, the most beautiful road that we got to travel on was the Rathnapura Panadura road, which is a messed up road to drive on (has way too many curves, and is narrow... we passed one head-on collision), but has views that are to die for. After coming down from the mountains, there are the industrial parks of Horana, which are vast! (You literally can't believe we have such huge factories in Sri Lanka)

There is also a bad ass bridge across the Kalu ganga somewhere near Kiriella that I wasn't able to snap, which is a shame coz it looked really nice, deserted like an old Western film and leading to a haunted-looking rubber estate on the other side. :D

Update: Here's a photo of the bridge I managed to catch a few weeks later. It doesn't look that haunted in the mid-day sun, but at the right time, in the right light, it looks seriously haunted. ;)

Huge rubber estates were a recurring theme

So were awesome sunsets

Here's something strange I saw, and I hope Amila can shed some light on this. At sundown, Mathugama town is filled with literally tens of thousands of these tiny birds (a friend of mine suspects they could be 'Vee kurullo'), fluttering around like tiny moths near a lightbulb. They were on every visible tree and lamp-post, and I had never seen anything like that before. O_o

Like 'Meruu', but bigger o_O

Oh, and here's a video of Tommy and his friend Achcharu being idiots. :D

Not-so-lilac skies, and the beginning of December

A sequel of sorts to Lilac skies and the end of November

(Two years later...)

:P

I took a look at the blog archive and noticed that November is usually a very busy month around these parts. Not so this year, COZ SAI IS BACK! Woohoo! :D So we've been on all sorts of trips around the place, including a secret Negombo beach trip that my parents know nothing about. ;) Yes, I'm aware that I'm writing this under MY OWN NAME and that my (pretty internet savvy) mom could be reading this. So let's just call it Schrödinger's trip. Since nobody observed it, it simultaneously could have and could have NOT happened. :P

But here's a panorama from Rathnapura, where we stayed at my place all by ourselves for two nights. Fun story: We almost lost Sai to the angry waterfall. Good times. :')

In other news, things have been ORSUM. And I mean that. I think my life is finally getting back in order (knock wood) and things will hopefully get orsumer and orsumer now that Makuluwo is back on holiday! :D

Going to finish off on a random music-y note, and no, I'm not going to post Oasis here like I've been spamming my Google+ with. But seriously, Noel ILY!!! We owe you big time for making guitar bands cool again. Like I said once, I quite like SoKo, and I love Cornershop, and two days ago in Kandy (in a moment of total randomness) I discovered 'The School of Soul E.P.'. What a gem! :D

On a side note: Is it just me, or does the original 'Brimful of Asha' not have a bassline? :O

How to track down the @himalkk

Himalinga

Today on Chavie's nature hour, we're going to track the elusive (and endemic) Himalus Kotelawalus, a distant cousin of the Melursus ursinus inornatus (The Sri Lankan sloth bear) and also of Foxus Houndus, but my editor told me to take that bit off

There is only one confirmed specimen of this species, which would put it somewhere between Extinct in the Wild (EW) and Critically Endangered (CR) in the IUCN Red List, a category I personally like to call "ZOMG Almost Gone WTFBBQ!!11 (ZAGW)"

While naturally found wandering aimlessly around MC and Marine Drive, habitat and climatic changes have forced Himalus Kotelawalus to move into other areas. While there is no guarantee that you might spot him, conservationists scored a massive victory by introducing a smartphone to the specimen, which has made tracking using foursquare a trivial process. Though sightings in the wild have been rare, some lucky trackers and conservationists have had the privilege of capuring the specimen on film, often in quite unexpected places:

...

Yeah, I'm that jobless. :P

Edit: Here are some more and a link to the PNG file, if anyone wants. ;)

Bus Route Finder

A month and a half back, I made a map of bus routes in Colombo that became a surprise hit. This, coupled with the number of calls Himal was getting asking which bus to take, made me think that a website that tells you which buses to take from location A to location B would be pretty useful. With my beginner-level knowledge of SQL, JavaScript and PHP, I was able to cobble together a website that helps you find the bus route to your destination.

The system is far from perfect (it has only 25 or so bus routes, from the 70 odd listed in the Colombo bus routes Wikipedia article), and so it could do with some improvement, which is why I'm releasing the source code and the database SQL under the GNU GPL. :) So, I hope someone who's better with buses and code can take this to the next level. So, do feel free to modify, change, and host as you please, and please excuse the n00bish code, I'm kinda new to this! :D

A better algorithm for finding buses would be really nice, since all buses are not created equal. Waiting for a 135 that never came on a Sunday afternoon in Narahenpita, or getting late for an appointment because some fool recommended you take a 255 (worst bus ever!!!) from Kottawa to Mount Lavinia, is uncool. A better system with some sort of ranking algorithm would solve this problem, me thinks. :)

Hope you guys find the system useful. There is a mobile version of the site, but my stupid web host won't let me automatically redirect users to it using htaccess. :( A special Thank You to all my friends who helped me with this, and especially Mr. Inosh Perera, who helped me with the 187 bus route and also suggested I add Google Maps geolocations to bus halts. :)

Update: Bus Route Finder on GitHub (Thanks, John!) :D

I Know What You Did Last Summer

So, a couple of months have passed since finals and the university student inside me has been awoken from the long slumber that he took during the vacation months. Our fourth semester at SLIIT promises to be filled with challenges, the most important of which is the infamous "Second Year Project". We have been blessed with a great client, and it's now up to the group to deliver. This project offers us a chance to get our hands dirty with all aspects of the development process, from requirement gathering and analysis, to designing the system, to making databases, writing documentation, keeping the client and the lecturers happy with progress reports, as well as my favourite part - getting down and dirty with some mean code. ;)

The holiday months, alas, were not spent being entirely useless. :P I helped my friends at The Pooch Foundation by designing a website for them. When you're short on development time, bad code and design tends to seep through, and the website went through some horrid n00b html versions before coming out with the current iteration, which I quite like. The great thing about it is that it uses jQuery to look very, very good. ;) And the sad thing about it is that it uses jQuery, which tends not to run in some machines (like at uni), even if JavaScript is enabled. :/ But the project, as a whole, was brilliant. I learned PHP and jQuery on the job, and the intricacies of writing code for other people. ;) This new found love for PHP, coupled with something else has resulted in me working on a small project of mine, which I'll update you on within the week. :D Needless to say I am terribly excited about this, and it's something which -with enough user input- can grow into something that I hope a lot of people will find useful.

So, with the promise of blogging again in the not-too-distant future, I bid you adieu.

Colombo Bus Map v0.2.4

I love the London Tube map and thought of making a map of Colombo's bus routes using the same principle, i.e. topology over geography.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombo_Bus_Routes
http://www.oocities.org/waidyah/SRILANKA/COLOMBO/BUSROUTEMAP.HTM

Excel file I used to draw the map:
http://chavs.000a.biz/bus4.xls

Bus routes:

• 100 Panadura - Pettah
• 101 Moratuwa - Pettah
• 120 Horana/Kesbewa - Pettah
• 141 Wellawatta - Narahenpita
• 177 Kollupitiya - Kaduwela
• 154 Angulana - Kiribathgoda / Bambalapitiya - Kadawatha
• 138 Homagama/Athurugiriya/Rukmalgama/Matthegoda/Kottawa/Maharagama - Pettah
• 122 Rathnapura/Awissawella - Pettah
• 125 Meepe/Padukka - Pettah
• 103 Narahenpita/Borella - Pettah
• 175 Kollupitiya - Kohilawatta
• 135 Kohuwala - Kelaniya
• 140 Kollupitiya - Wellampitiya

Notes:

• Variants may exist. A 154 might stop in Bambalapitiya, or a 103 might stop in Borella. Be aware of the stop names on the big yellow board.
• The hollow lines follow the route of the filled lines unless otherwise specified.

May, I ♥ You!

Thank you for being a great month to me.

April was horrible to me, with exams and assignments effectively ending my social life. Gahness galore. But we finished off uni, got two months of vacation time and the past two weeks have been insanely awesome and very very productive.

Stuff I've been involved with:

Reach Out

The fact that a woman can't travel in a bus without being groped, or walk a street without having to face catcalls and leering is a serious issue in our society. Reach Out's project focuses on educating school children to be aware of the consequences of harassment and intervene in situations where a girl is being harassed. The end goal is to create a strong social movement against sexual harassment and to make public spaces safe again. We're doing presentations at schools (our first, at Amal International School, was held today) these coming weeks. And the best part is that I get to hang out with a load of bloggers, since a lot of them are involved in Reach Out. :)

Facebook Page

Pooch Foundation

There are currently 4 million stray dogs on the streets, without food, shelter, vaccines, and most importantly: love. Pooch Foundation aims to find homes for these innocents, and also change society's attitude about stray dogs. I have been helping them out with their website (I'm learning PHP and jQuery on the job, baby! ohhhyeah!) and stuff. Pooch also publishes a weekly column on the Funday Times called "Pooch Times". :)

Website

After feeling all caged in and socially isolated for almost two months, the last two weeks have felt like dying and going to heaven. I hope the good times keep on rollin', and that I don't suddenly fall off a bus and die! ;) (That'd be epic though. LULZ!)

Date a girl who Codes

This (Facebook note) was inspired by the Tumblr post Date A Girl Who Reads (by Rosemarie Urquico) which GG had posted on Facebook. :) Disclaimer: I'm NOT an Emacs user. ;)

Date a girl who codes. Date a girl who spends her time on Stack Overflow and not TMZ. Her computer's fucked because she messed with the kernel too much, not because she downloaded "Free Smileys". Date a girl who knows a couple of languages, compiled her first program when she was 11.

Find a girl who codes. You’ll know that she does because she'll always have Emacs open. (What do you mean vi? Are you crazy to even look at the devil's spawn?) She lovingly looks through the Java API, and quietly cries out when she finds that one interface that's been giving her a hard time. You see the weird chick staring at her laptop with her hands on her head? That’s the coder. They can never resist the urge to code, even in public.

She’s the girl coding while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of inheritance and multiple threads. Sit down. She might not notice you, as most coders don't like to be interrupted. Ask her what's up with her indentation.

Get ready to have a cup of coffee thrown on you.

Let her know what you really think of Stallman. See if she can code Lisp. Understand that if she's a fan of Bash scripting, she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Canonical or she would like to work there.

It’s easy to date a girl who codes. Leave her alone when she's coding, but never for too long. Tell her to look out the window from time to time. Giving your eyes rest is important for coders, lest you want her to go blind. Buy her Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming". Let her know that you understand that code is love. That every opened curly bracket is a commitment. Understand that she knows the difference between how code works and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little binary. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

[Can't be fucked writing any further. I've got more important things to do.]

:P

P.S. If you meet the aforementioned girl, please give me a ring! O_O

Obsession [update]

Remember my little obsession?

So, I got to uni a liiiittle early today, and even though the sky was cloudy, I was greeted to this outside the windows:

Look just below the clouds and just above the towers...

After a bit of messing with levels

All photos courtesy of my friend Heshan, who saved these images for posterity with his camera phone. Thanks mate! :D

Cerno's desktop screenshot festival...

...and I'm 2 years, 7 months and 5 days late, according to this. ;) Better late than never, I guess. :D

Lucid, running hotot and Firefox :)

OS: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx)
DE: GNOME 2.30.0
Dock: AWN (lighter and better than Docky, imho)
Theme: Elementary

Cerno's original post can be found here. :)

Mud

You know what would make the Galle Lit Fest cooler? If they had authors mud wrestling. That'd be pretty cool.

I'm rather bummed that I didn't make it to Galle this weekend, but that's cancelled by the whole 'glad to be alive' thing that I've got going on.

I wholeheartedly recommend watching Stranger Than Fiction. Sure, they could've made it better, but the story's serious while being quite funny, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is nothing but smoking all throughout.

I decided I shouldn't hate Java just because it's very popular and a lot of people use it as a golden hammer. I also learned that writing single line methods gives me a 'kick'. ;)

Van Morrison really is an underrated artist. I mean, sirawata! :/

Since I won't really be able to support Wikipedia financially (till I get myself a credit card), I decided that spending some time each week expanding stub articles and starting up new ones on stuff that I like would be a nice way of contributing. I also discovered that I've been a registered Wikipedia member for more than 4 years now! O_o

Stuff I want to do next month: Go somewhere exciting (could be in Colombo, could be out, I don't care), go for the Wagon Park concert on the 12th and pass my midterms. :P That is all.

Happeh!

This is going to be nonsensical, but I'm mentally prancing around in joy. This week, everything from Monday onwards, has been awesome. Lectures got cancelled Tuesday (Pirith at uni) and we got tomorrow off as well (research symposium at uni. HA!) and I wrote a report I had no idea was due today in like an hour, got it printed and handed it in as well, and to add to that, I helped out a friend who couldn't make it, made his report look fabulous (note to Meshak: you sent it as email text... aneyyy babo! :P) with my customary formatting (wink wink... look at the design of this blog... imagine that minimalism in a word document. People who've had the (dis)pleasure of working with me hate me with a passion for messing with their formatted headings and painstakingly tabbed indentations) aaaand printed it and handed it in too and I did all of that and I got out of the building just right on the dot at 5 when I told my father that I was coming out and I fully appreciate how much I love my mom for the first time in years and I ate so much food today and had yoghurt and cookies and I'm hiiiiiiiiiiigh...

I told you it was going to be nonsensical. I swear it's the gotukola and all that lime acid talking. :D

But yes, moving on to the more serious part of my post, one of my oldest and bestest (suck it spellcheck, that word exists!) friends, who's also a budding veterinary student, is starting out a small foundation for pooches, that aims to do big things. So if you're inclined towards animal welfare, and would like to learn more, please visit their blog at http://thepoochfoundation.blogspot.com/ :)

Soooo, to end my happy, high, high post I shall leave you with a gig played in the sky (or on the rooftops of London) and the longest microtonal lick George Harrison was ever forced to play by one Sir James Paul McCartney. It last from 1:22 to 1:26 in the video and I think it beats the one in Helter Skelter by a mile, but my ear hasn't been tested recently so can't be sure. ;)

P.s. A note about everyone who's complaining in that video: They got to hear the last gig ever played by all four Beatles together. Imagine what that must've felt like after a good few years! :D

Dingdongs

Nope, not talking about Dinidu's balls here. :D

At the end of last year, I felt like doing some comics, but putting them up on this blog was not an option, what with no anonymity and the rather political (and rather offensive) nature of most of the comics. So I created a webcomic blog called Dingdong, made about 8 or 9 comics, ran out of inspiration and shut the thing down. Sadly I lost all the comics (They were stick figure art... I had just discovered xkcd and my drawing was terrible), but there was this one comic I remembered and I redrew it today (with updated art and what not). It was entitled "Living it up in a puritan society". I used GIMP almost exclusively for today's comic (I usually use Paint.NET) so this is my first comic created in GIMP and in Linux. :D

Recap

November started off on a positive note with a presentation at uni that went off pretty well on the first day of the month. But plenty of other things that were planned didn't happen as expected, but it was a good month nonetheless.

I learned a fair bit of C, and can implement everything we learned up to now at uni using it. Object orientation and such are obviously not supported, but the workarounds exist and as many programmers say "C is easier to learn in its entirety, and that is the biggest advantage it gives a coder". Basically, when you know exactly what the language can and cannot do, it makes coding so much easier and more productive.

A thing I didn't get to do was visit ol' Tommy. The time elapsed since I last saw him has hit a new high of 5 freaking months! :( And I don't think I'll get to visit him this weekend either. Sucks ass.

A lot of the travel planned for November had to be shelved, especially due to the bizarre weather conditions. The family did visit Katharagama and the south, but it was a rain affected journey. The planned hike to Nuwara Eliya with Uni buddies didn't work out, and neither did Arugam Bay with Sai and the old thread gang. I did get to spend an extraordinary amount of time at Sai's place though (thanks for the lunches, Sai! :D And the lulz too.) Spending time with one of your best friends in the whole world who only drops by the island once every 15 months or so is one of the true delights of life. :)

Hmmm, so what else. Watched a couple of movies, including "Toy Story 3" (How the hell does Pixar impress over and over again like that???) and "The Social Network"  by David Fincher. The latter was one of the best movies I had ever seen. It had the obvious geek appeal for me ("OMG Zuckerberg uses Linux!!!") and also the first Beatles song in a soundtrack that I've heard in a long time (Baby, You're a Rich Man, off Magical Mystery Tour. Beautiful song.) But what I loved about the film is that he achieved in a couple of years things that most people wouldn't in their entire lifetime. And it made me think... What's the point of being called a geek, what's the point of knowing what a wget command does if you don't apply that stuff and do something exciting, do something that you can be proud of? Will you forever be remembered as a nameless faceless glorified typist who slaved away coding some buggy commercial software, or will you be remembered as a Torvalds, a Stallman or a Cohen? Someone who gave up a boring, well paying life to do something that they genuinely found exciting and worth working towards? It's something I'll have a long hard think about in the next couple of months.

Welcome to the rain-affected test match known as life*

11:21 AM

The downpour keeps steady as I gaze out the window on the second floor of Liberty Plaza. Hard enough to make the towers in the distance a barely visible grey silhouette, but not hard enough to drive away the people from the street. The street, as it runs in front of Liberty, has 6 lanes and is one way, though it functions like a 4 lane road. I love staring at the rain, more so when I'm safely behind a window. Yes, I'm evul like that.

Liberty cinema is playing a Hindi film called Guzaarish. Aishwarya Rai reminds me of a creep zombie for some reason. O_O They're playing an old Bathiya Santhush song called 'Tharuka', which I heard is based on a Hindi song. Earlier they played some hip-hop song which had the lyrics 'This is an awesome ring tone for your phone' in the rap. Hmph.


01:34 PM

We're walking back to Kollupitiya in the rain. The buriyani and doughnuts we had for lunch are getting digested. Talk shifts to malfunctioning computer parts and how to destroy hard drives without any scratch-marks and have them replaced. The school yard has filled up like a lake and a stream is flowing out into the road. Fucktards drive at breakneck speeds in the almost bumper to bumper traffic and splash water all over the pedestrians. I yell obscenities at 'em. Rain is fun.

2:51 PM

We're at the uni canteen again, Meshak, another friend of ours and I (Yes, in the middle of vacation. So what? We kinda missed the place okay?). The second years had decorated the common room with and the wall sported a sign saying 'Thank U'. I guess they threw a little party for the lecturers before 'graduating' from here and moving on to the bigger campus. I'm going to miss them. They were the polar opposite of our own batch, always together, having fun. Even from a distance, it was a treat to watch them. Le sigh.

* Okay, the title has got nothing to do with the post. But it does vaguely sound like something off Chinaman, yes? ;)

Pwnage on the cloud

Cloud computing is touted to be the next big thing. From Google Docs to Dropbox to Chrome OS, innovative applications are putting thousands of super powerful servers at the command of users like you and me. But non of these applications seemed that interesting. Granted, backing up to the cloud is one of the most failsafe ways to secure your data, but none of these things had that Ohmagawd effect. I was reading Gizmodo yesterday (sorry Jerry!) and I was hit with that effect thanks to this.

OnLive MicroConsole
(Image copyright Gawker media. Please don't sue me for unauthorised use!)

Think about it for a second. A game, rendered dynamically on the server, streamed to your home like a normal IPTV stream. Provided network latency is low (something that we really need to work towards in this country), your controller-strokes will be transmitted to some server in Palo Alto and the resultant scene in the video game rendered and retransmitted to your HDTV. It's like having a PS3 without having a PS3. And think about it, you don't have to worry about hardware upgrades, or buying expensive VGAs for the singular purpose of playing games anymore. The physics will be beyond awesome, the system requirements will always be met, and you don't have to deal with those pesky anti-piracy measures because there won't be any piracy anymore. If all the games run on servers, and no retail versions are ever released, there's obviously no way to pirate the games. It's a win-win situ whatever way you look at it. And imagine the amount of money spent on hardware that can be saved. You'll essentially be sharing a server with some dude in Bosnia, and while you sleep (due to the time difference) he'll be pwning away, and while he sleeps it'll be your turn. Playing multiplayer would be a breeze since inter-server connectivity is lightning fast (no need to worry about who's hosting and what his upload speed is anymore!)

And you know what the best part is? Servers hate Windows, because it is buggy, slow and expensive, where as Linux is stable, fast and free. The gaming servers will also need to run on Linux, which means... MORE GAMES FOR LINUX, YO! :D (side note: I discovered an open source clone of one of my favourite classic strategy games: Transport Tycoon Deluxe. It's called OpenTTD and it...is...AWEsome! A must have for any Linux user. There is a port for Windows too.)

All of that being said, I'm still not going to pay $99 a year to play games on my bullcrap internet connection. :P