Another fantastic year gone by and the new 2012 starts today. Awesome! Almost half of the year I couldn’t blog. So just thought of doing a quick recap.

Team PeraSoft won the Imagine Cup software design category locally and represented the country at the Imagine Cup World finals held in New York. During the 2 month window between the local finals and world finals I did about 6 trips to Peradeniya University for preparation on the world finals. Team lead by Lahiru did a wonderful job putting their 100% heart and mind into the project. Kinect SDK released during this time was an extra bonus as the team used it to enhance the solution drastically. World Finals was an amazing experience. Venue was right at the Times Square .. I mean you just walk out from the hotel lobby and here you are at the Times Square … it truly is a never sleeping place. It was perfect that they had mid-night movies … watched Transformers: Dark of the Moon in iMAX 3D and it was fantastic. Only regret is I couldn’t watch Lion King the stage drama in a Broad Way Theater … it was all booked.

In October Ministry of Higher Education launched the Student Laptop project giving an opportunity to new students to obtain a laptop through a student loan scheme. This was a wonderful opportunity for new entrants from all over the country to enter to the knowledge world regardless of which subject stream they are in.

Steve Jobs passed away leaving a remarkable footprint in the consumer IT world. Though I never actively used Apple products I have always been a fan of the innovation and creativity Apple brought in.

Imagine Cup 2012 campaign started in October from Peradeniya University in grand style with over 300 students participating the event. As of now we have over 250 signed up and expecting this would go up to 1500 within the next 4 weeks.

My Gadget list grew tremendously … among the new additions I got a new laptop – a Dell Inspiron 6420 with 8 gig of RAM, a Windows Phone 7.5 Mango Phone, Three 2 TB external HDDs, a Steering Wheel Bluetooth MP3/FM Car Kit,  Rii Mini Wireless Keyboard, Huawei Wireless/WiFi Dongle, Jabra Hands free,  Energizer XP2000 Battery Packand many more small stuff.

Many new things happened in Sri Lanka also … Hambantota Port Kick started work which will indeed be a grand contributor to the country in the future. Southern Highway was opened for traffic and this is a pleasurable drive. So travelling to Galle is no longer a problem just under 1 hour we can get there. Internal Air taxi service is up and kicking which is another great addition to the internal transportation.

Also I was travelling frequently during the this whole time. List includes a visits to Peradeniya University, to NIBM Galle, to Rajarata University, to Sabaragamuwa University, to Ruhuna Engineering Faculty at Hapugala, Ruhuna University Main Campus at Mathara, Wayamba University and many more and the full year 2011 topped up about 16,000km. Not many personal trips though which is a damn shame.

oh! Ceylon theaters opened up a 3D theater a much needed essential. Woo! hoo!

Well! seems like too many things to write … I’ll just get on with the New Year … Happy 2012 folks!

Two days ago I received a letter from a an org named SOS Children's Village addressed to me on my office address. When I called them to find out how they got my details I learnt that it was a company named Direct Solutions who has SOLD them the information.

But surprisingly when I called Direct Solutions they first said they haven't sold this information, but 2 minutes later said they have given it to SOS at a nominal fee. And the other part is .. they also have obtained my information from another party. And they refused to reveal the name of the party who gave them information. The person who answered the phone said as per the contract they have with the data source they cant reveal the information. I’m sure DS have no clue of how the data source collected the info.

WHAT THE HELL. HOW CAN PEOPLE JUST SELL CONTACT INFROMATION LIKE THIS. I have never signed up with any local agency to receive any newsletters or mailers or anything. Fancy tag line to have ... 'accountable marketing' ...

14 years ago when I first saw a mobile phone the perception was ‘AWSOME’ by every means. But it was out of reach those days due to the mammoth price tag. Remember this is not a sophisticated phone as you and I see today. It was almost the size of a brick, weights as much as a brick, and had 1% of the features of a modern phone – which is the ability to make phone calls, but this was perfect at the time as it served the purpose.

But few years later a sudden rat race became the name of the game – to make the mobile phone smaller - while the rest of the world I think was trying to make things bigger. In few years’ time the good old brick phone became a ‘dinosaur’ antique gadget and the new phones that was like 1/10 the size dominated the market. Smaller once were packed with many more cool features also. Now! who the hell said ‘bigger the better’.

As I see it this trend continued until the mobile phone became too small. Too small to hold in a hand comfortably and make a button. A person with big fingers for sure had a tough time getting to press the correct button. Anyways there were choices.

Today! it seems like things are going backwards. Are you using a Windows Phone 7, Apple iPhone or Google Android? Look at the size of it. Even though these new smart phones and several other phones in the same league are big in size compared to the trend few years ago – it seems like nobody is worried. I’m not for sure.

Eagerly waiting for my next phone

dang! 2010 is just about to end. On several angles its been a great year. On work front there were couple of interesting events. Great thing is there was never a dull moment … it has always being very challenging and dynamic. Have made tons of new friends. I’m not talking about just Facebook friends (now! no offense to all my FB friends) … tons of new friends who I have really met.

But on another angle things are not too great.

I have missed tons of movies … Backlog has about 50 movies that I have to watch. Given the current situation cant see a way to find time for this. There are other more important things which need my attention. Wela Junior is not 1.6 years old and occupies most of my time when I’m home. Anyways it’s all good.

Cant even believe that I have gone only 3 trips during the whole year … previous years there was an average of 12. In some good years there were like 20. This is a terrible situation so I have set things in motion for 2011. Jan 1st and 2nd I’ll be starting the year with a trip with family.

Anyways … looking forward for the new year … for bigger tougher challenges. Bring it on baby!

What is your practice when you reply an email? I’m sure your answer would be Click REPLY and type and send away. Have you seen replies without the original mail contents … I get these all the time.

Most cases University students reply mails without the original mail. the reply comes to my inbox as a new mail and I have no way of relating to the original mail. I think to save bandwidth or something they just delete the original body contents. I just have received about 10 replies from 10 people to an email which I sent yesterday and now I have to open and compare which one is which as each of these mails had personalized contents. … you know what… I’m just going to ignore them all … even though these mails are important. no time to waste

Put this in a context where I deal with couple of hundred emails every day. It’s time wasting. So folks … for god sake please make sure to KEEP the original mail contents when you reply.

The first thing that comes to your mind is … oh! damn! those spammers. This morning I just deleted about 400 emails from couple of my inboxes from various email marketing companies. Among them Sri Lankan Advertising,  SriMails.com,  eVision Advertising, CP Promotions, 4th Dimnsion tops the list by sending the most number of emails .. or more SPAM!

I was just annoyed and called some of them and also called the companies they are sending emails on behalf of. Comic Classics! Their customers have no clue about what’s the problem or purposely neglecting with excuses. Some even had balls to say we have outsourced it to our media agency and cant take responsibility on whom they are sending the mails to. Now! what kind of an irresponsible answer it that. As per my knowledge they are equally responsible as the party who are sending the emails. Sad part is they put all these effort to create the emails and they have no clue of to whom they are sending to … just sending out … in other words that sounds like they have no damn clue about their own business. For an example … so called Training Sri Lanka Newsletter have no clue of who they want to reach or train.

Out of the above mentioned companies it seems like nobody had a clue of what they are doing, or no knowledge about the correct process, or the worst case purposely ignoring the situation to make a quick buck out of it. One of them mentioned that they know about the issue but cant stop because it’s a good income source. When I questioned about how the mail addresses were collected (because I never subscribed to) the answer was they have an option to enter the mail address on their site, and anybody can go and enter any email address. How would I know they themselves didn’t enter my email? Rest of the answered were just useless.

Anyways … the way I see it … the end is near. Email campaigns done in the right way can be a very effective marketing tool. But when keep spamming people like this without analyzing the customer preferences it just becomes useless. Right now hotmail and live have already recognized some of them as spammers. and for sure many administrators have blocked these from receiving mails to their networks … and within couple of more months their headless customers also will realize that there is no value in sending emails. For an example SriMails market themselves as they have a database with over 200000 addresses … what's the point if 90% of them are blocked by servers, firewalls and many more receivers just delete these mails and only like 20 of these receivers actually reads these emails. I’m sure most of them don’t have a good tool to track how many emails were received, read etc, or don’t provide a report to the customer.

Something that could have been a good ethical marketing channel have already been spoiled by few companies who call themselves innovators, or first to do e-marketing in the country bla bla … too bad! Even though two of the above listed companies agreed to remove my mail addresses that’s not going to solve the problem at large.

Couple of years ago I also have sent email campaigns for several of my foreign customers, but only to mailing lists where receivers have subscribed. Not just bunches of collected emails.

I’m 100% supportive to any startup company who do business in a professional manner. But people who break all the rules and annoy me … I’ll wait for the next mail from any of you

As all of us know only SLT provided true unlimited broadband facilities. Every other service provider implemented this thing called the ‘Fair User Policy’ which is a load of crap putting barriers to heavy internet users  like me. I have tried WiMax connection from Dialog which after couple of months they applied this FUP. Also I have tried dongles from Dialog, Mobitel and Airtel which is the same … Some of them without a shame advertise saying they are providing 7.2 mbps connections which is actually the speed of the device not the speed of the connection.

My SLT ADSL connection started giving problems 3 weeks ago and when I called the support center they informed that there is a known problem which they are attending to and to wait 1 week till they fix it. After one week when I called back it was like I called a different planet. They were telling me to upgrade to a higher package if I want a higher speed and still it might give me higher speed. So they wanted me to start paying Rs. 5500 instead of the 2900 I’m paying currently to see whether it works. Don’t customers in this country have a thing called right?

I have a feeling that they are purposely reducing the resources in the current package to push customers to go for a higher package. WTF?

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/07/14/chicken-egg-mystery-finally-cracked/?test=faces

British scientists believe they have found the answer to an ages-old question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Scientists cracked the puzzle after discovering that the formation of eggs is possible only thanks to a protein found in chicken's ovaries. That means eggs have to be formed in chickens first.

The protein -- called ovocledidin-17 (OC-17) -- speeds up the development of the shell. Researchers from Sheffield and Warwick universities in England laid out their findings in the paper "Structural Control of Crystal Nuclei by an Eggshell Protein."

They used a supercomputer to zoom in on the formation of an egg and realized the protein is vital in kick-starting the crystallization process. It works by converting calcium carbonate into the calcite crystals that make up the egg shell.

Dr Colin Freeman, from Sheffield University's Department of Engineering Materials, said "it had long been suspected that the egg came first -- but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first."

"The protein had been identified before and it was linked to egg formation, but by examining it closely we have been able to see how it controls the process," Freeman said.

"It's very interesting to find that different types of avian species seem to have a variation of the protein that does the same job."

It is hoped the discovery leads to the invention of new materials.

Technically absolutely nothing wrong with it! but on the other hand something seems not right. Now, don’t get confused or don’t get to the attack mode … this is not one of those “this one is better than the other one” kind of a post. I’m just writing based on a serious long discussion I had with a very good friend mine who is a 100% Open Source dude. One thing I really admire about him is he actually lives and breaths OSS, unlike some so called OOS folks who talks about it and run Windows in their machines.

We just met after a long time for a beer (many beers apparently) and started talking about stuff and this topic popped up. Even though both of us wanted to stop the topic several times I think the dense alcohol levels wanted to keep it going. Anyways … after a 3 hours we were still good old friends and we were glad all other friends enjoyed the friendly fight.

When you really look at the OSS space there are plenty of software applications most of the times mimicking software in the proprietary world. The list goes on … Microsoft Office vs Open Office, Windows vs Linux, Adobe Photoshop vs Gimp, Microsoft SQL vs MySQL etc. Even the small apps like WinZip, CuteFTP, WinAmp have OSS flavors. In a world where people look at saving cost, still over 90% of the computer users pay big $$$ and stick with proprietary software when there are countless number of OSS applications available free. Honestly that doesn’t sound right. If it is free and still people are not using it there must be something seriously wrong with it. I think a significant contributor for this situation is the support and usability.

Most of you who read this post are for sure capable of dealing with any technical challenge to get your broken computer up and running, but if you look at the average computer user out there he/she just worries about getting the work done using the computer. So when installation of applications, updating, upgrading and using is bit difficult .. the average user naturally turns to the easier options. I think that’s what has happened. Companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Apple etc have gone an extra mile on this by Innovating new ways where average user can comfortably work with a computer.

In the corporate world … big companies have better things to worry about than IT problems. They need IT to be a contributor for them to run their business better and more efficiently. In this area I think the technical support and services is the main driving factor. Even locally I have seen companies who have gone and deployed a full stack of OSS software and struggle to keep things up and running due to lack availability of patch/update management techniques. Motive in deploying OSS was to save a quick buck which resulted in suffer to the mainstream business. Microsoft on the other hand have a much better approach and a solution to this problem through the System Center products.

Also another major enabler on this is situation is the developer platform. Most of the times when Microsoft releases a new tool or a version there is an SDK/API with it so developers can start their game. Recently Apple also realized the importance of having a developer force behind them, see the effect on enabling developers to develop apps for iPhone. Surprisingly I haven’t seen any similar trend in the OSS world except the popular saying that “the source code is available for you to do anything”. Well! having the source code of a massive software application is one thing and being able to understand and edit/change/update the complex C/C++ code is something totally different. For an instance lets say I found the complete blueprint of a space shuttle … if I think for a moment I’ll be able to engineer the entire shuttle and go to space just because I got the blueprints I must be a real idiot … a real ambitious one at that. For me … having the source code of an OSS software is somewhat similar. Take the total number of computer users in the world … how many of them are programmers, how many of those programmers are C/C++ programmers? and how many of those C/C++ programmers are capable of handling something so complicated. I’m sure the number is very small compared to the billion+ who uses computers.

My friend’s vision is “everybody should be using OSS because its free and the source code is available and you can do anything you wish”, while I stick with my end of the story where “masses of people should be able to access and use computers with minimum or if possible zero trouble and shouldn't have to worry about whether the source code is rectangular or circular”.

Anyways … things ended up with many unsolved questions … until next time bro …

During the transit I decided to chk out the city. Because most of the time as Microsoftees we visit a country and never get to see the country for real. This was anyways not an attempt to see the country for real but at least better than nothing. Either we stay stuck at the hotel where the conference/event is or stick with a planned city tour … which most of the times SUCK!

I went to this shopping mall which they called the kingdom of computers … Pantip Plaza, its a big a** IT Mall … actually bigger than the SimLim in Singapore. Gadgets seems pretty cheap here. I only got to check 2 floors in the shopping mall. It had 6 or 7 floors. With a little bit of bargaining I got two 1TB External HDDs and two 1TB Internal HDDs for just Rs. 10000 each … that’s awesome compared to the Rs. 22,000 price tag back home. And a digital photo frame just for Rs. 1900, which had no brand or anything. I decided to take the risk and buy it. It works perfectly fine after 10 days … so its all worth it for 1900.

After that took a long walk … about 3 kilometers in crowded roads in Bangkok, which reminded me Japan and Korea … everybody looks the same.

Right now I’m @ an event @ Peradeniya University … will write more about the event tomorrow with photos etc. But this is about the pathetic welcome I got from Queens Hotel in Kandy.

Couple of days ago I called the Queens Hotel and made the reservation for a room with the king size bed, because I was planning to come to Kandy with my wife and kid and the little fella is now turning to sides, and attempting to crawl :)

As planned I arrived at the hotel late night … around 11.00 PM and checked into the hotel. But the room had only a tiny bad … half-king size. When I questioned about it they said the room they were planning to give me was not free at the moment due to the current guest extended his stay. Surprisingly the guy at the reception asked me to ‘manage’ with this for the night and they will give me the room promised tomorrow … honestly that’s royally f***ed up. The real reason I got really pissed is when I called in the afternoon to double check they said it’s available and perfectly fine and even when I arrived at the hotel they didn’t even had the courtesy to tell me that there has been a problem and change in the plan. I had to discover the mess myself. That’s the most f***ed up way to treat a customer by any hotel. Well! i’ve been to so many hotels around the world and have never faced a situation like this. Anyway I'm NEVER going to go to Queens Hotel Kandy again. I’m yet to talk to the hotel manager and blast the hell out of him.

Luckily I managed to get a good room @ Sussie Hotel. If not the situation was to a drive back home or many miles to get a good hotel. Because all the other hotels I checked earlier were full.

Hell! I was never a fan of Twitter. Always thought of it as a pain in the a** tool, But during one of the sessions saw how it was used … to get instant feedback from the attendees in the room. It was a moderated panel discussion and and the whole discussion was based on what attendees published to the Twitter feed at that time. So now i’m officially a fan of Twitter. Still haven’t started mine … But will do soon :)

Not only that i’m going to hook up my LinkedIn profile also. As of now I have received over 140 LinkedIn invitations but never was too interested in keeping it up to date.

So … I’ll be on Windows Live, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn … I think that’s more then enough :)

This is a historical moment! well! at least for me. After trying really hard for many long hours even in holidays I have finally cleared up my tasks list in outlook, sent out all the draft mails in my Outlook Drafts folder and actioned all the things I have noted in my 'Today' notepad.

Normally whenever an important email comes to my inbox and if i'm not in a position to reply or do the needful at the time I flag it and put a completion date/time. Depending on the importance of the mail I reply or complete the task. Normally there are many task items in the list :) .... there were few times it exceeded 100 ... No matter how many items I clear every day ... at the end of the day there is a new list of things as mails keeps coming. But right now there only 2 items on my tasks list and i'm going to clear it out in the next hour.

Some cases I have to search for information and write long replies with information which means if it is taking couple of hours/days it can result a draft email in the Drafts folder. Had 31 draft mails in the folder on last Wednesday when I went home for holidays. But as of now ... only 3 draft emails which i'm just about to send out and clear. So you can imagine how the holidays were like. Well! it was not that bad. During holidays found time to do many things ... emails, couple of movies, new year celebration, spent time with my wife, met couple of old friends etc.

Normally I have a text file on my desktop named 'today' with a list of items I want to finish within the day. While I manage to finish most of the things in this today list of mine few remains based on the importance. Right now this is also down to one action item ...

So I have like few moments to feel cool. Because ................. more mails will come.

Just thought of writing about this, because this is important as hell. Wanted to write this on Saturday the moment I saw this news in Swarnavahini evening new (8). But my Internet connection at home was not working for some stupid reason.

Well! the news was about an artist who is extremely good in wood carvings, who had won international awards for Sri Lanka in hand carving competitions ... and now the guy is leaving to Russia because he was invited to teach his art to students there ... It seemed like the Russians are actually valuing this as a very important area. So this person has decided to leave the country because everybody gotta make a living in this commercial world. Unfortunately officials here haven't made any efforts to support this person. As the result he is leaving ...

Think for a moment ... reality of this story is we (Sri Lanka) are going to loose another amazingly talented individual to the country. Guess what! Nothing new in this for us in the IT industry. This is happening in a daily basis. There are many good techies who are leaving the country to find better jobs in Middle East, Australia etc. Few days ago there was an indecent where key 5 techies in a company left and now they are almost closed down. I have many friends who have permanently left the country because they were frustrated here for not getting something decent for their talents or due to chasing for more $$$$. It's perfectly fine for going after a better life but the sad part is ... all of them benefited from the free education system we have in the country which the government spends a loads of money on each individual and without making their contributions back to the country ... now they are leaving. No matter what the reasons are ... that is unacceptable. In case if you didn't know it's everybody's hard earned money that is being spent to teach all of us for 13 long years. If this continues we will never be able to come up from this mess as a country. Because it's people is the most strongest force in any country.

So if YOU are thinking of leaving ... think twice ... have you done your part? OR are you just going to become another selfish person? Lot of people ask me why am I still here ... when am I going to leave bla bla bla. But for your info ... NOT INTERESTED :)

"""" Computers ... are everywhere. it's not only for specialists or engineers today. Over the years it has become an everyday device which many of us find very hard to live without. Also it is not only a device used for office work. Today we can find computers in many different forms. when you goto an ATM, when you listen to music using your MP3 player, when you use your Mobile phone, when you play games using a game console ... you are using a computer. So it is in every part of our Digital Lifestyle.

We all live in a very interesting era which we call the 'knowledge society', where computer skills are an essential element. All the big players in the IT industry are envisioning about the next evolution of computing which we call 'could computing'. Big things are about the happen ...

But, how can we forget the past? The journey, the 'computer' has taken over hundreds of years, to become what it is today is remarkable. We should indeed thank several individuals and organizations for the remarkable contributions they have made to build the digital world we all enjoy today.

Let the journey begins ... """"

Jut saw that there is a new version of Facebook is there. Features looks cool.

and millions of people around the world are going to burn zillions of man hours on this. Woo! Hoo!

This about a popular bank ... I’ll leave it up to you to decide their quality of their service, because for me it has gone from a very good service to the worst (actually most pathetic) service a customer can imagine from a bank. I have a credit card from this bank and I have been using this almost 5 year. There has been a delay from my side on the payments due to the busy schedule and they don’t have a branch in Nawam Mawatha. If they had a branch this wouldn’t have happened. But in a way I’m glad that this happened because this revealed their true colors.

All of us know that when a credit card payment is delayed the bank charges an interest and a late payment fee and move on with it. They don’t scream or blast the crap out of you to get the payments. Well! This bank does exactly that. I think it is their payment collection team who don’t have any damn clue about how to handle or at least talk to customers. Sometimes another person calls and he knows how to talk to customers. They charge the interest (nothing wrong in that) and the late payment charges (nothing wrong with this too) and as a bonus they call every day like many times. May be somebody there made a policy that it is a must that the agent calls the customer till the phone bill goes up to the value of the monthly card payment or something like that. S&*t Happens!

Even when I say I’m at a meeting these idiots keep calling back every minute, don’t know from which planet this guy who is calling me is from because he doesn't seem to understand any Sinhala or English. May be this fella who is calling don't believe when I say I’m at a meeting ... If I had his email address I can send a pic of how my calendar looks like. Never mind! There is no point in talking to a person who doesn’t listen to you, or who don’t know how to talk to a customer.

I have several other credit cards from other banks and all those payments are going on time because there are branches in Nawam Mawatha. Once in a while when a payment is delayed they have a decent way of reminding. I think this ‘charterr’ bank should learn a lesson from those. Because of this reason I have completely stopped using this credit card ... and apparently they lost a good customer.

What a ‘Charterrr’ Standard ….

Large Hadron Collider

Just thought about writing about this ... not that I have anything to do with it or understands it. Honestly I don't understand anything about this. It's a massive ... believe me when I say massive ... it's a gigantic ... something being built by European Organization for Nuclear Research and thousands of scientists from all over the world are involved this and of course several billions of dollars. It's about some research on particle acceleration blah blah blah ... creating a micro black hole etc etc ... and destroying the whole world or perhaps the whole galaxy if something goes wrong kinda thing ... or something of that sort. Naaaah! I'm sure there are couple of thousand pretty smart people working on this billion dollar project. Anyways it's about atoms etc ... Last thing I remember about atoms is some stuff I learnt @ school for chemistry. Ewwww! Chemistry was never an interesting subject for me.

Anyways ... this is a very interesting thing ... as they say its going to be a break throguh in nuclear research and many other things. A bigger bomb ... no no ... this time they are going to use this for something good ... may be a free unlimited power source for the whole world ....

Found some high-res pics of this few minutes ago http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html

As most of ya'll already know there is a new traffic plan being executed in Colombo these days ... or may be still being tested.

Yesterday it became really annoying because got badly stuck in the traffic. But today morning i just came to Colpitty without any issue. I mean not even a single traffic light after the townhall round-a-bout. That was really cool. But just found that there are some major blocks in some other areas. In a way police experimenting on new routs to minimize traffic jams in Colombo is really nice. But making us ginipigs to test it out is not cool. How about using a computer simulation to try this :) ... Anyways as an outcome of this effort if police can minimize the traffic jams in at least all the major routs ... it'll be awsome.

Let's wait and see ... when the 'one-way' plan was implemented several months back that also created lot of haa hoo. But now it seems to be working out really nice. It's good that somebody in the traffic control department thinking in the right direction.

Not exactly sure why ... during the last wee I got 4 calls with the same question ... "when are you having the next Tech.Ed?". The answer is ... exact date time is not yet decided ... but hopefully soon. Personally I think its time to have a Tech.Ed. But there are hundred different things that should fall into place. Above all the security situation in the country.

So what's next? ... Imagine Cup 2008 World Festival in Paris, France.