Update on the current situation in Colombo (exactly here in Wattala). Still nothing is yet to confirm and moments passed by were filled with fear and uncertainity. We got electricity back in few minutes ago (around 3.50 am) and now the whole city seems calm and quiet. Still there is no any official update on what [...]

Electricity has been off here since 1AM or so.

wish they can take it back again……..

wish they can take it back again……..

wish they can take it back again……..

wish they can take it back again……..

wish they can take it back again……..

Ruchith Fernando, the brains behind Apache Rampart (WS-Sec/WS-SecConv) and Apache Rahas (WS-Trust) (and good chunks of Axis2/Java) will be in Maryland in mid-May and is available to do some training on those. If interested see the instructions in his blog!

Tomorrow is the day. Yes, the day Sri Lanka again comes to the top of the world of cricket by winning the ICC Cricket World Cup for the second time. Yes, the day we're going to thrash those arrogant Aussies and send them back down under with their tail between their legs.

The atmosphere here in Colombo is electrifying. Cricket fever is everywhere. The radio stations are full of best wishes for our beloved team. Even our president decided to cart himself halfway around the world to see the match in person (using my taxpayer Rupees of course .. but for once I don't mind). I hope even our LTTE brethren are busy watching and cheering instead of doing anything nasty these days.

Tomorrow nite is party nite for everyone here. The match starts around 7pm local time and will go until 2-3am. Actually the match will likely finish earlier when we thrash those kangaroos but the partying will only go on.

The last time this happened was in 1996 .. and again the final was between Sri Lanka and Australia. That too was a massive thrashing of them Aussies, who were just as arrogant as they are this time around.

We were in the US then, at Purdue. After the match, one of our friends, Dr. Keerthi Premasada (who had been in grad school with us in Purdue and had since returned to Univ. of Colombo) wrote an email about the feeling in Sri Lanka .. I can only now begin to understand what he tried to convey then!

The 1996 World Cup holds more memories for me: this was just the beginning of the Web and the current awesome Cricinfo wasn't around. I was then visiting faculty at Purdue and my wife was doing her PhD in Purdue. Only our son Rukmal was around then and he was less than one year old. I was an active member of LAcNet (maybe a director or maybe that was later .. can't remember) and one of the people  driving SLNet, the mailing list that was started in 1987 to help distribute news about Sri Lanka. (Its hard for the Web-generation to understand how hard it was to get news back in the dark days!) Being in the US, there was of course no TV coverage of the Cricket World Cup. (Now you can of course buy it on DishTV etc. but there was no satellite TV either back then!)

Prior to cricinfo, there was a really cool distributed system someone had written to allow one person to type in the game commentary and for it to be distributed in a scalable manner. I can't remember its name but IIRC it started with "a". (I'm pretty sure that was the original power behind cricinfo too but I couldn't locate anything about it from a cursory Web search.) Anyway, I decided to write some programs to bring that data to the Web .. so in 1996, over a few nites just before the World Cup final, I wrote a bunch of Perl scripts that got the data out of that and put it on the Web with a self-refreshing page. Of course bandwidth was sparse and the servers were wimpy back then. (I didn't have access to a proper "server" .. it was the Sun 3/50 (running at a whopping 1.5MIPS) on my desk IIRC.) So a bunch of other Sri Lankan grad student types volunteered to host mirror servers using the software. Then we had a start page which randomly redirected the  reader to one of the mirror sites (nope, there was no GeoIP data available then to do it right) and the mirrors all picked up the data from the master server I was running. Since the match was at nite (it was played in India), Shahani and I stayed up all nite watching the match and babysitting the master server side our whopping 14.4kbps dialup line to Purdue. The software was a phenomenal success: I remember there were 100s of people who "watched" the match like that!

Ah, what a difference 11 years makes! On the other hand, we still don't have Internet TV to watch it on the net and all we have is a (greatly) improved version of that type of software in the form of Cricinfo. However, by the time the next world cup comes and Sri Lanka is again in the final, I'm sure we'll have Joost to watch it with!

Why is it such a great achievement for tiny Sri Lanka to be at the top of the cricket world? First of all, we're the country with the smallest population from all the cricket playing countries. Well that's not strictly true- New Zealand has a significantly smaller population .. but they have 16 times more sheep than people and that's a lot of meat to bulk up on! (Plus, we whacked them all the way home already. Bahhhh.) What that shows is that any country can do it .. size really doesn't matter. What it takes is dedication, committment, team effort and discipline. Small can knock off big.

Another really cool thing about Sri Lankan cricket is that when it comes to cricket, we're all Sri Lankans- not Sinhalese, Tamil or Muslim; just Sri Lankans. Now, if only that spirit lasted for longer than the cricket season we'd never have all the nasty terrorism and counter-terrorism we have right now.

Prasad Dharmasena, one of the original SLNetters and one of the people who helped set up and run the 1996 World Cup scoring system, wrote a piece to SLNet which is now immortalized on the Web: Top Ten Excuses of the Aussies. Prasad, better start up a new list .. we're gonna need it tomorrow nite!

Good luck to our brave cricket team as they go out and whip those Aussies!

Having blulldoze in to Worldcup finals, defeating South Africa, Australia will face mighty Sri Lankans on 28th at Kensington Oval.
Australia team and media are very good at phsychological games before a critical match with a team. It will be normal if you see annoying statements about Sri Lankan team , especially about Jayasuriya, Malinga or Mahela, from Australian cricketers or Australian media, in next couple of days. I hope we will answer all of them with bat and ball on 28th.

Without any surprises Aussies have made their way into the Finals beating South Africa comprehensively in the Semi Final match, yesterday. Australian bowlers demolished the South African batting order with some tight bowling. So now it all comes to that grand Final where Australia and Sri Lanka will meet each other to battle for the ultimate prize. These two teams are the best that has played throughout this tournament, so its definitely gonna be a tight contest.