root@geeklanka$_

Its been almost an year since I last blogged and what can I say, micro-blogging killed blogging for me. Even micro-blogging has got to a point, I don’t do as much as I used to. Perhaps the end of web 2.0 or perhaps I’m getting too old for this :)Anyhow, getting back to the [...]

Fedora 10 (F10) was one of the best fedora release I’ve come to use. I liked it so much that I made it the default OS on my Mac Mini PPC. So naturally I was looking forward to the release of Fedora 11 (F11). But with a couple of release dates slipping, the wait was [...]

SinhalenFOSS, the audio podcast we started a little over an year ago is now available as a vidcast. A couple of months back, I got a call from Dr. Ajantha and I was thrilled to hear of UCSC.tv, the latest venture by UCSC. I was even more thrilled when Dr. Ajantha invited us to produce [...]

Kanchana, my wife had an old P4 machine from back in the days before we met. It was a PC House branded G-Max. Anyways, she’s been wanting to fix it up and give it to her sister to use and so we’d figure it would be a good B’ day gift for her. So last [...]

Considering it’s been exactly 1 year since my last post, I pondered a bit on a title for this post. “The comeback”, “Still live and kicking” or “I’m back!” sprang to mind. But then I realized I’d be fooling my self and you, if I even remotely meant this blog was going to be regularly [...]

The Sinhala Bloggers Union is organizing a 24hrs Blog Marathon starting from 8pm local time today, 18th to the 19th. There are currently over 30 participating blogs, including our sister (or brother depending on where your from site sinhalenfoss.org. Each blogging site will be trying to reach a crazy difficult target of 96 posts! [...]

If your a music lover and also inclined to discover new (&old) music then last.fm is the place to be. I’ve signed up a couple of months back and have really been enjoying music surfing. Thats right! similar to channel surfing last.fm is about discovering music based on what you like and what others who [...]

Recently I’ve been trying to start a Blog and Podcast as a means of reducing the language barrier when it comes to learning and playing around with Free and Open Source Software, aka FOSS. So a couple of months back I started the Sinhalen FOSS Blog at Wordpress.com. The idea of the blog is really [...]

The following post was an April Fools Hoax While bits of it are true such as I did finally move away from Gentoo as my primary distro its got more to do with lack of time and laziness to reinstall gentoo. Hopefully I’ll do another post on me moving to Kubuntu (Ubuntu + kubuntu-desktop [...]

We had a nice couple of sessions on shell programming today at the LSF lab @ UCSC. Anuradha started off with a great introduction that set the stage for the rest of the day. I followed with my invent as I go style of presentation, which for the most part I believe (hope) made sense. [...]

Dr. Ajantha came back from the “International Conference on Advanced Communication Technology” after submitting what appears to be our (that is myself and Wathsala’s) first paper at an IEEE conference. The subject of the paper which you can download and read here, is about a Next Generation Proxy caching system which fuses the idea of [...]

Oh boy what a day it was! I spent a good 5 hrs at the Sri Lankan Airport cargo office on Friday trying to clear a 3″ tiny piece of memory which I had ordered for my Toshiba L1 laptop.I didn’t really expect this to be held by customs in the first place, considering its [...]

Its rare but sometimes it *can* happen. This is an important one to fix! If your running a GNU/Linux server (or desktop), running kernels from 2.6.17 - 2.6.24.1, it is HIGHLY recommended that you update the system using what ever package management system your distro provided, IMMEDIATELY.If not updated, your system could be at risk [...]

Last Friday, I had the privilege to attend a workshop on “One Lap Top Per Child” or OLPC as they call it, at HNB Towers. The OLPC is a marvellous piece of technology (note, I fell short of saying hardware). For instance it has a very low power processor that was developed by AMD to [...]

I’ve just come back from UCSC’s roof top, where RMS came to say hi to the many geeks, students and staff as the last event before he heads back tomorrow noon.The last couple days had been quite hectic, balancing between home, work and organizing RMS events. From before his arrival on the 14th [...]

Right! so you had plenty of time to purchase the touch or the iphone and Steve had enough time to cut me a check for the previous 2 articles. But since the later didn’t happen, lets just concentrate on the former - but this time in combination with GNU/Linux.Once the new line of ipods were [...]

My command center went through a major overhaul this year a couple of weeks ahead of Christmas as I upgraded my 19″ LCD monitor for 32″ LCD TV. This was good because I now no longer need to juggle swap A/V cables when ever I want to switch between watching Dialog TV, Playing the [...]

I’ve been a kde user for very long time, since from before version 3.0. I vaguely remember being excited with version 3.0 to the point I was using the beta releases on a daily basis.Similarly I have been anticipating kde 4.0, the next major release since 3.0 I suppose. But it seems that is just [...]

Previously on Part 1 …Just kidding! Scroll down and read it your self.Its been a while, and I think I’m falling into the “Oh twittering is so much more easier than blogging” trap. So if you’ve been following my twitter, then you’d know that I’ve been discovering quite a few uses for the iTouch.Unfortunately its [...]

So now that I had a little time to play around with this cool gadget, I think its time that I shared some of fun in hacking the iPod Touch. But first a friendly government warning :<disclaimer>WARNING: Hacking gadgets is known to cause bricking and in some instances may even void your warranty. As a [...]

And I’m still here! That’s right, its been exactly 3 years as of today (31st) since I got into the world of blogging. For the curious here is my first blog post which I made out of UCSC’s MSc computer lab, under not so good circumstances :)Anyway thats history. Now lets talk about the future. [...]

so I had my reservations about the iphone mainly due to the lack of 3G but also other reasons. Instead what wanted was really a good PDA device thats flexible and not too limiting - some thing like the upcoming N810.But all that changed when I walked in to BTOptions hoping to checkout an [...]

So I’ve been thinking of getting Nokia’s Linux tablet PC ever since the 770 was released a couple of years ago. When the N800 came that was a major improvement over the 770 and I was hoping to buy that.Well now, Nokia has released a further updated version, the N810 and this just might be [...]

Microsoft’s biggest enemy is probably itself. Getting users to upgrade to Vista hasn’t received the kind of welcome many thought. Microsoft has tried hard to get users to switch using the “Wow starts Now!” campaign and even taking desperate measures such as launching a “Get the facts campaign against itself”, similar to the discontinued [...]

GNU/Linux has been ready for the desktop for quite some time. And yet, when trying to tell the world about how ready Desktop Linux is, using a well prepared Open Office presentation, I am often faced with having to smile and say, oops looks like I need to restart X windows before my computer [...]

Software Freedom Day concluded on the 15th with several events happening around Sri Lanka and the world ofcourse.The Excel World event, which I helped organize, turned out pretty well. It could ofcourse, have been a lot better if not for the matches that kept people @ home. But hey, who’s complaining? Not me! We had [...]

Just came home after dropping off some items at APITT, which is a convenient storage location due to proximity, for tomorrow’s SFD event at Excel World. As usual, the venue got finalized at the last minute (last minute being this evening)!Tomorrow should be a busy day as nothing has been setup as yet. I am [...]

If dist-upgrading your Ubuntu or Debian GNU/Linux distro is taking a considerable amount of time (or says it will), then this might be a useful tip to speed things up a bit.This is nothing new really; something I used to frequently back in the day when Debian was my primary desktop disto. You see I [...]

Undoubtedly one of the best games that came on the PS2 and more recently on the 360 is Guitar Heros II. Ever since I got my hands on this came, I haven’t as yet swapped the DVD to play another game on my PS2. For those who haven’t heard of this game, it basically lets [...]

Ah just came across another Geek-with-an Attitude . Seems like an interesting Blog with “Technological advice you can actually use”. Now excuse me while I run off to perform a DoS.Just kiddingPEacE out