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On deciding the web framework to build Realie, one of the main considerations was should I move to a totally asynchronous framework? Most established web frameworks, including my favorite Rails is built in a synchronous manner and follows a call-stack based model. Real-time web apps needs to be asynchronous. Evented programming model ideally suits to [...]

Last couple of days, I found some time to work on my individual research project for the degree course. The topic area I selected for my project was on “Real-time Web”. Real-time Web is just the opposite of the current way we use the web. Rather than we checking (polling) content providers for updates, content [...]

Though its been two days since the announcement of the results, still there is no end to the spread of speculations & rumors on the concluded Presidential Election in Sri Lanka. I don’t have any strong political bias to either of the main two candidates and didn’t want to accept anything reported in a blind [...]

We are already into the 2nd decade of 21st century and it is very evident that this would be the decade, where Cloud Computing, Realtime web and Mobile Web will start to rule!
As per some buzzword fanatics, this year (2010) will be the transition year from web 2.0 to web 3.0. Buzzwords aside, as [...]

This morning, I came across an interesting article called “Why Introverts Make the Best Leaders”. It gives some really good reasons why introverts could lead better than their extroversive counterparts, who are normally considered as the natural leaders.
Being an introvert myself I know, majority of the people have the perception that introverts are just [...]

Last Wednesday (30th September 2009), the first-ever meatspace gathering of Sri Lankan Ruby Users was held at Ridgecrest Asia (Pvt) Ltd. There were more than 20 passionate, enthusiastic Rubyists filling the room and I would call it a promising start.
For several years, myself personally knew only handful of Rubyists in the country. Though, we had [...]

In last December, when I said to you “I’m going to do a Advent series for Ruby..” you asked “Is this the best you could do? And do you know what advent really means?”. I didn’t really understood what you meant, so I asked “why don’t you just tell me what advent is?” Then you [...]

Independent thinking and self-concious decision making is what builds a person and the society. Yet, it’s the most discouraged, criticised and often punishable act that a person can do. Our culture has done a nice job by misinterpreting and abusing values - such as obedience, loyalty and teamwork to suppress the importance of independent thinking.
This [...]

It’s very sad and alarming to hear the recent incidents taking place at Sri Lankan schools. Government shows they are so concerned about these issues by banning everything they believe that can harm our next generation Mobile phones at all schools are banned, Web Sites with explicit content are banned, screening of “Adults only” [...]

If you were one of the early readers of my blog, you would know that I was selected to do my Bachelors in IT at Faculty of Information Technology in University of Moratuwa. It’s hard to believe 3 years have gone pass in a flash, but reminiscing what I gathered during this period it feels [...]

I love Test Cricket. I believe it has very close resemblance to our real lives, and it gives so much of inspiration. Sri Lanka’s remarkable victory today against Pakistan after being at the jaws of defeat, yet another classic example for that. Pakistan were dominating in first 3 days of the game and it was [...]

I thought of sharing some tips in Ruby on Rails development, which would come in handy especially if you are a newbie.  The cornerstone of all of Rails’ magic is ActiveRecord. As you know it’s an ORM, which hides all cumbersome and mundane SQL by a syntactic sugar coating. However, blind and lazy usage of [...]

First of all sorry for letting this space go on a hiatus yet again.. Though I tried to make it a habit of posting regularly, other priorities didn’t allow me to do it as I wish. In last few months I had to run through lot of challenges in real life and in hacking, which [...]

My first few days doing Maths in Advanced Levels was a nightmare. I usually sucked in Maths in high school and only because of my strong passion for IT made me do Maths (thats the only way in Sri Lanka to gain higher education in IT). I couldn’t grasp a single shit, other than knowing [...]

Most of my university colleagues has this craze of following various professional education courses and certifications. They call it CIMA, BIT, BCS, ACS, SCJP, CCNA, MSDN, PMP and the list goes on. I don’t get the rationale behind this, What’s the benefit of having all these qualifications? What exactly you gain by spending such hefty [...]

It is almost mid January and still this is the first post for new year. I’m looking at 2009 to be a switching year in my life. The days of adolescence have almost comes to its’ end and real life responsibilities seems to be creeping up. The days for bullshitting are numbered, and “I’m still [...]

Inspired by the previous incarnations of Ruby advent calendars, I thought of running one for this year. For those who are unaware, idea is simple. To serve an interesting article on Ruby, each day for the first 24 days of December.
We saw lot of cool stuff in the Ruby throughout the year, so it would [...]

In the past couple of months, I heard this from number of my friends. I hope there will be more joining the club in the coming days. For the benefit of the freshers, I thought of sharing some tips I learned about Ruby hacking (though it may sound as obvious to many) .

Write something that [...]

Don’t get confused over the title, I’m not trying to punch the Merb community as Zed did to Rails. A grasshopper like me don’t even qualify to do such a rant. I’m actually trying to pimp Merb!
Merb is the newest addition to Ruby town. First, it was started just to satisfy the unfulfilled desires of [...]

Bort is an awesome base Rails app, which allows you to get into real action without wasting your time on setting up the most common and boring stuff. It comes with RESTful Authentication, OpenID support, Capistrano Mutli-stage deployments and many other essential plugins, thus lifting good work load. I first got to use Bort when [...]

Recently, I needed to use a color picker with predefined color palette for my work. Thanks to many enthusiastic developers, there are several popular, sophisticated color pickers already exist for jQuery. However, most of these plugins looks complex as if they are made to be used in a online image editor. They are overwhelming [...]

In “Maybe you can’t make money doing what you love”, Seth Godin challenges the conventional wisdom about careers. He argues sometimes converting your passion in to a profession may not work. Though most of us may not willing to accept, this is the harsh reality of life. Rather than doing what you love, you have [...]

Yesterday I participated in the first Academic Symposium organized by our faculty. The topic for the day was Graduation, Entrepreneurship and Success. The panel, which was modereated by Peter D’Almeida (he is also an old Benedictine) included Dr.Sanjeeva, Wegapitiya (Laughs), Harsha Purasinghe (Microimage), Ramesh Shamuganathan (JKCS) and Mohammed Azmeez (Concept Nursery). The discussion raised some [...]

They say pen and paper is the best way to manage a todo list. Following the popular norm, I also started tracking my todos with pen and paper. But after several unsuccessful attempts of finding a pen or deciphering tasks from torn or soaked paper, I felt keyboard and the pixel-screen would be more accessible [...]

Major benefit of using Rails to develop web applications is its smart conventions, which promote developers to adapt to common patterns and avoid wasting time in reinventing the wheel. Rails is strictly bonded with a database and has a pre-defined directory structure. Though these conventions are helpful in common cases, it reduces the flexibility of [...]

Popular notion about developing web apps with Ruby on Rails (or other Ruby frameworks) was “You can write a web app in 15 minutes, but it will take 15 days to deploy it correctly”. Especially if you are coming from the world of PHP, where you have to just write the app and upload it, [...]

Most of us do work hard in our lives, but how many of us achieve the goals we strive for? Complains such as “I never missed a class and never missed homework but I couldn’t get through the exam” or “Though I work 12 hours a day I’m not getting a promotion in my job” [...]

I know most of you may have already assumed this blog is dead and removed from your RSS readers too. However it’s not..I always have the intent to keep on blogging, but lack of consistentcy and pure laziness of mine didn’t really help the cause.
During the past six months of silence, actually I tried to [...]

The week ended was a great week for Sri Lankan FOSS community, as the father of Free Software Movement, Richard M. Stallman (RMS) paid a visit to the country. Yesterday, I got the opportunity not only to listen to a live speech of the legend, but also to grab a picture with him. It was [...]