New Decade New Life

After couple of months silence, I thought of doing a blog post. My life has being an active and dynamic one since I've born! :-). It has come to this state passing various stages. Once I turned back and look at my life, I don't have any regrets! I've done almost all the good, bad, fun, adventure stuff that a boy could do. I heard most of the people answer the question in TV etc, "if you want to go back to a state of your life, to which part you would go?" and they answer "My school life". If I would have to answer that question, I would say "I don't want to go back, I just want to move forward and end this life happily". It's because I've done all the things in my capacity and have enjoyed the life to the maximum, gained lots of knowledge and experience. I haven't missed any thing! Those who missed certain things in their pass wishes if they could go back and do those things!.

Now that I'm 30 years old, and going to be a father soon, yeh my wife is 7 months pregnant as at now. I'm a happily married family guy! Now I'm enjoying being a husband, father and the total family life. We should not postponed the good things we need to do. Since I'm following a middle path and living a simple life with basic needs it's bit easy for me to do good things, like going to a temple, keeping fit, taking my family on a trip, etc.

In this 2010, I thought of changing my career from being a high-tech to a semi-tech and more human oriented. I had this concept of being a "Human Oriented IT Person" for a while and I got a golden opportunity to move in to that level. Last month I joined WSO2, one of the world's leading Open Source SOA Company runs in US, UK and Sri Lanka, founded by a great Sri Lankan scientist Dr. Sajiva Weerawarna. I joined WSO2 as the Community Manger and the Editor of the Open Source Community Developer portal called OxygenTank. With this new role, I'll be able to get more closer to the Open Source Community as a whole and specially around WSO2. Since I have experience in Network/Systems Administration, Engineering, Project Management, Training, Consultancy, FOSS Advocacy, public speech, etc I have a good understanding in IT, Business and Community.

Well... It's a new decade, and a new life! Have to do lots of new/good things. Catch you all soon!

Apache hitting the road!

If you were dreaming of meeting Apache (World's No 1 web server) big shots Greg Stein, Justin and our own Sri Lankan Apache contributors, this will be the best opportunity for it. Apache Asia Road Show is a 3 day event with 2 days Conference and a single day hackerthon. Hurry!!! reserve your seat now before it too late.

My house for Sale

This is not a spam. :). Yes I'm selling my house. Here's the details.

Location: Ampara, Sri Lanka.

Directions: 1.3 KM from Ampara Town, 1KM to Ampara Base Hospital. ( Located in a Residential area)

Description : 3 rooms, 2 bathrooms (one attached to master bedroom), Living room, Dining hall, Kitchen. Full ceiling, fans in every room, 24 hour water supply, electricity, overhead tank Land is 43 perches and have 5 coconut trees (grown for 30 years), 2 King-coconut trees, Jack tree, Mango, etc. You have enough room to park more than 4 vehicles in the garden area. Fully covered boundary wall.

Price : 5, 000000/- (Negotiable) US $43555/-

Those who are interested please call

Weerasinghe (My Dad) : +94 714446404
email : mdweerasinghe@gmail.com

I'll put some photos later. Still couldn't find time to visit Ampara as I'm stuck in Colombo.

It's 09/09/09

Life has many patterns. And we always like patterns. For example, many people love to have a phone number with some kind of a number pattern. (688688, 566566, etc). We can pay some extra cash and get a vehicle registration number with a pattern, like PP-1111. In another hand, some numbers have some value to it, like "Lucky 7", "Hero Number 1". Even our Postal Department have issued 9 new stamps to remember today. Same way in Sri Lankan culture many people consider the number 9 as a bad number. (නවය නපුරුයි). But personally I don't believe such things. But I like patterns. So this blog post is to denote the pattern of the day, 09/09/09. September 09, 2009. Wish you all a bright future. :).

Using iPod Nano (3Gen) with Ubuntu

Couple of years ago, using Apple iPods with GNU/Linux was not an entertaining experience for most of people. But now the FOSS world is more promising on that and also in many other apps on cross platform interoperability. Earlier, My wife asks me and I used to sync the movies, music vids, mp3 to her iPod using gtkpod. I had to do it because i used ffmpeg to convert the videos to MOV format and then sync them to the iPod via gtkpod. But here after she's going to do it by her own. So I had to find some "click and go" way to covert the files and had to teach her on using gtkpod.

YouTube and google video are the main search repositories for music videos. The best tool I found for this was DownloadHelper extension for Firefox. The version I'm using here is 4.3. It can download videos and convert them to many formats as single files or as a batch. And the extension is actively developed and updates are released frequently.

After converting the downloaded video you can put them to the iPod using gtkpod. Using gtkpod is not a big deal. It's simple and any one can catch the features within a half and hours time.


Click "Save Changes" to write the changes to the iPod. And you can use Sync Directories or files options in the File menu of gtkpod. In order to perform the tasks smoothly you need to have some software pre-installed in your GNU/Linux system.

• ffmpeg
• libmp4v2-0
• All other multimedia codecs

If you have a movie file (avi, wmv, or any other type) you can use ffmpeg to convert them easily to MOV and can be used with your iPod Nano. Haven't try it with iPhones and iPod classics, cos I don't have those with me yet. ;-).

This is the basic way to use the iPod with gtkpod. You can try out other stuff like online music syncing when you have time. :)

Cheers!

King of Pop, no more

Yesterday I lost another "one of my legendary characters". I have few favourite entertainers, namely; Bruce Lee, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Michel Joseph Jackson, Dr. Dre, Eminem and few others. But among them, there are very few who I call " A Legend". Bruce Lee was a legend. And Michel Jackson.

I still remember when I was 8,9 years old I didn't know that was MJ who dance like that, sing like that, but I liked the moves he make and the accent. I started to immitate him by wearing cloths like him and shout "aauww" like him. As I grow with the time, finally I managed to catch the moon walk and some other dancing movements he made by watching his videos. I started to collect the lyrics, CDs and sang alone with the CD. No one told me he's the king of pop but he was a king to me. No one told me nor I didn't have Internet or Sat TV to get to know about his unmatched skills, but I thought to my self no one in this earth can do break dance as he does. Finally today he leaves at his 50th year of life, leving my childhood memories with me.

Dear Michel Jackson, you were the hero of dance world to me. And you'll always be in my heart till I die.

"There's a place in your heart
And I know that it is love
And this place could be much brighter than tomorrow
And if you really try
You'll find there's no need to cry
In this place you'll feel there's no hurt or sorrow"

Dear King, thank you very much for the joy you gave me from my childhood and for the unbileiveable contribution to the music world and for helping many of the helpless people in the world.

Image from celebrity-blogger.com

Welcome to new Sri Lanka

By now we know and believe Velupillai and Other terrorist leaders are killed by our Armed Forces or they have suicide. We knew this will end soon. I like to give my sincere gratitude to our Three forces, Police, Civil security forces and Mr. President for scarifying their life for the future of Sri Lanka and for our lives.


I salute you all!!.