It arrived!

When I was in the US, my brother wanted me to bring diapers for his baby (Don’t ask! there are diapers in Sri Lanka – I don’t really understand it either) I already had more stuff to fill my bags up and diapers creates more space problems than weight problems. So I decided to send them through post with some of my cloths. The guy at the post office said it would take about 6 weeks to send them via sea shipping. This was late November and I had a good four weeks left before returning, so I decided to sea ship them. And so I did, on 27^th of November 2006.

The package was shipped to my brother’s office. So when he left the country soon after I came back, I was a bit worried that we would never be able to get them. But he had arranged for it to be delivered if it arrives. Weeks passed by and with no news at all about the package and the baby out growing the size of diapers I bought, I also gave up the idea about my cloths in the package. (Despite that there were some shirts and t-shirts in it that I really liked)

After exactly two months since I came back, and more than three after I shipped it, Manori akka (my sister in law) called me last night to inform that it has finally arrived!! After 12+ weeks I don’t even remember what exactly did I put in there, but remember wrapping it up with duct tape. It would be as if I were opening a box of hidden treasure when I open it.

Kandy

The first twenty two years of my life was spent in the beautiful city of Kandy. One of my favourite places in the town since then is this wonderful place overlooking the whole town. Couple of weeks back when I was down with Chikungunya, I went up there to capture few shots.

Refact your C# Code

Refact your C# Code is a blog maintained by Papenoo pa with news, tips and tricks about C# Programming Language.
It has a nice collection of references to downloads and articles related to C# .NET and so is being frequently updated.

P.S. The women from the care taking company hasn't cleaned my desk this morning. It's a total mess (sigh)

Being me

Once in a while I stick my nose into pointless discussions and get carried away. Like this

Chikungunya

Last Tuesday I fell ill. It started with an ache in the shoulders then the whole body was in pain and later came the fever. I was down with the fever till Friday. I couldn’t move myself around. I was completely off balance. An attempt to drive was hilarious but could have been lethal.

Both my Aththamma (grand mother) and Appachchi (Father) caught Chikungunya during the last couple of weeks and I knew the symptoms all too well. So the moment I could lift myself up, I called my sister and went home to Kandy. Rested for another couple of days and returned on Sunday eve. I’m not completely recovered yet but am back at work.

http://www2.alldistributed.com

I have almost completely drifted away from tech blogging. And when I bought my laptop I pledged not to install any development tools on it. Truth be said, I don’t use my laptop at least once a week, and that too is to copy the images from the camera or to watch a DVD. And last weekend, I found out that a colony of ants has made it their home.

After completely dissembling the laptop, cleaning and reassembling, I figured it out that it’s about time I use it everyday. But what for?

I remembered Prabath announcing his purchase of alldistributed.com domain name to do some thing meaningful. So I decided to add a little meaning of mine to it as well. Writing articles does not require a development tool.

At first, we would start off as a simple blog at http://www2.alldistributed.com/, but hopefully we shall soon host our own site with articles, forums etc. on distributed systems.

Globalizing an existing application

Some applications start small and grow in to enterprise class applications that run around the globe. And despite the language changes and platform changes, these applications retain most of their original code intact, including the culture sensitive formatting and operations which were written with just one culture in mind and with no adoptability at all.

So where should we start from and how should we work our way through in making these applications truly world ready? As with any major task, it should be taken one step at a time.

First, we should identify what are the culture sensitive data that needs to be addressed. This includes calendars and dates, currency formatting and number formatting. Then we have the option of changing every code segment to use the formatting classes in System.Globalization namespace or to have a separate central component for formatting. Some times having a separate central component is a bit more desirable for this kind of applications because of the flexibility to alter the functionality a bit based on the requirements of existing components.

It’s a task that takes a lot of time and concentration that you would expect, especially when there are legacy third party components left in the application. But it’s some thing I enjoyed doing over the past couple of months.

Google reader

I had tried out Google reader during the days it was first launched. But I was much comfortable with sharp reader those days and didn't wanted to move. As time moved on and I changed machines and firewalls, I some how stopped using a feed reader and started to just browse to the blogs.
I saw few posts on how well the Google reader has evolved from Merill and few others over the past few months. So I setup the Google reader today with the blogs I read now regularly and it seems quite good, perhaps even better than a windows application. I think I might stick to it at least for some time.

Photo shoot

Yesterday, I wanted to go out and shoot some pictures. So I packed the camera and the tripod and headed to Viharamahadevi park. Lucky for me, all the elephants brought for the Gangarama perahera were there. Putting aside all the need for photography, I got quite friendly with a pregnant lady elephant there.

But to start with, amidst all that, here's a man passing his middle age, probably with weak eye sight, all alone, sitting under a tree and reading some thing... How could I have resisted capturing it?