Photo per day progress

I just posted at http://365.photoweaver.net for the 46th consecutive day! I'd like to think that my photography has improved; but I know for a fact that now I'm more satisfied.

I no longer feel limited by the gear I have; I'm quite confident that 80% of the time I could make the photo I want with my existing gear. For the remaining 20% of the time; it's simply not worth it to invest thousands of dollars to capture those moments on digital storage.

I also feel that my 70-300 VR is quite obsolete in my camera bag. Its use probably fall in to that 20% of the times above so my success level with the current gear should be something like 80.5% and the limitations should be 19.5% or something. I only use it to take pictures of birds and; to make any decent picture with its light hunger, I need to shoot at ISO levels above 1000; which simply isn't fair by my old D80. I'm not going to buy a better body only to satisfy a single lens.

All that said; I've also come-up with a list of two things (he he) in a precise order by which I would benefit from having them.

1.) One more SB-600 Speed Light
2.) Nikon 105mm Micro (I would also settle for the 60mm Micro)

Now; I do have some cash which I've preserved for something of that sort; but the problem is, I don't have a friend coming down from the US to bring that for me..

Anyways; I would still kill to get myself a D3s or even a D700.. But I wouldn't spend my hard earned money on them yet. I simply don't need them.


        

Kubuntu 10.04 LTS

I've used Linux some years ago. In the days of Red Hat 6.4 and then 7.1. My career in .NET development and probably some frustrations with compatibility issues with my hardware at that time, made me switch back to Windows and never look back. I've since used and promoted Windows and had perceived all Linux compilations to be at the same level as Red Hat 6.4.

I did downloaded Fedora 11 in 2008 or so due to frustrations over Windows Vista but somehow never installed it. When Windows 7 came along, I thought Windows days are here to stay. But Janaka at office kept talking about Ubuntu once in a while and that made me want to give it a shot.

I received my CD of Kubuntu 10.04 LTS from good people at Canonical couple of days ago. I installed it on a VM on the same day and was impressed with the user experience. Today, I installed it on my father's laptop and boy! I'm loving it.

So, those of you who are using pirated copies of windows making the excuse that Linux is not in par... Take another look at Kubuntu 10.04. It's way better looking and faster than Windows 7 and is guilt free!

The DigiKam application is a feature rich image editing tool at par with Nikon's Capture NX. Open Office has come a long way to be a good office suite and Google Chrome lives by the name of Chromium in the Linux world. I haven't looked at any of the IDEs yet, but I'm sure there are some that could compete with Microsoft's Visual Studio.

So, this is me, a pro-microsoftee asking you to try out Kubuntu. Believe me, it's really nice.

365 Photo Project

I've been taking pictures for few years now; but never had the will to do a photo per day project. But after buying the S90, I thought I would do one. A whole 365 day thing!!! Let's see if I could keep that kind of a commitment.

I've counted two days so far.. publishing at http://365.photoweaver.net. I'm struggling to keep up already... But let's see; If things go really bad, I might post photos from my phone :)

Update: Is there something wrong in google app hosting?

Found out the cause; If you are using SLT ADSL; you cannot reach any of the google hosted contents using a custom domain name. SLT as usual; has screwed it up.

May be they are taking advise from China and are in the process of blocking out Google.. or whatever. In all accounts.. fuck SLT; they seem to even block the Google's DNS server IPs.. I was using 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as my DNS settings and I was experiencing a lot of failures in DNS resolving. Didn't suspect SLT. I just switched to SLT DNS servers and lot of things got corrected. But who knows.. may be they are monitoring my internet usage too.

You could use a custom proxy for now to access all those unreachable blogs with custom domains.

But long term... complain to SLT. Make demands. Or let's just switch ISPs.. Dialog?

Wordpress acts Linux (or worse?)

Our team decided to start a group blog to write about tech stuff. After spending at least couple of hours deciding on the domain name (I'll refrain from posting the name now as it's not in proper shape yet) we spent only a few minutes in deciding on the host (blogger/wordpress) to finally deciding to use wordpress.

If you own a blogger blog, you know that Google offer a domain name and Google Apps (docs, email, sites, chat and so much more) for your blog for just $10 per month. If you already have a domain name, everything above is free. Yes, FREE.

Wordpress on the other hand is charging 9.97$ for using a custom domain name (No. That's not for the domain name. That's just for using a custom domain name on the blog) But of cause they offer the domain name for a subsidized price of $5. What do they offer for 9.97$? Just the blog of cause. No email, no nothing. Just the blog. You have control over DNS so, if you do have an email hosting account somewhere, you could add a MX record.

How do you customize your Google profile in blogger? You just go there and change things right? It's all intuitive. Wordpress, on the other hand haven't heard of the concept of intuitiveness. It's all a mess there.

So what's with Linux you ask? it's like this. Linux is secure, powerful and so on; but the effort and the learning curve it takes a beginner to accomplish a very common task like installing a printer is quite high. So it is in Wordpress; but worse; this is a paid service.

PhotWeaver.net

I was thinking of separating my photo-blogging from day-today blogging...

I know; all I do on this blog right now is photo blogging; but you know I write things once in a while, and I used to tech-blog too. I want to start all that again; but that would bore off most of you who come here just to see some photos.

The options I had was either to keep this as the photo blog and create a separate blog for other stuff or create a separate photo blog and make this the general blog. I opted the second mostly because of existing content of this blog and the template issues.

So I started PhotoWeaver.net. I hope you will visit me there, and follow too.

For starters, I'm posting the photos which are already on my flickr stream. So some of you would have seen the stuff before. Bear with me for a while, and I will start posting new photos there.

Religion and Governance in Sri Lanka

I've been reviewing an article by Prasad Mapatuna on the subject "Religion and Governance in Sri Lanka" lately, and now we think it's in a state to be shared with the general public.

This article contains the views and beliefs we share, with regards to the religious influence towards governance and it's effects.

We intend to initiate a dialog on the subject. So please download the document below and give it a read. And let us know what you think of what Prasad discuss.

Please email your comments to comments@icloneable.com

Download the document

Is my identity stolen?

There's at least one another person in Sri Lankan blog-sphere making comments by the names "Mahasen" / "Mahasen Bandara". I know quite a few Mahasens' and there could be other Mahasen Bandaras' as well; But I've been the sole Mahasen Bandara in the Sri Lankan blog-sphere for a while now; so it's annoying to see someone else posting comments using my name.

Especially, this other Mahasen Bandara is expressing some political ideologies which I don't really subscribe to. And friends actually do buzz me to check whether that's me...

Since almost all of those comments I've seen from that other Mahasen Bandara are of political nature, I have a slight suspicion whether that is intentional identity theft (Not that many people care what my political views are...).

So; to whom those who care; I never comment on blogs without signing in, if the blogs have blogger or openID authentication. If the blogs don't have authentication, and I really want to leave my comments behind, I always leave the following credentials:

Name : Mahasen
Website/blog: http://mahasen.blogspot.com
email: blogger at icloneable.com

New Year Wishes

May your heart always be warm
May your mind always be calm
May your health always be good
and, May you have a happy new year!

Starting it all over

It's been some time since I moved in to a place with fixed line telephone and my office firewall unblocked blogger. So I could have really blogged earlier than this if I wanted to... But I didn't feel like it up till now.

Things have been generally okay but could have been much better. To put aside personal life, which again could have been much better, work has been as boring and frustrating as it could be. I enjoy solving design puzzles and writing code. But that's exactly what I don't get to do these days.

The company is more focused on engaging in enterprise level business even at the stake of not following proper engineering practices, and that conflicts with my interests.

May have to abandon my blog

Our MIS leadership, after pathetically proving how inefficient and incompetent they are during the last couple of days, has decided to block access to blogger (including many other commonly accessed sites/blogs - not to mention some banking sites) from our network. And I do not have an internet connection at home. So that may well mean that I am forced to abandon my blog, unless I find a house with a fixed line telephone, so I could blog from home.

So folks, if this is the end, thank you so much for reading my blog over the past 3+ years and making comments. I got to know many nice people through the blog and wish them all the best in their lives.

Any one could reach me at blogger@icloneable.com

සිංහල වියුම

මෙච්චර කල් බ්ලොග් කරල සිංහලෙන්නුත් ලියල බැලුවෙ නැත්තම් හරි නෑ නෙ

My love of Tamil music

Couple of days back, I made a comment on Parthi's blog about A R Rahman's music. But he seems to have thought I was being extravagant. But the truth is, I listen to Tamil songs more than I listen to Sinhalese or English. So I gave him a glimpse of my Tamil Music collection. And today thought of writing how it all started.

I never was a music lover. I had several hundreds of MP3s in my machine but never listened to them regularly. During late 1999 or early 2000, my good friend Shamik (yeah Muslim) brought his hard disk to be backed up to mine. In there was a huge collection of Tamil MP3s. I played couple of them randomly and was touched deep in my heart by the fascinating music. Of cause I didn't understand any words. It was just music for me. I decided to keep the MP3s and listened to them much often.

After some time I realized that since I do not understand the words, I could concentrate on anything else while listening to them (Which I couldn't while listening to Sinhala or English) and more over, that music always had a soothing effect on me. It made me calm and happy. So I became an Tamil Music lover - they were in my car, in my phone, at home and at office.


BTW, I like Tamil movies too

If I blog about this...

I was accused of blogging about politics and terrorism just to attract traffic. No hard feelings - I'm excited to see more traffic, but I write what ever that comes to my mind when ever I feel like writing it down. When people read them and comment, there's a little excitement in it. But I don't think what I write about politics or the terrorists would have any impact on the system or the situation in the country. Nor do I expect to change the way people think. It would be bonus if they ever do.
There had been many a discussions in this blog on the terrorist issue (No it's not ethnic and that's my stance) and how it should be handled. Every one had their say and then that's that.
The current news highlights are on eviction of Tamils who are from NE and could not provide a viable reason for staying in Colombo from the lodges. I'm tempted to write my view on it, even when it serves no purpose.

• Why were they here in the first place? Why did they left their homes to come live in lodges in Colombo?
• How on earth do they afford paying for lodging, food and all other expenses? They do not work here. Can't presume they earned that much money while in NE.
• What do they do here? If they aren't working or learning, why are they in Colombo for months? How and on what do they spend their time?

Anyways, that's that and I'm having a issue with how Microsoft Resource Schema 1.3 and 2.0 stores OcxState. There's a difference but I can't find it documented any where...

Spending time with parents

For the past couple of months I was unable to spend much time with my parents. So this weekend I came to Kandy and spending four days with them. So I won't blog much till next Monday.

Mistranslation of Rathana theros speach.

The heading "Tamils don't belong to Sri lanka, they should fight in Tamilnadu- Rathana thera" in lankaEnews website is a slight mistranslation from the Sinhalese.
The monk is implying that Tamils has their origins in Tamilnadu and Sri Lanka is the home land of Sinhalese. Check the star gallery link in the same site and you would understand the standards of the site.

Anonymity and Screen names in blogsphere

Modesty and fear are the main factors that make us behave the way we do. We control our expressions of anger, hatred, disgust, lust etc. because of them. Anonymity provides the opportunity to be free from the need to be modest or feared to express their true opinions. It also shows the true character of a person. Most of the anonymous comments we see in blogs are expressions of such depressed opinions.

When the anonymity of those people is lost, they get hyper defensive of their acts as they know in the back of their minds that their true tarnished personalities are being exposed.

People who present themselves with screen names are often just being defensive of their opinions than being guilty conscious about it. They represent their personality with grace unlike the anonymous. These people wouldn’t mind exposing their true identities to those they trust.

Localized web

It amazes me how many websites provide localized contents these days, it's quite more than I would have imagined.

I'm working on a application that should be supported in several languages including Japanese and French. So often, I have my regional settings set to these languages. And when I browse the web, I get pages in those languages...

Me and my cameras

During my childhood, my brother had a camera, first a Konika auto focus point and shoot one and then a Zenit SLR. I loved them, however hardly ever was allowed to use them. Then I had a point and shoot camera of a brand I don’t recall. All I did with it was - point and shoot. Then there was a Canon point and shoot camera my sister brought from Japan… can’t remember making much use of it either.

Then I bought a mobile phone with an inbuilt camera - a Nokia 6230i with a 1.3MP camera. I shot a fair deal with that one and felt the need for a *real* camera. Perhaps it was the digital factor that made me addicted for shooting. So when I went to US last year, the first thing I bought was a Canon PowerShot S2 IS with 12X optical zoom. I needed more optical zoom for some reason but I seldom use the mega zoom. S3 was just released by that time but I wasn’t convinced it is worth for the extra $80.

I shoot a lot with it and go out solely to shoot as well. Among other things I’ve figured so far are the facts that, I got a lot to learn and I should have invested on a dSLR. Hmmm…

How you find me

It’s quite interesting to know how and where from my visitors come. There are like 40~50 visitors (unique IP) everyday who just type in http://mahasen.blogspot.com or use a bookmark. Probably syndicates count in here as well. Then there are another 50 or so coming from kottu.org, achcharu.org or geeklanka.com. Another 20 or so comes from sites that have linked to my blog. An interesting 15~20 come from search results every day as well. Search criteria that had directed here yesterday were
“Mahasen”
“Tamil Elam”
“Tamil blog Canada”
“sri lanka blog”
“Virtusa”

Interestingly, some IPs have visited me 20 times during yesterday!

Most of my visitors come from Sri Lanka, second highest is shared between Australia and United States. There are some regular visitors in the UK and the Middle East as well.