Its the third largest sector in the global entertainment industry (Yes movies and music come on top)…and has a massive double digit growth beating other giants in the industry, recording a revenue of $41 billion for 2008.  A multi-discipline realm of professionals including biologists, physicians, artists, musicians and programmers, 25000+ people all over the world, making other people’s imaginations a reality. Yes it is The Interactive Entertainment Industry or most popularly known as Video Gaming.

Sri Lanka has a youth gaming community sizing over 10000 specially in cities like Colombo, Kandy and Kurunegala as hardcore gamers and thousands more all over the island as fans and followers of PC, mobile and console gaming. Annually they get to meet each other and compete to the heart’s content at events like “Srilankan Cyber Games”. But until now Sri Lanka never had a gaming magazine. Print or electronic media never considered it as a serious form of entertainment. The popularity of gaming among kids, youth and young-at-heart urged for a voice…. until now.

Bunch of friends got together to create the Sri Lanka’s first ever gaming magazine, The Gamer. And its the second of its kind in South Asia. With strategy guides, reviews, gaming events,competitions and new releases it will cater to the gaming community of Sri Lanka and beyond. The first issue was out in September and it was available in all leading book stores such as Vijitha Yapa, MD Gunasena, Sarasavi, etc. and in popular gaming cafes and DVD stores as well. And if you are lucky enough, you will still be able to grab your self a copy left. This inaugural issue of ‘The Gamer’ features newly released NFS: Shift and many more hot titles including Majesty 2, Colin McRae Rally: Dirt 2, Resident Evil 5. A special strategy guide on FIFA 09, Reviews on The Sims 3, World of Goo etc is also included. Since The Gamer’s intention is to bring forth & expose the gaming community to the general public as well to increase the awareness of the Sri Lankan enthusiasts regarding the latest developments in the international gaming arena, this issue covers the news on World Cyber Games – Sri Lankan Preliminaries too.

Ahhh… and I almost forgot to mention I write about FOSS (and specially Linux) games for ‘The Gamer’.

These days we are getting ready to publish the second issue of ‘The Gamer’ – the follow-up to a great success seeing almost all 1500 copies sold. If you like to contribute to the magazine’s future issues with articles please drop a mail to edit.gamer@gmail.com
If you wish to contribute in any other way or to find out more about advertising opportunities in ‘The Gamer’ contact mkt.gamer@gmail.com

You can follow ‘The Gamer’ on twitter at http://twitter.com/TheGamer_SL or be a fan on facebook at http://bit.ly/48AvpW

I came across this interesting talk titled ‘How the Net aids dictatorships’ by Evgeny Morozov from Former Soviet Republic of Belarus, while going through the daily dose of vodcasts and thought of sharing it because we as a developing nation has to have an clear idea where all these technical advancements will lead our society amidst the heated arguments about human rights, media freedom and censorship. While we all think of web 2.0 and new media as a tool for empowering the societies and widen citizen’s view points, do they really take people out of repression and pave the way to a democratic nation?

He tells that giving them more connectivity and devices doesn’t mean democracy will eventually follow. Rather than fuelling cyber-activism, technologies like internet, television and other media are shifting the youth to cyber-hedonism. Some cool imageries, comparisons and wordings. Most importantly the insight he gives us in the end, its all about empowering the intellectuals,dissidents and members of the civil society, not about the number of ipods,cellphones or laptops per head…

‘What might be my last long holiday ends in few more days’ said Pathfinder in his last post and kept me thinking for a while. ‘Oh yes few more hours left and what did I do?’. I wanted to answer… in one big sentence… and found out so many snapshots, animations, quotations (and imaginations of course) hovering all over my mind, trying to sum up the whole experience.

So.. I thought of writing a blog post.

Among the crazy trips, movies, talks and meet ups there were some significant events… highlights.  TEDx Colombo was cool. I had been watching TED talks via miro for a while and it was so nice to see TED fans of Colombo getting together, watching TED talks, sharing ideas and building connections. Though it was not a grand event like TED conference itself, I think it accomplished what it was meant to be.. A TEDx event in Colombo. And another good thing is I got to meet some bloggers including Dinidu, St.fallen, jester100 and indi. And the evening ended quite nicely, coffee with Suchetha, who also happened to be at the event.

Then came the 10-day short film workshop for children, where we volunteered and had a great time. Constance Tillotson from US with famous Sri Lankan filmmakers Anoma Rajakaruna and Kasinathar Gnanadas did the coaching. There were kids selected from all over the island, to learn film making in a fun-filled way. We helped out everyone with translations etc. and the kids made 8 lovely short films in the end. Evenings were spent playing cricket, rugby, handball and a mixture of everything near the Bolgoda Lake. The 10 days were full of little little incidents that fills up my memory. Young kids who were good in English helping their friends to overcome language barriers. I felt they were unknowingly repairing the bridges which were forgotten for generations. One night while having dinner, I remember, a little Tamil boy comes to my friend to ask what is the Sinhala translation of ‘Are you angry with me?’

It was a memorable experience for all the volunteers too who had passions varying in fields of Engineering, Music, Performing arts etc, not to mention the other-worldly discussions we had at free times, ranging from Osho, la vie en rose to web 2.0 .

We came back to Colombo to involve in another range of events at the university which included the Annual programming competition, Award Ceremony and Indifferenz 2009. Here are some of the videos created for the events. With all these cool stuff happening, I missed out some (including this,that and the other) where I really wanted to be too. But hopefully, most of those have plans to be held next year too.

So this marks the end of a long, eventful vacation. (Most probably the longest I’ll get for few decades) New subjects have been released for enrollment for the new semester. Many (including Intelligent Systems, Image Processing, Embedded Systems, Communications and Numerical Analysis) sound cool enough to keep us busy for the coming months, (meaning less of twitter, facebook and gReader). But as always, every second will lived, will tell us a story as they sing… “All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be.”

It’s the holiday you were waiting for after a few days hard work. You settle at the monitor, looking forward to a movie marathon… Few minutes in to the movie and you realize that it’s not going to work.The accent of the actors and foreign language phrases… you can’t get a thing! So you go for the subtitles..
After trying many subtitle sources all over the web, you find every dialogue is either few seconds late or early than the subtitles! Trying to synchronize the lips and the voices makes you feel dizzy… What a day its turning out to be…
Don’t panic. Here comes Gaupol – The free and open source subtitle editor. Built for GNOME using GTK, it supports a variety of subtitles including .txt, .sub, .srt and .ssa

To install use synaptic package manager or type the usual line in the terminal

sudo apt-get install gaupol

Then open your subtitle file in gaupol to edit as you wish. [Tools] >> [Shift Positions] will let you shift it by a desired time interval to synchronize it with the movie. Save the modified file and it’s done!

Sit back and enjoy the movie.

Yeah.. It’s coming to a crazy peak these days! How will this guy marry? How will that gal die? What Spongebob character are you? What flavor of pie are your neighbor? Do we care? It seems.. Yes. When I saw the clean, organized, pretty fb interface getting cluttered by hundreds of these crap – quizzes day by day, I sometimes wondered what’s wrong with these people. Facebook was turning into another hi5,tagged or mySpace for me.Then came…. the greasemonkey to the rescue.

1. In Firefox  install the Greasemonkey add-on. Then you will see a small monkey face at the right bottom corner of your browser window.Unlike other firefox addons which does one particular thing, Greasemonkey extension lets you add so called ‘user scripts’ which can change behavior of a web page. In the next step we are going to try one such user script.
2. Click here to Install the Facebook Purity GreaseMonkey script. Go to facebook home and notice the difference. The script puts a little message in the top right hand corner of your page saying how many apps were blocked.

Gone are the days, that we kept blocking them and they were born next day with a different name again, again and again like a monster in a movie of the twentieth century. I have my neat facebook home page back again.

PS:

You can experiment with more and more GreaseMonkey Scripts to make your surfing easier, cleaner and effective. My favourite is IMDB pirated version. But try to avoid scripts which are not from userscripts.org.

If you are someone who is madly in love with these quizzes, I’m really sorry for killing off your enjoyment (and ultimate source of future predictions) . I never thought this will make it to a new blog post, but the sad status messages, and angry blog posts like this and this,all over the web, made me do this.

If you are using Chrome instead of Firefox, try GreaseMetal

Image Credit: Joshua Porter

පය පැකිලීමෙන් කිසියම් මිනිසෙක් බිම ඇද වැටුණේ ය. දණි පනි ගා නැගිට ගත් ඔහු දෙවැනි වරටත් විසි වී ගොස් ඇද වැටුණි.
“චිහ්, දෙවැනි පාරටත් වැටෙන වග දන්නවනම් මං නැගිටින්නෙම නැතුව ඉන්නවනෙ” ඔහු කී ය.

චීන උපහාස කතාවක් ඇසුරිනි

විභාගේ ඉවර වෙලා ගෙදර එන ගමන් මේ කතාව මතක් උණේ විභාග ශාලාවෙන් එළියෙ ඇහුණ කතන්දර නිසා වෙන්නැති මට හිතෙන හැටියට

Hmmm.. Let it be by fear or by excitement.. Its true I need something to send shivers down my spine to write it down in my blog. It happened yesterday amidst the firecrackers, by a thread of photo comments in facebook, the place I’d least expect it to be. Written by a (lazy-to-blog )student living several thousand miles away from his motherland, these few lines gave me food for thought.

Yes we see all that. We made Kiribath Last night and had a gathering with few of our friends, some were celebrating, and some, for the wrong reason. I hear them say worst things that could come out from a Sri Lankans mouth at this moment. Which made me to think about what we are and we should be celebrating.

And I don’t think we shouldn’t be celebrating this situation for the reasons we are thinking of. If we think about it, we have been in this stupid situation for our whole life time. We have been through horror that no other country has been, we have been under constant fear. Death was just too casual for us. Blocked roads literary blocked a brighter future. It is a shame that we have made bad decisions and chose wrong paths in the past. Being a country especially with a Buddhist background and a rich culture we could have acted more rationally and sensibly.

We should recall the reasons why we were in this situation at the first place. Must come to the senses at least now and understand that this was not just an issue with the LTTE or Prabhakaran. Prabhakaran and LTTE is just one face of the devil. We may have destroyed it. But the real devil or the cancer has not been treated yet. People who talk are the people have never walked that talk.

Everybody thinks that they know everything about the war, especially the once who has never been at one. We should regret loses of our fellow brothers and sisters. As for me I even regret loses of young men and women of the LTTE, and the millions of Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and all Sri Lankans, because we all have been affected by this in some way.

Our country is strong, especially now. Since we have a “king“. It’s good to see after a long time (May be for the first time in our life time) we have gathered together with our Sri Lankan flags on for a reason other than Cricket or Susi. But still the I feel an extra weight on my Sri Lankan shirt, as I know that we have a greater responsibility to overcome what we have been through, rise like one and build our nation to be one country to its very meaning, a place where all ethnic groups treat each other fairly and respect each other. We have been in this kind of a situation after the tsunami and we made the whole world to see what we are capable of. And now we have a greater challenge to win.

We have now reached one of the most critical junctions of our country’s path. The whole country, (at least the majority of Sinhalese are) is on one side having one thought in their minds. And I believe that has a great power. We must use that power to change our mind sets and understand the true meanings of our lives and true meanings of our country’s history. And we shall overcome. We shall change. All our minds were corrupted with WAR, by force or by choice. But now, it’s over. Now is the time for us to hit our breaks and think what we should do now. We are left with hundreds of thousands of displaced innocent Tamils. And may be millions of extremist Tamils really pissed and may do anything to get back us. If we go back to eighties and act like those idiots & maniacs back then another war is not so much of a fiction.

We are blessed to have such a leadership to bring one country back together. Now he is faced with a much larger responsibility, to heal a broken nation. The final political solution and the ideology that would define such act will define the future of our country as well. This is the best time to do such. If we make the mistake of putting a plaster on it again we may lose the greatest opportunity of our life time and will face the consequences of it tragically. We all must act wise. Especially the majority Sinhalese.

“WAR, NEVER AGAIN!!!. Celebrate not the war but the end, the peace that it brought us. Celebrate the bravery of our fellow brothers and sisters. Salute the courage and unity of our people. Regret the losses of all beings. Hope for this light to brighten the future and to set our sights on a land with Love, Peace, Respect and Unity among all Sri Lankans. “

And he contiues..

And to add, This should be a Sri Lanka’s Victory and a Sri Lanka’s Celebration. not just Sinhalese. If you have seen or read about such wars and their history and their aftermath, its a fact that people who were caught in cross fires and even the solders will be left with personal, emotional and social trauma. The sights that they have witness will scar them for the rest of their lives. It is very important at this stage to focus on those IDPs and and prepare for a well planed rehabilitation process. This is important for many reasons.

1. Because they are Sri Lankans
2. Because we need to show them that we are still not their enemies.
3. propaganda to wash off any scars made on us by outside.
4 .Start to change our own mindsets.

For the next couple of days, months and may be years we will face with lots of trust issues. from both sides. Tamils, even the innocents will fear to face any Sinhalese because they are still haunted by the black July.
So we will have to compromise and reach out for those who need. help them out. It is said that the way to mans heart and mind is through the stomach. JVP, Hela-Urumaya and other Extrema fractions, now have a responsibility to show the people of their real ideologies. We should stop making all this a numbers game as well. what done is done.

PA, UNP and all the other political wings have a responsibility to open their forums and start discussions with minor representations (real once) about the “Political Solution”. It must be a democratic one which will define equality and harmony among all races, religions, ethnicitys in side one Nation.

“WAR, Never Again!!!!”

JayaSri
Hirunda

Photo credit: daylife.com

තවත් අලුත් අවුරුද්දක් එළැඹ සැණෙකෙළි සමය ගෙවී ගියේය. නැවතත් වෙනදා වාගේම මේසය ළගම දවස ගත කරන්නට කාලය පැමිණ තිබේ. අන් වසර වල මෙන් කොහෝ නාදය වත් රතිඤ්ඤා හඬවත් මගේ දෙසවන් වල පිලිරැව් දෙන්නේ නැත.

අවුරුදු සමරන්නට පුල පුලා බලා සිටි කිරි දරුවන් ඇතුලු ගම් වැසියන් නව දෙනෙකු අමු අමුවේ වෙඩි තබා ඝාතනය කරනු ලැබ උන්ගේ නෑ සියන්ගෙ විලාපයෙන් ඇලලී ගිය ගම්මානයකට හූවක් දුරින් තවත් එවැනිම ගමක අවුරුදු සමය ගතකොට හද දෝංකාර දෙන අඳුරු මූසල මුස්පේන්තු හැඟීමෙන් යුතුව මේ සටහන ලියමි.

තුන්සිය හැටපස් දවසක් මහපොළොවත් සමග පොර අල්ලා දහදිය කඳුලු වගුරවා නෙලාගත් අස්වැන්න තම නැ සිය මිතුරන් සමග සතුටින් රස බලන්නට ලැබෙන වසරේ එකම අවස්ථාවත් බලාපොරොත්තුවත් විසින් මුවට ගෙනා සිනා පොද, කටින් කට දොරින් දොර ඉගිලී ආ බියකරු මස් වැද්දන් ගැන ආරංචි නිසා වියැකී යන අයුරු දකින්නට මම අවාසනාවන්ත වීමි.

වෙනදා මෙන්ම අටු කොටු වී, මුං, මෑ, තල, කොල්ලු ඈ බව බෝගයන්ගෙන් පිරී තිබුණේ ය. අත්තම්මා සෑදූ කැවිලි පෙවිලි සෑම අවුරුදු සමයක මෙන්ම මේසය හැඩ කළේය. ලොකු අප්පච්චීගේ ගෙදර සෑදූ කුරහන් තලපයත් කායමත් වෙනදා මෙන්ම අති රසවත් විය. නමුත් අවුරුදු මේසය රජ කළ සිනා කෙලි කවට කතා අතරින් පත වරින් වර සුසුම් නැග ආයේ ය.

වෙඩි පහරට ලක් වූ දරුවන් මවුන් රැගෙන බුත්තල රෝහලටත්, එතැනින් මොනරාගල රෝහලටත්, එතැනින් බදුල්ල රෝහලටත් ශල්‍ය වෛද්‍යවරු සොයා ගිය ගිලන් රථ තියදුරු තෙමේ මගේ හද පත්ලේ වීරයකු විය. මීට සති කිහිපයකට පෙර ගෝනගල් ආර මුරපොලට එල්ල වූ ප්‍රහාරයේ දී මියගිය හමුදා සෙබලෙකුගේ පොකට්ටුවේ තිබූ ජංගම දුරකතනය නොනවත් වා නාද වූ හැටි ගැන කතාව මා කම්පනය කලේ ය.

මහ ගොඩ යායේ මළ සිරුරු වල උණුසුම වියැකී යන්නටත් කලින් නැවතත් අවුරුදු දා රෑ ඔක්කම්පිටියේ හේනකට වැදුණු LTTE මෘගයෝ අසරණ ගොවීන් තිදෙනෙකු වෙඩි තබා මරා දැමූ හ.

සිනා පිරුණු මුහුණු රූප පෙට්ටියෙන් රට පුරා අවුරුදු සිරි ගැන මොර දුන්හ.තම දරු පවුල් ගැන මර බියෙන් තැති ගන්මෙන් පුරවාලනු ලැබ කණසල්ලෙන් පිරුණු මුහුණු ඒ දෙස බලා උන්හ.

වෙනදා අවුරුදු සමයේ සැණෙකෙළි සිරි ඉසිලූ බුත්තල නගරය මෙදා අඳුර වැටෙද්දී පාළුව ගියේ ය.
හිස තෙල් ගා ඈ දෙපා නමදිද්දී අත්තම්මා සැම දා මෙන් ම අපට තුණුරුවන් ගේ ආශිර්වාදය පැතුවා ය.

මේ ඒ අවාසනාවන්ත රෑ රෝහලේ සේවයේ නියුතු ව සිටි හෙද පුංචි අම්මාගේ ලේ වැකුණු නිල ඇඳුම් දැකීමෙන් ද මෘත ශරීරාගාරයක දී වෙඩි වැදුණු ළමා මළ සිරුරු දැකීමෙන් ද කම්පිත වූ සිතිවිලි දාමයක් නිසා ලියැවුණු සටහනකි. මෙය කියැවීමෙන් සිත් තැවුලකට පත්වූ අයෙක් වෙතොත් මගේ බලවත් කණගාටුව

Since I got my Vostro equipped with the new version of LinuxMint – Felicia, I had the opportunity of sharing the FOSS/Linux experience with most of my friends. And the requests for Mint, Ubuntu ISOs & hands-on tutorials kept on increasing…

Although these fancy UIs & Graphical fireworks take our concentration away from getting our hands dirty, its always better to keep an eye on how things work down there. The simple reason is because the terminal is the way to do things faster,better & safer. There are plenty of tutorials on the internet teaching us how to get things done using linux/unix OS, but its always handy to keep the manual or a cheatsheet by your side for a quick reference.
So I thought of sharing some interesting wallpapers & reference manuals I found some time back on the internet regarding Linux/UNIX commands.

Linux Commands Wallpaper I

Linux Commands Wallpaper II – For Beginners

Unix/Linux Command Reference List

THE ONE PAGE LINUX MANUAL

Important Note: Dear guys & gals please note that these interesting material were not created by me. All the credit should go to the original authors and owners. I hope they wont get angry with me or sue me for posting these stuff here.

Thanx Dhanaja for the idea…

මේක ගැන ලියන්න මම ටිකක් ප්‍රමාද වැඩිද මන්දා. කිසි ආබාධයක් නැතුව වැඩ ටික කරගන්න පුලුවන් වෙච්ච නිසාත් අත් හදා බැලීම් කර කර මෘදුකාංග නැවත පිහිටුවා ගන්න වෙලාවක් නොතිබුණ නිසාත් මං මෙච්චර කල් ප්‍රාථමික මෙහෙයුම් පද්ධතිය හැටියට භාවිත කළේ උබුන්ටු 7.10. ඉවසලා ඉවසලා අන්තිමේදි උබුන්ටු 9.04ත් නිකුත් වෙන්න ඔන්න මෙන්න කියල තියෙද්දි තමයි සති දෙක තුනකට කලින් මින්ට් 6 හෙවත් ෆෙලීශියා හමු වුණේ.

උබුන්ටු 8.04 පදනම් කරගෙන බිහි උනත් මින්ට් ලිනක්ස් හි සුවිශේෂතා බොහොමයි. බහු මෙහෙයුම් පද්ධති පරිගණක සඳහා ලැබෙන GRUB මෙනුව අලංකාර පසුතල වලට ගැලපෙන පරිදි නවීකරණය වෙලා. පිහිටවූ ගමන් උණු උණුවෙම MP3 ගොනු ධාවනය කරන්න, ෆ්ලෑෂ් වීඩියෝ බලන්න, ජාවා සහිත වෙබ් පිටු බලන්න, සීමා රහිතව DVD නරඹන්න කිසි කරදරයක් නෑ. නීතිමය අවුලක් නැති රටකින් එන නිසාද කොහෙද ඔක්කොම මෙවැනි සහයක කොටස් මෙහි නිසඟයෙන්ම ඇතුලත්!Compiz එහෙමත් තිතට වැඩ…

ස්කයිප්, ගූගල් අර්ත්, අඩෝබ් රීඩර් වගේ දේවල් එහෙම පිහිටුව ගන්නත් කිසි වදයක් නෑ.මෘදුකාංග මූලාශ්‍රවල (Repositories) මේවා අඩංගු කර තියෙන නිසා ඕනෑම (Synaptic වැනි) පැකේජ පිහිටුවන්නක් මගින් එය කර ගත හැකියි.

මම අත් දැකපු තවත් අගනා දෙයක් තමයි Giver! තවත් මින්ට් පිහිටුවන ලද පරිගණකයක් සමග ගොනු හුවමාරු කර ගන්නට එමගින් හරිම පහසුයි (ssh,NFS,samba එපා.. ). Gnome Do කියන්නෙ වැඩසටහන් පහසුවෙන් අරඹන්න මින්ට් හි ඇති කෙටි මගක්. mintInstall, mintNanny, mintUpdate වගේ තවත් සුළු සුළු වැඩ කිඩ බොහොමයි. ඔබත් අත්හදා බලා ගුණ දොස් මටත් කියන්න