Driving in US

Just started driving in US after about 9 months break! Initially I thought getting used to driving in the "right" side (are we driving in the wrong side back home? ;) ) will be a problem but for my amazement it was not a big issue; mind switched fast. Still turn wiper on for the signals though :)

One interesting thing I noticed in my few weeks of driving experience is the role of "right-of-the-way". Back home we never cross a signal (even it is green for us) without looking both sides, but here people just assume that everybody obeys the rules (I am not certain about this assumption though) I am still scared to think what if some one just cross the signal when it is red. It will end up in multiple collisions as nobody is expecting it.

Anyway, having fun with missing exit points and coming back after a long way, turning around blocks to find roads and driving without touching the horn (it was an essential tool in the vehicle back home); a different experience after all.

BitchX - Command line IRC Chat Client

http://bitchx.org/download.php

At last I found a command line IRC chat client that works without any installation and works on Linux. I missed Sandesha chat today since I was connecting through a proxy. BitchX simply works in a ssh shell(in a server which allows IRC) and looking forward to tomorrow's Synapse chat :)

Axis2 1.0 Released

It is a great achievement for everybody involved in Aixs2 project and now we have a “true open source” web services substrate for the next generation web services.
http://ws.apache.org/axis2/

Dr. Sanjiva’s blog has a really nice description of the path of the project from its inception.
http://www.bloglines.com/blog/sanjiva?id=128

Windows on Mac!

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/265676_applewindows06.html
May be we will endup with Linux and Windows or only "Windows" ??

CenSEARCHip

Censorship at work! This is from Indiana University
http://homer.informatics.indiana.edu/censearchip/

What it means to be British

This is interesting :)

" What it means to be British

Being British is about driving in a German car to an Irish pub for a
Belgian beer, then travelling home, grabbing an Indian curry or a Turkish
kebab on the way, to sit on Swedish furniture and watch American shows on a
Japanese TV.

And the most British thing of all?

Suspicion of anything foreign."

A New Code Search Engine

One of my friends, Nabil, pointed me to this news. Krugle, a new source search engine will be launched next month. It seems to support searching for code in open source world. It’s actually inline with the "true" open source movement but how about the Licenses?

Here is the link: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70219-0.html?tw=rss.index

Free SVN Account at svn dude

I and my partner were thinking of setting up a svn repository for our class project. However setting up a svn was not that possible with the access rights that we have in the university servers. Then we found this CVS dude that allow free svn repositories upto 2MB.

It is a good place for this kind of small projects. Of course if you pay they allow much bigger repositories :)

So here it is http://www.cvsdude.org/

Humans eat animals alive for money - are they really humans??

Last night I saw this program that conduct challenging games based on people's fear factor and was shocked to see one event where competitors had to eat raw spiders to go to the next round.
Animals kill and eat other animals as a means of surviving in this world
May be there are some tribes who eat animals like this alive. But this is not like that, this is for money and all of them are from some rich countries where they don't want to eat live animals to live. It is all for some $. It is very sad to see how they eat those spiders alive while they try to survive in those so cold human's mouth. It seems like successor of homespun will be “homeevil”

My New Homepage

Just set up my homepage in the Indiana University Domain. Now it is
https://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jekanaya/

Google.cn - My thoughts

I found this study on "Internet Filtering in China in 2004-2005: A Country Study" http://www.opennetinitiative.net/studies/china/

Seems like there blocking lot of political and news related contents as well, which is very annoying. Back home (Sri Lanka) we had a period around 1989 where the news contained only the praises for the government. No criticism was allowed. However, according to the history these things could not last long. It is up to the Chinese people to decide to accept this or not in their coming elections. (Hope it is not blocked  )

IMHO, blocking peoples' freedom to express ideas and criticizing something is really *bad* but with respect to other blockings I feel that it might be the way they have found to keep that country from crashing into pieces with 1.3 Billion people.

Initial Committers of Apache Sandesha

I found this photo in my album. These are the team members who wrote the initial version of the Apache Sandesha(ws.apache.org/sandesha) with me. From left to write we have Sudar, Jaliya (me) Amila and Nilantha. We took this photo in the last day of our university (undergrad) life and it is really a wonderful time in my life.