A Coder's Soliloquy

Premium account?? Bitch Please!!

2012-01-25T09:23:00.001+05:30

Why the hell do I need a premium account?

A Checklist you should follow when connecting to a Projector

2012-01-06T11:25:00.001+05:30

May be in the school, may be in work, or may be in a public gathering, you may meet a situation where you need to connect your Laptop (or PC) to a projector, to present something to the spectators. Here is a checklist you SHOULD follow in such a situation, before connecting the projector, to avoid some awkward things could be happened.

- Check your wallpaper. Is it a nude, topless or "poorly dressed" celebrity, or an unknown girl? Change it to some other, at least to a OS default wallpaper ASAP!

- Check your desktop icons. Are there porn movies you copied from a friend's USB drive in a hurry and left on the desktop, or some nude pictures? You better hide the desktop icons as a safety precaution.

- Check the minimized applications residing on the taskbar. Close all unwanted ones.

- Check the applications visible on the System Tray. If you are presenting in your office in front of your boss and/or network guys, and if uTorrent icon shows on your taskbar, you will be fired!

- Close all popping-up apps. Usually IM applications, Twitter clients pops up their notifications. It will be an awkward moment if one of your friend starts a conversation with you over Google Talk, saying "yo dumbass!" and the chat is popped up. Or else, if your twitter client pops up a tweet that mentioned you, saying "fuck off @yourname !"

- If you are presenting something with the web browser, check the Search Box. Search boxes in Firefox, new Internet Explorer contains the text you search last. I'm pretty sure you don't want let others to know that you googled for some nude pics of a celebrity a while ago!

- If you are presenting something with the web browser, check the bookmarks bar, if it is visible. Have you bookmarked the sites you visit regularly "PornHub" or "Xhamster" in the bookmarks bar? Hide it!! (not a good idea to bookmark those in bookmarks bar, use bookmarks menu instead!)

Caution Notice FAIL !

2011-09-20T20:01:00.004+05:30

(click for larger image)

What should I do? Drink, or not to drink?

Oh shit! KFC uses Windows!

2011-09-18T08:10:00.002+05:30

Send this, or Don't Send ?

(seen on 2011-09-17 at KFC, MC)

No-Unicode FAIL!

2011-09-17T21:47:00.000+05:30

a funny discussion between me and some friends of mine :D

Hiding from Facebook Notification Emails?

2011-09-13T16:56:00.000+05:30

I hear most of the people are using a separate email account for their facebook notification emails. In the fact that facebook generates a huge lot of emails each and everyday for an active user, that would be enough to ruin one's personal mailbox. (Meanwhile facebook reaserches the possibilities of reducing the number of emails, Mashable reports)

But is this a solution? Take me for an example. I rarely log into facebook when I'm at my office. But as a facebook addict, I need to know what's happening there. The way I'm getting that information is, my notification emails. These emails has a capability of replying to add a comment to relavant post at facebook, making its value doubled. A situation like this may encounter for you, where you will be needing your notification emails.

So isnt it good to have those notifications in your own mailbox, without messing up with your other emails? The best way to do it is, to filter out the facebook emails and skipping them from the inbox (I assume you are using Gmail, like me).

All you have to do is going to the Mail Settings from upper right corner Gearwheel icon, going to Filters and creating a filter that filters all the emails come from facebookmail.com You may set it to skip the inbox and apply a label too. Then your facebook notifications will be shown at the left sidebar, without harming and jamming your other important emails. Pretty simple solution.

Steve's iResign™ letter

2011-08-25T11:04:00.001+05:30

Always iSaid™ if there ever came a day when no longer iCould™ meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, iWouldbe™ the first to let you know.

Unfortunately, that day has come.

iResign™ hereby as CEO of Apple. iServe™, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, iRecommend™ strongly that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

iBelieve™ Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And iLook™ forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

iMade™ some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and iThankyou™ all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

Steve

Easy Playlist with Linux

2011-08-07T10:58:00.003+05:30

For 3 years, I was using a Sony Ericsson phone. Other than telephony and messaging, the most important use of my phone is, Music. In SE phones we can separate music in folders (as Sinhala songs, English songs, and so on) and create playlist from each folder.

Recently I came up with a Symbian mobile and its music management is somewhat different. All the songs in memory card are shown at once. I had to scroll down a large list of songs (of 8GB) and separate them into my favourite playlists. And this became a real headache.

Finally I got to know that this phone supports M3U playlists, and the life became easy because I'm using Ubuntu. This is why.

A M3U playlist is nothing other than plain text file which contains the filenames of songs in that folder, separates by line-break. Linux users know that ls shell command reveals the contents of the working folder, separated by line-brakes.

So, to create a M3U playlist, all I had to do is, traverse to the required folder in linux shell, reveal files in ls command and send the output to a file, not to the display. That can be done with,

ls > playlist_name.m3u

Single command to create a playlist of the items in current folder!

Note: ls command reveals the output file as well. So your playlist contains your playlist file too. In some devices, this may cause a recursive loop playback. So simply open the .m3u file in a text editor, remove the playlist_name.m3u (in your case, your playlist name) and save it again. Thats it.

Another Note: If your folder contains album art images, junk .ini files, they will be also included in the playlist. Just remove them also

More: Want to make playlists for all folders in your music library? Then my friend Sudeera suggests you to read this.

Windows User?
no problem, you can use the following command in your command prompt for this task.
dir *.mp3 /a /b /-p /o:gen > playlist.m3u

My laptop is a shit!

2010-08-22T12:12:00.001+05:30

Today I realized that my laptop is a piece of shit. It is having many problems. Drivers available only for Windows Vista. Hardware are the world's most uncommon and troublesome ones (as I understood by googling)

Today I was going to install a Hackingtosh and I needed to disable Network adapter. Oh, then I saw there is no option in BIOS setup to disable it. Not only network adapter, but also every other things, they can't be disabled. This is worse for a laptop.

And then I realized that BIOS setup lacks many important features. It provides only basic features like setting up boot device order.

Seems this laptop is suitable for very basic usage, not for doing new things, experiments and geeky things. If you want your laptop to accompany with your geeky work, never ever buy a Compaq Presario C768TU. (Don't know about other Presarios, but I guess they may be)

How to ask for help

2010-08-14T08:33:00.000+05:30

Some people don't know how to ask for help from someone. They use a tone like "giving orders" instead of kindly asking. When someone "orders" us, its feeling uneasy to help them.

Yesterday I faced two incidents like that. One case is an uneducated old lady. So I ignored my anger and helped. In second case, its a wealthy looking lady. Seems they treat all others as their servants. I asked her to "learn how to talk" and left the scene :D

Fort

2010-04-15T22:09:00.001+05:30

Galle fort

Linux Software Buffet

2010-03-23T12:15:00.000+05:30

මේ ලිනක්ස් මෙහෙයුම් පද්ධති වලට සොෆ්ට්වෙයා බර ගණනක් නිකං දෙන එක හරිම කරදරයක් අප්පා. Synaptic එකට, Ubuntu Software Center එකට, එහෙමත් නැත්තං Ubuntu Tweak එකට ගියාම හොඳ හොඳ සොෆ්ට්වෙයා සිය ගණනක් දකිනකොට බුෆේ එකකින් කෑම බෙදාගන්නව වගේ ඔක්කොම ඉන්ස්ටෝල් කරගන්න හිතෙනවා. මගේ මැෂිමේ දැන් ඒ විදියට පටවගත්ත, කවදාවත් පාවිච්චි කරලා නැති සොෆ්ට්වෙයා ඕනෙතරම් තියෙනවා. මේ දැන් ඒවා අයින් කරන ගමන්...

Death during Batch Trip

2010-03-11T10:04:00.001+05:30

A 1st year girl of Faculty of Management Studies and Commerse, University of Sri Jayewardenepura has passed away during their Batch Trip to Hanthana. Reported that she was suffering from Wheeze and the tiredness has make the situation more critical. She has fainted during the climb, but the Student Union has refused to take her to the hospital, saying its against their traditions, students need to learn to face troubles.