Geek with an attitude

It's 1:30 AM in the morning and I'm having fun. I've just setup a wireless radio station in my house. Ok, before you start to park your car outside my gate to tune in, take a deep breath and chill. Its awesome but no big deal! All you do is install something called an icecast server, which is supposed to be better than the original Shoutcast server by the folks that brought you winAmp and then sold it to the devil (aOL) ;) Ice cast server version 2.x can stream both mp3s and ogg vorbis (better quality and patent free). A small vague run down of the steps keeping in mind this is a blog and not a howto! First I installed icecast2 on debian # apt-get install icecast2 You need to modify the configuration file, the main setting being setting a password and then start the server. # /etc/init.d/icecast2 start Next you need a client streaming application that will connect to the icecast server and stream a live feed such as from a mic / soundcard loopback or in m...

Ok I know the title is a bit misleading, not to mention intriguing for those who know me. Is this guy capable of such a thing? So before you start substituting my life for a sitcom, let me clear thing up by saying my double date was for two B' day parties at two very different locations. Who's B' day party you ask? Shame on you! It was mine! If you forgot then I guess you weren't invited, so that makes us even. Anyway, I didn't really plan for two B' day parties to take place simultaneously. I invited a couple of my friends (just couples ;)) to Delimarket at WTC. Delimarket isn't my favorite place but at the time it was convenient since Kanchana and I were working late and that seemed the closest. Anyway as the party progressed (in a very cheerful, talkative mode might I add), I got a call from home saying my uncle/aunt [aka. loku thaatha (big daddy), loki amma (guess ;))] had shown up. I guess its not a total surprise, since they usually do show up b...

What can you do when more than 100,000 people are dead and more than a million displaced with little food, clothing or medical care at hand? Coping with a tragedy of such massive scale is not something that most of us have prepared for. I guess different people have their own way of coping. May be its by going to the affected areas and giving a helping hand. Or perhaps collecting donations and other goods and handing it over to those efforts. I can even imagine some, who might just be glued to their TV sets, switching channels to catch the latest news and programs on Tsunamis'. So while the rest of the world was coping with this tragedy in their very own way, I got involved with a project that has helped me to somewhat cope with it as well. It all started just about a week ago, when we met at ICTA to discuss about building an application to find missing persons. At the time Dr. Gihan Dias from the University of Moratuwa had already setup a simple system, called findthe...