Geek with an attitude

Dr. Ajantha came back from the "International Conference on Advanced Communication Technology" after submitting what appears to be our (that is myself and Wathsala's ) first paper at an IEEE conference. The subject of the paper which you can download and read here , is about a Next Generation Proxy caching system which fuses the idea of Cached content and Bandwidth utilization with web 2.0/x.0 trends. These ideas are the result of what we learned by implementing Bassa , an Open Source Next Generation Proxy Server (NGP) at UCSC . We are very excited about continuing our research and development to expand its scope.

Oh boy what a day it was! I spent a good 5 hrs at the Sri Lankan Airport cargo office on Friday trying to clear a 3" tiny piece of memory which I had ordered for my Toshiba L1 laptop. I didn't really expect this to be held by customs in the first place, considering its size, weight, cost and the fact it was a 256MB chip (quite outdated by todays memory standards). I was also misled by FedEx's tracking comments which gave no indication of the shipment being held at customs but stated that it was on its way for delivery. It was only when the courier guy came and handed a letter I knew what happened. What was more amusing was the next update on FedEx's tracking site - Goods delivered. I called up FedEx and they said in order for them to clear it I had to get apply for a VAT number which seemed like an unnecessary hassle. They did suggest I go to the customs and try to sort it out myself - thank you FedEx for getting me FedUp! So I made my way to Katunayake which turned o...

Its rare but sometimes it *can* happen. This is an important one to fix! If your running a GNU/Linux server (or desktop), running kernels from 2.6.17 - 2.6.24.1, it is HIGHLY recommended that you update the system using what ever package management system your distro provided, IMMEDIATELY. If not updated, your system could be at risk allowing a normal shell user to gain root access (i.e root exploit). A technical overview of the exploit and links to POC code and source code patch can be found here .

Last Friday, I had the privilege to attend a workshop on "One Lap Top Per Child" or OLPC as they call it, at HNB Towers. The OLPC is a marvellous piece of technology (note, I fell short of saying hardware). For instance it has a very low power processor that was developed by AMD to only consume 2 Watts of electricity, compared to 30 - 40W on other notebooks! The battery has a life span of 4,000 hours compared to about 2,000 on others and only costs USD 10 to replace it (costs about USD 60 - 100 on our laptops). The screen works great in both indoors and in bright sunlight where it consumes less energy and has a higher resoultion in a black & white mode. The screen's back light can be replaced easily without having to replace the whole LCD panel and it only costs 25 cents to replace! It has a WiFi like no other! It supports mesh computing, a standard known as 802.11s (as opposed to 802.11b/g). And still normal wireless devices are welcomed to connect as p2p devices (...