FOSS-ed Conference - Day 1

The first day of the FOSS-ed conference went really well. The focus of the event is to bring awareness to Free and Open Source Software to the general public. In addition to a keynote from Manju Hathotuwa, there was a series of presentations on various aspects of FOSS usage. Unfortunately, I couldn't listen to Bud and Mifan on distros and desktops. Suchetha did a really good one on web development tools. In the late morning, I did a short presentation on "Dispelling FOSS Myths". The time was too short to talk about legal aspects in detail, so I covered a few "myths" lightly, including "FOSS is not user friendly", "I have to give all my code away", "FOSS should not cost" etc. In the evening, I moderated a panel on "Challenges to wider adoption of FOSS in Sri Lanka". Reshan represented the ICTA, and Dinesh Fernandopulle of DFCC, Sanjiva, Chamindra and Bud were the other panelists. Most of the questions were along the lines of support and the government's role in wider adoption of FOSS in Sri Lanka. One good thing that Reshan mentioned was that the ICTA and the government are going to mandate the use of open standards, while giving implementors the freedom to choose specific technologies. Although a little bias towards FOSS would have made things even better, I still consider this as a very progressive step for the country in gaining "independance" in terms of software.

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Dialog Self Service Sucks

The customer care call center of Dialog GSM has always been excellent. The staff is well trained, polite and efficient. However, it turned out that their self service, activated by dialing 687, sucks.

Recently, I wanted to change a number in my frequently dialed numbers list (the "family and friends" call list). Everything went well, but I felt very uncomfortable as the system did not give me a chance to verify the new number. I was "told" that it was changed immediately after I entered it.

I felt the need to verify that the new number is correct, so I went to the main menu again and tried to list the new set of numbers. It looked like the last digit of the new number was missing. Oops... I had done a mistake by starting the numeber with a "0777", instead of a "077".

Every other system I have come across either allowes the user to verify before changing an important piece of information (e.g.: password dialog boxes) OR allows reverting a mistake either through the system itself or some other means. Unfortunately, it wasn't the case here.

I called the customer care call center immediately, and explained that I made a mistake, and asked if anything can be done to correct it. I also mentioned that this happened few minutes ago and that I made no other calls, to show that this is not an attempt to exploit the "friends and family" feature. The executive was very polite as usual, but apparently this was a call beyond her authority. I asked her if I could speak to her lead - hoping to reach someone who is authoritative to make a decision - but while she was trying to transfer the call, the line got disconnected.

I called them again, and told the customer care executive (a different person) that I need to talk to her lead. She said that her lead may not be in a position to make the decision, but gave me the names of two people in another department. I managed to reach one of them, but he said nothing can be done, but also told me to try and contact the Billing Manager.

I made another call to try and contact the Billing Manager, but the phone was never pick up.

I gave up. Not only was I charged Rs 100 for the "change", but I couldn't "correct" it until the next billing cycle.

On a positive note, this is the ONLY bad experience I have ever had with Dialog GSM. Unfortunately, as all my attempts to give them constructive critisism failed, I was forced to blog the incident.

Update: Dialog GSM is investigating into the insident, and hopefully will improve the system in question. Very nice of them to take customer feedback seriously.

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Kohomba Kankariya

After a long silence in the blogosphere, I am back again... :-) I happened to be in Kandy on the 23rd to attend the annual alms giving in rememberence of my grandma. My eye met, somewhat accidently, a notice about a `Kohomba Kankariya' is to be performed at the University that very evening. It was a long time since me seeing one for the last time, so I jumped at the opportunity. We arrived at the uni in time. It was great to see some of the well known faces in the group of performers. During the introduction it was clearly mentioned that this is not a performance to cure someone, which is a Kankariya is officially meant to be, but rather a cultural exhibition, so that the timings of some events were to be `edited'. The dances were longer, and unusually better. There were many `competitive' encounters where dancers used to recite drum-verses, simple to complicated, and drummers played them flawlessly, and dancers danced to them. It is very interesting to see this works so well, considering that there is no rehersal, and some of the performers, who come from different schools and backgrounds, have not even met each other before.

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University of Peradeniya

During the vacation, I visited the University of Peradeniya. Unlike other visits for `official' purposes, this was a purposeless visit, just to meep people and see around. I spend the morning at the Faculty of Engineering and met a lot of old friends and lectures. Also spent a short while at the `server room' where LK-LUG server lives, and fixed a small problem with the network card driver after a recent upgrade. In the afternoon, I visited the newly built IT Center. Chinthaka Kumarasiri of LK-LUG was there, and I met Thusitha, a very old schoolmate of mine, who also happened to be Chinthaka's roommate. I spent the afternoon `sight-seeing' and on photography. Some of the `selected' photographs can be found here.

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Taking a Break

After the FOSS week and 1001 other things, finally I decided to use some of my leave. However, I decided to deviate from the usual practice of using leave for non-work related activities and trips, and just spend some time doing one of the most relaxing things in the world: nothing. Well, not exactly nothing, but to sit by the flowing waters and watch swimming fish, or listen to birds sing, looking for changing patterns of clouds, or a pleasent mixure of them all; no deadlines, no commitments, no responsibilities. I choose week days to travel so to avoid traffic. I went home (Kotmale) on Tuesday the 4th through Avissawella. The road was very scenic and it was a treat to drive by misty mountains and flowing rivers. I decided to go through Nawalapitiya (instead of Hatton), but the road between Ginigathhena and Nawalapitiya is being reconstructed and will have to be avoided for the next few months. The holiday was nice and calm, and I didn't make any major trips except to the University of Peradeniya on the 8th. Apart from sleeping late and just hanging around the garden, I also found a bit of time for some photography. My mother helped me with selecting scenic angles. She also happily `forced' me to go to a car wash to clean the otherwise ignored exterior of the Jimny... ;-) The number of cats had grown to three this time, with the new addition of two kittens. However my mother doesn't like petting them too much, although she is very keen to feed them and advocates their `freedom'. So me and my brother had to do a bit of `training' for them to stay in human hands and one such training sessions ended up with a bleeding finger. I returned on Monday the 10th and it was also a pleasent journey which took only a few hours.

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Mini Code Fest

Following the Asia OSSS Code Fest, we had a miniature version of it on Saturday, partly for everyone to get the hang of it, and partly to close out urgent pending items on Taprobane. UCSC kindly provided logistics, in addition to a lot of encouragement. There was a quite a number of known faces including Anuradha Weeraman, Bud (his blog entry on the event is here), Chamindra, Chamath, Deep, Kosala, Mahangu and Tharindu of UCSC. Many others joined from the UCSC (don't rememebr all the names, may be next time), including Gowri who maintains the network. We managed to get the infrastructure setup within a couple of hours, including an apt-proxy. Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out a neat way to go out of the network and connect to IRC or SSH, and this forced us to use a local ircd instead. Anuradha Weeraman was working on the installer, Mahangu on the Taprobane documentation project, and Bud and myself worked on closing bug reports for a quick 0.4.2 and close out this branch. Lot of interesting work was going on all over including installing, testing, remastering and so on. There was a wired set of IBM machines with some strange CDROM drives, and booting Taprobane on them was impossible. However, Tarindu managed to install Taprobane on one of them over the network by manually copying files and running grub. Dr Ruwan, director of UCSC, visited us in the afternoon. Being a hacker himself, he has been a big supporter of FOSS activities in Sri Lanka. We are planning on the next codefest on the 15th. If anyone is interested, contact me or ask on the Taprobane list.

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Virtusa Motor Rally

Annual Motor Rally organized by the Virtusa Club was held on Saturday the 24th. The 50+ km route was was in the Colombo city and suburbs, starting from Virtusa's Trans Asia (TA) facility and ending at Keith's place near Bolgoda lake. We named our team the `Tux Racer', and had Anuradha W, Dihan and Nipuna of the KM team. 32 teams were lined up for the Rally. All the other teams were to be driven in cars, and my Suzuki Jimny turned out to be the only SUV. This was a mixed blessing, as we had to travel through bumpy terrains where it could do better, as well as good roads with sharp corners where cars are superior. External participants were also allowed as long as the majority of a team remained to be Virtusans. The `clue list' was long, but not very difficult. Teams also had to find answers to questions such as the number of red lines in a railway gate and times of watches shown on advertisements. Some activities were difficult; for example, we had to buy something prized between 18-20 Rs and two 500 ml bottles of soft drink from a named super market, and later when we reached a checkpoint, one member had to drink the whole one liter of drinks in a given time, all by him(her)self. This drinking part was not mentioned in the instructions and came totally unexpected! The event was fun, and apparently the pedestrians also were aware that something is going on as we were asking for certain landmarks. The course went through the Fort area, Slave Island, Borella, Parliament area, Athurugiriya, Homagama and ended up in Bolgoda. I was driving fast till the end expecting to finish in style. However, the very last bit was wetter than expected with grass and gravel, and breaking resulted in a 10-15 meter skid, and the Jimny stopped just less than an inch away from a big lorry parked right in front of us. It was a big lesson in estimation for me, luckily non-destructive, but unfortunately `Anuradha's entrance' also happened to be a discussion topic of the afternoon. Keith's place was located in a very scenic location by the lake. One part of the garden sloped towards the lake. After a pleasant lunch, the winners were announced. We turned out to be the 4th overall, and our team, along with many other teams, had been severely penalized for speeding between certain checkpoints. Being an event on the public roads, we were strictly supposed to maintain speed limits and adhere to all the other traffic laws. The organizers are expected to revalidate the calculations in due time. I once read an article about the `Paris-Dakar Syndrome', the participants looking forward to the next one at the end of each Rally. It turns out to be universal, not just limited to big rallies such as Paris-Dakar, for most teams were making plans for the next one. But more than everything it was such a fun filled event.

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We Need Mirrors

"Mirror mirror on the Web, who is the fastest of them all?" We are badly in need of HTTP/FTP mirrors, just like the Ancient Mariner who desperately wanted water: `Water, water every where, not a drop to drink!'. Our Swiss mirror is being throttled after Taprobane appeared on Distrowatch. There are many well wishers who are kindly offering gigabytes of bandwidth left in their sites to host Taprobane. Unfortunately, considering the terabyte of downloads from the Swiss mirror yesterday, we need more heavyweight hosting for the ISOs. We are trying some potential options, and any offers would be greately appriciated.

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Taprobane on Distrowatch

Distrowatch has added Taprobane to it's long list of GNU/Linux distributions. The waiting list is long and there is a 90 day waiting period to make sure that only sustainable projects get added, but apparently we have made it early. Wow! It's interesting to see that someone has taken the trouble to study what's in our first public release (0.4.1), and put that all information into a release page. I wish to express our sincere thanks to the folks at distrowatch and its contributors for their efforts. Also, the Taprobane team and everyone at LK-LUG should be commended for the hard work and support in contributing, distributing and advocating our own GNU/Linux distribution.

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There and Back Again

After the FOSS Fair events on Sunday, me, Suchetha and Sanjaya went to meet Rasmus and Sam Ruby, returning from their trip to Habarana, Minneriya and Sigiriya. David Axmark's flight was somewhat early in the evening, and the plan was for him to directly return to the Airpot. We met Sanjeewa Wijerathne and Rasmus at the Airport Garden hotel. The discussion over the dinner was quite amusing. There were some interesting comments about Slackware from Rasmus, which Suchetha didn't like of course, such as `Slackware is dying', `I have five years ahead of you for not using Slackware' (during a discussion about each one's age), and `like slackware?' in reply to a comment about a dying nation... ;-) It was very unfair for all of us at the table to bash a singled out Slacker, but I am sure everyone, including Suchetha, enjoyed the whole affair, and there wasn't anything personal. The matter came to a climax when Sam Ruby, who joined us after the dinner, commented in a mild serious tone `What's Slackware, we don't hear about it' and added that he used to hear many good things about Slackware years ago, but that has ceased lately. We bid farewell to Sam and Rasmus, and drove straight to Suchetha's place. It was a very scenic setting by the Bolagoda lake. After weeks of hard work, we crashed and slept tight, and woke up quite refreshed. After enjoying a fabulous breakfast prepared for us by Suchetha's mother, we made a relatively early start towards Kandy. The journey was pleasant and the drive was nicer with less traffic. Sanjaya was fast asleep at the back, while Suchetha and myself had a conversation which wondered all over the place. At once point, we started singing. In fact, we managed to sing `Mage Raththaran Helena' to completion, and a variant followed. Later we started a bit of `Panamure' as a part of an elephant discussion, but neither of us was successful at coming up with any more song suggestions. We met Greg Stein and Bruce Momjian at Kandy, had lunch at Senani, which was high up at Rajapihilla Mawatha with a great view of the city. Greg and Suchetha had a lot in common to talk about, and the discussion over lunch was a lot of education for the rest of us... :-) In the evening, we went to see a cultural dancing show at `Avanhala'. It was nicely done as a pleasant mixture of all three variants of Sri Lankan dance and music. At the end was a fire walking session. After the show, Sanjaya insisted that he wanted to try out fire walking himself, as he had done it few times before. But as the fire they had setup there was much hotter than a typical session, he took our advice not to go ahead. However, we made friends with the organizors, who turned out to be somewhat neighbours during our long stay in Kandy years ago, and one of them gave us the news of a funeral of a close aquaintance of ours in Ampitiya that took place on the very same day. Then we visited Dalada Maligawa in good time for 'Tewawa', the ritual of offering sounds. Among many things and people we showed Greg and Bruce was the old gentleman who was playing `Horanewa' for decades as his `Rajakariya' (King's duty). When the LTTE bombed the Maligava (which me and Sanjaya witnessed few minutes afterwards as we were in Kandy at that time) he was known to be performing the morning ritual. He has been thrown yards away by the bomb, but it is said that he picked up the horn (Horanewa) and completed the Thewawa in the midst of everything. The King's dury is generally taken very seriously. Greg and Bruce got a chance to peek inside the inner chamber as it was the time for the evening offering. We also went to the library of ancient books at Paththirippuwa and I showed Greg the place the King used to judge his subjects. Suchetha accompanied Greg and Bruce back, while I went to the funeral house with Sanjaya. It was nice to see some old places there, despite the sadness of the occation. After dropping Sanjaya at IFS, I joined Suchetha and Greg in the midst of a merry discussion. Our topics were very diverse, but we rarely got to anything technical. Next morning, Suchetha and myself joined Bruce for breakfast and afterwards Bruce went on to do some shopping. We followed with Greg later, and in the city I got a parking ticket, and one of my tires was loosing pressure. So I drove Greg and Suchetha to join Bruce at the place where he was shopping and returned to Kandy, paid the fine, got my driving license back and pressurized the tyres. After a couple of hours drive, I joined the others at Pinnawala elephant orphanage for lunch. The elephants were out for bathing, and we had a good view of all the hapennings from the table. It was interesting to watch one elephant that was chained to a rock in the river (probably due to violence induced in elephants in mating seasons) `learned' how to remove the chain from the connection and set itself free. However, this didn't create any dangerous sitation. A farewell dinner was sponsored by OpenWorld at the `Vadiya' seafood restaurant of the Mount Lavinia Hotel. After some tedious driving towards oncoming traffic with lots of lights, we joined Sanjiva and Shahani (Mrs Sanjiva), Deepthi and two others from OpenWorld. One thing I hated was the killing and cooking of sea animals right there, which I had seen only once before at a Chinese restaurant at San Fransisco. After the dinner, we bid farewell to Bruce and Greg. We also briefly met Himira, my group mate at the University and great contributor to the LK-LUG behind the scenes. I came back to my lodgings around the midnight, completely exhausted by weeks of work followed by a nice trip, and of course looking forward to work the next day.

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