Unlimited Terms for Presidency Good Thing?
I am not a political writer and politics is not my thing either. But recent news on unlimited terms for executive presidency made me think. This is not a well thought through post either. I am just putting out some thoughts that came to my mind.
Main argument that I have heard so far is, if a president is good enough to retain majority support among people (lets assume he is not influencing the election result in any way other than doing his duty as the president to meet or exceed the expectation of people) it is unfortunate that such a president will not be able to serve his people longer than two terms. Well that sounds logical.
Also we are in a post war situation where there is a lot to be done in terms of development and reconciliation. It requires to have a continued strong policy and a strong man on the job for longer than two terms. But that is a temporary situation.
Automatically Add Name Attribute for Google Syntax Highlighter
If you write programming related posts in your blog, you are most probably using Google Syntax Highlighter to highlight your code snippets. In case if you don’t, it’s a set of javascripts that allows you to add syntax highlighting for source code that you post on your blog. It supports a large number of programming languages. After installing “Google Syntax Highlighter for WordPress” plugin (If you are using WordPress of course), all you got to do is to enclose your code inside “pre” tags, add a name attribute with value ‘code’ and then set the language of programming code in class attribute.
Ex:-
<pre name="code" class="java"> .... </pre>
But there is a slight problem. When you use it with WordPress WYSIWYG post editor all the name attributes get removed. Therefore every time you change the post using WYSIWYG editor you have to go back to HTML view and add name attributes again. Which is really a pain if your post is a large one with lots of text and code snippets.
Java Zip API: How to Create a Zip File Using Java
This is a follow-up to my earlier post “Java Zip API: How to Read a Zip File Using Java“. This time it’s about how to create a zip file using Java. This is even simpler than reading a zip file.
Following is a very simple example which create a zip file named RaKasUniverse.zip. Inside that zip file we will create a directory named MyDirectory and inside that, we will have a file named MyFile.txt. That text file will contain the text “Java Zip API: How to Create a Zip File Using Java”. In the example we will be using following classes from Java API.
Read the rest of this entry »
Moving from WordPress.com to Own Hosting – Installing Essential Plugins
Moving to own hosting gives you full control to do pretty much anything under the code of conduct of your new host. And having a domain of your own is kind of cool 
. But be careful when you ask for full control! Because you will get exactly full control. And you will be on your own. WordPress.com installs a quite a number of plugins for you and make them work seamlessly. But after moving to own hosting you have to do those thing on your own.
As soon as you setup WordPress and log in to dashboard you will realize few things. Dashboard does not look the same. Lots of things are not there. Even the Akismet spam filter is not working. You might even have a brief moment of panic. There is a lot of work to do.
This is a follow-up to my earlier post “Moving from WordPress.com to Own Hosting – Getting It Up and Running“. In this post I am writing about the plugins that you will need to make your new blog work at least in the same way your WordPress hosted blog did. If you haven’t setup your blog on your own hosting, may be you can start by reading my earlier post. If you have no plan to host a blog on your own, you don’t need to read this post.
YouTube: Wavin’ Flag – Bradby Mix – At Royal Parade 2010, Street Party
Royal College Orchestra put up a brilliant show at Royal Parade Street Party 2010. This was my favorite part of Street Party. Just felt like sharing!
Viraga Perera & Sanchita Wickremesooriya backed by the Royal College Orchestra performs their version of the Wavin’ Flag (originally by K’Naan) to celebrate Royal College 175th Anniversary at the Street Party following the Royal Parade on July 3rd 2010.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q4r-U7fnsY&feature=player_embedded
ASP.Net: Reduce Page Size, and Make Pages Load Faster by Storing View State on Server
Imagine that you have a control that allows you to edit a specific object (Lets say a very complex user information form like in facebook). Every time you change/click something on your control, something about that object is changed. But only if you click save it should update things in your database. Where do you keep your data object in between changes until the last submit is received from save button?
You may use session variables, but then the data object is not local to your control/page. It’s there in the session. If user close the browser or navigate to another page at some point it is still in the session. With complex objects that takes up memory this can be problematic. Specially if you want your application to be scalable, you don’t want to put unnecessary things in to session. And you don’t want to keep things longer than you need in memory. How would you deal with this? Very often you will find yourself keeping track of things using hidden fields in HTML forms.
Royal Parade 2010 & Street Party – Photos & Afterthoughts
Royal Parade 2010 and Street Party was held on 3rd July 2010 as a part of 175th anniversary celebrations of Royal College. It was a grand event by any definition. Probably the festive atmosphere was even bigger than IIFA. And I am glad that I did not miss it.
It was very interesting to see other schools participating in the walk. If I remember right there was Kingswood and Trinity from Kandy too. It was nice of them to come all the way from there. There was College band, junior band, eastern band, and number of bands from nearby schools, and a quit a number of papara bands. I was bit surprised to see Mahanama College after seeing what some of their guys are doing on facebook. But it’s great that they came. I guess in every school there is a small bunch of guys who gives a wrong impression.
There were people from all the walks of life. Young Royalists with their parents, Royalists, Old Royalists, Really Old Royalists, teachers, past teachers, elephants, old fashion double decker buses, fancy cars, clowns, Ninja Turtles, Asterix, Obelix, and what the name of his crush?, she was there too. And I think I saw about 50 out of 300 Spartans minus King Leonidas. May be that’s what was left after the war with Persians . There were lots more fun stuff but this is all I can remember. Best part was meeting up with old pals after years and having a chat with them. I met many friends and classmates that I haven’t seen since I left school in 2002.
Parade was great and the Party was even better. Great DJ, food and the live band. Even the FIFA fans were able to catch the action on big screen. For me, the best part at the party was live performance of Royal SaGa guys. Their talent was amassing and they pulled off a brilliant show.
FM Royal 2010 – 175th Anniversary Celebrations Broadcast is Now “On Air”
Royal College, Radio Club is broadcasting “FM Royal” radio channel parallel to Royal Parade 2010 and “Party On The Street” as a part of Royal College 175th Anniversary Celebrations.
It will be on air from 1st of July through 3rd July 2010 on 96.1 MHz FM. Apart from Colombo broadcast there are two relay broadcasts from Kandy and Galle. You can also listen in its webcast and podcast from FM Royal website.
Links:
A WALK FOR A PURPOSE – THE ROYAL PARADE 2010 – Only Two Days Away
Royal College which started in year 1835 is celebrating its 175th anniversary in year 2010. Need not to say that this is a massive milestone and time to celebrate service rendered by Royal College to its past and present students, and to this country.
Royal Parade 2010 and “Party on the Street” will be happening on 3rd July 2010 as a part of 175th Anniversary Celebrations. This is a once in a life time event all the Royalists and Old Royalists can take part with their friends and families. If you a Royalist or an Old Royalist this is not an event to miss.
Parade is expected to start at 3:oo pm from Royal College Junior Gate. Hopefully you have already received information about the event. If not, following are few information extracted from the e-mail sent out by organizers.
Three of My Posts are on Sunday Leader Web!
After moving my blog to its new home I spent some time to figure out a way to improve search engine ranking of the new URL over the old URL. In the process I did some searches for term ‘rakasunivers’ on Google, hoping to find out places that are referring to my blog. And I found a pleasant surprise.
Three of my posts are re-posted on Sunday Leader website. Of course they did not get my permission or tell me about it. But they at least put my name as the author. For me that is good enough. I think it’s nothing big because they post lots of posts from other blogs too. But there is nothing wrong with taking a little pride of having a post there with my name on it.
