Protect-IP is For Those Who Cannot Adopt to Internet Age |
For those who use Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Google, SOPA/PIPA is not news any more. I am not going to describe those again as you can find all about its good, bad, and ugliness by just searching for those two horrible acronyms.
Piracy is a problem for any industry I am not trying to defend it. But this is not how you fight it. And in my opinion this is not even the fight they should be fighting in the first place.
Fight Piracy With Availability
IMO piracy is the answer that internet age has found for inaccessibility. Lower the availability you will find piracy spiking. Just think about it. World is not just US,Canada and UK any more. Most of the population is outside those regions and they too have TVs and Internet. If you live outside US/UK/Canada region how long do you have to wait till you can watch the latest Episode of your favorite TV show or a movie legally. Most likely your local cable channels don’t has it or few seasons behind or you will have to wait till a DVD release. Most people are not that much patient.
Navigating through Linkoping with a dead GPS phone |
Well! Yesterday was my 2nd working day in Linkoping with two other guys. When you come from a place like SL, its bit tough to find your way around. All the names of places sounds same. All houses looks same. There are separate roads to drive, walk and ride. Everything is little too systematic (like buses always come on time) :).
We decided to find our way from work place to apartment on foot on our own after work. When we get out of the office it was completely dark and temperature was near zero. We did not have a map with us, but being a long time Google maps user on a GPS enabled phone we were quite confident and did not even bother to ask for directions from anyone.
Moving WordPress – My Story! |
Well! this topic is well covered here, and probably repeated all over the web. But I am going to write this post any way. Because my WordPress move went quite well. And here is how it was done.
Everything Starts with Taking a Backup
A move is as simple as a backup and restore. You back up your old host and restore it at your new host. That is all you got to do if your domain name/blog URL is not going to change. Backing up has two steps. You need to back up your database and you also need to back up your files. You don’t need t back up entire home directory or public_html folder. If you have wp-content folder backed up that’s good enough. Because that’s where all your Thames, plugins and uploaded files are stored. If you have access to cpannel this is a very simple task. Otherwise you may need to use one of those plugins which allow you to back up the database and files.
Buying Local is Overrated, At least for Web Hosting! |
When it comes to buying services and complex products I always prefer buying from a local seller. This makes it easy to communicate and handle any matter that might come up when using the product or service that we buy. But in some cases the typical Sri Lankan customer relationship attitude make it a nightmare.
This happened way too often with my hosting provider. To be specific the X hosting provider. Not that this blog is some mission critical application, but when ever there is a problem with servers or downtime, a simple proactive mail from the host can save lot of time for customers. Instead they just make us panic and wonder what is going on. And in most of such incidents it takes ages to get a response from them.
Nothing Fix a Broken Electronic like a Good Old Bang! |
How to fix E61:00 on youtube.
Remember that old TV your parents used to have, which simply refuse to work until you give it few good bangs. Well I thought you don’t have to do that any more with new 21st century electronics. Well! I was wrong.
My Cyber-shot started to give me this error called E61:00. Basically when you turn it on it fail to focus, and show a blur image on the LCD with the error code. And the error code means exactly that. It’s like the focus motor is jammed or something.
Fixing Flickr Thumbnail Photostream WordPress Plugin |
“Flickr Thumbnails Photostream” is one of the neatest plugins available to display a random set of photos from a Flickr stream on your WordPress sidebar. I tried out so many plugins before settling with this one for my blog. It builds a local cache of information about your Flickr stream in your website database. As a result it performs faster. Cache does not contain a copy of images. And the plugin is very simple and easy to customize. Which was the main selling point for me.
It’s a wonderful plugin, but it has some issues. Biggest of which is, when trying to update local cache from Flickr, it often times out if your stream has more than 50 images, which is common for many Flickr users.
If you have already used this plugin, you know what I am talking about. “Flickr Curl Function failed to execute. Oops, there seems to be a problem accessing the Flickr information.” is not a very helpful error message 
. However in its community pages there is a partially working solution. With bit of time getting my hands dirty with PHP code. I managed to do a pretty much complete solution for the problem. And here it comes. By the way if you guys don’t want to mess with PHP or the plugin code of your sites, this is where to stop.
Empower Farmers, Without Burdening Government or People! |
MAHOtrain recently posted two posts on their views on farmers problems and solutions that they propose. This post is an attempt to continue and expand on the discussion they started. But with a slightly different view.
Should the farmers problems be governments problem?. Well as far as the politics and votes are concern, yes it should be. They represent a large percentage of voter base outside Colombo. But should it involve itself at the level it does today? I don’t think so.
Farmers has many problems. Their crops are not market driven. Their decisions are driven more by tradition than science and economics. There is a disconnect between them and the market. They have very high production costs and low returns. They import fertilizer and machinery, but the product is locally consumed. And when it comes to selling their harvest the middle man is pretty much a monopoly, which farmers can’t control.
I agree with MAHO in many of its points. Specially about the gap between science and farmers on the ground, Diversification, Proper Planning and Organization. But I do not agree when it comes to government should do this, that and what not.
Nuclear Fusion in a Cookie Jar |
World is running out of its energy sources. Most recent breakthroughs were simply efficiency improvements. Most renewable energy approaches such as solar, wind… are not capable of supplying for mainstream demand. Also most of them consume wast amounts of land and don’t even produce energy all day long. Nuclear fission is risky and ever decreasing in popularity. One main promise of future is Fusion energy. Which is expected to be lot more cleaner, safer and more productive than fission. However the world is long way away from having sustained fusion, as well as producing positive net energy fusion reaction.
Having said that, sometimes you come across bright sparks of hope in places you least expect. I was searching about nuclear fusion reaction recently after Japan incident and came across this. It’s a table top sustained fusion reactor by a high school kid. His reactor core is made using a cookie jar with some commonly available material. He calls it ‘Star in a Jar‘. Of course he has had some help.
Electronic Billing Proof, Anyone? |
These days you need billing proof for everything. Good old days of opening a bank account with just your ID and money is long gone. I was lucky enough to have my first bank account and my prepaid phone connection that way. In case you don’t know, billing proof is a piece of paper which has your name and address on it. Without it, you don’t exist. But once I started to work and wanted to get a credit card and a post paid phone connection, it turned out to be a whole new ball game. Apparently I did not have any acceptable billing proof. In other words, I was a ghost.
On Parking Fees in Colombo City and Our Vehicle Owners |
Yes! parking cost is high in Colombo. Specially if you don’t want to park your vehicle under boiling hot sun and leave one of your biggest assets at the mercy of robbers. It’s high not because some people trying to rip off vehicle owners, but because the gap between supply and demand has driven up prices. Sunday Observer recently ran two articles on this topic (this and this). And they shed some light on this issue. How ever what took my eyes was the pathetic situation of hippocratic in the minds of our own people exposed through these two articles.
We all have at some point used all the sorts of car parks in the city. Most outdoor parks has little or no sense of security, (I have lost few parts of the vehicle by parking in those places and it has cost me lot more than what I could have saved by parking there) and bake everything inside the car if you park during the day. Then there is those indoor parks attached to main shopping malls in the city. They have better security (at least you feel that way) and better protection from elements. And for that there is a higher demand to park there and the prices are high. Also these are not public parks by definition. Those parks are setup by those companies for customers who are shopping in those malls. But we all take those for granted and happily use/misuse them. We all know where we prefer to park between those dusty hot outdoor parks and nice indoor parks.
