Archive for the ‘Me, Myself & I’ Category
From Nokia E75 to Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo
Until recently my wife was using a Nokia E75. Which is a fine phone when it comes to the specs and the looks but if you drop it, its going to be a few thousand rupees worth of repair. A small drop can break some part of the housing, screen, and ribbon cable. Just to give you the picture of the costs the housing repairs will cost you 3k or above and the screen will cost about 11k if you insist on original parts. E75 is just not a solid build.
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.
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.
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.
How Not To Celebrate 2600th Sambuddha Jayanthi: Music at Temples!
Ok! first of all I am not a very religious guy. But I do go to temples and worship once in a while. Most of that credit should go to my mother and my wife. And I normally avoid going to temples on poya days as temples tend to be too crowded, and lose their relaxing and peaceful environment which one would need to do religious activities.
How since this is our first Wesak festival after getting married and the 2600 Sambuddha Jayanthi, we went to the temple close to our house. It was a good thing that we left the vehicle at home and walked all the way. Traffic was like hell. Vehicles were jammed bumper to bumper. There was even an ambulance with sirens running but going nowhere. Hope whoever inside that is still alive. I also could not help noticing that the dansala with the longest queue was the one done by the local BBQ shop.
Is Democracy Being Flushed Down the Drain in Sri Lankan Blogosphere Or Are We Just Playing Naive?
For many countries Internet, World Wide Web, social networks, blogs are the strongholds of democracy. In recent events in middle east they have served as the last line of defense for democracy, allowing it to fight back dictatorships and totalitarian societies. But Sri Lankan blogosphere seems a little different. It appears that some people thing that it should be more totalitarian than the Sri Lankan Society itself. Of course Sri Lanka is not a totalitarian society. At least not yet. But the Sinhala blogosphere seems becoming one thanks to few fundamentalists. Of course they do not have the support of the majority, but I think it’s the lack of awareness of the majority that is creating them room.
Cricket World Cup 2011, Free Live Streaming Link
Got this link for Cricket World Cup 2011 live stream from a facebook friend. Its on espnstar website. It is relatively ad free. I gave it a try using a Mobitel HSDPA connection and quality was ok in full screen view most of the time. Stream did not break up time to time for buffering. Only problem was that the bandwidth was not enough for fast sequences and resulted in fussy images in such situations.
Any way at my place quality of this link on a Mobitel broadband connection is far better than Channel Eye reception. So this is how I am going to watch world cup.
Here is the link:
http://www.espnstar.com/cwclive/
Back From a Mini-Disaster!
In case you haven’t noticed this site was off the web for about a week from 21st January 2011. When I first noticed that it’s not there, I didn’t bother much as it could be a very short outage that happen once in a while with my hosting provider. However I got a bit nervous when I realized that this is not an ordinary outage, but something that is going on for days. I created a support ticket at hosting provider, but got no response even after 24 hours. And their phone was also busy most of the time.
Couple of days later, after few calls and leaving negative rating on a web hosting rating site, I was able to get a response that really ran a cold down my spine. Data center provider of the host has been attacked and offline. According to them data stored in about 18 nodes are wiped out. So the response I got from my host was that the server they have hosted my site on is gone and backups might be compromised too :S.
Thank You 46 Unique Viewers!
First of all let me give a big thank to 46 unique viewers for watching the crappy online broadcast of our wedding. That was in fact a several times larger audience than we expected 
. And thank you all the guys who took turns holding the phone during the broadcast. Sorry HaYa for misplacing the backup phone you gave . And thanks for all the wishes. I was hoping to write this little early. But unfortunately my blog went down day after the wedding, and I was too busy catching up with the work I had to leave behind because of the wedding.
Based on the feed back and calls we got during and after the event, we would have got few more viewers if we managed to spread the word little further. If any of you guys are planing to do this kind of broadcast, here comes few pointers. Try to spread the URL to people you know as much as possible. Because when some of your friends/relatives get to know that your event is online, and want to know the URL, you will be at the event and unable to help them out. It is best if they can get it from some one else. More of your friends and relatives know it, better.
