Archive for the ‘Me, Myself & I’ Category
Watch Our Wedding Online :)
If you have read my last few posts you should have seen this coming. However this is a big if. We are not sure if we will be able to do this until the last moment. In a wedding online broadcasting has lower than the lowest priority. Lot of thing has to come to place.
We are planning to do this using a 3G camera phone. Therefore the venue must have good 3.5G reception with good upload speeds. Venue doesn’t have a Wi-Fi hotspot so that option is out of the table. We should be able to find a volunteer to hold the camera phone. And the phone battery must last long enough to do a meaning full broadcast. Oh also I must be able to borrow a backup phone to use my sim while my phone is being used for the broadcast with a mobitel broadband sim.
A Case For Going Hybrid!
These days there is a bit of a hype about hybrid cars, mainly fueled by slashed tax. Of course they come with an interesting promise. But can we really utilize its full capacity?
Main benefits of hybrids are ability to run more on less fuel, or reduced cost per km and reduced carbon footprint. This is achieved in two ways.
By having an alternative energy source in the car, hybrid can work around some deficiencies of internal combustion engine. In a regular car you need to have larger bulky engines which suck up more fuel and deliver more energy to support acceleration. But when you are cruising you don’t need that much energy. A hybrid can have a smaller, efficient engine and/or run it at the efficient RPM level, while electric powertrain is compensating for the rest of it. Also when decelerating, a regular car will slow down by evaporating its energy as heat through friction. It means that energy is lost. A hybrid use regenerative brakes, which is just a fancy name for the mortar doubling up as a generator to absorb that energy back to its batteries. As a result hybrid accelerates, runs and decelerates more efficiently. Because of it hybrid can get good mileage in slow city limit driving too. Also breaks will generate less heat, and engine will do less work resulting reduced maintenance.
Year 2010 in a Post!
Last day of the year! Felt like writing a post with ups and downs of my year 2010 any my plans for 2011. Here it comes….
Weddings are awesome, as long as you are not the groom!
It is with deepest sadness that I inform you that me getting married. (Hope my fiance don’t read this). Well getting married is probably ok. It’s the wedding which will suck the life out of you. I knew that wedding is a massive project. I have done number of projects before and I did them quite ok. But there is nothing like doing a wedding :S.
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.
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.
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.
Moving from WordPress.com to Own Hosting – Getting It Up and Running
I just moved this blog to RaKasUniverse.info domain from a free blog at WordPress.com. When I moved the domain I also moved to own hosting. Reasons for this is not 100% clear even for me. I was a bit frustrated about not being able to install my own plug-ins, not being able to write java script code, and lots of other things that I find fun and interesting as a hobby programmer. I know I can do pretty much all that on blogger. That’s why I said it’s not 100% clear.
Setting up WordPress on own hosting is not that easy. That’s what I read in most other blogs. It may be so for a non technical person if you are setting it up full manual. But based on WordPress installation guide it’s not that complicated. Even with the manual steps you just need to upload WordPress files, set up a database and configure WordPress using wp-config.php file. But if you use Fantastico you just need to do few clicks and it’s done.
In this post I am trying to share my experience of moving to self hosting probably with some pointers for any one who is planing to do the same.
Worshiping Sun God at Galle Face Green
I captured this image with my mobile phone sometimes back (18-April-2010) when I was at Galle Face Green. I was just trying to capture the evening sky. I could not do a good job on it as the lighting was little low for my phone to handle and I was pointing the cam directly at Sun.
I realized what it looked like only after I viewed the image on my computer after coming home. By than it was obviously too late to go back and take few more (better) shots 
I wish I had a better camera with me than just a mobile phone at that time!
/Rakhitha
New Domain, New Host, New WordPress…!
Well, couple of days ago I felt like moving my blog off the free WordPress.com hosting. I did not have a real need of it, but I just felt bit restricted by all the restrictions there. Not that I could not live with those restrictions, but my mind just hit some kind of a critical point at which it made me go and by a domain + hosting.
I found this place called lkservers.com. They had a pretty attractive hosting package which included 10Gb of Storage, 100Gb/month of transfer, and pretty much everything else I needed\ for just LKR 1500/= (Aprox 15 USD) per year. So I went for it. Also As soon as I set things up here I noticed that new WordPress 3.0 is out. I am not the kind of guy who installs shining new software. I normally wait until it prove itself to be stable. But for some strange reason I installed it right away even without doing a very basic reading about it. So far nothing is broken. I am hoping for the best. Otherwise I will have to find a way to revert everything back.
