It’s just the TV output.

Yesterday, ahhh… Heroes season 1 final episode - “how to stop an exploding man”. When I got back to home from exhausted exam paper and a exhausted journey about 3 hours(Colombo to Ratnapura), my brother had almost downloaded it. However, after all who want to watch heroes final episode in small 14″ laptop screen. So, I plugged in my laptop to TV and boot it.

But as usual, when I’m trying to do something, Windows didn’t work. So, I tried fixing that. After lots and lots of fixing, I got it to boot, and when I played heroes sounds didn’t work. So, what to do - I restarted the computer again. Unfortunately, windows is not working again. It says “system32/config/system” file is missing.. ahhh!! That file is always important (lol.. if you are not sure what I’m talking about, read my previous post).

As you have already guessed, now windows doesn’t even boot in safe mode. So, I put a windows professional CD and tried to go to recovery console. No! No! It’s not a pirate version :). I got an original CD for selecting for second round in imagine cup web development (I also didn’t believe what I’m seeing when I first saw that.. So, no need to read that sentence again ;-)). However, recovery console was very helpful : It said “There are no hard disks present”.. whoah!! Cool, isn’t it? Actually, later on I found out I have to disable “Native SATA support” in bios in order to run the windows setup.

Anyway, since I didn’t released that SATA thing before, I rebooted in linux again to check whether I can find an old “system” file and replace the corrupted one. Thanks to my genius mind, System Restore is disabled and I had no copies of the “system” file left. So, I got one from the “windows/repair” and replace it(Thank you ntfs-3g). I could not stop just by just replacing that, I had to replace all the config files SAM, SECURITY, etc.

So, when I rebooted windows again, it worked perfectly, I was damn happy and got prepared to watch heroes. Oh!! Who is “Owner”?? instead of booting my normal user account, it booted to something called “Owner”.. oh!! Shit.. everything in the registry is gone.. How did I miss the fact “system” file is the registry? Anyway, I hope it’s ok and start installing drivers again. Actually, all driver files were in the system32 folder, so I just had to buzz the system to reinstall the drivers. Now, everything is ready, and I started installing software. Crap!! Even though everything seems fine, nothing works correct. It goes into an endless loop, which doesn’t even use my resources. It’s really annoying because usually when your computer is stuck, it uses your CPU power, uses your memory etc.. Then, I know something is going on, and be patience. But now, when I start an application, it just doesn’t show anything.

Okay.. Heroessss….. I can’t wait, and I also want to watch it in a 29. So, I got my hammers, knifes, etc ready and booted linux to see whether I can get the S-Video output working. And I never though this would be this much easier. Screw the hammers and knifes, you just a need a small blade(I think not even that if you are running feisty fawn - Not so sure, have to try that out). I just had to edit the “xorg.conf” file and put an option called “MonitorLayout” to “TV” in the “Device”. That’s all, I ran a “sudo killall gdm” and again a “sudo gdm”, it worked perfectly. (Yes, I know that you can do all that by one click in windows, but imagine getting your TV output works with windows generic drivers, you must be kidding).

And after all, happily ever after, Nathen and Peter stopped the bomb(If you want a detailed description on what happened read Kasun’s post).

After few more hours of installing windows and messing up with the drivers, I got windows running again. After all, how can I goe my ADSL to modem to work in linux?

Last month we got selected… oh! In case you don’t know about that, just read my previous post. “And Then” the next phrase - Development.

AcSO is basically academic information sharing site, which will be run by the users (Web 2.0 concept). So, it has some amazing features, but no so hard to code. However, since we have four fellas in the team and we want this built well, we need to come up with a nice site structure.

There was an ASP.NET built in login system. It’s very easier to use. But there were some problems, by default it uses some kind of weird database and replacing it is not so easy. So, we argued about two days whether we shall use it or not and finally decided to code our own one which only took about 15 mins

First what we decided was to use portlets; basically, web parts. After developing sevaral portlets, we again reran an evaluation and decided that we don’t need portlets.

Then we had an exam paper and after all we have 3 and half days to build the application. So, we just started coding raw pages, and we used some base classes written for the web part application and here is the final result : http://team4366.webdev07.imaginecup.com/

There was one big problem when we are developing the site, “version controlling”. Keshan and Me replaced each others codes several times. So, after all we used manual version controlling mechanism. Before updating code, I always took a backup of the current site. Believe me, I have more than 300 MB in backup files. But, it along didn’t solve the problem. So, we started to working at shifts ;-).

Since these pages have put together in three sleepless days, there are lots of features missing. And we also didn’t have much time to put the validations, etc. Basically, we haven’t fine tuned the site. But anyway we are happy with the current progress of the site and if we go to the next stage, we should start development at least about a month before the deadline.

About a month ago, keshan posted a blog article called “Theory of falling in love“. There were quite amazing replies for that, and when I read those replies, I understood one thing; Most people there doesn’t have a idea about theories.

Let’s not talk about the definitions of the theory. The only thing matter here is that the word “theory” brings a concept to your mind. Ok. That’s what a theory is :).

According to Stephen Hawkins, a theory should have two basic qualities. One is that, it should only have as much as few as arbitrary elements and those should be easy to calculate. Then the next one is that it should accurately predict the behavior of the subject. In short, is it useful?

So, let’s look at the keshan’s theory of falling in love. Well, when we consider the first rule of the theory, definitely it might be hard to calculate and those are not defined yet, but somehow by measuring few facts that he mentioned will somewhat accurately predict the subject. So, in that case, we can safely assume his theory is not bad at all.

Ok. Let’s look at the comments. Most of the comments there talks about a best match which cannot be explained by maths/logic. That’s definitely one way of saying “God made us to be together”. Ok, do I have to talk more about that?

Nuwan has made some interesting comments there. “Well its true u can explain many things using maths or logic.. but yet i have to remind u that mathematics or even logic are also concepts that defined in human brain”. Let’s talk about maths. There are some base concepts in maths, and other functions, formulas, etc are proved using those concepts. And amazingly those concepts explain the physical world. So, the love is also a concept, which can used to explain to human behavior. Since love is also a concept, what else can explain it rather than concept themselves? Even, if you don’t agree the fact that love is a concept, you have to admit that love is defined in the brain. And somehow, fortunately or unfortunately, the brain works according to logics.

“What You are doing is, you trying to take some theory which is invented by the brain and ur trying to explain the brain chemistry out of that theory”. Definitely, and he is right. As I have pointed out earlier, Maths explains maths.

“if all human beings love according to theories.. the world cannot be…….”, that might be where you got wrong. People don’t love according to theories; the theory explains how people love.

After all, what really matters is not whether a theory is prefect or not; whether it is useful or not. That’s why Newton’s theories are more important than the Einstein’s theories even though Einstein proved most of Newton’s theories are not accurate in larger scale.

Theories fall when there is a better theory. Not by saying “Love is a noble thing, and it cannot be explained by theories”.

After all Thoughts of a coder running on my own theme. Actually, I designed, or not designed but just layed the content, because I got several complains that the earlier theme makes the content hard to read. Now, you can read it easily.

The image in the header is taken from Mental Disorder Theme