I took this photo in August, 2006 in Houston air port. If you are a typical windows user, it’s nothing amazing, just a day to day experience(rather hour to hour).
Archive for category Microsoft
Just another windows bug
Dec 7
Errr… Windows
Jun 30
As you may have noticed, I haven’t put something interesting here for few weeks. That was due to several reasons. One was that I was wrapping up all unfinished work I had to do. Then, more importantly, my laptop was struck by lightning about a month ago. Then, both home desktops were also got burnt (Probably the motherboard – I was too lazy to check those). So, I had a lack of personalized desktop environment, and also got restricted access to my old backup files along with the movie database because the old hard disks were IDE and the new desktop only supports SATA.
There is something I really hate; I was only using Windows for about a month. That’s why nothing interesting has taken place – What could you possibly do in windows? (However, I’m focusing on few web development activities, and will do a new blog post).
After thinking few days, the only thing I could come up sharing with you is this :
Imagine Cup Experience
Jun 20
Last few weeks, I have been quite busy with exams, some assignments and imagine cup. As I have said earlier, we got selected for two imagine cup projects, AcSO (Web Development) and GeoLink(Software). Unfortunately, we neither projects were got selected for the next round.
AcSO stands for Academic Status Organizer, which helps you to manage your academic life. What it really does is provides a platform for students, share their thoughts to files. What we are mainly focusing on is that avoiding data redundancy. Actually, there are lots of software solutions/ web sites, which provide the functionality to manage/schedule. But here, we allow our users to even share their schedules. So, let’s say, when I enter the “Database” class is at 9 AM on mondays, then others who registered for that class can easily add that to their schedule, of course If I shared that. Other than that, we allow users to create forums, share files, assignments discussion, assignments progress meter, to-do list and much more. And we also have a really nice looking web 2.0 type interface. The basic concept is also web 2.0. Since site is still there I’m not going to talk about all here. Actually, we didn’t have time to complete the site; it was during our exams, so this site is quick wrap up of the things. We didn’t at least have time to put the validations. But, the basic functionality of the site is working fine. Check out the site: http://team4366.webdev07.imaginecup.com/
Then, GeoLink. Speaking of GeoLink, it’s a mobile solution which helps you to get the information you need by just a click of button, without you worrying about finding the right content. What happens here is, let’s say you go on a trip to Anuradhapura, and you have no clue where it is and what to do next. That’s where GoeLinks comes in, you open the GeoLink, then you’ll see a list places near by you. (Sigiriya, Ruwanwalisaya, etc). Then, you can select a place then and there and get the information about that place, even some pictures. But how do we(GeoLink) know the information? No, we don’t. You are the person who knows. Actually, we are introducing a mobile Wiki concept to bridge the gap of the information flow. When you know something which is not in GeoLink, you simply edit the page enters the information. Basically, GeoLinks gives you information about the importance of the places around you.
Well, that’s not all, let’s say, you found Sigiriya as an interesting place, so what you do is go there. Then, you can open up GeoLink, and what you’ll get is you are in sigiriya and by clicking on sigiriya as I mentioned above, you’ll get the basic information about sigiriya. But you might want to go bit deeply. That’s why we provide a search functionality, you goto sigiriya, you see some nice pictures and you can search for “Arts” in the internet using our application. Actually, when you searched something, that search string is recorded along with the location. So, when another person comes to sigiriya, and he can see that someone else has searched for “Arts”. So, GeoLink also provides deep information about a specific place.
We didn’t simply stop from there. As you continue your trip, you might want to do a research on a topic. Let’s say about fish in a wewa. Then, you go there, create your research, and you can easily write notes and upload them. You can also upload pictures, videos and even sound clips(well, uploading videos and sound clips are not implemented yet, others worked fine. Unfortunately, our demo didn’t work in during the presentation due to some problems with Wi-Fi. Actually, it worked fine just before the competition and just after the presentation, I can’t still figure out why. We were using Wi-Fi to connect to web services). So, returning back to researches, your whole research will be stored in our servers. And let’s say someone else comes to the same place, and he is also going to do a research. The lucky guy will quickly see the research done by you, and it’ll be a great help for his research. Now, you might be thinking that what if you should do a research privately and your research materials should not be available for others. It doesn’t matter, just mark your research as private, and we won’t show that in the research list.
That was about researches. Educating people can be also defined as letting the people know about what’s going on his area, what are current news, etc. A farmer in Polonnaruwa certainly isn’t interested in stock market changes, but will be eager to find if there is disease spreading over cultivation. Now, don’t say that farmers don’t use mobile devices. Well guys, you are not the only people who uses mobile devices. Mobile is just a trend now, and lots of people use mobile devices.(But most of the time, not the windows smart phones – What to do, after all that’s the platform Microsoft asked us to develop). Somehow, the farmers can enter the news into GeoLink and others will get alerted about that.
So, where does the innovation comes? First, we take the information from the community. It’s not like one or two person filling in all the data. Imagine the vast amount of data which can be entered by an active community. Look at the wikipedia. Ok, but vast amount of data itself might be a problem, people will get lost within the data. That’s why we have our own unique solution for categorizing the data. We categorize the data by location and the topic. So, we’ll know where you need data, and what you need. Just imagine, you are walking in a zoo, and you went near the bear’s cage. You open up GeoLink, here comes all the information about the bear. That’s what GeoLink is.
Now, you might be thinking, there is a system, which might be useful, but gives everything free, but need a lot of resources like high bandwidth servers, etc. Only Bill Gates can certainly run it, others will run out of money. No – We have our own unique business model. If you take a typical product, what they’ll do is, they sell their product to users. The users have to pay for the service etc. But here what we are suggesting is a purely advertising based scenario. Yes, the advertising along is not a new concept, but what we are doing is displaying the advertisements according to area you are currently in. Let’s say, if you are in Hambanthota, there is no point of showing a Pizza Hut advertisement there. You should show an advertisement of a shop in Hambanthota. You go to the Vijitha Yapa, and you’ll see an advertisement of Sarasavi. You go to ODEL and you’ll see an advertisement of Hameedias. Even if you are in middle of nowhere you can show an advertisement from DHL saying, we also do deliveries there 
That’s about GeoLink and AcSO. I currently don’t have any screenshots or videos of application right now. I’ll put something soon.
Before I wrap up with post, I should definitely tell something about the short films. All three films shown there were awesome. The concept, how they achieve it, emotions, video quality (Most probably without high-end camera’s etc), every thing was neatly done. Finally, filming industry of Sri Lanka is going somewhere. Keep it up.
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.
