Author Archives: thameera

Theists are stupid people

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But Marge, what if we chose the wrong religion? Each week we just make God madder and madder.

– Homer Simpson

Theists are stupid. There’s no doubt about that. It would be okay if a 5-year-old child believed that there’s a superman up in the skies watching our every move and listening to our prayers. But if a grown up believes that, there’s something definitely wrong in him.
One thing many theists fail to understand is that no one’s sure who exactly the real god is. From Allah to Zeus there are thousands of gods being worshipped and everyone thinks that he or she is worshipping the right god. If you tell this to any of these theists, he’ll start coming up with the several pathetic arguments used to ‘prove’ there is in fact a god. Arguing over such a thing is a waste of time indeed, for such arguments have happened since thousands of years and nobody has won. It would only lead to broken egos, so let’s not argue again.
If you really think there is a god, okay, there is one. Go on with your prayers. Peace.

Chrome extensions you MUST have

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I’m angry today. Very. And I will be writing about must-have Chrome extensions. Keyword: must-have. If you think they aren’t must-have, fucking leave already! Sorry, I won’t use swear words again.

1. AdBlock
It’s the first must-have. Why not? How the hell is one supposed to browse the web with all the colorful ads? You have to concentrate on the content, not the ads.

2. Evernote Clipper
When you find something interesting in a web page what do you do? Clip it to Evernote of course. You don’t use Evernote? Go fuck yourself. Sorry.

3. LastPass
What can you do without lastpass? Type in the usernames and passwords everytime manually? You browser saves them? That’s only temporary. You HAVE to use lastpass.

4. Mail Checker Plus for Gmail
How else would you get a notification when a mail comes? You don’t use Gmail? Dumb idiot!

5. RSS Subscription Extension
Without this how would you subscribe to blogs? How would you find the RSS links of a web site? This is an official Google extension, so you better install it now. Now.

6. Singreesi
It was developed by me. So all of you MUST install it. No excuses, please.

7. Wikipedia Companion
Everytime you want to check up a word, a name, or something what do you do? Open a wikipedia tab and do search. Stupid numbskull. Go install the Wikipedia Companion. It’s the super easy way to browse wikipedia.

Okay, that’s it for now. I’m going to kill someone and get rid of this anger. Kthxbai.

Boom!

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Four thousand hungry children leave us per hour from starvation
While billions are spent on bombs creating death showers
The lines are from the song ‘Boom‘ by System of a Down. They were the lyrics that came to my mind when I heard today about the multi-million dollar nuke submarine that was being  imported to India from Russia and the whole multi-billion dollar submarine deal. India is home to many billionaires, but it’s also a country with billions of people below the poverty line. For how many days could the Indian government have fed those mouths if they hadn’t wasted the money on the stupid subs? Think of all the money they spend trying to win a piece of land in Kashmir. And to show the rest of the world that they’re a super power.
Why, India, why?
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind
The answer is blowing in the wind.
PS:  Wrote and compiled the whole post while on a Colombo-Matara bus. 🙂

Rebecca Black

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So I thought of writing about Rebecca Black. Not a fan of hers, but I had nothing to write and Rebecca came to my mind and I thought why not? So here I am.

Rebecca BlackLike most of us, I got to know about Rebecca Black just after she released the Friday video in YouTube. Seven am I wake up in the morning, gotta be fresh gotta go down stairs, dun dun dun. No one disagrees that the lyrics are a bit um.. childish. But neither can one disagree with the fact that the song was more or less catchy. I played it two or three times in YouTube. Okay, I admit, it was more than half a dozen times. My subconscious even began humming the tune several times during the day.

Rebecca became an internet celebrity, and the video came to be the most disliked video on Youtube. People said that she was the worst thing happened to be on earth after Justin Beiber. Haters gonna hate. However, it was later announced that she was donating all the Friday’s proceedings to emergency relief efforts in Japan, making many mouths shut.

Rebecca then starred in Katy Perry’s Last Friday Night (TGIF) music video. She didn’t of course sing in it, but she looked real elegant and charming, and the video was a hit.

In July she released her second song and video ‘My Moment‘. The lyrics were like a slap in the faces of the haters. “Were you the one who said that I would be nothing.. well, I’m about to prove you wrong”. Anyway the new track wasn’t as catchy as the first. The lyrics weren’t bad, but the song was far from good. It was received with mixed reviews from the fans.

In the end, I’m neither an RB hater nor a lover. Whatever people’s reactions are, she is here to stay everyone will have to live with it.

Streamie – Not just another twitter client

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StreamieWe’ve seen hundreds of twitter clients come and go. Only the fittest survive in this frenzy. And Streamie is going to be one of them.

Streamie is a browser-based twitter client, so it’s cross-platform from the outset. It’s timeline is real time, as in Tweetdeck. But these are not what make it stand among the rest.

Streamie strives to remove the unwanted bloat from the timeline. As seen in the screenshot below, only the the text of the tweet and user’s dp are displayed. Furthermore, it filters out long conversations (longer than 3). These filtered out tweets are shown as slim lines without text in the screenshot. If you want to see the hidden conversations, just click on those lines and they will appear. The result is a minimal timeline with less distractions and bloat.

Streamie twitter client

Streamie is still in its beta, so expect some minor glitches and sluggishness. There’s still no support for twitter lists, etc. However, the app is still good for a beta. Hope the developers will continue improving the web app and if properly developed Streamie has the potential to become one of the best web-based twitter clients out there.

Streamie in Chrome Web Store

Vodafone 945 – thoughts, rooting and installing sinhala

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So finally I ditched my beloved Nokia E63 to an android, Vodafone 945. It isn’t a high-end device, but it’s as far as I can reach to an android right now.

Vodafone 945
Talking about the cons, the resolution (240×400) of the 3.2 inch screen is rather low, but one can live with that. Perhaps that’s the only major problem with this phone. The response time of the capacitative touch screen is quite satisfactory and it’s fast for a 600MHz device. There’s nothing to whine about the battery life too. The OS is Android 2.1 (Eclair). I’m still trying hard to get used to the touch keyboard. Badly miss the physical QWERTY keyboard of my E63.

The 5 megapixel camera works great. Here’s a snap I took this morning. (Click on the photo to view the original size)

Snap taken from the Vodafone 945 camera

Rooting
You can simply install the app z4root and root the device. I wasn’t able to do a permanent root, only the temporary one (which lasts till the next restart) worked. But it’s enough for the needs.

Installing Sinhala and the Ubuntu font
After rooting, install the app Root Explorer and copy these three fonts to the /system/fonts directory. You’ll have to enable R/W permissions for the directory. You won’t get complex scripting support for Sinhala unicode, but the outcome is readable.
Sinhala in Vodafone 945 (Android)
It’s also advisable to use Root App Remover to remove the stupid trial-ware that come pre-installed with the device.

Many thanks to Akila for walking me through rooting and installing Sinhala.

Adding captions to images with Python

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So I wanted to add captions to a set of images and wrote some lines of Python. Python has some cool image libraries so the job was real easy. Have never used Python before except to write some kindergarten-level programs, so this may not be the best way to code the thing. But it does the job.

	import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont, os

	pathz="/home/thameera/ws/img_caption/pics"
	if os.path.exists(pathz) and os.path.isdir(pathz):
		for name in os.listdir(pathz):
			print name
			fullname=pathz+'/'+name
			im = Image.open(fullname)
			namez=name[:-4]
			d = ImageDraw.Draw(im)
			f = ImageFont.truetype("Arial.ttf", 16)
			d.text((4,0), namez, font=f)
			im.save(fullname)

	else:
		print "Directory not found"

It scans the given images directory and adds the file name sans extension as a caption, as shown below:


Original:will.i.am_1.jpg		    
After adding the caption

Cruncher 2011

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Although video games have become quite popular throughout the country, game development hasn’t come into mainstream in Sri Lanka. At least yet.

Cruncher 2011 aims to fill that gap by bringing in the creative and talented game programmers to light. Organized by the Young Members’ Section (YMS) of the Institute of Engineers of Sri Lanka (IESL), Cruncher 2011 is a game development competition that is open to all. The theme of the event is “Make Games, Make Global”, depicting its goal to pave way to the creative game developers to go global.

The competitors have the freedom to choose the type of game they want to develop, be it flash-based, non-flash 2D or 3D or storyboard. They can participate in the relevant subdivision: school, undergraduate or open. While the competitors will be awarded with attractive monetary prizes, they will also have the chance to participate in workshops with leading personalities from industry.

For more information, visit the competition’s website at http://cruncher.lk. Also join the Cruncher 2011 Facebook fan page to keep yourself updated.

Unity 2D

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It was a bumpy ride. Unity, Gnome 2, LXDE and KDE. I tried almost all the popular environments (except XFCE, of which I had heard a lot of bad things).

KDE is perhaps the most attractive of these, but, sadly, it’s too heavy for a netbook. LXDE is light-weight indeed, but I had trouble running several applications with it. For example I couldn’t get gPodder to work no matter how hard I tried, and ibus was buggy.

I was going to test run Gnome 3 but @kau_mad said otherwise, so gave up. Which left me with two options: Unity and Gnome 2.

Unity was originally intended for netbooks. (This was the default environment in Ubuntu Netbook Remix, remember?) Stuff like global menu bars were made with small screens in mind. Unity works, but I found it a bit too sluggish. The solution? Unity-2D.

Unity-2D is a clone of Unity intended for low power computers like netbooks. While Unity has been written with GTK, Unity-2D uses the QT toolkit. It doesn’t require GPU acceleration , something which netbooks and other low-end machines can’t provide.

To install Unity-2D in Ubuntu 11.04, all you have to do is to install the package “unity-2d-default-settings” from the Software Center. Log out and choose Unity-2D as the desktop environment. The interface is quite similar to Unity, but it may not be as slick as Unity is. For example you won’t get those lovely fading effects. However it’s able to provide you with the maximum possible Unity experience.

 

The Kewl desktop environment – KDE

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So I wanted to get some first hand experience on KDE. To install KDE in Ubuntu what you need is to install the kde-desktop (or  kde-netbook in my case) package from the repos. Once installed, log out and choose KDE before logging in.

KDE is the sex! There’s absolutely nothing so beautiful like it! Due to the restrictions in my netbook most of the effects won’t work for me, but still it looks marvelous. Sad to find that it’s being underrated in the FOSS world.

KDE desktop in my netbook

KDE’s however not so sweet with resources. The environment is heavy, perhaps even heavier than gnome. But I can’t make up my mind to leave it and go back to LXDE. The performance loss is quite worth the sacrifice, if you ask me.