Shaakunthala's Portal

Eleven years back, I started blogging at Blogger.com as a hobby, using our slow dial-up Internet connection. Facebook was so young at that time, and the latest emerging trend was called "Blogging". The new unfamiliar English word 'blogging' created so much desire to experiment with the new thing. My little write-ups didn't attract much, so I closed the blog in a couple of months. In 2008, I started over, but in my native language, Sinhalese. And in both cases, it wasn't THIS blog. :)


At that time, there was a significant lack of proper representation of Sinhalese language in the Internet. Unicode text standards had just emerged and there was a need of more and more content to signify the presence of our language. Sinhala Bloggers' Union, an alliance of enthusiast bloggers undertook part of promoting Sinhalese content with the fun and excitement of blogging, and soon became a top Internet trend in Sri Lanka. I restarted blogging with the support of SBU members in 2008, to keep up with this trend, share my self-learning experience and contribute to the good cause.

Today, if I look back, Sinhala Bloggers' mission is well accomplished. Our language is everywhere on the Internet, including many social media sites, instant messaging platforms, etc. At that time I dedicated my blog 100% to Sinhalese content because the trend and cause felt important. Soon I started this blog to write in English. And another to try out the concept of 'blog marathons' and microblogging (now taken over by Twitter). It was all experiment.

However, now, it has come to the point that I find no use of maintaining multiple websites. Keeping one site for 100% Sinhalese content is no longer needed because it's not the same today. So, I'm closing this blog today.

My writeups will continue in my Sinhala blog, which will become a bilingual blog thereafter. It was all fun and exciting experiment. Even closing a website and taking visitors to the new home gradually could also be an experiment. Occasionally, some of the old posts in this blog will be re-posted in the new location.

So, here's the home of all future write ups: http://blog.shaakunthala.com

I'm still just a hobbyist blogger with not that much time for blogging.

Adios! :)

This is going to be quite a short blog post. I bought an Android device. Well this is no big thing because it's been almost five years since the first release of Android. But I'm new to it. Still grabbing bits and pieces on how to use it.

I've been using several mobile devices time to time over the past few years. My first phone was a NEC-e1108 which was not good at all. Then used a Sony Ericsson K770i which was really a good phone. That phone made me a photogrpher. In 2011 I got a Nokia 5230 as a gift from a friend. Good thing with it was it had GPS. But when when my needs become more I wanted something that capable of much more things. That's why I bought my Galaxy Note II. Few years back it was the dream of mine to use a Linux capable phone. And now it's here.

As I said I'm still trying to grab bits and pieces on how to use Android. I've been able to experience several cool stuff. I'm writing this post using the S-Pen and using the Google's Blogger app. Handwriting recognition is pretty awesome.

A while ago I managed to setup Tor to work with Google Chrome browser. Most probably within next few months I'm planning to learn Android application development as well. No plans to root the device until The warranty expires, however I would love to hack this device.

And much more to try out such as USB OTG (On The Go). I'm going to try out mounting my one terabyte portable hard disk into the phone. And I hope it's going to open the door for much more cool and interesting stuff. :)

Cheers!
(This is just a blog post I wrote to try out Blogger app on Android)

If you've read my last post you'll find that I had a trip to Jaffna. Yes, it was last month, but I had nothing to do other than waiting for my internet connection to be restored. Sad. :( Early in the last month, our ADSL router seemed not working properly. So we handed it over to claim warranty. This caused me miss some important events including few career opportunities. I tried to use my mobile phone to connect, but it also failed. Although Airtel provides a very attractive and pleasing 'Youth Pack', no chance for us to use at least 100 MB of the 400 MB data bundle -- no 3G connectivity. I live in Ambalangoda, a well known coastal urban area in Sri Lanka, and I don't know why would such a big telecommunication service provider fail to offer a satisfactory service.

However, things are now OK as we got the router back yesterday evening. :)


Okey,... let's get back to the topic -- Jaffna. I had a chance to join a group of devotees who were on their way to Nainativu. For a person living in the Southern Province it's a fairly cheap travel to Jaffna. Since I'm a novice photographer I wanted to make this a chance to enjoy the art of photography also. So,... my K770i was back in action, althogh it has begun malfunctioning a bit. Here's the journey... (please click on each image to enlarge)



















































I have many more. Not all are worthy shots, but I've kept them because I believe that in any particular graphic any viewer other than myself may see something that I may never see. They're available to download.



Since sunlight is too heavy in the North province, lighting quality of raw photographs were poor. Even automatic white balance settings in my camera didn't work. So I had to do some post-fixes such as curves and levels, with the use of GIMP 2.6 software. This is something usually I don't like to do becuse I believe that the photographer must retain the original lighting conditions whenever possible; simply because photography is the art of capturing light.

Overall I'm not satisfied with my photography experience during this tour. I even missed several 24k shots. If you're a reader of my Sinhala blog, you could know that I had a wondeful experience in our tour last year. This time it was with a group of devotees and the tour was to worship Nainativu and some other religious activities. No no time to wait and capture light... what do do? :(

Okey... thanks for reading! Have a great time!!


PS:
If you use Airtel be sure to keep your phone in 'Flight mode' to save battery. Your Airtel SIM will act as a world class dumb SIM, as it is required for nothing but keeping few other phone functionalities other than communication. X(  

Today, I've received an email from Google (accounts-noreply@google.com) subjecting Google Password Assistance. Google sends this email when somebody has made an attempt to reset the particular Gmail account's password. But, this request is not initiated by me.

Google password reset process works as follows:

1. User enters the Gmail address into the password reset form.
2. Using CAPTCHA, Google verifies that the request is not made by truly a human.
3. Google uses either of the following methods to verify the account ownership.
   

• If the Gmail account was inactive during the past 24 hours, Gmail asks for the security question which the account owner has provided during sign up.
• If the Gmail account was not inactive, it sends an email to the secondary address that is provided during sign up.

4. After the verification of account ownership, it enables the user to choose a new password.
   

In my case, somebody has made the attempt, and Google has sent me the password reset email. Well, I have reset my password -- I periodically do so. :) So thanks to the poor guy who made the attempt. :P

Anyway, how do we prevent such vulnerabilities? Here's what I think:

• Use at least two email accounts. Use each other to receive password reset emails. Eg: set your Yahoo! address as your Google account's secondary address and set your Gmail address as your Yahoo! account's secondary address.
• Try to access those accounts frequently.
• Use ambiguous Q/A pair as the security question and answer. Use your own tunes with creativity. I know, this can go INSANE!!! Eg: Q - Where did you spend your honeymoon? A - Cloud #9

OK. Anything else does not come to my mind this time. May be later I might add more. By the way,....... who might want to hijack my Gmail account? I still don't have an answer. :-?



Well, there might be several bloggers who want to do this adventure. :D

Thank for reading!

Well, after a long long silance, Shaakunthala is back here, with a new domain name, shaakunthala.com. Today what I'm gonna talk about is, does Kottu need a feedburner email subscription box?

Kottu, no need to explain what it is,.. it's the most famous Sri Lankan blog aggrigator. When I first started blogging in 2006, I didn't know anything. So I gave up. After two years, while googling for something, I saw something interesting.... whoa.. Sinhala blogs. Yes, I got interested, and came back to the stage again. Because of the Sinhala blog aggregator, which uses the same technology that in Kottu, I was able to address a large number of readers. After some time, through Sinhala bloggers I got to know about Kottu. With the help of Kottu, I have been able to address even larger audience. That's nice of course!

After few months, I started this blog. Kottu was the only aggregator that helped me to get readers' attention this time because posts are written in English. Although what I write here are not much interesting, regular bloggers at Kottu were kind enought to put some comments too. But, sadly I often forget to check the Kottu feed so I couldn't comment some interesting blog posts. This normally happens because of my busy and geeky life.

Not only Kottu but also I often forget to check Sinhala blog reader regularly. But, there's an email subscription box on the Sinhala blog aggregator. So using that I've subscribed via email. Every day around 7.30 pm I'm getting an email digest so no need to check the feed. Within an hour I finish reading and commenting all the interesting posts.

Most of the time I miss interesting blog posts going on Kottu. Well, honestly I don't want to miss them. What I would suggest is an email subscription option, like the one that Sinhala Blog Reader has. So interested people can enter their email address, verify and get updats, and others can do the regular way.

I hope indi would pay some attention ;) . Actually it's not a big thing to handle a feedburner email list. After the initial setup you can keep your hands off. I'm also managing a small email delivery list at feedburner for my Sinhala blog. I have around 25 active subscribers there and actually I even dont look at it.

This is just an idea, according to my point of view. I don't want to miss anything that I should read; are you too?  Please share your ideas if you have any...

Thanks for reading. :)

The upcoming version of Fedora, Fedora 11 (Leonidas ) is to be released on May 26th, 2009 [schedule].

They have prepared a counter badge that anybody interested can put it in his/her own web site. I have also put one in my Sinhala blog. So, dear reader, if you also have a blog/ site, please put a badge on your site and help spread the power of human knowledge (human knowledge - that's how Richard M Stallman defines free software).

But there is a problem with the badge. They provide a script (hosted on their servers) so it may not be available in the size you prefer. In my Sinhala blog, my preferred size is 120 pixels. The code they previde is this:


<script id="fedora-banner" type="text/javascript" src="http://fedoraproject.org/static/js/release-counter-ext.js?lang=en"></script>


So I had to download the script and modify it. So here's the modified code and you can simply copy-paste it into a HTML/Javascript widget in your blog. You can modify the 23rd line (bannerimg.setAttribute("width", "120px");) of this code to adjust the badge size.


<script id="fedora-banner" type="text/javascript" language="javascript">

var available_langs = [ "en", "it" ];


var today = new Date();
var release = new Date("May 26, 2009 14:00:00 UTC");
var millisBetweenDates = release - today;
var days = Math.ceil(millisBetweenDates/1000/60/60/24);

var script = document.getElementById('fedora-banner');
var lang = "en"

var url = "http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/Schedule";

var banner = document.createElement('div');

var bannerlink = document.createElement('a');

var bannerimg = document.createElement("img");
bannerimg.style.border = "none";

bannerimg.setAttribute("width", "120px");

if (days <= 0) {
    // TODO: Get an actual image here!
    bannerimg.setAttribute("src", "http://fedoraproject.org/static/images/banners/f11release.png");
    bannerimg.setAttribute("alt", "Fedora 11 is here!");
    url = "http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora";
} else {
    bannerimg.setAttribute("src", "http://fedoraproject.org/static/images/counter/" + lang + "/fedora11-countdown-banner-" + days + "." + lang + "." + "png");
    bannerimg.setAttribute("alt", "Fedora 11 Leonidas released in " + days + " days.");
}

bannerlink.setAttribute("href", url);

bannerlink.appendChild(bannerimg);
banner.appendChild(bannerlink);

script.parentNode.insertBefore(banner, script);

</script>


If you are interested, please put a counter on your blog too.

Thank you for reading.

Hello, again... after a long time this is not gonna be a junk post. As mentioned in the title, I'm giving you a pice of code that is very simple and you can modify it. Just copy-paste to your Google Blogger powered blog. If you are a geek, then you already know this. Others read read and read!

Just go to www.blogger.com/home and sign in. Then, under your blog's title, click on the Layout link. Then you'll get a visual page elements editor. Click on an Add a Gadget link, and then add a HTML/Javascript. Copy-paste the following code (you can modify it later) and then save.

<form action="/search" method="get">
<table>
<tr><td><input name="q" type="text"/></td></tr>
<tr><td><input value="Search" type="submit"/></td></tr>
</table>
</form>

Thank you for reading.