Monday, May 29, 2006

@ the Honda Meet

Last Saturday I had the chance to get involved in the first Honda Meet in Sri Lanka and man there were some 'seriously' riced up hondas there. As a guy who is more into the 'clean' outlook as opposed to the 'ricey' look, I loved the elegant, black Honda S2000, which was there.

Our guys at autoLanka has done an excellent job in organizing, I must say. Pictures of the event are on the sites gallery. Great photography Preveen (our 'official' photo dude).

Friday, May 26, 2006

Gambas Tutorial from FOSS-ed for Hackers

The session I did on Linux GUI programming with Gambas, is available online now, along with most of the other sessions. This tutorial should help as a starting point for guys familiar with GUI development in VB to migrate to Linux programming.

Happy Hacking !!!

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Kaffeinate yourselves

Bud, Arunan and I have decided to launch a GNU/Linux magazine for the Sri Lankan GNU/Linux newbie. My article on Kaffeine is available from yesterday.

The next article due by me is on amaroK. However, I need to do a dist-upgrade from my Ubuntu Breezy to Dapper to get the latest version of amaroK.

So.. Go Kaffeinate yourselves in the meantime... :)

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

FOSS-ed for Hackers

A very productive two days at the FOSS-ed ended yesterday.

The first day was graced by Professor Lawrence Lessig , a co-founder of Creative Commons who did an excellent presentation on the concept of 'commons' and the importance of 'freedom' for innovation.

This time I got the opportunity to conduct a session as well on Gambas. It was a good audience who were keen to learn. I guess FOSS in Sri Lanka is becoming mainstream. It's apparent by the large number of corporate participants along with the university students.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Google Web Toolkit :: First Impressions

Get it here

Just got the toolkit up and runing along with a project in Eclipse. I have been trying all sorts of javascript libraries trying to develop a satisfactory AJAX PoC for a while now. I was not very happy with the results.

With the Google Web Toolkit, I (mostly a java guy) was able to get a basic 'Hello World' AJAX application running in record time. Eclipse integration is simply great, which brings in the ability to debug AJAX applications in a 'civilized' manner, among other things.

The documentation and the samples were very helpful in ramping up. I'm now looking at the RPC and the surrounding architecture. I think this would be the toolkit that made AJAX 'usable' for a broader subset of developers.

Hope to see great things in the coming days ....