Conundrum

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).

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 !!!

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... :)

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.

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 ....