Free crash course on Java web programming - Yarl IT Hub

Start date: 21st April 2012 - 9 AM to 10.30 AM

Location:  Online

Technologies to be introduced: Java web programming, introduction to source control, JSP, JPA, JSF2, Bootstrap, JQuery, Java scripting and Ajax.

Intended audience: students and programmers who are passionate about learning technologies and those who wish to code on the ySchool open source project on a volunteer basis or/and as interns.

Experienced expert programmers will conduct training sessions on technologies that will be used on ySchool project.  The course will also have hands on exercises and the students who develope the best solutions will be walking away with surprise gifts!

Make sure you do not miss this opportunity! If you want to participate, please drop a mail to jk at yarlithub dot org or sayanthan at yarlithub dot org . Send in the mails at the earliest to avoid disappointment because of bandwidth limitations we can only handle limited number of students.

"Teachers open the doors, but you must enter by yourself”. Chinese Proverb

Sayy's (365/365) ~ The END!

Dear All,

All good things should come to an end, so does all bad things! So today, its the 365th post on a self proclaimed "365" challenge. Just like a typical human being while in the journey I yearned for the destination and today when I reached the destination I started feeling nostalgic about the journey.

It happened during school days too, when I was at school wanted to grow up as soon as possible and attain a perceived notion of "freedom" . So that the world will be all out to be explored. But then, from the day that "freedom" was attained, I started missing whole list of things including school, the carefree life without responsibilities, a mind filled with joy, the child like innocence, etc. 

Like wise during the 365 days, I badly wanted to reach this post. But when I sat down to write this post was thinking that 365 could have been a bit longer. Was thinking whether to extend it to reach 500 posts. But my mind reminded me of the irony that during the 365 journey there are countless fake posts. So after a few days of contemplation I decided that a post a day will end here! I would definitely blog,  but probably it will be a post a week or when ever mind says that I have something nice to write about. At least I hope that I will not be making fake posts hereafter.

So now its time for the vote of thanks, so ladies and gentlemen with that I would like to thank each and everyone of you who had been reading the stuff I put up here, special thanks to JK, Nee, Sach, Angel, Roshni, Sanderenu, Gayathiry, Indi, Uthaya, Dee, Jack Point, Gowri, Sabesh Anna, Ishara, Vimal and all the others who took time to leave comments on the blog and apologize me for replying to those comments very very late at times. To be honest, when the comment arrives, it brings a child like joy and it  also reminds me that - "oops! there are people who read this crap!, so let me try to do a better job on my next days post!" Last not least, a big thank you to all the others who had been silently reading the stuff I put up here and had given me feedback in person at different times. Don't worry I can hear those people who are cursing, after 365 days of fake posts, now he wants to add a vote of thanks. Its all part of the game - Politics is the name of it :D

Wishing all the locals a very happy new year! Have fun!

Signing off after 365 days,

Yours truly,

Sayy

Comedy around Tsunami warning

One of the peculiar abilities of the people in this Island, is to keep our selves entertained with jokes even in the worst of situations. While all the panic and chaos was raining, the social networks were with its own share of comedy but I guess the best comedy was from the metrological department itself.

When daily mirror tweeted this,

Out of curiosity I visited the official site of the metro logical department and this is what it had to say!

Probably the guys were on New Year holidays, but anyway the guys came back to work by about 6 PM to update the withdrawal of the warning visit here - God bless this country!

Out of Jokes, we haven't still realized the importance of technology during crisis and how technology could help in such situations, luckily nothing serious happened this time but we are playing with lives.

Some Gems on this warning from FB and twitter,

"டேய் நகுல பாண்டிகளா .. facebook ல சுனாமி வருது என்று ஸ்டேடஸ் போட்டு லைக்ஸ் வாங்கிற ஆசையில .. தக்காளி சுனாமி முதுகுல தட்டபோகுது .. ஓடுங்கடா! ஸ்டேடஸ் போடுற வேலைய நாங்க பாத்துக்கறோம்!" [ JK ] 




ஹலோ மணிக்கு 400 கி,மீ ஓவர் ஸ்பிடில சுனாமி சென்னை கடற்கரையோரமா வாறானாம்,உடனே ஸ்பாட்டுக்கு சென்று பைன் அடிக்கவும் ஓவர்..-தமிழக பொலிஸ் [ https://twitter.com/#!/Mrkunchu ]

Bogambara Ariel views

 Some times walking around Kandy we do not realize how big the Bogambara prison area is. It just takes a view from one of the hills to figure out how big this place is and what kind of space its taking up in the center of the city!

The Bogambara ground and the adjoining Bogambara prison 

A zoom in of the bogambara prison complex. A prison right in the center of the town. Has been the topic of relocation from the day I know. 

The beauty of Kandy Lake! [ Pictures ]

Dalada Maligawa and the mini Island in the middle of the lake

View of queens hotel

Birds' shadows

Counting light posts

In local exams for failures the grade given is "F". For some weird unknown reason "F" is usually called as "light post" in local dialect,  on second thoughts probably due to the resemblance of the shape of the light post to the  letter F. When I am not studying properly for exams, I had been asked countless times by my mother on how many light posts I had ordered,  to annoy her; I used to reply with a very generous number.

Today I was standing just outside home and gazing at sunset, when my mother came and showed me the light post, I remembered her age old question, but I am too and she didn't ask that and for once I missed not being asked that. Instead she admired the shining light post with the back ground lit with sun set. I didn't do a proper job when she referred light posts to warn me years back and even today when she showed me a post so I could capture it on camera, I failed again. Probably I now agree - Light posts has something to do with failure.

Bata slipper

If I do not write a tribute to this, I would rot in hell. Its one of the most important things of my life. At university it was almost a synonym with my name or rather the object that symbolized me. Was part of my daily attire till I started to work at which point, I was reluctantly compelled to learn to wear shoes . This is one of the biggest regrets that I have of the corporate world.  When I used to be at campus I used to tell that "if I had my own company I would allow people to wear Bata slippers and redefine corporate attire". If Steve Job's could walk in with a turtle neck t-shirt to board meetings then why shouldn't we allow Bata too. Now ain't that "Ape Kama"! ;)

In other countries they call it as flip flops and some other names, but for us its bata slipper. Even if we are using the DSI brand of slippers, we still call it the Bata slipper. Out of jokes for our type of climate and landscapes its much much better than any other kind of footwear. Even if you are going hiking you would find that it has a better grip than the expensive branded shoes. It's one of those perfect fit for any day. Probably except on rainy days if you are not too used to it, you would be splashing mud and when you reach home you would have a nice mosaic type art on the trouser.

Normally we can wear it to almost all the places, including lectures, weddings, library, meetings, hanging out, hiking, when playing cricket, you name it... The rumor goes that I even wore it for my graduation, the truth be said "I wish I did that, but I didn't. The picture which did the rounds on the internet was a Photoshop". In case if you haven't used this you had lost half the pleasure of a true Sri Lankan lifestyle.

ySchool modeling session

For once we have a weekday which is a leave in many countries! So to 'celebrate' that we would do a online requirements modeling session. We would start at 3PM Indian standard time and will go on till we are tired and down, being old limbs I am guessing that it would go on till about 7PM.

The objective is to agree on scope and then to move in to nitty gritty up to the level of forms, attributes and create the wire frames. So when developing we can forget about those complications and develop it.

We had decided to go with bootstrap as the CSS and JS framework. So will try to build the wire frames using that itself. (This is subject to confirmation from the rest of the team )

The tentative plan is to cover the following use cases,

1. School set up and configurations ( 15 mins )
2. Admin features ( 2 hours )
- Student CRUD
- Staff CRUD
- Parent CRUD (?)
- Student parent relationship management (?)
- Class CRUD
- Subject CRUD
- Class student relationship management
- Class teacher management
- class subject management
- student subject management
- Terms management
- Promote students ( better done after confirming marks management from teacher side )
- Manage school wide student notification
- Generate term reports
- manage clubs and societies
- manage teacher club relationship

2. Teacher experience ( 30 mins )
- manage subject social page
- manage club social page
- update student marks
- update student notes
- generate class ranks, subject ranks.
- manage student extra curricula achievements.

3. Student experience ( 30 mins )
- share on club or subject social page
- view school wide notification
- personal online reports
- manage profile ( pic ) (?)

4. Parent experience (?) ( 15 mins )
- View children's reports, achievements.

These are the things that came to my mind. Will add/remove based on feedback. This just a framework to get the ball rolling!

If you are interested to do some contribution to the session/project please drop a mail to sayanthan at yarlithub.org
So I could share the detail on how to connect.

Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

MySQL error when running replication and triggers

One of my friends today has today run in to an issue where his MySQL db has run out of synch and giving an out of synch error. When exploring it and checking MySQL documentation I came across an interesting comment in the documentation.

If you want triggers to execute on both the master and the slave—perhaps because you have different triggers on the master and slave—you must use statement-based replication. However, to enable slave-side triggers, it is not necessary to use statement-based replication exclusively. It is sufficient to switch to statement-based replication only for those statements where you want this effect, and to use row-based replication the rest of the time.

So the main message is that If you are using triggers probably its not a good idea to go for row based replication, specially if you want to even complicate it more by having master master replication. I am guessing that this statement implies that replication format - mixed is a better fit. Let me give it a try. Trouble shooting on replications are like how a doctor treats a patient. You try to try different combinations and then find the needle in the haystack!

muppozhudhum un karpanaigal - movie

Last weekend was one of those movie night weekends after a long time. Muppozhudhum un karpanaigal  was one of the movies I watched. It was a psycho thriller and I actually liked the movie. But after watching the movie more than the movie what I remember is this particular song from the movie.

Its just out of the world. Something really different and gave me goose bumps. The lyrics were magical and probably the first time I heard a mother singing a song for her son in this way and tone. I couldn't think of another situation song I could compare, usually what we come across in movies are the songs in which son sings about his mother.

Listen to the song above, I am just getting myself willingly addicted to this song and spreading the addiction.

Lame April fools' prank

April fool, go to school and tell your teacher that you are a fool!

The above is a famous line we keep on muttering while we were in Junior school after pulling each others leg on the April Fools day. Usually we do have extended April fools' days and irrespective of the date, when we pull a trick we just keep on chanting this. Yesterday I was reminded of this since I managed to pull one on the blog. 

First I thought I will not have victims, but was over the moon to find that I had 3! One actually breathed a short lived sigh of relieve saying that - Thank god this mess ends. Where as the other two, tried to pursuit me to continue to post" probably they think that I can be a better laughing stock when I write!

Sorry people the shop will be open for another 11 days (atleast) and I would decide on the 365th day whether to really close this down from business or not!

365 challenge - accepts defeat

Sayy's 365 was started with the intention of making a blog post on a daily basis for the next 365 days. Today when I am on the 354th post and 11 away from the self set target mark, I decide to quit and accept defeat.

Its been a whole pile of rubbish that I had been putting up here and whether I get to 365 or not is insignificant. The whole of this exercise had been a waste if time, so enough is enough and today I close the shop for business.