2009 Sri Lankan Holidays List

  • Posted by Chathurika Sandarenu
  • Friday, December 26, 2008
Year 2008 has almost came to an end. This is the best time to get started to welcome new year. As with last year I created a List of Sri Lankan holidays, which you can add to Outlook, Thunderbird or Google calendar.

Outlook Holiday List

– – – – – – – – – Start Copy – – – – – – – – –
[Sri Lanka] 26
Duruthu Full Moon Poya Day(BPM),2009/1/10
Tamil Thai Pongal Day(BPM),2009/1/14
National Day(BPM),2009/2/4
Navam Full Moon Poya Day(BPM),2009/2/9
Mahasivarathri Day(BP),2009/2/23
Medin Full Moon Poya Day(BPM),2009/3/10
Milad-Un-Nabi (Holy Prophet’s Birthday)(BPM),2009/3/10
Bak Full Moon Poya Day(BPM),2009/4/9
Good Friday(BP),2009/4/10
Day Prior to Sinhala & Tamil New Year Day(BPM),2009/4/13
Sinhala & Tamil New Year Day(BPM),2009/4/14
May Day(BPM),2009/5/1
Vesak Full Moon Poya Day(BPM),2009/5/8
Day following Vesak Full Moon Poya Day(BPM),2009/5/9
Poson Full Moon Poya Day(BPM),2009/6/7
Esala Full Moon Poya Day(BPM),2009/7/6
Nikini Full Moon Poya Day(BPM),2009/8/5
Binara Full Moon Poya Day(BPM),2009/9/4
Id-Ul-Fitr (Ramazan Festival Day)(BP),2009/9/21
Vap Full Moon Poya Day(BPM),2009/10/3
Deepavali Festival Day(BP),2009/10/17
Il Full Moon Poya Day(BPM),2009/11/2
Id-Ul-Alha (Hadji Festival Day)(BP),2009/11/28
Unduvap Full Moon Poya Day(BPM),2009/12/1
Christmas Day(BPM),2009/12/25
Duruthu Full Moon Poya Day(BPM),2009/12/31
– – – – – – End Copy – – – – – – –

Please follow the instructions given in one of my previous posts to add holidays list to Outlook.
Note: If you have last year’s list under Sri Lanka you will need to replace it with this year’s ones


Google Calendar

Just click on the link to add the Holiday Calendar to your Google calendar.
http://www.google.com/calendar/render?cid=trbsm3c2ek1f1l3500qr4muejs@group.calendar.google.com


Thunderbird
In order to add calendar to Thunderbird you have to have Lightning add-on installed. Follow the instructions given here if you haven't installed Lightning yet.

After installation go to Calendar view. and select Calendar -> New Calendar from main menu. From the Create New Calendar window select >On the Network, click >Next, select >Google Calendar as the format and insert the following URL into the >Location field. http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/trbsm3c2ek1f1l3500qr4muejs%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics
Click >Next, eventually enter your Google >User Name and >Password and click >OK, >Name your calendar, give it a >Color, click >Next and finally >Finish to complete the procedure.


Hope this will help you.....
 

Solving Spring Schema not found issue

  • Posted by Chathurika Sandarenu
  • Friday, December 12, 2008
Few weeks back when we were testing a Mobicents application I came across a strange error from Spring.


Warning parsing XML: XML InputStream(68) schema_reference.4: Failed to 
read schema document 'http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.0.xsd',
 because 1) could not find the document; 
2) the document could not be read;
 3) the root element of the document is not .


Application was working fine few hours before and I was wondering what could be the error. Later I found out that this error comes because I've unpluged the network cable, application worked fine when I plugged it back. It was seems to be that Spring is trying to download schemas from internet rather than using files in classpath. This was a serious issue because machines at production site do not have internet access.

After few hours of searching we found out that a way to tell spring to get schemas from class path rather than downloading. Just give classpath:schema location in Spring xml context file in the opening declaration instead of giving url http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd.


<beans schemalocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
 classpath:org/springframework/beans/factory/xml/spring-beans-2.5.xsd"
 xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans">

</beans>
 

Extending Nautilus with Scripts

  • Posted by Chathurika Sandarenu
  • Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Nautilus is the default file browser we get with Gnome. Today I found out about wonderful feature of it. We can very easily extend Nautilus functionalities by adding our own custom scripts.  These scripts can be any executable file like shell script, python script or even C/C++ program.  You only have copy your scripts to
~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts
We can get information such as current directory path, selected files using environmental variables set by Nautilus. Full set of variables are as follows.
  • NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS -lists the paths of the currently selected files, separated by newlines. Works only on local filesystem.
  • NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_URIS - contains the URIs (file://file) of the selected files, separated by newlines. Works on both local and remote filesystems.
  • NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_CURRENT_URI - contains the URI of the current directory. Works for both local and remote filesystems.
  • NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_WINDOW_GEOMETRY -provides the window location and geometry of the browser window.
Nautilus also passes list of selected files as args to your script.  So we can use them to do what ever processing we want to do.

This is a simple script that will prompt all selected files in a message box.

#!/bin/bash
#Author: M.A.C.Sandarenu http://sandarenu.blogspot.com
for arg
do
fileList="${fileList}${arg}, "
done
zenity --info  --text="You have selected following file(s) ""$fileList"
 

CrossOver Rocks.....

  • Posted by Chathurika Sandarenu
  • Sunday, November 02, 2008
I managed to grab a copy of CodeWeaver's CossOver software using their 28th October promotion campaign. For those who don't know about CodeWeaver, they are the people behind the FOSS project wine which enables users to run windows applicaiton on their Linux boxes. CrossOver is commercial counterpart of the wine. The gave away $70 worth CrossOver Professional version for free on 28 Oct as a pomotion.

I Installed Microsoft Office 2007 on my Fedora 9 box using CrossOver and it works fine. I managed to install Word, Excel and Powepoint, but had problems with installing Visio.

Unfortunately CodeWeaver's aren't going to do this kind of promotions in near future. So you'll have to use Wine if you didn't managed to grab a copy on 28th Oct.










 

I'm Back after some time.....

  • Posted by Chathurika Sandarenu
  • Saturday, October 25, 2008
During last few days I was unable to do any blogging simply because I was too busy with my work at hSenid. I just started my first job at hSenid 1st of October and It was really wonderful. On the first day itself I was put in to a really challenging project. I had to learn lot of new technologies such as JSLEE, SMPP, JMS, JMX, AOP and so on...
I'd learnt lot of new things and I'll hopping to share with you all as I get some free time :)
 

HTML Signatures for Your Favorite Webmail Services

  • Posted by Chathurika Sandarenu
  • Saturday, October 04, 2008
Today I got to know about wonderful Firefox add-on called WiseStamp. It allows you to add nice HTML signatures to popular webmail services like Gmail, Yahoo, Live mail and AOL mail. This was a add-on I waited for long time. Some time ago I used Greasemonkey script to add HTML signature for Gmail. Now with WiseStamp I can use common set of signatures for all my webmail accounts.

Give it a try, You'll love it.
 

7 Years of Excellence - Faculty of Information Technology, University of Moratuwa

  • Posted by Chathurika Sandarenu
  • Saturday, September 27, 2008
[Press release from FIT anniversary celebration committee]
 
The Faculty of Information Technology (FIT), University of Moratuwa which was established in year 2001 is the only faculty of its kind, producing pioneers to the ever growing IT industry in Sri Lanka. With the rapid growth and expansion of the information technology, FIT provides immense service to the nation by creating highly skilled IT professionals to bridge the gap between the demand and supply of IT personnel in the industry.

Despite the lack of adequate resources, both physical and human, the Faculty commenced its academic activities with a batch of 47 students in 2002. Its first home was a rented facility at Borella. The intake was increased to 100 in 2005 in response to the steadily increasing demand by the IT industry and also to provide more opportunities in this field to the talented youth of the country.

Though a fledgling faculty, FIT started its first postgraduate program in IT in 2004 with the PG Diploma/M.Sc. in Information Technology. In August 2008, the Faculty launched another postgraduate program, the PG Diploma/M. Sc in Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is the first postgraduate programs of this kind in Sri Lanka. The faculty also conducts several professional development programs from time to time. The FIT will continue to develop and expand its academic programs, adapting to the ever-changing needs of the IT industry to become an entity which both the students and the industry would look up to.

A landmark in the faculty's march towards progress is the completion of the first phase of a new state of the art building complex at the University of Moratuwa premises in August 2008. To celebrate this occasion and 7 years of excellence in the field of IT education, the Faculty will hold a series of events comprising of a multi religious ceremony, a symposium and a cricket tournament, followed by an exhibition of student innovations.

An academic conference on the theme "Graduation, Entrepreneurship and Success", will be held on 27th September 2008 at the new faculty premises with the participation students, alumni, members of the staff and industry representatives. Lead by a distinguished panel of resource persons, this conference is intended to provide students with the opportunity to experience through role models and success stories, how they can make a success of their careers in many different ways after graduation. The objectives of this symposium can be further elaborated as:

  • To create a culture of entrepreneurship among the students.
  • To learn through the experience of accomplished entrepreneurs.
  • An opportunity for the students to interact with the industry leaders.
  • To create better awareness among the corporate community about the Faculty of IT.
  • To establish links with the industry to emphasize the value and recognition of the Faculty as a leading educational body.
  • To broaden the knowledge of students on new trends in the IT industry

Among the distinguished resource persons at this event will be Mr.W.K.H Wegapitiya, CEO of Laugfs Holdings Limited, Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, Chairman & CEO of WSO2, Mr. Mohamed Azmeer, CEO of ConceptNursery, Mr. Ramesh Shanmuganathan, Group's Chief Information Officer, John Keels Holdings, Mr. Harsha Purasinghe, CEO of Microimage (Pvt) Ltd and Peter De Almeida, CEO of e-nable (Pvt) Ltd.


The event will conclude with a get-together at which all students past and present, will come together to celebrate the inauguration of the Faculty's new home. They will be joined by the industry representatives to create an enthralling atmosphere of celebration and entertainment.
 

Error on launching Tomcat from Eclipse in Fedora 9

  • Posted by Chathurika Sandarenu
  • Friday, September 26, 2008
Last few days I was doing some self learning on Servlets and JSP.  After doing few examples using Text Editor, I wanted to see how to create dynamic website using Eclipse; my favourite IDE. I followed the instructions given in a article in IBM site. But when I try to start the Tomcat server from Eclipse I got an strange error.

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:
 org/apache/commons/logging/LogFactory





I didn't have a clue about this error. As usual Google save my day. I found this post regarding the same error by Greg Johnson. 



In order to solve this problem you have to download the Apache commons 1.1.1 and copy commons-logging-api-1.1.1.jar to /usr/share/tomcat/bin folder.  After copping that jar I was able to start Tomcat from Eclipse without any issue. 



Thanks Greg, you save my day :)






 











End of a Beginning....



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Thursday, September 18, 2008
    • 









graduate 
  
It seems yesterday that I first walked into the university, yet 4 and 1/2 years have passed. Exams of my final semester at university finished yesterday :)
  
It was a wonderful 4 1/2 years at FIT. I take this moment to Thank all academic, non-academic staff and my batch mates at Faculty of Information Technology, University of Moratuwa for guidance and support they gave me during all these years. 
  
Next step of my journey begins 1st of October as a Software Engineer at hSenid.... 
  





 











Firefox on Fedora - No sound on Flash Videos



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Thursday, August 14, 2008
    • 









I recently shifted to Fedora from Windows XP. In Fedora it did not give sounds when I was watching flash videos such as from YouTube in Firefox. It was a big problem for me. But after some research I found out that it is due to not installing a dependency library 'libflashsupport' with Adobe Flash plugin. Fixing this problem is very simple, just insall that library using yum.

yum install libflashsupport

After intalling it I got the sounds. :)






 











Reading Excel Date fields from Java



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Friday, August 01, 2008
    • 









Previously I posted on how to read data from Microsoft Excel file using Apache POI HSSF. This is a small addition to that.



If the Excel file you are to read is using 'Date' fields, then you have to be little careful about it. In HSSF these Date fields are taken as numeric fields. Anyway that is how Dates are handled in Excel; it uses an Integer to keep number of days since 1900-Jan-0. Luckily the there is a small utility provided by HSSF to covert these Execl Dates to Java Date format. Just use HSSFDateUtil.getJavaDate(double) method.






//Date of Birth
HSSFRow row = sheet.getRow(ROW_C_DOB);
//Handle Excel Date type cells
HSSFCell cell = row.getCell(COLUMN_DATA);
if(cell.getCellType() == HSSFCell.CELL_TYPE_NUMERIC)
{
  Date d = HSSFDateUtil.getJavaDate(cell.getNumericCellValue());
  client.setBirthDay(d);
}
else
{
  String tmp =    row.getCell(COLUMN_DATA).getRichStringCellValue().toString();
  client.setBirthDay(Util.getDate(tmp)); 
} 






 











Getting Started with OpenCV



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Sunday, July 27, 2008
    • 









Finally our final year project is finished. As I've promised in my previous post I'm going to do few posts on OpenCV. In this post I'm going to tell you how to configure MS Visual Studio 2005 to work with OpenCV library.  
  
Step 1: Installiny OpenCV
  
First you have to download the OpenCV library from Sourceforge and run the installer. It will install OpenCV library on your computer. By default it will be installed to "C:\Program Files\OpenCV". Installer will add "C:\Program Files\OpenCV\bin" to system's PATH variable. But sometimes this do not happen properly. In such cases you'll have to add OpenCV bin directory manually to the system's PATH.
  
OpenCV installer 
  
Download OpenCV: http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/
  
Step 2: Configuring VS 2005
  
In order to use OpenCv from VS you have to add libraries and header files to projects path. Create Win32 Console Application in VS 2005. Then right click the project form the Solution Explorer and select Properties.
  
project properties 
  
Under "Configuration Properties -> C/C++ -> General" put following folders to "Additional Include Directories".
  
C:\Program Files\OpenCV\cxcore\include    
C:\Program Files\OpenCV\cv\include\     
C:\Program Files\OpenCV\cvaux\include     
C:\Program Files\OpenCV\otherlibs\highgui 
  
set include directories 
  
Then under "Configuration Properties -> Linker -> Input" put following folders to "Additional Dependencies". Add them line by line with double quotes.
  
"C:\Program Files\OpenCV\lib\cv.lib"   
"C:\Program Files\OpenCV\lib\cvaux.lib"    
"C:\Program Files\OpenCV\lib\cxcore.lib"    
"C:\Program Files\OpenCV\lib\highgui.lib"
  
set linker dependancies 
  
Sometimes it is possible that you don't have above lib files in "C:\Program Files\OpenCV\lib" folder. In such situations you just have to compile the OpenCV solution.
  
It is also possible for you to get complains regarding corex100.dll (it can be corexXXX.dll) when running your OpenCV application. If you get such error build the OpenCV solution and check whether the "C:\Program Files\OpenCV\bin" folder is in your system PATH, if not you either have to add that to the path or copy all the DLLs in bin folder to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 folder.
  
opencv solution 
  
So that basically what you have to do to configure VS2005. You can check whether you have configured the VS correctly by compiling and running some sample applications in the "C:\Program Files\OpenCV\samples\c" folder. So have fun with OpenCV. 
  





 











Back to Firefox 2



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Thursday, July 17, 2008
    • 









It's being nearly a month or so I've started using Firefox 3 browser. Yes it has lot of cool new features such as new address bar. But I'm having a big problem with new FF3. It is giving me "Network Timeout Error" all the time. 
  
FFtimeout 
  
I have to do multiple refreshes to view the page, and if the page is having lost of images than those are also not loaded.  But when I checked the same site with IE, it loads the page correctly and without any issues. 
  
When I searched the Google for this issue I found that FF3 is having some issue related to this Timeout problem. http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3_Timeout_Problem
  
So until a fix is available I'm going back to good old FF2. 
  





 











Gmail Provides Remote Sign Out and Tracking of Account Activities



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Wednesday, July 09, 2008
    • 









If you are using Gmail this may the security feature that you were looking for ages... Now Google let you monitor your account activities and Sign out remotely. This is very good news for people like me because I access gmail from multiple computers, including from the computers at university labs.  Read more about this from 
 Gmail Blog >>>  
gmail_Remote_Signout1 
  gmail_Remote_Signout2  





 











All-in-One Media Converter



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Sunday, July 06, 2008
    • 









 FormatFactory is a free application that can convert video, audio and images in to different file formats. It also supports batch file conversion as well. As reported by DownloadSquad is seems to be really good application. FormatFactory
  





 











OpenCV - Computer Vision Library



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Monday, June 23, 2008
    • 









OpenCV is an open source computer vision library developed by Intel. This library is written in C/C++ and it has lot of very powerful image processing features. 
  
I got to know about this library few months back when I was doing researches for our final year project. Our project "Sign2Voice" interprets signs of sign language to voice in real time using a video captured using simple webcam. 
  
OpenCV has rich image processing API that that provides wide range of functionally ranging from simple image processing tasks to machine learning algorithms.  In our project we uses OpenCV library to detect and identify sign language hand gestures. We uses Haar-Cascade classifier provided with OpenCV to detect hand. After training the classifier with set of positive and negative images we can use the classifier to detect objects. OpenCV has a good trained classifier for face detection. 
  
Training of Haar-classifier is not an easy task. This became especially difficult because there is nor proper documentation for this process. Their are few web sites that give instructions on how to train, but they are not that comprehensive. 
    
We had to do lot of experiments and learn through trail and error to find out how to do the training properly. After lot of failures we managed to achieve good results in had detection.  
  
hand_detect hand_detect1 
  
 
  
I'm planning to do some posts regarding how to train haar-classifier share the knowledge I gained with you in future. So keep you figures crossed. :)
  





 











Artificial Neural Networks for Solving Complex Problems



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Friday, June 20, 2008
    • 









I just completed my independent study review paper. As the title suggests, it was about "Using Artificial Neural Networks to Solve Complex Problems". If you haven't heard about neural networks before, they are a new approach for solve problem inspired by inner workings of human brain. In traditional computing we have to give step by step instructions on how to solve specific problem to the computer. But in ANN that is not necessary, they can learn how to solve a particular problem from samples.
  
ANN technology is not a new thing, they exist since 1940s. When I first started this study, I thought that ANNs are only used for pattern recognition/classification and predicting some factors. But when I go more deeper in to the research, I was amazed by the diversity of fields where ANN is used. Most of the applications I came across during my review were successful in achieving their goals, but in field of cryptography use of ANN was not as successful as other fields. 
  
Even though ANN technology is very successful in solving complex problem they have their own set of limitations. Major limitation is it's lack of ability to explain how they generate output. Another main limitation is not having formal method to find optimal network architecture for solving particular problem. But even with these limitations, future of ANN looks promising. There is lot of research going on in dedicated ANN hardware and hybrid ANNS.  
  
You can download my complete review paper here. Hope this will help you to learn more about ANN and it's applications.
  





 











A Picture is Worth More Than Thousand Words



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Thursday, June 05, 2008
    • 









This picture tells the whole story....ATT1135779






 











Being Punctual....



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Sunday, May 25, 2008
    • 









Well, what do you think about this....being punctual? 
  
I’m not sure about you, but I hate people coming late and not doing things on time. Especially in here most of the people don’t take this seriously, they never come on time. As an undergraduate I have seen lot of my batch mates coming to lectures, group meetings late. They are the most selfish people; they don’t think that they are wasting time of others. As professionals I think we should learn about how to do time management and being punctual. 
  
I found these two articles at lifehack about the importance of being punctual and most importantly how to do that. Hope this will encourage you to be punctual...
  





 











සාමයේ පහන් දැල්වෙන, සුභ වෙසක් මංගල්‍යයක් වේවා - Have a Peaceful Vesak



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Tuesday, May 20, 2008
    • 









vesak-card-2
  





 











University of Moratuwa is the 1st in Top 10 Universities for Google Summer of Code 2008



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Wednesday, May 14, 2008
    • 









Few weeks back I posted about that Sri Lanka being among the top ten counties in Google Summer of Codes 2008. But there is more good news. This time among top 10 universities. I'm very proud to see that University of Moratuwa(UOM) is the 1st among top 10 universities. This is a BIG BIG achievement for us. 
  
Congratulations to all my friend at UOM.   
  
 
  
image
  
image 
 Read more about this....  





 











Sri Lanka among Top 10 for Google Summer of Code 2008



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Wednesday, April 30, 2008
    • 









 Sri Lankan academic community is making its name more and more visible in the global arena. I saw this in the Google Open Source Blog which list out the top 10 countries at Google Summer of Codes 2008. It is very happy to see that Sri Lanka is among the top in both applicants and accepted project vise.  
  
image
  
image 
  
See the full blog post at Google Open Source Blog...
  





 











Imagine Cup is back to UOM



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Wednesday, April 23, 2008
    • 









Yesterday we had the final round of the Software Design category of the Imagine Cup Sri Lanka competition. There were six teams selected for the finals. Out of that six, three teams were from University of Moratuwa, two from UCSC and other one from SLIIT. 
  
This years theme was "Imagine a world where technology enables sustainable environment", so all of the projects were about how we can save our planet Earth.
  
For the fourth convective time undergraduates from University of Moratuwa managed to win the trophy. This time it was a joint effort by both Faculty of Information Technology and Engineering. Team "Sasrutha" presenting the project "Haritha Prayathna" won the 1st place.  They will fly to France on July to participate for the global finals.
  
Like last time this year also 2nd place was won by team "Gagana" from SLIIT and 3rd place was won by team "Will Power" from University of Moratuwa, Faculty of Engineering. 
  
Congratulations to the winners.
  





 











Wish You All a Very Happy Sinhala and Tamil New Year



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Monday, April 14, 2008
    • 









 
  
සුභ අලුත් අවුරැද්දක් ‍‍‍ෙව්වා
  
  
Happy New Year - Suba Aluth Avruddak Vewa
  





 











Imagine Cup 2008 Sri Lanka Finals



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Wednesday, April 09, 2008
    • 









Get invited for Imagine Cup 2008 Sri Lanka finals It is your chance to get an invitation to participate for the Sri Lanka's premier IT event. Hurry up. 
  





 











MySQL taking long time to connect



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Friday, April 04, 2008
    • 









Today I experienced strange issue with MySQL server which I'm using to developing and testing applications. Today it took unbelievably long time to connect. When I try to connect to the server using, do not connect and after long time it gave an irrelevant error.
  
mysql error message 
  
 I searched the net to find what could be the issue, and found this which is somewhat similar to my issue. But I couldn't fix the issue :(. Finally I uninstall MySQL and reinstall it. Haa... it works properly :D. 
  
Ok, reinstalling may not be the best way to it, their may be some work around for this issue. If you know something about this issue please be kind enough to share it with me. :))
  





 











After Long Time...



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Thursday, April 03, 2008
    • 









It's being a while since my last post. It was mainly due to I'm being busy with my studies for the end semester exams. Today was the final day :D. Now I'm free again till the final semester starts at the end of April and hope to do more blogging :)).
  





 











Microsoft Excel as 3D Game Engine??



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Friday, March 07, 2008
    • 









Today I came across this wonderful article which shows how Microsoft Excel can be used to render 3D graphics. Sounds amazing isn't it..... 
  
3D grapgics rendering in MS Excel
  





 











TreeTable in Java using SwingX



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Monday, February 25, 2008
    • 









TreeTable is a combination of Tree and Table. It can be very nice component when you want to display tabular data in a hierarchical manner. Last week when I was looking for a component that can be used to implement TreeTable, I came across JXTreeTable. It is a component of SwingX package by SwingLabs.
  
TreeTable 
  
Using JXTreeTable we can create TreeTable very easily. Only difficult part is creating the DataModel to match with our requirement. 
  
This is the sample application, I did for my HCI assignment with contains code for how to use  JXTreeTable. You can download SwingX here. Hope this will be helpful for you. 
  





 











Maximum RAM supported in Windows XP



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Saturday, February 09, 2008
    • 









Recently I assembled a new computer with 4GB RAM. My motherboard supports up to 8GB RAM and Widows XP supports 4GB RAM so no problem.....
  
But when I open the System Properties, it shows only 3.23GB of RAM. Where did the rest go? OK, I'm using onboard VGA with 256MB memory, so part of the RAM will be allocated to that and will not be shown in System Properties. But even with that there is considerable amount of RAM is missing.
  
4GB RAM not showing in System Properties. 
  
I wanted to know why it is. So I did an Google search and found out this. Reason is XP uses its 32bit address space not only to address memory but also to address some other components like System ROM , APIC(s),Integrated PCI devices, such as network connectors and SCSI controllers, PCI cards , Graphics card, etc... Because of this some part of the ram may not be accessible by the operating system since it ran out of address space. 
  





 











Using Bookmarks in Eclipse



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Sunday, February 03, 2008
    • 









When we are writing programs it is important to keep track of important locations in the code. Using Bookmarks are the easiest way to do it. But in Eclipse that feature is some what hidden. By default there is no shortcut for that as well. 
  
To add a Bookmark chose the code fragment you want to bookmark and from Edit menu select Add Bookmark. Once the bookmark is added there will be a small blue rectangle in the left hand side of the code window and a green rectangle in right had side of the code window. To view all the bookmarks that you added you have to bring in the Bookmarks view. Select Window > Show View > Other… from the main menu. Type "bookmark" in the filter box of the Show View Dialog box and select Bookmarks view.
  
Eclipse Show Views
  
 Eclipse Bookmarks Vie 
  
To make the process of adding bookmarks easy you can create a shortcut key combination for it. To do that choose Window > Preferences from the main menu, which brings up the Preferences dialog. Then type in “key” in the filter box, which takes you to General>Keys. Then selects the Modify tab. Select “Edit” from the Category drop-down. Then choose “Add Bookmark” from the Name drop-down. Then click in the Key Sequence > Name text box. Then hold down the keys you want to use for your keyboard shortcut. I selected Alt+B for this. You can selects any unassigned key combination for this. Finally click Add. 
  
Now you can use this shortcut to add bookmarks very easily. Cool isn't it?..............
  





 











Food for your thoughts....



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Thursday, January 24, 2008
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RMS and Philosophy of Free Software



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Tuesday, January 22, 2008
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rms 
  
Last Friday I got once in a life time opportunity to participate in a conference where Richard Stallman (RMS) did the key note speech.  If you do not know who is RMS, he is the father of "Free Software Foundation" and he is the one who started GNU project. He is a really interesting guy. 
  
From that key note speech I got to know about four freedoms related to free software.
  
0. The freedom to run the program as you wish. 
  
1. The freedom to study the program's source code and then change it so the program does what you wish. 
  
2. The freedom to distribute exact copies to others, when you wish. 
  
3. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others, when you wish. 
  
Other than that I learnt that it is note fair name popular open source OS "Linux" as "Linux". It has to be corrected GNU/Linux since Linux is only the kernel where GNU project developed all other components required for the OS.   
  





 











ZOTERO, Ultimate Research Tool for Students



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 









As students we have to do lot of research on various subjects. when we go researching stuff in the Internet, sometimes it can be very difficult to keep up with the information we come across and keep them organized. Before I came across this wonderful tool Zotero what I did was save all important  web pages, PDF documents, etc... in one folder and later open one by one and read them. When I'm writing a report on something this opening one by one and reading it can be really annoying. 
  
But with Zotero all this can be done very easily. This Firefox extension can keep everything very organized. Zotero can save files, PDFs, images, links, and snapshots of web pages along with the citation.
  
Here are some of the other features that Zotero has to offer:
  
       
  • Automatic capture of citation information from web pages 
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  • Storage of PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages 
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  • Flexible notetaking with autosave 
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  • Fast, as-you-type search through your materials 
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  • Playlist-like library organization, including saved searches (smart collections) and tags 
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  • Platform for new forms of digital research that can be extended with other web tools and services 
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  • Runs right in your web browser 
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  • Formatted citation export (style list to grow rapidly) 
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  • Free and open source 
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  • Shared collections 
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  • Remote library backup 
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  • Integration with Microsoft Word and other word processors 
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  • Access your library from anywhere via the web 
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  • Advanced search and data mining tools 
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  • Recommendation engine and RSS feeds 
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  • Wide variety of import/export options 
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zotero
  





 











Eclipse's Local History Saved Me ...



    

  • Posted by
Chathurika Sandarenu
    • 

  • Saturday, January 05, 2008
    • 









Today while I was working on our "Financial Planing System" project I replaced one simple code fragment throughout the project. That ruined how the application works. Since I've changed nearly 20 source files correcting would have been a nightmare. 
  
But fortunately, Eclipse is keeping track of the local changes done to source file. Because of that I've been able to replace the changes I did using that. 
  
select 
  
You can compare the changes you have done very easily. 
  
LocalHistory_Compair 
  
This is a really cool feature to have, specially if you are not using source control system. Even with source control local history can be very useful.
  





 















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