A bunch of tech enthusiasts have got together in organizing a meetup for the techy/geeky crowd in Colombo. It was organized in quick time and is scheduled to take place this Thursday. Its totally an informal meetup where we get to share our ideas. Most of the sessions will be much similar to a Lightning Talk. Though few topics have been chosen already, anyone will be welcome to do a lightning talk related to technology. The event is open to public and entrance is free. But your RSVP on the FB event page will help the organizers to get a head count as the seating is limited. So do drop in to meet individuals who think and act like you

Refresh Colombo

Refresh Colombo is a community of web and technology enthusiasts/professionals who come together on a monthly basis to share ideas and meet like minded individuals.

Refresh Colombo events are open to the public. We encourage you to bring a friend or two. Hackers, bloggers, coders, geeks & geek lovers, journalists, techies, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are all welcome – you can even bring your grandma.

This month’s presentations :

Samir Husain – CEO of Cenango USA will be presenting on “Transforming Sri Lanka into ‘Silicone Island’ – Asia’s IT innovation hub”

Buddika Siddhisena – FOSS evangelist will be presenting on “The Open Source Opportunity”

Aloka Gunasekara – SEO Specialist will be presenting on “Introduction on Search Engine Optimization”

Indrajit Samarajiva – Creator of kottu.org will be presenting on “Blogs and Social Media”

WHEN - June 17, 2010 at 5:30PM

WHERE - The Ceylon Chamber of Commerce ( No. 50, Navam Mawatha, Colombo-02. Sri Lanka )

For more information Contact Milad – 0772257225 or Email info@refreshcolombo.org
Visit our website at http://www.refreshcolombo.org/

When I planned to revamp lkgeeks.org some where around the end of last year, I wanted to make it happen within a month. But things got bit dragged and new ideas came in and now I have almost taken it to the next level. The website has been re-launched. You can check the site out at www.lkgeeks.org. There is a dedicated Twitter account and a Facebook fan page to connect all the Sri Lankan geeks. A new Twitter List has been created, so the Twitter Feed on lkgeeks.org will be based on this list.

While the initial idea of aggregating the blog posts and tweets of Sri Lankan geeks still remains, lkgeeks.org will provide more interaction among the geeks in Sri Lanka. From being connecting everyone virtually, it has gone a step further up by trying to get all of them physically together to share knowledge and experience. While this is a challenging task, lkgeeks.org has taken up this challenge to arrange workshops/meetups which will be free or at an affordable price (to cover the cost).  The workshops will be conducted by our own local experts in their relevant field. The topics will be based on the latest emerging technologies which will be a great way for the Sri Lankan geeks to start adopting to it. Topics/date/time/venue will be announced soon.

So keep checking the website, follow lkgeeks.org on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook to be first informed. Let me know your thoughts and comments as it will help in a great deal to improve on what I have built so far.

Richard M. Stallman, the Founder of the Free Software Foundation and the one who launched the GNU Project is in Sri Lanka and there are few events happening where he will be talking on 'Free Software in Ethics and in Practice'. So don't miss out.

More Info : http://www.foss.lk/events/2008/rms-in-sl

For starters thats a brief of what SFD is. Most of you know the fact that here in Sri Lanka we have been celebrating this day for the last few years. This year too several events have been organized on the 13th, 14th, and 15th of September. Due to my busy work schedule I couldn't really get involved in organizing these events but I had to give a talk today morning at the APIIT SFD celebrations on PHP. You can download the presentation here.

Tomorrow several events will take place and the event in Colombo will be held at Excel World from 10AM onwards. You can bring your PC or Laptop and get GNU/Linux installed for FREE at the Install Fest. Few geeks will be around and showing off cool FOSS Applications and you also can play video games on GNU/Linux. There will also be free Wi-Fi access as well. So don't miss out. Be there!

Here are the locations & list of activities that have been planned for the event. Don't miss out.. Be there to celebrate the Software Freedom Day..

The second session was the one I have been waiting was on 'Web Application Security Bootcamp' by Christian Wenz. It was one of the hot topics IMO where most of the Web Application developers tend to avoid the fact of securing their Web Applications. The session covered XSS(Cross Site Scripting), SQL Injection, Session Hijacking etc.. The best part of Christian Wenz's tutorial was that he showed us a live demo on how all this could be possible by cracking a Web Application that was poorly coded without considering the security issues. Then the countermeasures on how we can write secure Web Applications that would be secure against these type of attacks. I gained a lot with this tutorial. Some of the types of attacks I was already aware of, but I started to think twice after the live cracking he did on the Demo Web Application.

So that was the end of the ApacheCon Asia 2006 which was a great success. I'm really proud to be a part of it and it being held in Colombo, Sri Lanka. There is a Geek-Out event this weekend where all the geeks get an opportunity to have some fun at Kitulagala. Unfortunately I will miss out this event due to some schedules that I can't cancel.

The day ended with the panel discussion which was then followed with the award ceremony, cultural show, cocktail etc. And there is more tomorrow where Tutorial sessions will take place in four tracks. 'Introduction to the Apache Web Server' by Rich Bowen and 'Web Application Security Bootcamp' by Christian Wenz are my two obvious choices as most of them being Java based tutorials. Got some time to talk with Christian Wenz about his tutorial session tomorrow and he mentioned that it won't be language specific though his examples will be in PHP which is good news for me

The first sessions was on AJAX and PHP by Christian Wenz. This was one of the key sessions I wanted to listen. The session covered in-depth of AJAX and how it works with very simple and basic JavaScript code. And he also spoke about the frameworks that are available. He showed couple of examples which used Sajax. Sajax is a very good toolkit IMO but I prefered libajax over Sajax. But libajax was not in his list. So bit surprised. This session was followed by Emmanuel Cecchet's session on Building Highly Available Web Applications which covered on how Sequoia can be used to build highly available multi-tier web applications. During Lunch got the opportunity to have talk with the geeks and hackers around. I did skip the session after lunch but was a part of the talk with Russ Nelson with his gadgets where Bud, the local gadget expert was also present. Rich Bowen's session of WebDAV was also something new for me and its something I gotta try it out after getting back to work (may be next week). The last session was Lightning Talks and I was keen to see whats gonna happen on that session. And it was really a cool session indeed where individuals were given 5 mins to present a 5mins talk on a topic they selected. It was a fun session all the way. It was a mixture of informative and fun talks. So that really ended the first day of Apache Con Asia 06 though there was a BOF session after that which I was not really interested in. So waiting till I get there tomorrow

The most interesting part was that I met and got to know a whole bunch of people at foss-ed. I know the guys by their names as I'm in the LKLUG mailing list. I was really happy to get to know the ones behind the mask and quite a few bloggers as well. I have uploaded some pics to my flickr which I took with my phone but didn't turn out that well as I couldn't carry a digicam this time as well.