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.

Couple of days back I heard about Ubiquity, an experiment by Mozilla Labs to connect the Web with language that would make Web tasks much more easy and fun to deal with for an average user. I installed Ubiquity and I'm already fascinated by how certain painful day to day tasks can be done easily by combining few commands. The initial version, Ubiquity 0.1 comes with loads of features including working with maps and insert maps to anywhere you want, translate on-page, search google, search wikipedia, digg, twitter, lookup and insert yelp review, get the weather, syntax highlight any code you find, convert a URL to tinyurl and the list goes on. Its definietly a worther try.

Make sure you go through the Introduction to Ubiquity which has most of the information you need to know about Ubiquity. Don't forget to watch the video which explains how easy it is to do certain Web tasks using Ubiquity.

Also read the Ubiquity 0.1 User Tutorial which has some nice tips on how to use Ubiquity and also has some valuable information about how to extend Ubiquity by adding new commands.

Have fun..

What a day it was, helping Firefox to set a new Guinness World Record. The Download Day is an awesome success I guess reaching more than 8 million downloads in 24 hours. It was supposed to begin at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Tuesday, June 17th. It was 10.30p.m. here in Sri Lanka at that time when I tried to login to getfirefox.com but the site was down and all Firefox related sites were hit hardly by the massive crowd login in at that time. I tried couple of times but no response. Then my Internet connection got dropped may be due to a failure from the ISPs end for some reason. I couldn't login yesterday morning even but checked the progress at SpreadFirefox's Download Day page. Finally around mid-day I was able to download Firefox3 as I pledged. What a feeling it was. The people of Guinness will review the World Record attempt, so it will take a few days to know whether this made it to the Records.

The Firefox3 Download Day has officially begun. For Sri Lankan's the cutoff time will be 10.30pm today. So go download Firefox3 by this time. Don't forget to spread the word as well.

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord

Upto now1,375,759 people have pledged to download Firefox 3 to set a Guinness World Record for the most no of downloads for a software when its released on 17th June 2008 which is today. 1,711 Sri Lankans are in that list so make sure you download Firefox 3 when its released.

The date/time for the Firefox 3 Lauch Party here in Sri Lanka will be announced soon. So be ready for that as well

The news Raids against 'software pirates' in Colombo caught me by surprise this morning while I was going through the news papers. I'm not sure whether similar raids have been carried out in the past but it was unexpected. I'm really glad that such action has been taken to protect the Intellectual Property Rights for software. But where does it lead to? The next target will be the general users of pirated software. But have we educated people about pirate software? Do they know the consequences of using pirated software?

As far as I can see it, 90% of the general public are unaware of the fact that they are doing something illegal. If they go to one of these outlets that sell pirated software they can buy a CD for Rs.80 ($0.75) or a DVD for Rs.150 ($1.3) quite easily. They actually think that they are paying the price for buying the software, which is not correct. The software is actually worth hundred times than that. Even if you buy a genuine copy of one of the proprietary software for its price you cannot make illegal copies of it. Because the licence clearly states that you cannot do that. Most of the tech-savvy users understand what is pirated software. But there is a non-tech crowd in other industries that use pirated software for their day to day needs without realising the fact that they are doing something illegal.

So whats the solution? Are you ready to pay over Rs.10,000 ($100) to get a genuine copy of the software? Or will you look for an alternative software which will give you the freedom to use and share among the others? The latter will be my choice. That is why I use Free and Open Source Software. I think for a country like ours using FOSS is the ideal choice for people involved in any industry. By choosing Free and Open Source Software you have

 - The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
 - The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1).
 - The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
 - The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, 
so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3).

As you can see you have the full freedom over the software unlike the software tying you down. Its important to make the public aware that for almost every proprietary software there is one or more alternative Free and Open Source Software available. I made my move to GNU/Linux as my primary operating system sometime back and never looked back since then. As I said I had more than one alternative in this case as there are hundreds of distributions for GNU/Linux. I did try Redhat Linux 9, Fedora 3, Slackware and finally settled with Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) at that time. This doesn't mean that the other distributions I tried are bad. It means that I had choices to make before settling down with what I was comfortable with. Currently I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) on all my computers. I use FOSS for all my day to day needs. I use Mozilla Firefox for Web browsing and Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client. I use Pidgin for Instant Messaging which supports Yahoo, MSN (yes, I have friends there too ) and Google Talk. I use OpenOffice for handling all types of Word Processing, Spreadsheets and Presentations. And the list goes on.

Find FOSS alternative for your proprietary software at www.osalt.com

What I wanted to emphasize is that there are FOSS alternatives. By using it you won't be considered a criminal. You won't be caught by the police for copying a FOSS software in a CD and selling it to someone by charging the cost for the CD. You are free to do so. More than that you can modify the source of that software. In a proprietary software the source itself is not available. Lets not consider that part for now.

It was the Lanka Linux User Group and FOSS Sri Lanka that were behind my move towards FOSS. They conduct workshops, trainings, conferences all around Sri Lanka in order to promote Free and Open Source Software here in Sri Lanka. Specially in Schools amongst the younger generation. So when ever you are in need of any help of FOSS you know where to look for. So make the move now. Don't wait till its too late.

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