Speak out loud at Refresh Colombo
by Nazly on Wednesday, 2nd March 2011 11:46:00
By now you would have heard about the Refresh Colombo meetup which happens every month. In a nutshell, Refresh Colombo brings all the technology, Internet, Web, Mobile and Social Media enthusiasts into a place where they could share knowledge and ideas. We have been live tweeting and streaming the event which allows people to take part in the meetup even though they cannot attend. The meetup has a pre-scheduled agenda with 3-4 talks by voluntary speakers so that people have a general idea about what’s in store for them. Ideally we want something like an unconference or lightning talk driven meetup but we are still in the early stages. So we are having everything in the agenda prior to the meetup.
Refresh Colombo needs more speakers from different areas of expertise. This is where you need to chip in. The whole idea is about sharing knowledge. Submit this form and let us know your areas of expertise and on which areas you can speak on. If you need any further details drop me an email. Looking forward for your response. Thanks guys!
Get your Emails back in Thunderbird after Ubuntu upgrade
by Nazly on Tuesday, 1st March 2011 13:39:01
Due to the unavailability of proprietary drivers for my VGA card since Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), I have been using Hardy as I couldn’t give up on working with dual screens. Though I tried upgrading when ever there was a new release, I had to revert back since neither proprietary driver nor out of the box support was available. As of late I was desperate for an upgrade and decided to work at least with a single screen and installed Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat). But to my amusement the dual screen support was available out of the box and with the help of Mili, I was able to set it up and I’m one happy fellow since yesterday.
Photography as a hobby
by Nazly on Sunday, 27th February 2011 11:49:32
Photography is an art that you have to be born with. If your eyes doesn’t capture the beauty of what you are about to click, its hard to imagine that your camera will. Some may argue it’s the quality of the camera that makes the difference. If you have the passion for photography, it really doesn’t matter what camera you have in your hand. But you need both skill and tools to be producing top quality images which would live up to expectations.
Headlight restoration with toothpaste
by Nazly on Thursday, 17th February 2011 15:05:20
This might sound like I’m trying to increase the sales of toothpaste or at least thats what I thought when I saw couple of posts that mentioned about using toothpaste to restore cloudy, foggy and yellowed headlights due to oxidation. In the market and all over the Internet you will find plenty of Headlight restoration KITs and even here in Colombo, you will find agents who will charge over $30 per headlight to get it restored. But if that can be achieved by something that we use on a day to day basis, why pay a thumping amount for it?
Multiple custom field handling in WordPress
by Nazly on Sunday, 6th February 2011 19:12:12
Since WordPress 3.0 introduced Custom Post Types, I have been using it extensively in my projects. Each Custom Post Type had multiple Custom Fields, but I had major concerns on building an algorithm to search across multiple Custom Fields using query_posts() since it allowed only a single key value pair (meta_key and meta_value). I had to extend the functionality of query_posts() to get over this problem. Looking at the documention it appears that with the release of WordPress 3.1, query_posts() will have a new parameter called meta_query which could handle multiple Custom Fields.
Optimizing the MySQL tables of a WordPress Website
by Nazly on Friday, 4th February 2011 14:44:31
If you are running a WordPress Website or a Blog where the content is updated and/or deleted frequently, you will need to optimize the MySQL tables more often than not so that you don’t run into database issues and down times. This also helps to maintain the average response time of MySQL queries.
jQuery noConflict() saves the day!
by Nazly on Thursday, 3rd February 2011 12:34:15
All these years I have been only using jQuery as a Java Script framework. But I came across this situation where I had to use both jQuery and Prototype in one of my projects. This unavoidable situation resulted in jQuery functions not working as its supposed to. The obvious reason was a conflict between the two libraries. A Google search revealed that this is a common problem and the good news was jQuery already had a solution for it.
Sad state of online advertising in Sri Lanka
by Nazly on Wednesday, 29th December 2010 16:44:17
There are tons of Online Advertising Websites all over the Internet that are targeted to the Sri Lankan market. Since developing dynamic Websites became quite popular, classified Websites emerged as a great tool that bridged the gap between buyers and sellers. Most of the Websites offer their services free of charge or at a reasonable fee. The sellers can manage their advertisements on these Websites. It’s a basic requirement for any Classified Website so that it will display the most recent and appropriate advertisements. There are few Websites that serves the purpose and have been providing a quality service.
England retain the Ashes
by Nazly on Wednesday, 29th December 2010 11:22:50
Since 2004, this blog has tons of topics related to English Cricket. For the first time in 24 years, England have retained the Ashes in Australia. Isn’t that a big news for me? So I won’t be doing any justice to this blog if I don’t actually blog about it. The rest of the world apart from the English are happy coz the Aussies have lost the Ashes. But being an English fan since 1992, I feel so great coz England have retained the Ashes for the first time in Aussie soil.
