Joomla! 1.5.5 Released

From Joomla Site :

The Joomla! community is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Joomla! 1.5.5. This is a quick turnaround release to address the Duplicate Title error from 1.5.4 . This release also contains important SEF URL improvements and fixes for com_content in addition to a number of bug fixes and improvements. It has been nearly three weeks since Joomla! 1.5.4 was released on July 8, 2008. The Development Working Group 's goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla! community.

SourceForge.net Community awards 2008 winners

At last the SourceForge.net Community awards winners names are released.

Best Project »	OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org
Best Project for the Enterprise »	OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org
Best Project for Educators »	OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org
Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition »	phpMyAdmin http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmyadmin
Best Project for Multimedia »	VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Best Project for Gamers »	XBMC http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbmc
Most Likely to Change the World »	Linux http://www.linux.org
Best New Project »	Magento http://www.magentocommerce.com/
Most Likely to Be Ambiguously and Baselessly Accused of Patent Violation »	Wine Is Not an Emulator http://sourceforge.net/projects/wine
Most Likely to Get Users Sued by Anachronistic Industry Associations Defending Dead Business Models »	eMule http://sourceforge.net/projects/emule
Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins »	phpMyAdmin http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmyadmin
Best Tool or Utility for Developers »	Notepad++ http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus

Source Forge Community choice awards 2008

The Source Forge Community choice awards 2008  winners names are going to be announced at OSCON 2008 in a while… This time Moodle also a nominee under 2 categories. I would like to see the Moodle also in the Winners list.

Compare to 2007, this time there are more categories and it is good to increase the categories, because now Open Source covers almost all the areas.

Fingers Crossed

Horrible wind

Yesterday was a too windy day… specially in the night, after 3 am… all the windows and the doors were banging… the roof shutters were dancing… the coconut tree leaves almost were touching the land…

My room is close to sea…. The sea also was sooo busy… I was on the shore when Tsunami hit the Sri Lanka in 2004… I saw the Tsunami waves… So that scene came into mind…

The rain drops were strongly hit the roofs… I went outside once; I couldn't even open my eyes… drops were soo hard…

Around 4.30 am… the next door's asbestos roof sheets were starting to fly… altogether 4 sheets were missing when we check in the morning…

After the Tsunami, myself and some medical student went to Batticoloa side to have medical camp. Were there for few days… We saw the effect of the Tsunami in through the naked eyes… Couldn't believe that whether water can do this much damage...

Got the similar feeling yesterday…

Humans can't beat the nature… Nature always wins the humans for sure.

It was a horrible windy day…

Broad knowledge vs Depth knowledge

I was thinking which one is good… broad knowledge or depth knowledge…

 

Last 7 or 8 years... I was trying to learn everything…  Astrology, Astronomy, Cosmology, bit of sociology, Atheism, Philosophy, bit of medicine (I didn’t consult a doctor for last 5 or so year to take medicines for small problems, like fever, cold, pains etc., got into physics lot, Tamil literature, started to write stories, essays and poems, Many areas in Computing, Electrical works, Bit of vehicle mechanics, English language, Sinhala Language, bit of politictics… a long list. Therefore when ever people talk about something, mostly, things  were familiar for me… not much new.

 

This is broad knowledge… But it’s a pain to have a broad knowledge… coz, when ever people say something, something from somewhere will come in to mind. Then mind will start to think all the connected things… and get tired soon…

 

But when u have the depth knowledge in an area, you will face problem only when ppl talk in that area. However in that case you have to assume many things in life. I can’t think of such a way of living. So… can’t do anything… I have to suffer and I am going to suffer K

 

Hectic days

uu… since last Friday… the days were so packed… sleepless days…. almost 24 hrs I was sitting with laptop... You may not believe… After 4 days time, yesterday evening I slept 3hrs… Apart fro the office works, I had to submit an midterm evolution report to GSoC, write a research paper, works on Localization, conducted a lecture on Virtual Communities… etc… But I enjoyed all the works..
Now feel bit relax even though I do have an MSc research progress evaluation tomorrow…. I had a long sleep today morning… Anyhow I have a whole night, so I think that I can do something…

IDNs in Firefox 3

Atlast found a solution for enabling Tamil IDN in Firefox 3. Got to know that by defalut the IDNs are disabled in Firefox 3 for the security purpose.

To enable IDNs in FF3,
- open a Firefox browser
- type 'about:config' on the address bar
- add a respective whitelist and set the boolean value to true.

Eg: if we want to see the www.சர்வேஸ்.blogspot.com, we need add following whitelist -  network.IDN.whitelist.com

Another doc that worth reading is : http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/tld-idn-policy-list.html

தசாவதாரம் - Dasavatharam

Very recently a Tamil film call தசாவதாரம் - Dasavatharam was released. A Mega film... Actor Kamal Hasan has took 10 character in it. It talks about Chaos theory. I wrote an article about it. You can find that article here. http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dpxnhgb_1g8v9qz73

Your Valuable comments are most welcome.

A shocking news

Yesterday I attended a conference which is organized by Dept. of CSE, University of Moratuwa. The theme was, "Mind IT - Balance IT". In that conference there was a talk on Life values...
The speaker said that, in Sri Lankan urban areas... there are 36 % of the newly married couple are divorcing within 5 year :-( That was a shocking news for me... Also he has added that, this is 2nd highest in the World and 1st is somewhere in America.
This denotes that Sri Lanka is going towards the nothing in all the ways... Earlier economy, war, prices, death, politics were going in towards nothing... not cultures also get added :-(

All should think about this and atleast we should preserve the villages from this worse culture. Until this, people were arguing that, in foreign countries' cultures are worse and there are not much interaction between even husband and wife. But I think now they are moving towards positive direction.. now they value the relationships.. I think now it is becoming as a trend... But Sri Lanka is going towards wrong directions.

You know, we are always looking foreign countries and try to follow them... better to say, we tried to follow bit more than foreign countries do... I was thinking this was happening mainly in fashion. Everytime when we try to catch and start to follow their fashions... they forget that and move into new / other one.. Like wise we are always running behind them.

I think thats what happened in this divorcing culture also.. this was a trend in western countries and then we also have started to follow.. following it strongly... result is, now we are the second in it :-|

Will see what is going to happen next.....

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 set a Guinness World Record

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours- 8,002,530 downloads. I also pledge for this and downloaded the Firefox 3.0 on 17th June. For this pledging, Firefox people are issuing a certificate.
I also got a certificate for pledging :-)

A way of Gaining knowledge from Books

We can gain knowledge from books even without opening it. Don't you believe it?
See the picture below, these piled books help me get knowledge in this way ;-) I didn't open many book in the pile yet :-) But still they help me to gain some knowledge...

Firefox 3 and Punycode

I was testing the IDN - Tamil. It was working with IE 7 and also IE 7 redering the punycode as Unicode in the addres bar. But Firefox 3.0, even thought it is released very recently, does not decode punycode back to Unicode and its shows the punycode in the address bar :-(
Becuase of this in Firefox 3.0, when we try a Tamil URL, it looks like our site redirected to somewhere else...
to try : http://சர்வேஸ்.blogspot.com

Any solutions?