October 27, 2009 at 12:52 pm (CSS, Javascript, Web)
Recently while I was searching the web to find resources on web development I came across the Yahoo’s YUI Theater that provides valuable insight into the world of Web development through a series of videos that covers basically most of things required to know by a person who is into web development. I strongly believe that anyone who likes to understand the basics should watch it.
Out of the dozens of videos I loved the following ones
- Nate Koechley — Professional Frontend Engineering
- Nate Koechley — The YUI CSS Foundation
- Douglas Crockford — The JavaScript Programming Language
- Douglas Crockford — An Inconvenient API: The Theory of the DOM
- John Resig — The DOM Is a Mess
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September 16, 2009 at 4:36 pm (FOSS, SAHANA)
Almost most of the excitement related to this year’s GSoC has come to the end with lot of success. This time I got the chance to be part of this wonderful community representing Sahana Project as a mentor.
Looking into the history of GSoC Sahana Project has won a grate position, I’m telling this because Sahana Project got selected as a mentoring organization for the fourth consecutive year (2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009). As previous this time also Sahana Project won ten positions. These ten positions got allocated to students proposals from Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan (out of 44 proposals), out of them eight students were successfully in building new features to the project.
I mentored Akshit Sharma form India who developed the Dynamic Theme Manager module that enables the user to alter the existing theme to his/her preference without needing to have any knowledge about CSS, just through the use of a color pallet to select the respective colors and a new logo.
Although with my academic work I didn’t had much trouble finding time to guide him to understanding the system’s functionality throughout the summer since he is just a time zone away. It was a grate experience for me. To my understanding he enjoyed working with Sahana community and hope to have his contributions in the future as well. Lastly I would like to congratulate all the eight students for being successful in delivering new modules to leverage the functionality of Sahana.
I just got a email notification from FedEx stating that Google has handed over a T-Shirt to them to deliver it to me. 
Thank you Google.
Looking at the history of GSoC the University of Moratuwa has reached a significant milestone by being the top ranking university that produced the highest number of student participants in the GSoC 2009, 2008 and alltime
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August 25, 2009 at 5:54 pm (FOSS, University)
Today I got an opportunity to take part in a Sun’s JavaFX training session at our Faculty. This session was conducted by Mr. Feisal Ahmad from Singapore. He was currently a Senior Technology Consultant in Sun Learning Services at Sun Microsystems. Along with him some senior officials from Sun Microsystems visited our Faculty, this training session was part of their programme.
There was a session introducing the Sun Microsystems’s new technology that enables all the Java developers (web component, standalone application and mobile application) to use a common technology for creating rich applications using a common user interface called JavaFX . For me it felt like they have combined the features of Java Swing, MIDP, JSP, JSF, etc for creating rich GUIs and JavaScript or VRML kind of syntax for implementing the properties and controls for these components sticking to Java’s basic syntax.
During the morning session Feisal talk to us about the features and capabilities of JavaFX and how it can be used to make the life easy for developers in creating eye catching GUI applications which can be easily ported to run on any platform(Web, Mobile or Standalone). This further strengthen their saying ‘write once and run anywhere‘ making it applicable for all the hardware platforms. It was a technology that gives the flexibility to the programmer to create the GUI with very small set of lines of codes when comparing to earlier technologies that took hundred lines of code. It provide plugins support for Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for creating the necessary designs and for developers this technology is freely available for download as a plugin for NetBeans. For beginners they have provided a nice set of tutorials and other resources covering its basics and for getting our hands dirty. Next he extended his discussion toward Java’s enterprise technologies and the important aspects (about the importance of the Functional requirements as well as the Non-functional requirements) that we should considered when building enterprise level world applications. He explained about these aspects and how it can be handled using J2EE platform.
The afternoon session was dedicated give us a hands on experience about the JavaFX technology. During this session I learned how to make use of JavaFX to build a small image sideshow incorporating rich features like tweening, scaling, rotating, adding reflections, etc… into it and later we looked at how to incorporate a media player into a Java application having features that we are currently experiencing with web based Flash video players. At the end of the session Feisal asked questions based on the stuff he spoke to us during the morning session and gave gifts for those who gave correct answers and I was fortunate to win a laptop bag and a T-shirt having the Sun logo embedded.
I would like to give my special thanks to Mr. Feisal Ahmad of Sun Microsystems for his wonderful effort and spending his entire day with us sharing his knowledge and experiences, also I would like to thank my friend Ransara for coordinating this event in collaboration with NetAssists International.
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July 27, 2009 at 6:28 am (Life, Music)
Previous month (28th June) brought the music lovers around the world a sad news, the death of Michael Jackson the King of the Pop. His music carrier started in his early ages along with his brothers and revolutionized the world with his singing and dancing talent. Although he left the world physically his creations will stay with us for ever.
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June 14, 2009 at 6:04 am (Sports, Trinity College)
This year marked the 65th rugby encounter of The Bradby Shield against Trinity Lions and Reid Avenue boys (Royalists). It’s a very important event in Sri Lankan school rugby calender as well as for all the Trinitians and Royalists. Most of them make sure they never miss its excitement and glory, although they are abroad. It consists of two legs, one being played in the Royal College stadium in Colombo, and the other in Bogambara stadium, Kandy. The winner is decided on the aggregate of the scores from these two matches, usually played a few weeks apart. The first historic match between each other was played on July 31, 1920. and to this date Trinity had won most of the encounters by wining 35 while Royal had bagged 29 and a single tie in between.
In the 65th encounter, The Bradby Shield was won by Royal beating Trinity with a score of 53 points to 27 points. At the end of first leg at Kandy score board was Royal 22 points and Trinity 12 points and here at Colombo the Royal capitalized on their lead and went on to score another 31 points while Trinity managed to score 15 points on the board.
RESPICE FINEM.
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