Sahana GSoC 2009 WrapUp

September 16, 2009 at 4:36 pm (FOSS, SAHANA)

Google Summer of Code 2009 logo 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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Sun’s JavaFx session at FIT

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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Unix the revolutionary OS turns 40

June 8, 2009 at 7:53 am (FOSS, GNU/Linux)

Forty years ago, Ken Thompson wrote a small operating system that eventually got named as Unix. An article at ComputerWorld describes the history, present, and future of what could arguably be called the most important operating system of them all. ‘Thompson and a colleague, Dennis Ritchie, had been feeling adrift since Bell Labs had withdrawn earlier in the year from a troubled project to develop a time-sharing system called Multics. They had no desire to stick with any of the batch operating systems that predominated at the time, nor did they want to reinvent Multics, which they saw as grotesque and unwieldy. After batting around some ideas for a new system, Thompson wrote the first version of Unix, which the pair would continue to develop over the next several years with the help of colleagues Douglas McIlroy, Joe Ossanna and Rudd Canaday. During its 40 years the Unix got evolved into many different versions and it made way to various modern operating systems that facilitate the world to do wonders specially in the fields of military, research, education, etc…


Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie

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Sahana @ Unlocking Young Minds ~ 2009

May 17, 2009 at 2:27 am (FOSS, GNU/Linux, SAHANA, University)

Last Thursday was a very busy day for me specially because it was the starting day of our exhibition. I was responsible for designing the brochure and getting the content finalized and few other designs which needed to handed over to Sanjaya to get them printed on previous day (Wednesday).

The FOSS lovers of my batch got together and decided to do something valuable of what we know during the exhibition by having a section called “Open Source Software” to educate the public about the importance and the benefits they can gain for their daily life. Glimpse into what Sri Lankans have given to the world community. We planned to have the section as follows:

  • Free Operating Systems and their usage
  • FOSS tool for our daily work
  • Sahana Project

In the Free OS section we demonstrated Minix, Free BSD, Sun Solaris, Fedora and Ubuntu by Kalana and Yoshan. In most cases majority of them were surprised about the functionality and the capabilities inherited in them because they had only experienced and exposed to the Windows XP. In the next section people got the chance to get to know and experienced the FOSS alternatives for Office Productivity(OpenOffice Suite ), Image and Video Manipulation(GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, etc..), Internet (Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, etc..), Entertainment(VLC, Amarock, Mplayer, etc..), Education, Emulation Engines(Wine), etc.. to name a few, it was conducted by Uthpala.

I took myself the opportunity of explaining and demonstrating the Sahana, which came as a result of Asian Tsunami devastation that took quarter a million of human life away. With the help of the documents received from Chamindra I prepared a poster highlighting its special milestones and its functionality.

Sahana Poster :1

Sahana Poster : Part 1

Sahana Poster :2

Sahana Poster : Part 2

To make the session more interesting I took the OLPC running Sahana on it, and Sahana running from an USB to show them and make them feel how the system can be used in real life situations. I’m happy to say that out of the people I spoke to most showed their interest towards joining the community, especially by students. I’m happy to say that I got an invitation from a school at Rathnapura to do a demonstration of the Sahana project at their exhibition which will be held on 22nd of June, I’m looking forward to it.

During the three days I got the chance to get to know various people and majority of them haven’t even knew that such a project exist and it had done so much of service to the world. So I’m very happy that I got a chance to convey the importance and the services it had given to the world community. I got the chance to talk with Mr. Wasantha Deshapriya the Director, Re-engineering Government Programme Information & Communication Technology Agency(ICTA). He appreciate the effort rendered by the Sahana community to make it a globally acclaimed project.

I had to run to Motorola (Pvt) Ltd Sri Lanka. to collect some of their equipments(various kinds of Bar-code Scanners, Wearable Computers and several other hand-held devices – happy to say that most of them are designed and developed here at Motorola Sir Lanka) during Wednesday. I must especially thank Mr. Ruwan Jayanetthi(who teaches us Embedded Systems) and Mr. Damith Jayawickrama at Motorola (Pvt) Ltd for the support given to me despite their busy schedule.

Memorable moments

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Sahana used in world largest Humanitarian Rescue Mission

May 13, 2009 at 2:01 pm (FOSS, SAHANA)

During the last couple of months group form LSF and Ministry of Resettlement and Disaster Relief Services got together to deploy Sahana to facilitate the operations of world largest humanitarian rescue mission carrying out by the Sri Lankan Security Forces and the government of Sri Lanka to rescue the innocent civilians from the brutal and barbarian LTTE carders who keep them as a human shield with the fight against the Sri Lankan Security forces.

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I’m so fortunate to help in this humanitarian rescue mission by being part of the development team which was lead by Ravith.

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