Wela's Blog

When it comes to my blog I never wanted to use any of those ready made tools even though I knew those tools had everything needed and fully featured. All I wanted to do was to build it from the scratch ... just to feel good. I even started developing the second version ages ago but never got a chance to complete due to the busy scheudle and seems like never will be able to :(

Last Sunday started working on customizing BlogEngine.NET for another site and I'm suprised by the simplicity it gives when customizing the UI. Within 2-3 hours I managed to change the entier UI to the new look and feel I wanted. It was simple and clear.

Right now i'm thinking of migrating my good old blog to BlogEngine.NET ... any thoughts guys?

Last Sunday I went to the Lavinia Breeze with family to have dinner. Expectations were high as the advertising is good and more importantly I have been to a 'real' Brazilian restaurant when I was in LA last November. So wanted to have the Churrasco again.

Experience @ the lavinia breeze was utterly disappointing. For that price there are plenty of good restaurants in Colombo to have a good meal. We were there for about an hour and they served meat only twice and even for that I had to remind couple of times. I'm not an expert in grilling meat, but i'm sure I can do a better job in preparing meat. Last BBQ we did with couple of friends was pretty awesome. Also had to ask and remind again after 15 minutes just to get a water bottle. May be there was something wrong with me ... because a group in the next table who came much later was served pretty fast.

Anyways i'm NEVER going there again.

James Cameron had done it again. Previously it was Titanic which stayed the top of the box office for a very long time with a whooping 1.8 billion dollar.

And now it is Avatar … already grossed over 1.8 billion dollars, and already on the top of the list as the highest ever grossed movie and well on the way to become the first ever movie to gross over 2 billion dollars.

Haven’t you watched it yet? I have already watched it thrice and will be watching it for the 4th time soon.

Just watched a making the movie short video about how it was made and its amazing. The new technologies, concepts and tools created for this movie takes the arena of movie making to a new height.

Well! If you haven't watched it yet … go now!

WOW! Tech.Ed is back. Last time when Microsoft hosted a Tech.Ed in Sri Lanka it was 3 years ago and I was not in Microsoft. But now i have the pleasure of putting together the whole event.

Things are going to be really interesting this time at Tech.Ed. Some pretty big names are involved in the list of speakers.

Will write more details later, for now just go to the site and register. http://www.teched.lk

A Big Mac is one of the coolest creations of the fast food industry. OR in other words its one of the three kings of junk food. Other 2 are of course the Zinger from KFC and the Whooper from Burger King.

Yesterday I went to McDonalds during lunch time to grab a quick bite and ordered my usual favorite meal … a Big Mac meal. The guy in the counter by mistake have given me a Chicken Big Mac (A WHAT!). I noticed this only after going to a table. Just thought for a second … ask to change this or give it a try. What the hell! I just decided to take a bite and see. Had two bites and … CRAP! who decided to call this chicken burger a Chicken Big Mac. It’s a damn insult to the Big Mac.

Once upon a time when my office was just walking distance from McDonalds I use to have 2-3 Big Macs a day. Now! In case if you are wondering how fat I am … don’t worry … Big Macs could never made me fat.

I LOVE MY BIG MACS … SO DEAR MCDONALDS … PLEASE DON’T SCREW IT :)

Was thinking a bit about how 2010 will be and the list of activities I have lined up for 2010.

2009 has been pretty interesting, with couple of big initiatives being launched here @ Microsoft Sri Lanka, big stuff in personal side and some good events including PDC etc. I really thought 2009 was interesting. But compared to the things lined up for 2010 i'm excited and now feels like 2009 was a piece of cake. Anyways it seems like 2010 is going to be another exciting action packed year.

Things for 2010 is going to start with a big bang .. a Tech Colloquium (4th Jan), then there is Tech.Ed 2010 in Feb, Imaigne Cup in April and several other pretty big stuff coming.

During the transit I decided to chk out the city. Because most of the time as Microsoftees we visit a country and never get to see the country for real. This was anyways not an attempt to see the country for real but at least better than nothing. Either we stay stuck at the hotel where the conference/event is or stick with a planned city tour … which most of the times SUCK!

I went to this shopping mall which they called the kingdom of computers … Pantip Plaza, its a big a** IT Mall … actually bigger than the SimLim in Singapore. Gadgets seems pretty cheap here. I only got to check 2 floors in the shopping mall. It had 6 or 7 floors. With a little bit of bargaining I got two 1TB External HDDs and two 1TB Internal HDDs for just Rs. 10000 each … that’s awesome compared to the Rs. 22,000 price tag back home. And a digital photo frame just for Rs. 1900, which had no brand or anything. I decided to take the risk and buy it. It works perfectly fine after 10 days … so its all worth it for 1900.

After that took a long walk … about 3 kilometers in crowded roads in Bangkok, which reminded me Japan and Korea … everybody looks the same.

It’s the same university but a different faculty. Yup! during the last couple of years we did .NET days at the Science and Arts section, but after a while I decided to stop it due to there is no continuation of activities. Sorry guys I have to say this. We did event based on the request but after that there were no continuation in the champ program or anything from the previous organizers. Then when a new group of office bearers got appointed in the computer society they organize a session again … etc. I’m more interested in supporting the students in a continuous fashion.

So this time the request came from students from the Engineering Faculty with the promise of continuing the programs … and these guys are hungry for new stuff, knowledge etc.

Chanaranga deserves a big thanks for taking the initiatives to organize the event. As you can imagine handling registrations and coordinating a two day event is not an easy task … especially when you are working in Colombo and when the event is happening 100 km away.

A big thanks to Dinesh Asanka, Dinesh Priyankara, Susantha Silva, Prabath Fonseka and Tharindu Nanayakkara for joining the long trip with me. Looking forward to have a continuation session very soon.

Photos@ Windows Live Gallery / Photos

Right now I’m @ an event @ Peradeniya University … will write more about the event tomorrow with photos etc. But this is about the pathetic welcome I got from Queens Hotel in Kandy.

Couple of days ago I called the Queens Hotel and made the reservation for a room with the king size bed, because I was planning to come to Kandy with my wife and kid and the little fella is now turning to sides, and attempting to crawl :)

As planned I arrived at the hotel late night … around 11.00 PM and checked into the hotel. But the room had only a tiny bad … half-king size. When I questioned about it they said the room they were planning to give me was not free at the moment due to the current guest extended his stay. Surprisingly the guy at the reception asked me to ‘manage’ with this for the night and they will give me the room promised tomorrow … honestly that’s royally f***ed up. The real reason I got really pissed is when I called in the afternoon to double check they said it’s available and perfectly fine and even when I arrived at the hotel they didn’t even had the courtesy to tell me that there has been a problem and change in the plan. I had to discover the mess myself. That’s the most f***ed up way to treat a customer by any hotel. Well! i’ve been to so many hotels around the world and have never faced a situation like this. Anyway I'm NEVER going to go to Queens Hotel Kandy again. I’m yet to talk to the hotel manager and blast the hell out of him.

Luckily I managed to get a good room @ Sussie Hotel. If not the situation was to a drive back home or many miles to get a good hotel. Because all the other hotels I checked earlier were full.

Still @ the Bangkok airport. have sometime before the boarding starts. Had a long 16 hours long flight to Bangkok from LA and then a ridiculously long transit for 14 hours … around 4 more hours to Colombo.

Things at PDC09 went fantastically well. Day 1 keynote was delivered by Ray Ossi and it was mainly focusing on the future … Azure etc. Ray Ossi talked about how committed Microsoft is to the bring a seamless experience in all three platforms. Throughout the PDC there was a major focus for Windows Azure. I think this clearly demonstrates where things are heading. Also how serious Microsoft is when it comes to cloud computing.

Most of the times there were about 10 parallel sessions. Since unfortunately it is possible only to be at one place at a time I had to make some hard choices. All the sessions were in good quality in contents, demos etc. Anyways it is really good that all the sessions are recorded and published in the site to download.

Day 2 keynote had several highlights, announcements … first part was mainly on Windows … basically how it was built over the years and how bugs are tracked and fixed etc. For me the most interesting part of the keynote was the part done by Scott Gu. Yup! even though we just release Silverlight 3.0 … during the keynote Scott Gu announced the availability of Silverlight 4.0 beta …. and the final version of 4.0 will be released around mid 2010. Talking about giveaways … it was a surprise announcement. ALL 4000+ ATTENDEE at PDC09 got a Acer tablet PC for FREE. Not a crappy low config one, but a tablet with 2 GB RAM, Core 2 Duo, etc. There were about 5000 attendees. However as usual Microsoft employees were excluded from this fabulous free offer.

Partner Expo (exhibition) was great … actually much bigger and exciting than the entire Infotel exhibition we had last year. Almost all the stalls had something exciting for people to come and talk to. I talked to many people from the partner booths … including DevExpress, Telerik, Infragestics, Code Projects, Dundas, Resco, ComponentOne, Channel 9, Mono ext … Yup! I got a chance to talk to the guy who created the Mono project (.NET on Linux).

One of the most fascinating things I got to see @ PDC was the Windows Azure Data Center Container. I have been doing some reading and home work on how Microsoft is providing these crazy capacities and services to millions of users around the world. I mean Windows Live platform as of now has over 240 million accounts … multiply that by 35GB storage per account (5 GB in Live Mail, 25 GB in the SkyDrive). Several months ago got to know about this amazing innovative concept of how Microsoft is adding servers to the datacenters … containers … I actually got the chance to see … not just see … I went inside it … awesome!

Watched couple of movies during the stay in LA. 2012, Fourth Kind, Planet 51 and the most amazing one was ‘A Christmas Carol’ 3D movie .. .guys this is off the hook. This is the first time I got a chance to watch a 3D movie. At the entrance to the theater they gave a 3D glass to wear. Don’t have words to explain it. It’s too good to believe. It’s like I was inside the movie. When there were fast moving scenes and objects closing … I automatically / naturally moved to sides to save my head … well! that sounds dumb … but it was so real. I have to do some reading and understand the technology behind 3D movies.

Hell! I was never a fan of Twitter. Always thought of it as a pain in the a** tool, But during one of the sessions saw how it was used … to get instant feedback from the attendees in the room. It was a moderated panel discussion and and the whole discussion was based on what attendees published to the Twitter feed at that time. So now i’m officially a fan of Twitter. Still haven’t started mine … But will do soon :)

Not only that i’m going to hook up my LinkedIn profile also. As of now I have received over 140 LinkedIn invitations but never was too interested in keeping it up to date.

So … I’ll be on Windows Live, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn … I think that’s more then enough :)

What more could I say … everywhere I look, every blog entry I read about Windows 7 says only good things. I have been using it since the first beta and the experience has been fantastic. Even though Windows Vista experience was questionable at its best, Windows 7 delivers the expected quality, flexibility, performance … you name it … everything. As of now all my machines including the 2 Lenovo machines (tablet and laptop) and both desktops @ home are setup with Windows 7. Among all the coll new features … coolest for me is the Home Group feature which simplifies the process of creating, working and sharing information, files, videos, songs on the home network.

If you still haven’t had a chance to try Windows 7 out … what the hell dude! what on earth are you doing. Go grab a copy.

Windows 7 launch was simple. In Sri Lanka also we had several small events to launch this milestone product. Among them the official press conference, a CEO breakfast, Public Sector & Academic lunch, a dinner event for Microsoft partners and finally the Windows 7 community launch party was there. I couldn’t join the community launch party as I had to attend another important event … National Best e-Content Awards – e-Swabhimani.

I was slowly downloading the famous documentaries from BBC, Discovery, National Geo, History Channel etc to watch in my free time. It’s much more useful and productive than looking at television channels. No offence if you are a big fan of those 100+ episode, always crying, always fighting colorful dramas.

Back to the documentaries … list grew too long and the 1 mbps SLT connection seemed not enough at all. So … I upgraded the home like to a whooping 4 mbps connection … temporarily of course …. and purchased premium accounts into couple of download sites including rapidshare.

And now things are in full swing … almost 35 gig downloads a day. While in LA i’m going to have to shop for couple of HDDs. Heard those are pretty cheap here.

Seems like I have missed a much of exciting stuff in my blog. Good, bad, big, small … all sorts of things. Don’t want my blog not to have info about those when I check the blog back in 10 years. So here we go …

Couple of long awaited movies … among those my favorite was Transformers 2: Revenge of the fallen. Normally when a sequel comes out of a good movie everybody feels skeptical about the quality etc. But making all it’s expectations as of now Transformers have grossed over a whooping 800 million dollars. I watched it thrice in theater and 2 more times @ home. Movies about big bad aliens is always a winner in my book, but this was special because the story is surrounding the great pyramid of Giza and i was there couple of weeks before … seeing this wonder by my own eyes. A big bad alien destroying it was a really cool scene. Harry Potter: Half blood prince … for some reason breaking all beliefs about sequels have also grossed over 900 million. I think the next to episodes are well on it’s way to join the billion dollar movie club.

Most upsetting of all things happened was the death of MJ. I was very much looking forward to watch the new concerts. But breaking all hopes suddenly he died. I watched THIS IS IT last Thursday and enjoyed it a lot. too bad its going to be in theaters for a short time. It’s in theater right now in LA in few places and if I get enough time I’ll watch it again.

Among the local events there was efi2009 @ the Engineering Faculty of University of Peradeniya university, IT Day @ Mathale science College, IT Day @ De Mazaned College and the IT Day @ St. Sylvester College Kandy. Dang! during September – October I have done almost 7000 kilometers participating these events. It was a fantastic run!

Many more things … will write later as and when I get time …

Being in Microsoft gives me access the loads of material to stay on top of all new technologies. However the amount of time I get to spent on those is very little. Suddenly out of the blues I got an opportunity to go to the PDC09 (Professional Developers Conference) in Los Angeles. Even though I was so excited about going to PDC … didn’t even get a chance to blog about it … that should give you an idea about the ‘busy’ level. Anyways right now I'm in LA and looking forward for a great event. Have already picked several presentations in to the ‘must go list’ … too bad there are many good parallel sessions.

Will write some exciting happenings from PDC as and when I get time. Next 4 days is going to be packed with techno stuff.