Sinhala Blogs

There's a growing upward trend I noticed recently in Sinhala Blogging. 'Sinhala' or 'Sinhalese' is the unique language the Sinhalese (Nice recursive definition btw) people in Sri Lanka and it has never been the language for the computers or Internet in Sri Lanka. Times are changing though!

So is it a positive trend? I think it of course is. Your mother tongue is the best possible means of communication among your country men (and women of course, තව පොඩ්ඩෙන් ගුටි). And there are always unique stuff to discuss among your country men., beside the usual blog attractions like Holywood movies or technical developments. At a time when the traditional means of mass communication like print media and TV/Radio are meeting their (natural?) limitations and showing signs of being completely irrelevant and useless, I'd expect progressive advancements like Sinhala blogging to go a long way.

On the other hand Sinhala is not going to take us outside the country. So it's equally important for Sri Lankans to blog in English. Currently its taken as a fashion as well, but I guess the 'Kick' out of it will ware off with time when people realize it's own boundaries.

There's also an official body behind driving this initiative. You can get lots of useful information regarding Sinhala Blogging in their web site.
'සිංහල බ්ලොග් කරුවන්ගෙ සංසදය'

If you want to check out a few different kinds of Sinhala Blogs,
1. සුපුන්ගේ අන්තර්ජාල සටහන
2. කාලිංගගේ බ්ලොග් සටහන
3. මගේ මරණය

ප:ලි
මම සිංහල ලිවීම සදහා භාවිතා කලේ මෙතන

Pickups

Thought of sharing a few things I picked up during the last week from Internet/Blogs.

1. TED - http://www.ted.com
A very useful site which you should visit every week.

2. Predictable Irrationality
Is the idea which challenged the classical economist view that all human decision making is rational (Can be minimized to a Cost Benefit Problem). Picked it up from TED and then viewed a few more video of Prof. Dan Ariely, who is the man behind the idea. See it here.

3. Everythin's amazing, nobody's happy
Picked up from Dr. Sanjiva's blog. A very simple yet a truthful view of the current generations ungratefulness towards the things that we enjoy for granted. See it here.

Backup Essentials

Everyone of us has to format our hard disks once in a while. After switching to Vista I did that many times :). Although the usual data backup is done by most of us, I thought of putting down a list of things that we tend to overlook.

Outlook
1. Outlook Mail files (pst)
2. Outlook rules
3. Outlook personal contacts

Firefox
1. Favorites
2. Scrapbook
3. History
4. Passwords

Go here to find an easy way to backup complete firefox profile.

Anti-Virus
1. Settings (Special Blocks like TCP ports/Applications etc..)

Windows
1. Odbc DSNs
2. hosts file
3. Special gateway settings / TCP-IP (Eg: routes)

IM
1. Message History

IIS
1. All web sites and their settings in local IIS
Backing up IIS differs from one version to another. You have to do some googling and some tests to figure it out for your version of IIS.

A shortcut for all this could be to backup your windows profile directory. But it won't be a complete solution as some of the above could be saved in other locations.