Thought Net

Browser Wars - Under a New Set of Rules

2009-06-02T07:40:00.003+05:30

It's not a secret to know that there are hundreds of browsers. The cold war between the main players is no lesser secret.

With the industry joining the HTML 5 bandwagon the browser war has entered a new dimension. HTML 5 is the next generation HTML standard which is 'work in progress' by the way. As in the past the software developers have overtaken the standards bodies and started implementing this and some have even done beta releases. Google has also announced their willingness to fully join the club with Chrome at recently concluded Google I/O.

Some cool features of HTML 5 which caught my attention was,
1. The new video and audio tags
This enable application authors to create their own interface for video/audio players. This means that the browsers can also provide their own players. There is still conflicts as to which encoding/decoding mechanism to use as the standard.
2. More support for offline web applications
3. API exposing the browser history
This will be very welcomed by all the developers who had 'Back Button' problems
4. API for Background worker threads
This is a method to perform highly expensive computational tasks without interrupting the user interface.

Two main objectives of the HTML 5 standard are,
1. To foster interoperability of browsers
2. Introducing new APIs and Markup for emerging web usage patterns while being backward compatible with already deployed content

It is really fascinating to see that the user experience on top of the browsers is reaching a level very close to the desktop experience. With new communication platforms like 'Google Wave' we will be taken in to a whole new range of web applications. Below chart from O'Reily shows how the native client and web user experience is merging in the future. (Is Chrome in front of Firefox...duh..may be in terms of release date only)

What I would be interested in next few months is how Google Chrome would fair up with Firefox. Chrome did not came out well in it's first version. But I just feel that they will come with a bang next time around although the current news is not encouraging for Chrome.

Pickups II

2009-05-16T22:47:00.003+05:30

Here are few things I came across which caught my interest

1. Indika sent me this great article about something we have know for a long time, but conveniently ignored even longer.
"Characterizing people as non-linear first-order components in software development"

2. Saminda, a former work colleague at Eurocenter, who works for WSO2 now, has created this firefox add-on which enables seamless transition between English and Sinhalese based on 'Singlish' scheme. Specially useful for Sinhala users who do not want to learn the typical Sinhalese keyboard.

3. Rang Di Basanti is one of the best hindi movies I've seen (Better than slumdog). The song 'Lukka Chuppi' is a hypothetical dialog between the recently dead soldier son and his mother. The son is treated as a hero by everyone (And he himself conside himself to be one), but does it erase the void set in mothers heart ever? Facinating lyrics, music, vocals...and really relevant for the current times in Sri Lanka.

Video
Lyrics with Meaning

I suggest you watch the video along side the lyrics/meaning. Even better if you could watch the whole movie.

Keeping Web Sites Alive (IIS/ASP.Net)

2009-04-03T17:18:00.015+05:30

Problem:
IIS recycles app pools periodically and the first request which comes after a recycle takes too much time to process because the whole app needs to be loaded and compiled. By default the idle time is 20 minutes.

Solution:
1. Configure App Pool to recycle when you need it to
2. Setup a ping service which will act as the first request to reach the web site after a recycle

Method & Details:

1. IIS App Pools
IIS App Pool concept is a very useful thing in keeping web sites in same server seperate from eachother. App Pool recycling is also an important activity which cleans up left overs from your application runings.

But default IIS App Pool recycle options are not suitable for a highly responsive site. It can recycle

Every n minutes
After m requests
At specific times of the day
If consuming M amount of virtual or physical memory
If idle for p mins
If kernel request queue (where http requests are kept before dispatching to IIS) has more than x requests

You have to change the default settings to suit your requirement while making sure that recycling actually happens as well. I recommend using the specific time of day approach to force a recycle at a low traffic time.

2. Keep Alive Services
A Keep Alive Service will send a dummy request to your site just to make sure that it won't go to sleep (recycle). One other important attribute of a keep alive request is that it should not make the current logged in user count to go up. So typically Keep Alive services will send a request to a 'KeepAlive' web page of the site which is specifically made so that the user statistics are not screwed up. Following keep alive page will show the current time,

<html>
<head><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="300"></head>
<p>Current Time Is : </p><%=now%>
</html>

There are 2 kinds of Keep Alive services

Web based services - siteuptime.com, host-tracker.com
Standalone Applications - Siteup by Xequte

The standalone applications is useful but it has a heavy dependancy on the machine that you install it. If the machine is down or the application is shutdown by someone you have a risk. I recommend the usage of web based service (for a nominal fee). They provide much more features as well as releasing you the burden of keeping the keep alive service alive.

Sinhala Blogs

2009-03-29T02:23:00.006+05:30

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

2009-03-24T00:07:00.004+05:30

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

2009-03-12T00:28:00.003+05:30

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.

Exceptions Revisited

2009-01-19T22:47:00.003+05:30

Exceptions are an integral part of any modern programming language. AS a mover from Java to .Net I have had my fair share of exception handling changes. In Java you have both checked and unchecked exceptions and the throws exception clause is part of the method signature. In .Net (C#) all exceptions are unchecked which was kind of weird to me at the start. But after programming with .Net for over 2 years now I'm pretty convinced that the unchecked exceptions are the way to go. But I came across Spec#, an experimental extension language to C# by Microsoft has decided to give checked exceptions another go and thus I thought I'd revisit the whole argument again.

When the chief architect of C# language, Anders Hejlsberg was asked why they opted to keep checked exceptions (which he recalls as 'handcuffs' on programmers ) he sighted 2 main reasons.

Scalability
Versioning

What he meant by scalability is the fact that when you write programmes which interacts with a whole bunch of other subsystems and APIs the number of exceptions the programmer is forced to handle grows out of control. When you just deal with the IO namespace in .Net framework this is not so much of an issue as you only have to handle a few IO exceptions but in large systems you can end up having to handle tens and hundreds of exceptions. So what happens is that the programmer gets tired of this and writes a big catch Exception clause which completely defeats the purposes of having checked exceptions in the first place. Or even worst they have the empty curly braces for each catch clause which is basically a planted time bomb. Another valid tactic people use is catching all checked exceptions and to wrap them as Runtime exceptions making sure that they no longer obstruct the users on top of the chain.

Under 'Versioning' the problem is that the throws clause is part of the method signature. So when you release a second version of an API or class library you can not introduce new exceptions or change existing ones since it will break client code. You are now left with having to declare a new method with a different set of exceptions which makes the API messy and unclean.

On the other hand one of the main arguments against unchecked exceptions is that the client programmer has to solely depend on the documentation of the API method to know what exceptions can be thrown by the function. But you can have a tool do this analysis for you like the 'Exception Hunter' from RedGate Software. According to Hejlsberg the most important thing about exceptions is not how you handle them, but how you release resource upon encountering one. This is perfectly handled by the try-finally blocks or using blocks in C# (Disposable pattern). The reason is that only a fraction of exceptions caught really need or can be handled by client code. The proven practice of dealing with unchecked exceptions is to let them propagate to the top of your call stack and handle them in a single place. By handling what is usually being done is a message to the user and graceful termination of the programme. We do this in very simple way in ASP.Net applications by using the Global.asax Application_Error handler.

War and Peace

2009-01-13T22:50:00.007+05:30

One of the most die-hard critics of current Sri Lankan government, Lasantha Wickramatunga was shot dead last week. He was the chief editor of Sunday Leader, a weekly newspaper in English. I must say that I have not read the Leader for a very long time and not a fan of Lasantha by any mean, but still I was deeply shocked at his demise. Although I have many a reservations about his never ending conspiracy stories , without a doubt he was the only main stream journalist in South who criticized the highly glorified war currently run by the SL government. Although the country is going steeply downward in terms of democracy almost the entire majority Sinhalese is glued to the war heroics like we are glued to a game of cricket won by the Sri Lankan cricket team.

The author of the attached EDITORIAL is ‘Dead Lasantha’ not the living one which makes its points send a more chilling wave through my spine than ever. The writing lists 4 very important assets of good governance.

1. Transparent

2. Secular

3. Liberal

4. Democratic

Please get away from the Wins in war fields for a second and give it a thought. Does your educated mind allow you to do that you?

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me

German Theologian,
Martin Niemöller
@ the time of the Great Holocaust

Gran Torino

2009-01-02T11:30:00.006+05:30

As of things to expect during the new year of 2009 in the very first day of the year, I had to go through an absolute crap bag of a movie and followed it up with one of the top notch movies in 2008.

The worthless movie was 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' although I'd wish the whole movie could have stand as a still photograph of Keanu Reeves. I don't think we need to discuss a lot about that one.

The follow up movie was 'Gran Torino' is by none other than Mr.Clint Eastwood. Gran Torino has Mr.Eastwood himself as the main character 'Walt Kawoski' a former World War I soldier who operated in Korea. Kawoski is a very independent man who has a past which he likes to forget and a very lonely present time. At the start he projects himself to be a typical old age American who is so arrogant and big headed. His nerves are further tested by the fact that his neighborhood has ended up being a cross-cultural dump yard of people. The movie beautifully shows how the bond between him and the two young Hmong girl and boy builds up. As the movie unfolds the very same characteristics of Kawoski which you hated at the beginning starts to first entertain us and then even educate us about human relationships towards the end. Eastwood with his ever deepening voice of his cracks up some very good humour and also forces us to appreciate the fact that old style of living is indeed simpler & better.

I always judge a movie either by the number of 'Ohhhhhh' feelings or the number of feeling of some heavy chunk stuck up in the top of my throat. Being ‘Ohhh’d is an indication of being tricked by the movie which is good most of the time (Remember Usual Suspects/Memento). The second is the feelings we have towards the characters and their situation which indicates how well the movie has bonded us with the characters within 1 or 2 hours. Gran Torino left me up with a few heavy chunks stuck up in my throat (specially at the end) as an appreciation of how pure and worthy plain old style human relationships can be without all the religions and sciences trying to dissect and describe it.

I would recommend any of you to get a DVD and watch this.

Opera Mini on NOKIA 6500

2008-11-29T23:02:00.009+05:30

I bought a NOKIA 6500 slide and was very interested to see how the Opera browser would work on it. I had once worked with a colleague from India, Deepak who now works for Opera. He had given me enough reasons to at least try it. So I decided to go for Opera Mini. But getting it to work was not so straight forward. In this post I will explain how I got it to work step by step.

From my service provider I got the web settings such that the default browser started to work. Well, Opera cannot be so far away now…So I downloaded Opera Mini to my laptop and transferred and installed it on the phone. But when I started Opera I was surprise to see the "Failed to connect to the Internet". In this article the cause for this problem is explained in detail. In short the reason is that the service providers use an internal Access Point setting which results in no Access Point being available in the phone. So the solution is to create your own Access Point with the settings found on the internal Access Point used by the internal browser. The disappointing thing is that the mobile phone manufactures do a terrible job of documenting these things and also the opera mini settings page does not list Sri Lankan service provider details plus nokia.com does not also have Sri Lankan network details.

Menu > Configuration Settings > Personal Config. Settings >
You will be able to see the existing web connection or access point. Write down all its details.
Now under Personal Config. Settings choose Options > New > Access Point and provide the details
These are the details I provided
1. Account Name - MyAP
2. Data Bearer - Packet Data
3. Under Bearer Settings provide exact same details you found under Bearer Details in the default browser access point.
Now under Menu > Configuration Settings > Preferred Access Point provide the name of the AP you just created (MyAP)

After that Opera Mini (Or Other Data Applications) will start to connect to Internet.

Zeitgeist Addendum

2008-11-16T15:12:00.009+05:30

I have watched the second part of the Zeitgeist, "Zeitgeist Addendum". This is more focused on the naturally corrupt and faulty nature of the worlds current monitory system, specially the Banks. Also in the last section of the movie it devotes it self to explaining the solution. Discussing solutions and possible actions was very interesting as it gives us more courage to do something about it. The final section introduces the viewer to the 'Venus Project' which proposes a very different and at this point of time very radical social system, which is driven NOT by money, but by technology. I propose every one to watch the 2 Zeitgeist documentaries to get a fresh perspective of what's happening around us. The awakening I got after watching these 2 is somewhat similar to what I got after watching the first Matrix movie.

PS : A better quality version of Addendum can be obtained via Torrents.

Efficient Outsourcing

2008-11-02T09:30:00.009+05:30

The business model at Eurocenter is 'Extended Engineering'. Although the fancy term might give u the feeling that it's actually another term for 'Out Sourcing', it's not. We try to be partners of our client which in most cases is an ISV, Independent Software Vendor. Our ISVs are from Scandinavian countries and we tend to work with them not for a project or 2, but for a long time. We already have several clients who had been working with us for more than 3 years.

Although one of the strengths of Eurocenter is its commitment to delivery once a project is signed off, a recent whining I get from one of the clients is that time taken for us to sign off a project is too much. This is due to the fact that we like to resolve as many grey areas as possible in the scope to prevent scope creep and unhappy situations with the customers late in a project. Mind you our projects are usually small in size, roughly 3000 hours and completed within 6 months or so. But what I noticed is even for a project which is smaller than this we take around 1 month of back and forth discussions to finally agree and start the project.

This is not healthy for an ISV who's looking forward to cut down on his Time to Market by partnering with a company like Eurocenter. We have tried framework agreements where the client basically agrees to pay for a certain number of resources for an period of time (6 months) which is kind of Time & Material job. But this is more suited for projects where customer manages the resources and provide them small grained tasks as oppose to whole projects. The typical advantages customer gets by working with a company like Eurocenter is that the emphasis in quality and process. But in a time & material based cost structure this is not captured and the customer can't expect the same quality & process benchmarks as a fixed price complete project. In case of a typical product development (Which builds a specific product for customer) we follow the fixed rate model where we scope & estimate prior to sign off. This is where the initial delays are seen, when we try to agree on scope & estimates.

One of the models we came up in our discussions recently is a model where as soon as the client gets the idea of a product/project and wants it to be done by us, 1 or 2 resources from us can start working on the project while also scoping and estimating. There is always a % of actual project work which can be done before the scoping is not completed. There is a risk of the project not progressing after couple of weeks. What we have agreed is to share this risk with the client. So for the initial work that we do on this project will be billable to the customer on a time & material basis. This gives the client time to go through scope & estimates properly while knowing that he's not impacting the final delay of the product by much. On the other hand we get to provide our resources with billable work which is both good for the company and satisfying for people. In the current fixed price model we end up having 2-3 resources doing non-billable work for a few weeks just because customer hasn't yet signed off a project rather than any other technical problem. Of course the client and the outsource company can't do this if they have met for the first time. You need to have a certain level of trust and confidence on both parties for a model like this to be a success. We plan to employ this tactic soon and see how it goes with matured clients of ours.

If the model proves to be a success it can be one of the most efficient models of outsourcing. while managing the risks.

Eurocenter - CMMI Level 3 Company

2008-10-26T11:06:00.011+05:30

Eurocenter, the company I work for has achieved one of its biggest milestone by becoming the first Sri Lankan software company to achieve CMMI Level 3 Dev maturity level. CMMI is a process improvement model proposed by SEI (Software Engineering Institute - Carnegie Melon). The exact achievement of Eurocenter is CMMI for Development version 1.2. Out of the 22 processes in CMMI Dev 1.2 Eurocenter was evaluated for 17 processes up until Level 3 which is depicted below. Out of this Supplier Agreement Management was not considered as its not part of Eurocenter Core Processes.

This project started more than 1 year ago involving many colleagues at Eurocenter. I was involved in the SEPG group which was focused on defining processes. Also the project I was involved in pass year was considered as one of the two focus projects which got evaluated for all 17 processes. My process area was Engineering and the processes were Requirement Development, Technical Solution, Verification and Decision Analysis and Resolution. It was a great learning experience and a test for all of us. The achivement has proved that Eurocenter is now leveling with the best companies of the world in terms of process.

Have a look at the list of companies who had achieved various maturity levels up until now. I will update the post as soon as Eurocenter is also officially added.
CMMI wikipedia site is here.

UPDATE : Eurocenter had officially awarded CMMI Level 3 certification. Check this link for the official CMMI page.

Zeitgeist

2008-10-12T22:04:00.004+05:30

One of the biggest news to hit the media in recent times is the US economic turmoil, which in turns affects other parts of the world in different strengths. The hottest story before this in my mind was the 9/11. In addition one of my main areas of interests is the concept of religion. I have come across a documentary this weekend which discusses and disects ares similar to the above. This is a very popular documentary which is placed in top 5 of the all time best documentaries in imdb. Say HI to 'Zeitgeist, the movie'. After Micheal Moore documentaries, this is the most interested I have become for films of this kind. While Micheal Moore clearly exhibits his hatred towards a certain set of people and focus groups Zeitgeist projects a much broader view of a system which is built upon greed and lies.

Zeitgeist identifies a triplet of myths upon which the current world empire is built upon. The myth of religion, country and prosperity. These are 3 symbols of modern americansim where it's metrialized (Clearly mentioned over and over again in current US elections) as faith (Christinaity), national security (anti-terrorsim) and economic wealth. The movie clearly articulates that all 3 of these is based on either pure myth or is a carefully staged act to make sure that a few can prospour in the expense of a blind-folded nation (world). The movie also is clearly in 3 parts where I prefer the third part which talks about how the central banks (Federal Reserve) have consumed countries in to a never ending debt cycle. And that it's merely a property of the system to have recurring cycles of booms and busts (recessions) is cleary understood. The fact that the movie was made much before the current economic problems speaks volumes. Almost everything in part III of the movie can be related to the current economic problems.

On the other hand it's the internet which had made Zeitgeist a runaway hit after it has been freely distributed in google video. Also the main authors of the film Jaque Fresco an Architect, Engineer and a Futurist has used Internet to spread his ideas for a long time. Jaques main idea is to use science, nature and technology instead of religion, politics and money to decide the future of our world. I suggest everyone of us watch this movie and treat it not as just another 9/11 conpiracy theory but take the more broader view to change our own lives and then our societies in turn.

Some other interesting links related to this are,
1. Zeitgeist Wiki Link
2. Movie Review
3. Zeitgeist Addendum, the follow up

Also check out some e-books available on the Zeitgeist Movements official web site.

Google Moderator

2008-09-28T20:47:00.003+05:30

The famous Google '20 percent' project initiative has produced another product with very high potential. It's called Google Moderator. All of us are very familiar to crowd source techniques used in sites like reddit to rank popular web sites. The same technique is used by many user forums where an answer to a question is ranked by the readers to be the best or most suited. But with Moderator, you are assisted to ask the correct questions in the first place.

You can find obviously popular question topics like 'What should you ask the next US president' to 'Ask a Google engineer'. But the good thing is you can create your own question series and invite people to participate to it. You can think of many ways to use this tool both inside your company and as a general tool to the community.

Fighting Vista

2008-08-31T19:02:00.002+05:30

After years of having to work with used laptops I was astound to hear that my Employer is going to give me a brand new HP – 6710b laptop. I was eager to check out how my productivity increased with the new machine. My working environment usually consists of 2 instances of Visual Studio 2005, MS Office word/excel, IIS 5.1 , 2 DB Servers (SQL and Faircom), Around 10 tabs of Firefox, 2 windows of IE, Skype and MSN, Outlook, Virus Guard and a few other utility programs on a Win XP SP2 box. My problem was that whenever I’m furiously in to a debugging session I end up with insufficient CPU cycles for my crucial programs. So naturally this ‘state-of-the-art’ laptop had brought me new hope.

As soon as I got my hands on the new laptop I was impressed with its look and hardware features. But my main concern was the fact that the new box is running on Vista Business. What I’ve heard about Vista is not so great. Well, I thought I shouldn’t trust on rumors and should try it my self.

First thing was to get all the software installed. One thing I noticed during installations is that you better run the installer under admin rights. (Choose ‘Run as Administrator’ from the right click menu). The behavior in Vista is such that although your logged in user could be belonging to Local admin group you will have to explicitly mention to the OS that you actually need Admin rights whenever you execute something.

From the point of getting everything installed it took me nearly 4 -5 days of spare time to get my development environment to a workable state. Main challenges were with getting IIS 7 to run my web applications and enabling them to be debuggable with Visual Studio. Listed below are some of the steps I did while achieving this feat. Please note that I plan to explore more in to why Vista has these restrictions and on the way discover a few more things to share on the blog.

1. Turn on IIS related features/requirements

General instructions -http://geekswithblogs.net/ranganh/archive/2008/01/31/visual-studio-2005-windows-vista-and-iis7.aspx

VS 2005 Debuggability - http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/09/19/Tip_2F00_Trick_3A00_-Using-IIS7-on-Vista-with-VS-2005.aspx

(I actually disabled UAC which in turn got rid of the annoying gray screen asking me ‘Are you really sure?’ every time I try to do start something productive)

2. Turn on Windows Authentication

For the web application you are trying to run you need to enable Windows Authentication. Just select the web application in inetmgr and go to security > authentication and enable it.

3. Using the Classic .Net Application Pool

One of my friends suggested to use Classic .Net application pool and I did configure my application to run on that. But I will do more reading and testing to find out why or why not we can run our applications in Default App Pool in IIS 7.

Right of (Non)Believing

2008-06-30T18:04:00.002+05:30

Following is a collection of thoughts I gathered reading a column letter published in the Sinhalese newspaper 'Ravaya'. This piece is written by popular Sinhala novelist Gamini Viyangoda. It's one of the few writings I've seen in Sinhalese about Atheism rights. Some of the other interesting reference material in this area are the book 'God Delusion' and the BBC documentary 'Root of All Evil' by Richard Dawkins.

‘The right to express, hold and publish my ideas should not challenge the right of the other to criticize the same’. This is a well accepted practice in politics and in all social matters in general. If law comes up and defends my right to protect my idea from being criticized, that law will be grabbing the right of freedom of expression from the other. Although such laws are not common place, strangely enough, most of the countries have similar laws when it comes to religion. Although the right to criticize any sort of political opinion is well accepted at a principal level (practice can be different) the same right is not even accepted at a principal level for religion. If I go ahead and try to criticize a religion I most probably be accused of a legal offence.

Including Sri Lanka, many countries generally agree that you should not ‘look down’ upon religions. Actually looking down upon anything be it religion, people or anything at all is not appropriate. But the religious societies misinterpret any sort of criticism towards them as a ‘looking down’ scenario and all of us have got used to accept it as an eternal practice. There could be exceptions when the main religion of a country goes ahead and criticize other religions, but in principal criticism towards any religion is considered as non-ethical in any country. But what is the need to have such a ‘critic-proof’ shield only for religion?

Any religious person does NOT like others criticizing his/her religion. So he himself imposes a self-ban on criticizing other religions due to very obvious effects of throwing stones from a glass room. Preventing from criticizing other religions to prevents one’s own religion from getting attacked is a well understood self-preservation mechanism that cannot be criticized J. But what about an atheist, someone who does not believe in any traditional religion? It is not correct to say that an atheist does not have a religion. Not believing in any religion IS his ‘religion’. So as much as the right of a established believer to rise for his religions correctness and atheist should have the same right for his ‘religion’. On the other hand if the religion is a way of self liberation an individual should have the freedom to decide whether he wants to liberate that way, not the majority or state. Similar to a Buddhist rejecting the Islam liberation and a Christian refusing the Buddhist liberation and atheist should have the right to say that he does NOT want any religious liberation.

If someone claims that the refusal for religious liberation is harming the established religions, the same logic should apply against any religious person by another religion. We should not forget that if someones (non)belief in some way harms the society at a more physical level (murder, theft, sexual misconduct etc…) the civil and criminal law is there to handle that as for any other social misconduct. There have been recent developments in the world promoting this right to non-belief at least at a principal level.

While the world progresses on this aspect we as Sri Lankans seem to accelerate backwards. Religion is been continuously used as a way of forcing or isolating people from the mass recently. It’s still very much a taboo to say that you are an atheist here. Also lots of social and personal tensions rise up due to total myths and traditions which are part and parcel of established religions. At a time when scientists and so called intellectuals come and spread myths about science and religion in media round the clock, even the law seem to be very distant from protecting the innocent public, both believers and non-believers.

PS : The photo is of 'Dr. Richard Dawkins', the famous Atheist and great biologist.

Kite Runner - For you thousand times over

2008-05-12T20:19:00.004+05:30

I recently had to stay behind at home due to me being sick. I used up the time to watch some good movies. The one which caught most of my attention and my appreciation afterwards was 'Kite Runner'. Kite Runner tries to capture the guilt and tormentation of an Afghan writer living in America tries of the betrayal of his childhood friend. He decides to 'be good again' by rescuing the son of his then killed friend from the Taliban. This is an adaptation of a novel by the Afghan-American writer 'Khaled Hosseini'. The film brought me back memories of feelings I got after watching English Patient some time back. The strong feelings of friendship runs through the film and binds the viewer like the Kite is bind via the string to the little boys.

I really loved the score of the movie. The English hymn played when Amir's search for little Shorab becomes in vain and when he goes to mosque is heart warming. And I'd love to know the meaning of the song played at the wedding festival. I will start an Internet search to get the soundtrack and post as soon as I find it. Also I started an affection towards the language (Dari Persian). The songs as well as the tones of speech were really warm and touching and rich. The mono-tone view of the Arab world by people like us who really see the Arabs through American lenses is another aspect of my perceptions that can change over time due to this movie. The official movie web site is also very attractive (Don't forget to listen to soundtrack excerpts). I highly recommend any one of you to watch this movie. I know I'm going to watch it again with my wife this weekend.

Fight for disk space

2008-04-30T13:00:00.003+05:30

I'm sure all of us encounter the disk space problem in C drive with Windows more often than not. I encountered the same problem recently. Of course I've tried the usual tricks of uninstalling all software I don't need and using windows disk clean etc...But still I was left with around 500 MB of free space from my 12 GB size C drive. Then I set out to find out how to solve this more methodically. Following are the steps I took and I feel some of them will be helpful to anyone out there when they need to gain some breathing space in the C drive in quick time. (I have a hp compaq nx7010 laptop running windows XP SP2) 1. First thing is to find out where exactly all u'r space has gone. Right clicking on each suspecting folder and finding out the size is not a scalable option. So I found 2 very easy to use freeware.

Largest file finder - More concentrated on finding the largest files occupying u'r system

TreeSiz - Gives u a chance to scan the folder of u'r choice and provides a break down of how each folder had consumed space.

2. Using these two tools I found that there are 2 files consuming around 5GB of my hard disk space

hiberfil.sys
pagefile.sys

hiberfil.sys is used by the windows hibernation feature. It uses up roughly around 3GB of disk space and my feeling was that I prefer to have more disk space instead of hibernation which anyway gives me weird problems with my hp laptop. So I disabled hibernation and got the space back from hiberfil.sys. In the same windows you should be able to find some information which gets rid of all fancy XP animation stuff which can provide you with better performing OS. Try those too.

Now to the page file. The pagefile is an integral part of windows and you can't get rid of it. What you can do however is to have a minimum size page file running on your C drive while you have the bulk of the page file running on a different disk (or at least a different partition). You first need to know what you are doing by reading this. Then you can find out how to do it by reading this. After carrying out the above 2 tasks I was able to gain nearly 4 GB of my disk space and the mere fact of having your page file in a non-frequently accessed drive is bound to make your system perform better. Please share any un-common ways to gain disk space in windows and in the process improving the system performance.

SQL Express - Usability Improvement

2008-04-22T05:23:00.004+05:30

I'm currently in Norway deploying a portal product we have built. This is spring time in Norway and the weather is just starting to be Colombo friendly :). It's amazing how the environment has changed from the autumn, which was when I last visited Norway. The same trees which used to be in various colors in the Automn is now has gone in to complete hibernation. The church in the picture was not to be seen in summer/autumn but now we can clearly see it from the apartment.

Our customer is a debt collection software vendor and the portal is the product he will sell for collection companies. The product is based on DotNetNuke (DNN) and the DNN DB used is SQL Express. With SQL Express we have several limitations when using the product.

1. DB Size limitation - 4 GB. Since the DNN database we are using is not expected to grow in heaps and bounds this is not really an immediate problem. But any client who has an increasing DB is encouraged to migrate to SQL 2005 server.

2. CPU Limit - 1 CPU

3. RAM Limit - 1 GB. Does not use the maximum RAM which is available in the machine.

4. Practical Problems

The administrators can NOT open the SQL Express DB from SQL Management studio for maintenance work while the portal is up. Since the SQL Express DB we're using is used as a file the portal gets an access violation when the DB is opened up from the management studio.

The above was the main problem we had during development. But during the deployment I came across an article which describes how u can set up a file based SQL Express Database to overcome the window file access limitation. This is a very good find since one of the problems we found hard to place the product for new customer could have been this limitation.

HTTP requests from the future

2008-03-26T10:40:00.002+05:30

These days I'm working on a DotNetNuke (DNN) based Portal development. Our development env is IIS 5.1/XP while our deployment env is IIS 6/Win 2003. During our past 2 deployments we encountered a strange error on IIS 6/Win2003. Soon after the deployment every page in our portal solution spits a java script error 'Sys is undefined'. This is an error related to the ScriptManager.js which is needed in Ajax pages. There were dozens of google search results for this error pointing fingers to IIS, web.config file settings, axd file handlings, Ajax java scripts etc...but we just couldn't figure out the solution quickly enough. After a late night struggle we gave up and decided to check it the day after. When we came and check next day, the problem has got fixed by itself overnight :).

I always know when problems starts to get fixed by themselves it's a warning sign for worst things ahead. But I just could not reproduce the problem to study it that day. So we went happily in to our final deployment yesterday and here we again had the good old error 'Sys is undefined'. This time around we dig down and went in to analyzing this in depth. When we looked at the HTTP response for a page 2 requests for a ScriptResource.axd files were having HTTP 500 codes. (Read about .axd files here ). When I used fiddler to analyze the HTTP response in detail we caught up with the message "System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Specified argument was out of the range of valid values.Parameter name: utcDate". Eureka!!!

Now we knew that the problem has to be something to do with the time. In every ScriptResource.axd request there are 2 parameters being sent. Eg : ScriptResource.axd?
d=8fBiB6-cb_63xIkOjfdl6BCL-uzAt8lEaJgT8GHfNac0VUzhoOSl_j9ebDYDA0Ao0
&t=633420390180000000
The 'd' param is relevant to data it is asking for and the other 't' reflects the time which the resource was built. (Use this tool to decrypt axd requests). The problem was that our win 2k3 servers time was not accurate and it actually resided in the past ( A few hours). Thus the axd request was seen by the server as requests coming from something which was built in the future. After the problem was identified the root cause finding was not difficult. Our win2k3 time synchronizing service had a problem. Now we were able to think back and understand why this problem got fixed on it's own the last time :). The problem just slept over it till the server time difference was consumed. Isn't that a nice way to solve problems....just sleep over it :)

Continuous Documentation cont...

2008-03-09T12:22:00.001+05:30

As it usually happens, after going through all the troubles to have a continuous documentation happening (see previous post) in my project I found out a much easier way to achieve the same. While the previous post concentrated on purely using the native sandcastle xsl files to apply several xml/xsl transforms using Nant, the new easier method will rely on the very useful tool 'Sandcastle Help File Builder' or SHFB as it's also known. You need to download and install SHFB in both your local machine and the build machine. ( It would be better to breeze through my previous post before you go through this)

Let me run through the simple steps involved in this method.
1. Open up SHFB in your local machine and configure it to generate the documentation to your project.
2. Some important steps in configuring the SHFB are,

Adding the assembly and the documentation xml (Generated from the Nant -doc attribute as mentioned int he previous post) for documentation
Adding the dependent assemblies needed to build the main assembly
Choose the helpfile format (I choose Help2xAndWebSite)
Set HtmlHelp2xCompiler Path (Where you have installed HTML Help Workshop, see previous post)
Set output path

3. Build the SHFB project and let the documentation to generate
Now you will have the documentation files (html, chm) in your local machine, which is not our target. We want the documentation to build periodically, automatically in our build machine. Patience....2 more steps.
4. Now save your SHFB project and you will find a SHFB configuration file. Get it copied to your build machine.
5. Now include the following task tag in to your ccnet documentation project (other project tags are not mentioned here) and you are ALL SET to have continuous documentation running in your project.

<tasks> <exec> <executable>C:Program FilesEWSoftwareSandcastle Help File BuilderSandcastleBuilderConsole.exe</executable> <baseDirectory>D:WorkDirSandcastleWorkDirSPNPortalDocumentation</baseDirectory> <buildArgs>"D:WorkDirSandcastleWorkDirSPNPortalDocumentationDocumentationSettings.shfb"</buildArgs> <buildTimeoutSeconds>10800</buildTimeoutSeconds> </exec>
</tasks>

Pay attention to the 'buildArgs' element where you specify where the shfb configuration file can be found.

Continuous Documentation

2008-01-18T14:26:00.002+05:30

Continous Integration (CI) is not a new topic anymore. It has been a proven method to make sure your code works as expected every single time you do a change to it. Usually a CI process focused on building a project (Deployment might involve more steps) involves steps like,

1. Detect changes to the source
2. Download the updated source from source control to the build machine
3. Compile the source and build the binaries
4. Run the unit test suite
5. Publish the result to relevant people

The additional step I'm going to focus in this posting is documentation. i.e To generate the documentation for the complete source automatically using the CI tool, which I prefer to call 'Continuous Documentation'. My focus will be on ways and technologies to achieve this in the Microsoft technology domain.

The most popular documentation generation tool for .Net is Sandcastle. The way to achieve our target is to write a Nant target which produces the documentation in either html or chm format and to call this Nant target at an appropriate time from CruiseControl.Net (CruiseControl.Net is the build scheduler while Nant is the actual builder).

Most of the learnings on how exactly to do this is from this article on code project. There were some discrepancies in that article with respect to latest SandCastle version and I'd like to emphasize on those points. (To keep the post short only important nant extracts are mentioned in the post it self. The complete Nant target will be attached for your convinience)

1. Compile your source with the additional 'doc' attribute to 'csc' (C-Sharp compile) nant target.
Eg:

<csc target="library" debug="${debug}" output="${foo.dll.dir}\foo.dll" doc="${foo.dll.dir}\SPN.PredatorAPIDoc.xml" >

2. Copy a Sandcaslte configuration file from the default configurations that comes with Sandcastle. You just have to replace the default documentations comments xml with your own doc xml 'fooDoc.xml' generated from previous step. Sandcastle comes with 3 default configurations hana, vs2005 & prototype. I'm using vs2005 here. (Instead you can have the required sandcastle config file in your source and refer it as well)

3. Run the MrefBuilder to generate a basic reflection XML by introspecting on the assemply

<exec program="${sandcastle.mrefbuilder.exe}" workingdir="${sandcastle.workingdir}">
<arg value="..\${foo.dll.dir}/foo.dll" />
<arg value="/out:reflection.org1.xml" />
<arg value="/dep:..\foo.Lib/*.dll" />
</exec>

4. Next step is to run a step of xmltransformations (using xsl) on this basic reflection xml from the preivious step
<exec program="${sandcastle.xsltransform.exe}" workingdir="${sandcastle.workingdir}">
<arg value="reflection.org1.xml" />
<arg value="/xsl:"{sandcastle.applyvsdocmodel.xsl}" />
<arg value="/out:reflection.org2.xml" />
</exec>

Similar to above you need to run a few more transformations and you can also run some additional transformations as you wish. (Eg : FriendlyFileNames.xsl). There are many presentation transformations in ProductionTransforms subfolder in Sandcastle installation directory. I faced some difficulties getting all these transformation mentioned in the code project article to work. My approach was to refer the example MS Build script (<SandCastle_Install_dir>\Examples\sandcastle\build.proj) which was shipped with Sandcastle and to convert the transformations mentioned there to Nant.

This step (or series of steps) should result from a final reflection file called the reflection.xml

5. Now copy the other presentation helper directories (scripts, icons, styles) from Sandcastle_installation_dir/Presentation/vs2005 in to a subdir inside ${sandcastle.workingdir}.

6. Next you need to create some source files for Help compiler which generates a chm file. These files are

* hhp file - Html Help Project file
* toc.xml - Table of Contents file
* hhc file - Chm contents file out of toc
* hhk file - Chm index file from the final reflection xml

For all the above you will be using some kind of xml transformation (xsl) which comes with sandcastle.

7. And the grand final step is to use Html Help Workshop's hhc.exe help compiler to compile all above files in to a single chm file

<exec program="${hhc.exe}"
commandline=".\test.hhp"
workingdir="${sandcastle.output.dir}"
failonerror="false"/$gt;

Finally you will have a chm file which is the compiled help file which can be distributed with your application.

Since documentation generations is usually a time-taking process I suggest you run this nant target as a nightly task. So you have the documentation getting updated each day as opposed to each check-in. Use the <triggger> block of CC.Net to schedule this documentation task as a separate CC.Net project which runs every night.

Having the documentation up-to-date like this helps your project in several ways.

1. You have a ready to pack deliverable without any extra effort at the end of the project
2. You can send the documentation for review very early
3. The development team can readily refer the documentation as and when new parts are added to the system
4. Encourages developers to document as and when they code

PS : The complete Nant script can be found here.

Visit to Sandefjord, Norway

2008-01-03T11:22:00.001+05:30

As per a request by one of our clients in Norway, me together with 3 other engineers had to travel to Southern Norway to a small city called Sandefjord. We stayed there for a period of 4 weeks during the month of September. This was my first exposure to winter like weather and it was luckily not the fully fledged winter but the autumn.

We were working on a potential Portal project for our customer 'System Partner Norge AS' (SPN). SPN is a Software Product vendor for a very popular credit management system called 'Predator'. The initial study of their requirements together with the knowledge about their internal systems were acquired during our stay.

The working conditions in Norway is much different to what we have here in Sri Lanka. It's kind of small office based arrangements as opposed to tiny cubicles we have at Sri Lanka. The people are somewhat reserved but once you get to know them they seem to be friendly and kind. The facilities you find in SPN is of very high quality as oppose to an normal Sri Lankan software firm. Also the outside environment close to the harbor and protected camping area make it much more pleasing to the eye compared to the busy, smoking cities like Colombo & Bangalore. All in all Norway is a pretty good country to live & work if not for the cold weather.

During this visit I was able to travel briefly to some other European cities as well like Amsterdam, Fedrickshavn (Denmark), Stromstaud (Sweden). It was a really novel experience for me to travel on a ferry and the overnight journey to Denmark will never be forgotten.

SPN Office near the harbor

Overlooking SPN from the sea

Our customer Hans with me & my co-engineer Chatura

My Year Ending Update?

2007-12-27T18:05:00.000+05:30

I finally made up my mind to put up an entry after a long lapse. I thought it was my duty to post before this year comes to an end. My last posting was in August and lots and lots of things have happened since then. Let me summarize,
1. I went to Norway for a period of 1 month to work with one of our customers System Partners Norway.
2. I was involved in implementation of CMMI in my company, Eurocenter
3. I learnt a lot about Software Estimations.
4. I learnt & implemented a continuous integration system with unit-testing for a project in Eurocenter.

I plan to post entries on each one of them as soon as possible.

Till then take care everyone!