Monday, November 23, 2009

The Sixth Sence Comming Up!!

WoW.. This is amazing. Must watch

Believe it or not! Here comes the Chrome OS !!

Windows "Magics" and Explenations

Last week, one of my colleague has forwarded some bugs to the company tech talk. Sometimes back, this email was circulating through the web uncovering some bug in Windows calling "Magics"

Here I post those magics and explanations for them.

MAGIC #1
An Indian found that nobody can create a FOLDER anywhere on the Computer
which can be named as "CON". This is something funny and inexplicable...
At Microsoft the whole Team, couldn't answer why this happened!
TRY IT NOW, IT WILL NOT CREATE A "CON" FOLDER

Explanation:
Not only folder named ‘con’. Following names also not possible.
NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3,COM1 to COM9 and LPT1 to LPT9. ( these are systems variables)
But there is a way to create above named folders in windows.

Try these steps.
1) go to run dialog.
2) type cmd/command (command prompt gets opened)
3) go to root directory like C:\ or D:\ etc
4) type md\\.\\c:\\con ....(here is done)
5) check the folder on the respected drive.

This is because MS-DOS Device Driver Names Cannot be Used as File Names
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/74496/en-us

MAGIC #2
For those of you using Windows, do the following:
1.) Open an empty notepad file
2.) Type "Bush hid the facts" (without the quotes)
3.) Save it as whatever you want.
4.) Close it, and re-open it.
Noticed the weird bug? No one can explain!

Explanation:
This is a string parsing bug in the parser. Any string with letters 4-3-3-5 will cause this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_hid_the_facts

MAGIC #3
Again this is something funny and can't be explained... At Microsoft the
whole Team, including Bill Gates, couldn't answer why this happened!
It was discovered by a Brazilian. Try it out yourself...
Open Microsoft Word and type
=rand (200, 99)
And then press ENTER
And see the magic.....!

Explanation:
This is a documented function in Word
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/212251

Monday, September 14, 2009

University of Moratuwa tops the Top 10 Schools in 2009 and all-time!

University of Moratuwa tops the global Top 10 Schools in 2009 by # of
Accepted Students, with 22 applications:

Sri Lanka - University of Moratuwa - 22
Brazil - University of Campinas / UNICAMP - 12
China - Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences - 11
Romania - Polytechnic University Of Bucharest - 11
Poland - Gdansk University of Technology - 10
Austria - Vienna University of Technology - 9
India - Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Goa campus - 9
Sweden - Royal Institute of Technology - 9
India - Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University - 8
Singapore - National University of Singapore - 8


University of Moratuwa also tops the all time list: Top 10 Schools 2005
- 2009 by # of Accepted Students

Sri Lanka - University of Moratuwa - 79
Brazil - University of Campinas / UNICAMP - 37
Canada - University of Toronto - 34
Austria - Vienna University of Technology - 31
China - Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences - 30
United States - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - 28
Poland - Wroclaw University of Technology - 27
Hungary - Budapest University of Technology and Economics - 21
Canada - Carleton University - 21
Romania - Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi - 20

Congratulations - great feat indeed!

Monday, August 3, 2009

Stuff to know with Police

1. A single Cop, CANNOT stop you on the road ! (it's prohibited and you are not suppose to Stop either !)

2. A single cop CANNOT seize your driving license !

3. Only a 'traffic control' cop has the authority to request anything MORE than your NIC when you are behind wheels.

4. A single traffic cop NEVER can press charges against you. HE MUST HAVE A WITNESS IF DOES SO.

5. That's why you always find 'two' cops together

6. Police is a peace controlling force. NOT AN ARMED FORCE !!! They are prohibited by LAW to carry anything more than a BATON ! (but due to the prevailing WAR, they are issued Guns by a supreme court ruling,till the war ENDS)

7. So, if a Cop pulls a gun on you, YOU CAN sue him !!!

8. If a COP claims that you are drunk, you have the FULL right to ask for a 'balloon test', if they DO NOT HAVE it in their possession on the time of your request, you can GO.

9. Only Traffic Cops have the RIGHT to stop any moving vehicle. (that's why you find at least 1 normal cop in every checkpoint even though they are manned by Army)

10. COPS, CANNOT ENTER YOUR HOME OR WORK PREMISES without a court Order. You have the FULLEST right ASK for it, if they try to enter and also DENY their entrance if you 'feel' like it.

11. A traffic cop CANNOT seize your driving license UNTIL he fully states the crime you have committed and the relating penal code violation. If he is unsuccessful in stating them, you can go free

12. If a traffic cop seizes your license by force and ask you to come to the police station to collect it. DO NOT GO ! Lodge a complain directly to Police commission or the Provincial IGP', YOU can get the cop SACKED for his misconduct and unruly behaviour.

13. (for girls), If a COP asks for your Identifications and (if you think he's doing it on purpose to harass you) you CAN deny his request. He cannot arrest you ! you have the RIGHT to request for a Female Police officer.

14. (for Girls) If you are asked to be Body checked, it's your right to get it done by a female cop. If they don't have one in present, DENY their action.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

CEB's New Energy and Costing System - EnCoSys

Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB), the prime electricity supplier of the country, is a government statutory body corporate established in Sri Lanka under an Act of Parliament No.17 of
1969. Its main functionalty are the development and coordination of the Generation,
supply and distribution of Electrical Energy.

Over the past years, CEB was not so successful in minimizing the energy loss in the their transmission network and hence the energy loss still remains as a considerable amount. Recently, we got to know that CEB's manual way of energy calculation is one reason for that. Due to the unefficiency of this process, the management is unable to attain actual figures of the energy losses and hence they have to work based on estimatations.

With the coordination from CEB's depeuty general manager Mr. M.G. Tillekeratne, a team of undergraduates from Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa has developed an energy calculation and costing system (EnCoSys) for CEB in order to overcome the above stituation.

EnCoSys is a web based system designed totally according to CEB requirements. It can be considered as a re-implementation of one of their internal project, ECCS which was an attempt to develop such a system using Delphi4 with Informix as the back-end database few years back. However, with the change of CEB management ECCS had been discontinued. With the new EnCCoSys system, it enables CEB to keep track of energy transfers and associated costs between its three divisions, namely;
  • Generation division
  • Transmission division and
  • Distribution division
Login Screen
Main menu

As a whole, system is intended to keep track of energy transfers between generation, transmission and distribution divisions of Ceylon Electricity Board. It provides facility to the board to accurately measure and calculate the energy transfer costs. The application is capable of performing the following basic features.
  • Generation Entity Hierarchy Management
  • Meter Management
  • Distribution Entity Management
  • IPP and Mini-Hydro Management
  • Total Energy/Cost Calculation
  • Report Generation
  • Calculation of the Transmission loss
  • Meter Reading Tracking
Adding new meter reading

At each station, meter readings will be fetched to the system in monthly basis.

EnCoSys Equation Builder

EnCoSys's equation builder eanbles its users to define and store energy equations for each meterpoint. During the energy/cost calculation, these equations are interprited dynamically with each meter readings for appropriate cycles, and then solved to the final figure.

Generation division - Sub Control Pannel
Central Confirmation Page

In order to introduce new technologies to CEB IT division, EnCoSys has been developed with Microsoft .NET platform. The web system uses ASP.NET 2.0 and EnCoSys core is developed with C# .NET. According to a pervious requiement of porting to Informix database server, all the database communication was done through odbc layer with generic SQL commands, so that it could be possible to port EnCoSys to any database server having associared odbc driver.

EnCoSys Messaging System
Energy Report

Further, EnCoSys has a properly designed, easily exitensible architecture though it was developed according to rapid application developement approach due to time constrains. The requirement engineering process was undergone comprehensively with hours of discussions at CEB.

The architectural release was handed over to CEB's internal development team at CEB headoffice on 2nd March. Furthermore a knowledge transfer workshop was conducted at the same place. We hope that they will continue with the system deploy EnCoSys there in the near future.

Dhanuka Senarathne, Harshana Porawagama, Isuru Senadheera, Janaka Padukka, Lahiru Samarakoon, Rajeev Prasad (EnCoSys Development Team)

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Internet Broadcasting with Mogulus

Recently when I was exploring flash streaming over internet, I found an interesting powerful broadacasting platform called Mogulus. Local tv broadcaster, ITN is testing their streamings these days and used Mogulus sometimes back. Well it worked very well, with a good video quality than others.

Mogulus is one of the most powerful live broadcast platforms on the internet. Mogulus' browser-based Studio application is a powerful platform to create LIVE, scheduled and on-demand internet television to broadcast anywhere on the web through a single player widget.

The virtual studio is a great application where you can feel like working in a real tv station environment. It offres the following features.
  • tream LIVE with any USB or DV camera
  • Mix multiple cameras and clips in real-time
  • Add broadcast graphics
  • Server-based recording for instant on-demand replays
  • Stream remotely using a datacard or mobile phone
  • YouTube and Media RSS Feed import
  • Create automated 24/7 channels from clips
Mogulus offers both Free (ad-supported) and Pro (white-label, no-ads, pay for usage) packages. Its unique features include the ability to mix multiple live cameras, imported videos clips, and overlay graphics. With Mogulus, you can also broadcast live from a mobile phone; use a customizable flash player with integrated chat; and develop a branded channel page on Mogulus.com that incorporates interactive chat.


Later, when I was browsing there, I found that "Ranaviru" channel launched sometimes back to broadacst defence news is also operating on Mogulus at http://www.mogulus.com/ranavirutv


Further, Mogulus recently announced the launch of PROCASTER, a free software download available at www.procaster.com that allows you to create live streaming video content with incredible ease and unprecedented production value.

PROCASTER offers the simplest-to-use broadcast experience, with simple user interface. In addition to high-quality video, you can broadcast whatever is on your computer screens live, including presentations, images, and even video and graphics-intensive video games. PROCASTER even streams the most demanding of computer applications; graphics-intensive high-end video games, enabling creation of a whole new form of entertainment around GameCasting.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Testing an Anti-Virus Software

If you want some way of checking that you have deployed your anti-virus software correctly,there exists a test file to do that easily.

This test file has been provided to European Institute for Computer Anti-Virus Research (EICAR) for distribution as the "EICAR Standard Anti-Virus Test File". It is safe to pass around, because it is not a virus, and does not include any fragments of viral code. Every Anti-virus vendor do this test before every release of their product, in order to ensure that it really works. Hence most products react to it as if it were a virus.

The file is actually a legitimate DOS program, and produces sensible results when run (it prints the message "EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!").

It is also short and simple - in fact, it consists entirely of printable ASCII characters, so that it can easily be created with a regular text editor. Any anti-virus product that supports the EICAR test file should detect it in any file providing that the file starts with the following 68 characters, and is exactly 68 bytes long:

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

The first 68 characters is the known string. It may be optionally appended by any combination of whitespace characters with the total file length not exceeding 128 characters.

In order to facilitate various scenarios, they provide 4 files for download at http://www.eicar.org. (You can download it by following "Anti-Malware Test File" link on the top right corner of the site.)

The first, eicar.com, contains the ASCII string as described above. The second file, eicar.com.txt, is a copy of this file with a different filename. Some readers reported problems when downloading the first file, which can be circumvented when using the second version. Just download and rename the file to "eicar.com". That will do the trick. The third version contains the test file inside a zip ARCHIVEe. A good anti-virus scanner will spot a 'virus' inside an ARCHIVEe. The last version is a zip ARCHIVEes containing the third file. This file can be used to see whether the virus scanner checks ARCHIVEes more than only one level deep.

Once downloaded run your Anti-Virus scanner. It should detect at least the file "eicar.com". Good scanners will detect the 'virus' in the single zip Archive and may be even in the double zip Archive. Once detected the scanner might not allow you any access to the file(s) anymore. You might not even be allowed by the scanner to delete these files. This is caused by the scanner which puts the file into quarantine. The test file will be treated just like any other real virus infected file.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Summer of ‘69 - Manipal University Theme Song

Wonderfully created by Manipal University. A must see.....

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

CSE බ්ලොග් යොමුව

අපේ නිමලෙ මේ දවස්වල අලුත් වැඩකට අතගහල. අපේ CSE 05 කන්ඩායමේ කොම්පියුටර් ඉන්ජිනේරුවොටිකගෙ බ්ලොග් ලිපිනයන් එකම වහලක් යටට ගන්න එක තමා මේ අලුත්ම වැඩේ. වහලක් කිව්වට ඉතින් මේක වහලක්ම නෙවේ. අන්තර්ජංජාල පොත් යොමු පිටුවක් කිව්වොත් තමා වඩා නිවැරදි. :)

ඉතින් කැම්පස් එකේ මේ අන්තිම දවස් ටිකේදි නිමලෙගෙ මේ අලුත් වැඩේ බොහොම හොද එකක් කියල තමයි මගේ නම් අදහස. මොකද ඉතින් ආපහු කට්ටිය එකතු කරගන්නත් ලේසිවෙන එකක් නැහැනෙ. ඒක නිසා මේක පස්සට හොඩ මතක සටහනක් වෙන්නැතෑ. ඇරත් පුදුම දැනුම් සම්භාරයක්නෙ මේවයෙ තියෙන්නෙ.

ඔක්කොම කියල කියල තාම වැදගත්ම දේ කියන්න බැරි උනානෙ. http://delicious.com/talkout/CSE05 තමයි ඒකට යන පුරුක. ඕකෙ මගෙ මේ බ්ලොග් එකෙ ලිපිනයත් ඇති. අනෙ ඉතින් මමයි මගෙ බ්ලොග් ලිවිල්ලයි..

ආවඩා ආයුබෝවේවා!!

මෙදා සැරේ සිංහල අලුත් අයුරුද්දෙන් පස්සෙ පරණ බ්ලොග් එකේ අලු ගසල බසල දාලා ගන්න හිතුව. පහුගිය මාස ගානටම මගෙ බ්ලොග් එක දිහා ඇහැක් ඇරලා බලන්න උනෙ නැහැ නෙව. ඉතින් මේ අලුත් අවුරුද්දෙ හාහාපුරා කියලා බ්ලොග් එකට අලුත් මූනතක් දාලම තමයි වැඩේ පටන් ගත්තෙ.

අහා. ඒකෙන් මේකෙන් මට කට්ටියට සුබ පතන්නත් බැරි උනා නෙව. ඕන්න එහෙනම් 120ට 220ක් ආවඩා ආයුබෝ වේවා කියල මුලු අවුරුද්දම කිරියෙන් පැනියෙන් ඉතිරෙන්න ඕනෙ. මේ අබුද්දස්ස කාලෙ ඖරුද්දට සුබ පතන එකත් දැන් වෙළද දැන්වීමක් වෙලා නෙව.මේ ඊයෙ පෙරේදා මගෙ යාලුවෙක් ඔය ඔක්කොම දැන්වීම් ටික එකතු කරලා හරි අපූරු සුබපැතුමක් එවල තිබ්බා මේ විදියට. "මේ ලබුවාවු නව වසර කිරියෙන්, පැනියෙන් සහ නෙස්ටොමොල්ට් රෙඩ් රයිස් අන්ඩ් ගොටුකොල වලින් පරි පූර්න වූ සුබම සුබ අල්ටිමේට් තීත්ත අලුත් අවුරුද්දක් වීවා. ඔබලා හට ඇති සියලු ප්රාර්තනා ඉහල උත්කර්ශන විදියට ලගා වී සියලු සැප සම්පත් සහ නීරොගි දිවියක් උඩාවෙවා...!!" බලමුකො ඒකෙත් හැටි. :)

කතාවෙන් කතාවෙන් මට ඒකත් අමතක උනා නෙව. අලුත් අවුරුද්දෙ සිංහලෙන්ම ලියන්න හිත හිතා ඉන්නකොට මට හම්බ උනා හරි අපූරු බඩුවක්. ඒක තමා කොළඹ විශ්ව විද්‍යාලයේ පරිගනක අංශයෙන් හදපු යුනිකෝඩ් එසැනින් පරිවර්තකය. අපිට පුරුදු SMS සිංග්ලිශ් වලින්ම ලියන්න පුලුවන් නිසා හරි ලේසි. අනික සිංහල යුනිකෝඩ් ඇර වෙන මොනවත් ස්ථාපනය කරන්නත් කරදර වෙන්න ඕනෙ නැහැ නෙව. ඔය පල්ලෙහායින් තියෙන පුරුකෙන් එතැනට ගියහැකි. http://www.ucsc.cmb.ac.lk/ltrl/services/feconverter/t1.html

If you can not read this, please install Sinhala Unicode in your computer from here. http://locallanguages.lk/