Performance per watt

"Performance per watt" is a measure of how fast a computer can process the data and the power it uses to do so. Intel says that "Megahertz" and "Gigahertz" are out in measuring the computer processors speeds.

Intel's CEO Paul Otellini in his first Intel Developer Forum speech as CEO introduced several chips which will hit the market next year using Intel's "dual core" technology in which computations are done with "two brains" on a single chip. He predicted that this technology will reduce the power consumption of the processors drastically.

If I look at the history and present situation, consumers have been trained to look for the clock speed as the measurement of the processor speed. Intel has spent years and billion dollars to convince the consumers to believe so. Because of this, I hope that Intel may face marketing challenges to again convince the consumers that "Performance per watt" matters.

We should wait to see whether Intel suceeds with this new technology.

FOSSSL 2005

The LAMP stack consisting of Linux as the operating system, Apache as the Web server, MySQL or PostgreSQL as the database and PHP, Python or Perl as the scripting language is taking over the application development platform.

FOSSSL '05 provides you with a unique and fantastic opportunity to hear all about the LAMP stack by none other than the creators and drivers of the LAMP stack.

Happening in beautiful Sri Lanka, this is your chance to get up to speed on LAMP!

The globally renowed list of keynote speakers include:

Michael Tiemann
President of Open Source Initiative
[OSI], VP of Open Source Affairs
Redhat and father of G++

David Axmark
Co Founder of MySQL

Martin Michlmayr
Former Debian Project Leader

Bruce Momjian
Lead contributer to PostgreSQL

Greg Stein
Chairman,
Apache Software Foundation

Resmus Lerdorf
Father of PHP

Sanjiva Weerawarana
Member of OSI Board
Apache Web Services Leader
Chairman - Lanka Software Foundation

Sam Ruby
Member of Apache
Board and Hacker
Extraordinaire

More information at http://www.fosssl.org/.

Microsoft's Linux Lab

Have you ever seen Linux in action within Microsoft?

Microsoft's Linux and Open Source Software Lab serves as both a place to examine the threat posed to Microsoft products by open-source offerings and a venue for testing software from Microsoft and others that's designed to span that divide. The lab is home to hundreds of servers and desktops that run dozens of different types of Linux and Unix.

Just see these two photoes of that lab.

RSS Screensaver

I got to know about this RSS Screensaver about two weeks back. The review published on the net urged me to download and install this software. (its free to download and use)

In the settings dialog we have to provide URLs of RSS feeds. When the screen saver is active, this software connects to the URLs, fetches the feed data and caches it locally. It presents this feed contents with some nice background images (can be supplied by the user also), changed periodically in a very nice format.

This is the settings dialog for the screen saver. I have added 3 feed URLs already.



Some limitations and bugs also exist.

One is that, it can't display the HTML contents in the feed. For example, it didn't display the Google News feed properly (last in the list).

I don't think that, other known bugs such as, sometimes screen saver displayed with the taskbar visible, keyboard arrow keys do not serve the purpose of browsing the feeds while the screensaver is in action, etc would not make me to change my screensaver in near future.

Download Here

Google News Feeds

Google has provided with the RSS feeds for its news site from tuesday.

Google news used email news alerts to send news updates earlier. But in real-time world email updates can seem slow. This may be the reason behind this new offering from Google.

Available kinds of feeds are;
1. News sections feeds
2. News search results feeds
3. Customized news feeds

To get the links of the feeds visit: http://news.google.com/intl/en_us/news_feed_terms.html

My new car

Today is one of the happiest days in my life time. I bought a new car (even though its a used one, its new for me) from Panadura.

I am the proud second owner of this 'Toyota - Corsa' sedan typed car of wine red colour, one of the attractive colours among the car lovers. The exterior, interior and the engine had been maintained in excellent condition. I suppose the reason would be that it was owned by a company previously.

Front view



Rear view


I should thank my school mate for spending time with me to search for and to select a car.

I went to the Kathiresan Kovil, Bambalapitiya to get the blessings of God Ganapathi for me and my new car. In the evening I took my wife and mother in the car. Everybody including my family appreciated the car.

Our Trip

Last weekend we (our team) went on a two days trip. It was a family trip where the spouses of team mates also participated. My wife aaccompanied me.

OUR GROUP
I had to wake up at around 5.30 am in the morning with my wife woke up before me on that day. We planned to take dhal curry to have with the bread as planned. After we got ready we left home around 6.40 am and reached the office at around 7 am. Others had come already and they were ready to get into the bus. We left the office at around 7.30 am.

On our way we collected the sliced bread and continued the traveling. At around 8.30 am we stopped by the side of a rubber garden and had the breakfast there. It was a tasty meal, bread with dhal curry, chicken curry and seeni sambol. Some of us bought some rambutan fruits from the street side shops.

We played cards while traveling. There were different kinds of sweet items brought by our mates. Those helped us to postpone our hunger.

We reached the 'River Garden Resort' at around 1 pm. That is one of the restaurants which provides the means to have safer bath in the river (belihuloya). It was very much refreshing to have a bath in the running water. We enjoyed it and had the lunch as well.

It was around 3.30 pm when we left that place, and we traveled towards our main destination 'Bandarawala'. 4 cottages already booked for us at the 'Holiday Resort, Ceylon Tourist Board'. The hotel and surroundings were very attractive. We selected the cottage 8 and occupied it at around 6.30 pm.

As the journey was very tiring, we took rest for an hour and then went to the common hall to watch the television. It was Sanath who was with the bat in a match against India. So it was interesting to watch his shots. After having the dinner we went to sleep.

Next day the hotel people delivered the tea to the cottages. Then we packed up the things and got ready to leave the place after having breakfast.

After around half an hour from the time we started the journey, our bus got problems with the 'leaf springs'. We had to wait for 2 hours to fix that.

Then we continued to travel to the Ravana Elle water falls. It was really an atrractive falls and there were lot of people watching and taking baths. Some of the guys from our group took bath and others were wandering around. My wife and me bought a wooden made stuff where 2 birds sitting on the branches looking each other from a small shop there. Then we moved to differnt place to have the lunch and continued travelling.


We reached the Adisham bangalow by 5 in the evening. It was such a nice place with beautiful garden. The could get a better view of the surrounding mountains from the peak where the bangalow is. There was a sales outlet with the products from the adisham factory. They said the products are 100% pure. And we bought 2 'Nelli Syrup' from the outlet.

We started traveling back to colombo. Journey was not as interesting as saturday's one because everybody was tired and went asleep. We had the dinner (Parota, chicken and dhal curry) at a small restaurant and continued traveling. At about 11 pm we arrived at the office premises. Luckily we got a lift from one of my co-worker to my home.

It was 11.30 pm when we got into the house.

I could feel happiness after the first outdoor entertainment after our marriage. It was really happy trip. I would remember this for a long time.