No question is a silly question

The phrase "No question is a silly question" is often used fake to help someone to start interacting. Don't be surprised to see your questions left unanswered, if that is obvious. Careless questions often lead to the reply of "RTFW", a link to http://www.justfuckinggoogleit.com/ or http://lmgtfy.com/, or in the worst case being ignored, when asked in a technical forum or open-source mailing lists, which have volunteers who have smarter stuff to try than helping a child. Just Google before you ask instead of being too lazy. On a slightly related note, I found one of the threads really interesting (!).

Some sites never cease to entertain us. One such site is "Clients from hell". While surfing the web, I found pointlesssites.com which has a huge list of pointless sites, as they claim. However, they are really funny and interesting. Worth browsing once.

We are completing the first trimester of 2011 with this blogpost. \yay/. Hope the upcoming months will be more interesting. "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." Also have a look at the Spanish alphabet and the pronunciation, if you want some more in the meantime.

GSoC 2011 and FOSS

It was really nice to meet many interested students in today's session at Science Education Theater (SET) of University of Peradeniya, hosted by the Computer Society of Science Faculty, UoP. Special thanks to 07CSE who made everything possible within a very short time frame.

We created the gsoc-srilanka group with the goal of "Promoting FOSS through GSoC among Sri Lankan Universities, hence doubling/increasing the Sri Lankans' presence in GSoC and FOSS altogether," a year ago. Now we have started spreading the word in real; not promoting merely online. Hence I feel that today is an important day towards achieving the goal. We are in the correct path, I am pretty confident. Keep the word spreading.

The presentation slides Can be found here.

This is basically the same presentation that I prepared for the IESL GSoC Session, along with some further improvements/additions.

Update: Pls find the latest revised version of this presentation at 

Google Summer of Code 2012.

GSoC-2011

Yesterday we had a Google Summer of Code awareness session at IESL auditorium. I gave an introduction to Google Summer of Code in the event. My presentation is given above.

Feel free to drop a comment here if you need any clarification or further assistance; join the gsocers' group of your country and start interacting with the GSoCers. :) 

Update: Pls find the latest revised version of this presentation at 

Google Summer of Code 2012.

A few things that made my 2010 interesting..

2010 is my best year so far, followed by 2004. Several interesting events made the year interesting and unique - and hence the year deserves an appreciation post. This post summarizes the remarkable events of the year.

1. Job Interviews.

The final days of the final semester were full of interviews. We all secured our jobs even before we completed the final semester. 

2. Joining WSO2 as a Software Engineer.

On the 13th of September, a Programmer Day (256th day of every year, September 13th or the 12th on leap years). 

3. 5th year WSO2 Anniversary Celebrations on September 17th.

Almost instantly after we joined.

4. My physics teacher's 60th birthday.

And meeting friends after a long time.

5. CSE Seminar at Jaffna.

Our department organized these islandwide seminars and I was responsible for Jaffna together with my friends.

6. Graduating from BSc (Eng)

With first-class honors!

7. Getting a Passport

All set for 10 years!

8. Mooshabaya, our final year project
We are a team of 4.

9. Mooshabaya paper in MGC workshop
Good to have our paper in a Middleware workshop.

10. Presenting Mooshabaya
I presented our final year project in the department. It was successful. We received A+.

11. 4.0 GPA in the final semester.
This semester single-handedly increased my final GPA to 3.80.

12. Nightly walks in the Flower Road and the nearby lanes.
After work, walk back to the bus stop.

13. GSoC with OMII-UK
My 2nd GSoC, working with the OMII-UK's project, OGSA-DAI.

14. A conclusion to 4 years at UoM.
And reflecting how it all went.

15. Working on WSO2 Stratos
It is the brand new cloud platform from WSO2.

16. CS&ES Conference
To mark the 25 years of CSE.

17. Rebranding of my blog Llovizna.
This is the year I got serious about my blog.

18. First flight abroad
We went to Paris, with a layover in Oman - with Oman Air!

19. Presenting our paper in SoCPar 2010
I presented our work at Universite Cergy Pontoise.

20. Enjoying my first snow in Paris
Who expected that we will be in Paris during one of its coldest winters in history.

21. Wine tasting in Paris
It was fun to taste so many varieties of wines. 

22. Paris by night
Paris was already ready for Christmas in early December.

23. Sticking with Abiword as a committer.
I remained a committer and helped onboard new contributors to Abiword through GSoC.

24. Meals at Dinemore
It had become a daily routine at work.

25. Europe with friends
Although I have been on several trips, a journey abroad is special.

26. Enjoying the beaches and temples of Jaffna
Jaffna peninsula has some good beaches.

27. Organizing computer science workshops in Jaffna schools.
It was also fun to give computer lessons to enthusiastic school kids.

28. Feeling different compared to previous years.
Now that it is the 2010s. A new start, perhaps.

29. Jaffna university
It was good to spend a day at another university.

30. The French cuisine in Paris.  
Especially, the rabbit cooked in white wine and foie gras.

Thanks for reading my list until the end. I also hope to continue this practice of writing an the upcoming years as well. Happy new year everyone.

SoCPaR2010

SoCPaR (International Conference on Soft Computing and Pattern Recognition) is an annual conference that focuses on bringing the Soft Computing and Pattern Recognition together ~ "Innovating and Inspiring Soft Computing and Intelligent Pattern Recognition". For the second consecutive year, SoCPaR has been successfully conducted. SoCPaR 2009 was held in Malacca, Malaysia on December 4th - 7th, 2009, which was followed by SoCPaR2010 in Cergy Pontoise / Paris, France at Universite' de Cergy Pontoise on December 7th - 10th, 2010. Following the two successful years, SoCPaR2011 has been scheduled to be held on Dalian, China on October 14th - 16th, 2011.

Presenting the paper on Association Rule Mining
It was really a pleasant experience for me presenting our paper on our research "Horizontal Format Data Mining with Extended Bitmaps [1]" on SoCPaR2010. Our paper has been listed as Paper 113 in the proceedings. I presented the paper on Dec 8th, 2.30 - 3.00 p.m at E1 auditorium of the University, where the conference had 3 parallel sessions at E1, E2, and Colloque. It should be noted that the paper was from the same team of undergraduates from the University of Moratuwa who published a paper on their product, "Mooshabaya - A Mashup Generator for XBaya [2]". Our paper got positive and constructive feedbacks, which essentially gives us more idea towards taking the algorithm forward. We have our algorithm implementation benchmarked with the FIMI datasets, and also have the door opened to the competition of algorithm implementations on Frequent Itemset Mining Implementations, as suggested by the chair.

Paris (6th - 11th, December 2010)
Apart from the paper presentations and tech talks, we also had social events and extra social activities such as 'Paris by Night', 'Wine Tasting', 'Visit to Chateau de Chantilly', and Banquet at Abbey of Royaumont [3][4], organized by the committee. It was a nice learning experience along with the days filled with fun. It should also be noted that we had the opportunity to face the strongest snowfall that Paris experienced after the year 1986. After the conference, we were also able to enjoy two more days at Paris, and were lucky enough to visit Louvre (the museum where Mona Lisa and many other master pieces live), Notre Dame Cathedral, Montmartre Hill along with a big white church Basilica of Sacre-Coeur on its crust, Eiffel Tower, and a few other places of interest.

[1] Buddhika De Alwis, Supun Malinga, Kathiravelu Pradeeban, Denis Weerasiri, Shehan Perera. "Horizontal Format Data Mining with Extended Bitmaps," in  Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Soft Computing and Pattern Recognition (SoCPaR2010), Cergy-Pontoise, Paris, France. pp 220-223, Dec. 2010.

[2] Buddhika De Alwis, Supun Malinga, Kathiravelu Pradeeban, Denis Weerasiri, Srinath Perera, Vishaka Nanayakkara. "Mooshabaya: mashup generator for XBaya," in Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Middleware for Grids, Clouds and e-Science (MGC '10), Bangalore, India. ISBN: 978-1-4503-0453-5 doi>10.1145/1890799.1890807 

[3] The abbey
[4] Photos of the Abbey