Respect is major part of love!

See the look on his face! This is while Marion speaks to the villagers of Uffculme to make them confident of Robin and his team in their capacity and willingness to fight Hounds of Lucifer. This look shows his appreciation, respect, love...and lot more towards Marion.

Thank you "Robin of Sherwood" for:

• Bringing back my lost taste
• Bringing back my 'self'
• Bringing my kids from hypothetical magical cartoon world to reality
• Teaching my kids the eternal truth 'everyone dies!'
  

For those who may need, particularly kids'moms in primary school.

Refresh life goals

So that I have laid my foundation and settled in a career, a stable family and smooth daily routine, now its time to think ahead and dream wide and deep. How do I look like in 10 years from now? Hmm... there is one image. But there are lot more gaps to fill. How about being lot more firm in
* Technical
* Social
* Political
* Psychological
* Physical... domains?

I will take the journey with my little fellows at home and work as a success is not worth if I miss them in any means. Tiny steps to lead to a bigger future for the benefit of all.

For my supervisor

Deep in treacherous sea
When the boats struggle
A ferry that drags
All of them ashore

You are magical
In the way you inspire
The way you set examples
The quality that you pursue

You are a guiding star
Without whom we are nowhere
You are not just a teacher
But one who transformer

from DUMB to LEARNER to EXPERT to VISIONARY

to cherish the achievement of firstever PhD from CSE, UoM

Balancing research and personal life as young moms

I know what the mess you are in if you are doing an MPhil/ PhD type research while parenting even one kid at home. This post is for the purpose of sharing your disappointments, frustrations, achievements and related feelings. One thing is clear for sure, if you are tough enough,

IT IS INDEED DOABLE!

LaTex: no other tool can make you an academic!

I LaTexed in Linux (Ubuntu) with TexLive. The packages I used in my thesis:

pgfplots - plotting graphs
tikz - drawing figures, flow charts, include pgfplot graphs

Used IEEETrans class for thesis and conference paper templates.

Life was easy writing with LaTex as I could focus on content rather than formatting. Could easily change from one format to other with two or three words in tex file.

Teach effectively

Found this useful in preparing for lectures:

1. Waterloo pages

Camera phone...

What a materialistic world is this? Phone is for calling, but it has everything else and marketed with all the features is has except its ability to communicate voice. I have always seen people comparing their phones? "What megapixel is your phone camera?"
"Phone is an ornament to show people's wealth?" I wondered until last Friday when I saw this incident I am going to share with you.
I was near a traffic light, watching around through the glass of the bus I was traveling in. On the pavement I saw a young boy, with animated movements holding a camera phone up. Any guesses, what it was all about?
He was making a video call with sign language...
What a difference the technology can make in one's life. What different ways the same technology can be used...
BTW: I don not have a camera phone, otherwise could have snapped the scene for you ;)

Global Issue

After some time I felt, oh oh... what should be happening around the world. Since the monitor at my place, which was plugged into a TV box, burnt off totally after long time since the days the colors were changing like lizards, I didnt bother to watch news or listen to some discussion of what's going on around the world.
Hence I was looking some 'everything under one roof' kind of a place, to end up here (http://www.globalissues.org/)
At a glance I picked the article on global financial crisis http://www.globalissues.org/article/768/global-financial-crisis there.
Well, it was comprehensive. Anyway, what carught my attention the most is this nice video. What a visualization of it!
http://crisisofcredit.com/

weary winds

rough voice loud voice
cool voice low voice
humble voice hidden voice
so many voice
voice voice
let you not be carried away
let your roots go deep in truth
so no weary winds
can blow you off
hey ho... hey ho...

To run a cookie based web session in httperf...

I was trying to mimic how a user interacts with a web application using httperf tool. I installed httperf in my linux machine using source code from here:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/linux/httperf/download.php
(The originators of this tool are D. Mosberger and T. Jin from hp few years back)

Httperf is a command line tool. You have to type httperf followed by the options.
Httperf has an option called --wsesslog to simulate session.
#httperf --server localhost --port 80 --wsesslog 1,1,sessionfile --print-reply > outfile

Now the web server sends the pages requested by URLs in the session file. When you use --print-reply option the the HTML header and body of each resulting page is written to outfile. Otherwise only the performance information of the web server and the network will appear as the output of the command.


A user is represented by the sequence of URLs separated by think time which is called as session. Each URL in the session can be appended with POST data.
The format of the sessionfile is something like this:
/simple/login.php method=POST contents="username=user&password=pass"

Most imprtantly, if you are to have URLs with POST data you must state the Content-Type header. I set content type to 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\n' and it worked for me.

Httperf currently allow an option called --add-header but that header holds equally for all the URLs in the session file. But for my task I needed diferent headers for different URLs in my session file. Fortunately I found a patch for getting this done:
http://www.overset.com/2008/03/27/load-test-ajax-applications-with-httperf/

After applying the patch I could use an additional attribute for the URLs in my sessionfile as follows:
/simple/login.php method=POST headers='Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\n' contents="username=user&password=pass"

Now its time to play with Cookies in httperf.... (think)
Of course by simply typing --session-cookie option with httperf command worked with a simple php site with just one cookie. But for me its to work with two cookies sent by server in two parts of the same header.

Will get back to this once I get some good news! :)

Satisfaction...

Job satisfaction is an achievement that not many people get in plenty. But the profession of teaching has made me feel that rare opportunity. Its such great feeling that keeps the fire of motivation when you see the attention, the feedback, the simple nod of a head from the students. You feel the importance of yourself being in that position.
I became a fan of the movie Freedom Writers which says such a motivational story. Hence hope to share. I feel like being a Ms. Erin Gruwell who can toast for change one day.

Watch 12 parts of it at youtube!

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=freedom+writers+part+1&search_type=&aq=0&oq=freedom+writers++-+par

A ship

There are so many ships but not as amazing as this ship
The ships can be built of diamonds and platinum
But this ship made of hearts is so delicate and smooth
A ship that rocks in harsh winds of life
A ship that lulls in calm water
A ship that saves when you are drawning
A ship that carry you when you are alone
It is a ship that evolves
Hey my friend
It is your friendship
The best ship I have ever travelled...

A secret

Last Monday there was an inspiring talk by Mr. Lal Chandranath, the Managing Director of DMS Electronics, Sri Lanka to a bunch of engineering students in the University of Moratuwa, who were newly entering to the stream of Computer Science and Engineering. I was quite impressed and inspired as well. He was so old with grey hair yet the audience could see at a glance the energetic and dynamic youth inside him when he talked.
The secret behind a successful engineer as he elaborated based on the famous book 'Secrets of success in 8 words' was simply the 8 words: Passion, Work, Persistence, Ideas, Focus, Practice, Serve, Push.
Passion is loving what we do. Work is to do things really hard. Persistance is never giving up. Focus in one thing. Have smart ideas popping up. Practice to be really good at something. Serve the world by adding value to what you do. Push, is simply push, push, push yourself, never let you down.
Is your job so passionate to you? do you work for money or work because of love of work? We must fall in love with the work just like we fall in love with a girl or a boy.
Don't you feel so bored when you keep away from work? Can you ever lie on a bed for hours doing nothing. Oops! just think of such a day you spent like that.
These 8 words together makes a value added person who ultimately leads him/herself to success.

I found this short clip of another talk on same line:
http://www.plijnaer.nl/weblog/2008/05/ted-secrets-of-success-in-8-words-3.html

The Narrow Escape!

I was watching the beautiful sky sitting in the veranda of a two storied apartment in a serene morning. The sky was blue, except for few wool-like whitish clouds.
In a little while a small aeroplane, coloured in white and red rose from the nearby air port like a bird. It took off into the blue sky. I kept watching so leisurely that I enjoyed the fly of this artificial bird into the blue.
That attractive scene didn't last long proving once again the undeniable truth that everything is uncertain. Do you know what happened to that aeroplane?
It hit against a huge cloud. Cloud was like a sponge and the aeroplane got thrown back. Oh! it was thrown towards me. The huge bird was just going to blast me into ashes. Luckily I got up from my weird sleep :)
Hey, does anyone of you know what this weird dream say?

World for his kid...

Today on my way home in the small passenger van, along the narrow road I saw a certain incident which captured my heart. The road though small was crowdy and full of small vehicles, three wheelers, motor bikes and pedestrians and so on and so forth.
Among the crowd a motor bike came towards my way, which was heavy with a big bundle at the back and a small kid stting in between father's lap. The car driving in front of this father's motor bike suddenly disposed a cloud of black smoke. This poor father, despite the concentration on balancing the heavy load, finding way through the crowd, despite the disturbed eye sight offered his hand to close his kid's nose, to protect him from inhaling that black smoke.
How many such fathers worry for seeing a world where their kids have at least a bit of pure air to inhale...

එළඹෙන වසන්තයට.....

එරබදු මල් ගහ මුදුනේ කොහා හඬනවා
බක් මහ මල් වැස්ස වැටී ගම හිනැහෙනවා
අවුරුදු කුමරු වඩිනවා.....

කුසගිනි නැති අවුරුද්දයි
වැරහැලි නැති අවුරුද්දයි
ලතැවුල් සිඳ සිත් අරණට
අවුරුදු කුමරු වඩිනවා....

Are you in a Complex System?

A Complex System as I learned recently is a highly unpredictable and uncertain system in which parameters change with time not only by value but also in number. Such system can be modeled as a multi agent system where agents communicate with each other. These communications lead to sharing, reusing, and discovering knowledge. Knowledge here is not something pre-stored but something which emerges and evolves within the system.

Quantum Physics and Spellbinders

Co existence of many parallel universes or "multi verse" is a fundamental idea of quantum physics. Every object even i myself living on this earth in this universe is supposed to have counterparts in other parallel universes. Those counterparts of me are supposed to behave differently yet interfere with each other which is said "quantum interference". While I was going through this idea of Hue Everette (proposed in 1957) I felt the famous science fiction "Spellbinders" captures the same idea.

The questions are:

1. Are parallel worlds that Spellbinders talk about and the multi verse in quantum physics the same?
2. Is there any possibility to travel between the universes in the multi verse?
3. Quantum computers - will they be a reality?