The Life Story of the World Best Army Commander

Not only battle-harden soldiers but also we have such kind of veterans as well

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Android now in action

You are not required to be an actor to be famous

Journey a triumph of human spirit

On the morning of March 3 in Lahore, the world of cricket was shaken to the core. The horrific attack on the Sri Lankan team bus, as it pulled into the Gadaffi Stadium ahead of the third day of the second Test against Pakistan, was the moment a thousand preconceptions were destroyed. Cricket's presumptions to diplomatic immunity had been mocked by the forces of evil, and as Pakistan spiralled into sporting exile and Sri Lanka's traumatised players rushed home to the bosom of their families, the obvious reaction was to wonder "what now?" for the great game.

Three and a half months later, and sport's great gift for reinvention has delivered a contest that flicks two fingers at the perpetrators of the Lahore atrocity, and proves that - without wishing to overload the sentiment - the human spirit cannot be crushed by cold calculation. Pakistan and Sri Lanka will take center stage at Lord's on Sunday for the final of the most joyful international tournament the game has arranged in years. Twenty20 may be cricket for hedonists, but after everything these two teams and their respective nations have been through of late, the need to lay on a party suddenly feels like the only serious obligation.

"It is a fitting reward for the courage of the team in the way they have played the tournament," said Kumar Sangakkara, Sri Lanka's statesmanlike captain. "All the players have got through Lahore, but what it brought home to us is that we are just the same as everyone else. Sometimes it is nice to be reminded of your mortality, especially when the press and everyone else blows you up to be more than that in this sporting culture. But we've shown no fear and we've gone to play cricket, and it's a fitting reward for that attitude."

If Sri Lanka enter the final as favourites, it is only by dint of their exceptional consistency throughout the tournament. Unlike South Africa, the one-dimensional steamrollers who were spectacularly upstaged by the mercurial Pakistanis at Trent Bridge, Sri Lanka's unbeaten run owes itself, if you like, to a Barcelona-style carousel system, in which the identity of the day's gamebreaker is impossible to call until the damage has already been done. One day, Ajantha Mendis will sweep through the midfield, the next it's Lasith Malinga, while Muttiah Muralitharan's enduring class allows no liberties to be taken against his four overs. And then, every once in a while, up will pop a totally random destroyer, such as Angelo Mathews, the three-wicket wrecking ball against West Indies on Friday.

And yet, Pakistan have developed some serious momentum in the latter stages of the tournament. Their captain, Younis Khan, laughed in the face of their group-stage trouncing against England, dismissing Twenty20 cricket as "fun", and later likened it to WWF wrestling as well. His comments caused consternation at the time, particularly for the thousands of passionate Pakistan fans whose presence and exuberance at all matches have been among the highlights of the competition. But internally, his words had a soothing effect on a side that had lacked meaningful match practice since a low-key one-day series in UAE. As soon as they hit their stride with a walloping of New Zealand at Lord's, Younis' impassioned defence of his star bowler, Umar Gul, in the face of ball-tampering insinuations, left no-one in any doubt as to the galvanised nature of their campaign.

Gul's peerless death bowling remains one reason why Pakistan have the potential to go one step better than in 2007, when Misbah-ul-Haq's traumatic aberration delivered India a five-run victory and instigated a Twenty20 revolution. Shahid Afridi's big-game mentality and bamboozling legspin is another. Set against their wiles is the sensational form and innovative eye of Tillakaratne Dilshan, who produced his most orthodox innings of the tournament on Friday and still came within ten yards of posting the second century in Twenty20 international history.

But whatever happens, it's all about to come down to 40 overs of fiesta cricket in front of a packed house at Lord's, and on this occasion, the old adage "to the victors, the spoils" somehow doesn't seem fitting. Sunday's final is not merely a celebration of cricket, it is a celebration of life. And that's a very serious reason to abandon any lingering hang-ups about the place of 20-over cricket in the grander scheme of the game, and simply get on with the important business of letting the hair down. Joie de vivre has carried these two teams into the final, and it will sustain them in victory or defeat.

When the country is in winning habit, it continues in all aspects

Despites the fact that I am supposed to complete a final year project, write a theses, study for the two hardest subjects ever learned in the university life, I thought to put an article in my blog regarding the knocking out Australia from the T20 world cup yesterday at the Trent Bridge, Nottingham in England. Australia was coming to the match after being hammered by West Indies and they should won the match against Sri Lanka yesterday in order to enter the second round of the tournament and it should be a huge win because the net run rate of Ausies was far behind the 0. Actually it was less than -2. But they started to struggle starting with the first over. Sangakkara won the toss and elected to bowl first with the uncommon opening bowling pair, Anjalo Mathews and Sanath Jayasuriya. Mathews struck in the first over and then the Ausies showed some resistance. But then Ajantha Mendis was called to the action and Ausies was no sign of reading the balls of Ajantha. Certainly, the first ball of Ajantha was a wicket but it was not given but he sent the great Ponting to the dug out in the last ball of his first over. Then the Austalians collapse began and Ajantha and Malinga with his amazing youker shared 6 wickets. However the Ausies were able to score 159 because the Mitchel Jonson scored quick 28 and the finally the score card was 159 for 9 wickets.



When the Sri Lankans started batting, Sanath went early for 2 because he was caught amazingly by Warner at the boundary line. Then the Dilshan and Sangakkara thrashed the Ausies bowlers and Dilshan went for 53 after cleaned bowled by Clerk.Mahela jayawardana and Chamara silva were not able to stay in the wicket for long time because both were 11 and 9 when they were out. Then the Mubarak joined with the Sangakkara and the required run rate was more than 9 but both players were calm and cool. But Mubarak plays the role what he supposed to do and he hit an impressive flat six over midwicket for Bret lee. In that moment all are scolding to Mubarak because he wated first 3 balls he faced without single run and the 4th ball for 2. The six came in the 5th ball. The heat was up in the 18 th over but Sanga struck a boundary and it was 15 for 12 balls at the end of the 18th over. Then the things began to change because Mubarak went again over midwicket for a massive six for Bret lee and it was a violent six which went into the crowd. And again another hard hit went for a boundary from Mubarak's bat and at the end of the 19th over, 1 required from six balls. The first ball of the last over was a wide and the Australia went for the dug out to pack their bags to go back to Australia.



It was the first time after 17 years that the Australia is knocked out from a tournament from the first round and that was the first match which led by Kumar Sangakkara as the captain. Sanga became the man of the match and the favourites of this death match group went to their country while the non-favourites heading to the second round.

Sensors and sensitivity

Data collection: Mobile phones provide new ways to gather information, both manually and automatically, over wide areas

IF YOUR mobile phone could talk, it could reveal a great deal. Obviously it would know many of your innermost secrets, being privy to your calls and text messages, and possibly your e-mail and diary, too. It also knows where you have been, how you get to work, where you like to go for lunch, what time you got home, and where you like to go at the weekend. Now imagine being able to aggregate this sort of information from large numbers of phones. It would be possible to determine and analyse how people move around cities, how social groups interact, how quickly traffic is moving and even how diseases might spread. The world’s 4 billion mobile phones could be turned into sensors on a global data-collection network.

They could also be used to gather data in more direct ways. Sensors inside phones, or attached to them, could gather information about temperature, humidity, noise level and so on. More straightforwardly, people can send information from their phones, by voice or text message, to a central repository. This can be a useful way to gather data quickly during a disaster-relief operation, for example, or when tracking the outbreak of a disease. Engineers, biologists, sociologists and aid-workers are now building systems that use handsets to sense, monitor and even predict population movements, environmental hazards and public-health threats.

A good example is InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters), a non-profit group based in California, which promotes the use of mobile phones to improve developing countries’ ability to respond to disasters. Launched with seed money from Google’s philanthropic arm and the Rockefeller Foundation in late 2007, it has just released a suite of open-source software to share, aggregate and analyse data from mobile phones. Its first test-bed is Cambodia, where health-workers can send text messages, containing observations and diagnoses, to a central number.

The sender’s location is determined for each of the messages, which pop up as conversation threads on an interactive map that can be called up on the web. Clicking on this map allows text messages to be sent back to users in the field from the control centre. InSTEDD says this service, called GeoChat, enables “geospatial ground-truthing, as your mobile team works to confirm, refute, or update data”.

Automating the reporting of titbits from remote clinics has already had a profound impact, says Eric Rasmussen, InSTEDD’s chief executive. Instead of recording information on scraps of paper, which would sometimes take days to reach higher-ups and trigger an alarm, the cycle-time has been reduced to days or even hours. GeoChat has been officially adopted by the six countries which share a border in the Mekong Basin, including Myanmar and Yunnan province in China, establishing a flow of real-time disease data from villages in the region to each country’s health ministry. Authorities can then choose to share this information with international bodies such as America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the World Health Organisation. The aim is to enable a quick response to any outbreak of avian flu, cholera, malaria or dengue fever. InSTEDD is helping aid organisations and government agencies deploy its free tools in other countries, including Bangladesh, Peru and Tanzania.

An alternative approach is to gather information passively from mobile phones, without any user intervention. Alex Pentland, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, dreams of “X-raying entire organisations, cities and countries” by collecting data in two ways. First, some handsets can capture information about individuals, such as their activity levels or even their gait, using built-in motion sensors. (Modern handsets use these sensors to work out whether to display information in landscape or portrait format.) Second, information from mobile-network operators, which keep track of handsets in order to pass them smoothly from one network cell to another, can provide a high-level view of how people move around. Dr Pentland’s algorithms can even cluster information from thousands of phones to divide people into “tribes” of like-minded folk. He calls this “reality mining”.



Following the crowd

Sense Networks, a company co-founded by Dr Pentland, wants to use the predictions derived from tracking mobile phones not only for commercial purposes—to produce real-time maps showing the most popular nightlife venues in a particular city, for example—but also for the public good. The company’s charitable foundation is working with Vodafone, a big mobile operator, the CDC and other collaborators to build an early-warning system for modelling and predicting the spread of tuberculosis in South Africa.

As a first step, Sense plans to collect positional information from a control group of infected patients being treated at Helen Joseph Hospital in Johannesburg who would have to volunteer to participate in the scheme. Dr Pentland and his colleagues will then be able to determine which neighbourhoods these patients frequent, and their commuting patterns between them. They hope this will then enable them to work out the characteristics of typical TB patients, so that they can then spot potentially infected people in the wider population. How public-health officials will use this information has yet to be decided: people who are thought to be infected could be contacted by text message and asked to visit a doctor, for example.

Path Intelligence, a British firm, is applying a similar approach to answer more commercial questions. Its FootPath system aggregates and analyses signals picked up from mobile phones as people move through a particular area. The results can be used by planners to optimise the flow of pedestrians through railway stations and airports or to guide the layout of shopping centres. It can determine, for example, whether customers who visit a given shop also visit a rival shop. The same passive method can be used to figure out where best to locate emergency exits, and even to locate clusters of survivors after a disaster.

But some people find the idea of having their movements tracked in this way unsettling, even when the data are anonymised and aggregated. And knowing someone’s position is not enough on its own to determine whether they carry a disease or would be interested in going to a particular nightclub. So the best approach may be to combine voluntary (but potentially unreliable) contributions that are submitted manually with automated data capture that does not require user intervention, but may not capture the whole picture. A good example is the study of well-water contamination in Bangladesh conducted by Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University. His project combined readings from remote water-sensors with queries and data which villagers keyed into their mobile phones.

On a grander scale, InSTEDD’s Dr Rasmussen is trying to stitch together a global network, tentatively dubbed Archangel, to combine all manner of data sources, from satellite imagery and seismic sensors to field-workers texting from refugee camps. A first glimpse of what such a network would look like is pachube.com, an experimental web-service launched in 2007 by Usman Haque, an architect based in London. He aims to patch together sensors and people into a “conversant ecosystem” of devices, buildings and environments.



Some computer scientists look forward to the day when mobile phones and sensors can provide a central nervous system for the entire planet. An abundance of sensors, they believe, will lead to two things. First, the amount of data will increase, allowing scientists to build more realistic models. Alessandro Vespignani of Indiana University compares the current state of affairs to weather forecasting a century ago, before satellites had provided meteorologists with the data to build and optimise mathematical models. When it comes to problems such as tracking and predicting the spread of diseases and other environmental hazards, he argues, scientists can never get enough data.

The human touch

Second, once people are able to contribute data to research projects from their mobile phones, it could provide an ideal way to broaden public involvement in scientific activities. This would be the next logical step after the popularity of web-based participation in scientific research, from folding proteins to categorising photographs of galaxies. Eric Paulos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, predicts the rise of “citizen scientists” able to measure and sample their surroundings wherever they go. When people can report mundane variables such as the level of traffic noise in their street or the degree of air pollution at the bus stop, he argues, their outlook on science changes. “People develop a relationship with and a sense of ownership over the data,” he says. He foresees amateur experts being driven by a new sense of volunteerism, the 21st-century equivalent of cleaning up the neighbourhood park. Nokia has even designed a prototype handset with environmental sensors (see article).

Dr Paulos has already equipped street sweepers in San Francisco and taxis in Accra, the capital of Ghana, with sensors to measure pollution levels, which he then used to create a map of each city’s environmental landscape. He plans to do the same with cyclists in Pittsburgh. Graduate students in his newly created Living Environments Lab have loaded households with sensors to sample tap water and indoor-air quality. Results are uploaded to a website where participants can compare them with other people’s contributions.

The technology is probably the easy part, however. For global networks of mobile sensors to provide useful insights, technology firms, governments, aid organisations and individuals will have to find ways to address concerns over privacy, accuracy, ownership and sovereignty. Only if they do so will it be possible to tap the gold mine of information inside the world’s billions of mobile phones.

Sanga talk about cricket and terrorism

YalDevi

Pidgin with Google Apps

Hope you have basic knowledge of the Pidgin. In order to add the Google Apps accounts,

Accounts -- > manage accounts -- > add

Then

Protocol is XMPP
Username and password are your Google apps email address username and password
Server is the server name which uses Google apps (ex:bcsc.lk,opensource.lk)
Resource is Home

More importantly in the advance tab
set connect Server field to talk.google.com

So you are ready to go

The war is over

The five leaders report to the commander in chief that the victory is accomplished



The first news about LTTE learde's death







Prabakaran's body found

Army silence their guns ccerromonialy



Another nice article

The grand finele

Field commanders except colonel Ravipriya

Here is another one with all commanders

Troops who captured the body of the terror leader


Here is the official end game.Final offence

Nation

DailyNews

The king arrives for the victorious country

The president Mahinda Rajapaksha arrived Katunayake today morning after by cut shorting the G11 in the kingdom of Jordan



This is a nice song composed for president Mahinda Rajapaksha

How to install Nvidia graphics driver in Ubuntu

First install compilers and make tools by

sudo apt-get install build-essential


Go to this page and download the driver

Set the execution permission necessarily but I always do like this

sudo chmod 777 NVIDIA-Linux-x86-180.51-pkg1.run

press ctrl+alt+f1 and you should be on the pure terminal. If not press that combination until it works and then stop the xserver

sudo /init.d/gdm stop

Then

./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-180.51-pkg1.run

Accept the agreement and say OK for anything asked. After successful installation

sudo /init.d/gdm start

Thank God because Mahela is back

Today, Mahela Jayawardana steered the Kings IX Punjab to the victory over Decan Chargers. He scored 43 runs and took two stunning catches hence became the man of the match. I writing this blog post not because I am a support if Kings team but I am very happy because Mahela is back in action and we can hope a lot more to Sri Lanka from this world class stylish right handerd batsman. I never ever consider Mahela as an ordinary batsman but I think he is an intelligent batsmen. Because nobody can predicts from which location the ball is going to cross the boundary when the Mahela in action as a batsman. He is such class and this classic batsman have become one of the most technically sound cricketers in the world today. The most interesting thing I like to see in Mahela's batting is the movement of his feet, He uses that elegantly and play wonderful drives along the ground. But he is not a batsman who has been categorized as off side or leg side batsman because he is strong in both areas. Finnaly I am really anticipated for couple of fine nocks from Mahela Jayawardana soon.

Let us salute the great nations that genuinely helped us fight terrorism

Sri Lanka is about to conclude her war against terror. The ordeal that about 19 million people have been living with for more than quarter of a century is about to be over. It would never be too early to express our gratitude to all the great nations who genuinely helped us to come this far in this historic battle. Because, the value of a sincere friend would never be so felt, as when one is beset by a group of hypocrites.

On April 30 it was reported that the UN Security Council has no interest in punishing Sri Lanka, by withholding funds that she needs at this moment. Before that decision was taken, some countries that portray themselves as the global guardians of human rights, had made several shameless attempts to recommend punitive action against this poor third world country, struggling to rid itself of terrorism.

Ironically, these so-called human rights champs tried to justify their claims saying that they were doing it for the safety of civilians, held at hostage by terrorists in island's North. Moreover, they put a number of ridiculous demands on the Sri Lanka government, such as offering amnesty to the terrorists, allowing a third party to rescue the terrorist leaders, go for a ceasefire, etc. Never did history unmask the hypocrisy and the sanctimony of the Western Powers than their behaviour towards Sri Lanka during recent times.

In this context, the people of Sri Lanka are grateful for the wholehearted support given to them by India, Pakistan and the rest of the South Asian countries, China, Russia, Pakistan, Japan, Iran, Libya, Vietnam, Mid-East, African and Southeast Asian countries. But for their understanding on our plight and the trust they placed on us, we would never be able to come this far in our battle against terrorism. It seems the international community has become more independent and therefore safer for poor countries like Sri Lanka to stand up for their rights. At least, the people living in poor war affected countries like ours can now have hopes for achieving peace if their leaders are genuine enough to take appropriate action.

It is worthwhile recalling how the civilians, whose safety the Western powers are so worried about, were driven to their current situation. It was the LTTE terrorists who took hold of these civilians at gunpoint and held them as a protective shield during the last three years. As troops gradually liberated the territory held by the LTTE, the terrorists forcibly took most of these civilians with them in order to protect their leaders. All the human rights champions now blaming the government were brazenly silent on this blatant atrocity against our citizens, despite the government's untiring efforts to convince them about the looming humanitarian situation. All they did was trying to corner Sri Lanka in the international community, with their usual "warnings", "urges" "concerns", etc.

They always asked us to stop fighting and start negotiations for a political settlement. Yet, they could not tell us how to stop the continuing atrocities of the LTTE against Sri Lankan citizens. They neglected to see that a political solution is needed for a political problem but not for a terrorist problem.

Human sufferings are the main weapon the LTTE has been using for its survival. It is no secret that the LTTE has been engineering the most brutal crimes against civilians and cunningly manipulates them to its advantage. From their first village massacre in 1984, the terrorists have been mastering this art for earning sympathy for the crimes they themselves committed. The LTTE leadership has been so obsessed with his strategy of cowering among the civilians and increasing their sufferings to win international sympathy.

Therefore, anyone who refuses to accept this realty and asks us to stop fighting against terror, serves the exact purpose of the terror leadership. In other words, it is their response that inspires the terror leadership to continue these crimes. Therefore, all those diplomats, politicians, human rights organizations that dance to the tune of LTTE propaganda are equally responsible of the plight of the civilians under the clutches of terror.

Let us salute our friends who accepted the truth and are bold enough to stand by us at our moment of need.



Original Article is here

Sanga showed off some character

It was the match between Mumbai Indians and Kings Eleven Punjab. Kings batted first and scored 119 in a pitch where ballers are supposed to rock. The Kings wicket keeper batsman Kumar Sangakkara scored unbeaten 45 while others collapsing for low scores. MI started chase but the veteran opening pair returned to the MI dug out early and others also had the same fate. But J.P. Dumminy and Abishake Nayar fought back but Nayar fell as the MI had to get 30 out of 26 balls. In the next over, Kings captain Yuvraj Sing injured while he try to stop a boundary and Kings seems to plying without a captain for a while. On that moment, the new Sri Lankan captain and Kings wicket keeper Kumar Sangakkara took reign of the Kings team as the MI had to score 20 out of 12 balls. Sanga with the help of his former captain and his friend Mahela set the field and gave the ball to Abdulla to ball the critical 19th over. But suddenly Sanga took ball from Abdulla and gave it to Chawla and Chawla produced the goods in the first ball. Finally, MI were restricted to 117 and it was Sangakkara who became the man of the match for the second time in IPL 2009.

World lagest hostage rescue mission is on-35 thousand rescued in first day.

This is not my post by defence wire one of the famous blog

first

second

third

fourth

This is from wannioperation.com

fifth

From Nations.lk

Lakbima News

President visits kilinochchi

Android VS Iphone

This is a nice conversation still going on in Android mailing list. I have put the offensive stuff brought forward by A.I. Sutton. That is not because I hate Android but there are people who love Iphone. In my case I need both.

Now before I start on the iPhone comparison I'm going to pre-empt the normal "But Android is open source....." response by saying lets be honest and admit it as it stands Android is not an open source project because the public "open source" repository is pretty worthless in its' current state.

The last time I tried to build the master branch it failed missing some Google internal API classes. The SDKs I've produce from the cupcake branch seem to be considered by Google employees as pretty useless with comments like "This is why we want to be clear it is "unofficial," because it is not actually a working SDK" being thrown around and networking in the emulator

still being broken a week after users started reporting the showstopper problem (And Romain did hint that Google have a fix, I read http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/msg/41fcefc36bd16d44 as "there is a version where this is fixed"). And as we all know you can't use it to build the exact versions of the open source parts of either of the two firmware versions that have shipped on the G1.

To me it seems little more than code dump which is aimed at ensuring Google can keep saying "But it is open source and not just a Google project"

Now, in the last week I had few conversations with iPhone developers so I could compare the Android developer experience to that of what is perceived as our nearest competitor and they are laughing at us (seriously, when I mentioned the G1 most of them responded by initially chuckling). The general consensus among them was;

- Yes, you pay $99 for the iPhone dev kit, but you get "free" external testing (i.e. at apple) and commercial quality support with many queries being turned around in hours or a couple of days at worst. Compare that to some of the support queries on b.android.com for basic problems things like a Android failing to connect to wireless lans with hidden SSID (http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1041) which, after *five and a half months* is still marked as "New" and doesn't have a single response from a Google employee.

- The most common cause of App Store listing rejections are things that users would complain about anyway. This includes things like performance characteristics, UI anomalies, and inconsistent behaviour. This is the type of stuff that is left for users to find out on Android and only comes to light when 1* or 2* comments are posted and even then you don't know if it's
a one off on the users device or possibly something specific to their region (http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2372).

- The normal amount of time from submission to app store listing is around 7 days. Some apps take months to go through the approval process, but that is because of intellectual property concerns, concerns over offensive content, or is because the app has to be re-reviewed a few times to meet the apples performance and behaviour guidelines. Yes it's not as fast as Android, but you know that once it's on the market it's of a quality where you're not going to get bombarded with user queries about problems straight off.

- Most of the developers actually feel valued by Apple and feel that Apple does what it can to make sure they get the tools they need to do their job and ensure they're apps. This has been re-enforced by allowing the developers to beta test the new firmware and develop against it.

Personally, it's made me shell out $99 for an iPhone SDK, dust off my Nokia N81, and spend $75 on eBay on a Blackberry so I can explore the alternatives.

This is a reply to that by Tom Gibara

I think my response might best have been posted to android-discuss, but I'll reply here anyway.

Pre-empting a debate about whether Android is open source with the argument "...let's be honest..." isn't adequate. I don't know whether there are established metrics for measuring a degree to which a project rates as being "open source", but here are some of mine:

(1) Can I make use of the code and do so freely?
(2) Can I distribute the code free of onerous conditions?
(3) Can I contribute?
(4) Can I be openly critical?

By all of these metrics I regard Android as open source.

(1) I regularly access the git repository to learn how various Android components work. I downloaded and successfully built an SDK based on cupcake for a preview of forthcoming IMF. On a few private scratch projects, I've copied widget code out of the android framework and tweaked it to make my own UI components. I neither sought nor needed permission from Google to do any of these things because the code was licensed so as to give me these freedoms.

(2) Since almost all of the source code is licensed under the Apache License I feel very comfortable distributing any software I derive from it since it's an extremely permissive and well understood license. I've seen a number of people post in this, and other groups, that the absence of some code from the repository disqualifies Android from being open source; even that the inability to create an installable phone image betrays a malign intent. I don't hold with these arguments - they would carry weight if Android was only operable on one model/brand of hardware but since that's demonstrably not the case I'm contemptuous of them.

(3) I have to-date made one very modest contribution to the Android code base, but intend to make more when time permits. My limited experience so far is that the Android engineers are extremely receptive to contributions pitched at a technical level and supportive of anyone trying to commit code. Perhaps others have had a different experience. I do anticipate that programmers who think they are going to sweep in and carve out whole new areas of functionality inside the core frameworks will probably be disappointed, but due to an inadequate understanding of how large projects need to operate rather than by intransigent Google staff.

(4) This is an important freedom that is not necessarily guaranteed by the preceding ones. I include a public bug reporting system as an element of this. Android has one and there is little evidence that Google engineers ignore the bugs filed there. It's clear that there is insufficient public visibility of the statuses of issues, but that's not the same thing. Reading the android related groups demonstrates that criticisms of Android, irrespective of how well founded they may be, are freely accommodated even though the groups are moderated by Google employees.

Given the personal observations above, I find the argument that Android is not an open source project simply misguided. Perhaps it arises in many instances from a lack of experience with open-source or alternatively large scale software development. I'm not denying that there are some key problems, especially concerning the state of the master branch. Nevertheless, having closely observed the progress of the android project since its first public announcement I believe that things have improved considerably and that they will continue to improve; both the core Android team and the community (as with your interim builds) will have a role to play

I'm not qualified to comment on the experience of releasing iPhone applications, and I'm inclined to believe what you report - that the experience of most iPhone developers is not as negative as many websites like to report. For companies and individuals who are looking to generate more revenue more quickly that they might with an Android application, I would do nothing to dissuade them from investigating other opportunities; the iPhone foremost.

Nevertheless, I regard it as almost inevitable that those with power will ultimately abuse it. As a consequence I believe that Apple will ultimately abuse their monopoly of the App Store. In contrast, I expect the open source nature of Android to protect its community of users from egregious abuses that could be countenanced by present or future management of Google or the OHA.

I regard the ceding of software to its related community via the process of "open sourcing" it as analogous to the establishment of a democracy which forces the government to be reasonable with those governed and thus protects against the worst excesses of its corruption. Companies that open source the software they produce are serving their users by protecting them against the potential actions of future management. Given the significant commitment that I must make to any new platform I adopt, I regard this as any extremely beneficial provision.

Here is again Sutton

My metric is simple; Can I build a working system from the public repository which represents what most users are using?, and the answer to that is currently no.

To me there are many products being labelled Android; There are the ones that are used on devices, there are the ports that people have made to new platforms, and there is the public repository, and although all these are different in their own way people seem to pick attributes from each and say that's what Android is.

As I see things, the answers to your metrics are;

(1) You can for the Android open source project, but not for the version of Android that's shipped on the G1, Magic, or ADP1. I will happily admit I am wrong if someone can give me the git revision numbers from the open source project which will build all the open source components of the "official" updates for these platforms.

(2) Again, yes for the open source repo, but again builds from the open
source repo are not what's in use by a majority of Android users.

(3) I've contributed code to "closed source" products before after the source code was made available to me under an NDA. I did not work for the company at the time and I did not get paid for the contribution, so I'm not sure it's a metric of an open source project. I've also had contributions to projects considered as open source sit in a review tree for 6 months and
then one another developer submit the same code and it gets integrated (this was a 1 line fix, and so the fix was *exactly* the same). Therefore I'd say this metric possibly isn't a charactistic that identifies an open source product

(4) I would again disagree that bugs are ignored, as I stated in my original email there are bugs that are still marked as new after five and a half months. This means they haven't even reached the "reviewed" stage even though many later bugs have. I would also disagree it's a metric of an open source product as there are numerous public criticisms of Windows, and the
developers complaining over problems submitting iPhone apps are well publicised, and both of these are closed source projects.

I think the main point of our differences is that you see Android as one thing, whereas I see Android as the basis for many things which are trading off a brand, and to me that's like saying IBMs HTTPD is open source because it has a codebase built on Apache (Thanks to Disconnect in
href="http://andblogs.net/2009/04/android-and-open-source/ for bringing the
IBM/Apache link up).

Train tracking and elephant catching

If my memory is in order, we started a train tracking project with the help ofDr. Kasun De Zoysa . Certainly it is not a complete project as our final year one but it was mini project for the subject of Wireless Adhoc and Sensor Networks. We used micaz s ensor equipments and Tiny OS as our hardware and software platforms. After getting the permission from the Railway Department, we carried out our first experiment as Fort railway station and the second one at Bambalapitiya station. Our team was Chamara, Dhanuska, Girisha, and I. Girisha was not a member of our group but he helped us a lot because he is the only person who has a LapTop with a serial port. Still we haven’t come into conclusion about the results of our experiments but the experiments were funny and interesting.

Today I got a chance to go to the Dehiwala Zoo because Girisha was going to record elephants’ infrasonic sound. It is his final year project and we recorder sounds of an African elephant as well as Asian elephants. We faced some unforgettable incidents when we setting up the equipments and I was never be such close to an elephant in my life. The results of the recording are not yet released and I hope the train experiment will be a success as well as I wish Girisha good luck.

What happend to the STF

Sri Lanka Army is heading towards the LTTE last bastion and the remain area is almost less than 40 square kilometers for today. Although the three Special Forces regiments were kept reserved during entire wanni humanitarian operations, 2 Commando regiments are operating in the front line. 1-commando regiment is heading toward Pudumathalan via chalai with Brigadier Prasanna Silva, commander 55 division and the 2-commando regiment is reaching the east of Puthukudierippu with Brigadier Shavendra Silva, commander of 58 division. Although they were kept reserver, the SF units were called upon to action when it was tough for regular infantry units to hold the defence line as well as special operation were required deep inside the enemy territory. Day by day, we hear heroic stories of these Commando and Special Forces units and they have become the immortal in the hearts of the every peace loving citizen in Sri Lanka. I think that they deserve that honor because until today, LTTE was not able to over run any defence line held by those Commando and SF units and almost all the assaults, operations, ambushes conducted by those units were a success.

But the problem is what happened to the nation's third elite unit, the Special Task Force. They were the nightmare of the LTTE decade ago and their ability was able to bring the fear to the heart of the enemy even for the heads of the LTTE. But today we are hearing the news of inability of STF and they have proven that they are not such deadly now as they were five or six years ago. Recently, a STF unit was assaulted by the LTTE while they gathered around a fire and couple of months ago, LTTE were operating 600m ahead of a STF camp in Trincomelie and those terrorist were gunned down by SF not STF. These people are the hub of VIP protection but I think that if a well planed ambush occurs for any VIP convoy, I am pretty sure that these STF people may not be able to overcome the situation.

I am not saying that these people are not talented but they did not show their colors when they get a chance to do so. Almost decade ago, we have no idea of commando and SF units but only elite units we knew was STF and I can not forget how they stopped the LTTE Rajagiriya attack. Finally we hope that the STF will keep their standards and will regain honor they lost couple of years ago

They came to kill them

I was shocked for the second time over yesterday’s terrorist attack on Sri Lanka cricket team because I tend to believe that the intention of terror team is not to harm players but to threaten the Pakistani government. But today morning I had a chance to read the live action as seen by Kumar Sangakkara on Cricinfo as well as on regular news papers of Sri Lanka. It is not just threatening but they have come to kill our players. The team escaped from with minimum damages just because the courage and braveness of the driver Kalil and the quick reaction to the situation of the SL team members.

The attack started by firing a RPG to the players’bus but it missed the target and hit the electricity tower. Then the terrorists fired gunshots to the tires of the bus and next they fired to the passenger area of the bus. SL players quickly reacted to the situation by jumping over seats and laid down to the deck of the bus. They were not panicked and they shouted to the driver to continue the driving the bus forward. As Kumar’s plot, when they lay on the bus, bullets were flying over their heads and hit the seats of the bus. Kalil the driver of the bus has heard someone shouting ‘go’ ‘go’ and he lowered his body to the driver seat and accelerated the bus towards the stadium in mids of heavy gun fire. Unless that brave act of the driver as well as intelligent reaction of players, we shall not have a chance to see our beloved players alive again. The terrorist threw a grenade to the beneath of the bus but it exploded after the bus passed it. If it exploded, the bus definitely caught up in fire because of the fuel tank. Quoting about the incident, Mahela has said that the terror experience of the Sri Lanka helped them to escape from the heavy gun fire. It is possible that Ajantha Mendis led the escape because in SL Army. He has been trained to do so.In the meantime Umpire Ahsan Raza in critical condition because he was traveling by a mini bus just behind the SL team coach.

On the other hand, if the terrorist wanted to threaten the players, they do not want to come with loads of weapons and actually they don’t want 12 people. They can do it by single gun and with one person. Because SL cricket team knows to play cricket but not to fight a war. Finally according to the Mahela, they were survived by some merits they have done in past lives.

Further details-
Live Action By Kumar

Mahela's comments
Assistance Coach on the seen
Narrow escape of Pakistan team
Dhoni commenting

Sri Lanka Cricket team attacked in Lahore by terroists

Sri Lanka cricket team was attacked by the terrorists today morning when they are arriving Lahore Gadafi stadium for the third day of second test match. I was really shocked when I got the news alert from DailyMirror and even the friends who are not known as cricket fans also shocked by sudden incident. Initially we didn’t have any information about the damage caused to the team but by means of couple of minutes, we got to know that the six team members are suffering from minor injuries. Mahela, Kumar, Ajantha, Thilan, Vass and the news opening batsman paranawithana who just took his debut in this series were among the wounded. More than ten terrorists (12) have come to the attack and they have came for the liberty circle by a white van. They have brought load of weapons including rocket loungers as well as graneds. They started the action with firing rocket and exploding grandes. The tyres of the bus which carried the players were initially shot and then they started to fire to the inside of the bus. However the driver has driven the bus to the safe location mid gun firing and the players laid down in the bus to prevent from bullets. The incident caused five lives of Pakistani policeman and the Sri Lanka team was evacuated from stadium by helicopters. While I am typing this, the cricket team is on their way to the Sri Lanka and all the players are safe except minor injuries.
Although nobody have claimed the responsibility of the attack there are some obvious reasons to such attack. Sri Lanka team went to Pakistan just because the Indian cricket team refused to go there. On the otherhand Pakistan is a closer friend of Sri Lanka with respect to the military because they provide us a lot of arms as well as training. In addition groups like Al-Quida want to attack Pakistan and stop its normal day to day life because Pakistan has deals with USA the rival of Al-Quida.

Anyway our team will be safe at home by tomorrow morning and this incident again proves that the terrorism is ruthless.

Cricket Situation Sri Lanka

Yes, cricket again because it is a hot topic these days.Mahela Jayawardena has decided to step down from the captaincy and the Sri Lanka cricket board have also accepted it. So who will be the next candidate for the captaincy ?. This is an interesting question to be asked from anybody who likes this amazing game. My view is the suitable person for the captaincy is obvious because Mahela also mentioned it when he was addressing the media after submitting his resignation later. He is non other than Kumar Sangakkara but who will be the next vice captain?. Kumar Sangakakara has great potential for the captaincy in every version of the game. It doesn’t matter whether it is Test cricket, Oneday international or 20-20, this man is capable of leading Sri Lanka. I am pretty confident about Sanga’s ability because I have seen it for long time.

My selection for the vice-captaincy is T.M Dilshan because non other player is experienced as him except Sanath, Vass and Murali of course. Kapugedara as well as other playes have to gain a lot of things from the international cricket rather than bothering with the vice-captaincy.

Meantime I am really happy over Mahela’s resignation because I strongly believe that this man will definitely return to his form soon and that will be the birth of next Aravinda de Silva. Mahela is an ideal batsmen for the middle order and I don’t think that there will be someone who don’t appreciate this world-class classic batsman’s skills. He has got strokes around the wicket and he is strong both side of the wicket. I hope and wish that Mahela could be succeeded in his carrier after his resignation.

Sri Lanka lost the Indian tour for 4-1 as well as we almost won the 20-20 match unless the bowling of Dilhara Ferbnando. Sanath-Dilshan combination started the Sri Lanka batting and this combination seems to be a better investment for the 2011 wolrd cup because they showed some partnership during the whole series. Jayasuriya made one centuary in the first macth but he didn’t show the performance I expected from him. However, he hit some massive sixes in 4th ODI and the 20-20 matcha nd those sixes cannot be forgotten for someone who loves big hits. They were really flat strokes and those strokes showed how much power still he posses. Finaly I hope that our players s specially Mahela and Sanath may back in their usual form by the time of IPL and then we can have hopes for the next world cup which will be hosted on our country as well.