How a human being likes to see an RSS feed:Jerry's comment feed (Wordpress)How a monkey generates an RSS feed:Mein feeden (Blogger)The reaction of the hapless programmer who's trying to parse comments:I know, I know, parsers don't care about whitespace. But uuuugh, that fugly feed makes.me.want.to.tear.my.eyes.out.
...is not Google+. Har Har. ;PYears after the party ended, and everybody had left, I joined Last.fm back in March. It's pretty neat. It stores records of all the music that you listen to quietly in the background and gives a running commentary on your profile page. Everything is neatly categorized, and every artist (even the more obscure ones) have ...
A sequel of sorts to Lilac skies and the end of November(Two years later...):PI took a look at the blog archive and noticed that November is usually a very busy month around these parts. Not so this year, COZ SAI IS BACK! Woohoo! :D So we've been on all sorts of trips around the place, including a secret Negombo beach ...
Computers have crept up on us on an impressive scale in the last 30 years or so. They were once behemoths stuck in large rooms, but with the advent of the microchip things have gotten a lot more exciting. First came devices like the personal computer that took computing to the masses, but today computers are virtually everywhere - even ...
Yes, that Michael Douglas movie. The one which involves a lot of walking around Colombia. And my post today is about a lot of walking around in Colombo. See what I did there? Yeah Raisa, I didn't expect you to get the joke. *ka-ching* ;PAaaaanyway, this morning I got a haircut and walked all the way from Pannipitiya to home ...
Komari Beach. Picture by my friend the hikerExams will be over tomorrow. I've been waiting for this day for a long time. And my legs are itching to run fast and run far. I need to get away from this city. It no longer feels like home. I know, I know, I used to profess my undying love for her ...
My last two posts were (sadly) about dead people. Today's one is about a guy whom I hope lives to be 94: The funny man in the blogosphere is turning 22 today! :D w00t w00t! Oh, and while the king was looking downThe jester stole his thorny crownThe courtroom was adjourned, no verdict was returnedWe all have our fair share ...
Logo I designed for Kottu, in tribute to dmrIs October the month of tech's heroes dying, or something?C was the very first language I learned at university. I had dabbled in bits and pieces of code before, with VB6 (ugh), a bit of C++ (utter failure) and maybe JavaScript. But C was my first proper language, and I fell in ...
Kottu, after the 8.0 redesignThe thing with designing a software system you have no idea about is that you don't know how deep the water is, and you never will, until you jump right in. When Indi contacted me back in July with the proposal to join him at Kottu, I was stunned. It was truly a dream come true. ...
Our philosophies about software freedom and user choice were worlds apart, but I was an admirer of Steve, and the company that he built - basically out of his garage. He was the epitome of the American dream, a self made tycoon who (unlike most people) only sold products he was genuinely passionate about. There are stories of him getting ...
HimalingaToday on Chavie's nature hour, we're going to track the elusive (and endemic) Himalus Kotelawalus, a distant cousin of the Melursus ursinus inornatus (The Sri Lankan sloth bear) and also of Foxus Houndus, but my editor told me to take that bit offThere is only one confirmed specimen of this species, which would put it somewhere between Extinct in the ...
I'm sitting here alone in the 15th floor lab, near a window looking out on Dharmapala Mawatha. A view I've taken for granted since the initial wonder of being on a high-rise bulding passed. It's been two years, and the memories have been good. Good friends, good times and of course, pretty pretty code. :) The first great memory I ...
I think this blog will be going into nostalgia mode shortly. The impending end of our happy days at Kollupitiya campus will warrant another post, but I'm going to go way back with this one. Back to 2003-06, in fact.I was about thirteen when my parents put me in a school van to get me home. Not just any school ...
When I first heard 'Blue Skies' on PseudoRandom's blog, I had no idea that this was one of the few uplifting songs in an album about a breakup. I listened to that live version a million times, fell in love with it, but didn't do much follow up with the band. I didn't even discover 5 Years Time, their big ...
Two IF conditions, in Allman styleI consider myself a fairly rational person, and hopefully others do too. But I am very control freakish about the world, to the point of obsession. If things don't neatly go the way I want them to, I take great offence. This is not to say I go around imposing my will on people. I ...
Soooooohhhhh, it took a complete GUI redesign at Blogger to bring me back to these parts huh? :DWelp, I have been a biiit busy, ostensibly working on Kottu (a hora sneak peek at a new feature I'm working on here), but actually just doing nothing or catching up with Sai, WHO'S FLYING DOWN FOR GOOD THIS MONTH! Yaaaaayayayaya!!! :DThere are ...
Kottu is the Sri Lankan feed aggregator we all know and love. Kottu currently has more than 1000 Sri Lankan blogs in all three languages (and one Dhivehi blog too!) listed, and it's safe to say that without the community and traffic built up around Kottu, most of us would never have continued blogging. Indi, who basically set up and ...
A month and a half back, I made a map of bus routes in Colombo that became a surprise hit. This, coupled with the number of calls Himal was getting asking which bus to take, made me think that a website that tells you which buses to take from location A to location B would be pretty useful. With my ...
So, a couple of months have passed since finals and the university student inside me has been awoken from the long slumber that he took during the vacation months. Our fourth semester at SLIIT promises to be filled with challenges, the most important of which is the infamous "Second Year Project". We have been blessed with a great client, and ...
I love the London Tube map and thought of making a map of Colombo's bus routes using the same principle, i.e. topology over geography.Sources:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombo_Bus_Routeshttp://www.oocities.org/waidyah/SRILANKA/COLOMBO/BUSROUTEMAP.HTM Excel file I used to draw the map:http://chavs.000a.biz/bus4.xlsBus routes:100 Panadura - Pettah101 Moratuwa - Pettah120 Horana/Kesbewa - Pettah141 Wellawatta - Narahenpita177 Kollupitiya - Kaduwela154 Angulana - Kiribathgoda / Bambalapitiya - Kadawatha138 H
