Some people begin life with a running start, quite often backed by wealth, an expensive education and rather well-connected parents. Tharindu Wijesekara is not one of them. He modestly describes himself as a typical Sri Lankan, and his story is indeed as Sri Lankan as you can get. Nevertheless, Tharindu’s pretty unusual. He’s an artist, a designer and a video ...
Sri Lankan website have been hit by yet another hacker spree, this time apparently targeting central government websites. Approximately 14 hours ago, the twitter account @OpSriLanka sent out a single tweet: “Extremist ‘Bodu Bala Sena’ bodubalasena.org has been TangoDown #OpSriLanka #BBS @HackerBrigade #CrimesAgainstHumanity” From there, the hackers apparently moved onto take down the website of the Sri Lanka High Commission and the ...
A long time ago, a man named Ferdinand Porsche looked back upon a fine career and remarked, “I couldn’t find the sports car of my dreams, so I built it myself.” Many people can relate to this, but perhaps none more so than a tiny team working out of Trace IT City, Maradana. They’re working on the impossible: a custom-built ...
Suchetha (or Such, as his friends call him) is a colorful character. At any given gathering, he’s easy to pick out; he’s got long hair, a beard, walks barefoot, and generally looks like someone plucked out a hippie from the 80’s, gave him a Linux hat and set him loose on the city of Colombo. His speech alternates between political ...
The first thing a lot of students do as they finish their exams is wonder: How do I program? This question, as it did for me, eventually leads to the discovery of programming languages and, eventually, to more choices. One of the [...]
Meet Dulith Herath, the award-winning founder and CEO of Kapruka. In just over 11 years of operation, Kapruka has evolved by leaps and bounds, scaling from a humble website running on a laptop to a billion-rupee icon of success and disruptive innovation. Dulith, too, has been through a lot – in the past three years, he’s been called everything from ...
Old is gold, they say. But sometimes, the new stuff is leagues ahead. This time, we’ve got a list of some of the coolest new media sites on our radar. Now the concept of “new media” is a very hazy one, but as a disclaimer, we mean “new” media sites. We’ve left out sites that are affiliated to any of the large, classical ...
April 15th is generally a good day for most Sri Lankans: post Avurudu, we’re usually working off the kiribath and lazily wondering whether to check the office mail or not. As it turns out, some people had other things to do. On the 15th and the following day, Anonymous hackers launched #OpSrILanka – a kind-of-global hack on a number of ...
The Colombo Camps Community (the same people who gave us the the Software Product Engineering Conference and the Colombo Agile Conference) are working on the Colombo UX Conference 2015. Slated to be held on 21 March 2015 at the BMICH’s Committee Room A, it aims to create an open platform to invoke inspiration and innovation among the country’s vibrant IT community. The ...
Word Puzzle is an interactive SMS based service which aims to improve the user’s English language vocabulary. The service is developed by a Sri Lankan start-up, Square Mobile and is currently offered through Etisalat in Sri Lanka and Nigeria. The first tri-lingual offering of its kind in Sri Lanka, Word Puzzle offers service delivery in two local languages Singhalese and ...
“What excites me about the Imagine Cup is the combination of the huge potential of technology and the passion and idealism of the hundreds of thousands of high school and college students who participate around the world” – Bill Gates [...]
With the Appzone Champions 2013 closing in, the Readme team walks into an interview with Dumindra Ratnayaka, CEO of Etisalat and Dinesh Saparamadu, CEO of hSenid to get a better perspective on the platform and the much talked about awards ceremony that has been making a buzz lately. Started back in 2011, the Appzone Champions is running into its 3rd ...
Maya Creations (@webdesignlanka) is having a field day. The little web design firm has just scored huge: their latest creation, SRKUniverse.com – a Shahrukh Khan fansite endorsed by the Bollywood star himself – earns the honor of perhaps being the most popular website ever crafted by a Sri Lankan team, scoring a staggering 10 million hits within just five hours of launch. ...
After months of anticipation, on December 7th the event which tweeps from all over Sri Lanka had been waiting for finally happened at the open grounds of the Mercantile Cricket Association. Yes ladies and gentlemen, we are talking about #TweetupSL 4! For those of you who aren’t tweeps – aka twitter users and are asking, “What the heck is TweetupSL?” here’s ...
Orion City: March 3rd. The upper floor of the aptly named Chips and Bytes cafeteria suddenly finds itself with a 5′ O clock crowd. We take our seats in front of a crowd of tech heads and business enthusiasts from all walks of the IT industry. All of these people are two things in common: they’re in the same ...
Workstations designed for 3D Animation. That’s a tough topic. First and foremost, the rendering times for 3D animations are are based on CPU performance. So the better your processor, the the faster you get your results. More clock speed? Better. More threads? Better. Having said this, the logical assumption is to go for AMD’s infamous octa-core processors, isn’t it? Wrong. This isn’t ...
Remember how we said that most hackathons and code competitions are Colombo-centric? Well, there’s always the rare exception. This time, we found ourselves in Kandy: more specifically Peradeniya: even more specifically the University of Peradeniya. Each year, this magnanimous university hosts what they claim is the largest coding competition in the country. Titled “Aces Coders’, the event is organized ...
“Never Settle” is the motto of the new smartphone startup, OnePlus. Their first release is dubbed the “Flagship Killer”. Still have no idea what we’re talking about? It’s the OnePlus One. Nilosh Sathiyamoorthi (D Bro Fist on YouTube) got his hands on our dream phone this year – the uber-exclusive One Plus One. Everybody’s been waiting for this, so let’s get started! Unboxing ...
Few things could drag us from bed this early. The event unfurling today at Water's Edge - the first-ever Software Product Engineering Conference in Sri Lanka. If you're working in the softare industry, it goes without saying thats you'll have run across this event on tickets.lk at some point. Here's our report, live from Waters Edge. 09.59“Watch the size ...
Noise. Cheers. A thousand gamers cheering on their teammates. Millisecond reactions and strategies playing out on big screens. Bullets flying in virtual space. What do you call this? SLCG. A bit of background first. SLCG, or the Sri Lankan Cyber Games, is Sri Lanka’s single largest professional eSports tournament. Since its inception, SLCG, mirroring larger, international competitions like the World ...
