Life: Havin a break...

With the first subject of our exams over, it's time to relax for a bit. There's a week's break till the next one which is "Theory of Computing" so I could go home and see how the guys are doing. Got some work at the OSA of my first school so there won't be much time to have a break.
Hope I could get the new stuff chaky has downloaded. Normally half the stuff he gets is crappy. Must be because he's always looking DVD rips and not the latest or best movies. He's got X3 though. Yeahh!
God I miss Ramedian and it's 7mb downlink :(

Life: Sri Lanka Ministry of Defence Web Site

I don't like to put down my ideas about the ongoing ethnic crisis in Sri Lanka but recently there has been a lot of propaganda carried out by the LTTE (the rebel tamil tigers if you didn't already know that).
The Ministry of defence of Sri Lanka has created a new website to counter the false claims made through tamilnet. Dinesh has forwarded a mail asking us to put links to the new MOD website. I created a new icon to put in mine so it wouldn't spoil the looks.



I've uploaded it to image shak. You can find it here.
You can add a link to the MOD SL by inserting the following HTML in the appropriate location (should be between the "" tags):

<a href="http://www.defence.lk/"><img src="http://img456.imageshack.us/img456/3166/sla8rn.jpg"></a>

Leisure: Bleach and 1UP

What!!! You dont watch "Bleach"??? Sooooo uncloooooooool Duuudes.... Seriously Bleach is like the only anime that I keep up with. It has this universal appeal of being complex and serious and being funny at the same time. And the best thing is you don't have to have access to torrents to DL it. All episodes are available as direct downloads here. While your at it you might wanna check out the 1UP video podcast. These are the guys who do Electronic Gaming Monthly and they got the latest reviews in the podcast. Get it here with your favourite RSS reader.

Views,Life: Sick of Sci-fi

I've been reading nothing but sci-fi novels for the last hundred years. It seems to be the only type of fiction our library has and thats thanks to the huge number of sci-fi books donated by Dr. Arthur C. Clarke who was a former chancellor of our uni. Most of them are more than twenty years old. The style doesn't quite hold up to the expectations of the modern reader.
Sci-fi took a great turn for the better with the advent of Neuromancer and other cyberpunk novels released during the early 1980s. Modern sci-fi seems to capture human nature and find the perfect balance between morality and technology where as most pre-1980 s sci-fi novels seems to be chronicals of future technologies with a few humans thrown in for flavour. Not that there weren't any good sci-fi books before that (apparently Aldous Huxley's books were quite good but I found "The new world" a really tiring read) but they were quite rare. Hardly the stuff fit for someone who's mingled with the works of Iain Banks, Kingsly Amis, Le Carre, Forsyth and so forth.
I'm stuck up with reading "Architects of Hyperspace" and it's an excrutiating experience to say the least. It seems I have to be content with outdated sci-fi and a few Terry Pratchet books till I can find the time and finances to get a membership at the British council.

A dying man's message sends interstellar explorers on a search for a lost alien civilization.

"A splendid book. McDonough has created the most mind-boggling artifact since EON."
—Arthur C. Clarke

"McDonough's imagination is as daring as they come."
—Locus

"The imagination and scientific know-how of Clarke. I loved it."
—The Midwest Book Review

"High adventure in the classic SF tradition."
—Science Fiction Chronicle

Views: Intellectual Property (IP) Law in Sri Lanka

One of the modules that we had for this semester was "Professional Practice". In between all the talks about ethics, morality and whistle blowing we had a few lectures on SL IP law conducted by Mr. Jayantha Fernando. According to him, Sri Lanka has implemented alot of reforms to meet up with the standards of the EU, the TRIPS agreement (whatever that maybe) and the WIPO standards.

It's strange though to hear that computer programmes are protected along the same lines as works of literature. I don't think programmers go through the grueling process of coming up with a unique idea, wrestling with it for months or years and finally getting down to
putting everything down in words.


I've tried both writing and computer programming and I find a programming a breeze compared to writing anything remotely creative. But the wierd thing is software and other content, if downloaded, doesn't appear to be clearly addressed by any of these laws.