[caption id=”attachment_620” align=”alignnone” width=”500” caption=”Captured by Shutter :)”][/caption] I was browsing around Launchpad looking for stuff coming up in the new Ubuntu 11.04 and found Shutter.

Shutter is a feature-rich screenshot program. You can take a screenshot of a specific area, window, your whole screen, or even of a website - apply different effects to it, draw on it to highlight points, and then upload to an image hosting site, all within one window.

I also saw this in their Launchpad page

========== WE WANT YOU! Please help us to translate Shutter to every possible language. ========== Translate the main program and shutter plugins: https://translations.launchpad.net/shutter

So I thought I’d help out and started translating to Sinhala. It wasn’t easy at first I had to setup some fonts and get a decent keyboard working. Have a look at Adding Unicode Sinhala to Linux if your on Linux. I found the Sinhala transliteration keyboard to be the easiest to use. Going along that path I found Type in Sinhalese - Google Transliteration So if you can spare some time over the holidays help to complete translating Shutter.

I finally setup a company for myself. Yay for me! Don’t believe the hype just yet. Then again there isn’t much hype about it right now. I’ve been trying to drum up some interest over the holidays but it was harder than I thought. I might be a bit late to the website-company party but I’m packing a whole lot of punch behind it. I have a pretty good team around me that lets me do this. We are starting with Sri Lankan small business websites so we can give a more localized and personal service. We believe we have something unique to offer. Ya I’ll be using ‘we’ a lot but its mostly just me. ;) A few people asked me. Why do websites? Isn’t everyone else doing it? Well ya but that’s something I know I can do well and its a simple enough business to start when you know a bunch of good designers, and they do all the work for you. My general instinct is to stick to something unique and untouchable but in this case I’ve seen many cases where we can do a better job. We don’t have a killer solution (not yet at least), to be honest we can only handle a handful of clients at a time. But I think our clients like that we are small and spend some 1 on 1 time with them and get things right. I’ve been building websites off and on since 1996, it was Mosaic times back then and we were exited about getting HTML tables! Its a whole new ball game now. We are come very far in Internet time. So bring it on! We are here to play.

Paying yourself first is good financial advice. I’m going to need to do some of that for my sites as well. I was going through some of my old sites, ideas and domains and they are not doing so well. Dilantha.info is okay as far as WordPress core is concerned but the old K2 theme and numerous plug-ins are killing my page performance.

Date	05/12/2010
Average page load	10.9s
Home page size	1MB
Requests on home page	49
HTML requests	7
CSS requests	7
JavaScript requests	19
Images	11
Flash	4

I was getting very few search hits as well. The reason was my Sitemap plug-in was broken, and the web crawlers were not picking up the latest content. Bummer. So looks like I have some tinkering to do over the holidays. That’s good considering I was demoted from Christmas decorations due to my lack of taste :(

The angry birds are still in the background but @dilantha, @chathuranga99 and @primalsuaris strive on. Show Notes We talk about the evolution of mobile applications and smart phones. Mobile platforms iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, maemo. iOS popularity in developer community. Android’s lack of worldwide market support. Windows Phone 7 New phone manufacturers like Acer and Dell thanks to Android Comments, corrections welcome.

I see a lot of tweets saying that people don’t blog anymore because of micro-blogging. Keep tweeting but and come back to blogging as well. On a blog you can build a longer lasting impression where a tweet would have past someone’s time-line even before they saw it. Blogging is more personal since you don’t have to compete with all the other tweet noise. People who follow your blog is more likely to hang around and comment on a few posts, micro-bloggers are jumpy, trigger-happy clickers who will just scroll away you well crafted short message to the world.

I finally managed to make it to a Refresh Colombo. It was a good ride except it took longer than I expected. I suggested to @nazly they keep things down to a few talks (like 3) and keep them short! @chamara did a web standards talk which was good and useful. Web standards is the thing that we think at an end of a website as something that would be ‘nice to have’ but as he puts it should be practiced earlier and more evenly throughout a web project. @devaka did a good talk about innovating vs. outsource services, and how well they were doing innovating. The audience didn’t ask him the most important question. Are you hiring? :) @gihangamos talked about Colombo Ride 3D and the future of making games in Sri Lanka. You have to hand it to him for trying. Its a space that most people wouldn’t get into in Sri Lanka. Overall good effort by @refreshcolombo I will try to attend more often and even attempt to present something myself.

Welcome to December! I thought we’ll try out this Podcasting thing. If it was just me talking this would have been quite boring. Since now I have a few guys to chat after work we thought it would be a decent idea to put our tech chats on-line. We are big fans of Sinhalen FOSS and Tech Katha. They do a great service and we are just here to complement them. Hopefully we can keep this going and share some information with the Sri Lankan community. Its recorded in Sinhala since that’s what we are most comfortable in. Maybe later we’ll do an English one as well. Our show notes are in English because I can’t type Sinhala :(. If there is anyone willing to translate it to Sinhala and Tamil I’ll gladly post it. Meanwhile here is the introduction. Show Notes I’m Dilantha as you might have guessed. I’ve been making web related stuff for over a decade now, so I have more than a few things to say. Chathuranga is a multimedia guy and our Podcast producer. He has also about 10 years of experience doing everything from web, print, audio and video post production. Primal is a mobile application developer turned PHP developer and he has about 3 years experience.

I haven’t had to wash the car in weeks. It just keeps raining down and keeping the poor car washers from decent work. In other news I’m never freaking buying an assembled computer from Unity Plaza ever again! I bought one a few months ago an Atom. It was rigged from the start. First it came in a cute small case that makes a ton of fan noise for an Atom. Then the Samsung monitor didn’t work with the boxed power cable. I like Samsung but touch controls are not going to last long. Its just a monitor put some buttons on it! Oh and that HP branded keyboard and mouse with 6 months warranty… the keyboard didn’t work! I asked for Linux but they insisted on putting some bootlegged Windows XP in there that blew up in my face after a few updates. Not genuine eh? Format… Ubuntu 10.10. Its going to be fine now. Here is an interesting video. Keep your goals to yourself. Its the end of the year. Looking back I want to believe I made good this year. I came down and just started working out of the spare room staring at a white wall. Now we have an office with a tree-top view mostly thanks to my wonderful wife. Who convinced me to build it without buying that nicer car. There are 4 more working with me and we have a water cooler. If there aren’t many power cuts we can make this work. As for next year, watch the video, I have nothing to say ;)

I’ve been having this razor problem for a few months now. I don’t know about you but I’ve been to a few super markets with this same result. Scenario 1: You can buy Gillette Mark 3 blades but no handles I don’t own a Mark 3 handle. I don’t mind buying one but I can’t find one. Scenario 2: You can buy Gillette Sensor 2 handles but no extra blades I have a Sensor handle but no blades. :( I’m using some disposables for the time being if anyone has a solution for this I’m eager to hear it :)

My cousin makes music so I’m supposed to post this. Then again its a good listen. Hope you like it.