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.
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
Tablets have been around for years but this is not a tablet with a pointy pen device. This a full hands on experience. If I had one I could have written this post with the latest WordPress app for the iPad.
The state of Java and MySql are changing. In case you missed it. Sun bought MySql and Oracle bought Sun. I’ve been working on Java for over 10 years and MySql for over 5 now. I’m not happy with what is happening.
The Java and MySql websites have changed. On the mysql.com site there is no prominent link to get to the community edition. If you go to mysql.org to redirects to dev.mysql.com where you can find it.
This is not good for me or a country like Sri Lanka. Most of the solutions I’ve been involved over the years have used open source foundations. So we were able to deliver solutions to clients at a very reasonable cost. If things get too commercial I’m a afraid the licensing costs will far overtake the implementation costs.
I’m sure there will always be open source or free to use versions of Java and MySql, but with a large commercial entity backing them profit comes first then community. I don’t know I think its time to look at some alternatives.
