Category Archives: Work

Tropical storm or free car wash?

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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.

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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 ;)

So Much for 2009

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Hope you enjoyed my moving to Australia posts, cause just after posting those I moved back to Sri Lanka. I won’t get into “moving back to Sri Lanka” cause its pretty painful and I’m sure no one will want to read it.

Why move back? Well although its a bit crappy here most of the time its home, and with the end of the war one can hope again. Here are a few first impressions of Sri Lanka for someone returning after a few years.

Driving has got worse and kind of easier. Before there were only a few idiots who drive bad, now everyone does, so you go with the flow and try not to hit anything.

Everything is more expensive. The quality of products are lower. A bar of soap has been carved in so many creative ways now its about half the weight at the old price.

There seems to be a few new local products trying to fill in the gaps of more expensive imports so that’s kicked off a bit of business.

Everyone seems to be doing more business than going to a 9 to 5 job.

2009 has been a decent year. I’m still working so I survived the recession. I thought coming down in time for the holidays would be a great idea, but this season was a bit damp and low-key. Not my kind of Christmas.

Most of the time I feel very few reads this. Since I got down I’ve spoken to a few people and it seems a few more do. So I’ll try to post a bit more often even if its not too technical.

By the way if anyone is hiring Java people drop me a line I know a decent J2ME developer looking for work.

Pradeep Kodikara Architecture

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House in Colombo 7 2007

Pradeep Kodikara is a young and hip Sri Lankan architect. I’ve known him for many years now since we first worked on the Sri Lanka Architects website (www.slia.lk).

I recently helped setup an online portfolio for him over at

pradeepkodikaraarchitecture.com

He showed me this great house when I met him last. It seems so spacious yet it was built on only 6 perches or so. If you are ever in the market for a dream home like this give him a buzz.

Fixing PHP Redirect On Nokia N80 Web Browser

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I had a problem on a PHP page that was supposed to redirect to another page after some process was done. This is the code I used.


header("Location: http://example.com");

This kept giving me a


Web: no gateway reply

So after looking at the PHP manual for the header function and HTTP status codes I managed to get it working with this redirect.


header("Location: http://example.com", 307);

Choosing Your Freelance Clients

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Freelancers have this advantage over companies. You can choose who you want to work with on a personal level. Old school business types would tell you its not personal just business, that you should be able to work with anyone.

But when we work from home and get to know our clients first hand and see their software grow up with them, it becomes personal.

Choose your clients well. A few will stick with you for a long time. That one annoying client that pays more but gives you too much stress will take your attention away from your other, probably better clients.

Oh sometimes you get great clients that pay well too! :)

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