Nisadas

As I may have pointed out before, the consistent feature of this blog has been upgrades to WordPress and its plugins.

Rarely have I taken the time to actually add anything of note to this blog.

Beginning May 2005, Nisadas was launched from home on my dial-up connection and featured a mashed up theme that borrowed (stole?) heavily from various existing themes that I thought were interesting.

Prabhath, the design guru at the up-and-coming contender for Best Sri Lankan Web Design Firm (Vesess) saw it, puzzled over it and then kindly advised me to use a more interesting theme like Blix.

After that, I managed to squeeze in a few posts such as;

• Small is beautiful
• Multum in parvo
• Identity crisis
• The Horton Place Progressive Front (possibly one of my better posts)
• Quis custodiet ipso custodes? (which combined my penchant for latin headings with my interest in Pratchett)
• The Magic of books (the Kindle wasn’t out yet)
• Life on the silver screen (my first movie review and the first time I went for a premiere. It was weird sharing the theater with so many sri lankan actors, ‘cos I didn’t know any of their names – just their faces )
• and my most viewed post – HSBC (SL) doesn’t want me to use Linux

After that, most of my posts came few and far between, with random surges whenever I got some free time (which was spent mostly fiddling with the themes and plugins).

During all this time, I’d been hosting at NearlyFreeSpeech.net which I have to say is the best bet for anyone looking to start out hosting their own domain for their blog. Then came a special offer from Dreamhost which sounded pretty good  so as of January 4, 2009 Nisadas found a set of new nameservers. Within a few days though, the server this was hosted went down. It was back up again and I’m sure apart from a few spambots, no one else apart from me noticed. Which is ok – I’ll give DH a go and see how it fares. If it doesn’t impress me, I’ll be back at NFSN.

Installing WordPress 2.7 and getting the fabulous Amazing Grace theme working (after getting it off NFSN) was a breeze. I’m quite impressed by the ease of exporting the blog using the settings. Also, WordPress 2.7 looks even better than before. Very Web 2.0 so to speak (I remember the older 1.5 UI). The facility to upgrade from within the blog comes quite in handy, especially since I’m not much of a hacker anymore.

So my goal for 2009 is quite simple – at least one post a week, for a total of 52 in 2009. Let’s see how that goes.

I’d ask you to put your seatbelts on, but this is going to be more like a ride on a bullock cart, so no worries, y’all

The last time that I got involved in Nisadas was to upgrade to WordPress 2.3 or something like that. The next thing I know, my next spam-deletion visit was met with the news that 2.5 was out and my spanking new upgrade was obsolete! Ah well, so there I went and upgraded…

To be honest, it’s nice. Nice to use WordPress again and nice to be blogging again. Over the last few months, much has happened.

• September whizzed by and South Africa won the Rugby World Cup (as I predicted to my All Blacks’ fanboy colleagues, weeks before the tournament).
• Sri Lanka fought hard and got into the Cricket World Cup finals, only to lose out to Australia (and don’t even think of discussing the whole squash ball incident).
• I watched the finals of the aforesaid cricket match, whilst running intermittently to the balcony to watch tracer bullets fire at the possible locations of LTTE light aircraft.
• I never got around to buying the new computer, although the people from ABC Computers thanked me for pointing out that their website was a bit out of date.
• I married an amazing young lady. Life has taken a distinct turn for the better!
• I got promoted.
• After much deliberation, I bought a car.
• I got over my suspicions of social networking and finally joined Facebook.
• The guys at Vesess totally amazed me with their new look and have now gone totally Free.
• A number of blogs that I enjoyed reading have vanished – notably Mahangu’s which is now used by someone else (unless that is, Mahangu.org is written by MW in an intentionally different style).
• The local website for HSBC was revamped and now allows access from a variety of browsers. Haven’t checked whether it works with linux, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t.
• I realised that 34 posts over a period of almost three years (since Nisadas went live) is pretty lame for a blog.
• I also realised that apart from fetish-crazed spambots, no one (well, except for one special person) really vists Nisadas anymore.

So that’s it. Things have happened – not limited to the list above – over the last few months. If you will join me again, you may find out more…

Technically, time is supposed to fly when you’re having fun. However, it also flies when you least want it to. The question that lingers most in my mind is whether the days really are shorter than when I was younger, or whether it’s just the change in perspectives. Most definitely time flies when you’ve been given a deadline and a ton of stuff to do.

The cliche is that the only thing that doesn’t change is change itself.

It’s almost a year now since I left Vesess and it’s been hectic. It’s great to know that the guys are doing well and destined for greater things. It’s a shame that Nidahas and Adahas are off the Kottu syndicate – if only they were updated more often… (GP, Venu – hint, hint).

Mahangu has been offline for quite some time now (or so I think), so the link to his page has become rather redundant.

Meebo has become a lot more shiny and I kinda miss the old site already.

Firefox 2 came out and now I’m wondering how long before it’ll be exactly like Opera.

And that’s my two cents for the month.

I am still alive. And occasionally kicking. Contrary to what my pals might think.

Of course, subsequent to my shift away from full time participation in being part of (arguably) Sri Lanka’s best web design firm, I’ve had my laziness at posting compounded by a lack of time and inspiration.

So I have decided to make this post to share with you a little piece of Sri Lankan innovation:

I normally catch a bus headed into Colombo from the outstations, since they don’t stop at too many halts and have more courteous (no, seriously) conductors. This photo was taken in a bus that travels from Matara to Colombo and back. The journey likely takes around five hours, if you consider the traffic and bus stops.

So what do these people do on these long journeys? They watch VCD movies.

This is in a Viking Leyland bus, most commonly known for loud horns, thundering along the roads with little concern for road rules, passenger comfort or general safety.

Given that reputation, I was pleasantly surprised that this particular bus (or rather its owners) had taken an innovative step towards making life interesting for its passengers.

I wonder whether they charge extra depending on the movie being played.

Sometime back, I wrote on obscurity. While doing so, I also mentioned something which sittingnut later explained was known as the GoogleBomb effect.

Via Digg, I found a response from Google on this matter at the Google Blog, which I thought is worth reading.

While you’re at it, there’s another interesting link to an AJAX powered dictionary here (Also via Digg).