Today marked a new beginning in life. Having spent more than 1 and half years in Sri Lanka, the time up to now was spent in studies as well as fun and excitement. Finished the higher national diploma this month, and now it’s time to concentrate on the top up. Today, attended the degree orientation program at cinnamon grand and it was a new experience there, after hearing about the good things about the bachelors program.

Classes start next week, and it’s on weekends. The program finishes on the first week of May next year(2012) as per their schedules. The bachelors program is an internal certificate from Middlesex UK, and recognized worldwide.

Busy days ahead with the remaining assignments and presentations. Wish me luck peeps. Will need it :D

Over the past couple of weeks it has been very inspirational times for me, Trying out new ideas and concepts. It seems like the best way to get motivated is to try to learn something new at times of boredom, And this idea has never kept me actually bored enough to start disassembling and breaking stuff.

I have started to develop a liking for the language Java by Sun Microsystems. At a first glance everybody seems to hate Java, Because of the lousy syntax and strict rules, But these rules enforce good coding practices and a fair amount of satisfaction is guaranteed after building a working prototype. Thinking like a hacker when coding is really inspirational and encourages one to break stuff and find new ways to meet the goal. My interest and passion for web development technologies is never-ending and hope to continue without taking a break.

It's been one and a half years since I started the course which I am doing now and this is the point where I must say bye-bye to all the ideas which I am having and focus solely on finishing the last project and to submit all the remaining assignments. Very hectic days ahead indeed ;)

I have been into programming and computers since my childhood and had a fascination for how programs and applications run in the binary world. It's been three or four years since I actually started programming. Along the road I have developed a keen interest in some languages.

Attending college opened many previously locked doors, And I was able to get deeper into the core aspects of programming such as OOP methodologies and concepts, Developing web applications for fun purposes was a very good practice to put my skills up to the test, Nevertheless not failing at any task so far. Java Server Pages (JSP) and Servlets are the most interesting things I have come so far in the learning process, And developing a hatred for the Microsoft's baby ASP.Net.

Programming in a Windows environment has been the biggest difficulty I have come across so far, After switching completely to Linux Ubuntu it was like finally finding freedom out of a long enduring torture. Everything is inspirational. Although having to use windows at some point to play with Microsoft's Visual Studio.

All in all it was a smooth ride, And hope to continue doing new stuff.

Will keep this blog updated more frequently. See you then ;))

Its been a very productive couple of weeks. Playing with programming languages and stuff, Inspired by the questions and puzzles put infront of me. The higher education programme is about to end soon. Have to admit, Learnt some awesome stuff over the past 1 and a half years, But not quite a challenge to overcome at any level. As college life didn't even come any close to what I had expected beforehand I am waiting for this to end and patiently waiting to get back into home soil. 

Also hoping to get back into active blogging :)

It's been like 8 months since I came here for the last vacation, And finally I arrive here at Fuvahmulah. This time a lot has changed since then. It's been a week now since I arrived here and it already feels like fun and excitement. 

Nothing beats the fun of hanging out with buddies and having a good time. Going out on rides, to check on the island and old friends, Going to the beach and chill out. Nothing beats it. It's not yet time to talk about departures, as this time, It's all about fun. Tick Tick :)

Another boring night. Was testing out some bash scripts, And this is my version of the famous 99 Bottles of beer I wrote in bash to kill some boredom.

#!/bin/bash
 # The famous 99 bottles of beer lyrics :D
 clear
 bottles=99
 while [ $bottles != 0 ]
 do
          echo $bottles bottles of beer on the wall, $bottles bottles of beer.
          bottles=$[bottles-1]
          if [ $bottles != 0 ]; then
         	echo Take one down and pass it around, $bottles of beer on the wall
         	echo 
         else 
         	echo Take one down and pass it around, no more bottles of beer on the wall
         	echo
      fi
 done
 echo No more bottles of beer on the wall, no more bottles of beer. 
 echo Go to the store and buy some more, 99 bottles of beer on the wall.
 echo

Are you lonely?
Hate having to make decisions?
Rather talk about it than do it?

Then why not HOLD A MEETING

You can:-

Get to see other people
Sleep in peace
Offload decisions
Learn to write volumes of meaningless notes
Feel important
Impress(or bore) your colleagues

And all in work time!

'Meetings'
The practical alternative to work

=D

After months of Ruby on Rails application development I finally upgraded to Rails version 3. Rails 3 is a good upgrade, And everybody accepts that. But i have had a bit of trouble get started with it. There are major differences in the previous versions and Rails 3. The most significant change has to be the command line generators. For example, ruby script/server has changed to only rails s, Which is a much easier than the previous command.

It took me sometime to figure out the changes in the ajax implementation and the routing. I haven't been interested in Rails 3 before, Therefore I didn't even care to look at the rails blog for upgrades. The new version is a whole lot better and I am getting the hang of it. It feels much lighter, agile and much easier to understand.

There are lots of other changes as well. But as I am going to keep this post short, So buckle up and be familier changes in the Rails 3.