First Job Experience at WSO2 Inc

I was able to get an offer from one of the leading open source software company in Sri Lanka as well as in the world. Even with the recession getting an offer from company is a big deal for a fresh graduate. I got my first offer from WSO2 Inc which is almost developing complete SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) platform.Most of the development works are done in Sri Lankan office though we have offices in US and UK. We have basically two streams of products with Java and Scripting-C products. Main Java product is WSO2 Carbon which is a complete SOA platform with lot of bundles integrated all together using OSGi to give a collection of implementations to have a single platfor for SOA. During these days I'm trying to catch up the works going on WSO2 which is a really cool experience for a fresh graduate since I have whole a lot of thing to be learn by myself.

I'm suppose to work with one of the major product called WSO2 Registry which is a registry implementation for SOA platform which help to make a complex unmanagable system more structured and managable. This is not a product which is very specific for SOA management but we can use to manage our resource generally. I will be writing more technical blogs in future about Registry work and my technical experience I'm getting during my time at WSO2.

Trips to Amsterdam and New Orleans

Fortunately I was able to travel overseas two times during my undergraduate time simply because I contributed over Apache Software Foundation during the time I spend at the university as an undergraduate. It was a really really cool experience for me since I haven't been in abroad before that. I went to New Orleans in Louisiana in November 2008 and Amsterdam in March. But due to the touch schedule at the university I couldn't write about both.

My first to participate in ApacheCon US 2008 and I had to give a talk in one of the sessions and it was all about Apache Qpid which was the project I got the committership and now I'm a PMC member for Apache Qpid. That was a very strange experience for me to travel over US alone and I was shocked when I landed over Atlanta AirPort since all most all the people who were around to me was foriengers and I never being to that kind of a scenario before in my life. During my time at the ApacheCon I was able meet lots of Apache folks and discuss certain thing which are technical and really helpful for me for my career and I was able add lot of professional contacts. Whole trip went pretty decent other than delaying my baggage during my arrival to US but now I feel it's good since I got enough cloths from one of the WSO2 collegue and got 50$ from the AirLine.

Now the Amsterdam trip was again a cool experience and opportunity I got from ASF travel assistance committee and I'm really grateful to ASF giving me all of these opportunities. Amsterdam is a damn beautiful city and most of the people are riding their own bycicles and no trafic in the city at all. When I was there it was very cold but I love that weather since I don't want to wash my cloths :-) Most of the people used to close their shops when it comes to 6 in the evening and they go home and enjoy. Almost all the houses are very much similar to houses in Galle Dutch fort so those architectural thing were not unfamiliar for me since my home town in Galle. I was able to get a real experience with the streats I used to see in films with lot of shops around the road and flow of the road is not build with tar but with some kind of bricks. I have noticed couple of differences between Europe and US during the two weeks of my time in Europe and US. US people are friendlier than Europians but they Europian people enjoy their lives and less traffic and little bit of less complex life stile than US. And most of europians used to speak something other than English and sometimes it's hard to do the work in English (All the ATM machines were in Dutch).

I have lot more to tell about my experience but that's all I can write due to busy schedule with my first job which is one of unmemorable opportunity I got in my life.

My Today's Sunday School Lesson

I thought of blogging about some stuff which I'm thinking deeply and which motivate me to think more and more. I hope this will be very useful for all the people, no matter what your religion what your nationality or whatever.. since you are a human being.

My Sunday school lesson was thrilakshana which is a Sinhalese term and I'm really sorry that I don't know the english term of that. It is capable of describing the whole Buddhism using three words.

1. Anithya ( inconsistency )
2. Dukkha ( Sadness but not sure about the exact term)
3. Anathma - ()

In buddhism it describe that all the constructs in this world have the previous charactoristics which we never think about that. For me I used to think of it time to time and I feels pretty good when I start on think in that way but unfortunately my mind is changing time to time according to the environment I used to live. From now I'm going to describe each term one by one.

First the Anithya which imply the inconsistency. It tells that all the constructs in simpler way all the thing in this world used to get change during the life time of that. First it creates due to certain facts and it last for sometime with whole bunch of changes and it ends. This is an obvious thing everybody can understand but the important fact is that we never think about the goods we are using day to day. We try to think that goods belongs to us more and more but the truth is everything is gonna change according to natural low and nobody is capable of changing that nature but we keep on trying that. As an example we used to do lot of thing to maintain our figure and show that we are not getting older.... Are we capable of stop getting mature.. Nobody can do that.. So the best thing is to understand the reality of changing nature of the world including ourselfs. Our thoughts used to change in a very rapid manner so the best way to deal with those inconsistency is to understand the truth and deal with them. That's what I understood from the meaning of Anithya... or inconsistency.

Next term is Dukkha, it is not all about sadness nrmal meaning of dukkha in Sinhalese is sadness but in here it describe the unimportant nature of the surrounding of our environment. Since everything in our environment used to obey it's own rule and since we cannot change it according to our requirment we should consider them as unimportant or nonvaluable things. This exactly does't imply that we shouldn't neglect everything around us but this tells us not to stick in to goods in an extreme manner. We should keep on dealing with everything while keep in mind about the real nature of the things.

Anathma term is not much clear for me but as far as I undestand it's all about again we do not belong anything in this world including our selves because they use their own rules so can we consider my car is exactly as my car... Can we consider my computer exactly as mine since it break whenever it wants to be and one day it won't work.... Think little bit can we tell those thingbs belong to me.... Same fact apply to ourselves... we get sick.. we recover.. we die.... it uses it's own rules we cannot control our body so can we control outside stuff.. never...

This is all about my idea of Thrilakshan.... If you got any comments please feel free to comment which will help to someone....

Microsoft Joins AMQP working group

 Decision to join AMQP Working Group based on commitment to
     openness,interoperability and providing customer choice.

REDMOND, Wash., Oct. 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Microsoft
Corp. today announced that it is joining the Advanced Message
Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Working Group, an organization
focused on the development of the AMQP specification. Microsoft
is joining the AMQP Working Group at the request of its members,
including several of Microsoft's customers in the financial services
industry, in order to support the development of an open industry
standard for ubiquitous messaging.

http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20000822/MSFTLOGO

AMQP is a specification for platform-neutral, open standards-based
business messaging. The primary goal of AMQP is to enable the
communications necessary for business processes. AMQP Working
Group members are collaborating on specifications for messaging
infrastructure that provide businesses with a simple and more
powerful way of connecting messaging-dependent applications both
within and between firms. By joining the AMQP Working Group,
Microsoft is seeking to contribute toward the development of such
solutions and to enable greater customer choice in the marketplace.

"Customers are seeking scalable solutions with lower costs that will
allow messaging within the enterprise and outside the corporate
infrastructure," said Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy
at Microsoft. "By joining the AMQP Working Group, Microsoft is
aiming to contribute to the development of the specification in ways
that will best promote interoperability for existing market
implementations and provide customers with increased choice."

Message-based transports with security and transactional integrity
are a vital infrastructure component throughout institutions. As
Microsoft continues to provide vertical industry solutions, AMQP will
provide an alternative to current messaging options. The AMQP
specification and related implementations may provide greater
interoperability for a number of vertical scenarios in addition to
financial services, insurance and healthcare, among others.

AMQP Working Group members embraced the news of Microsoft's
decision to join.

"The AMQP Working Group is doing great work to facilitate open
and interoperable standards for messaging infrastructure across
platforms," said Adrian Kunzle, head of Engineering and
Architecture at J.P. Morgan."We welcome Microsoft's commitment
as another step toward AMQP becoming the preferred connectivity
for business messaging on the Internet."

"Cisco has long been a proponent of open industry standards that
benefit our customers," said Pranta Das, technical leader for Cisco
Systems Inc. and member of the AMQP Working Group. "We are
pleased to welcome Microsoft to the AMQP Working Group as we
continue to develop open specifications for messaging."

Paul Fremantle, chief technology officer of WSO2 Inc., another
working group participant, noted: "We welcome Microsoft's
commitment to openness and the AMQP messaging specification.
Their participation will be valuable to our efforts to support the
development of interoperability solutions across heterogeneous
IT environments."

Members of the AMQP Working Group are Cisco, Credit Suisse,
Deutsche Boerse Systems, Envoy Technologies Inc., The Goldman
Sachs Group Inc.,iMatix Corporation, IONA Technologies,
J.P. Morgan, Novell, Rabbit Technologies Ltd., Red Hat Inc.,
TWIST Process Innovations Ltd., WSO2 and
29West Inc.

More information about Microsoft's interoperability efforts can be
found at http://www.microsoft.com/interop.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader
in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses
realize their full potential.

ApacheCon US 2008 New Orleans

ApacheCon is a week of open source goodness straight from the source of the Apache Software Foundation, featuring intense training classes over two days followed by three days of more than 60 sessions by the creators of open source software such as the Apache httpd webserver, Tomcat, Lucene, Hadoop and more.

Unable to attend ApacheCon? No Problem!

Just register for the live streaming and follow the event live from your own PC. After the live transmission, you can view repeats of the talks, whenever and as often as you like.

ApacheCon US 2008 features:

• Over a dozen Training Workshops from industry experts -- half-day, full-day and two-day classes are offered.
• More than 60 1-Hour Sessions on System Admin, Enterprise Web Services, Open Source & Business and more.
• For the first time, attendees may join Apache Committers at the Hackathon
• The Fast Feather Track returns, featuring short and to-the-point updates on the latest emerging technology from Apache
• The standing-room-only Business Panel returns to kick-off the Business Track
• Attendee-organized Birds of a Feather sessions bring together like-minded people
• An ApacheCon favorite, Lightning Talks are fast, furious, and fun!
• World-class Keynotes and vendor Expo

Done with Google Summer of Code 2008

I'm really proud to inform everyone that I have completed my Google Summer of Code project this year and that is the first time I'm doing the Gsoc. I'm really satisfying the way I have completed it and I kept on writing code continuously and the important thing is that I never left stuff to handle at the end and kept on doing things in a continuous manner.
Next important thing happen to me is adding another project for my committing list which is Apache Qpid, previously I had committing rights for Apache Axis2C, Apache Axis2, Rampart/C and WS-Commons, now I'm happy to have committing rights for Apache Qpid which is the project which I most likely to being with. I have already committed the code in to SVN and change the build. I thought of writing a blog post in order to thank all the people who helped me over this.
First I got this oppurtunity simply because I was expose in to the open source world when I was in my internship at WSO2.I have to thank to the university and all the staff members and all my colleagues in my batch. Then I have to thank to people who personally advice me to select WSO2 for the internship who are Vajira Ginneliya (my cousin) and Dinesh Premalal (Senior student from my university and currently reading for his MSc). Thank you very much all the employees at WSO2 for helping me to have a great time during my internship.
Then I have to thank all the people who helped me to make my Gsoc proposal a success, first I have to thank Rajith Athapaththu (who works for RedHat in Canada). He was the one who adviced on how to make my proposal effecive and he kept on helping me for the whole period of time I spent with Gsoc and thanks Rajith Ayya for your assist and I really really appriciate. And next important people were Aidan Skinner, Marnie McCormack and Martin Ritchie who were my mentors and I think I'm the most luckies guy with Gsoc to have mentors like them, and if I wasn't get Aidans help I might not be able to complet my Gsoc in this way so BIG THANK YOU FOR AIDAN....THANKS DUDE THANKS A LOT.I shouldn't forget the Qpid developers community and they were very helpful for me whenever they can and I really appriciate your great assist and thank you very much for being helpful for me during last couple of months.I have to give a special thanks for Leslie Hawthorn from Googles side and she was always in our side and helped emmensely to make everybodies project success. And thanks for Google for organizing the event and allowing us to get in to open source world with a great exposure.I'm always reminding all my family members whom always there with me my Mom Dad and three bros.
I will be working with Qpid community as much as possible simply because I love that and that's my pleasure to contribute towards ASF.

Mounting hibernated NTFS file system on to Linux

I had a problem with mounting my Windows NTFS file system which was Hibernated on to my Ubuntu 8.10 installation. When I'm trying to mount the file system as usual it gave me this error,

Windows is hibernated, refused to mount.
Failed to mount '/dev/sda1': Operation not permitted
The NTFS partition is hibernated. Please resume and shutdown Windows
properly, or mount the volume read-only with the 'ro' mount option, or
mount the volume read-write with the 'remove_hiberfile' mount option.
For example type on the command line:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/ -o remove_hiberfile

After going through the previous message I tried to run the given command and try to mount the file system but it again gave me another error message like this,

$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0)
Failed to mount '/dev/sda1': Operation not supported
Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use. Choose one action:

Choice 1: If you have Windows then disconnect the external devices by
clicking on the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon in the Windows
taskbar then shutdown Windows cleanly.

Choice 2: If you don't have Windows then you can use the 'force' option for
your own responsibility. For example type on the command line:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/ -o force

Or add the option to the relevant row in the /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sda1 /media/ ntfs-3g force 0 0

As this error message describe I tried to run those commands but those command prompt the previous error I was given before this particular error. But hopefully when I tried to mount the file system as read only using the following command it worked fine for me,

sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/ -o ro

So if you have the same problem you can mount your file system as read only using the command like that but to be honest I don't know how to mount the file system with write access.