Janitha Karunaratne

Lately I’ve been working with large sets and analyzing them for work… and as a side effect, I’m now hooked on the art of data visualization.

Wired networks are everywhere whether you like it not.

If you are ssh’ing constantly to a lot of boxes using long ssh commands with many switches, you are doing it wrong.

Lately, all my primary technology news sources have been polluted with articles about Twitter and other related url shortening services.

Last night I was wondering how interesting it would be to have your friends Facebook status updates, twitter tweets, and other types of live feeds be read back as speech in real time as they are updated.

Want to map out a whole bunch of telephone numbers by their location?

So lately I’ve been hanging out a lot at Coffee Station and on campus using my Laptop.

A few days ago I was messing around with some face detection libraries when an idea hit me, what better place to look for faces than Facebook!

When I finally have a need and I am looking for a tool/system to accomplish that task, I tend to be extremely picky and very demanding of certain features.

The other day I was trying to figure out how much I can do with accessing only one port without tripping IDS before that machine.

I got my hands on a bricked WRT350N router was trying different magic trying to flash a new firmware and get it working.

Sometimes it’s necessary to sort sets of data based on metrics that are not usually recognized by a computer such as artistic quality of a picture.

Almost all cellphones and carriers support SMS’s now, and sms bundles of hundreds or unlimited plans are really cheap.

I wondered a few days ago why I need to press a few buttons to set the time and start the microwave oven every time I put something in it.

Rest In Peace A7M266-D (March 2003 - March 2007).

Carl Sagan is the man.

Getting Spam these days is normal, even with several spam filters, but what’s interesting is when the spammer’s automated scripts are malfunctioning.

I noticed how boring my ceiling fan was just a few minutes ago.

There have been lots of activity going on in the DIY Projector scene, specially using a design involving a 15" LCD panel, two fresnel lenses, a projection lens and the metal halide light sources.

The more I use emacs, the more fascinating it becomes.

When you get on a trans pacific flight, you would expect everything to go smooth.

Someone mentioned to me that they don’t have a irc client today.

It turns out Xscreensaver can do much more than just act as a screen saver.

It seems slashdot along with multiple other sources are reporting the working of google’s Instant Messenger service dubbed “Google IM” based off talk.google.com, which is suppose to use the open source IM protocol Jabber.

After starting on the Automatic Scheduler application, I have realized there there are no simple program (there are big & bloated ones…) to enable me to develop C++ applications to run specifically as CGI applications which does small annoying tasks such…

When you mix these three things, aa xine and ssh, you get the most pointless result ever, the ability to watch movies stored in your computer over a ssh connection in ascii art remotely.

Ever wonder what all the data in your hard drive sounds like?

It seems that I have under estimated the amount of time required by these 5 week summer sources I am taking, which are squeezing in 15 weeks worth of information, a 3:1 compression ratio.

Low temperatures and things that cause items to drop their temperature dramatically fascinates me, or simply process of taking away lots of heat energy from random items around is quite fun.

Washing cloths to be me is quite possibly the most boring and time consuming thing, and making this process faster is and optimal is on the top of my list.

Much improvements were done to the dry ice cannon in the past few days.

Below is how I made a Asynchronous linear induction motor which is also known as a gauss rifle or simply a coil gun at 2am in 15 minutes.

It seems that I have finally come to a decision about the perfect Window Manager (at least for me), and that is just simply vanilla enlightenment.

This was done about a year ago, when I was too lazy to carry my whole computer to some event due to its size and unease of carrying.

As you can see, I have finally set up and organized a website.