July 2005)

ed sh itin ari g ng

IT Schools Ranked

o eBanking at work ot ph

TOP 11

blogging

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new wave writers

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contents

We took a long break, retooled and we’re back with a new name, new look, and rethunk content. The name iTimes is a bit lighter and easier to say than IT Times, and we hope the mag makes for a better read as well. As you can see at right, there are definite sections now. They are loosely, work, learn and play. In keeping with our motto of ‘better living through technology’ these sections each cover how IT relates to a certain aspect of life.

Local News Gadgets MacBook Outsourcing

Work tries to address the IT infrastructure that underpins our daily lives, and the skills that everyone needs to succeed in their jobs. This issue has interviews with representatives from Oracle, Commercial Bank, and IBM on the inner workings of the banking system and the one box that’s capable of processing money for millions of Sri Lankans. We’ve also got an in-depth section on Security, ranging from phishing and viruses to enterprise level questions.

Virus Tips

The Learn section in this issue is a long researched piece from Sri Lanka’s Education Forum (www.educationforum.lk) on the value of a modern IT Education. This piece is the result of a long-term survey into the cost, reputation and job-market success of various IT Institutions, and the value they provide. This is data that the Forum is developing, and it is an exciting chance for parents and students to get a better understand of the opportunities available to them.

Basel II

Phishing Security Checkpoint Virtusa Goes Global Suntel CDMA

work

Ghost in the Machine

learn

Your Robot Banker

Finally, the Play section ranges from Music to Blogging to Photography. This issue should actually teach you everything you need to know to begin putting your words, photos and voice online for the world to see.

Cisco Education

Presentation Zen IT Education Ranked

play

Music

All in all we hope it’s a more rounded package for you. We are also publishing bimonthly, so there are two months worth of events we can fit in as well. Happy hacking!

Guerilla Radio Blogs Become a Blogger Andy Skelton

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local scene

Asus Centre Opens

EPSI Computers (Pvt) Ltd, sole authorised distributors for ASUS in Sri Lanka, in collaboration with ASUSTEK Computer Inc., recently launched the unique and stateof-the-art ASUS centre which offers customers a privileged service in the heart of Colombo. Equipped with state-of-the-art technology, the ASUS Centre gives IT a new dimension with a wide range of ASUS new technologies on display. It also provides warranty claims and service levels that are unmatched by any other in the industry.

Horizon Lanka Gets New Building The HorizonLanka Foundation was started as a small ICT educational institute and now it addresses the development issue with a broad vision and it firmly believes the ICT as the best possible tool to develop a community. It is in Mahavilachchiya, which is a rural village, located 40 kilometers away from the nearest city, Anuradhapura. The new building is in two stories and has a computer lab that can accommodate about 20 students. You can have a look at the building here.

Sri Lanka’s Summer of Code Sri Lanka is having it’s own version of Google summer of code. For two months students will be payed a small allowance to work on an open source project of their choice. Total money that will be given away will come up to around quarter of a million rupees. The Sri Lankan Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community is hosting FOSS Code 2006, a program that encourages students to work on open source software projects, in May this year. Modeled on the popular Google Summer of Code program, computer science students of universities and schools island wide will be given the chance to be innovative and also earn some money for their efforts.

FOSS-ed for Hackers FOSS-ed for hackers came to a successful close on the 24th May 2006. It was a very successful event with the Excel World hall filled up to capacity. The event kicked of with the traditional lighting of the oil lamp in a not so traditional way. Then every one was treated to an amazing keynote address by Professor Lawrence Lessig of the University of Stanford Law School and a world renown authority on Cyber Law. After that it was a deep dive into the world of open-source software development and usage.

Virtusa Depolys FOSS for 2500 Users Virtusa Corporation reinforced its commitment to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and open standards by launching the Keystone initiative globally. This is the largest implementation of FOSS within Virtusa with a global deployment of over 2500 users. Keystone is an automated Software Configuration Management (SCM) system that puts control of the development process in the hands of the project teams by providing them with access to all project assets through a central repository supported by process management. Project teams benefit from tools for file version control, managing requirements and changes, tracking defects and managing the tasks required by effective project management.

Progess Kick Off Kingslake together with PROGRESS software presented PROGRESS Kick Off 2006 to a large gathering of local PROGRESS Users and IT Gurus at the Cinnamon Grand on Wednesday 17th May. Dr S Dharmavasan Managing Director Kingslake in his keynote address said “PROGRESS Software Corporation supplies software to simplify and accelerate the development, deployment, integration and management of business appli-

cations”. In his address Dharmavasan said that 2,000 Application Partners worldwide utilize PROGRESS technology to deliver over 5,000 business solutions.

Microsoft Opens Mobile Lab A modern high tech mobile technology lab has opened its doors at the University of Moratuwa, propelling students to a new dimension in practical mobile application learning. This Mobile Technology Laboratory was set up by Microsoft in partnership with the Moratuwa University and Infinity Technologies (Pvt) Ltd., to enable undergraduates to experience the fast growing area of mobile application technology. The project was initiated by the staff and students of Moratuwa University’s Faculty of Engineering, the premier engineering university in the country.

SOPHOS Anti-Virus In Sri Lanka SOPHOS a leading anti-virus company in the world have entered the Sri Lankan market recently. In keeping with there commitment to the growing Sri Lankan ICT Market have teamed up with TECHCERT University of Moratuwa in order to serve Sri Lankan companies in Emergency Disaster Management Service or Crisis Situations and thereby signed up a strategic partner agreement with TECHCERT. Recently Miss Nimmity Zappert (Sales Manager, International Sales) was in Sri Lanka to signup the partnership agreement with TECHCERT. In Sri Lanka Debug Computer Peripherals have been appointed as their Master Distributor for all SOPHOS Products.

Oracle Receives J.D. Power Certification Oracle today announced it has become the first enterprise software provider to receive global certification under the new J.D. Power and Associates Certified Technology Service & Support Program for its worldwide Support business, encompassing 17 hubs on 5 continents. Based in the United States, J.D. Power and Associates, is one of the world’s leading global marketing services firms and bases its quality and satisfaction measurements on responses from millions of consumers and businesses annually. This distinction recognizes Oracle for delivering an outstanding customer service experience worldwide. Oracle was also the first enterprise software provider to receive the certification in North America.

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Gadget Review by Kingpakse

The Razer Barracuda Gaming Audio System With gaming mounting its global conquest and becoming the most lucrative genre in the entertainment business, vast amounts of cash are understandably being invested into maximizing the gamer’s overall experience. Audio, an area that has been long overlooked and considered as a mere sideshow to the visual artistry is now becoming an essential area of improvement. In light of this Razer, recently launched its Barracuda Integrated Audio System, a set combining specially designed gaming headphones and audio card for the PC. The AC-1 Gaming Audio Card touts 7.1-channel output, 24-bit audio technology and 117dB SNR. Razer’s Fidelity technology improves positional audio, a must for gaming fanatics. The HP-1 Gaming Headphones come with a built-in microphone for in-game trash talking and its 99% oxygen-free copper cord guarantees that crisp audio with minimal interference. VoodooPC ENVY U909 SLI While the faithful desktop slowly grows both cumbersome and outdated, laptops are steadily becoming the standard. There are those that are slim, sleek and cool and then there are those that are...well, not. Introducing the monster truck of the laptop derby, is the VoodooPC ENVY U909 SLI. Featuring some serious fire power, this machine comes with two NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX graphics cards in an SLI configuration and an AMD Turion 64 processor. It also consists of a 19-inch 1680x1050 screen, 160GB hard disk and includes a 4-in-1 memory card reader for good measure. All this doesn’t come without its drawbacks though and at a near 16 pounds it isn’t exactly what you would call light. iWood 5G Fresh on the tracks of the multitude of iPod accessories to flood the market, the minds at Miniot present their hardwood cases for the 30 or 60 GB iPods. Imaginatively named the iWood 5G, the latest range comes after the introduction of the iWood nano and is carved from a single piece of hardwood. Fans can choose between a range of five different

grains; maple, walnut, mahogany, cherry and oak. This handsome devil includes concealed steel hinges and uses tiny magnets to stay firmly shut. The screen is completely enclosed within the case so only the headphone jack is accessible, so you’ll have to open it up to access the sync-connector. Customers are given the added bonus of a monogram engraving with a two line message of their choice inside the lid. For product imagery visit http://www.iwoodnano.com/miniot/video.htm. It may not be witty, but at least its pretty. Smart Caddie UMPC from PBJ Smart Caddie is Japanese company PBJ’s front runner in the UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) market. Instead of the Intel Celeron that other brands use with their UMPCs, Smart Caddie uses a 1GHz Via C7M processor and runs Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 on a 7-inch display at 800x480. It comes in a handsome Mac look-alike white form factor and features Bluetooth and WiFi compatibility. Unfortunately the battery life is a mere 2.5 hours per charge compared to the three to four hours of the Q1 from Samsung. Smart Caddie hopes to hit the markets by mid June. Mini Smart Spair Remember all those trips that went horribly wrong when a flat tire hit you at just the wrong moment? Well thanks to the Mini Smart Spair, you might never have to twitch about it again. Developed by a company that was tastefully named Slime, this palm-sized microcompressor pumps up your tire after you’ve sealed it with Slime; a special substance that claims to consist of “environmentally friendly fibers, binders, polymers and proprietary congealing agents that inter-twine and clot to seal punctures up to 1/4 of an inch.” The micro-compressor plugs into your 12 volt car battery and the kit eight ounces of Slime, so there’s plenty to work with. After this quick fix, you’re free to trundle off to a nearby garage and fix the tire properly.

Black Diamond

For phone fanatics who drool for the new cool, here’s a taste of the latest design masterpiece. A showcase of industrial designer Jaren Goh and seductively named the Black Diamond, this phone was created for Sony Ericsson and will undoubtedly mount a strong opposition to the Nokia Vertu. The high end 4 megapixel phone is cased in a layer of polycarbonate with mirror finish cladding. The OLED technology is designed for vivid illumination under the polycarbonate skin and gives the Black Diamond a beautiful borderless screen effect. The ultra sleek profile, clean lines compliment its glossy finish. Look out folks, it’s almost too good to be true. VP-X210L Camcorder Samsung recently launched its latest camcorder, the VPX210L. This rugged creation also turns out to be a music player and still camera. Its most innovative highlight is the detachable lens that can be mounted on handlebars, your helmet, or anywhere else as long as it’s within 9 feet from the camcorder body. The VP-X210L has a gigabyte of builtin memory and an SD memory slot for extra storage. The camcorder has a 10x optical zoom and doubles as a twomegapixel still camera. Its extended battery life will make it a worthy adversary in the market and a definite must have on your next outdoor trip.

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Mac by Indranil Dasgupta

Apple has two major line-ups in the notebook sector, one for the budget conscious, and the other for the power hungry. The iBook, though underpowered in many ways to the superior PowerBooks, is priced for the budget buyers among us. On the other hand, the PowerBook, the desktop replacement notebook from Apple, was traditionally powered by the top of the line PowerPC processors, oodles of RAM, and a very large screen. For the last few years, however, Apple has been unable to provide power hungry PowerBook users with enough bang for their buck. The fault lay with IBM’s PowerPC G5 processor chip, which was unable to cool down enough to be used in a notebook environment. Apple, therefore, had to resort to measly upgrades in processor clock speeds of the G4 processors for more than 2 years. With people getting impatient, and Apple running out of excuses, Apple CEO Steve Jobs this year switched to the new Intel Core Duo processors. With the switch came the first major upgrade to Apple’s notebook line in over two years. Despite the ugly name, the MacBook Pro is just what the doctor ordered to boost Apple’s share of the notebook market. The Macbook Pro, released at MacWorld 2006, was one of the highlights of the convention, which saw Apple switch its main line of CPUs over to the newer and faster Intel Core Duo processors.

4X faster? Despite Apple’s claims that the MacBook Pro is four times faster than other Powerbooks, this may not be quite true. The MacBook Pro is definitely a lot faster than the Powerbooks. Just not 4X faster. Come to think of it, this sort of advertising is quite thinkable from a company that said that PowerPC G3 processors were supercomputers! However, that is not to say that the speed boost will be small. Let’s face it, a G4 simply can’t stand up to an Intel Core Duo, now, can it? Hence, the performance will really be great.

the specs The MacBook Pro comes in two flavours. The machine has a 15.4” screen with either a 1.67 GHz or a 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo processor and 512 MB or 1GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM (PC2-5300) RAM respectively. There is also

an ATi Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics card with GDDR3 SDRAM and dual link DVI (Read: Great graphics). There is also a SATA 5400 rpm Hard disk drive of 80 GB or 100 GB capacity. Of course, there are the usuals, which include Superdrive DVD Writer, built in microphone, stereo speakers, ethernet card and Airport Extreme.

Book

Pro with iSight comes Photo Booth, Apple’s cool new photo capture software to be used with iSight to produce a lot of really cool effects with captured photos.

on the soft side of things Based on the new Intel Core Duo, the MacBook Pros have to rely on Rosetta to deliver stable performance of PowerPC only apps. I have to say one thing, though. The speed with which most Apple developers have switched over to Universal apps is truly great, and makes you realize the tight bond Mac developers and users share. Universal apps are applications for the Mac that runs natively on both Intel and PowerPC processors. Apple hopes to phase out the PowerPC chips completely by 2009, but until that time, when both PowerPC and Intel based Macs will be in the market together, Universal apps are the way to go. Most of the apps you’ll regularly need and use have already been converted to Universal binaries. Some big programs, like Adobe’s lineup, and Microsoft Office, which still haven’t been converted over, run quite admirably under Rosetta. Both Adobe and Microsoft have promised Universal binaries of their products as soon as possible. However, if your work involves heavy use of Adobe or other 3-D apps, you may want to hold back on the purchase till such time as when you’re sure that the software you use has been converted over to a Universal binary. Though Photoshop and other “heavy” apps run well on Rosetta, there is a noticeable lag in performance when compared to machines with PowerPC chips.

Of course, there are two new important additions to the lineup. The first one, of course is the Apple remote, which was first bundled with the iMac G5, to be used with Front Row. And yes, you got it right. MacBook Pro comes with Front Row. The second, and most exciting addition is the integration of Apple’s iSight web camera with the MacBook Pro. Along

Apart from the boost in performance, you can also expect a lot of fun from this new apple laptop - with the new Photo Booth and Front Row apps, and the new iSight camera and the Apple remote, the MacBook Pro is bound to be a treat for the entire family. All in all, a very well done package indeed. Design wise, the MacBook Pro isn’t that different from a Powerbook. However, the machine is noticeably slimmer and lighter. How they do that is really anyone’s guess. So, my advice? If you can afford the $2000 price tag, do yourself a favour and pick one up right away.

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Sri Lanka’s Outsource WNS is one of India’s top Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firms, managing back-room business for leading global companies. They also operate in Sri Lanka and iTimes has arranged an interview with their MD, Dushan Soza. Hopefully it will shed some light on future opportunities for this small but educated island.

How many employees does WNS have worldwide? How many in Sri Lanka? Worldwide WNS employs more than 9,000 including Sri Lanka which has more than 275 employees currently working here.

Which country out sources the most work to Sri Lanka? UK

Does India outsource work to Sri Lanka? No

What makes up the majority of your work? In Sri Lanka we are concentrating on Accounting and Finance. WNS world wide operates in five sectors and they are Travel Services, Insurance Services, Enterprise Services, Financial Services and Knowledge Services.

Is it easy to find and retain good talent? Sri Lanka is one of the few countries that have been blessed with good talent as far as finding employees for the Financial and Accounting sector. We target partly qualified and fully qualified accountants. In our organization we have CIMA, ACCA and Chartered Accountants. We employ over 80 fully qualified accountants. Being a BPO company WNS gives key emphasis to employee retention management and has thus being recognized as one of the most reputed employers in Sri Lanka. In this respect, CIMA Sri Lanka has judged WNS Sri Lanka as one of the top 10 preferred employers of the month and CIMA UK has awarded WNS Sri Lanka “the preferred employer” within their member countries. Not only that, At the CIMA Finan-

cial Management Awards 2005, held at the Waldorf Hilton in London in December, WNS - Sri Lanka, one of Colombo’s largest Business Process Outsourcing (B.P.O.) firms and one of the Country’s biggest recruiters of Accounting Professionals, bagged a highly commended status under the “Employer of the Year 2005” award category. This award by CIMA Global recognizes the support and commitment of employers to their CIMA Trainees and WNS has seen the number of CIMA qualified employees they support double in the past few months. From the very beginning WNS has set in place values and best practices that are observed across the company. The company believes that people are its strongest asset, and sought to maximize on Sri Lanka’s rich talent. WNS Sri Lanka’ employee strength has grown from 42 employees to a workforce of 275 within 12 months. The working lifestyle of the 250 plus qualified staff has progressed significantly, since joining WNS. Each employee goes through a comprehensive training program that includes a compulsory training period in the UK and customized training programs that uses novel training methods.

Do you hire University graduates, and are you happy with their quality? Yes. We find them to be well educated and very intelligent. The challenge is to hire candidates that can communicate both verbally and in written English.

What are more important, English skills or professional qualifications? Both. Since we serve International clients, having good communication skills in English is quite important. Besides, BPO is a specialized service and need people with professional qualifications. For e.g.: Knowledge Services is a specialized service that entails market research, business research, investment research, analytical/data mining, sourcing manage-

Poster on wall in Bangalore, by Paul K (flickr.com/photos/paulk). Creative Commons License

ment, legal research and hence we need people with MBAs who can do high end research work for us.

Knowledge based service as pool of readily accessible talent is available.

Raman Roy has said that Sri Lanka is where Bangalore was 8 years ago. Do you agree with that statement?

Is the BPO Boom slowing down?

Sri Lanka is in its nascent stage as far as the BPO industry is concerned. The country has great potential to be a key player for outsourcing especially in high end process activities. There is a phenomenal pool of talent available in Sri Lanka that is still untapped waiting to be sourced, trained, aligned to BPO culture and developed.

What is our market niche compared to India? High domain expertise. We can do well in Finance, Legal and

On the contrary the BPO industry is riding wave of growth and success. In India the industry has shown a growth rate of 44% for 2004-05 employing over 400,000 employees and bringing revenue of over 5 billion (source: Nasscom). This industry has accentuated a phenomenal economic growth in the country. It has compelled the government to ensure infrastructure support, given phenomenal purchasing power to the youngsters, initiated real estate growth and opened the market to international standards. This phenomena is not restricted to Tier I cities as we call it but has extended it to the Tier II cities like Pune, Nashik, Kerala and more creating job opportunities for graduates in their own hometown.

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BasicVirusTips C

omputer viruses can be defined as malicious software applications that are created with the intention of causing harm to an information system or its users. The concept of computer viruses dates back to the time of the inception of the computer and since have developed often at a faster pace than modern technology. With over 100,000 known (I repeat known!) computer viruses in circulation these programs have resulted in losses of millions of dollars for businesses, damage to confidential information and in some instances even claimed the lives of innocent individuals. Combating computer viruses has become a major industry with over 500,000 professionals working in the information security field worldwide. Anti-virus software has become a multi million-dollar industry and the demand from customers is on a rise. To IT professionals the area is one of key importance as the risks brought about by computer viruses is one of the greatest threats to information security. The following article will focus on making individuals aware of computer viruses, their impacts and some suggestions on how to minimize the impacts upon your business establishment. Let us first consider the psychological perspective of virus developers. Investigations on virus incidents and forensics have revealed that several types of individuals develop viruses. The least dangerous type of virus programmers are usually those who develop viruses for challenge or as a prank. The most common instances would be the valentine’s virus (hearts) which keeps popping heart shapes like a screen saver blocking user activity for a limited time period. Another exploits weaknesses in device drivers and uses these to control hardware. Monitor blanking, CD-in & out, distortion noise (high volume sound) viruses are common often used as a prank to annoy friends, colleagues and family. The group usually consists of teenagers and wiz kids sometimes-even aged as low as 12. The second group of hackers is more dangerous as they have intention of causing harm to others. Popular virus incidents of this group included hacking and planting of viruses into ex-employers systems by a staff member who was made redundant, viruses that damage corporate networks and those that automatically duplicate and distribute confidential information. The third group is by far the most dangerous. This form of viruses are hyper destructive and cause losses running into billions of dollars each year. The viruses of this group can spread easily and often cause complete loss of data and in some instances even damages the hardware access drivers that make the computer totally malfunctional. There are instances of viruses infect-

ing thousands of computers worldwide during a few days, disrupting international data communication networks and in some instances even penetrating the systems of vital services such as defense or hospitals. Viruses have also become weapons of preference for criminals who find them to be more powerful than primitive guns and bullets. Let us now consider how viruses operate. A virus is like any other software application. It is a set of code instructions that could be executed. There are a few fundamental differences between viruses and other software applications: • Viruses are often dependent on triggers. Events, which occur in the system, can activate/deactivate viruses. • Viruses are self-reliant. Most software applications are dependent on the user for instructions. Viruses tend to be more independent and often behave with little regard to the user. • A Virus has automatic duplicative ability which enables it to copy it self automatically and spread to writable media (such as diskettes/flash drives/e-mails or even internet messages) • The main characteristic being a fraudulent intent where the application attempts to disrupt user/system activity. This disruption could be in the form of deleting files, transferring files to hidden folders, changing the behavior of applications, modifying application code or similar. • Viruses often come in hidden form either embedded in other applications or as hidden files. Having learnt the fundamentals about computer viruses we will now consider how we could deal with these threats. Like the vaccination for human virus infections PC viruses could also be remedied and reasonable protection obtained against virus infection. The most common precaution is to install anti-virus software on your PC or Corporate network. Anti virus software contains a database of virus code extracts in a database which is called the virus definition file. When a virus scan is initiated the application will search through other applications and data files for code segments that match those which are stored in its virus definition file. If a match is found the file is flagged as one that is infected with a virus. If a virus is found in a particular file there are several actions, which could be initiated by the user. The first preference is the “clean” option that enables you to remove the virus code and restore the original file without any loss to data or functionality. Viruses

By Rehan Fernando

however have become more advanced and don’t allow users to easily remove them from files. The second choice would be to delete the infected file. Even if the file and its data is lost the firm could prevent the virus from spreading and infecting other data files. This option may not be available in all instances and some viruses can’t even be deleted from the system. These viruses are moved to an isolated location in the hard disk, which keeps them in inactive status. The process is termed as quarantining. Applications such as Norton AntiVirus, McAfee and Dr. Solomon’s are commonly used anti virus packages in the local market that provide reasonable protection against computer viruses. The auto protect module is available in most anti virus software packages which automatically scans files upon execution. This acts as a precautionary mechanism to detect viruses before actual infection. Anti virus packages also face the challenge of time with newer viruses been developed everyday. It is important to have an updated (preferably most recent) virus definition file to detect recent viruses. But remember for every 1 computer virus known about there may be another 9 that are not even heard of. Another measure is to use best practices to prevent the spread of viruses. Common measures include → A firewall or message filter could also be used to scan incoming data/messages. If virus coding is detected it would be deleted prior to entering the computer system. It also helps to minimize the chances of computer hackers penetrating internal networks and placing virus applications on servers or terminals. One can never be 100% protected from the threat of computer viruses but taking preventive measures can prevent the likelihood or if not minimize the impact of virus infection. Awareness is the first step of prevention and prevention is often better than risking all your valuable corporate data to the threat of computer viruses. Better Safer Than Sorry!

Reports from one of the first virus outbreaks, 1988

Avoid opening attachments that come

 with junk mail. 

Delete chain emails and junk email. Do not forward or reply to any to them.

downloading software, games  Avoid and content from unknown websites



Back up your files on a regular basis. If a virus destroys your files, at least you can replace them with your back-up copy.

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phishing - the new By Rehan L. Fernando.

A fisherman goes to a river side pushes his boat from the shores of the river and rows until he finds a suitable spot to engage in a day of fishing. He takes his fishing kit and selects the best rod together with some bait which will tempt even the most cautious of fish. He then fixes the bait to the rod and throws the bait into the river and waits for the prey to be tempted by greed and get captured to the hook of his fishing rod. Hours pass and there is no pull on the rod but the fisherman patiently waits until at last there is a strong pull and the fight between the might of a man and a great fish begin. After about a minute of struggle the fish begins to surrender and is pulled up to the boat by the fisherman who has once again proved his might over the king of the river. You are probably wondering what relevance this story of man and fish would have to us IT Professionals?...Well, just imagine if you were that FISH!!! Phishing is a problem faced by many users and organizations which have fallen victim to the acts of Phisherman. Phishing involves sending out e-mails to users pretending to be from a known party and asking users to visit the web site and update their account information. For instance you may receive an e-mail from your free e-mail provider (say abcdfreemail. com) asking you to renew your account details within the next 10 days to avoid disconnection. The e-mail will be almost identical to the standard e-mails which originate from the site but little will you know that it is being sent by some other fraudulent party (say abcdfreemail.com.f). The mail will have a link which will take you to the account information page which will once again look identical to that on the real web site. Faced with the so called risk of being disconnected from the service many users will promptly enter their details which could include confidential details such as contact details, bank account details, credit card numbers and even passwords. Upon entering the information the user will press the submit button and unaware to him/her will submit the information to some illegal party. The user will then get a confirmation thanking for renewing the account and will be told that they could use the service for another year free of charge. Happy with the response the user will log off and proceed with day to day life. Weeks or months down the line will they realize the consequences of their mistake! When the credit card bill comes in

there could be $1574 of transactions from some overseas country which they never even visited. When they call the bank to verify the transaction it is likely to be processed with the customers own credit card number and secret code being entered. I did no such a transaction one may argue! Regardless, your account is likely to be over $ 1574 less. Upset by this occurrence you go back home to find out that you have received over 300 junk mails from all kinds of annoying retailers. How did they find me you ask!. I never even visited any of these shops. You later login to check your e-mail and find that some of your important e-mails have been deleted or worse yet you can’t even log in to your e-mail account. Yikes… How did this all happen to me you may wonder? Do you remember the time you updated your account details on the free e-mail site? What did you tell them? You gave out your credit card number and pin which was probably used for the fraudulent transaction. The postal address you entered was sold off to junk mail companies which would explain the large number of letters and the password you entered and confirmed was used by someone to log into your email account, delete your e-mails and change your password locking you out of your own account. You may be unlucky to experience this, but you are not alone. Thousands of computer users (and sometimes even organizations) fall victim to phishing attacks every year. The damage caused by phishing attacks extends into millions of dollars and it has been a major barrier to the development of electronic commerce systems. Your next question is likely to be concerned with how you could protect your self from such attacks. The unfortunate part about phishing attacks is that it relies on social engineering (which attempts to trick the user into causing damages for him/her self) rather than causing any damage it self. This means that such attacks are hard to discover and even harder to avoid. One prudent action to take would be to increase awareness about phishing. Users who are aware of the dangers of revealing personal information over networks are likely to be more cautious when doing so. They are also likely to refrain from using credit cards on non-secure web sites and think twice before entering passwords on unknown web sites. Many web sites and magazines carry articles on the topic of phishing which brings to light the ways in which

email scam people have fallen victim to such threats. Many security solutions providers and antivirus companies also publish phishing alerts which help their customers to be more alert from such threats. Anti-Phishing software is also available which enables users to detect and protect them selves from known phishing attacks. Many such programs integrate with the web browser or e-mail client and reveal the actual IPs of the originating message (or web site). This is then compared with an index of references to ensure that is indeed the original site which is communicating. If for instance a phishing attempt was made the IP of the site would not match the IP indicated in your system reference. This way the system could detect that there is potential for a phishing attack and thus prompt the user. As technology continues to evolve so will the abuse of such technologies. We must equip our selves with the best response to such threats which is simply “Awareness”. The more people know, the less likely they are to keep space for such mistakes.

malicious websites, pretending to be the IRS and PayPal to obtain personal information. Phishing emails link to these sites

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Security Checkpoint Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. is a leader in securing the Internet. It’s customers include 100% of Fortune 100 companies and tens of thousands of businesses and organizations of all sizes. Scott Ferguson, Regional Vice President ANZ and South Asia was recently in Colombo and iTimes spoke with him at the Cinnamon Grand.

What are today’s major threats? The major delivery threats are email and web access. Th major threat is, to be frank, people’s ignorance. Threats can be delivered by email, but if you never click on it it’s never a problem. Protection starts with the way that you use the Internet. That’s a big part of our business. We spend a lot of our time speaking to the public, spend a lot of time in schools and professional bodies just helping people understand. The notion here isn’t ‘don’t use the Internet’, it’s to be aware that there’s some precautions you need to take. It’s like driving on a major highway. You have seatbelts, cars have airbags, you make sure the brakes work. You minimize the risk of accidents rather than not using the freeway entirely.

How does Checkpoint protect companies? It’s not as black and white as a packet filter where it’s a network address that gets in and a network address that gets out. In fact, a lot of the existing firewalls today allow the very attacks they’re supposed to prevent because they’re only really looking at addressing information. There are a few uniques about Checkpoint. First we’re a software company. We firmly believe that software is the only way to provide deep security. Software is a lot more flexible than software.

Is your software OS independant? We offer software on a number of different platforms. We’re

a RedHat Linux enterprise partner and we do all of our R&D and development on Linux. All of our first release products come on Linux. We have our own hardened version of Linux called Secure Platform. We actually deliver the applications on the Operating System complete. In very simple terms, what you can do is take the CD and an Intel platform and within about two minutes you have a hardened firewall.

What does basic corporate protection cost? Appliances start at around $200 [about Rs 20,000] and go up to several thousand depending on the configuration. Some appliances we deliver have multiple functions, it’s a firewall, it’s a switch, it’s a hub, it delivers anti-virus, anti-spam. All the major banks, telcos in Sri Lanka are using Checkpoint. What we’re doing with CNT [Ceylinco] now is taking the same technology and extending it downmarket.

How often are your virus definitions updated? Even our approach to anti-virus is a little different. We deploy a lot of heuristic technology, so we can stop a virus attack before it’s being discovered. We strip out bits of executable code, run them in a secure virtual area, then make a decision. If it’s a keystroke logger or a trojan we can still pick it up because we’re not just looking at signatures.

How do you recognize new threats? We have a whole bunch of people that spend their lives trying

The business that we’ve done in Sri Lanka to date has been high-end - telcos, banks, government departments, insurance companies. Those kinds of organizations typically don’t use pirated software. For them it’s not an issue. The fact that the environment outside is potentially corrupted is less important when you employ Checkpoint technology. What we were really announcing yesterday was two things. One was that we scaled our technologies now so we don’t just approach major enterprises. We scaled the form factor and we scaled the price such that medium business and small business and even the consumer can take advantage of the strength of robust enterprise security technology. Couple minutes ago I said we’re only a software company, but now we do deliver a couple appliances into the small business environment. Only reason we those products is because we couldn’t find anyone else to deliver a hardware platform at the appropriate price point. Even those appliances are still an application on an operating system on a hardware platform.

to break our products. One of the ways we deliver security is to recognize vunerabilites and provide security around it. If you recognize vunerability you can identify the characteristics of an attack and know what data packets to look for.

Do you hire ex-hackers? I don’t know, I know we employ a number of people who get up in the morning and try to break our products. But I’m sure we have lots of resources we don’t talk about

Are you in the cellular or mobile market?

Our view is that we look at protecting all data streams. We patented technology called Inspect back in 1993. What Inspect as a piece of code does is that it actually opens up the data packet and views the payload of the data packet within the context of the application’s behavior. We also view the data that comes in contact with other data packets, so we have to ability to pick up fragmented attacks, an attack spread across many different packets. We can deliver that technology without slowing down the computer at all. Even with that technology we can support Voice over IP or streaming video without introducing any latencies.

How involved is organized crime? Most of the dangerous threats are coming from organized crime. Let me talk about the business of hacking, because over the last 5 years it’s become just that. Somebody out there is trying to steal your money, your identity, to steal information from corporations or even trying to bring down a corporate environment to bring competitive advantage. There is a lot of organized crime behind phishing, etc. A whole bunch of it is Russian, a lot from Japan, Australia.

Our technologies break down into three categories. 1) Gateway, perimeter of the network, typically where the router goes into the wide area network 2) Internal Technologies that look at what’s happening within the LAN environment and 3) Client Technologies which can be loaded onto an application server or access device, or a laptop or a PC, PDA, etc. Client Technologies include cell phones, anything that’s running Windows Lite or a Windows type environment, or Symbian. The reality is that people are using GPRS and 3G to surf the web or get back into their corporate network. The viruses we’ve seen so far only attack the battery life of the device, there hasn’t been a virus that steals information, but over a period of time that’ll evolve.

Is it profitable?

In a country like Sri Lanka where piracy is rampant, how does that affect security situation?

We sit and work with a number of organizations around the world on Homeland Security, emergency response teams,

Most criminals don’t think that far ahead, so they must be making money from it.

Are the security problems truly manageable? Absolutely. The first part of managing the security problem is recognizing it when it exists. That means not putting your head in the sand and saying it’ll never happen to me, or worrying about it when it happens. Sometimes worrying about it when it happens is far too late and the consequences can be very damaging, both to business and the individual.

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and even with some federal police authorities. Trying to help people understand the landscape scenario so we can jointly advise the general public about how to best go about using the Internet safely. The Internet isn’t going to go away, it’s just too good.

with the security on top of that. We don’t care if you use IE or Firefox. We’ll secure the data that’s going to and from that browser. We can actually allow the browser application to open up in a secure virtual environment. As the session closes we go back, clean the cache, clean the memory.

Is there any connection between Internet Security and Terrorism?

Do you do content based filtering, as in the censorship imposed by the Chinese government?

There were some reports in the press. The concern is that they’ll use the Internet as a means of attacking infrastructure, electricity generation, airport control system, police and military communictaions. Most of these systems have some form of connection to the Internet.

There are a couple things there. For sure at a policy level, with firewall technology you can inhibit access to certain address ranges, based on time of day or identity. That to my mind is not content-based filtering, for that you look at the data packet. We look at the data packet, but we don’t ‘read’ it. We’re looking for executable code or patterns. Access to sites is configured by individual IT departments.

Is the global legal structure ready to deal with Internet security threats and cyber-crime? Whether a government in a country actually implements legislation, the fact is that every major business is a global company now and therefore they have to conform to global best practices. Things like Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II, there are specific accountabilites that are applied to the directors of the company around reporting, auditing, disclosure statements. If a company in Sri Lanka wanted to do business in the US and they’re a public company, they have to conform. Commercialization is actually driving the adoption of standards rather than standards being imposed by legislation.

Do you have any real competitors at your level of security? At a commercial level Cisco, at a technological level, nobody. Nearly all of our customers have Cisco networks. If you want to buy routers and switchers you can’t avoid Cisco. If you want to buy security, the only thing we do is security. We don’t do routers and a bit of security, we only do security. To provide the level of security that Checkpoint delivers, you’d have to put together two or three types of technology, so there isn’t one particular competitor.

What’s happening is that major industry is actually driving behavior, and that behavior is coming down-market. As more and more companies seek to do business overseas or have business influences overseas they will have to start to confrom to some of this legislation. Most of this legislation is common sense. It’s about managing risk, having proper documentation. I don’t think it’s too onerous.

What about Norton, Panda, etc?

Do you recommend a particular browser, as in Firefox or Internet Explorer?

How important is Sri Lanka to Checkpoint?

That’s not our business. Our view is that the issue of security doesn’t lie with the operating system or the browser, it lies

Norton tends to be consumer and small business, Panda tends to be small business. We have a product suite called ZoneLabs/ZoneAlarm, which is already a very popular product. We haven’t evaluated the consumer market, we’ll do small medium business next.

You’re not a very large market, but you’re a market. Our view is that we are a global company.

Virtusa Joins Top 100 Global Service Providers S

ri Lankan bred IT company Virtusa was listed as one of the world’s top 100 service providers by Global Services Magazine. GSM is a trade magazine for the services industry, which has become almost synonymous with offshoring/outsourcing. Other companies on the list include big names like HP, Infosys, Tata and Wipro. Virtusa is Sri Lanka’s first big player in the outsourcing business, and MD Asian Operations Keith Modder had some interesting comments on their business model and how they plan to stay competive against the other Indian giants on the list. The award is newsworthy for Virtusa because they are now being recognized along side the big Indian companies like Wipro and Infosys. Virtusa, though incorporated in Massachusetts, was founded and is still largely run by Sri Lankans like Kris Canekeratne (CEO), Madu Ratnayake (GM) and Keith Modder. While India has been making headlines worldwide for its outsourcing growth, Virtusa has slowly grown to over 2,300 employees, posting 45% annual growth over the last five years. Much of that creates challenging and rewarding jobs for Sri Lankan youth because as Ratnayake said, ‘The raw material of the information economy is people’. Manju Hathotuwa, CEO of the ICTA, added that there was actually more demand that the Sri Lankan education system could provide for, especially in the IT sector. As Modder said, ‘India produces something like 285,000 IT graduates, so we can’t compete on numbers.’ So the question is, how does Virtusa compete? According to Modder, Virtusa competes by moving up the value chain. Most Indian outsourcing firms compete on cost arbitrage, which is basically just profiting from wage differences between the east and west. A western IT Department

will decide on the solution and vision they need and farm out the component work to India, usually to the lowest bidder. As in the textile market, Sri Lanka can never compete purely on cost. In response to this, Virtusa has developed a business model they call Productization, which operates at a much higher level. This methodology is comprised of three parts, Conception, Transformation and Optimization. Now what differentiates Virtusa from its Indian competitors is the first, conception. Conception simply means that rather than providing a block of code, Virtusa sends consultants into Fortune 100 and 1000 companies to assess their IT infrastructure and recommend solutions that improve their bottom line. This goes beyond simply providing the components an IT Department requests, Virtusa actually works with the company to leverage IT towards greater profits and efficiency. Many large companies acquire IT infrastructure haphazardly through mergers, acquistions and natural growth. Virtusa sends consultants (usually young Sri Lankans) to help them sort out the tangle and increase business agility, streamline redundancies, and achieve economies of scale. This is fundamentally different from the business model of an offshore code-shop, Virtusa is actually providing value at a much higher level. This is also a great opportunity for Sri Lankan youth, because Virtusa consultants get to sit across the table from large telecom providers in the UK and financial firms in the US and discuss how to move their global businesses forward. If their sustained growth and this award are any indication, it seems that Virtusa has found a comfortable niche in the highly competive world of outsourcing, one that holds great promise for Sri Lanka as a whole.

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C D M A Connectivity Reaches 80% of Sri Lanka A

lmost 80% of Sri Lankans now have access to CDMA phone and Internet service through Suntel. In just two years they have built or modified over 155 base stations, like the one in Habarana, pictured above. Suntel’s Ushani Kannangara took iTimes on a tour of one base station to give us an idea of the scope of this endeavour. The work involved is substantial, but these two years of work means that even rural areas now have a significant infrastructure for voice and Internet traffic in the years to come.

ing the land - 20 perches for a normal 70m tower. The best land is the highest as that provides the broadest coverage. Then there are mountains of paperwork to be filed through the Telecom Regulatory Commission, the Ministry of the Interior, and other government departments. The process can take anywhere from one month to two years, though the average tends to be 3-6 months. This current roll-out was actually done with extraordinary speed given the significant physical and legal challenges.

As quoted from their press release, ‘Suntel pumped in Rs 2 billion into its CDMA network during the last financial year and over the next three years, is expected to strengthen the network with investments of a further Rs. 8 billion.’ What these investments mean on the ground is construction or modification of towers like the ones above. Each tower services an area of about 8 km, though the figure depends heavily on terrain. With its new base stations, Suntel CDMA has a population coverage of over 90% in Colombo, Galle, Gampaha, Matara, Kandy, Rathnapura, Kurunegala, Kegalle and Hambanthota, while in Kalutara, Mathale, Nuwara Eliya, Puttalam, Badulla, Monaragala, Ampara and Vavuniya Districts population coverage is over 80%. In Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Batticaloa and Trincomalee 70% of the population is covered and Jaffna and Mannar remain the only districts not covered by the Suntel CDMA network.

Once the tower is built it can support multiple devices, meaning that these towers can be scaled to accommodate Internet or even cellular services in the future. In fact, the CDMA network currently supports island-wide Internet access through a Broadband Access Card for laptops. This means that Suntel has effectively built the infrastructure for the next generation of connectivity, making it easier for services like Internet to reach rural areas.

In practical terms, building these towers means first obtain-

Currently, CDMA phones offer IDD and Internet access on every connection as well as a prepaid option (Suntel Chat). Jerry Huxtable, Managing Director of Suntel said, “We are delighted with the response we have received to our CDMA telephones; and we are indeed pleased to have played a positive role in developing Sri Lanka’s telecommunications by improving penetration rates. The intensive roll out of CDMA has enabled us to pave the way to realizing our vision of connecting every Sri Lankan home.

the pipe connecting Habarana (background) via CDMA

cable going into ’switchboard’, left is voices in, right is voices out

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Basel II - Managing Risk Basel II is a brain transplant for your bank. Just as the human nervous system tells us if we’re hot, cold, on fire, etc, banks need to know if unacceptable risk threatens their survival. Most people can tell when they’re on fire. Banks, in the same way, can generally sense mortal danger without significant IT infrastructure. Granular sensations of hot/cold, however, require higher processing. Large banks with a variety of credit and lending ventures need Business Intelligence to tell them if their risk is too hot to handle. Shareholders and Regulators, also, need to know if that they’re investing in a creature with a good chance of survival in a harsh and competitive environment. Oracle is one company that builds brains for business, and their Senior Director Dr.. Chris Marshall visited Sri Lanka to discuss Basel II and what it means for the next evolution in banking. “Basel II as a revolution disguised as regulation,” Marshall said.

What is Basel II? Basel II is a 400+ page document drafted by central bankers from the G-10 nations. Aside from throwing it at you, the committee doesn’t have significant enforcement powers. Basel II is not a treaty and it is non-binding (outside of the G-10). However, it is the rulebook of international capital

markets. If banks want to play the great game then they must implement Basel II, beginning in 2007. Implementing the guidelines will be required to access international capital markets and satisfy global shareholders. Those that do will remain competitive, and those which cannot will find themselves more and more marginalized. That of course, still doesn’t explain what Basel II is. That big document is really a complicated recipe to calculate, regulate and disclose risk. It is, fundamentally, a blueprint for a rudimentary artificial brain that can sense the market and ensure the survival of the bank.

What Does Oracle Do With Banking? Basel II produces mountains and mountains of data, and data is Oracle’s business. Basel II, as written, is just an algorithm without any implementation. Indian coders at iFlex have designed a powerful manifestation called Reveleus, since bought by Oracle. This means that Oracle can now take those regulations and make them a living, breathing reality for banks all over the world. If Basel II is the blueprint, Reveleus is the actual artificial brain, implemented by Oracle.

What does Basel II do? As brain transplants go, Basel II makes banks that much smarter. Specifically, banks need to manage risk. Any bank that makes foolish investments and loans isn’t going to survive very long. The first pillar in avoiding those mistakes is simple sensation of what risk you’ve already undertaken. The next pillar involves turning those sensations into a meaningful perception of risk, and finally being conscious enough of the risk to express it to the market.

Pillar 1 (Sensation): Banks have to have a sense of how

risky their business is. How much credit they’ve extended, how costly their operations are, and how market fluctuations can affect their survival. Pillar I takes a mound of data and calculates the amount of money the bank may lose compared to the capital it has on hand. This provides a broad sensation of how ‘hot or cold’ the environment is.

Pillar 2 (Perception): Pure sensation, however, is of

limited use for making business (or life) decisions. The second pillar of Basel takes the raw shapes and colors of the first pillar and forms them into a coherent perception, set in a regulatory context. It takes general Risk Management data and runs it against rules to say what the data really means. It tells the bank, effectively, whether the environment is too hot to handle.

Pillar 3 (Consciousness): The third pillar involves disclosure to the Central Bank and the market at large. This means that shareholders in a bank know the amount of risk it has undertaken and can make decisions based on that risk. “The first pillar is about capital, while second is about managing the risk,” Marshall said. “It’s relatively easy to determine amount of capital, but it’s more challenging to evaluate how the bank uses the data. Pillar 3 is about reporting, communicating information about risk to all the stakeholders. Shareholders have got to understand what risks the banks are taking on its behalf. Basel II means pushing banks towards aligning their operations with what investors want to see, that’s the hidden agenda if you will. It’s no hype to say that Basel II is a revolution dressed as a regulation. It promises to change the landscape of banking.” Where Oracle and Basel intersect is that the company implements an automated manifestation of some pretty complex Business Intelligence. Especially when the system is integrated with existing Oracle data infrastructure. Reveleus can take the sum of a banks loans, mortgages, etc and produce comprehensive reports that investors and regulators can act upon. Pillar 2 also has the added benefit of providing actionable intelligence that makes the bank that much more aware of its environment. As Marshall says, “Basel II is a way to improve how the bank works, not a regulatory tax.”

What does Basel II Cost? Basel II doesn’t cost anything, but software implementation

does. The software, of course, depends on the specific bank, country, etc. A functional Basel II implementation can cost anywhere from US $250,000 to $1 million. That doesn’t include the vital management and human resources changes that a bank must undergo to make the system work.

What does Basel II Mean for the Future? If you visualize the financial sector as an ecosystem, it’s obvious that some banks can afford to implement Basel II and some cannot. Basel II is designed for larger, more complex banks. Those financial animals, once they adapt, will find that it is easier for them to raise international capital, manage risk, and deliver value to shareholders. For example, Marshall mentioned that “banks can utilize Risk Adjusted Performance Management to take capital and allocate it to different areas. This aligns how the bank works with the wishes of shareholders. Shareholders like that, the share price rises, and then the bank has more funds to buy out competitors.” It means that a more intelligent bank with Basel II will have the resources to buy out smaller banks that run legacy systems. By raising the bar for risk management, Basel II indirectly makes the environment more hostile for smaller banks. Sri Lanka, for example, has a population of 20 million and over 20 banks. That is too many banks chasing too few customers - a market ripe for consolidation. Large banks that implement Basel II will find that international capital and rising shareholder value give them the ability to eat up the small fish in the pond. This should mean more efficiency and better value for consumers, but it may also mean that small, unprofitable banks which cater to rural populations will go out of business. Large banks may not service rural (low-volume) areas at all without regulatory interference. In short, Basel II runs somewhat contrary to the socialist-leaning policies of the incumbent SLFP and JVP. Of course, it is an international standard and there is little that Sri Lanka can do. There is, however, one notable country which will not implement Basel II anytime soon. That is China. China’s banks are notoriously risky and bloated with unretrievable loans to State Owned Enterprises. The rigors of Basel II would probably expose many of them as unstable. Sri Lanka, however, doesn’t have the luxury of a large internal market and we may well see the consolidation that Marshall predicts. All in all, this seemingly mundane and boring regulatory change will have far reaching effects on the banking and business sector as a whole. It is also interesting in that it is a tentative step in real business intelligence - that is, sensation, perception and a very vague consciousness. It is by no means conventional artificial intelligence, but Basel II and IT infrastructure like Reveleus allow banks to display intelligent behavior beyond some of their competitors. Banks that upgrade their risk management ‘brains’ should find that their improved processing gives them an advantage in the mergeor-be-merged marketplace. In the artificial ecosystem that is the market, only the fittest survive. Basel II and its IT implementations are redefining fitness for banking. Only time will tell who prospers and who becomes extinct.

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your robot banker

The IBM iSeries and Deutsche Bank Headquarters in Germany (background)

You are probably an i5 user, whether you know it or not. Anytime you withdraw cash from an ATM you’re operating a remote iSeries, telling it what you want and it telling you what you get. The IBM System i5 is used by thousands of clients beyond banks, but this series of interviews explores what exactly this powerful machine is and how it affects your day-to-day life, one transaction at a time. Our first interview is with Mahesh Ramanayake. Mr.. Ramanayake, is the iSeries Marketing and Solutions Executive for IBM Asia Pacific, based in Australia. Mahesh has been with IBM for the last 15 Years. He has held various positions in IBM Asia Pacific in the Systems/Server Solutions Group.

What makes the i5 different from an Intel box running its own database and applications? What we’ve done on the iSeries is that we’ve put everything together. There are a few unique things, one is that you will never have a virus. It was announced in June of 1988 and we have 250,000 customers worldwide, not a single virus attack. If you look at in the world today we have close to 16,000 banks using the iSeries for their core banking.

What operating system do I run on an iSeries? It runs multiple operating systems, it runs os400 as its native OS, it runs AIX (Unix), it runs Linux, it also runs Windows. It runs native. The way we do that is that it runs the PowerPC processor – a similar version is used by Xbox and Playstation 3. If you look at Sri Lanka, take any bank, Commercial Bank, Seylan Bank, People’s Bank, all of them are running this system.

Can these large businesses really handle all their needs with one box? In Sri Lanka we have about 400 customers using the iSeries, formerly called the AS400. We have a system that runs multiple personalities simultaneously. I can run i5 for core banking, a risk management application on Linux that runs on another partition, all at the same time. If I want to shut down one partition I can just do that. The OS400 operating system is different. If you look at something like a Unix environment you buy hardware and operating system from IBM, you buy a database like DB2 or Oracle, then you require a security package, and a communications package, and if you’re a bank you require a transaction engine, so need to acquire that as well. You start putting

all these pieces on top of that and then you have to start integrating the pieces into a whole. The iSeries, on the other hand, has an Operating System with everything built in. The database is DB2, the security is built in, storage management, disk management, communications, everything is built into the operating system. It’s tried and tested in one lab in Rochester Minnesota. The beauty of that is that it dramatically reduces the cost of ownership.

Isn’t it cheaper to build my own Linux/Unix system from competing vendors? More expensive. It’s always more expensive Total Cost of Ownership putting these parts together. If you do a 3 year TCO you look at what is the cost of hardware, management, and upgrades. Always the iSeries comes in lower. The reason is that you’ve built in everything. If you go to someone that’s in a Unix environment and they want to upgrade, they have to deal with all these vendors. That’s time they’re not spending on their core business. Go to any i5 customer, ask them if they have a database administrator. They don’t. The database is built into the operating system. Go to a midsize customer and ask how many people are there to look after the system. In many cases you won’t even have a person. Someone just comes in to change the backup tape everyday. You get customers running completely self-running systems. If you look at the way we design the iSeries, this is designed as a commercial service. If you’re running a bank you’re business is banking, it’s not IT. That’s why everything is built into the operating system.

As a normal consumer, am I interacting with an iSeries when I do my daily banking? If you make a transaction at any one of these branches you’ll be using an iSeries. If you go to a Seylan or Commercial ATM and you put your card inside and withdraw your money, there’s a DB2 database on the server that will check you’re account balance, authorize it and dispense 5000 Rs to you. Everything happen on an iSeries.

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Why would I trust all this vital data to one box? iSeries has the highest systems availability. If you have a Unix system for example, database from someone else, security from someone else, and finally the application. Look at this architecture, there are all these different points of failure. The iSeries is tried and tested in a single lab by 8,000 really smart engineers. The custom solution, the customer has to test this. Their combination may have never been tested, you are the first person that’s going to test the environment. When we ship the iSeries, we know that it works. That is the difference.

If there’s only one system, doesn’t that mean there are thousands of hackers focused on breaking it? Nobody has cracked it. There’s a reason you can’t crack it, something that I didn’t tell you. We have something called TIMI – Technology Independent Machine Interface – that puts some part of the core on a hard drive. So for example, my security runs down here. Why are there too many possibilities. Because there are too many interlocking pieces. The reason a virus can get into your system is something called objects. You may have a data file, you may have an Excel spreadsheet that gets into your system. On Friday the 13th, this becomes an EXE [executable, common for viruses]. You can’t stop it.

How would an i5 stop a similar attack? If this is a data file that tells the system what I can do on a data file. I can write, I can read... but I can’t execute. It says that if it is a data file I cannot execute it and I cannot change the file type. That is a fundamental thing about a virus.

What if I’m running Windows on an iSeries? I can have up to 254 partitions on an i5. Here’s how I run Windows. I plug a card into the back of the iSeries. Inside this card is an Intel motherboard with Intel memory, nothing else. This is a PC Server with a motherboard, nothing else. I’ve created a virtual disk for this machine on the iSeries. What happens with the Blue Screen of Death, why can’t you do anything? It’s giving you an error message that you can’t understand. On the iSeries, if you run Windows you can still get the Blue Screen. However, the iSeries is still running, the processor is still independent and running. It can read the error message and restart the process and keep running. What happens if a virus comes in and hits your boot sector? Then you’re gone. When you run Windows on an iSeries, the boot sector is on an area that no one can write. It’s protected. We’ve done some pretty fancy stuff to accommodate security issues like that.

How do I add more operating systems?

What we’re announcing today is the capability of attaching blade servers, thin servers. We do this through TCP/IP (Internet) based adapters. Today I can go up to 108 servers, but with this new adapter you can just attach a hub and branch out forever. I can do some pretty fancy things with this architecture. Say you’re running ERP on one server, human resources on another one, email on another one. These are different servers, so you have to have different passwords. On the iSeries I can have one ID/password and access to all the servers you should have access to. This is a technology called single sign-on.

If I’m a bank, how many transactions can I run on an i5? How many do you want to run? This system scales from really small to large. A large bank can run its entire operations off one box, with one for backup. We don’t have server racks, we just run it off a central box. The system itself is desktop size, though it expands for multiple disks. You can also run multiple partitions, multiple operations. For example there is one bank run out of Singapore, serving 18 countries in 7 time-zone. One operating system runs a Japanese version with a different time stamp, and there’s a Sri Lankan and Australian partition as well. All with different users, different languages, different time stamps. I have a customer in Indonesia that’s running an iSeries for 63 million customers. The world’s largest microbank. The challenge in microbanking is that every customer does a transaction every day. This guy has 63 million accounts on a single box, with 16 processors active. A large Sri Lankan bank is running 5 processors. This is all within one box.

Ghost InThe Machine How one i5 machine processes over 1 million customers across countless branches and ATMs for Commercial Bank To see the i5 in action iTimes spoke with Angelo Peiris of Commercial Bank. Mr. Peiris is Deputy General Manager (Information Technology) and oversees the IT infrastructure behind the millions of transaction that Commercial Bank processes every day.

What model of computing do banks use? In a business organization there are two computing models. You can operate the centralized approach or the distributed

approach in the early days, even 20 years ago. We have seen shifts between these two systems with time. At one time the centralized approach was considered better, and there was a time the distributed was considered better. Now there’s a shift towards the centralized approach, I think. Twenty years ago definitely the centralized model was the only model, like the mainframe. They had the mainframe and the terminals were dumb terminals, the green screens. They depended on the mainframe to do even a little thing. When you type a key the mainframe had to interpret that and send the message

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back. Anything had to go to the mainframe. When the PC first came in the 80s it had the ability to emulate this green screen. Then came the point of the PC becoming powerful and the concept that we could use the processing power in this machine. Then the distributed approach came, with the desktop becoming powerful. If you had a distributed approach then the branch server would have the database and people in that branch would share it. There are some banks, maybe 200, 300 branches that still might operate on that model. If that branch’s customer comes, well and fine, it knows, but if another branch’s customer it’s have to go and check on that server. That is more like the client server approach, with distributed servers among the branch. Still, there was always a set of businesses that operated on the centralized approach. This particular system we are talking about now, the AS400 (now called iSeries), since 1992 we have been using that approach. From that day we have been on the centralized approach. Mind you, IBM has been supporting the centralized approach. In that market there are only a few players and IBM has a good market share.

Is the i5 a mainframe? You have the mainframes on one side and in the middle you have what we call mid-range. We call the high-end mid-range machines mainframes, at the Colombo Port or Exams Department, but the mainframe was never announced in Sri Lanka. The local market was never considered big enough, whereas the Indian railways were running something like 9 water-cooled mainframes. The capabilities of all these ranges was rising so now there’s a growing overlap between the midrange and mainframes. The iSeries is a good example, the capability has grown maybe a thousand times. For many people there’s now no real requirement for a mainframe.

What are the spec of the machine? Right now there are about 12,000 jobs in the system, users might be about 3000. We have about 1,500 Gigabytes of diskspace (1.5 Terabytes), of which we’re using about 50%. We have about 40 or 50 hard disks, each one 50 or 70 GB. Customers are not using the machine, all our branches are using this. We have about 135 branches. Each branch will have 6 or 7 people using this machine. We have about 215 ATMs, all connected to this machine. It all goes to one box. You can see the response, it’s handling 12,000 jobs and it still responds well to my commands. Now we connect almost entirely over TCP/IP, through lease lines. At the moment these are 64k lines. Upcountry recently we were running on 9.6k. The entire branch can work on that, no problem. It connects to the server and the ATM, 9.6k line was sufficient for branch work and ATM work but it could not provide things like intranet/email, so we upgrad-

ed to 64k. That’s the beauty of the model, there’s a server at the branch where all the screens and all are kept. It’ll only come back here for the data fetching. The ATM will communicate with the least amount of data, just the transaction, just the balance. To work an ATM maybe even a 2.4k is sufficient. A very small amount of data is communicated between the host and the ATM. Now we’re on 64k so we get intranet, email. The single link we put through a Cisco router and that routes it to the branch server and we have small bandwidth for Voice Over IP so we can call all the branches free of charge. It’s all done on a 64k line. For electricity failure we have UPSs and generators. Mainly we are on Sri Lanka Telecom network. For out bigger branches, we have a second service provider giving a second line.

How do you ensure data security? If you have 8 disks, 7 is the usable space. If one fails the spare will take over. While it is running you can replace that and it will rebuild automatically. The systems are smart. When you’re writing/reading, if it finds that it takes more than the usual time, the OS will warn that it is about to fail. That’s the time to change.

Who has access to the data? I can view but cannot change data. The password is broken into two parts and it can only be used by two people. We keep it very secure, the job log will be generated and the auditor will check it.

Have you ever lost client data? Not really. In any case we take about two backups daily. Take it to a tape and then take it off-site. We stay within comfortable parameters, disk space can never go above 70% without decreasing performance, CPU can go to 60-70%.

What product do you actually buy? What IBM provides is the box and the OS400 [Operating System]. It has a built in database, DB2. That’s the database that we use, on top of that we have a specialized banking application, for the last 13-14 years. Part of it runs on this box and part of it runs on the branch server. For the ATM we have another piece of software.

How many staff operate the box? In the IT department we have 60 people, constantly monitoring the ATMs etc. We only have a few people keeping an eye on the box, it’s pretty self-sufficient. At the end of the day we cut it off and do end of day processing for about two to three hours, doing calculations and backups. We have more than 1 million customers, over 1.7 million accounts, all this information is processed in this box.

Presentation Zen O

ccasionally, I’m asked by colleagues or clients to send samples of “great slides” or “good PowerPoint.” I usually hesitate to send examples of slides since my answer to the question, “what does a great PowerPoint slide look like?” is “...it depends.” In a world which often thinks in terms of absolutes — “this is good, that is bad” — “it depends” is not the most popular answer.

context matters However, as far as design is concerned, it is useful not to think (judge) in terms of “right or wrong,” but rather in terms of what is “appropriate or inappropriate.” That is, is it appropriate or inappropriate for a particular context? “Good” and “bad” are indeed terms we use when talking about design — including PowerPoint slides — but I’m personally cautious of this dualistic thinking, especially when judging a design without its full context available. So much

depends on how the visual is placed within the context of the presentation, and the content and objectives of that particular presentation are of paramount concern. Without a good knowledge of the place and circumstance, and the content and context of a presentation, it is impossible to say this is “appropriate” and that is “inappropriate.”

simple but not simplistic If there is one important precept worth following, it is the idea of simplicity. The best visuals are often ones designed with an eye toward simplicity. Yet, this says nothing about the specifics of a visual presentation. That will depend on the content and context. For example, even the best visuals used in support of a presentation for one audience on, say, quantum mechanics, may appear complicated and confusing to a different audience.

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before

after

Simplicity is often used as a means to greater clarity. However, simplicity can also be viewed as a consequence. A consequence, that is, of our careful efforts to craft a story and create supporting visuals that focus on our audience’s needs in a clear and meaningful way. Ok, simplicity is great you say, but how simple? What is the formula for simplicity? If you can’t give me concrete examples, you might say, at least give me a formula for making powerful, simple visuals. But do static formulas for achieving simplicity exist?

apply Zen principles to everyday life including design, even the design of slides and other visuals. Simplicity is an important design principle. But simplicity in design is as much art (small “a”) as science. It is, therefore, quite difficult to offer up prescriptions or “rules” for appropriate design. Without full knowledge of the context and circumstances, such rules could become “a great bondage,” so to speak, leading to inappropriate design choices or recommendations.

In Living Zen, author Robert Linsen (in speaking on the simplification of needs in everyday life) says that a “simplification of existence” is a consequence of an “effective experience of Zen.” In other words, as one discovers their true nature, “needs” such as possessions or status are reduced or seen for what they are: superfluous. This begs the question then: “What are the minimum or maximum needs for an individual?” To this the author responds “No one can define them or draw up a system around them. That is where we should exercise our judgment....Use depends for each one of us on the place and circumstances. If we were to codify the laws concerning it they might soon become a great bondage for us.” Here the author is not necessarily speaking of design and presentation visuals, of course, but we can see how we can

visual makeover Having said all of that, below are a few slides demonstrating different visual treatments in support of a single message. The context is a presentation on gender and labor issues in Japan. The purpose of the slide is to visually support the claim that “72% of the part-time workers in Japan are women.” This statistic is from the Japanese Ministry of Labor. The figure “72%” is something the presenter said she wanted the audience to remember as it is discussed again as the presentation progresses. So how to design a slide that is subtle, simple, memorable, and fits into a theme that is appealing and attractive? BEFORE. Above (left) is the original slide. The problem with the slide on the left is that the clip-art used does not reinforce the statistic, nor does it even fit the theme of women in the Japanese labor market. The background is a tired,

overused PowerPoint template. The text is difficult to read. And as one trainee commented: “it’s ugly.” The slide on the left (above) was an effort to display the same information in a pie chart. Besides using an overused template, the visual displays the pie chart in a distorted and inelegant fashion. For the sake of clarity, it is usually best to avoid 3-D effects. Also, rather than giving the slide a title, a declarative sentence that states the point directly may be more appropriate. AFTER (previous page): All the slides were redesigned to match the theme above. The slide on top was the one used for the presentations. But the one on the bottom could also be used effectively. Notice that either slide (especially the slide without any text) would be virtually meaningless without the presenter’s narration. The handout that followed the presentation expanded on the relevance of the statistic and gave it context. The five-page handout proved to be a good reference for those who attended the presentation and for those who did not. Using a pie chart is also a good way to represent this simple statistic. Here (right) the large text at the top can be easily seen. The text reads more like a headline — a declarative sentence — rather than just a title or category. The slide on the right is another possible way to support the message. In this case a completely different template was used.

should you design your slides like this? The design choices are many. The examples above are just a few attempts at improving the look & feel, impact, and effectiveness of the original slides. Should you design your slides to look like this? That’s your call and depends on your specific circumstance. Also, this particular example does not deal with a technical presentation. If your presentation is on a less technical topic such as leadership, HRM, marketing, etc. then simple slides like these may be very effective. If you are giving a very technical presentation to a technical audience hungry for data, then your slides may look quite different. But even for a very technical presentation, embracing simplicity of design and striving for the greatest clarity possible should still be the objective. How you do that will depend on a great many things. In the future I will show a design makeover featuring more technical content. In the meantime, if you have good examples of visual support for very technical presentation content, please feel free to share it with me. I’d love to see your examples. Garr Reynolds is currently Associate Professor of Management at Kansai Gaidai University where he teaches Marketing, Global Marketing and Multimedia Presentation Design. Garr is the former Manager of Worldwide User Group Relations at Apple Computer, Inc. in Silicon Valley. This article is reprinted from (presentationzen.blogs. com) with his kind permission.

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W

hen he flipped the switch on the assembly line in 1913, it’s unlikely Henry Ford set out to change the world; his goal was to build cars faster, cheaper. But his new invention not only reduced car production from 728 minutes to 93, it also increased mobility for the American public; spawning highways, suburbia and the possibility of being anywhere, anytime. In the 1990s, this production-based economy gave way to a transaction-centric one, as Internet technologies began to enable instant, anywhere transactions. And, once again, what began as a technical innovation became a business and cultural revolution. In 1995, offering an online store was a competitive advantage; much like having an assembly line was in 1913. However, both were relatively replicable; so competitors soon followed, diminishing the advantages of production or transaction-centric business models. The market is again shifting; this time towards an interactions-based economy. Global networks are enabling far more complex interactions; and technology is increasingly taking on low-value tasks, freeing

time for workers to focus on value-added interactions. Interactions may be the hardest competitive advantage yet to replicate – for example, while replicating an online store is relatively easy, replicating a person’s intelligence or people skills is not. An interactions economy calls for knowledge workers. The bottom line question is: are we prepared to succeed in this new economy? The answer lies at the roots of economic success, which can, in large part, be traced to the health of its educational system. We cannot ignore our educational roots – particularly the importance of math, science and engineering education – in determining the degree of our country’s leadership in the interactions economy. The Internet extends education, communication and commerce to anyone with a network, and makes time and place irrelevant; creating not only a world that is flat, but a playing field that is now globally level. Any country that can offer workers with the right skills can gain entry to the game. It is

The Cisco Education System by John Chambers, President and CEO of Cisco Systems

The Internet extends education, communication and commerce to anyone with a network, and makes time and place irrelevant; creating not only a world that is flat, but a playing field that is now globally level. Any country that can offer workers with the right skills can gain entry to the game. It is in these times of market transition that major upsets occur, and unexpected winners and losers emerge.

in these times of market transition that major upsets occur, and unexpected winners and losers emerge. We live in a world where kids are riveted by interactive gaming, instant messaging and cell phones, but generally uninterested in the technologies that enable these interactions. Thus, we must engage our imaginations and resources toward sparking interest and providing education that will enable them – and thus our nation – to compete. We must recognize, as we design an education system to leave no child behind, that we will leave our country behind if we do not ignite a revolution in math, science and engineering education. Technology is pervading every aspect of the way we work, live and play – and, increasingly, the way we learn. The same technology that is becoming the center of our economy can also be the answer to providing 21st century education. For example, Cisco is partnering with state and local governments and school boards to create programs like the 21st Century Schools initiative, using technology to deliver world-

class curriculum, teacher development and process changes for schools affected by Hurricane Katrina. This follows on a similar system set up in partnership with His Majesty King Abdullah, the World Economic Forum and more than 40 other companies to provide education to children in Jordan. There is no better legacy, no greater hope we can leave for our children than the possibility of a good education. Education is the great equalizer in life. And, when paired with the Internet, good education becomes a global possibility; and more equally distributed prosperity takes one more step toward reality. It’s merely a simple math equation. Strong education added to a supportive government plus solid broadband infrastructure equals sustainable advantage that leads to a strong economy. Subtract the solid educational system, and the equation just won’t add up.

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1

3 4

2

5

IT Education Ranked Pilot survey shows private IT education institutes competing successfully with universities to produce graduates A university degree should not be a once in a life-time opportunity limited for those who manage to jump the GCE (A/L) hurdle better than others. Today, education is all about choices and second chances at every stage of life. If you miss the A/L hurdle, you should be able to get yourself a diploma while you work and then decide to pursue a degree at your convenience. If you had to stop your education due to finances, marriage, children or whatever reason, you should be able to pick up and move on when you are ready. Our public education system is designed to brand students from a tender age. The branding that begins in year-1 with an

admission to a popular school continues with the success or failure at the Grade-5 scholarship, and then culminates with the size of ones Z-score at the GCE A/L - a score that is largely a testimony to one’s exam taking skills. It is this branding that makes rookie doctors get upset if senior nurses get paid more than them. After all, doctors received much higher Z-scores at the GCE A/L than any of the nurses. It is almost as if the Z-score cut-off for university entrance represents a new caste system. If you do not do well at the GCE (A/L) you are a ‘low caste’ for the rest of your life. The root of the problem is the lack of alternatives to the

8

6 9 7

public education system. Governments are finding it increasingly difficult to be the sole provider of education, at the tertiary level in particular. In response, governments in most countries, including our Asian neighbors such as Bangladesh and Malaysia, are looking to private investment to supplement public education opportunities. In Sri Lanka, successive governments seem to have adopted a stealth policy towards private education. They want private investments but are afraid to openly encourage them because of the fear of small but vociferous anti-reform elements. Notwithstanding government’s lethargy, it is now possible to obtain a foreign degree in Sri Lanka thanks to the entrepreneurship of a few individuals and companies. Most of the opportunities are in IT or business. There are also a few private institutions that prepare students for the external Bachelor of Information Technology degree offered by the University of Colombo. A pilot survey that ranks IT education institutes in Sri Lanka, for the first time, shows that private education establishments are getting noticed by employers for producing quality

10 11 graduates. By their presence these institutions are offering viable choices and chances for the education seeking public in Sri Lanka. These private IT education institutes are not only competing head on with local universities and government subsidized institutions such as SLIIT and NIMB but are also churning out degree holders that local companies are waiting to snap up. In fact, the pilot survey shows that some private IT education institutes may be better known and preferred than some universities. This April, Sri Lanka Education Forum - a local non profit organization - conducted Sri Lanka’s first ranking exercise of education institutes, by targeting private and government establishments that offer degree programs in IT. The purpose of the pilot study was to fine tune a methodology for an annual ranking survey of education and training programs offered in Sri Lanka. Ranking surveys such as Good University Guide of UK and Australia, respectively, and Best Colleges in US report by US News and World Report provide parents and school leavers in those countries with comparative data necessary for making informed choices.

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Name (alphabetic within each box)

Reported Graduates

Employer Recognition

Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology (APIIT)

Yes

Yes

IDM Computer Studies (Pvt) Ltd

Yes

Yes

Informatics Institute of Technology (IIT)

Yes

Yes

Institute of Technological Studies (ITS)

Yes

Yes

Singapore Informatics

Yes

Yes

Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT)

Yes

Yes

University of Moratuwa*

Yes

Yes

University of Colombo*

Yes

Yes

There are at least six private institutions and two universities with a track record of regularly putting out IT graduates into the labor market and recognized by both employers and peers for quality in education. Universities of Moratuwa and Colombo were not included in the peer survey. Royal Institute**

Yes

na

Thesaurus Computer Center

Yes

na

Royal Institute and Thesaurus Computer Center reported graduating degree holders but at this point we can not say any thing conclusive about their employer recognition. Royal Institute was recognized by one or more peer institutions as being in the Top 5. Thesaurus Computer Center is noteworthy for graduating University of Colombo BIT degree holders externally. Track Record = Graduated 10 or more degree holders in 2004, according the Quality Assurance and Accreditation Council’s survey of 2005. Employer Recognition = Recognized by one or more IT employers as being in the list of top 5 institutions. na = not available or not able to report decisively whether not recognized or not * = Not included in the Peer Recognition Survey. ** = Recognized by one or more peer institutions as being in the Top 5

Twenty one other institutions advertised IT degree programmes but they did not report graduation data. Notable among this twenty-one are Australian College of Business & Technology, ICFAI University, Imperial Institute of Higher Education, International College of Business and Technology and National Institute of Business Management that received recognition from peers as institutions they would recommend to a school leaver seeking a degree in IT. AIMS Educational Services (Pvt) Ltd American College of Higher Education Aquinas College of Higher Studies Australian College of Business & Technology (ACBT) British College of Applied Studies Business Management School (BMS) ESOFT Computer Studies (Pvt) Ltd. Genovate (Pvt) Ltd ICFAI University Imperial Institute of Higher Education International College of Business & Technology (ICBT) Londontec International National Institute of Business Management (NIBM) NIIT - MMBL Cyber Skills (Pvt) Ltd Open Arc International Scholar Institute (Pvt.) Ltd Spectrum Institute of Science and Technology (Pvt) Ltd. University of Jaffna University of Kelaniya University of Peradeniya University of Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Jayawardenapura

Name of Institution2

Length3

Board of Study

Graduates

Tuition, Rs

Fees Rs

Total Cost4

IIT

4 years

Manchester Metropolitan UK

120 yearly

1,000,000

na

1,000,000

APIIT

3

Staffordshire UK

102

660,000

78,000

738,000

IDM

3

London Metropolitan U UK 102

328,000

198,000

526,000

SLIIT

3

Curtin U of Technology Western Australia

333

270,000

160,000

430,000

Royal Institute

3

University of London UK

145

285,000

na

285,000

ITS

4

Troy U USA

30

715,000

na

715,000

Singapore Informatics

3

U of Portsmouth UK

17

575,000

43,200

618,200

IDM

3

Charles Stuart U Australia

16

408,000

374,400

782,400

SLIIT

4

SLIIT* Sri Lanka

56

360,000

na

360,000

IDM

3

U of Colombo Sri Lanka

16

87,000

500

87,500

Thesaurus Computing 3

U of Colombo Sri Lanka

14

72,000

na

72,000

1. Calculated using data from the Private Higher Education Institutes Survey (2004), Quality Assurance and Accreditation Council (QAAC), Colombo, Sri Lanka. Credits for Math and English at the GCE (O/L) 2. Costs are reported only for private institutions that submitted degree completion information to the QAAC in 2005. Private institutions are those that admit students outside of the University Grants Commission’s national admission process. SLIIT is considered a private institution although that institution is housed in well-equipped public facilities and possibly supported through public funds in some of their operations. 3. A year is typically equivalent to 2 semesters and a semester is a period of 4 months. 4. Fees do not include VAT. The costs are as reported in data collected by the QAA in 2005. They are presented here for rough comparisons. Potential students should make inquiries from each provider institution.

Top 11 results are preliminary, and ranking is not in order

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methodology Quality Assurance Agency Survey, 2005 The Quality Assurance and Accreditation Council (QAAC) of Sri Lanka was established in 2003 with the support of World Bank’s IRQUE (Improving the Relevance and Quality of Undergraduate Education) project. The immediate task of QAA was to review all academic departments in the public university system. QAA did, however, survey the private tertiary education and training institutions and compiled a directory of private institutions, but unfortunately, for whatever reason, the document is not available to the public. Even if it was made available, The QAA directory is not a user friendly document.

Education Forum’s Ranking Survey Typically quality assurance directories published by government agencies tend to not be very user friendly. In developed countries ranking survey reports such as the Good University Guide of UK or Australia, and the Best Colleges survey by US News and World Report have emerged as responses to the consumers’ need for comparative information. Such information includes scores made of input data such as quality of teachers and the quality of the incoming students and some process data such class size. A third category of information used in such rankings is a reputation score received by each institution from its peers. Finally, an algorithm is used to calculate composite score and the score are ordered in descending order to produce a ranking of institutions. The intent of the Education Forum Survey is to present consumers in Sri Lanka a similar ranking report. Increased awareness in society about tertiary education opportunities available in Sri Lanka and in the education provider community about the importance of making avaialble to accurate and easy to use information are the desired effects. The ultimate objective is to change attitudes in society from a fixation on the exclusivity of free-of-charge education to a freedom of choice in education. The Forum’s pilot survey gave sufficient information to make some judgments about the relative standing of public and private institutions that offer IT degree programs. The pilot ranking exercise was conducted in three phases.

First, we extracted information from the QAAC directory about the track record of private IT degree granting institutions in Sri Lanka. The QAAC survey had captured 43 private institutions. Forum’s own newspaper advertisement survey revealed many more institutions. Of these we identified 31 institutions as those that may offer degree programs in IT. The number of IT graduates produced in recent years by each of these institutions, as reported to QAAC was used as a measure of the track record of an institution. Since the QAAC survey gave only the data for graduations in 2004 we used that measure. Only six out of the 19 private institutions in our survey reported graduation data to the QAAC. Second, we asked potential employers to indicate five IT education establishments from which they would most prefer to recruit degree holders and diploma holders. For the employer survey we targeted 33 of Sri Lanka’s leading software exporting companies1 as potential employers. Seventeen companies responded to the questionnaire that we emailed or faxed in April 2006. The response rate was 52%. We were happy with the response given that the survey had to be conducted in the New Year holiday period in Sri Lanka. 17 out of the 31 institutions were ranked in the top 5 by the employers. If an institution was recognized one or more time we record a ‘yes’ for the Employer Recognition’ of those institutions. We do not report the number of recognitions for any of the institutions and put only an ‘na’ for other institutions because we want to fine-tune our survey and obtain better response rates before we report the number of recognitions received and rank the institutions accordingly. However, we feel it is alright to divulge at this point that the University of Moratuwa and University of Colombo received the most number of recognitions, and, more significantly, several private institutions came close to the two established universities. The third part of the pilot project was a Peer Reputation Survey of private establishments that offer IT degree courses. The Peer Reputation Survey asked a set of 19 private IT education establishments to rate themselves on the quality of study programs on offer. This was done by asking the private organizations to recommend the five best places to study for an IT degree, other than their own establishment. They

were also asked to recommend the five best places to follow a higher diploma in IT, as an effective means to a degree in IT. We received responses from 9 institutions for a response rate of 47%, acceptable given the timing of the survey. We did not ask them to rate public institutions because our focus was on students who are cut-off from the public system.

Public v. Private In this study we define private institutions as those admitting students outside of the University Grant Commission’s admission process and charging tuition. According to this definition both SLIIT and NIBM are identified as private institutions. The software exporting companies ranked the Universities of Moratuwa and Colombo in the number one and number two positions but one private institute ranked very close to the universities and above SLIIT or NIBM. Several other institutions that did not report a track record to the QAA were also ranked among the best 5 by employers and peers. Even a few recently established organizations, that have only just started graduating students, were noted for programs of good standard. This is a very useful finding of the survey. According to the Higher Education Act, only an institution established by an Act of parliament can call itself a university. But once established there is very little follow-up on the quality of programs offered. To rectify these shortcomings, the recently established QAA is conducting quality assurance of academic programs. However, the pace of accreditation is slow. This, combined with the slow pace at which government agencies publish information, means that students and parents may not receive this information on time.

However, employers and provider institutions were in general agreement about quality of the 13 institutions that were recognized by both providers and employers, except for the institution marked by an arrow. (If there was perfect agreement all points would lie on the line drawn diagonally at 450. The institution marked by an arrow received a score of 11 from the xx employers who responded but only an equivalent of 5.5 from the peer providers. The Forum would be conducting in depth interviews with the providers and the employers to further understand the reasons underlying the difference between provider and employer responses.

Cost of a Full-time Degree Cost comparisons show that Sri Lankan tertiary education sector offer choices in private degree opportunities that fit all sizes of pockets, ranging from as low as Rs 72,000 to Rs 1,000,000 for a degree program followed full-time after passing the GCE (A/L).

Mature Programs The first set of 5 programs in the list, are offered by IIT, APIIT, SLIIT, Royal Institute and IDM, respectively. They reported graduating 102-333 students in 2004 showing a certain level of maturity in those programs. Costs of these programs vary widely. Judging by the employer responses, the disparity in costs may be justified because we found a certain level of correlation between the cost of program and employers ranking of those programs. With time we hope to be able to improve the survey methodology and provide consumers with more definitive quality assessments.

The results of the Forum’s rankings, combined with other information such as time-to-degree (at public institutions, in particular) and other performance data, may convince parents to take a second look at private education options - particularly if some universities are more closed than open and a general degree takes more than 3 years to complete.

Emerging Programs

results

External Degree Preparatory Programs

Recognition by Peers or Employers When peers name a list top 5 institutions they may be looking at attributes differently from the employers. Quality assurance by the degree awarding foreign institutions, qualifications of staff and facilities may be considered more important by education providers while the track record of producing graduates and the performance of the graduates in the work place considered more by employers.

The next set of four programs, offered by ITS, SI, IDM and SLIIT, respectively, graduated 30-60 student in 2004. These programs may signal the next level of growth in IT degree opportunities in Sri Lanka.

The last two programs represent University of Colombo’s external BIT degree preparatory programs. These may not offer a comprehensive undergraduate experience but may suit the needs of those who need degree credentials but not the full experience.

When Will You Know More The pilot survey gave the Forum some information that can be shared with the public, but, more importantly, it gave us ideas for improving the survey. During the course of this year we will hold discussions with degree program providers and employers to refine the survey further and conduct a successful survey next year in order to release the rankings with full details in time for the use by school leavers.

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Music Laika Come Home-Gorillaz vs. Spacemonkeyz Released July 22nd 2002 on EMI Records Genre: Dub/Reggae More Information at www.laikacomehome.com

Atom Heart Mother-Pink Floyd Released October 10th 1970 on Harvest Records Genre: Progressive Rock More Information at www.pinkfloyd.com

Following the somewhat unexpected success of their self-titled debut album in 2001, Gorillaz approached the ever ambiguous Spacemonkeyz, with the prospect of creating a remix disc of their material. Though Laika Come Home was, in essence, simply a means of satisfying fans until a new studio album could be delivered; it must be given credit for its fresh approach. Unlike a traditional remix disc, this was undertaken exclusively by the same group of artists and one of its most appealing features has to be the marked contrast between the remixes and the originals.

Atom Heart Mother, named after its sprawling twenty-four minute title track, is perhaps the most impenetrable of the 70’s Floyd albums. It is technically brilliant; indeed it is so complex that it was the only album never performed live as a whole. The six part suite Atom Heart Mother is by far the most intriguing track and is Pink Floyd’s longest un-split epic. It contains an amazing variety of instruments and also benefits from co-writer Ron Geesin’s interest in the potential of “environmental sound.”

The Spacemonkeyz rework the Gorillaz material in a laidback dub and reggae style and, as is typical of the genre, place much emphasis on the percussion and bass sections. The entire album is drenched in various sound processing effects like echo and reverb which contribute greatly to its surreal yet playful feel. Despite being slightly less accessible and exciting than its precursor, Laika Come Home is definitely a welcome alternative to the generic money spinning remix albums spewed out by so many contemporary artists.

The track is epic in every sense of the word and at times, also pretty bizarre. Elements of classical music are fused with electronic sounds resulting in more of an experience than a song in the traditional sense. The rest of the album consists of three tracks each written by a different songwriter within the ranks of the Floyd, the most noteworthy of these being the minimal and introspective If, by Roger Waters. Despite its success on the charts at the time, accessibility is not this albums strong point. Its experimental nature and unconventional structure mean this will always be one for die hard fans. Either you’ll love it, or you’ll hate it.

Push the Button-The Chemical Brothers Released January 24th 2005 on Virgin Records Genre: Electronica More Information www.thechemicalbrothers.com

Reviews by Asvajit Boyle

For their fifth album, the Chemical Brothers (formerly know as the Dust Brothers) take a more stylistic approach rather than pursue the “Big Beat” style evident in much of their earlier work. Push the Button contains a more variable structure than their previous albums, focusing on infectious hooks and the broadening of stylistic boundaries. The album is largely collaborative and contains contributions from a of host musicians. Tim Burgess, long time collaborator and lead singer of British indie act The Charlatans gives his voice to The Boxer, a track which despite being very catchy ends up a little repetitive. Push the Button also features Bloc Party vocalist Kele Okerke, Anwar Superstar as well as horrifically boring Magic Numbers. This album is hardly a breakthrough for the genre and the first single Galvanize suffered from tremendous overkill by the media, despite this it’s hard to dislike and, kinda fun too.

Show Your Bones- Yeah Yeah Yeahs Released: 27th March 2006 on Polydor Records Genre: Rock More Information: www.yeahyeahyeahs.com

Surprise-Paul Simon Released: May 9th 2006 on Warner Bros Genre: Rock Listen to it at: www.paulsimon.com

The second studio album by New York based indie rockers Yeah Yeah Yeahs appeared after an arduous process of selection, during which much of the material was scrapped. It bears a real contrast to their critically acclaimed 2003 effort Fever to Tell. The sound of this one is certainly far more polished and much of the rawness of its predecessor is ditched in favour of highly produced art-punk in the same vein as The Whitestripes.

Six years have passed since Paul Simon’s last solo work and his new album Surprise certainly lives up to its name. For starters he’s chosen an unlikely collaborator, the father of ambient music, Brian Eno. This latest effort sees Simon take his music in a somewhat different direction; whilst Surprise is essentially pop at its core, it contains a refreshingly free structure, atypical of his earlier work. Eno’s contribution is substantial and many of the albums better moments are provided by his “sonic landscapes.” However, in spite of the seemingly fresh approach as well as the talents of Eno, together with influential pianist Herbie Hancock, the album is still pretty dull.

The album has obvious potential and is extremely fresh and entertaining in many places. Cryptic debut single Gold Lion is probably the most significant of these and second single Phenomenon, with its pilfered but undeniably catchy hook, also deserves special mention. However, in spite of these moments of brilliance and the subtle yet effective input of producer Sam “Squeak E. Clean” Speigel, this album’s whole is definitely less interesting than the sum of its parts. Some of the later tracks including Honeybear and Dudley are little derivative, and at times vocalist Karen O, despite her quirky coolness has a slight tendency to steal the show. All in all Show Your Bones nails the basics but lacks consistency.

Simon’s pensive lyrics deal with routine themes of love, ageing and fatherhood in a rather lackluster and sometimes clichéd manner. Though his decision to drop standard song structure on several tracks is definitely admirable, many occasions see promising instrumental sections overshadowed by his pretentious lyrics. Surprise succeeds as comeback album for Simon but, for the most part, is largely uninspiring. No doubt it’ll be a fan favourite.

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Guerilla Radio By Mahangu Weerasinghe

find a podcast The following podcast directories are structured well and make it easy to find a show you’d like to listen to.

Podnova (www.podnova.com/index.srf ) By far my favourite directory, Podnova houses a huge array of podcasts. Apart from sorting it in to many useful categories and tracking the best to populate its top forty list, the site also has an excellent search facility. Try a keyword of your choice, and you just might be surprised at the number of shows on the subject.

Podcast Alley (www.podcastalley.com/) Another great archive, the Podcast Alley sorts podcasts in to a lesser number of genres. However, this in many ways makes navigation easier. Apart from this neatly structured directory, the site also has a forum and software repository where you can go and look for podcasting software to suit your operating system.

Podcast.net (www.podcast.net/) One of the earliest directories to list podcasts, Podcast.net has a detailed list of categories, making it easier to narrow down your search and find exactly what you want. The site doesn’t have the best design, but the content navigation is intact, and the sheer number of listings make it a must see.

Podcast Directory (podcastdirectory. com) More of a podcasting community site than a simple directory, this might be a little confusing for new users. Although the design also lends itself to more confusion, there is a lot of content here that is worth reading. Among other things, it’s possible to browse the geographical placement of podcasts on a Google Map, which is a nice feature.

iPodder (www.ipodder.org) Although the home of the veritable Adam Curry, iPodder is by far the worst designed podcast directory this writer came across during his research. The design is clunky, and the content organization is confusing at best. Worth a visit as a historical monument, but certainly not for anything else.

Firstly, my apologies to Rage Against The Machine. Let’s face it though - there’s a Disc Jockey in all of us. No, I don’t mean the whiny little idiots who make your drive to work a living hell by interrupting a perfectly good song with some stupid anecdote or supposedly inspiring story. I mean the talk show hosts of ye olden days, the radio personalities, the cowboys of the airwaves. Enter the Podcast. The what, you ask? Podcast, guv’nor! Podcasting puts the power of the broadcast media in to the hands of the people. Now, anyone with an Internet connection and a web browser can download and listen to a variety of different radio talk shows hosted by enthusiasts from all around the world. Podcasting is a portmanteau word that combines iPod and broadcasting. For those of you who have been in hibernation for the past five years, the iPod is a popular portable music player by Apple. The product reached such cultural significance in the West that it is now almost synonymous with mobile music. The idea of Podcasting grew out of this cultural background – broadcasts for the iPod, Podcasts. In reality, a podcast is just a bunch of links to mp3 files. These links are put inside tags called enclosures and then encased in a RSS feed. Typically, you just point your podcast software to this RSS feed and it will ask and download the episodes of each series you specify. As I write this, I’m listening to the Geeks in Space podcast (http://www.thesync.com/geeks/) by the Slashdot admins Rob “Cmdr Taco” Malda and Jeff “Hemos” Bates. This show is fairly informal, and will probably only appeal to a handful of hardcore geeks. Slashdot die hards of course, will love it. On the other hand, there are many, many podcasts out there that cater to almost every niche imaginable.

look mom, i’m on TV A newly emerging genre of podcasting is the video podcast category. Some shows have transcended the audio only barrier, and now record their episodes in video. How about that? It’s like free TV. Although video podcasts (sometimes called vidcasts) are still few and far between when compared to audio podcasts, they’re growing in number daily, and most of the directories listed above now have separate categories for them. These shows will naturally take a little longer to download due to their bigger file sizes, but this is becoming less and less of a concern as net access speeds continue to accelerate.

image by Olly Hart http://flickr.com/photos/ollyhart. Creative Commons License

squeeze it So you found a podcast you like. Now what? Well, you could go my way and use wget -c in your linux shell to download the files you want to listen to. On the other hand, you could let a neat piece of software handle all the work. Enter Juice (juicereceiver.sourceforge.net). Available for both Windows and Mac at the time of writing (with a GNU/ Linux variant coming soon), Juice is by far the most popular podcast download program out there. Built on the source code of the popular iPodder program by podcast aficionado Adam Curry, Juice lets managed your feeds, downloads the episodes you select, and organizes everything inside neat folders. Think of it as your personal DJ, downloading the shows you want and storing them for future retrieval. So you found a show you’d like to listen to. Great. Enter the URL in to Juice, and watch as it reads the RSS feed, seeing which episodes are available for download. Now, just scroll down and tick the few (or many) you’d like to download to your computer. Then sit back and relax as Juice queues and retrieves the mp3 files to your hard disk. Once downloaded, open them in your favourite mp3 player, and start listening. Well there you go – personalized radio. Apart from Juice, there are also a number of other podcast receivers for Windows, including Transistr (transistr.com), FireAnt (getfireant.com), Doppler (dopplerradio.net) and Nimiq (nimiq.nl). Of course, iTunes for both the Windows and Mac has had podcasting support since version 4.9 (released on June 28th 2005).

on the go odeo So you’re at a public terminal with a headset and some time to kill? Excellent. Or maybe you’re just too lazy to go about

installing software without first seeing what all the hype is about. Point taken. Thankfully, you can now listen to your favourite podcasts without ever leaving your browser window. Enter Odeo (odeo.com). Visit their website, and use their embedded flash player to stream and listen to any show of your choice. Of course, if you just have to have a copy on your hard drive, you can always click on the episode page and download the full mp3. As I write this section, I’m listening to the Engadget Podcast #66 (http://odeo.com/channel/2127/ view) and I must say, the streaming quality is near perfect. I’m listening to two geeks rant about the Nintendo DS in crystal clear audio. Odeo is definitely one of the easier ways to listen to podcasts. With a plethora of features and even an option to record and publish your own podcasts, it’s one of the up and coming audio publishing services on the web today. Think Flickr for audio. That’s what Odeo is gearing up to be. Oh, did I mention it’s free? One of the problems you might have with the service however, is that you may not be able to decide what to listen to. Given the sheer number of channels on Odeo, that’s quite understandable. For insipration, check out the Odeo Zeitgeist (odeo.com/listen/zeitgeist) or Staff Picks (odeo.com/ listen/featured-channels) for a run down of the day’s popular podcasts. You’re bound to find something of interest. All in all, podcasting is something that is going to change the way we think about radio. For probably the first time ever, you can truly control what comes to your ears. Want to listen to a show about art? Marketing? Philosophy? Bonsai? Your grandmother wants to subscribe to the Knitting News? Thanks to a power of personal audio publishing, all this and more is just a few clicks away. So, what are you waiting for? Grab those headphones and get going.

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ashorthistoryofsrilankanweblogs

By Mahangu Weerasinghe photo by Juavenita (flickr.com/photos/juavenita)

There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene iii (Brutus) If there was a tide in the affairs of Sri Lankan weblogs, we’re just about riding it to the crest right now. In the next year, we’re going to see bloggers everywhere. Sri Lankan blogspace in general has grown alongside the rest of the world. Although local bloggers are still few in number, it’s impossible to say that they don’t have clout within the wider blogosphere. Bloggers like Morquendi (morquendi.blogspot.com) and Nidahas (nidahas.com) are well known within their own genres, which are New Media and Web Design, respectively. As the blogosphere grows in size though, it’s important that we understand where it’s coming from. In this spirit, I’m going to try and run through the growth of the Sri Lankan blogosphere. Please bear with me while I equate our growth to Greek History. Too much time with J.B Bury, I tell you.

Prehistoric Times – (1995)

Mary Anne Mohanraj (www.mamohanraj.com), it turns out, has been maintaining a web diary since December 1995. Thus, she currently holds claim to being the first Sri Lankan to publish an online diary. When looking at how early she started, it’s also quite possible to reason that she’s one of the earliest Sri Lankan bloggers.

The Dark Ages – (2002–2003) These early adopters were a closely-knit group of friends who wrote essentially for each other. These guys, although still going strong today, have largely isolated themselves from the rest of the blogosphere in order to protect their privacy. In an age where what you say online can stick with you for

years, these kinds of precautions are indeed understandable. This type of small, closed network is a common phenomenon, and since the recent growth of local blogspace, there have been several such self contained communities that have emerged. Like any sub culture, these groups stick to themselves, preferring their own company, links, and comments.

The Archaic Era (2003– 2005) Although this age was marked by the rise of a few Sri Lankan weblogs, they were largely unconnected, and the wider Sri Lankan blogosphere (outside the first circle, that is) was still a very lonely place. Indi (indi.ca), it turns out, had been blogging in various capacities since around this time as well. However, since this was the world wild web and all, and he never found other Sri Lankan weblogs. Towards the middle of this period, Scourge (phlayer.blogspot.com) too began blogging, as can be seen by his archives that go back to July 2004. Morquendi (morquendi.blogspot.com), another veteran, was one of the most active bloggers during this period, and was posting at several sites, including his personal blog, which has posts dating back to February 2004. Chintana (chintana.wordpress. com), a linux geek and FOSS enthusiast, was another early Sri Lankan adopter of weblogs. Merill (merill.net) and a few .NET bloggers were also blogging since April 2003.

The Period of Transition – Kottu (2005) In this era, Kottu (kottu.org) was born, and the tide turned, so to speak. Not to say that Kottu was the cause of the growth that was to come. In fact, Kottu was just something that happened at the right time. The metablog, or weblog aggregator, served to connect existing webloggers, making them seen and heard. The exposure which Sri Lankan weblogs received as a result of the site fuelled many more locals to consider personal publishing on the web. Prabhath (nidahas.com), one of the local blogosphere’s most internationally renown webloggers, got started during the months that followed. A while later, Electra (electra.blogsome.com) started writing as well. Ivap (ivap.blogspot.com), another early community personality, also starts up his personal blog during this period of time. Towards the end of the year, we add more and more local webloggers. From a lonely startup, Kottu becomes a thriving community.

The Early Classical Era – (2005–Present) We have the first Kottu spin off, which is a clear sign that the blogosphere is growing, and needs more than one main source of syndication. Seeing the growth in interest, Latapata (latapata.com) is launched, and Sripost (sripost.org) quickly follows as another community site. Sri Lankan weblogs have come of age. Now, with over a hundred publicly syndicated weblogs, the community is ready for more horizontal growth. Although we’ve already seen a little of that in the past few

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 an early version of www.kottu.org 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 the group-blog, www.moju.lk 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 the design-oriented blog, www.nidahas.com 64 65 66 67 68

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photo by Juavenita (flickr.com/photos/juavenita)

months, it’s easy to predict that the next few will see more and more projects that feed off the community. Most of all however, there is going to be a huge surge in local weblogs. With services like Wordpress.com emerging as serious competitors to the now aging Blogger, starting a weblog has never been easier. Furthermore, the past few weeks have seen the emergence of serious group blogs such as Moju (moju.lk), which is a clear sign that the Sri Lankan blogosphere has also matured beyond purely personal posts. The Late Classical Era – The September that will never end Yes, the Sri Lankan blog influx is waiting to happen. It’s going to happen. Soon. The number of weblogs we add to Kottu every month has grown steadily, and the way I see it, it’s only going to get worse. We’re going to be inundated with weblogs – in magazines and newspapers, on notice boards and flyers. In fact, you’re going to hear the word blog in offline conversation so much, it’s going to make your ears bleed. There are going to be so many weblogs on Kottu that regulars will begin constructing their own feed lists in order to sort out the cruft. Weblogs have started to hit Sri Lanka in full force, and like I said earlier, the wave is just about cresting. Local businesses have yet to embrace blogging, and no high profile social or political figures have yet embraced the medium. Rest assured though, it’s going to happen.

Weblogs, which originated in Sri Lanka as a way of keeping in touch with friends, have now evolved to accommodate community discussions on everything from politics (nittewa. blogspot.com) to governance (moju.lk). In the near future, we’re going to see companies, as well as business and political personalities begin to use weblogs to communicate with their audiences. Business blogging, currently the hottest buzz word on the block, is going hit Sri Lanka in a big way in the coming months. As corporations realize the value of having direct contact with their consumers, my prediction is that at least a few, if not several of the major local players will begin to publish even a few limited feature weblogs. The bottom line though? Sri Lanka has a long way to go before weblogs become truly mainstream. Although there are many reasons for this, the most obvious ones are the lack of Internet access outside major cities, and the language barrier, which 90% of this country still finds hard to cross. For one thing, we need good Sinhala and Tamil fonts. Till we get the masses blogging, Sri Lankan weblogs might as well be called Colombo weblogs. So, you’re thinking - how can I get a weblog and join the fray? Easy, turn to Indranil Dasgupta’s excellent Wordpress. com walkthrough. Want pictures too? Chinthana Seneviratne has a nice tutorial on how to publish your photos to the web via Flickr. This may be a print magazine, but it’s a start if you’d like to learn more about this new media.

photo by Yanik Tissera (yaniksphotos.blogspot.com)

photo by Yanik Tissera (yaniksphotos.blogspot.com)

first blogger meetup @ Barefoot  The photos above are from the blogger meetup held in March. Here are some attendees, links available at kottu.org

was cool chatting with them about everything from SEO to blogging. They had to leave early, but we’re glad they came.

Wela and the .NET crowd

The Sociarati

Apart from a shared toast to Firefox (well, Wela toasted IE7, but that’s irrelevant), we had an interesting discussion on Open Source and Microsoft (yeah, you heard right). I also got an earful of Vista and it’s features. I admit, if it’s as good as it sounds, I might just give it a go. Charith.NET, Casper and Razor were in attendance too, which was great.

The society bloggers were Indi, Scourge, Electra, and Nazreen. These guys make up the part of Kottu that actually get themselves out on a Saturday night. While we’re at home writing shell scripts or playing games, these are the people who get out there and do something IRL.

Chintana, Chamil, and the FOSS geeks Chintana and I got out our Ubuntu machines and did the usual geek talk on distros and window managers and what not. It was great to have Chamil around as well. He proved very useful in battling the evil .NET geeks listed above. :) It was also great to meet Nilam for the first time. Among other things, this guy is responsible for the fantastic Moju logo.

The Coder Fu Dilantha and Venushka showed up to represent http and it

Pradeep – The Photographer The only pro-photo blogger at the meetup, Pradeep was interested in how Kottu came about. Naturally, I told him the old story and we chatted a bit about communities and how they grow. It’s a pity I didn’t see him leave. He’s someone I’d definitely like to meet again.

Arun, Asvajit and Yanik – Young Blood Between Yanik’s incessant camera flash and Arun’s love of Brokeback mountain, getting to know this new (and growing) part of the blogosphere was certainly a lot of fun.

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become a blogger with By Indranil Dasgupta

When starting your own blog, a few things have to be taken into consideration - your target audience, the mood of the blog, and how personal you want things to get. Along with these issues, there are also the issues of hosting and software. If you, like the millions of new bloggers out there, just want to get your feet wet, and blog for the fun of it, you really don’t have to pay anything at all - for hosting or otherwise. There are plenty of services which help you set up your own blog for free, and all in a matter of minutes too. Of the hosted blogging solutions, the more popular ones are Liverjournal, Blogger, Typepad, Xanga and WordPress.com. Today, we’ll be looking into WordPress.com, the hosted weblog solution run by the creators of Wordpress, which is probably the most popular weblog platform in the world today. Wordpress.com, or WP.com as it is affectionately known is free, painless to setup, and easy to get started on.

the deal Now, you may be thinking - what’s in it for the providers? Everything has a catch, right? First and foremost, it brings popularity to their products. Wordpress.com and Typepad. com, running on WordPress and Movable Type respectively, are essentially large-scale demos of the products, and are invaluable to the developers as they are more or less huge testing grounds. Moreover, many developers like Typepad.com and Livejournal have premium versions, with several tiers of paid memberships which come with added perks.

let’s get one, shall we? Well, it’s time to get our feet wet. First of all, head over to WordPress.com. You’ll see a big blue button that says, Get your WordPress blog now. Click it. Go on, you know you want to. You will now be presented with a sign up form, which you’ll have to fill up. You’ll notice that your web address is yourname.wordpress.com. This may sound clumsy, and if you want to change it to something good, I’ll show you how to do that later on in this article. For now, just fill in all the boxes, and click on Sign Up.

Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress and Wordpress.com

Now, you should check you email account for a message from WP.com which will include a link to activate your blog. Clicking on this link will take you to a page where your username and password are displayed. Mutter these to yourself

Well, as I told earlier, WP.com blogs have addresses like yourname.wordpress.com. Though WordPress.com doesn’t allow you to have your own domain name yet, there is a simple workaround. You will, however need your own domain, registered at any ICANN accredited registrar. My registrar of choice is GoDaddy.com. In your admin panel at your registrar, just enable Forwarding to another URL, and put in yourname.wordpress.com as the other URL. Now, when people come to your domain, they’ll be forwarded to your blog.

tweakability OK, now that we’ve got our blog running to our liking, let’s customize a few features, and actually write something. Although WordPress.com doesn’t allow you to make your own themes, it has provided quite a few themes to choose from. In your Admin panel, click on Presentation. You’ll be provided by a list of all the themes you can use. By default, the Kubrick theme will be your weblog theme. However, clicking on any of the other themes will make your blog use the new theme, and with 30-odd themes to choose from, you’ll surely find one which suits your style. Now, with design out of the way, let’s focus on content. Before putting your thinking cap on and writing this world class weblog you’ve always wanted to, let’s focus on the sidebar, shall we? In some themes, you’ll notice a sub-tab called Sidebar Widgets. Try to choose a theme that does support these, as these widgets are pretty cool, and very useful too. What it does is, it allows you to customize what goes into the sidebar, and how it goes in. Play around with the widgets, and when you’re done, click on Save Changes. Now, refresh your blog, and you’ll see your own custom sidebar. If, at any point, you want to restore the original sidebar, drag all the widgets to the Available widgets drawer until you see the Default Sidebar. Now, your original default sidebar will be placed.

join

my blog, my address

customize

until they’re committed to memory, and then go ahead and login to your blog. You should immediately change your password to something more personal. Use the Users tab for this purpose. Congratulations! That’s all it takes to set up a Wordpress.com blog. You, my friend, are already on your way to blogging nirvana.

start

ordPress.com

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bookmarks

widgets

With sidebar in place, let’s link to all your buddies who’re trying out the rough seas too, and to those two friends who’ve already made it. Click on the Bookmarks tab at the top, and navigate to the Add bookmark sub-tab. Now, enter the URl(address) of your friends’ blog, his/her name and any description you deem applicable. Create a new category named “Friends” from the right hand side bar. Then, click Add bookmark. Et voila! Your first bookmark is created. Like this, you can add many more friends, using the Friends category on the right. To add more categories, just write the name of the category and click Add.

core options From the General Options screen, you can set up your weblog’s title, it’s description (a tagline to describe it) and the language. The language is still a work in progress, and you probably won’t get any of them, but this is a placeholder for the options, and will help you remember its location once more features are released released. You can also uncheck the option to publicise your weblog. What this does is it removes any references of your blog from WordPress.com public listings, and makes it non-searchable by search engines like Google and Yahoo!, and blog trackers like Technorati. You should do this only if you want to keep your blog low-profile, as this will effectively not allow any of your pages to appear on Google for any search results. Not recommended if you’re on a popularity drive! Under the Writing sub-tab, you can set options for your Write admin panel, like how many lines of text can you see on the post box, and what should be the default category to post to. Under the Reading options, you can set whether your blog should start with a static page, or display blog posts. This is very important, as this enables you to push blog posts into a sub-page, essentially turning your WP.com blog into a full fledged web-site. To do this, select, Front page display a static

page. Then, go ahead to choose the page you’d like displayed it the front page. Now, select a page to display the blog posts in, and you’ve got an old fashioned web-site! Through this page, you can also set the number of posts to display on one page. 5 usually works fine for most people. In the Discussions tab, you can set up commenting rules. Usually, these options are already optimally set, but you can play around with them if you feel like it. If you’d like to disable comments entirely in your weblog, just uncheck the option, Allow people to post comments on the article. Delete blog is kind of self explanatory, so I won’t go into the details. Just try to stay off it, if you want to lead a healthy online life. Under the Manage tab, you can manage posts, pages, comments, and categories. You can edit them, view them or delete them. Just be careful when deleting stuff. It’s usually irreversible. Now, the moment you’ve been waiting for! Let’s write an article. Click on Write, and you’ll be presented with the post box. Enter a suitable title, and write to your hearts content. When you’re done, categorise the post the same way you did your links. Now, click on Publish, and wait while WordPress. com puts your masterpiece out for everyone to see. Congratulations! You’re officially a blogger. Now, you should go ahead and write a page or two by clicking the Write Page sub-tab. Explain to people who you are, what you do, where you come from, what kind of toast you like - you know the drill. So go ahead - write. Enjoy yourself.

caveat Wordpress.com is a fairly new service, and has its ups and downs. There have been a few downtimes, but these are to be expected from a new host, and a free WordPress powered weblog is very nice to have.

andy skelton

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A

ndy Skelton has been a lot of things in his short life: entrepreneur, snowboarder, frat boy, guy in a cubicle, government agent. Now he works from home as an engineer for Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and the Akismet spam blocking service. He likes comfortable chairs, Rudy’s BBQ and Woodford Reserve Distiller’s Select Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey.

So Andy, tell us a little bit about your background and how you started to work at Automattic? I suppose the short version is that I started hacking around on WordPress in early 2005 and some of my code got Matt’s attention, so when he got Automattic started he asked me to come to work for him.

5

questions

Right. What areas of Wordpress.com have you contributed to the most? I’ve done a lot of core bug fixing and tweaking but the most visible stuff would be the tight integration with TinyMCE, the WYSIWYG editor, the uploading interface, the new Blogger importer and some plugins we use there: Widgets, Blog Stats and our Blogs Of The Day installation were mostly my projects.

I see. A question that’s on a lot of our minds is why Wordpress.com doesn’t allow custom template editing. Although XSS (Cross Site Scripting) vulnerabilites are a viable threat, is there anyway that Automattic can protect the site and allow this functionality at the same time? Obviously we want to provide as much freedom as possible without sacrificing the performance and security of the site. Customization is the single most requested feature on WordPress.com. It’s something we’re always improving - such as with Widgets and the new version of Regulus with custom header images. It’s probably possible to create a new templating system for WordPress so that anyone can make their own template without exposing things that should remain secure on the server. There are people working on this kind of thing in different ways: plugins, flexible themes, even core mods. Most folks are very happy with the options we provide, too. They’re very vocal about it in the feedback form. The few people who really need their own theme are encouraged to run WordPress on their own server space so that they have full control over their site. Personally, I encourage anyone who wants to make their own theme to install WordPress on their home computer and play with it. If you fall in love with it, you’ll probably want to rent space on a shared server and then you can also have your own domain name. It’s a lot of fun, but when you just need a place to blog you’ll still have the ability to do so on WordPress.com. I have blogs there as well as elsewhere.

In terms of usage, what sort of numbers has Wp.com got? Do you see it posing a viable threat to Blogger or LiveJournal anytime soon? You can see some of our traffic metrics over at Alexa. We have been growing at a comfortable rate. It keeps us on our toes, both on the hardware and software sides of things. We’re in the process of doubling the number of servers handling WordPress.com. I don’t really see WordPress.com as a threat, however. The competition is very friendly. There is no scarcity of people starting new blogs and we’re not out to destroy other services. That’s one of the great things about this market. I was chatting with some engineers from another blogging service at a conference and they were apologetic about how hard it is to export their blogs to WordPress. We’re all alike in that we want every blogger to have the kind of service that suits them best.

Thanks for your time Andy. Here’s one for the road. After looking at other blog services and the way they work, the way you see it, what has Wordpress.com done differently? Like a good BBQ sauce, a lot of things have gone into it that make it good. I think the main ingredient has been the open nature of the system. It’s built on open source software and we give a lot back to that community as new code, user feedback, network traffic and goodwill.

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By Tashiya Mirando

original

optimize

photo editing for dummies T

hanks to rapid advancements in visual tech, photographers can presently exercise a near absolute control over their own imagery. With countless applications, programs and tools dedicated to image-refinement at your beck and call, perfecting that final photograph is now simply a click away. Picasa, one of the most popular choices in the field, was acquired by Google in the summer of 2004. Keeping with their customary business strategy, it took Google a single week before the company stopped charging users for the application. The latest version, Picasa 2.0, helps you instantly organise, edit, share, print, backup and create all the pictures on your computer. Its best features allows you to move photos across your Windows file-tree, add captions to your pictures, pan, zoom and use twelve new lighting and colour effects; and that’s just the beginning. There are further options to save photos to an external drive, burn them to a disc, create a collage and blog them. The system requirements include a 300MHz Pentium® processor with MMX® technology, 64 MB RAM (128MB Recommended), 50 MB available hard disk space (100MB recommended), with an optional 56K Internet connection speed or better for access to online services. Once the application is installed, it immediately scans your system for photos and collects them into a single library. You also have

the choice of scanning specific targets like Desktop or My Documents, depending on the muddle of course. Images (jpg, bmp, jif), movies (QuickTime), and RAW file types (Canon, Nikon), are all supported. The photo library and Windows correspond well together and you can organise your photos into ‘Labels’ and use them across multiple albums. An easy search key named ‘folders on disc’ lets you keep a tab on the originals. Furthermore, you can change filenames, key in captions, and add ratings to your favourites. Photos can be tracked down easily with this application’s improved search tool, which lets you locate files by keywords, ratings and dates. To ensure maximum accessibility, the team behind Picasa added twenty-five new interface languages, which can be used to automatically match your computer’s native language. The real highlights of the application are the numerous photo-editing tools available. Once you have selected a photo, you can instantly crop, straighten and remove red-eye along with adjusting fill lights, highlights, shadows, and colour temperature. There are twelve effects from sepia to glow, film grain to soft focus, and saturation to graduated tint. The best part about it all is that if you do not like the edit, you can overturn it with just a click of a mouse. Interested in sharing your photos? In addition to sending

straighten

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pictures via your local e-mail client or Picasa’s built-in client, you can now send these images via Gmail. Uploading photos to popular photo sharing sites (Ofoto and Snapfish), is as easy as burning the visuals onto CD or DVD. Picasa 2.0 still integrates with Picasa’s photo sharing client, Hello, which works a lot like instant messaging software. You can also upload photos to Google’s popular blogging tool, Blogger. Picasa does not however offer dedicated tools for transferring photos to handheld devices such as mobile phones and digital video recorders for which you will need Adobe Photoshop Album. Here we will use Photo 0.Original as a working example of using Picasa’s tools to maximise the quality and potential of your visuals.

Step 1: Optimize Before doing anything fancy with your photos we first need to optimise the colour, light and contrast. Once the image has been imported onto Picasa, double-clicking on it takes you to the editing page. Afterwards, 1) Click 2) Change the to approximately 40% 3) Change the to 25% 4) There is no need to alter the <Shadows> in this image as there is a sufficient amount 5) Change the to 75%, which adds a light glow to the image

Step 2: Straighten Now that the colours are looking much better, we can move onto straightening the image. 1) Click followed by <Straighten>. A grid appears and you can “Straighten” the image to your liking 2) Click <Apply>

Step 3: Effects Here comes the fun part. The more you play around with effects, the more you are going to learn, so experiment! At this point, we use a few effects on offer as examples. 1) Click <Effects> 2) Click <Sharpen> ONCE 3) Click (Black and White) 4) Click <Warmify> 5) Click Make sure that the focal length is symmetrical. This option is best used where colour needs to be differentiated and shown off.

Step 4: Crop Last but not least, crop your image where necessary. This is a necessity in cases where unwanted areas of the photo take the focus away from the subject matter of the shot. 1) Click 2) Click 3) Click <Manual> 4) Place the cursor on the image, left click and drag. Adjustments can be made to size, area etc… after the initial crop has been made 5) Click <Apply> once you are happy with the image. You can always Click to make more changes. Handy Hints 1) When editing images, save each step as a ‘label’ so that you have constant access to it. 2) Effects – Play around with the ‘Tint’ and ‘Saturation’, which will give you a chance to have a colour scheme anywhere from, full colour to B&W. 3) Effects – ‘Soft Focus’ is best used for portraiture as you can highlight the focus to a greater extent. 4) Effects – Never ‘Sharpen’ an image more than once or twice, as this will leads to a grainy and over-defined image.

black and white

Good photography matters, as there is a limit to what you can do with a bad shot. Using programmes such as Picasa 2.0 as a tool to manage and edit your photos is sensible. However, real enthusiasts should also learn the finer art of photography, which requires instinct and creativity. Happy photo-catching!

warmify

focal B&W

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Photo Sharing By Chinthana Seneviratne

start upload

W

hat do people who have fancy digital cameras end up doing with their pictures? I’m not really sure. For us point and click goons, there is Flickr. What’s Flickr? Well, that’s what you’re going to find out. “Flickr - almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.” This is how the Flickr team describes themselves and most of those who use Flickr are bound to agree. Flickr was originally developed by Ludicorp, an Internet startup that originally became famous for their Game Neverending, an extremely popular online multiplayer game. Flickr was launched in 2004 and Game Neverending became history. The photo sharing service became such a success overnight that, in 2005 Yahoo! acquired Ludicorp and Flickr. After Yahoo! bought Flickr, it became possible for anyone with a Yahoo ID to login to login to Flickr. So if you have a Yahoo ID (and who doesn’t, these days), then you are once step closer to posting your lovely photos for the rest of the world to admire. If you don’t have a Yahoo! ID or you want to create a brand new one Flickr ID, the process is pretty simple as well. The form is pretty much your standard web registration form. Pick an ID, choose a password, enter your name, type in the security number and you’re done. An email confirming your registration is sent to your new Yahoo! Account which is automatically created when you create a new Flickr account. Once you have signed up, the first screen you see will look something like this.

tag

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Looking closely at this screen, there are three options provided, the first being “Upload your photos”. As a Flickr user, I recommend this feature as the best way to get started with Flickr; after all sharing the photos is why you signed up in the first place. Clicking on any of the nine thumbnails allows you to take a look at the photos uploaded by their respective users. If you don’t want to start uploading your photos just yet, links at the bottom of the page allow you to access

the wide array of options provided for registered users of Flickr. These options include links to editing your profile, inviting people, joining/exploring groups, and fiddling with comments and tags. We’ll now take a look at each of the important areas of Flickr, from uploading and organizing your photos to adding contacts, commenting and favouriting photos.

uploading photos to Flickr

profile

For The Masses

what are tags? Tags are basically “one-word” descriptions of your photos. The tags you assign will be attributed to each of your photos. For an example, if you are uploading photos of your family, you can insert tags like “family” leave a space and type “[family name] , [country] etc.” By doing this, if someone searches for any of the tags you put in, your photos will also be listed in the search results. You don’t have to insert tags for your photos. It’s an useful option, however. If you don’t insert tags your photos cannot be easily searched by others. It’s a simple as that. Now choose a privacy level. You are allowed to assign the photos you upload to “Public”, “Private – Visible to Friends”, “Private – Visible to Family”. When you make contacts, you can assign them as contacts, family or friends. We will have a look at this later on in the article. By default your photos are made public, which means, anyone can view them.

view

You can upload 6 photos at a time. Click the “Browse” button and select the image you wish to upload. If you have more than 1 photo, select all the photos (up to 6 at a time). Once you have selected the photos, you must add tags if you want others to be able to browse your photos.

privacy

Uploading your favorite photos has never been easier. If you just signed up and plan to upload photos straight away, click on the “Upload your first photos” link. If you signed in later on, click on “upload”. You should now see a screen that looks like this:

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Once you have selected all of these, click “Upload”. At this point you may, either enter individual tags or a description and/or a title for you images. If you uploaded multiple photos, they will be listed one underneath the other in this manner. After you have entered (or not entered) the data you want, click “SAVE” and the process is complete.

editing your profile On your home page, to the right side of the screen you’ll notice three links. Click the “Your Profile” link. This will take you to screen that displays your profile along with a link to “Edit your profile”. Click the “Edit your profile” link. Filling in the details for your profile consists of four parts. Namely, your information (name, time zone, gender, birthday and about yourself), Online bits (Website name and URL, instant messaging ID’s), Offline bits (occupation, address, city etc.) and rhings you like (Interests, books, movies, music etc.). Once you have entered this info click “SAVE”.

adding/editing your buddy icon Once you have saved your profile, you will be directed back to your profile page. Your buddy icon is the image that appears left of your Flickr ID. Click on the small grey image to edit it. To help you create an icon that is 48 x 48 pixels, Flickr has a neat little tool called the Icon Builder. First find the image you want to set as the icon. You have 3 options to select from, in my Flickr photos, on my computer, on the web. Once you have selected the image either by uploading it or from your photos, Flickr will load the icon builder. It allows you to crop the selected image to a 48 x 48 pixel square. There’s a little box that you can move around to select the area of the image you wish to display as your buddy icon. Once selected, click on ‘Make the Icon”.

setting up a Flickr URL Click on the Account page link displayed at the bottom of the page. All the options with a brief description is listed on this page. To setup your own Flickr URL go to the category named Your Own Flickr Web Page. The format of the URL will be www.flickr.com/photos/YOURNAME/. The screen allows you to enter the YOURNAME section.Now hit Save.

You can use this URL to give to friends and family.

privacy for your photos As I mentioned in the Uploading section, you can specify the privacy level at that time. You can change this setting at any time once the photos are saved to your Flickr account. • Public – Everyone can view “public” photos • Private-family – Only contacts who are added as family can see these photos. • Private Friends – Only contacts who are added as Friends can see these photos. You must be wondering who these contacts are. You can add friends, family or just contacts to your Flickr account. You can add people who are already Flickr members as any of the the previously mentioned types of contacts. Just click on the “People” link at the top of your Flickr home page to view your contacts. If you select the privacy level of an image to Family, only the contacts who are on your family list can view this image. There are other privacy options that you can use. To access and edit these setting click on the Account link.

inviting people to view your photos At the top of the page you’ll find a link ‘Invite”. You can invite up to 3 people at a time. Enter their email address, name, customize the message you want to send them and click Send. There’s a lot more we can do on Flickr now that we’ve signed up. It’s very user friendly and is evolving at a consistent pace, with new features being added on every few months. We’ve talked about the free account, which, although having no storage limit, comes with a 20MB monthly upload bandwidth cap and a limit of only 3 custom photosets. However there’s the pro version, which costs $24.95 per year and which includes a 2GB monthly upload bandwidth limit, unlimited storage, unlimited photosets, ad free browsing and sharing, and permanent archiving of high-res original photos. Of all the websites setup for sharing and storing photos online, Flickr is by far the easiest to use, the best deal in terms of storage (even for the free accounts) and has hoards of options and nifty little tools to play with. Sign up with Flickr and experience a whole new world of photo sharing.

Painkiller In a time where first person shooters have evolved from the primitive early days to today’s advanced game play, Painkiller stands out from the crowd by adopting back-to-basics running and gunning. Stripping itself of all current generation FPS elements, Painkiller is a throwback to the days of the first Quake, where your bloodlust would drive you through the game - and it’s an amazing thrill ride which is extremely fun to play. Painkiller is primarily a horror based game, and it does pretty well getting that feel across. The game is based on a story which is rarely apparent during game play, but surfaces in-between levels in the form of cut scenes. The initial cut scene will present you with the introduction to the story. Daniel and his girlfriend are on their way for dinner one wet and slippery night when Daniel happens to miss the speeding vehicle headed straight towards them. The two vehicles meet

by Raveen Wijayatilake

in a not-so-pleasant crash and both lovers end up dead. The girlfriend - who probably did more good than bad during her living hours - ends up in heaven. Daniel on the other hand ends up in Purgatory, a place in-between Heaven and Hell. Here he is informed that Heaven’s arch enemy, Hell, is planning an attack on Heaven with an army of demons. Daniel has been chosen to redeem his sins by protecting Heaven from the invading armies of hell. His goal: to intercept them at a strategic point in Purgatory, saving Heaven from the attackers. As compensation for successful completion of the task, he will be re-united with his lover in heaven. Thus your mission to save Heaven begins, armed with a map of Purgatory, a unique weapon called the ‘Painkiller’ and your urgency to kill every living demon. Painkiller feels like your average first person shooter, but has a few distinct differences and kinks. Your goal for every level

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is pretty straightforward - kill any monsters that get in your way and reach the bright glowing rotating thing which demarcates the end of a level. Each level is as linear as it gets in FPS’s. An arrow on top of your screen points you in the direction of where the closest monster is, though at times it may go limp and you’ll find yourself running around for quite some time looking for that last monster to finish off. Dead enemies disappear in a puff of dust and leave behind a green glowing ‘soul’ which act as health boosts. Collect enough souls and you will go into this phase called ‘Demon Morph’. This is a graphically amazing feature and is also a lot of fun – it will be explained later on in the review since it deserves a detailed mention. The game is divided into 5 chapters, each chapter having a number of levels. You face boss enemies at the end of each chapter, who are surprisingly complex to beat, and a big contrast to the mindless shooting experienced during levels. You will have to find the boss’s weak point and work on it to bring him down. For instance, one boss is susceptible to damage only if you shoot his sledgehammer, another boss will only take damage once you shoot out all mud bubbles he creates, and so on. This can be frustrating or very fulfilling, depending on how successful you are. At the start of a level you are given a side task which once

completed, unlocks ‘Black Tarot Cards’ which can be applied in between levels. These give you extra abilities, such as faster movement or gaining more health from souls. A task could be to use a certain weapon throughout a level, or collect all souls or coins. Coins can be found throughout levels by breaking objects like barrels and treasure chests. Collect enough coins and you will be able to buy unlocked Tarot cards. Though tarot cards can make your game much easier and at times very interesting, it isn’t really necessary at all and can be ignored completely - sticking to side mission tasks can take away from your game play experience. The game has 5 weapons at your disposal, and you will be able to carry all 5 with you at all times – no stopping and thinking what you will need most and dropping the least effective etc. Each weapon has a secondary fire mode which is nothing like the primary fire, so it really feels like you’re carrying 10 different weapons. Each mode of fire can be combined (which requires a decent amount of skill mind you) to cause combo attacks. For example, the shotgun’s secondary fire is an ice blast which freezes your enemies. These two can be used to kill those almost-invincible enemies by freezing them first and then shattering them with a blast of the shotgun. Another weapon worth mentioning is the Stake Gun. This shoots wooden stakes in an arced projectile,

comics by Penny Arcade

which instead of traveling straight, travels like an arrow shot from a bow. Using the Stake Gun on enemies is extremely satisfying since getting a hit is not easy, and once you do get a hit, the unfortunate creature you impale will get thrown back and pinned to a nearby wall. You will find yourself using the Stake Gun more often than it is useful for, just for the fun of it. The secondary fire is a grenade launcher which can be used to clear large concentrations of enemies rather easily. Launch a grenade and shoot a stake into it; the grenade will travel with the stake and explode on impact. This allows you to take out groups of enemies who can’t be reached with the use of just the grenade launcher.

parts. Use your Stake Gun and you’ll be able to pin enemies onto walls and other enemies. There is no deficiency of gore in Painkiller. You will find that the gore factor is quite high, since after all, it is based on a horror theme. Painkillers’ enemies are quite varied and artistically modeled. You will encounter fore’s of all sizes, from the small but dangerously annoying bulldog’ish animals to the huge pink crabs that you just can’t seem to put down. Each creature is uniquely modeled so that they add to the horror theme of the game. Some enemies are modeled for a laugh; you will find big fat men wielding bottles of alcohol, whose primary attack is throwing up on you. Others are more lethal, like the ninja and the Knight who can put you down pretty fast if you’re caught off guard. You will never find a lack of variety with the enemies you encounter.

The combination of dark atmosphere, suspenseful sound effects and freaky monsters can at times bring you very close to rendering your underwear wet

Painkiller employs the Havok physics engine, which you can see in play when you blast a fore with your shotgun or stake gun, or land a well placed shot from your rocket launcher in the middle of a horde of enemies. Use your shotgun at close range and enemies will fly backwards, arms flailing. Get closer and your enemy will be dismembered into a rain of bloody

The level design is another impressive feat by the develop-

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ers. You might expect a battle in hell to be full of flames and nothing else. Instead, each level takes place in a real world environment. You will battle enemies in places like abandoned warehouses, industrial complexes, insane asylums, opera theatres and medieval castles. Each environment is extremely well done, and if you take time to explore the details of the environment a little, you will end up spending some time wondering what they all mean – most have some connection with evil or hell. The enemies you battle will spawn according to what your environment is – Knights in the Castle, weird straight jacketed freaks in the insane asylum etc. The boss battles will take place in rather large open areas where you will do a lot of running around to escape the boss attacks. Today’s first person shooter has shifted concentration from the pure fear and twitch based game play towards a more complex kind of theme. In that sense, when you play Painkiller, you will realize there’s nothing complex about it. This game comes alive, and is most fun to play when a couple of hundred zombies and skeletons spawn all around you - the music starts thumping and you start a frantic run and gun of the purest form. The overpowered nature of your weapons makes it that much more satisfying. That said, there is a certain element of ‘strategy’ to the killing. There is a most efficient way to deal with each enemy. For example, there’s a horde of undead skeletons charging at you with rifle butts

raised high, and your letting loose a shower of lead on them with your rocket launcher/chain gun combo. At the very moment you think you’re under control a big pink crab creature will spawn, who’s almost invincible to the chain gun. In this sense, you will have to use your head and act according to the situation, so it’s not always just plain mindless shooting – just most of the time. The weapon combo’s come in handy a lot during the intense fights, and if executed right, can give you a very satisfying and life saving result. The ninja-star shooter shoots lethal stars at your fore and has a secondary fire which emits electricity. Combine these two and you can charge a star and shoot it into the ground near a group of enemies, frying everything around it in the process. Though these combos will definitely make life easier for you, you will find yourself with the shotgun for the majority of the game. It is the easiest, most effective weapon, and whose ammo is most replenishable during levels. Painkillers’ enemies will not employ any tactics or strategies at all. They will spawn, turn towards you, and run. This isn’t a drawback gameplay-wise at all, since when a few hundred weird looking human-animal hybrids are charging at you, you tend to forget about how they should have actually hidden by that pillar and flanked you. You can tell that Painkiller was made for this kind of raw fun. Overpowered weapons, hordes of zombie monsters and a lot of flying gore gives you

a very satisfying experience. Even the switching of weapons is animationless. Switch weapons and your current weapon will vanish, being replaced with the selected weapon. Faster switching means more time for feeding Knights some lead, or maybe a wooden stake or two in the abdomen. Another strong feature of Painkiller is its awesome graphics. From the modeling of enemies to the textures of the environment, Painkiller has the ability to scare the living daylights out of you. The combination of dark atmosphere, suspenseful sound effects and freaky monsters can at times bring you very close to rendering your underwear wet. One level puts you in a haunted and dark insane asylum, where semi-human like creatures in straight jackets crawl around and attempt to lunge at you. The shock factor here is not because of a sudden jump or anything of the sort, but just the total creepiness of the character modeling. The lighting, though not playing a major part in the game, looks realistic. Environments are full of stuff that can be broken - barrels, coffins, pots, statues and other ornaments depending on the level. Once the action starts, particles start flying, and if you take a moment to look away from the ugly demon charging at you, you will be awed by its effect. Get whacked by an enemies’ bat or sword and your vision blurs, which is a nice effect. As mentioned earlier, if you change into demon morph mode, your vision turns shades of black and white and enemies stand out in bright and dark red. This looks brilliant and does a good job of giving you the feel of invincibility. The first time you experience demon morph mode will be one of those times you just sit and stare at the screen in awe and think “now that is a nice effect” The sound in Painkiller plays a big role in the darker and creepier levels. Enemies make appropriately meaningless grunts and screams. Guns sound like they should, and so does the impaling or dismembering of an enemy. The soundtrack consists of some decent heavy metal tracks, which go well with all the action you’ll be playing through. If you want to relive the days when getting through a level meant killing everything in a room and not much else (don’t be ashamed, you’re definitely allowed to), if you want raw gory action with lots of dodging and shooting, if you want pure adrenaline based twitch gaming - Painkiller is for you. With excellent graphics and sound to compliment the hectic game play, Painkiller is a definite must for any FPS fan.

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by Sanjana Hattotuwa

information apocalypse

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I sell something so virulently addictive that I put Pablo Escobar to shame. I sell information. I sell information as if I and I alone have the keys to solve the problems of collaboration, productivity and peace by better use of information. Truth be told, we’ve always been surrounded by information. And we’ve always managed rather well. Humans are defined by their ability to tune into and appropriately respond to sensory perception, feelings and emotions and instinct. We are information junkies all. We thrive on external stimuli to make our lives interesting. Touch, smell, sight, the incredible spectrum of emotions we go through in a single day define our lives and who we are. We define our lives by how interesting our stimuli are, and how we respond to them – whether through inebriation, drugs, meditation, murder, rape, prayer, silence, music, art, violence or the thousands of other ways through which we respond to our environment as we see fit – information is the silent force that drives who we are, what we do and how we do it. Like air, it is all around us. We are bombarded with it - literally, since with the evolution of mobile telephony and satellite TV, almost every corner of Earth is bombarded with bits of information every second of every day. The problem is, not every one can access this information. Or more accurately, while we’ve always been able to access information through our bodies and what is within our geo-physical reach, information from beyond our borders can only be accessed through devices such radios, TV, PC’s and mobile phones. Humans have evolved to embrace such devices. We are slaves

to them – the couch potato, geek, SMS addict and Bill Gates are all different manifestations of the same malaise. We are hooked to devices that provide us with information to tune into or tune out of the world at large. This begs the question, has mankind’s exponential growth in harnessing the power of information resulting in a better world? Or, with up-coming technologies such as presence aware devices (that can pinpoint where you are, know whether you are free or busy and vibrate, beep, blip or play Backstreet Boys ring tones accordingly) we can really envision free time as time disconnected from a sentinel and omnipresent web and internet? Something obviously is wrong. Despite the promise of free time - time to spend with our lovers if married, or at the pub if not - our Blackberrys and Palms are always within our reach, alerting us of urgent emails and impending deadlines. We do not turn off our mobiles phones, our TVs and PCs are always on standby, our email clients primed every 3 minutes to check for…. well, spam. And yet, we are insatiable. More and more information is desired – even though we haven’t figured out what to do with what we already posses. Information is our fix – we measure our manhood (if male) or our emancipation from it (if female) by the perceived liberation that technology and information affords us. That a geriatric man in the US Federal Reserve can send jitters through open markets means that some hapless stock broker is beeped in the middle of night with a fall in stock that bears no relevance to the fact that he is in Colombo, bitten by mosquitoes, in the middle of a blackout is one example of how useless information can

Artwork by NRG78 (flickr.com/photos/nrg78) Creative Commons license

be. How pointless, in this age of instant news, information can be in building a better life. La Dolce Vita – the Good Life – is the central promise of all technology and information. From door cooling fridges to air-conditioners that bring Nuwara Eliya to Colombo, technology is the new opium of the masses, since even religion is now proselytized increasingly through the web than through eroding congregations. With technologies such as PCs, TVs, radio, PDA’s and mobiles phones come an even greater promise of information that helps build the good life. Sri Lanka is just waking up to the possibilities of a true information society – where we are all connected in one way or another to a ubiquitous web of information that bombards us with details of shopping, sports, lifestyle, politics, news and other content that is personalized to individual tastes and purchasing power. The new globalization is invisible – it is electronic and it is mobile. The good life is only achieved through camera phones, door cooling fridges, high-definition video, plasma TV’s and the Xbox 360. Without these, we are nothing. Problem is, in our information age, marginalization of those without access to such devices is a very real threat. Sri Lanka, along with the rest of the developing world, share a bond of chaotic humanity that is a great challenge to the technocrat who wants to flood societies with cybercafés to promote an information revolution. However, this chaotic humanity of cows, humans, and dogs is a vital social structure with its own sophisticated information management architectures.

Caste systems, traditional mediation and alternative dispute resolution are two examples of extremely complex information management structures that preserve social order by providing ways through which information, delivered through the right channels at the appropriate time, ensures that everyone knows their place in society, what they should be doing and what they can do to avoid conflict turning into violence. These systems are easily scoffed at – but in their efficiency at maintaining order through centuries is something that modern day technology and information management systems have yet to parallel. Problem is, while we’ve always lived in information rich environments, today, we are mere glyphs in a complex matrix of information relationships. Our wives we SMS, our colleagues we chat through IM’s, our clients we email, our news we get through RSS feeds or websites, our entertainment we download onto our PC’s, phone or iPod’s, our vacations we scout through 3D immersion, our dates we fix online. What we have lost in essence is the human touch. A letter, a coffee with a friend, a call without an agenda or even a postcard from a foreign place – these are now exotic, rare and dying in an age of Flickr, Google Video, Gmail and 3G – technologies that allow us to experience the adrenalin rush of a roller-coaster and at the same time SMS our mothers back in Colombo that we are enjoying ourselves responsibly. But really, do we care? We already live in an age where what is virtual and real are coalescing – take the case in 2005 of a Chinese gamer who

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killed another gamer because of an argument about a sword in a online game they were both into. Or just more recently, the case where details of an attack on a school in Kansas in the US, posted onto myspace.com, resulted in the arrests of several deviants who were planning a killing spree on the lines of the Columbine massacre a few years ago (what is with the US, guns and violent teenage angst anyway?) Technologies like Google Earth, though they serve no serious purpose at the moment, allow me to point out my mother’s home in Sri Lanka to those who didn’t till then know that Sri Lanka existed as a separate country in relation to India. Two million users of Dialog mobile telephony in Sri Lanka exchange millions of SMS per year – there are entire friendships that are maintained via SMS, because they are too busy to meet up in real life, even though they may only be a block away from each other. I IM my colleagues downstairs instead of calling them up and we are all most often caught up in our own iPod world – tuning out Colombo and the heat, chilling to the grooves of the now banned Buddha Bar available freely for download on the web. We go for coffee not with friends, but with our laptops. We live in cocoons that we rarely emerge from. Even in daylight and in public, we are protected from the obscenity of the masses from information that is our own – our Playstation Portable, our iPod, our laptop, our PDA and our mobile phone. But in each device and through each device, we are also expanding our horizons. From news tailored to our parochial interests to our particular pornographic fetish (iPod friendly Lolita videos anyone?) the information age is defined by technologies that no longer require us to temper our personality traits to live harmoniously with others. Our essential anonymity is key - our blogs are racist, we play Doom 3 to live vicariously someone else’s war against terrorists, we project our every intimate personal desire on to the web, in the hope that someone, somewhere, finds it kinky enough to leave a response. We are entering a world where we are socially exclusive, virtually inclusive, where we have more friends online than in our neighbourhood. We are enervated in real life, but are loquacious in our ideas for social change in our blogs – so long as someone else does all the spade work. This is simply our world today. Connected, always-on – we are the system. I sell information, but I don’t sell knowledge and wisdom. I can’t.

Wisdom and knowledge are not features of technology and information alone – at least not yet. More knowledge is still to be found in good library than on the internet or web. More wisdom is found through a village Elder than all of Google. Today’s most sophisticated and powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) programmes struggle to answer natural language queries and spelling errors, issues humans overcome with ease. We get SMS updates on killings in the East of Sri Lanka, but do we really know the context and what gave rise to the violence? “Bringing Peace to Sri Lanka” in Google brings up 5 million hits – none of which will bring peace alone and some of which may actually contribute to greater violence. We are zealous in posting opinions on the web on conflict and peace, but can’t contextualise and frame the issues we speak of since all we have is information to barter and no knowledge to make sense of it. Is information alone going to make the world a better place? Connected, yes. Interesting, perhaps. Better, debatable. Debatable in some circles that is – for most others, it’s a way of life now and there’s no turning back. I peddle information to make lives better. That’s my spiel, that’s my angle, that’s my take on this so-called continuous partial attention to what’s happening around me. I believe in technology and the promise of greater access to information as a great leveller of society. As Sri Lanka joins the world in an orgiastic blogosphere, we tend to forget the violence in our backyards, those visceral examples of why violence needs to be stopped if ever we are to truly talk about the benefits of an information society for all. No amount of SMS’s, MMS’s, high-definition digital videos, high resolution cameras, discussions on blogs, websites brings home the smell of a burnt and rotting carcass, flies inhabiting once living tissue and limbs thinly joined to a charred frame. Now that’s visceral –information that our news sources – RSS headlines, SMS updates, emails, video even - so often dilutes or renders impersonal. Knowledge that this is real, is occurring today and needs to be stopped along with the wisdom necessary to overcome these cycles of violence is what, at the end of the day, help make all the petabytes of information we have on tap, truly useful for the advancement of society. Till then, I’m open for business.

ASUS Won 1706 Awards in 2005

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ASUS Won 1706 Awards in 2005

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