Nirmal Jayasinghe

I really shouldn’t be here. Really, I must study, and I have a cold. And the airconditioning here is really not for my good health..

Last week was our last day of lessons for this term. Hasn’t been a real nice term as well. Got two very bad scores this term: one for microcontroller programming and one for transmission system/computer interface design. Actually a shame. For Transmission and interface design it was that I turned up for the test at 3.00pm when actually it was at 2.00pm. Very nice, as one of my pals said. Must really pay attention, now.

This has been a real hectic term. I went through more bullshit during this other than any term else. So now here’s the score; I have to do really, really well at the finals [in one week] or else, curtains for yours truly, ah hahahaaa!

Wish I could stay at home in peace and work. But it simply doesn’t work. And here I have resources I have to tap into. I’ve been really reluctant on library visits since my mid terms. And not forgetting the course Web site, too.

I should be studying, not posting, haha, so now I guess I’ll close me browsers and go into my work, hopefully..

Wish me loads of good luck!

I’ve found this nice typesetting system thanks to my lecturer. He gave us an assignment to do. When he got to know that we were using WYSIWYG word processors he was like “Oh still you use these WYSIWYG editors? Shame on you! I use this LaTeX system all the time…” and went on to tell us about it. It seemed nice. I knew about the program vaguely but that was the first time I also gave it a good hard look.

LaTeX is a command-based document preparation system,(actually for the TeX typesetting program) written way back in 1984. Mostly used by scientists and engineers for related publications. The attractive thing is that you don’t need to worry about subtle things on how the document formatted. You fire up your text editor and without thinking anything about formatting, type out the raw content. Then you add some little formatting commands, like, for section headings, lists etc. Need a fancy title page? In three simple lines, you give author, title etc. info., and LaTeX will simply type out a nice title page for your document. In a single command, you select the document type: article, report, book etc. LaTeX automatically takes care of chapter division, paragraph division, subsection, sub-subsection, page formatting, text justification, footnotes, paper size, font size, text columns, emphasis, sp. character insertion,… you name it, with simple text commands. What got my attention really was the ease with which contents page and especially the appendix can be created. Marvelous.

LaTeX can nicely handle the obscurity of mathematical formula printing. All done via simple text. For instance, you can type the legendary LaTeX logo with the simple command ‘\LaTeX{}’. You can never print it using that ease if you use any fancy WYSIWYG word processor (I don’t know whether you can, actually). Once I used an everyday word processor to prepare a mathematics-heavy paper, oh my god it was hell. If I had known about this I’d have done it in a breeze. Still I’m learning its powers as I got to use it since very recently, it’s so comprehensive.

I use LaTeX mainly in GNU/Linux (although there are Windows versions). Using command line it’s very easy. You type the content in your favorite text editor, save it with the .tex extension, give the latex command in the command line with the filename as argument to get the formatted text in a new file (usually .dvi extension). Then you can give the dvips command in the command line with that filename as argument to convert it into Adobe Postscript data to send it to a printer. In addition, you can use the pdflatex command to convert your .tex file directly into a shiny new PDF file (my preference).

Although I discovered its pleasures only recently, it managed to separate me completely from WYSIWYG work when it comes to high-quality document preparation. No kidding, when you take a LaTeX-formatted document, you can tell the difference instantly. The font, the crispy accurate format, the professional look [and of course with a fraction of the hard work if done otherwise], you can just never achieve using anything else.

The LaTeX project Web site is at http://www.latex-project.org/

Software doesn’t seem to be a matter of big concern to us ordinary guys in Sri Lanka. Actually we do not [almost] recognize any difference whatsoever between proprietary and free and open source [FOS] software. This is mainly due to copyright infringement of software prevailent here. We can buy almost any piece of software we need from the ProgramLand [which translates to your local CD shop], we do not see the real value of the software.

Most of the software used today in Sri Lanka are not properly licenced. For instance take the Windows XX operating system you and I use. How much did you pay for it? For mine I really don’t know. I paid about SLR 50K for the computer. But if I bought properly licenced software, I’d have paid similar amounts for the OS and the office package. But I didn’t.

This is not the case everywhere. You cannot do it in foreign countries and you have to pay huge sums in licence fees. And most of these proprietary software, you cannot see the source code of it. That means you’re not allowed to highly customize the software as you would like to.

This is where free and open source software comes into play. Actually I’m a huge fan of them, and wherever possible I try to use them. The difference is that you don’t have to pay license fees for this type of software. And most of them have their source code published: so hackers can customize the thing to cater to their every wish. They are most of the time developed as community projects over the internet, which means that a lot of people are constantly developing and debugging them: and they don’t have any harmful pieces of code. Why? Simply because everyone would see it if they do!

Examples for this type of software include the excellent OSs like Linux [many flavors] and FreeBSD, office package OpenOffice, programming languages like Python and perl, Web servers like Apache, and oh.. the list just goes on and on. I myself use a lot of them cause, well, it’ just great and feels good. And I think in the future FOS skills are going to be very important.

Anyway here I don’t think it’s going to be a big issue whether you’re using free or proprietary software since we pay the same for both if we buy them, unless of course you download them over the internet or anything. And I don’t think in near future the proprietary thing would be a problem here.

But one thing is for sure: we won’t be able to buy all the software we need for say SLR 75-100 for ever. Slowly we also will have to pay the price. That’s why free and open source software would be very much beyond and enthusiast’s agenda.

My life is almost untouched by worldly affairs. I go to school/work [or stay at home looking after it] every day, undaunted by what is happening in the outside world, no matter where it happens, when. I simply don’t pay attention and I don’t want to know. All I care is my welfare. As long as it’s taken care of, I just don’t care.

I have ample supply of water when I step into shower in the morning, so I don’t care whose water sluices are closed by whoever, not to mention where. I let it run all the while I complete my work there: I don’t care there are people who walk miles to get a fraction of the amount of water I just wasted in my morning shower session.

I have plenty to eat, so I don’t care whose farms are destroyed by whatever, where, let it be drought, war or someone closing a dam or whatever. I only get concerned when the prices go up a bit here by, say, a fuel price increment. I complain when my electricity bills go up: I don’t know there’s a north in my own country where people aren’t concerned about such silly stuff. Not because they’re so rich, they don’t have it. They’re driven by primordial instinct of survival.

I don’t care about war, whether it’s going on in my country is not my concern. I’m a fan of the Air Force, because they don’t drop bombs on my home, so I don’t care if their weapons are landing near someone else’s doorstep, Why should I? They’re not even in my immediate neighborhood. What I rant about is why do they use those lame Kfir C7s and MiG-27’s: I wonder why they don’t buy some dedicated ground-attack Su-24/34s to finish it all off.

All I know of a war is footage shown by the TV, sometimes recorded by a UAV or something. As I see them, I cheer, since I have never even had a street fight in my calm residential drive so I don’t know the violence behind it. I’ve never been displaced by someone fighting in the fields nearby [or any reason whatsoever, only experience I have is shifting when we upgraded our home!], I don’t have claymores outside my gate. My children/siblings aren’t forced to fighting by some freedom fighter. Nor any of them are in Active Service. I don’t have a feeling towards that there are innocent people suffering, who are just like me. But I don’t feel: how can I? I put up my brave (cardboard) face up front and declare “Anything For The Country (as long as I’m not actively concerned)”!

I head the Tigers, I command the government forces. I wear red, I wear stripes. Most of my time, I spend in my safe haven. Why should I go out? Let them get all the bullets, suffering and whatever results. I don’t care, because I’m not concerned. I’m not involved. I’m the Insensitive Colombo Citizen.