TIPS for Vegetarian Travelers to Sri Lanka

Usually it’s very easy to find pure vegetarian (Eggs not considered as vegetarian but Milk considered as Vegetarian) food in Colombo. Areas like Bambalapitiya and Wellawatta have a vegetarian restaurant eating place every 100 meters. Usually the places are pretty clean, anyhow people who expect 100% hygene its better you choose the more expensive veg restaurants instead of the usual way side shops. For people who can afford little more and want a bit of more luxury can consider Shanthi vihar at Thunmulla junction, Food Waves at Hyde Park corner, Food waves at Nugegoda, Shanmugas outlet at the Crescat shopping Mall.

Any how my personal preferences are A1 Restaurant in Colombo 2, where it’s affordable for regular eating place and Food Waves at Nugegoda.

Watch Out For

Usually in Sri Lanka being vegetarian is a subjective thing and a lot of non-vegetarians claim to be one. So if you are trying to pick and choose vegetarian dishes at a non-veg place make sure you clearly verify if the dishes have maldive fish or not, in Sinhala maldive fish is referred to as “umbalakada”, any how be careful in pronouncing this word as if not pronounced correctly can sound awkward.In Tamil its called "masi".

If you are a vegan you might have to be extra careful to avoid the Milk related products at the vegetarian restaurants as its a common ingredient at Veg eating places.

If you are traveling out of Colombo then you would have limited options, unless you stay at a hotel which has veg dishes. Its better you communicate this before hand to the place where you are going to stay and according to your definition what you consider as Veg.

evolution of an "interview"

Few weeks back I managed to get something good written about me and get it published... the best thing is that I got it published on paper on the b'day....This is the accusation from my "dear" sister..lol

The funniest thing that happened was that I was told it might appear just on paper and I was thinking it will not reach too many people. When I gave the answers to the questions provided by email I was not at all worried. But on a Friday night quiet uncharacteristic of me to be working, but on that day i was at my office desk, when Gura sent me a link without even a "hi". I clicked on it to find the "interview" appearing on the link. Goodness gracious me, it has reached the "feared" guy ;) living in the land of rising sun even before I knew about it. I had a fair amount of answering to my friends and a hell of a lot of feedback ranging from a few good ones to a lot of funny ones. To most I promised that I will put up my exact answers here for them to read after the interst in this joke dies off. So as promised my answers appears here,

1. Tell me about your background?
(Where you are from, family background) I was born in Jaffna and brought up in the beautiful city of Kandy and currently working in Colombo. My father is a retired teacher and my mother is the “home maker”. I was born as the last in the family with three siblings. People at home are my greatest sources of energy. I had a blessed childhood with the care and security of my parents and a life within the Trinity College school compound itself, since we lived in the quarters. I had always been lucky to have parents, brother, sister, teachers, neighbors, friends and now at hSenid my colleagues, who believe in my ability, at times even more than the self belief I have about me.

2. What was your child hood dream?
(Describe about your ambition as a child)
As a child my dreams and ambitions were circumspect, but limited to the stereotypical careers like engineer, doctor and lawyer. But funnily as a child I never saw myself doing anything with computers, probably because I didn’t know what are the things that can be achieved in this domain and secondly thought that others around me were much better than me, when it comes to handling machines.

While being a child I wished I traveled the world like Ian Wright, the host of the discovery channel program known as lonely planet! Watching this program and fantasying about traveling like him was a routine activity of me and my sister.

3. Why did you choose Information Technology as your future?
(Describe the reasons behind selecting IT as a career path)
Soon after I completed my advanced level exams I started to experiment with web development and got captivated by the joy of seeing at work the pieces of code that I wrote, this excitement was the single biggest influencing factor in taking IT as my career path. The other thing that influenced me to take to IT, was the fact that I was fascinated by reading about the humble beginnings that the big players like yahoo and google has had and I was convinced that this is a field that we do not have to be dependant on having any ancestral inheritance and its more of a level playing field even with the developed world. Our success will mostly depend on what we do in present and not much on what others had done on the past.

Another reason might have been that I knew for fact that in this field you can be mostly dressed in casual clothing and would have the least amount of formalities. (Just kidding)

4. What is the impact IT has made on you?
(Note the changes, a brief comparison of your past and present)
Straight out of university I joined hSenid Mobile Solutions as an Associate Software Engineer. On paper I had a degree specializing in Computer Science from the Faculty of Science, University of Peradeniya and was a CIMA passed finalist. I was eager to apply the things that I had learnt from both Computer Science and Management and see them at use.

hSenid provided me with a good ground for me to put the things that I learnt to practice. I was pushed out of my comfort zone and was given challenges on a continuing basis. Currently I lead the Business Solutions Division. As a team we are primarily responsible for understanding the business requirements of our customers and proposing technical solutions. The usual tasks shall be like requirement gathering, feasibility studies, scoping, presentations, technical clarifications, demonstrations and of course a lot of traveling.

At the same time I was made into a MySQL expert at hSenid and currently a certified MySQL Cluster DBA and an authorized MySQL instructor. This gave me an interesting opportunity to conduct trainings on MySQL on a regular basis. This provided me with an opportunity to train students from more than 10 countries and at most times the students were older than myself and even had a few people with industry experience as much as my age to join my trainings. I was humbled by the attitude shown by them and made me realize that how much knowledge is valued and respected. Further at hSenid Mobile working on open source technologies gives me a sense of eternal satisfaction.

As part of my job I had got an opportunity to realize a childhood dream of mine, which is to travel the world. Looking into my passport the other day I realized I had traveled out of the country 15 times during the last 18 months and been to 5 different countries already and have scheduled business engagements in two more countries during the next month.

In short the experience at hSenid Mobile Solutions, which is a truly Sri Lankan multi national company had been exciting and it has given me a wider audience to perform in front of. I am very much thankful for the support and guidance I get from Dinesh(CEO), Harsha(CTO), Jerome(Senior Manager – Product development) and Ruchith (CTO, hSenid Malaysia) with respect to my career.

5. Why should I select Information Technology as my future?
(Describe why you think it is best for me to study, learn IT and work in IT)
If you are irresistibly attracted by the things that can be done by computers, has a thirst to learn and ready to take on challenges then this is the industry for you. IT is an industry with a global potential which is large enough to take in people with varied skills to play different roles and also has enough opportunities for individuals to carve out a niche for themselves. As our CTO Harsha said at a recent presentation for a group of university students “you do not have to be already the ‘Best’ in the batch, class or group, all you need to be is good enough and be committed to learn and practice it for a considerable amount of time to become the best ultimately!”.


The writer did a great job by putting it all together and making it read like a real interview. As it appears here,
http://prwire.blog.com/5189113/

having html tables in blogspot

If you want to have an HTML table included into the blog as I had done in my previous post. Make sure that you remove all the spaces in the HTML code.

If you write code like.

<table>
<tr><td>hii</td></tr>
<tr><td>hii</td></tr>
</table>


Then the table will have a lot of spaces from the top. So to avoid getting the spaces, have the code like

<table><tr><td>hii</td></tr><tr><td>hii</td></tr></table>

Forget about readiablity and coding standards. :)

This is written solely to get some traffic to the blog...lol

Seven Lessons Learnt in Dark

Life is not a bed of roses is a statement that you might very often hear, but I wish I could make an addition to this statement by saying that,

Life is not a bed of roses and if it seems like a bed of roses then you are not living ;)

I know I sound a bit pessimistic by that statement, but I feel that dark periods in life can be a great learning curve and could be used in a positive way.

I had a period in life which I would undoubtedly call as the "darkest period" in my life up to now. The span of this period was not a day or two it was for nearly 3 to 4 years when I was personally feeling doomed and as a family shattered. A failure or two made me come to the conclusion that I was a loser. It was a period of life in denial and fear. Made me spend a lot of sleepless nights just rolling in the bed and then when the eyes closed due to tiredness one thought would come and shake me out of the sleep. Last thing I wanted to do was to meet people, due to the fear that I will be just asked about one bad thing or the other and might make fun out of it. Bitter experiences with a few people suggested that my side of the explanation will never be listened to as people were already with pre-conceived ideas. These were days where I wanted to be at a place all by myself to cry out loud. For brief period found refuge in visiting the temples, but then again after some time stopped it when I found that even the temple had too many people and my own room was a better refuge.


My Intention here is not to talk about the circumstances of that bad period, but instead discuss some good lessons I learnt during this time. My intended audience of this piece is for anyone who is going such a period in life (If ever this would be read by anyone). They might be able to take some points from here to help them come out of it. But believe me life cannot be applied in templates, my way of things might not be the solution to your problem and what I say might be totally incorrect when applied to you.


1. Make decision after minimizing the sentimental factors
When ever we become emotionally attached to things the decision we make too becomes subjective and biased. At times when bad things happen considering them to be “blessing in disguise” could help in keeping the morale up.

2. One of the easiest ways to solve problem is by thinking from the other person’s shoes
A thing we Sri Lankan’s seldom or never do. It can be at the level of family, friends or even between communities learning to think from the other person’s shoes at times gives the chance to realize the harsh realities around problems.

3. Stop perverting data in the way we like to see
Another thing at which we Sri Lankans are excellent at! But unfortunately by doing this we are lying to us and being hesitant to face reality, it can make the situation bad to worse and at times we might be sleeping in the grave that has been dug for us and still be twisting the story.

4. Time is a good healer
I learnt that for non – physical illnesses time was a good healer. Especially when good people have misunderstood me or my ways. At that point arguing or even standing on ones own head might not convince them, but with time as we live our life with a genuine intent they would realize the ultimate truth. So to make this happen, give enough time to heal the wounds in heart.

5. Mind is the greatest Asset invest in it
Training the mind and learning to keep it coherent can be one of the real factors influencing a complete turn around. Though I am no expert in this was at times impressed by the content written by Swami Vivekanada in this regard.

6. Learn to position things.
Positioning is an art. I try to analyze people and think how they are positioning stuff. I first learnt positioning stuff with my amma, after I went out shopping for her, usually I forget that I need to get the goodies back home and get occupied either watching people play or get myself involved in it. So usually I will get home about 2 to 3 hours late and now to ‘ice’ amma I need to position the reason. This was the first place I learnt to position stuff and I think knowing to position well can be a big blessing to solve problems. But the fine line between lying and positioning should not be misunderstood.

7. If you had hit the rock bottom - remember it can be converted in to an opportunity

When at the rock bottom it gives two choices, either live in denial for ever and accept suffering as a way of life, or consider it to be an opportunity. Since we will neither be in the spotlight and scrutiny of the society nor required to live any longer in the fear of failure. Seriously it was hard to think about alternatives and options at this sort of time but after sometime I felt much relieved to rebuild the life at a slow pace doing what I wish to do, instead of doing what the society wants.

Believing that the odds would change will keep us motivated to fight another day. It’s easily said here but going through and living it that way is a huge challenge, but having that thought that there would definitely be light at the end of the tunnel is very important.

TIPS for facing the CMMI Interview

The thought of CMMI interviews and audits are surely making some butterflies fly in some of our stomachs these days. I list down a few tips here which might
be helpful in preparing and facing the interview in a better way.

********************* Before the interview **************************

1. Check Artifacts
Before the interview go through the checklist and see if your project or process has all the relevant artifacts and check if they are at the mentioned common location.

2. Read the process documents.
Go to the Process Asset Library [PAL] and read the process document/s which is/are relevant to your role in the project.
If a Developer - Read the Software Engineering lifecycle document, Configuration Management, Decision analysis and resolution
BA - Requirement Management Process and Configuration Management
QA - Delivery Assurance and Configuration Management
But better if you can check all the process area docs.

3. Find the PIID document and check the questions and the artifacts listed under them.
Here you will come across the CMMI terminology and will get to know what is the artifact that you need to mention about when asked a specific question. If you are desperately out of time consider even memorizing the questions and the artifact in the PIID file, but better if you can understand it.


4. Have a story to tell
As the project team sit down and plan out a consistent story to tell. For example if the BA says he prepared the Requirement traceability then the others need to follow it up by mentioning about it when they answer questions. So plan and have a coherent thinking process to explain the flow of the project.


5. Make sure you know the following terms in CMMI context before you go to the audit,
Baseline, Commitment, PMP, PAL, Integration Testing, Check list, DAR, Configuration Management, Artifact, Work products, Process Documents, Process Templates

********************* At the interview *****************************

5. Remember that the auditor is an outsider.
Do not assume that he will be aware of all the things. Explain to him every artifact as if you would explain to a small kid. For example, Just because you know and use SVN everyday doesn’t mean he will know what it is, so tell him about it and explain how you base line code and how the integrity of the baseline code is maintained.


6. Make use of the first question.
Just like in one day cricket the first few over will be with fielding restrictions, rather to be more specific the auditor will usually throw a very simple question first up. Make use of it; elaborate a lot on the project flow using this question. If you mention most of the things he is looking for in this question, you will get lesser number of questions thereafter. But incase if you miss this opportunity you will end up getting a lot of questions which are really hard to understand with some strange terminology.


7. Ask if not clear
If you do not understand the question politely ask him to repeat it for you. It’s perfectly alright to do so.


8. Make sure you refer all the artifacts while answering the questions.
It’s an unpardonable sin if you miss out on mentioning all the artifacts in you process, so mention all the things, even small things like, xplanner, svn, checklists, review documents, bugzilla, project plan, dash board and so forth.


9. Do not try to innovate.
Remember that the auditor is not your customer and don’t try to impress him by trying to make up a story that you never practice at the organization. This can back fire a lot. Secondly do not try to show off what you had read in the process documents too much unless it has been made use of in the project.