My Thoughts

Who is Anita Borg?

2011-06-16T08:11:00.000-07:00

Triumph of the Nerds(?)

2011-06-16T08:04:00.000-07:00

The beauty of data visualization : David McCandless

2011-06-05T06:03:00.000-07:00

Sheryl Sandberg: Why we have too few women leaders | Video on TED.com

2011-05-18T07:33:00.000-07:00

Sheryl Sandberg: Why we have too few women leaders | Video on TED.com

Ralph Langner: Cracking Stuxnet, a 21st-century cyber weapon | Video on TED.com

2011-03-29T07:56:00.000-07:00

Ralph Langner: Cracking Stuxnet, a 21st-century cyber weapon | Video on TED.com

Welcome 2011 !!!

2010-12-31T10:14:00.000-08:00

Good bye 2010!!!
Many thanks to everyone who have guided me, been with me during all ups and downs in the year 2010...

It's time to welcome the new year 2011 !!!
It's going to be a year with new great challenges...

Richard St. John's 8 secrets of success | Video on TED.com

2010-10-21T22:39:00.000-07:00

Richard St. John's 8 secrets of success | Video on TED.com

Create your IRC Channel and make the logs publicly available

2010-10-08T10:56:00.000-07:00

I was trying to create an IRC channel for our final year project discussions and started with registering a channel at freenode. I thought of keeping logs to monitor the activities on the channel and with the help of Gryllida at #freenode, I was able to setup the log as well. So I thought of writing a blog entry to have all steps in one place so that it will be easy for my future reference as well as for some others.

Registering a channel at freenode:

Before registering the channel you should check the availability of the channel name. Use the following command

/msg ChanServ info #channelname

If the channel is already registered, it will give you some information about it. If not, you will get a response like the following

-ChanServ- The channel [#channelname] is not registered

To create the channel first you should join the channel.

/join #channelname

If you are the first person to join, then you create it. To register the channel use

/msg ChanServ register #channelname

This will link the channel with your nickname and will give your the top level access.

Registering for a shell space at Bshellz:

To persist the logs of your channel you should have to host a bot on a server somewhere. But sites like Bshellz provide free server account with limited space. To sign up for a free shell just send BeschBot ( after joining #bzhellz) the private message !wantshell.

To register, type

!register <desired-username> <email>

In a short while you will receive an email with the confirmation code. Then issue the command

!confirm <confirmation-code>

Once you have done that, your shell will be created in 5 minutes time and you will receive an email with all the details.

Once you have registered you every 168 hours visit channel #bshellz on Freenode Network, and say

!keep <username>

to make your shell active. If you fail to do this in a 168 hour period, then your account will be deleted.

You can access your server space via

$ ssh server1.bshellz.net -l <username>

if you are on a *nix platform. You can find the steps for other operating system here.

Enable auto logging:

After doing ssh into the server, you should issue the following commands

screen
irssi
/set autolog ON
/save
/connect irc.freenode.net
/join #channel

The logs will be located at ~/irclogs/

You can use Ctrl+A and then D to detach the screen. cd irclogs, ls , cd freenode,ls will take you to the freenode logs directory.

In this way you can access the logs by logging into your server space. But if you want to keep the logs accessible online, you can do the following.

Make the logs available publicly:

Make sure you have ~/public_html/. Then issue the command

screen -rAad
then
/set autolog_path ~/public_html/$tag/$0.log
and then
/save

In the above set command, $tag indicates the IRC server (freenode in this case) and $0 indicates the #channel. These variables change from network to network, from channel to channel, so they have a '$' before. The client would set these variables itself for any channels that you open. So it is enough to use the command /set autolog_path ~/public_html/$tag/$0.log

Then say something in the channel and do 'cd public_html'

Check whether you have the 'freenode' directory there by doing 'ls'.

If the freenode directory is not there then do 'cd ~' and 'chmod a+w public_html'.

Then issue

screen -rAad
/reload
then Ctrl+A ,D.

Say something in the channel and do 'cd public_html' and you should have 'freenode' inside.

You can access the logs via the following url

yourusername.bshells.net/freenode/#channel.log

If you couldn't access the page try the following

chmod a+x freenode
chmod a+r freenode

then

cd freenode

and

chmod a+r #channel.log

By doing this you will be able to access your logs via

yourusername.bshells.net/freenode/#channel.log.

You should remember to do !keep <username>
weekly at #bshellz.

This way I have successfully created the IRC channel with logs.

I should thank Gryllida at #freenode for the great support in figuring out the stuff with understanding.

Hope this will help someone...

Happy Moments...

2010-08-20T13:00:00.000-07:00

Couple of minutes ago I received the mail from the Google Open Source Programs Team announcing the final results of Google Summer of Code 2010. I am so happy that I got through the final evaluations :-)

Simply it was a lifetime experience and opened me new paths towards achieving many new goals... My special thanks to my mentors Sy Haas and Dr.Paul Biondich for their immense support and guidance throughout the summer.. All developers of OpenMRS were very much motivating and inspiring me towards contributing to open source... Thank you very much everyone... I would like to thank all my teachers and friends for their support in every way...

Just wanted to share my happy moments...

I will be writing more about my GSoC experience soon...

Thank you every one...

Reaching the Final Evaluations of Google Summer of Code 2010

2010-08-15T10:10:00.000-07:00

Last week was the final week of Google Summer of Code 2010 and I spent it in writing module documentation, documenting the code and completing few enhancements. I did some refactoring to the code - introducing a new class FlowsheetPanel to have the user interface generation code (earlier it was inside the onModuleLoad() of the Flowsheet EntryPoint class). This idea was suggested by my mentor Sy, to make the code re-usable. The user interface generation code was put inside the onRender() of the FlowsheetPanel class, which is a subclass of LayoutContainer. In the Flowsheet EntryPoint class, new instance of FlowsheetPanel was simply created and added to the root panel.

Searching for observations based on ConceptName was handled using the default filtering options in the Grid widget earlier; since that way is only known by the users who read the documentation or the users who explore the module, I added the search box on the on top of the observations grid, visible to all users. The image below show's the new search box:

Module documentation for the Flowsheet module was created in the wiki page located at : http://openmrs.org/wiki/Flowsheet_Module. This wiki page contains the details of the module, especially the features of the Flowsheet module and how to use them. Also I have provided link for other resources related to the module.

I documented the source code using class level and method level comments and checked in the code to the svn repository. Last Thursday I attended the weekly Developer Call and listened to the final presentations of the Group-3 GSoC students. There were some good presentation on GSoC projects.

According to the GSoC 2010 timeline, next week is the deadline for the final evaluations. I had an awesome 12-weeks, working on the Flowsheet module and with the OpenMRS community. It is a life time opportunity for me to work with the developers all around the world. As I have reached all the goals we planned for the summer, I am so glad and feel very much satisfied. I hope everything will be fine with the final evaluations... The great motivation I got while working with the OpenMRS community during this summer opened me new paths towards contributing to FOSS. I am sure that this is a good starting point for me to reach many targets in contributing to the Open Source communities... I will continue my contribution to OpenMRS in the feature and will try to contribute to some other open source projects as well...

Eagerly waiting for the final evaluations next week...

Leveraging the new features in GXT (Ext GWT) 2.2 Beta...

2010-08-05T08:53:00.000-07:00

I couldn't blog last week. So I will be writing about how I progressed with the enhancements to the flowsheet module in the past two weeks. I completed my final demonstration on July 22nd and it was very success. I received very good feedback and more motivation from the OpenMRS community. I was really happy to hear that the developers of the community liked the progress of the project and the new look to the module.

After the demonstration I started working on the feedback given by my mentors, Burke and other developers. One of the major issue I had earlier was the height of the main Grid widget. Earlier I had a fixed size for the height of the grid, an integer multiple of the number of rows in the grid. But in some browsers, there were more white spaces left in the bottom and in some other browsers there was scroll bar added to the grid. After trying with many options, finally I found the best way to do it following the AutoHeightGrid sample. Now the Grid's height is adjusted automatically.

Another feature suggested was to highlighted the selected obs value in the graph as well. I managed to do it my using a star for the selected value and dots for other values. The screenshot below shows the change:

I did the other small changes like header of the pop-ups, make windows to close when ESC is pressed, etc, as suggested. Thereafter I started working on the two tasks left in the development plan: Adding search functionality to search by a name of obs and handling abnormal flags.

I came across the new release of GXT and the features in Ext GWT 2.2 Beta. One of the major feature added is the functionality to filter grid columns using boolean, integer range, string values etc. I understood that this new feature will be handy in doing the first task I mentioned above and went through the sample widget using this feature. I managed to get the way to add the filtering feature and added it to the main grid of the flowsheet after upgrading the GXT jar to Ext GWT 2.2 Beta. The output was very nice! The filtering of column is very fast and easy to handle. Some screenshots below showing this new features:

I believe that this filtering feature will be very handy.

I added some code to show the abnormal values using a color code; this color code will be finalized with others' suggestions. I'll add data about the color code in the flowsheet once it's finalized, so that others can understand it easily. Since there are no much abnormal data, I couldn't check all the scenarios; I will be adding more data and checking them as well. Once such indication is shown in the screenshot below.

While reaching the end of summer in next two weeks, I am left with the documentation work now. I started on writing the module documentation and will be completing it by next week. Looking forward to complete all planned tasks before the 'pencils down' date of GSoC and then continue further enhancements with future versions.

More UI Enhancements to the Flowsheet module

2010-07-20T20:38:00.000-07:00

Last week was an eventful one with more UI enhancements. I learnt lot of new things about GWT and GXT, especially using the GXT Grid widget, while doing the UI enhancements. I did a major change to the UI by changing the widget to display the obs from simple GWT Table widget to GXT Grid widget. The Grid widget gives a very nice look to the UI. I added the grouping feature to group the obs by obs date and it's really a cool stuff. Another advantage of using the Grid widget is it's support for easy data binding. In the following paragraph I explain how the data binding is handled in the Grid widget.

The GXT Grid widget uses BaseModel class for data binding. We have to have the following stepts to bind data to the Grid widget:

Create the model class extending BaseModel class
Have required constructors, getters and setters in the sub class of BaseModel class
It is always ideal to have a primary key fields, so that a specific entry of data can be retrieved easily
Create the ListStore or GroupStore objects with the type of the BaseModel class

Subclassing BaseModel class

class ObsDataModel extends BaseModel {

public ObsDataModel(String date, String time, String value) {
set("obsDate", date);
set("obsTime", time);
set("obsValue", value);
}

public ObsDataModel(String date, String value) {
set("obsDate", date);
set("obsValue", value);
}

String getObsDate() {
return (String) get("obsDate");
}

String getObsTime() {
return (String) get("obsTime");
}

String getObsValue() {
return (String) get("obsValue");
}
}

Creating GroupStore

       GroupingStore store = new GroupingStore();
store.groupBy("obsDate");
store.sort("obsDate", SortDir.DESC);
          sotre.add(new ObsDataModel("xxx","xxx","xxx"));

Creating the Columns for the Grid

               List col = new ArrayList();
ColumnConfig column = new ColumnConfig();
column.setId("obsDate");
column.setHeader("Date of Observation");
column.setWidth(200);
col.add(column);

Creating the ColumnModel and Grouping view

  ColumnModel cm = new ColumnModel(col);
GroupingView view = new GroupingView();

Creating the Grid and and setting view

  Grid grid = new Grid(store, cm);
grid.setBorders(true);
grid.setStripeRows(true);
grid.getView().setForceFit(true);
GridSelectionModel gsm = grid.getSelectionModel();
gsm.setSelectionMode(SelectionMode.SINGLE);
grid.setView(view);

The screenshots below shows the new look to the UI. ( I have upgraded to the branch 1.7.x)

In addition to this, I did some improvements to the flowsheet pop-up. The obs selected from the main view of the module is highlighted in color. When clicked on any entry of obs in the flowsheet, it will shows more details of the obs including obs location etc. I improved the chart for numeric obs to have the range limited to 10% from more and above the max and min values. This removes unused extra space. In addition according to the available data, I've added the critical and normal range of the obs values for numeric concepts. If all data is available, it will shows the range. Otherwise it will give an interpretation using the available data (eg: 'range > xxxx' , ' range <>

During the last week I also looked at improvements to handle huge dataset. As the initial steps I measured the time delay for data transfer and rendering the UI, using the System timer. I've listed the average measurements below.

No of rows	Time delay for data transfer	Delay for rendering
240	1310ms	42ms
130	999ms	24ms
93	640ms	20ms
80	883ms	19ms
60	496ms	12ms

I started to look at possible improvements to reduce the delays in data transfer. This will be a major task left before releasing the inital version of the module.

I am looking forward to the demo on this Thursday. I am sure that I can give a good demo about the flowsheet module.

As I mentioned in my previous post, mid-term evaluations gave me more motivation to work on the project... I believe that it will bring me towards successfully completing the final evaluations as well...

Getting through the Mid-term Evaluations...

2010-07-16T12:54:00.000-07:00

Just now received the mail from the Google Open Source Programs Team, announcing the results of the mid-term evaluations for my project. Happy that I got through it...

Special thanks to my mentors Sy and Paul, and the whole OpenMRS community for the guidance and support... I am sure that with this great motivation, I can successfully complete the project and get through the final evaluations ...

Reaching the Mid-Term of the Summer

2010-07-12T20:55:00.000-07:00

We have reached the mid of the summer and the mid-term evaluations are to be completed during this week. I am really happy that I have reached far beyond my mid-term goals and completed majority of the tasks for the summer. Now I am left with few more tasks, ehancements and documentation. I believe I can complete them far before the end of summer and work more on future enhancements. I have updated the 'Planning' section of my project wiki . I am very much thankful to the whole OpenMRS community; especially my mentors Sy Hass and Paul Biondich, and Burke for their wonderful guidance and feedback on my work. The motivation I got from my mentors and the rest of the community was the secret behind my success in this project. I am sure that this will continue during the rest of the summer and in the future as well.

I was able to complete some nice feature additions to the Flowsheet module. I added a flowsheet section in the pop-up window which shows the obs values against dates in a tabular view. For numeric type observations, the pop-up window has a the line chart along with this flowsheet. The screenshots below, shows the newly added features.

I used the GXT's Grid widget to create the flowsheet. This required some learning since it has some data binding confiurations. I am planning to use the Grid widget for the main view of the module where the obs are listed in reverse chronological order. This will give a nicer look than the current one. I got ideas for some more features from my mentors and Burke and I am working on it along with the rest of the tasks. Looking forward to the demo on the 22nd, July.

Hope everything will be fine with my mid-term evaluations.

Creating a Date-range double slider

2010-07-06T00:46:00.000-07:00

Last week was a special one where I have created my first GWT-widget. As per the suggestions made by my mentors & Burke, I decided to have a Slider widget for the date range selection. The major reason for choosing this, beyond the nice date picker widget was the amount of space it holds in the whole page. I searched for a double-slider. But unfortunately either GWT or GXT doesn't have a double-slider. I found a sample double slider in the GWT incubator mailing list and I went through it. I followed the same way to create my widget for date range selection.

Creating the widget was a wonderful experience to create the widget, where I learnt a lot about the GWT framework. I learned about the base widgets,handlers and event listeners. I got help from the developers at ##gwt IRC. I was an amazing learning experience. And I was more happy when my mentors & Burke liked it.

Then I changed the way of concept filterting. As suggested, I modified that feature to select results by ConceptClass types. I replaced the ListBox widget with a CheckBoxGroup widget. The concept classes for which the patient has obs, will be dynamically generated as check box options. The screenshots below shows the new look to the module. The slider widget and checkboxes really reduced the space for the filtering options form and increased the area to display observations.

I got valuable feedback from my mentors and Burke. Currently I am working on improving the pop-up window with details, to have the line-chat and flowsheet together. Hope I can finish this before the next demonstration on July 22nd. Mid-term evaluations are to be held next week and I've reached the goals exceeding my personal expections. Having a great time and I am sure this will continue...

New Look to Flowsheet Module UI

2010-07-01T00:29:00.000-07:00

During the last week I added a new feature to filter patient history by Concepts. There are options to select all concepts at one or few concepts at once. The patient history will be filtered according to that concepts and will be displayed.

I used the GXT FormPanel to enhance the UI. The screenshot below shows the new look.

Then I worked on displaying details of a single observation when clicked on it. There will be a popup window showing the details. In addition for numeric type concepts, there's an option to view the history of that particular concept in a graph(line chart). Images below shows these features.

I sent the progress update to my mentors Sy and Paul. Paul suggested some changes to the UI. I am working on them during this week. We have planning to have a discussion on Skype to discuss more on improving the module features.

Fourth Week of Coding - Date Range Filtering

2010-06-21T18:25:00.000-07:00

Just completed another exciting week and now it's almost a month after coding started. During this week, I modified the class diagram posted in my previous blog to have some fields like hiNormal,hiCritical, hiAbsolute,lowNormal,lowCritical and lowAbsolute in the UIConcept class. The purpose is to indicate any abnormal values of observation. Using this values, abnormal flags are indicated in red text as show below.

I will use a more effective way to show the abnormal flags in the future.

As the next task, I worked on date range filtering of Patient data. I did some search about possible widgets to use for the date range selection. DatePicker and Slider were my choices. After reading more, I used GXT's DateField (which has DatePicker popup) widget for date range selection. Using a slider widget was not a good choice in my opinion since it will be difficult to select accurate values. Using the feature of the GXT DatePicker widget which allows to specify a Max and Min value of dates to be selection-enabled, I achieved the objective. This widget will only allow to select dates between the range the patient has records.

I modified the service method which retrieve patient data to have additional parameters in order to enable date range filtering. I am happy that we reached the mid-term goal roughly by finishing this task. But there will be much more improvements in these features.

The next feature I am planning to have is filtering data by Concept. Once this features is implemented, the user will be able to filter patient data according to the Concepts related to the observations of that person. I started working on this and looking forward to finish it by next week.

In the mean time I received the Google's welcome package. It included a note book, pend and two stickers. Also the payment card as well :) .

Looking forward to keep my passion growing...

Third week of Coding - Modeling the Transfer Objects

2010-06-13T21:20:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in my previous post, during the third week I worked on the modeling the required API classes in the GWT client side. When using GWT-RPC, the transfer objects should be serializable. The bean class can implement either java.io.Serializable interface or the IsSerializable provided by GWT library. When the GWT module is compiled using the GWT compiler, it will create these bean classes in to javascript and package them in the generated folder, which is used as a resources in the OpenMRS module. I came up with a initial version of the class diagram and it can be modified later on when requiring more details. The diagram below shows the initial version of the class diagram.

I added these classes to org.openmrs.modules.flowsheet.gwt.model package and modified the FlowsheetServiceImpl to use these classes. The image below shows the output I got.

Last Thursday I presented my project's first demo to the OpenMRS community during the developer call. I explained the project, integration of GWT-RPC to the module etc. I got good feedback and valuable suggestions from the community to handle huge amount of data. I am reading more on the suggestions to decide on the most suitable methodology. It was a great experience for me to present the demo to such a experienced group of developers. Their encouraging words always motivate me to give my best. Special thanks to my mentor Syfor guiding me to present the demo successfully.

Awaiting for many more excitements and experiences...

GWT Integration to the Flowsheet Module

2010-06-06T07:16:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in my previous post, during the second week of coding, I started figuring out the way to integrate GoogleWebToolkit(GWT) to the Flowsheet module. As I expected, it was a challenging task since I needed to find out the integration points. My thanks to my mentor Sy and the OpenMRS developer Daniel Kayiwa. Daniel has already done some work related to GWT in his Xform module. I am happy that I could find out the way to integrate GWT. Thanks to the folks at ##gwt IRC as well. I have written the details about the integration in the module wiki page. Here I will talk more about the problems I faced and how I managed to solve them.

I faced two major problems during the integration:

1. I used a div tag id "flowsheet" in the GWT UI code to get the RootPane. But since my module name is "flowsheet", there was already a div tag defined with the id "flowsheet". When I used the same id in the JSP to hold the GWT UI, there was a conflict and the GWT was not rendered properly. When I inspected via Firebug, I found that the content window retrieved by the new div area was null. But I couldn't figure out at the first try that the name duplication was the actual cause for the problem. While going through the generated code observed in Firebug, I found that there was already a div area with that name. When I changed the name of the new div area, in to some other name, it worked fine.

2. After reading the documentations, I came to know that the servlets under the web/src of a module can be accessed via http:/moduleServlet/flowsheet/flowsheetService. But I took sometime to figure out the format of the URI parameter for the @RemoteServiceRelativePath annotation of the RemoteService interface. The @RemoteServiceRelativePath annotation specifies the relative path of the Service. In this case, the compiled GWT code resides under . So if the relative path is given as /moduleServlet/flowsheet/flowsheetService, it will end up with
http://localhost:8080/openmrs/moduleResources/flowsheet/generated-folder/moduleServlet/flowsheet/flowsheetService. To avoid that, the location ../../../moduleServlet/flowsheet/flowsheetService is used. This will end up in the correct location of the service :
http://localhost:8080/openmrs/moduleServlet/flowsheet/flowsheetService

My next task is to decide on the UI objects to be represented in the client side of GWT. I have already started working on designing a class diagram for this purpose.

The first group of GSoC students presented their project progress during the developer call on last Thursday. This week is the turn for the students belong to the second group. I belong to the second group and eagerly waiting for this Thursday to present my progress to the OpenMRS developer community. I am sure that it will bring me lot of experience. Looking forward to it....

Started the New Journey - First Week of Coding

2010-05-31T18:26:00.000-07:00

The official coding period for Google Summer of Code 2010 started on the 24th of May. I was prepared to kickoff with coding. One the very first day, my mentor created a svn location for my module named "flowsheet". Since the name, Longitudinal Dataview Model was somewhat lengthy, we decided to go with "flowsheet" as the module name. I was having conversations with my mentor Sy via Skype and Sy assigned me the first task. It was to make the module's tab available in the patient dashboard.

I created a new module using the OpenMRS Eclipse studio, modified the configurations and started working on getting the tab available in the patient dashboard. After some amount of time looking at other module's code and module wiki I managed to find how to do that task. I created a class inside the package org.openmrs.module.flowsheet.extension.html named FlowsheetTabExt which extends the class PatientDashboardTabExt. I got a new tab called "Flowsheet" available on the patient dashboard. I informed Sy about it and Sy asked me to check in the code to the svn. I did my first commit on Monday it self to the svn location http://svn.openmrs.org/openmrs-modules/flowsheet/.

Even though we decided to GWT, for the purpose of getting the idea about retrieving patient data, I worked on to get the patient history printed on the jsp page of the module. It was just a throw-away work to get knowing the stuff. I managed to list all the obs of a patient in reverse chronological order in a jsp page. The figure below, shows the output I got.

Next, I listed the obs grouped by encounters as shown in the figure below.

After doing these two tasks, I got more understanding of how the patient history can be retrieved from the existing OpenMRS services.

Next, I worked on integrating a simple GWT UI under the Flowsheet tab of the patient dashboard. I referred the existing Xforms module code which uses GWT. I created a separate GWT project, compiled the code and copied the generated folder to module/resources. Then I used the generated javascript by a call in the jsp page. The figure below shows the output I got.

Apart from coding, we had a nice demonstration on OpenMRS by Ben Wolfe. During the demo Ben explained how OpenMRS is used in a typical system, answered questions and discussed some code as well. I got to know many things and my doubts cleared about Obs,Encounters & Concepts. The demo was very useful for all new interns.

My next goal is to write some services to retrieve data in the GWT UI. Since it requires integration of both the OpenMRS module and the GWT module, it is a challenging task. I started working on it..
The first week of coding was lot of new experience... I felt that I am learning something new and was very happy... Expecting this fun will continue through out the summer...

Chrome Extensions for web development

2010-05-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

Some handy stuff for web development from Google Webmaster Blog:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/05/chrome-extensions-for-web-development.html

Getting ready towards a new journey...

2010-05-23T20:12:00.000-07:00

During the last two weeks my main focus was on preparing myself with the technologies which I am going to use in the project. I read about GXT and Spring mostly. While reading on Spring, I referred the OpenMRS code base (both trunk and modules) to get a clear understanding of how Spring Controllers, Handlers etc are used in the project. Honestly I progressed quickly with my reading because of the real world solution I was looking at. I read more on Spring Controllers since it will be handy for me when implementing the project.

As the next step I searched for possible libraries to be used for the purpose of GXT+Spring integration. As my mentor Sy suggested, I read about GWT-SL library and looked at some code hosted online. I got the basic idea about it and I am sure that I will get more understanding once I start using it. Meanwhile I requested for svn access and I got it. The developers at OpenMRS had long discussions about the name of the module and finally decided to have "flowsheet" replacing the existing flowsheet module.

In brief the last two weeks were full of new learning experience. Now another new journey is going to start... Yes, it is the GSoC coding period... the coding period officially starts on 24th May. I am looking forward for a nice period ahead.. Also I am sure that I will be learning a lot during the next developer call on Thursday through the demonstration on OpenMRS by Ben Wolfe.

The new journey starts here and I am getting ready to give my best...

The surprising truth about what motivates us!

2010-05-22T00:49:00.000-07:00

Write Code! Save Lives!

2010-05-10T08:34:00.000-07:00

It has been two weeks since I got the surprise mail from Google! Yes, I got accepted to the OpenMRS project : Longitudinal Data Review Module. My mentors are Sy Haas and Paul Biondich.

Since I was already working on tickets it wasn't hard for me to kick off and start with preparing for the project. On one side I was continuing with creating patches for the tickets and it really helped me to understand the OpenMRS code base. At the other side, I started to read and learn about the possible technology to be used to create the widget for the module. The possible candidates were : jQuery, GWT, GXT etc... As my mentor Sy suggested, I read about these technologies and did some sample apps following some tutorials. After initial reading, I decided to choose either GWT or GXT. GXT is an extended library of GWT. I did sample GWT applications using the GWT plugin for Eclipse. It was very easy to use the IDE to develop the applications. Then I tried samples with GXT and found that it has more features and GWT.

But there seems to be a drawback of using either GWT or GXT than normal JavaScript; that is the performance issues. Since there are some OpenMRS deployments used in less-speed internet connections. But according to my further reading I found that the latest version of GWT has handled it in a nicer way to make it efficient. So me and Sy decided to go with GXT. I started to read about integrating GXT with Spring and Hibernate as suggested by Sy.

Meanwhile I was looking in to the code base related to Patient data. I used the Patient dashboard in the web application to learn more about the Observations, Encounters and Concepts related to Patients. Finally I came up with some plans to break down the tasks to be done in to smaller steps. I will continue working with this and will finalize the requirements and timeline after discussing with my mentor Sy.

The first two weeks were full of new learning experiences! I am looking forward to learn more things in the coming two weeks and prepare my self well enough to start coding on May, 24th.

I had another good experience too in the last week. On last Saturday all four Sri Lankan OpenMRS interns met and had a good time sharing our experiences. It was a really nice experience to meet the talented guys Shazin, Ruwan and Firzhan. We are planning to have meetups in the future too...

CSE Symposium 2010

2010-04-29T08:47:00.000-07:00

The first ever CSE Symposium was held in the department today. It was a nice opportunity for the students to present their project reports. The event started with the welcome speech by Madam Vishaka Nanayakkara, Head, CSE. The key note speech was delivered by Mr. Dinesh Saparamadu,CEO, hSenid Group of Companies. It was a very interesting speech. Mr.Dinesh talked about the emerging technologies and how we can reach there. The technologies includes Cloud Computing, Mobile Computing , Social Media and more. There were many good thoughts for students in his speech. One such thought from him:Follow what you love to do and money will follow you.

The were fourteen paper presentations on various topics. All of the projects and presentations were very much interesting except mine :( . It was really cool to see my friends solving real world problems and giving very useful additions to the open source world. The first presentation was on Yahoo! Mail Informer, a chrome extension by Hasitha. It displays a pop-up when a new mail has arrived to your Yahoo! Mail box. It’s really handy for everyone. Next was a SeaMonkey currency conversion extension- XChange, by Dilmi, which does the currency conversions on web pages using Yahoo! Finances. Then Isira presented his project - A Tool on Moodle to Select the Students for Limited Size Classes Using Multiple Selection Criterions – a bidding process to choose modules. Then it was my presentation on SmartECards, a Joomla! component. It was followed by the presentation by Dilina, EasyFind- Support for Time-Line Course Format of the Moodle. There after Chamendri presented her project -Sinhala Spell Checker for OpenOffice.

The second session was started with a presentation on EasySinhala and EasyTamil real time Transliteration add-ons for Mozilla Firefox, by Suhothayan. It was followed by Isuru Udana on qsFOX – Quick Sinhala for Firefox. Then Isuru Haththotuwa presented EasyChat : An Easy Way to Use an Instant Messaging Client, an addition for SIP Communicator. It was really cool with many user friendly features. Pavithra presented her project -FoxAlert Extension for Mozilla Firefox Web Browser. It pops up alerts about natural disasters to the users. ChatCrypt: Chat Encryption System for Google Chrome was presented by Maninda. This extension is very useful for those who want to have higher privacy during online communication. Then Pivithuru presented her project Ooo Sinhalese Translator for OpenOffice. It uses a dictionary to translate word by word. Next Thilanka Kaushalya presented the project on extending the Sahana OCR project for automating the reading process of hand written forms. It uses the Tesseract open source OCR. The final presentation was by Keheliya on SiyaBasScript - Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome Extension for converting web sites with non-Unicode Sinhala fonts to Unicode. It’s a very useful one which gives freedom for users to view web pages in any browser they want.

The whole event was a great success and I am sure that this is a great start for top quality symposiums in the coming years. It was a day to learn about many new things including different technologies. In short – A good learning experience!

The Great Day!!! - GSoC 2010 Announcement Day

2010-04-27T08:45:00.000-07:00

I was one among the thousands of students all around the world who were waiting for the great moment.... - The GSoC 2010 announcement day - it was yesterday (26th April 2010) 19:00 UTC.

Actually I submitted five proposals( I am not crazy :) the maximum was 20) for two different organizations as follows:
OpenMRS :

(1) Longitudinal Data Review (Discrete Data Flowsheet) Module

(2) Approximate Date Support

(3) Concept Proposal Module

Apache Software Foundation:

(1) Implement Groups Support to Apache Shindig

(2) Simple Social Networking for Roller blog server

I got some clue when both the organizations found the duplicates and asked for my preferences :D But it was not sure until the results are announced. I gave my preference to OpenMRS project (1)

I was eagerly waiting for 19:00 UTC ( 12:30AM in my time zone). But about 10 minutes before that time, saw someone saying that they got mail from Google in the #gsoc channel. I refreshed my inbox and the surprise was there :D
I received a mail from Google congratualting me for getting accepeted for GSoC 2010. My proposal for Longitudinal Data Review (Discrete Data Flowsheet) Module project of OpenMRS got accpeted. I was lucky enough to get my first choice among the five proposals :)
Confirmed my acceptance after seeing the OpenMRS-GSoC2010 page. I couldn't access the Google's results annoucement page easily... refreshed many times before got the page loaded... Confirmed my name there too :) I got four more mails from Google saying that my proposal(s) were not selected (5-1=4 :) )

I got many good news from my friends of CSE'07 (my Uni batchmates). As we counted up to now, there are 12 got selected from CSE '07, 10 from CSE '06, 1 from ENTC '07 and 3 from IT faculty. Altogether the cout goes to 26+ from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka :) another successive record I believe!
I am so happy that CSE '07 gave the highest contribution to this count :)

Following of my batchmates got selected ( possilbly some more):
Kasun Gajasinghe
Nirmal Fernando
Sanjaya Liyanage
Thilanka Kaushalya
Suhothayan
Ishan Jayawardene
Shelan Perera
Kasun Lakpriya
Eshan Sudharaka
Meharuban
Keheliya Gallaba

Akila Wajirasena

Congtrats to all of you and rest of those from UoM. Good Luck to get through it :)

I have a long list to convey my thanks :)
In short I would like to thank every staff from the department of CSE, all my friends and senior students, members of the project communities, mentors and especially those who inspired my career in this field :)
Thank you all for your support!

There are some of my friends who couldn't get through this time even though they tried hard. Friends! cheer up! You have one more time to prove! Continue working with your interesting projects and get ready for GSoC 2011 from now onwards :)

Praying the God to guide us to complete the project successfully.

Solution: Couldn't access WAMPServer via http://localhost/

2010-04-26T10:53:00.000-07:00

Today I tried to run the WAMP Server installed in my Windows Vista. I could start the server and when I accessed http://localhost/ in the browser, I couldn't get anything instead of a blank page. I used the same installation earlier several times and it worked fine.

I was digging inside the php.ini file and suddenly I noticed that I have Skype running. I thought there might be some issues with the ports and tried Tools->Options->Advanced->Connection and saw the option "use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections" was checked.

I tried to remove the check mark and gave 9000 (can be any non-used ports) in the blank of "use _____ for incoming connections".

I restarted both Skype and WAMP Server.

It was cool :) I could access the WAMP homepage via http://localhost/.

My guessing was right!

So, if you came across such problem, check whether Skype or any other program uses port '80' and change it's setting.

Google Guice

2010-03-31T07:13:00.000-07:00

Sometimes ago when I was working with Apache Shindig, I came across Google Guice. It is an easy way to bind interfaces to implemented classes. In the context of Apache Shindig, they use the guice binding to bind the service classes such as Person Service, Activity Service etc to the custom implemenataion classes. It is handy to use the guice model in that case since any OpenSocial container developer can bind their own implementation of these services directly through the guice model to have their custom implemenation for Apache Shindig.

Guice model can be used for such similar requirements.

Here is presenation by Google:

More details can be found at: http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/

SmartECards - A Joomla! Component

2010-03-31T07:10:00.000-07:00

I have created a Joomla! component as my project in the University. It is a Joomla! component which is capable of sending e-cards. I will share my experience with creating my component “SmartECards”. If you are new to Joomla!, checkout http://www.joomla.org. Download the latest version and install it using the installation guide (http://www.joomla.org/download.html).

This e-cards component is created for for Joomla! 1.5 series. This 1.5 series version of Joomla! support the MVC approach creating components. MVC stands for Model-View-Controller which is a well know design pattern when it comes to web development.

Actually Jooma! components are packed as a zip file which is installed from the admin console. We have to create the model, view and controller for the component and add an XML manifest file which tells about the component and how it should be installed etc. This is the standard way of installing a Joomla! components.

But when I was developing this component I used a shortcut way since I wanted to test the component after some functionality is added. Once the component is finished developing, we can pack accordingly to create the component archive file.

The initial step is to register the components to Joomla!. All the components installed in Joomla! has an entry in the Joomla! database.

I’ll show the steps of creating a database entry using the phpmyadmin console. In the phpmyadmin select the database which you are using for the Joomla! installation. Tables in this database has the prefix “jos_” by default. If you have specified any other prefix during Joomla! installation, use that name instead of “jos_”. There will a table named “jos_components”. This is where the installed Joomla! components are registered.

Click on the insert tab and fill it as shown below.

name : SmartECards

link : com_smartecards

admin_menu_link: option=com_smartecards

option: com_smartecards

Keep the other fields with their default values.

When you click “Go”, the entry will be created.

Now if you go to the Joomla! administrator’s page (/administrator/index.php?), you can see “SmartECards” listed under components.

When you click on this, you will get a 404 error message. This is because we haven’t written the code to appear when it is clicked. If you have reached this place, everything is fine up to this point.

Relax a bit :)

I will continue from here in my next post.

Google Wave

2009-09-05T11:03:00.000-07:00

Today I came across a very interesting link. It's about Google Wave and I found it worth sharing something about the latest communication tool "Google Wave".

Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web. It is an open source project yet to be launched to public use.

Features of Google Wave:

Can communicate and work together with rich text, photos, videos, maps and etc.
It differs from the standard email communication in many ways
Any participant can reply anywhere in the messages, edit, add content and add new participants too
New participants can playback to see the earlier conversation
Instant messages are transmitted character by character, so we don't have to wait until some one finish typing and hit enter
Live transmission of data makes a real-time interaction
Easy drag n drop to attachment
Server-based spelling suggestion
A large number of participants can edit a single document real-time and each can be seen separately
Support many other gadget extensions
And a lot more

The list about contains only a few features which came to my mind. A very nice demo can be seen at:

The official blog:

http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/

10 Principles for Peace of Mind

2009-07-30T12:02:00.000-07:00

This is one of the most valuable article which have I read. I found this in Facebook and my thanks to the author and the person who shared this.

These words have been a good medicine for me many times, to get rid of my regrets, cure my pains. I believe that, posting this in my blog will make me to read this regularly.

1. Do Not Interfere In Others' Business Unless Asked:

Most of us create our own problems by interfering too often in others' affairs. We do so because somehow we have convinced ourselves that our way is the best way, our logic is the perfect logic and those who do not conform to our thinking must be criticized and steered to the right direction, our direction. Mind your own business and you will keep your peace.

2. Forgive And Forget:

This is the most powerful aid to peace of mind. We often develop ill feelings inside our heart for the person who insults us or harms us. We nurture grievances. This in turn results in loss of sleep, development of stomach ulcers, and high blood pressure. This insult or injury was done once, but nourishing of grievance goes on forever by constantly remembering it. Get over this bad habit. Life is too short to waste in such trifles. Forgive, Forget, and march on. Love flourishes in giving and forgiving.

3. Do Not Crave For Recognition:

This world is full of selfish people. They seldom praise anybody without selfish motives. They may praise you today because you are in power, but no sooner than you are powerless, they will forget your achievement and will start finding faults in you. Why do you wish to kill yourself in striving for their recognition? Their recognition is not worth the aggravation. Do your duties ethically and sincerely.

4. Do Not Be Jealous:

We all have experienced how jealousy can disturb our peace of mind. You know that you work harder than your colleagues in the office, but sometimes they get promotions; you do not. You started a business several years ago, but you are not as successful as your neighbor whose business is only one year old. There are several examples like these in everyday life. Should you be jealous? No.

Remember everybody's life is shaped by his/her destiny, which has now become his/her reality. If you are destined to be rich, nothing in the world can stop you. If you are not so destined, no one can help you either. Nothing will be gained by blaming others for your misfortune. Jealousy will not get you anywhere; it will only take away your peace of mind.

5. Change Yourself According To The Environment:

If you try to change the environment single-handedly, the chances are you will fail. Instead, change yourself to suit your environment. As you do this, even the environment, which has been unfriendly to you, will mysteriously change and seem congenial and harmonious.

6. Endure What Cannot Be Cured:

This is the best way to turn a disadvantage into an advantage. Every day we face numerous inconveniences, ailments, irritations, and accidents that are beyond our control. If we cannot control them or change them, we must learn to put up with these things. We must learn to endure them cheerfully. Believe in yourself and you will gain in terms of patience, inner strength and will power.

7. Do Not Bite Off More Than You Can Chew:

This maxim needs to be remembered constantly. We often tend to take more responsibilities than we are capable of carrying out. This is done to satisfy our ego. Know your limitations. . Why take on additional loads that may create more worries? You cannot gain peace of mind by expanding your external activities. Reduce your material engagements and spend time in prayer, introspection andmeditation. This will reduce those thoughts in your mind that make you restless. Uncluttered mind will produce greater peace of mind.

8. Meditate Regularly:

Meditation calms the mind and gets rid of disturbing thoughts. This is the highest state of peace of mind. Try and experience it yourself. If you meditate earnestly for half an hour everyday, your mind will tend to become peaceful during the remaining twenty-three and half-hours. Your mind will not be easily disturbed as it was before.

You would benefit by gradually increasing the period of daily meditation. You may think that this will interfere with your daily work. On the contrary, this will increase your efficiency and you will be able to produce better results in less time.

9. Never Leave The Mind Vacant:

An empty mind is the devil's workshop. All evil actions start in the vacant mind. Keep your mind occupied in something positive, something worthwhile. Actively follow a hobby. Do something that holds your interest. You must decide what you value more: money or peace of mind. Your hobby, like social work or religious work, may not always earn you more money, but you will have a sense of fulfillment and achievement.

10. Do Not Procrastinate And Never Regret:

Do not waste time in protracted wondering " Should I or shouldn't I?" Days, weeks, months, and years may be wasted in that futile mental debating. You can never plan enough because you can never anticipate all future happenings. Value your time and do the things that need to be done.

It does not matter if you fail the first time. You can learn from your mistakes and succeed the next time. Sitting back and worrying will lead to nothing. Learn from your mistakes, but do not brood over the past. DO NOT REGRET. Whatever happened was destined to happen only that way. Why cry over spilt milk?

Dimdim: A Tool for Free Web Meeting, Free Web Conferencing, eLearning etc

2009-07-30T10:25:00.000-07:00

Recently I came across a useful tool for free web meeting, web conferencing etc. It is Dimdim.

Dimdim was built to be a lot easier to use, extremly open and afforable. Dimdim tool is available in flexible commercial versions, free open source and as a free hosted service to support for free web meetings.

The nice feature which I found in Dimdim is the support provided by Dimdim to deliver synchronized live presentations, whiteboards and web pages and share our voice and video over the internet - with no download requirement.

The features:

Easiest to use
There's noting to install
One click to share our

- Microphone & Webcam

- Computer screen

- Whiteboard, websites, documents

- Public & Private Chat

It's free for up to 20 participants
Webinars & Audio Conferencing
Free recordings & embeddings

We can sign up for a free Didmin account which allows 20 participants, one webcam and free audio bridge.

The image above shows your own Dimdim page.

We can host a new meeting or we can join a meeting. If we want to hos a new meeting, we have to click the "Host Meeting" button. It will ask for the details and open up a very userfriendly interface to hold the meeting.

There will be a system check for the environment support and once it is fine, it will load the page shown below.

We can find collaboration workspace, public chat window, list of participants which has options for private chat, the audio broadcaster, white board, computer screen, document, web pages etc.

We can record the meeting using the "Record" button on the top part of the workspace.

This interface is really userfriednly.

I had an interesting 2 hour web meeting in Dimdim and it was a nice experience.

Future of Sticky Notes

2009-06-22T04:41:00.000-07:00

The Sixth Sense --- MIT Media Lab

2009-06-22T04:39:00.001-07:00

Google Summer of Code 2009 & Me

2009-04-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

It was 20th April, 2009, yesterday.

I was among the thousands around the globe who were waiting with a final hope...

It was the announcement day of the accepted proposals for Google Summer of Code 2009.

Finally, I was not lucky enough to get my project proposal accepted.

I applied for an Apache project, the Apache Roller which is a JavaEE based web application supporting for creating blogs.

Because of my interest in Java web applications, Apache Roller strike me most among the other projects.

Earlier I was thinking of take part in GSoC from 2010. But finally I managed to send a proposal for GSoC 2009. But it was not a success.

Anyhow this will be a good experinec for me to give a better effort next time.

I remembered the quote: "Failures are the pillars to Success".

But there was a good news for me. One of my batch mate among the very few who applied for GSoC, got selected to an Apache project. It was an inspiring newa for me to motivate my self towards GSoC, 2010.

What I learnt is: "Sincere comittement never fails"

"Try! Try! Try! One day you can fly!" a quote I used to see every where when I was a child.

Oracle to Buy Sun for $7.4 Billion

2009-04-20T12:16:00.000-07:00

For more : http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aVWptwRiZl1w&refer=home#

So, what's going to happen???
Will there be any huge affects for us??
I have to wait & explore more, I guess.

A Good Challenge

2009-03-26T09:46:00.000-07:00

Open CMS

2009-03-20T09:52:00.001-07:00

I came to know about the new technology "Open CMS" from one of my friend.

I found something interesting about it...

A small description from it's website: http://www.opencms.org/en/

OpenCms is a professional, easy to use website content management system. OpenCms helps content managers worldwide to create and maintain beautiful websites fast and efficiently.

The fully browser based user interface features configurable editors for structured content with well defined fields. Alternatively, content can be created using an integrated WYSIWYG editor similar to well known office applications. A sophisticated template engine enforces a site-wide corporate layout and W3C standard compliance for all content.

OpenCms is based on Java and XML technology. It can be deployed in an open source environment (e.g. Linux, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL) as well as on commercial components (e.g. Windows NT, IIS, BEA Weblogic, Oracle).

As true open source software, OpenCms is free of licensing costs.

Since it's based in Java and XML, I got interested about it and I'm going to read something more on it...

Why don't people value something which is given free of charge???

2009-03-20T09:30:00.001-07:00

I was attending a workshop last week and one thing which made me angry was the behaviour of some people.

Why don't people appreciate something when they get it for free?

That workshop was conducted free of charge and most of the participants were engaged in their own business when a lecturing session was going on.

It was really annoying me and I couldn't do anything.

I couldn't understand why those people behaved like that. They didn't think of the value of that session. I understood that people don't value something when they are getting it for free. When these people are given a chance to learn something new free of charge, they were just ignoring it due to some silly reasons. They were not thinking that someone is doing something free of charge just because they care about other people and want them to become more professional... Don't these people know how much other people spending to attend such workshops???

I value such good opportunities because personally I've spent money on such workshops. But these people were wasting a good opportunity... I don't know the reason... But onething I know for sure is that those people who were ignoring the service given free of charge will definitely regret about their mistakes oneday and surely they will be suffering at least a litte...

Some quotes which made me to think...

2009-03-18T09:16:00.000-07:00

f"Most successful men have not achieved their distinction by having some new talent or opportunity presented to them. They have developed the opportunity that was at hand." --- Bruce Barton

"Success doesn't come to you…you go to it." --- Marva Collins

“There are no failures - just experiences and your reactions to them.” --- Tom Krause

“Life's real failure is when you do not realize how close you were to success when you gave up.” --- Annonymus

“Try and fail, but don't fail to try.” --- Stephen Kaggwa

The Quality of Mercy By: William Shakespeare

2008-09-12T19:59:00.000-07:00

The quality of mercy is not strain'd.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is enthroned in the heart of kings;
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.