2016 has been... an interesting year. I've made friends, and I've lost some. I got a lot of time to sit down and reflect, and I grow thankful every day for the people who choose to stand by me despite all my shortcomings.
In the spirit of 2016, let me …
විපතෙහි සැපතෙහි
නොසැළෙයි නොතැවෙයි
අටලෝ දම හුරු හෙළයා
ලියන්නද දේවල් නැත්තෙ, ලියන්න වචනනම් ගලන්නෙ හැබැයි ඉඩෝරෙට වතුර කැපුවාම කරාමෙන් එන වතුර බින්දු වගේ.
ගියමාසෙ මම ලිව්වෙ design හුට පටයක් ගැන. එව …
With any sufficiently complex system, a major overhaul always creates more problems than it solves; there's enough and more "case studies" of the type you read about in Software Engineering to back it up. Things that were fixed over years and countless late night hacking sessions and painstaking iterations break …
So much going on right now, and all I want to do is run away and get a good night's sleep.
දැං මේ බ්ලොග් එකේ අන්තර්ගතයට (සිංහල හා ලතින් අකුරු සඳහා) සම්පූර්ණයෙන්ම යොදාගන්නෙ අභය ලිබ්රේ අකුරු මුහුණතයි. ප්‍රවීන අකුරු මෝස්තර නිර්මාණ ශිල …
Well, I expected this deluge of werk werk werk to sweep me off my feet, but it has been pretty thoroughly overwhelming to get back in the saddle. In the last two weeks I have encountered highs and lows that staying at home comfortably cushioned me from for weeks, got …
For Cerno.
Done using the usual process. Pencil on paper, inked with an Atlas Chooty Gel, and photographed.
It's then cleaned up in GIMP, and traced into a vector in Inkscape, resulting in an outline:
Then reimported into GIMP, coloured, and highlights and shadows added.
I've done a Luke and switched from …
...that are somehow supposed to describe your entire being. I saw the tag going around. No one has tagged me, but when has that ever stopped me?
This has proven to be much more difficult than I imagined, not because I don't have fictional characters that I can relate to …
Shot in the early morning light.
Not based on a true story (I hope?).
මෙහි එන සියළු නම් ගම් මනඃකල්පිතය.
The United National Party turned 70 this week. I thought I'd take a look at their electoral record, for funsies.
The data for this (short) analysis was sourced from Wikipedia. That data was in turn sourced from Department of Elections PDF files. I didn't cross-check the numbers because this is …
So much love for this film, and for Rita.
Disclaimer: I did my undergraduate studies at a private fee-levying university in Sri Lanka.
The above disclaimer reflects my natural sympathies in this fight. It was easy to support the private university cause, simply because:
Not everyone can get into state universities (in the academic year 2013, only 16.5 …
I'm changing the format of the links posts to topic-based posts which I will add to over time. Seems like a better way to organize than basing them on dates.
An exclusive inside look at how artificial intelligence and machine learning work at Apple
A fascinating look at …
Quick, dirty, and thrown together in a couple of minutes. NOT aimed at anyone or any gender, okay? 😜
Brain vector by Clockwise, via Noun Project.
Neural Networks exam in a week!
Today's AA exam went much better than expected, given how little I studied for it. That kinda thing totally incentivises the wrong kind of behaviour.
What to do. I'll start with the (overdue) assignments and try to understand as much of the mind-boggling math …
Deep in the jungle where the mighty tiger lies
Bill and his elephants were taken by surprise
So Captain Marvel zapped in right between the eyes, zap!
All the children sing
Hey, Bungalow Bill
What did you kill, Bungalow Bill?
Hey, Bungalow Bill
What did you kill, Bungalow Bill?
Of …
The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the …
අන්තිමට සිංහලෙන් පෝස්ටුවක් ලිව්ව කාලයක් මතක නෑ. ඇත්තටම කිව්වොත් උබුන්ටු 16.04 දැම්මට පස්සෙ iBus එක හදාගත්තෙ අද.
වෙනදටනං මොනාහරි බෙදාගන්න ලින …
There's been some "anti-racist" vigil out of nowhere and there was, as usual, a confrontation with one of the "ultra-nationalist" orgs. Without writing any further about any of this, I will defer to the wisdom of the crowds:
Instalment 2 of the "sharing links" thingy. Shorter too.
On Software:
I recently subscribed to the Dataquest newsletter, and today got this post emailed to me:
Python vs R: head to head data analysis
Make pairwise scatterplots: One common way to explore a dataset is to see how different columns …
I promised previously to use this space for link sharing as well, so here goes the first instalment.
On Software:
Gender disparity in computer science is an often discussed topic, and the following is one of my favourite graphs on the topic:
This week, I read about another study that …
We are bound by all the rest
Like the same phone number
All the same friends
And the same address
Today, I watched Casey Neistat repair a chair to get over the boredom of jury duty and having nothing productive to do all day. He got a 90 minute lunch …
I have good friends who are drinkers. I have good friends who are social drinkers, but aren't really drinkers. I have good friends who aren't drinkers. I have good friends who are drinkers, and also want all the non-drinkers to drink too. I have good friends who aren't drinkers and …
The mind is a fascinating thing that is little understood and often ignored.
We believe we have mastered it like we've mastered walking, or playing an instrument, or typing, or speech. But it is fundamentally uncontrollable and has a "mind of its own". Har har.
Making the fundamental error of …
It begins tomorrow, and I'm really excited because I've been FUP'd by SLT for
the last few days. It's been painful going, as vnstat attests:
day rx | tx | total | avg. rate
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
07/22/2016 410.55 MiB | 54.48 MiB | 465.03 MiB | 44.09 kbit/s
07/23/2016 …Yesterday, there I was, minding my own business, when Facebook "memories" or whatever threw this curveball at me:
Turns out it was exactly 5 years ago that I hacked together a small piece of PHP, with a liberal amount of SQL logic thrown in, and it became sort of popular …
Todoist reminding me that my Last.fm analysis is overdue
I downloaded my Last.fm scrobble data a week or so back using this excellent online tool. It contains almost every song I listened to on my PC (and some from my phone and iPod) between March 2011 and November …
Boy oh boy, this is something I deal with quite often. I rarely have problems with people in my life, because I've learned to respect boundaries and not get involved in other people's shit. But I hopelessly fail sometimes at keeping myself detached from people, and it leads to endless …
I've been meaning to write something cohesive about my thoughts post-attempted coup in Turkey, instead of having a half-dozen status updates with cryptic captions that, when analysed together, gives someone an idea of where I stand on the issue.
Writing for Foreign Policy, retired American 4-star admiral and supreme NATO …
Camouflaged Love by Prasad Aluthwattha
Nothing I write can do justice to the artwork above.
This probably pisses off so many radicals on all sides of Sri Lankan society, with their (very similar) views on sexuality and propriety. "Hoo!", I say to them, "Hoo!". Roll your morals and your bigotry …
All alone, I have cried
Silent tears full of pride
In a world made of steel
Made of stone
Saturdays are spent at uni, and whenever I'm at uni I think of a particular person who has nothing whatsoever to even do with uni. At one critical 3 hour paper …
Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
Drift is only natural in human relationships, and you shouldn't really feel bad about the inevitable. People change, relationships change, you meet new people, you move to greener pastures. It's perfectly normal to be mobile in …
'Cause I am hanging on every word you say
And even if you don't want to speak tonight
That's alright, alright with me...
Today's been a bit of an off-day. In the last few days I've a couple of interesting Medium posts. Highlights:
A healthy product company is, confusingly, one …
Why her though?
She's...
Not your type? At all?
And what is my type, again?
Not her
Right.
Come on, dude. I've known you since we had other people wash our bums for us. She's so not your type
Well, we're grown-ups now. Shouldn't we look past "types" and all …
I was watching one of the talks Casey Neistat gave at Vidcon this year, and he talks about his love for the 'act of creation', and how he loves his job just like he loves his family. The drive he has to wake up early to edit a video and …
It's July, I'm on a twelve week break from jeewanopaya, it's almost midnight and I'm slacking off from doing actual productive work by checking out static site generators. Pelican seems nice, and I've always wanted a hacky, markdown-powered thing for my github.io page.
Built using Pelican.