I bought the newest innovation from Microsoft, "Zune", an mp3 player with video playing capability. I believe I am the first to get in Sri Lanka since it takes so much time for something like that to come to Sri Lanka. Since I have not used an ipod I can't give a comparison but I should say it is pretty impressive.

The Good

1. The screen is big. Enough to watch a movie and it is very clear.
2. Capacity is pretty high. 30GB is like a portable hard drive.
3. The sync is very good. As you connect to the PC it starts to sync, download updates, update song data, and charge its battery.
4. I felt it would be bit big but not really. It looks very professional.
5. Scratch free. The covering is pretty rough

The Bad

1. It cannot be used as a portable hard drive yet. I hope Microsoft would do an firmware update soon. It makes the life so easier
2. It still support only few formats. AVI is not supported as yet. I have to find a convertor to convert AVIs to WMVs.
3. The radio can have only odd frequencies. I don't know what the point of that. You can have 89.5MHz but not 89.2MHz. Weird.

Overall it is a good product for $250 and the market statistics shows that is it doing well. It has a long way to go to catch up with ipod. We will only see a comparison when Apple releases its newest ipod video

I did my first matching engine with trading orders. Yeah yeah, I'm a business consultant but still my background is technical so there is no harm in doing such things just for fun. It is bit boring when you have only documents to read and this type of work I believe would be helpful in understanding the developers mind. My order were stacked in a <LIST> using generics but still to boost the performance  I should have used "Linked Lists" but writing in pointers is a pain in C# and it is pain to have a nice user control in C++. Since I just need simulation just chose  C#. Now for some real fun.

Today became my last day as a Microsoft Student Ambassador in Sri Lanka. It has being 2 years since I have being working with Microsoft in Sri Lanka and the South Asian region. I cannot believe it is finshed but yet I'm happy that now the student champ community is structured and going well without much effort. I glad that the new generation of Student Ambassadors are also as committed or more towards uplifting the quality of IT graduates. I was given few minutes to give me thanking speech and hopefully it motivates the students to reach further. I got a pen and a "Thank you" card and I was really touch with the thank you speeches. Special thanks should go to Jinashri who believed me for such a long time and backed my decisions. People from Microsoft Sriyan, Anton, Chadika, Indika, Allan etc for their continuous support for the program. Ed for his continuous support he gave to me from the region. The MVPs, Merill, Wela, Prasanna and others for their help. The new Student Ambassadors - Primal, Tharindu, Wajira and Buddhika, thank you and all the best. For all other student champs good luck and hope you would help this community to grow.

Last week I left a place that was very close to my heart, house where I was boarded nearly for an year. Four of our guys, Roshan Peris, Roshan Thatri, Salinda and me shared one rooms for sleeping and one for studies. It was one of the greatest days days in my campus life. I miss it alot. I guess the others do too.

What was more tough was how the land lady treated us. We called her "Aunty" and she was the sweetest. Her childern and her grand children became very close to us.

Well you have to leave many things behind in life. That is what life is. What really matters is not how much achievements you got but how many hearts you touched on the way.

My Room

Cheran with the guitar - sings alot of songs and very well

Aunty with Yenuli

Microsoft is releasing the first release candidate for its new operation system windows vista. I'm still not sure whether to install it in one my machines at work. I could install it in my laptop but still the performance I expect would not be very much. So I would like to wait for a while till I use the new operating system.

Microsoft has lent their hand to Mozilla to help it to work well in the new Microsoft Operation system - Windows Vista. This move is bit surprising even though I did support their recent openess to open source software. Their new open source lab has being a big step in their work towards open source. All the mozilla fans out there would be very happy about this move by Microsoft.

Very excited!!!

Link to » Firefox team accepts Microsoft help | Ed Burnette's Dev Connection | ZDNet.com