2013-04-17

New Year, Alcohol & Driving

It seems this season is an appropriate time to talk about alcohol related harm as alcohol related problems increase sharply during the Sinhala - Hindu New Year period.
This year alone Sri Lanka police nabbed 189 drunk drivers during New Year period.
Carr policy jails oldest woman
Also it is known that one dies every 4.5 hours in road accidents according to a survey carried out in Sri Lanka and 11% are due to drunken driving.

Drunk drivers are a worldwide problem. In US alone almost 30 people die in alcohol related motor traffic accident, which is, one death every 48 minutes.

It is worthy to note that,
The consumption of alcohol, even in relatively small amounts, increases the risk of being involved in a crash for motorists and pedestrians. Not only does alcohol impair processes critical to safe road use, such as vision and reaction time, it is also associated with impaired judgement and so is often linked to other high-risk road use behaviours such as speeding or not using seat-belts.[4]
There are adequate legal measures to curb the drink driving problems. A suspected driver can be subjected to a clinical examination by a government medical officer. Still these are enforced only when major disasters occur due to drink driving.
In Sri Lanka legal limit for Drink Driving is 80mg/100ml [5] & selling Alcohol products is prohibited to persons under 21 years of age[6]. This limit is still very high compared to the predicted effects of Blood Alcohol Concentration on driving
On a lighter note, old law bars liquor sales to women & there are suggestions to change the policies & laws governing the drinking in Sri Lanka & the world.

  • 2012-09-06

    Hatred ceases not by Hatred but by Love

    "Hatred ceases not by Hatred but by Love"

    The words from then Ceylonese Finance Minister J.R. Jayawardene on 6th September, 1951 played a major role in supporting the San Francisco Peace Treaty which pawed way for a free Post WWII Japan.

    2009-12-26

    Tsunami 2004

    Occasion: On the way to a health camp after 2004 Tsunami
    Location: Ferry, Verugal aru
    Date: 2004 Dec 27



    Ferry at Verugal Aru (marked) Google Map

    2008-07-08

    News 1st, Daily Mirror & CNN




    News Article on Daily Mirror web site






    Topix linking to article published by Daily Mirror


    It seems the Sirasa/ MTV had got an award for "Best World Report"!!! Is it really?
    This was posted as a News Article in online edition of Daily Mirror as a breaking news on 3rd July 2008. Just two sentences for such an achievement!!!
    Well few searches turned out negative results & it made me curious. The facts is there is no evidence of such award or an award ceremony, any where in the web or at least in the CNN website. The news report itself looks bit suspicious. It doesn't give any proof of such or links to the original news item. Further more it seems the award ceremony is for 2008. How can they have an award ceremony for 2008, in the middle of the year of 2008? How can a responsible media company like Wijaya, publish such baseless reports? Hope they will remedy it promptly & not by taking the relevant page off line, but by publishing an explanation or an apology on the same page...

    2008-06-18

    Firefox 3 is here





    Firefox 3 Download Day certificate




    to Firefox from Microsoft IE with love




    Al Billings of Mozilla Corporation




    The cake the Microsoft IE team sent on the Firefox 2 launch


    Ahh got my own Firefox 3 download certificate for helping to set the World Record. It's way past the expected 5million by the time I write this post & still counting fast...

    Get your copy of Firefox from here & also don't forget to get your own Firefox 3 Download Day certificate too.

    It seems Microsoft Internet Explorer team had delivered a cake personally to the Firefox team, as the tradition continues from the Firefox 2 release.

    I think it's really amusing that they had kept the 'e' part of the Firefox 2 cake in their freezer to this day. Hope they will keep a piece of the cake this time too until they get their Firefox 4 cake. Hope that will not take long...

    2008-03-19

    Arthur C. Clarke, no more...


    Arthur C. Clarke, the sci-fi author had passed away today at Colombo after a brief illness.

    2007-12-30

    Ridi Viharaya goes online

    A new web site was launched yesterday for the Ridi Viharaya, Kurunegala.
    It has a Sinhala Unicode version thought not fully implemented.






    2007-09-27

    Happy 9th Birthday Google!

    It's Google's 9th Birthday today. Happy Birthday Google!
    I was very much moved by a comment left by a visitor to my blog post
    Happy Birthday Google!, exactly one year ago..

    prakashraju said...
    YOU ARE MY GOD ALMIGHTY!!!!
    EVERYTHING IS IN YOU!!!!

    I LOVE YOU GOOGLE!!
    WITHOUT YOU MY DAYS WON'T START!!
    I WISH YOU MANY MANY HAPPY RETURNS OF THE DAY!!!

    I PRAY FOR YOUR SUCCESS!!!!
    WITH LOVE & AFFECTION!

    yours forever!!!!

    I couldn't agree more.

    Well this time I thought of bringing some facts about the Web search, the thing that Google does best...
    • Choose your search term wisely. Multiple terms will narrow down your search.
    • The order in which search terms are entered will effect the results.
    • All letters are treated as lowercase even if you type in uppercase letters.
    • and >> No need to have 'and' between words. By default all search terms entered are searched for.
    • + >> common words & single digits & characters are ignored in Google searches. To include them, you need to have + sign in front it.
    • " " >> having quotes around search terms will search for exact phrase.
    • - >> to exclude a term from the search, add a - sign in front of the term
    • ~ >> to include synonyms in a search
      • Eg: ~food research includes results with Food, Nutrition, Restaurant , etc.. as synonyms of food
    • OR >> to include either of the terms, put uppercase 'OR' between two search terms.
    • .. >> to include a number range, which can be years, $, v, kg etc.. as you specify.
    • * >> to include one or more keywords in it's place. Google will fill in the blanks.
    • site: >> to restrict a search to a particular web site.
    • allintitle: >> to restrict for search terms appearing only in the title of web pages.
    • intitle: >> to find web pages with the search term appearing immediately after 'intitle:' in the title of a web page. Note: No space between 'intitle:' & search term.
    • allinurl: >> to find web pages with all of the search terms occurring in their URL.
    • inurl: >> to find web pages with the term immediately after 'inurl:' occurring in the url. Note: No space between 'inurl:' & search term.
    • link: >> to find web pages that link to a particular site.
    • related: >> to find similar web pages to a specified web page.
    • cache: >> to get last snapshot Google bot created
    • info: >> to get information Google has collected about a web page.
    • definition: >> to get a definition of a word, as given in various web sites
    • filetype: or ext: >> to retrict search to a file type other than html. Supported types are,
      • Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf)
      • Adobe PostScript (ps)
      • Lotus 1-2-3 (wk1, wk2, wk3, wk4, wk5, wki, wks, wku)
      • Lotus WordPro (lwp)
      • MacWrite (mw)
      • Microsoft Excel (xls)
      • Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt)
      • Microsoft Word (doc)
      • Microsoft Works (wks, wps, wdb)
      • Microsoft Write (wri)
      • Rich Text Format (rtf)
      • Shockwave Flash (swf)
      • Text (ans, txt)
    Further readings at Google: Web Search Help Center :

    2007-09-16

    Cricket Scores @ Google


    Originally uploaded by zahidul islam
    I was amazed to find that Google search box can be used to see the latest Cricket Scores in Twenty20 world championship matches being played.
    You can just type Cricket for results of the latest match or Cricket Sri Lanka for your favorite team or Cricket Sri Lanka New Zealand for a specific match. A summery of the score card is shown with a link to the complete score card.
    After all Google seems to have noticed the enthusiasm among Cricketing fans...

    2007-08-17

    Ministry of Education Hacked into...

    Well not exactly...
    I was browsing among the Government Web sites, when I came across our Ministry of Education web site (see the image on right). I was shocked to see that it had been Hacked by some hackers. I quickly checked the Google cache for the snapshot they had created (see the image on left side). It was dated 15 Aug 2007, 14:18:06 GMT. So this site had been hacked during last 3 days. The hackers intentions are not very clear from what they had done. May be they just wanted to deface a government web site for fun.
    It seems only the home page of the site had been hacked.
    On further research I came across Zone-H which has an archive of Web sites that have been hacked. I was amazed to see the number of Sri Lankan Government web sites that had been subjected to defacement by various Hacking groups.
    As I could not link to the particular table, I have copied the text, as you can see below:

    DateAttackerDomainOSView
    2007/07/30 RitualistaS mcg.mpi.gov.lk Win 2003 View Mirror
    2007/01/27 Dr.Jr7 dmc.gov.lk/external.asp Win 2003 View Mirror
    2007/01/06 yas mail.samurdhi.gov.lk Linux View Mirror
    2006/12/04 DeltahackingSecurityTEAM primeminister.gov.lk/record/delta.htm Linux View Mirror
    2005/12/12 Devil Code mpdinor.gov.lk Win 2000 View Mirror
    2005/10/16 Tz4r muslimaffairs.gov.lk/forum Linux View Mirror
    2005/03/14 batistuta muslimaffairs.gov.lk/forum Linux View Mirror
    2005/02/06 H4ck3rsBR slelections.gov.lk SolarisSunOS View Mirror
    2005/02/06 H4ck3rsBR sec.gov.lk SolarisSunOS View Mirror
    2005/02/06 H4ck3rsBR ports-aviation.gov.lk SolarisSunOS View Mirror
    2005/02/06 H4ck3rsBR npd.gov.lk SolarisSunOS View Mirror
    2005/02/06 H4ck3rsBR trc.gov.lk SolarisSunOS View Mirror
    2004/01/24 Red Eye ibsl.gov.lk Win 2000 View Mirror
    2003/06/19 [ LunixO ] moe.gov.lk Linux View Mirror
    2003/06/07 Digital lords moe.gov.lk Linux View Mirror
    2002/09/27 PaGgY hinduministry.lk Win 2000 View Mirror
    2001/04/08 SadoR erd.gov.lk Windows View Mirror
    2001/04/04 Silver Lords customs.gov.lk Windows View Mirror
    2001/04/01 Silver Lords erd.gov.lk Windows View Mirror
    2001/04/01 PoizonB0x customs.gov.lk Windows View Mirror
    2001/03/31 PoizonB0x erd.gov.lk Windows View Mirror
    2001/03/18 LOUCOS.BR erd.gov.lk Windows View Mirror
    2001/02/26 Alien00 erd.gov.lk Windows View Mirror
    2000/12/24 Silver Lords erd.gov.lk Windows View Mirror
    2000/12/23 Silver Lords customs.gov.lk Windows View Mirror
    2000/06/04 EhW erd.gov.lk Windows View Mirror

    Still most of the above sites are not back online or have not been repaired completely. Any way most of our government websites are ill designed & not maintained well. Almost all of them use tables rather than CSS for layouts & are very poor in design, compromising their usability.

    2007-07-18

    Earthquake near Sri Lanka!!!



    Earth tremors have been felt in some areas of Sri Lanka, including Colombo & Kandy. The images here are from USGS Earthquake Hazards Program.

    According to USGS,
    Magnitude: 5.2
    Time: at 04:27:28 (UTC)
    at 10:27:28 am local time at epicenter
    at 09:57:28 am Colombo, Sri Lanka
    Location: 6.548°N, 84.455°E (In bay of Bengal)
    Distance: 510 km (315 miles) E of Colombo, Sri Lanka
    More details visit here Magnitude 5.2 - BAY OF BENGAL

    I couldn't find any details regarding any Tsunami Warnings at the time of posting.
    The relevant links are: