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

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...

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...

Arthur C. Clarke, no more...

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

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.

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.
  
• Eg: Google birthday +9
• " " >> having quotes around search terms will search for exact phrase.
  
• Eg: "Google's 9th Birthday"
• - >> to exclude a term from the search, add a - sign in front of the term
  
• Eg: Google -9th birthday
• ~ >> 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.
  
• Eg: Google OR Yahoo birthday
  
• .. >> to include a number range, which can be years, $, v, kg etc.. as you specify.
  
• Eg: search wars 2005..2007, electric shaver 100..250 v, electric shaver $100..250
  
• * >> to include one or more keywords in it's place. Google will fill in the blanks.
  
• Eg: "google's * birthday logo" will return results with 9, seventh, goofy , etc.. in place of '*'
  
• site: >> to restrict a search to a particular web site.
  
• Eg: site:ranatunga.blogspot.com Google birthday
  
• allintitle: >> to restrict for search terms appearing only in the title of web pages.
• Eg: allintitle: google birthday 9th
  
• 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.
• Eg: intitle:Google birthday 9th
  
• allinurl: >> to find web pages with all of the search terms occurring in their URL.
• Eg: allinurl: ranatunga Google birthday
  
• inurl: >> to find web pages with the term immediately after 'inurl:' occurring in the url. Note: No space between 'inurl:' & search term.
• Eg: inurl:ranatunga google
  
• link: >> to find web pages that link to a particular site.
• Eg: link:ranatunga.blogspot.com
  
• related: >> to find similar web pages to a specified web page.
• Eg: related:http://ranatunga.blogspot.com
  
• cache: >> to get last snapshot Google bot created
• Eg: cache:http://ranatunga.blogspot.com
  
• info: >> to get information Google has collected about a web page.
• Eg: info:http://ranatunga.blogspot.com
  
• definition: >> to get a definition of a word, as given in various web sites
• Eg: define:google
  
• 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 :

• Basics of Search
• Advanced Search
• Is there a Web Search glossary?

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...

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:

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

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.

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:

• JAPAN METEOROLOGICAL AGENCY
• Department of Meteorology - Sri Lanka
• Geological Survey & mines Bureau - Sri Lanka
  
• ITIC
  

Typo?

Typo is an abbreviation used to denote a typographical error or an error in a typeset. But now it's commonly used to define all spelling mistakes. For bloggers like us, it's a common thing, though we try hard not to do such mistakes.

Photo: AP Photo by John Raoux

Photo: Ken Thornsley, NASA

Look at these images closely. They were taken when the Endeavour space shuttle was taken to it's launch pad today. Look carefully at the banner. Can you see a difference between the two photos? First one says 'Go Endeavor'. But the space shuttle is named 'Endeavour' after 18th century explorer James Coock's ship HM Bark Endeavour. The mistake was noticed & was corrected as seen in the second photo, where the banner reads 'Go Endeavour'.
So typos can happen even at that level? Please bare with me if I have done any...