There seems to be something I call the Tamil pingback. It seems that a lot of Tamils give their wife or family a ringcut or a message every hour or so. Any delay is an alert. Prolonged delay is panic. Fellow I know didn’t pingback for a few hours and his wife was freaking out. My friend was making calls to all and sundry trying to find out where he is. After hours found that he’s with the TID (Terrorism Investigation Division). Perhaps his wife can see him on Saturday.

I visited Sarvodaya yesterday to see if I could help. They’ve got their hands full as one could imagine. According to the latest OCHA report (dated the 27th) there are about 150,000 in the IDP camps. This is an increase of almost 50,000 from just a week before. Numbers are numbers but I looked at some photos out of the camps and stadiums and basic shelters, churches are packed full of people.

Per more important things, there is a serious humanitarian situation in the North. Thankfully, Sri Lanka as a whole is woken up and everyone from church groups to companies to the government are collecting relief items and sending them up. Note that this is still a warzone and relief needs to go through the government and military. This is also an arena in which the international media and diaspora could help. Rather than attacking the government at this point we all need to unite to help the Sri Lankan citizens in need.

Ok, er, wow. Now Nibras Bawa is sending out mails threatening to hack Kottu. Is it possible to break Kottu? Yes, I do it all the time. However, it’s simply impossible to destroy peoples content as Bawa claims. Kottu is an aggregator. It doesn’t host any content at all. I’ve completely crashed Kottu and been able to reconstitute it in 10 minutes. It’s basically Wordpress plus a few plugins and a blogroll. The beauty of an aggregator is that all the content is on a hundred other sites and the aggregator can be rebuilt anywhere.

There seems to be a fair amount of trolls on Kottu revealing personal information. This has disheartened some bloggers, but I was doing some reading and there are protections. Passionately Patient is already removed from wordpress.com for violating their terms of service. I’m looking at how the Blogger Content Policy. For now you can ‘Flag’ his blog as objectionable (as shown above). If you do find it objectionable.

This is a repub of last weeks Sunday Leader article titled Vote For Yourself”. The Provincial Council elections are tomorrow (Saturday). I’m going to vote and I think you should to. It’s important – I’ve never voted. This is pretty hypocritical so I registered and anxiously await my ballot card. I’m actually quite excited about the whole thing. The Western Provincial Council isn’t that powerful and my candidate will probably lose, but that’s not really the point. I’m not voting for the politicians anyways. I’m voting for myself.

Wow. I’ve been trying to devote time to sending relief up the warzone and I didn’t realize that the blogosphere had become one. This fellow Nibras Bawa is publishing bloggers names and addresses. This is a violation of Kottu policy so I kicked him off that, with the option to return if he stopped. But he hasn’t. So, Mr. Bawa, if you want to out anybody out me. My name is Indi Samarajiva and I’m not hard to find.

The main story in the Western media seems to be how little access the Western media gets. However, there are Sri Lankan people here, we are not powerless and we fully understand the terrible terrible sacrifices both our civilians and soldiers are making. But, in all seriousness, we are the good (and terribly flawed) guys. Sri Lanka is good and offers hope for all its citizens, though God knows we must work for it. The international pressure now must be on the LTTE to lay down their arms, lay down the suicide bombs, free their child soldiers and let our people go.

ACT Lanka is sending a second shipment up to Vanni district hospitals. This is a reprint of my Sunday Leader column of two weeks ago, about that trip: I went to Vavuniya. Some friends in Colombo raised money, bought medical goods, pulled some strings and drove two lorries to Medavachchiya. There, kind men from the army loaded the goods onto military vehicles and drove us to Vavuniya in an armored bus. Medics and soldiers unloaded the goods and we met some of the people the relief is reaching. It’s not much and it doesn’t change the world, but it happened.

One wonders how the LTTE got into this mess. However, it’s clear that they had a plan. It just failed. The LTTE banned people from voting by threat of their usual violence. The disenfranchisement of northern Tamil voters ensured a win for Mahinda, the more warlike candidate. Then, expecting war, they set out on a campaign of targeted assasinations. ‘Good’ plan, in hindsight, but it failed. The Foreign Minister (incidentally, a Tamil) was killed but the Defence Secretary and the Army Commander survived. Hence they’re fucked.