My friend Dinidu has been following a protest in front of Colombo Fort. I called and he said there were about 150 people protesting for A) release of Tamil political prisoners B) right to Tamil language legal proceedings. One case they were mentioning was that of someone arrested for having batteries (like torch batteries, long been dodgy) and who signed a confession in Sinhala. He said the JVP’s Udul Premaratne was organizing but that there wasn’t an overt political presence.

When I first came to Sri Lanka I was like three or four. My dad tried to take me for a walk but after a while I refused to go any further. ‘No sidewalk’ I said. My parents still laugh about that. Yesterday my girlfriend and I tried to take the kid for a walk, him on his little bike. The sun was going down and the sky was a palpable pink. It seemed like a good idea. But it’s not. I was right when I was a child. Streets is mad.

IFrames let you stick a webpage within a webpage. This is cool, but can quickly lead to Inception style weirdness and thought crime. They have been shunned by the web design community for decades, until Facebook brought them back this year, for folding the web into Facebook pages.

India has long been known for innovations such as free public restrooms (peeing on the street) and high capacity buses and trains (use the roof). As the country matures, however, so is its style of innovation. Today, truly awesome products are emerging from and for India. These include a $3000 car, a $800 ECG and a $50 tablet PC. Pretty cool? Indeed.

Sometimes you need Flash, but using the full-fledged editor is like opening a beer with a bulldozer. I Googled it and found a cool product called BannerSnack that lets you make basic Flash animations online. Banners and ads mainly. Quite slick interface as well. The thing is built in Flash, to make Flash. Pretty, how do you say, flashy.

I’m not a pirate I just consume a lot. If companies make getting media fun and easy, I’ll gladly pay for it. If they make it annoying or impossible (conventional music industry, hulu, US only film streaming) I’ll pirate it. It’s not the product that people pay for, it’s the distribution. Copyright is historically not about the creation of media per se, it’s about copying it (publishers). Anyways, this is a comment I left in response to a Rhythmic Diaspora.

A lot of companies deploy a lot of disjointed, expensive software to help people work together. These apps suck because they focus on specific tasks (timesheets, email, documents) rather than on the point (working together). Social networks are really good at that task, but they don’t mix well with work. To that end, products like Chatter and Yammer enable companies to set up social nets in-house (NYTimes).

After the Sri Lanka Civil War, our Chinese arms dealers got some land. Now the Rajapaksa family is selling even more land to unnamed Chinese investors. At the same time, they’re changing the laws to allow foreigners to buy Sri Lankan land without the usual taxes. I wouldn’t even call it a Chinese land grab. The Rajapaksas are just handing it over.

In the myopic breaking news culture of Sri Lanka, it’s rare to see someone pursue a story for more than a news cycle. Recently, however, I found a blog made up of newspaper articles tracking a single issue – animals and the environment. The author, Malaka Rodrigo, has some interesting stuff on sea horse trafficking (who knew?), deaths at the elephant orphanage, and the killing of Nuwara Eliya leopards (a double who knew for me). The blog is called Window2Nature. Worth a read.

The kid goes to St. Thomas College, Mount Lavinia. I like the school, but there are obviously ways it could improve. Let’s start with the traffic. This is a guest post by my girlfriend Roel. St. Thomas’s College, Mount Lavinia has stood around in the same location for over a hundred years. Heres what they should do next.