Assela Pathirana

Random musings on various topics: Climate and water security, Small Island Developing States (SIDS), IT tools, Computer programming and Web-Applications, Citizen Science, ... Views are personal!

Slides of Peradeniya Seminar now on-line

A Productive Desktop Environment for Scientists and Engineers - Chapter IV is ready Chapter IV is on how to create a simple and effective desktop database in order to keep track of everything! Read More Note: GFS, CPC and TRMM (GFAS) maps All of the maps in these pages should open a window with a larger image of the map, when clicked. However, it has been noted by some that this is not the behavior with Internet Explorer Browser. Please use Mozilla Firefox to avoid this error, until it is corrected. The free download of Firefox is available. (Read this.) GFS Weather Forecasts The GFS model of NOAA, previously known as AVN/MRF, covers the globe at T254 (roughly equivalent to 0.5x0.5 degrees) with 64 vertical levels. The model is run every 6 hours, forecasting 16 days in to the future. More... Plots for Indian Ocean New Section: Hydrology & Meteorology The real-time data is online again. Thanks for all who reminded me to get this done!! AtmosphericPlot CPC Rainfall Estimates, CPC Rainfall Estimates for Sri Lanka, GFAS Rainfall Estimates, GFAS Rainfall Estimates for Sri Lanka, etc. Check here., UNIX file system permissions tutorial Access permissions of every file and folder in a UNIX system is controlled by a system based on two identification numbers: user-identification number (UID) and group identification number (UID). Every file or folder should belong to a UID and GID. In practice is it hard to remember these numbers, so the accepted way is to map a user-name and a group-name to each number. In a typical stand-alone, UNIX computer, all UIDs along with these mappings are listed in the UNIX file /etc/passwd. Read more ...

What is new ==If you have ever tried to give away a reasonably complicated program that was written and compiled on windows to another user you should be very familiar with complaints of missing DLLs, and other dependencies and module mismatches etc., etc. These erros can manifest themselves in many forms (The procedure entry point could not be located in the dynamic link library; The application or DLL is not a valid Windows image or even Program too big to fit in memory.) This is particularly so if you happen to be developing with a complex build environment that is tightly integrated with windows system, like visual studio (I often use Visual C++ 2005/2008 express (free) editions and they create a lot of trouble in deployment!) [[ Remote Editing in UNIX Unlike Windows, UNIX computers were always meant to be accessed both locally (in front of the computer) and remotely (from somewhere remote). Even with today's high speed network communications, editing with a graphical editor like gedit over the network can be a tedious experience. You hit a button and wait ages for the user interface to be updated!. Of course if you are comfortable with vim or emacs editors which don't need any graphical interface, they you are fine. But for those who don't know these, there is WinSCP. Read more ... Samba over SSH -- Opening Windows to UNIX safely and reliably If you have Cygwin on your Windows machine, how to connect to a Samba share by SSH tunneling. Your samba server may be behind a firewall that does not allow NetBIOS connections to pass. Or may be that your UNIX server is in Argentina while you live in Armenia -- it gives you creeps thinking how many people would be able to listen to your (unencrypted) data while its being transferred across!. A neat solution is to pass the communication hidden in Secure Socket Layer (SSH) communication. What's more you can automate the whole process rather painlessly, thanks to Cygwin! Read more Real-time Weather Forecast for South-Western Sri Lanka WRF Model Runs in 3 Nesting Levels I have started running a daily real-time forecast for Sri Lanka with Weather Research and Forecasting Model. Using GFS global forecast (NOAA) as lateral boundary conditions it forecasts 48h into the future at 15min time resolution. Spatial Resolution is 3kmx3km. Read more ... Adding new editor buttons to Mediawiki Depending on what type of article one is dealing with, there is always a number of specific directives that they end up using over and over again. Having these frequent tasks done at a click of a button saves time and increases the editing efficiency. Add Button Extension provides a simple framework to add custom buttons to Mediawiki editor. Read more ... This site was moved to a new hosting company Lately, there were some performance issues related to pathirana.net. Pages took increasingly more time to load and sometimes (when traffic is heavy) they even refused to load! I have decided its time to move internet service providers and just did that over the weekend. I was surprised to see how easy the entire process is. (Still it is not completely over, but things are working.) This experience may be useful for some others who, like me, are hosting small web sites as a hobby. Read more ...

SITES ON THE SERVER

[ Family web | Assela's web | Chandani's web | Medhini's web | Ayumie's web ]