Mooshabaya | Get Mooshabaya at SourceForge.net

First release of our final year project- Mooshabaya. Mooshabaya-1.0 - From here

Mooshabaya Feature Demonstration

This is my final year project-Mooshabaya feature demonstration webcast. This demo contains most of the project features. Hey, this is a voiceless webcast ;), and hope to add the voice soon.

Career Opportunities in Information Communication Technology(ICT)

This blog post is for folks who are looking for career opportunities in Sri Lankan ICT (Information and Communication Technology) sector. I referred the presentation slides by Mr. Samantha Senarathne, visiting lecturer from Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa. The presentation was created for the ICT awareness seminar series which was organized by my batch mates last month.

Not only in Sri Lanka but also around the globe there is a huge demand for ICT related academia. But still the supply of skilled IT graduates is not sufficient to cope with industrial demand in Sri Lanka. So there is a huge competition for jobs as well.

If you want to be successful at what you do there is a universal truth for the success on any thing. That is "Decide upon Your True Dreams and Goals". So if your true dreams and goals don't deal with ICT, the final outcome won't be that you expected.

These are few reasons to choose ICT field

• Good job opportunities
• Demand across the world
• Higher economic benefits
• Different career development paths
• Traveling opportunities to other countries

If you are really good at what you do, you'll have the demand across the globe.

There are many paths you can consider

• Software Engineering
• Network Engineering
• System security
• Project Management
• Quality assurance and Testing
• System administration
• Wed site development
• Database administration
• Technical support
• Client management
• IT consultancy

There are seamless opportunities in this field across the globe. But considering our country, above have significant opportunities. For more information just Google them, you'll find plenty of stuff. Here are some details specific to our country on choosing an IT degree.

Engineering fields require a strong mathematical background. So most of the times if you choose physical science stream for your A/L examination, it'll be a strong foundation to go forward. Then if you pass A/L well and eligible to enter to a University for Engineering you can choose Computer Engineering degrees offered by Moratuwa, Peradeniya and Ruhuna Universities.
Or there are other degrees like Physical Science and Computer Science from Universities like Colombo, Peradeniya, Kalaniya, Sabaragamuwa, Sri jayawardanapura, Rajarata and Eastern etc.
As well there are IT degrees offered by University of Moratuwa. But apart from your A/L qualifications you need to pass another aptitude test as well.
There are some other external IT degrees offered by Open University (Bachelor of Software Engineering), Moratuwa University (Bachelor of Information Technology) and Colombo University (Bachelor of Information Technology).
As well there are private institutes like SLIIT which offers degrees related to IT and some other areas. But you need to pay for those.
As well there are several private institutes which offers IT degrees with the support of overseas Universities. Some of them are Informatics (IIT), APIIT, IDM, ESoft etc.
Or you can go overseas like Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, USA, UK, and India and study there as well.

How you can start

1. Initial level jobs
2. Professional Training
3. IT degrees

You may not have specific educational qualifications or training. But with a small training you can apply for professions like computer programmer, web site developer, graphic designer etc. But essentially you need to have some skills related to those. If you are capable of self learning and to grab something quickly that will be a little challenge.
But if you want to go to a higher level, educational qualifications and experiences are highly recommended. So never stop learn.
There are certifications related to this sector like Microsoft certifications, Sun certifications, Cisco certifications etc.
There are diplomas offered by BCS, ACS, NIBM, HND, IDM, ESoft etc. You also should consider the quality and the recognition of the diploma.
I have mentioned about IT degrees on a previous section.

Requirements

• Dedication
• Self-confidence
• Commitment
• Positive attitude
• English language skills
• Good communication and soft skills
• (Money - only if to have a degree, diploma or certification from a private institute)

Hope you had some idea regarding the career opportunities in SL ICT sector. Good luck!

You and Social networks

Do you spend more and more time these days on one or more social networking sites like Facebook, Buzz and Twitter? Yep most of us are. But most of us don't think of the hackers, crackers, identity thieves, phishers, cyberstalkers whatever you call them also out there and have turned their attention to the big social sites. The threats are also getting increased in different faces. But most of us don't give much thought to how to defend themselves.

Most of the popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter etc. have been become attractive targets (honey pots) as the huge number of potential victims and the numbers are increasing exponentially. For Facebook it's around 400 million and I don't know exact figures for twitter.:)

Normally in each week we here at least one major attack against big social media sites. like New Twitter Phishing Attack: “You’re On Here?” [WARNING] or like Latest Facebook Scam: Phishers Hit Up "Friends" for Cash.

The main issue here is unknown parities are potential of getting direct access to your personal or sensitive information stored in your computer. They do not need to physically access to your information as these social networks are run on distributed machines.
Let's take an example from a particular social network. Some third party Facebook applications pull out private information to work correctly. These apps even can pull out your friend's info as well. So the potential victim is not only you but your friends as well. Most of those applications are like photo of the day, or some statements, jokes etc. First it asks for some thing like this.

If you allow it, then the risk is all on yours. I do not want you to get the wrong idea, Facebook applications for the most part are safe. Just like anything else on the Internet they can be exploited so it pays to be careful.

If a person that has evil intentions makes a Facebook app, they can now target all of the people who have allowed the application in their Facebook ecosystem and target them for identity theft. As those applications run different from the Facebook main servers, it's nearly impossible to validate the logic of the third party application. So the hackers may use the existing security wholes in the Facebook developer platform and attack the users. As well those social media sites also try to cover those security wholes as much as possible.

I feel user's common sense and the correct attitude towards the social networks are essential as well the technology can help to mitigate the potential risk.

Here are few tips any one can follow

• Secure your passwords

• Don't click here and there - The short URLs like "http://bit.ly/9OrLf4" which forward you to a page when you click. Problem is, there's no way to tell where those short URLs really lead without clicking on them.

• Use a up-to-date browser

• Read and judge the messages carefully - Sometimes the the site it-self provide some messages if there are potential threats to the user. But if the user does not read the message carefully the risk is all on the user.

ICT in Sinhala/Tamil or English

Today I was preparing few presentation notes on ICT subject for O/L , A/L students and those for an upcoming ICT awareness seminar series to be held in some schools in rural areas, Sri Lanka. So obviously the content is supposed to be in Sinhala and Tamil medium. When I went through the Sinhala teachers' manual, all most all the content have been explained well, and the editors have done a great job. As well they have taken a great effort to use our own terms instead of English terms.

But what I felt was whether we will able to generate our own knowledge base at least a glossary in our own mother tongue, for a subject like ICT. For subjects like Chemistry, Physics which are more theoretical the case is different as we have our own scientific terms which were generated a long time back.

But for a subject like ICT, the field is changing rapidly, so the existing information get updated rapidly and new information, technologies pop-up like crazy. So it's quite impossible to generate our own terms, with the present pace of change.
It's a good move if the students are motivated to use English terms themselves rather force them to remember the Sinhala terms. Because after they leave the school, those Sinhala terms are not gonna be valid for them anymore.
 

Overall view of the Mooshabaya project

Here I have come up with the mind map of the overall view of our final year project Mooshabaya.



For the full-screen mode. 
 

3 Idiots and Five Point Someone

I recently watched the Bollywood comedy movie 3 Idiots directed by Rajkumar Hirani. This movie is heartbreaking as well wonderfully entertaining when it comes to the story. Though the movie is said to be an adaptation from the novel "Five Point Someone – What not to do at IIT" by Chetan Bhagat, I feel the book is quite different from the movie. But you may find the book is also interesting, and you may have the same kind of experiences which appear in the book. Yeah, that's the beauty of this story.

The book can be found here.