Samanala Sandhawaniya (Butterfly Symphony)

Jayantha Chandrasiri's new movie "Samanala Sandhawaniya" (Butterfly symphony) is now screening in film theaters islandwide. "Samanala sandhawaniya" is Jayantha's third movie after the debut film "Agnidahaya" and "Guerrilla Marketing" screened eight years ago. He has shown his creative talent in theater and tele drama fields too. His theater works such as "Ath"(hands), "Mora"(The shark) and tele dramas like "Weda haamine", "Dadubasnamanaya", "Akala Sandhaya", "Rajana"(The queen), "Satharadenek Senpathiyo" are examples for that talent. "Dadubasnamanaya" and "Akala Sandhaya" are considered to be two milestones in the Sinhala tele drama history.

Script and Direction -   Jayantha Chandrasiri
Camera -                       Ruwan Kostha
Music -                          Ravindra Guruge
Costume -                     Wasantha Wittachchi

The song "Ikigasa handana" in the film Samanala sandhawaniya sung by Amarasiri Peiris is very popular these days.

The song "Mage sihina madure".

Dong Yi on Jathika Rupavahini

After the astonishing success of   “SUJATHA DIYANI” Korean Tele drama broadcasted on Rupavahini another Korean Tele series is now showing on the same time belt from 6.30 to 7.30 P.M. It is a very popular hit Korean Tele drama called Dong Yi dubbed into Sinhala as ABEETHA DIYANI. The story of ABEETHA DIYANI is about a brave and courageous young girl called Dong Yi who managed to become a royal concubine (Second Highest consort next to the Queen consort) in the royal palace. She has to face many hardships, Intrigues, enemies on her way to be a trusted and favorite companion of the king. Her sincerity, warm personality and exceptionally keen mind help her overcome all the difficulties and achieve success in her life.

Dong Yi is a historical drama based on the true story of Dong Yi later known as Choi Suk-bin who worked as a lowly water maid in the royal palace during the reign of King Sukjong in the Joseon dynasty. Despite being a low cast girl She could win the heart of  the king and gave birth to a son who later became the king of Joseon. Dong Yi is broadcasted on Rupavahini in week days 6.30 to 7.30 pm and the drama series consists of 60 episodes.

Weakening the free education system Another step to widen social gap

Sri lanka is one of the few countries which provide primary secondary & tertiary (university level) education free of charge to citizens. Free education act forwarded to parliament under the guidance & leadership of Hon. C.W.W. Kannangra has opened a new door to the underprevileged people in sri lanka to educate their children and make a bright future for them. There are thousands of youths in sri lanka from poor families who have taken the advantage of free education to become well educated respectable figures in the society. 

When considering about higher education there are several universities and many other public higher  education institutions in the country. All of them provide tertiary education to a considerable number of students who has passed the GCE A/L exam well. Over the time as a result of the population growth there is a remarkable increase in the number of students who pass GCE A/L exam exceptionally well and eligible for university entrance. But relative to the amount of qualified students there is a huge lack of space and facilities in our university system. Governments came to power in past few decades were not interested in addressing this problem which eventually became a major flaw in sri lankan higher education system. Students who have good results but couldn’t afford university entrance have to struggle for their lives with out hope of a better future. approach of recent  governments’ towards free education wasn’t positive because it is non profitable. But the truth is expecting direct financial profit from education sector of a country is rather meaningless. However the country gets indirect profit of education in several ways. Free education has helped sri lanka to be a country with a highest literacy among people. Education always helps to develop social stability and social equality in a country where free health and education are the only relief of poor people. When the people of lower social layers have the acess to higher education free of charge despite their poverty being a barrior they likely to be law abiding citizens rather than criminals who damage the social stability. As a result of free education youth from every social class have been able to contribute to the development of sri lanka by rendering their invaluble service to the country.

Free health services and free education are the last left assests of our country where every gap of inequality is widening in the shade of liberal capitalism which will eventually lead to disastrous consequences. The present government is also persuing the same path of paralysing free education and legalizing private universities even without the least sensitivity towards the future of next generation. Instead of increasing the government expenditure to strengthen the  state education they are seeking ways to cut down the expenses.

It is apparent that the government is not going to take a step back  in it’s attempt to setup private universities. Even though the private university bill has been withdrown by the government due to the protests from university students and teachers they are still taking many actions to weaken the free education. In this crucial time every ones’ obligation is to raise voice to protect the golden tree of free education which gave us shelter for several generations.

Photoshop Glass Effect

Photoshop is the most popular image editing software among designers around the world. It is a raster graphic application. (There are two types of computer graphics. vector graphic and raster graphic. in raster graphics an image is a combination of small dots.)We use Photoshop to edit images, retouch damaged photos, design flyers, greeting cards, book covers and for many more purposes. Photoshop is a very rich graphic platform which has almost anything we want for our creative works.

There are thousands of effects we can apply for texts in Photoshop. Here I’m going to show you a simple and frequently used text effect. From Applying this effect to a text we can get a glasslike transparent text.I’m going to use the adobe photoshop 7.0 edition. In other versions like CS3 steps will be similar.

Step1

First we should open photoshop and create a new document.

                 File- new

Here I changed the resolution to 300 dpi and background to white.

 Next we select gradient tool and add a gradient style to the layer. Use light colors for the gradient



Step 2

In this step we are going to add text as a new layer. Go to the text tool in the tool box and type the text you want. Then select the text you typed and adjust the font size to a large size.

Step3

In the layer palette, check whether the text layer is selected. Click “add a layer style” icon at the bottom of the layer palette and select drop shadow. I have given the values below for the drop shadow.





Step4

In the layer style box select “bevel and emboss”. See the picture below for given values. In the “gloss contour” dropdown box select ring double shape. After adding suitable values click ok.

Step5

Click on the “add a layer style” icon again and go to the blending options in the top of the list menu.



 Blending options box opens as you can see below. In the advanced blending part change the fill opacity to zero and click ok

 

 Final result will be like this. We can add this effect to create amazing art works.

 

Let’s talk more about Photoshop effects in the future. Please feel free to visit this blog again.

 

A free book reader for your mobile phone

I am a frequent user of free reading stuff on the internet. I used to download books from websites like Gutenberg and read them on the desktop. Main disadvantage of reading this way is we have to sit and stare at the desktop all the time. I had heard about reading software installable on mobile phones. But I couldn’t find a suitable one for my phone. Most of this type of software required a memory card.  My Sony Ericsson k320i phone has only a built in memory.

However I finally found this software Read maniac .ReadManiac  is a software installable on your PC. After installing ReadManiac on the computer we can use it to create book readers suitable for our mobile phone types. There are three types of book readers which can select according to our needs. ReadManiac FULL is suitable to read books on the net and in phone file system. ReadManiac LITE is used to embed books with reader.in this method we have to create a midlet for each book and install it on the phone.if you already have books on the computer then you can use ReadManiac LITE to insert those books embedded with reader to your mobile phone.I could install complete sherlok holmes series in my Sony Ericsson k320i using ReadManiac LITE.

Try out ReadManiac for your mobile phone too.You can DOWNLOAD ReadManiac here