Sunday, March 27, 2011

Cricket World Cup-Final Count Down

Well before the Cricket World Cup, due to many a reason, I decided not to write about Sri-Lankan Cricket.

This not the time to list them except to say, there are many who have never played or watched cricket except on TV (armchair cricket pundits) who have entered into cricket fray and making money at the expense of poor cricketers in the Asia subcontinent.

IPL can be taken as an extreme example but what I mention here is much more subtle and lot of politics involved.

Cricket is going to enter into a different era with all the contenders of the West except New Zealanders have been eliminated and gone home already.

I feel really sorry for Strauus, who played a gem of an innings at the beginning and showed all the signs of long winter of cricket and petered away in an almost burnt out or run out of steam fashion.

He has lot of cricket left in him and all the cricketers except a few in the team deserve the respect they deserve for trying out hard under extreme whether conditions. It is easy for the normally grumpy (politicians and diplomats included) Britishers who sit like potatoes in front of the TV with an ancient Axe in hand and try to destroy them.

I was expecting some unruly Sinhalayas with anger towards harbouring LTTE in their political and diplomatic folds make some unwelcome gestures towards the team. Nothing like that happened but they expected a real beating at the hands of Sri-Lankan cricketers.

When several catches were dropped, it was uneasy for everybody watching but England failed to capitalize on them but capitulated themselves.

Our boys were ready for Australians but since weather prevented it and India had done the honours, the cricketers were ready to pounce on England as an alternative.

It is as if we wanted England to score over 200 hundred (only a wishful thinking, catches were badly dropped) and getting two centuries was a record that is going to be in our memory for a long time.

As for Ricky Ponting unlike Strauus, time has come to say good bye to Asian Subcontinent and his century was glorious. We want to remember him for that century and as a cricketer of high caliber, somewhat steely like Steve Waugh, and not as a rugged Australian who lost the Ashes.
Good luck for his future.

For Graham Smith, I was thinking that they had a chance of lifting the cup but when they lost to England, I knew something nasty will happen eventually and I was actually banking on New Zealand to do that.

I like Smith's demeanour very much and he was my most favorite captain of this world cup even surpassing Sanga for that category.

In my mind he made the mistake of opening the innings and he would have come down the order, may be one down or two down. If he was there in the middle when chips were down, unlike the younger players, the outcome would have been very different.

We are going to miss hm as the most amiable captain of the world cup.

Now there are only four of the captains left to prove their mettle and Daniel Vittory is an ace who may even challenge Sri-Lanka when chips are down.
Watch out for him. even with injuries.

He was of the same caliber as our Murali when injured and even though he was not our captain he (Murali) was the one who every opposition captain envied and every Sri-Lnkan captain revered, as a god send messenger of cricket.

He is our ambassador of cricket and long live his memories, only the good ones not the bad ones that come from Australia.

Luggage and Laptops

It was World Cup Cricket Saturday.
I got up late decided to stay at home but did not want go out thinking I might get late and miss the first 10 overs where the game seems to be decided.

I was almost confident Sri-Lanka will be in the semifinals barring bad weather and poor ground preparations.


In any case I bought a new TV Card (PCI plugging) with facilities for recording (compressed images) and tried it on one of my Linux computers BUT unfortunately even though it had a TV software it did not configure the new hardware.

Then on second thoughts I thought of trying the LAPTOP I was using for testing Sinhala Linux and few other new Linux distributions on which I installed Win 2007 starter pack.

While I was doing this I counted the number of little, little gadgets on the table and there were 12 in all which included the power pack and the USB battery I used in case of power surge or drop in voltage due to everybody watching cricket.

This is one thing I hate about laptops, so many luggage, in fact a gunny load of gadgets.

The list goes like this.


1. Battery cooler (one USB port used).

2. Extension for extra USB ports (two USB ports used).

3. USB Mouse (now three ports used and adorned).

I hate fiddling with the laptop flat mouse. I prefer a real meaty mouse. which I can grip and squeeze when I am annoyed which is generally the case until windows find a driver.


4. Power connector and step down transformer

5. UPS battery.

6. Power connection cord with multiple plug holes

7. TV USB Kit

8. Antenna

9. Mouse pad

10. Microphone or Speakers

11. USB extension cord to prevent clutter and get the antenna cable well away for clear TV signal.

12. CDs to install drivers and any instructions that come with the gadgets.

With all this I managed to get the TV signal with cricket (except other channels) but I could not get Microsoft to configure audio codecs and a message that the audio was not available was on the screen when I open the software.

This is something I hate, the drivers with Microsoft and OEM vendors.

It used to be the story with Linux 10 years ago but Linux will identify and configure audio automatically and sound quality is pretty good too.

I hope by next Cricket World Cup Linux will have a search engine to detect any TV single over the globe especially in villages areas where TV signals are weak and after the cricket the Linux box can be used for education and games for children with TV channels providing services instead of advertisements which galore!.

Any way I did some home work which I had learned from win 95 (42 to 45 CDs then) days and got the audio working (AC 97) with TV channels all received except one just in ready for the semifinals.

I must state how we got the win 98 work.
1. Prepare hard disk with FAT partition.
2. Install with many restarts.
3. Install graphic driver.
4. Install sound driver
5. Install virus guard
6. install media software
7. Install office.
8. Install any other software you paid for including TV software.

It was apin in the neck and I went through this rigmarole many a times to get it in working order.

Now I do not have to do any of those donkey work. Put a live Linux CD/ DVD on the CD/DVD ROM and check the media and run Linux sometimes lighting fast booting with 1 GiB RAM.

I thank Microsoft million times since it was not for such a pain (getting the computer in working order) I would not have discovered Linux in its early and formative years.
Anyway for three cricket matches I can go through the pain again.

I love cricket much more than Linux or Microsoft.