A never say die attitude by Sri Lanka forced a draw in the first test with England at Lord’s. 7 half-centuries out of 11 Sri Lankan players is nothing short of brilliant. While England certainly bowled well the Sri Lankans batted even better, defending stoutly when neccessary and attacking at the opportune moment. I have never rated England very highly. I have always thought that the English cricket team is not upto the mark when compared to the three asian giants. In my opinion Sri Lanka should always beat England. Their performance in the second innings just proves my point. They showed heart and try as they might England could not get them out.A lot of commentators have been belittling the SL performance on the grounds that England dropped 9 catches. They say that the dropped catches were the chief cause of the draw. So what? If England dropped 9 catches then they made mistakes – more so than Sri Lanka. So how does that take away from Sri Lanka’s performance? England couldn’t take the pressure while Sri Lanka could.What’s more England enjoyed there own share of lucky breaks in the first innings when 4 pretty good LBW appeals were turned down by the umpires. People just don’t get it do they. The Sri Lankan team continues to be underrated and underestimated by the rest of the world.Farveez Maharoof’s performance in the second innings is just a continuation of his good batting form from the series against Pakistan. I am glad to see that a Muslim has made a mark in the Sri Lankan cricket team. Jehan Mubarak, on the other hand, continues to fail as a batsman and will most likely be replaced with Jayasuriya in the next test starting on the 25th. England are really going to get it at Edgbaston.
Talk about being backward
MODx CMS
I have been exploring a new open source content management system called MODx. Its designed to be extremely flexible. It is aimed at developers who like to their hands dirty. Its admin interface is based on AJAX so that even though it looks as good as joomla its actually a lot faster.
While other CMSs provide limited support for modification MODx embraces cutomisation. You can specify your own CSS, insert your own HTML code and your own PHP and javascript snippets. You can then insert MODx tags in the appropriate places to add content to the HTML files.
I tried it out at opensource CMS and I think it is probably the most flexible CMS I have tried yet. Because it is so developer oriented the learning curve can be a bit steep. And of course, you must really have a need for such low level control of your website. MODx also does not seem to support any sort of remote posting API such as blogger.
From a purely development point of view I think this CMS stands out from the crowd.
This bit of digital paper
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I have just made the first version of my first serendipity theme/template. I call it (creatively enough) “brown paper”
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The entire purpose of making a new template was to make this website my own bit of work. I am never fully comfortable with using somebody elses work. I find myself itching to customise it and make it my own.
I wanted to make my website look like a stained piece of yellowish paper. The paper had to be yellow because I think that makes it easier to read text. The stains would give it a well-used feel. I have successfully tested it in Firefox 1.5, Seamonkey 1.0, IE 6.0 and Opera 8.5. It displays too wide in IE 5.5 causing the horizontal scroll bars to appear.
EDIT: I have completed this template. I fixed a few bugs relating to comments display and admin new entry preview. A few other minor changes were also made. Its available for download here and via spartacus.This theme is a modification of the default s9y template. See the included credits file for details.
Scratch card Internet connections in Pakistan
I usually connect to the Internet using dial up prepaid scratch cards. For a long time now I have been using supernet cards despite their cost. Supernet Rs. 100 cards cost around Rs. 13 per hour for most of the day. But things get really bad at night. After ten their charges drop considerably and everyone dials in creating massive congestion. An already slow dial up connection slows to a crawl.
There is some good news though, recently I discovered cybernet student cards. These cost around Rs. 4/hour for most of the day which is great. Unfortunately their charges for the congested 10pm – 1am block are around Rs. 5, significantly higher than supernet’s.
One thing that I find really strange is that supernet blocks SMTP port 25. This means that I am unable to send mail using my hotpop.com account. I have to use my gmail accounts with a hotpop reply to address. I have no idea why supernet does this. Maybe it’s to stop people from using other POP email providers or some sort of anti-spam initiative. Now that I have switched to cybernet things may just get a little simpler.