Fabian's Home Page

ශ්‍රී ලංකා රාජ්‍ය සාහිත්‍ය සම්මාන: සම්මාන ලැබූ කෘති පිළිබඳව සංක්ෂේපයක් (Sri Lanka State Literary Awards: A Compendium of Award-Winning Publications). I have long observed that there is no centralized document or database of award-winning literature in SL and this is my attempt to gather details on the works that have been awarded with the State Literary Award since 1959. The page is Sinhala-only and will be initially updated with the award-winning works of long-fiction/novels (work in progress).

List of Gratiaen Prize Winners & Short Listed Writers (1993-2019). The Gratiaen Trust was founded in 1992 by Michael Ondaatje, the internationally renowned novelist, poet and essayist of Sri Lankan origin. Funded with his Booker prize money for his novel The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje’s vision was to establish a Trust that would recognize and promote creative writing in English by Sri Lankan authors. Towards this the Gratiaen Prize, to be awarded annually, was established in 1993 and is awarded for the best work of creative writing in English by a Sri Lankan citizen resident in Sri Lanka.

The University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), Sri Lanka played a pivotal role in disseminating information impartially during the LTTE's struggle for a separate state from 1970's to 2009. Drs. Rajan Hoole, K. Sritharan, D. Somasundaram and Rajani Thiranagama (assasinated in September 1989) of UTHR(J) published a seminal work on the conflict, titled "The Broken Palmyrah" in 1988-1992, which is now out of print and can be found online at the UTHR(J) website. The Social Scientist's Asscociation of Sri Lanka has made available a Sinhala translation (“බිදුණු තල් රුක”) of the work, which is currently the only way of obtaining a print copy. The website contains an (incomplete) transcription of Dr. Hoole's book "SRI LANKA:THE ARROGANCE OF POWER: Myths, Decadence & Murder" as well.

NOTE: The UTHR(J) website went offline sometime in early 2021, and I have hosted a mirror with all content here (along with fixes to several broken links in the main website). Previous versions (snapshots) of the UTHR(J) website can be found at the Internet Archive. Please contact me if you are the owner and have any objections in hosting a mirror. UPDATE (2021-03-06): Several NBSP (0xa0) characters present in the HTM* files resulting in a � glyph in certain browsers were cleaned.

KeePass is the password manager that I have been using for many number of years on my Windows PC to store passwords, recovery codes, key files etc. I use it in conjunction with the KeeAnywhere plugin (available on the KeePass website) to store the encrypted password database on cloud storage so that I can use the password information seamlessly on my Android device.

Keepass2Android a port of KeePass on Android that I use to access the password information I have stored on the cloud on my mobile device.

Signal is my go-to secure messaging application. Primarily, the app is easy to use, has a clean UI, has end-to-end encryption by default for all conversations, does not collect data on its users, is open-source and requires less permissions to run.

My current browser is Mozilla Firefox after migrating from Google Chrome due to privacy issues. So far I'm loving it (a close competitor was the Brave browser)! I use Firefox with DuckDuckGo as the default search engine and with the extensions uBlock Origin (ad-blocking), Privacy Settings (privacy related settings management), Decentraleyes (for secure content delivery), Mailvelope (encryption for common webmail, for example Gmail), and Change Timezone/Time Shift (to fix the time displayed on the browser, which usually breaks when the browser is made resistant to fingerprinting).

My PGP key ID is 0xBA5EAC5246A39E44 and the Fingerprint is F666 A614 3470 E992 297C 415C BA5E AC52 46A3 9E44. The public key can be found on keys.openpgp.org, OpenPGP keyserver, Hockeypuck OpenPGP keyserver and here.

Interactive Fiction titles (text adventure games) that I enjoy.

A large collection of Interactive Fiction Resources for aspiring developers by Joey Jones.

I attempt problems on Project Euler every now and then (sign-in required).

I had the privilege to complete the first part of the excellent Coursera course Build a Modern Computer from First Principles: From Nand to Tetris by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken in mid-2020. Hopefully I will be able to complete Part II in near future. My project files for the course can be found here.

A Detailed Guide to Buddhist Monasteries and Meditation Centres in Sri Lanka (BPS Catalog # MI008), courtesy of the Buddhist Publication Society. At the time of listing on this website, the document was updated on April 2018. A version of the same document from September 2015 could be found here.