The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

This is an interesting and a valuable book that I have been reading these days. The tale in the book is developed around a lawyer who has run the race that everybody was running, has got tired of it and has learned the wisdom of a fulfilling and a meaningful life. Throughout the book, from all most every sentence, it pours wisdom of life into your mind. Amazing part of it is that it is the wisdom that we are aware of and that exist in this world, but was not appreciated or put into action in our lives. 

This is labled as a personal development book. But I would say it is not a traditional book that explains theories. Robin Sharma- the author of this book has made a successful effort in accompanying lot of examples and realistic techniques that we can practice to link that wisdom to our lives.

It was a really an eye opener to me, one of the best things I learned so far is to find happiness in the apparently simple things in life. 

This will be a useful handbook of life for someone with really good will power to put the wisdom brought to you in the book, into practice. Just thought of sharing... :)

Problem with Dynamic Disk

Yesterday I encountered a problem which resulted in my laptop being unable to boot from the internel hard  drive. It was mainly caused due to creation of a simple volume in the unallocated space of the disk through disk management of Windows 7. Below I describe the problem in detail, the cause of the problem and the solution I found. If any of you also ran in to the same problem, hope this will be helpful.

Probelm:

First I installed Windows 7 on a primary parition which was created at the installation time. Then after the installation was successful, I loged in as administeator and created another simple volume in the unallocated space by disk management utility in Windows 7. When creating that, I got a warning that the partition will be converted to a dynamic disk. At that time I did not know what dynamic disk is, so I searched in the internet and found out that it is not anything harmful. Therefore I accepted the creation of the new volume. Then ,when I restarted my laptop, it did not boot up. Then I again tried to boot from the DVD and it got booted. Then I noticed that all the partitions have turned in to dynamic disk. Therefore to convert the disk back to basic, I tried to delete the partitions in the reinstallation process of windows 7, but did not succeed.

Cause: 

Windows 7 allows only 4 primary partitions. During installation, when we create a partition to install the OS, it additionally creates one partition with a size of 100MB to store temporary . Now two primary partitions are created. Then I created another partition to install fedora. Now there are four partiotions including the unallocated space. But I prefered to have two more partitions to store my data in a more organized manner since I had enough disk space (300 GB altogether). The only option I had, to create more partitions, is to create simple volumes in the unallocated space with the help of disk management utility in Windows 7. But by doing that, it has turned the whole disk in to a dynamic disk. Therefore, a bootable disk could not be detected at the boot up stage and hence the system could not boot.

Solution:

While searching for a solution, I found out that the solution is to convert the dynamic disk back to a basic disk. It could have been done through the disk management of Windows 7, but since I could not boot the OS, that option was not applicable. Then I found a good article which described a work around for that. First, you have to obtain a command promt at boot up as described in this article.. I used the option 2 described there. Then you can follow the procedure starting from step 2, described under the option 2 in in this article.

This will lead to the recovery of your disk by converting it back to basic disk.

Caution:

I could simply use that procedure because I encountered the problem just after I made a clean installation and hence, I had no data stored in the hard drive. But if you have data which was not backed up in the hard drive, above procedure will delete that data. Therefore if it is the scenario, you should find a better work around to convert the disk back to basic without loosing your data. 

True independence of Sri Lankans

This is to talk about a great endeavor  on its  one year celebration. True, it is late to write this post, but it is better late than never.  It was an incredible endeavour which was in action throughout one an half year's of time to save innocent civil citizens in my country from the terrorism.

Sri Lankans have been suffering from terrorism during 30 years of time where lots of valuable lives were lost and lots of properties were destroyed. By the time that Sri Lankan defence forces started this endeavour, the situation in Sri Lanka was such that bomb explosions have become an usual day to day incident and any one leaving home to work or to school are not guaranteed to return home. Everyone, specially mothers were living in a fire of fear till their loved ones return home without getting caught to a bomb explosion.

I personnally believe that the terrorism which was prevailing at that time was handled by a foreign hand putting the ethnic descrimination as a reason in the front. But such a descrimination did not exist in reality. We -Snhalese, Tamils, Muslims were living in harmony in non war zone areas without a problem (for an example: in the university we studied, there were lot of tamil friends and we shared all the resources eaqually and we studied together, went on trips together and they were also given eaqual priority in enetering the university.) There are lot of similar examples from world history (Kosovo, Korea, India and Pakistan etc) .

Fortunately, all Sri Lankans were lucky enough to get strong leaderships in politics and military in order to wipe out the terrorism which twisted the civilization in the country and  which brought misery to all the Sri Lankans for 30 years. Therefore I think we all got the true independence  when one and half year's of humanitarian operations in the north of the country were over on 18th of May 2009. We all should pay our grattitute to all the heros who gave their lives in that endeavor. Of course, killing of any kind is not a good thing at all . Everyone has the right to live. At the same time no body has the right to challenge the right of living of others. Any government who genuinely takes the responsibility of the citizens of the country, should protect the right of living of the citizens when that right is at risk.

I would like to conclude this by recalling a statement made by the President: "Hereafter no divisions among Sri Lankans based on races. The only two categories are: those who love the country and those two do not love the country". Therefore if we all think and work in the way that we all belong to the first category, no any non-seen forces will be able to divide our country by challenging the unity among Sri Lanakns.