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One Last Thing...

This is the last post on my very first blog. Thank you for reading! My new blog is at: gaveen.me And, if you do not wish to read any further, the gist is: This blog ends here. My twitter profile ( @gaveen ) will have a link to wherever my current blog is.  If you are somehow a returning visitor, I wish to thank you. No, really! You deserve serious kudos because I have even removed the custom domain where this blog used to live for years. In addition, the last post before this one was a single post in 2013 (i.e., over 4 years ago). In the year before, there was again only a single post. So, whatever the reasons for your return are, I thank you. To everyone else, I thank you the same. When I started this blog almost 12 years ago, I was a completely different person. I had different reasons to write, different drives to keep writing. I knew different things and I wrote, differently. As I have changed, so have those. Therefore, I am moving on. I was ready to take this blog offli
Recent posts

Reading List for 2013

Lately I have started to read a lot again, which is a good thing. I used to be an avid reader. Avid wouldn't quite describe it. I would read anything I could lay my eyes upon. But somewhere down the line, the amount of reading I did on non-technical topics became quite small. Most of my reading for a couple of years was limited to tech blogs and web sites, until 2011. It wasn't quite the lack of time which prevented me from reading much. There were two main reasons. The obvious one was, most of the time when I felt like reading, I found myself without access to a book, printed or or otherwise. The second reason was, I didn't come across good reads quite often. The magic of reading a good book was hard to come by, at least for me. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't the lack of good reads, I just wasn't finding them. Then of course, time at hand also played a part in which I wouldn't bother reading if I didn't enjoy it greatly. And to top it off, books fro

Happy

Is has been a long time since I've blogged, specially for a person who loves what he's doing. And how do I title that new post? "Happy". This isn't going to be a "looking-back" post reminiscing the hardship and success. I am not yet privileged enough for that type of post. It's just, while I've always been a cheerful guy, that is how I feel right now. Peace & happy (and I'm not high, before anyone suggests). The love of my life and I've been in our long and detailed love story with twists, turns and fun. But I'll spare you the details and just tell. Nadee and I are now happily married . We finally tied the knot this May, and it's been awesome! We've already been told by many that everything doesn't smell like roses always. Well, thank you. We'll figure things out on the way. Among other things, for more than a year I've had a pleasant work environment, good employee benefits and a team that's loads o

Departing Giants

October of 2011, the history will remember you as the month in which two pioneers of modern technology passed away. First Steve Jobs departed and withing a few days Dennis Ritchie too. I've never been an Apple fan, let alone a customer. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. However hold a deep respect for the man Steve Jobs was. I used to think that he's some rich guy running a tech company. Listening to his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University was life altering for me to say the least. Not only it changed how I saw who Steve Jobs was, it taught me to "stay hungry", "stay foolish" and more. If Steve Jobs was soaring high above there, Dennis Ritchie (dmr) was the giant whose shoulders he stood on. 'Dennis Ritchie' might not be a household name as 'Steve Jobs' is, but his legacy is far more vast. He made C . He co-created  Unix . C is not just a programming language, it's the programming language which paved t

My talk at Refresh Colombo - September

I did a talk on infrastructure scaling titled "Building Internet-scale Applications - The Beginning" at this months Refresh Colombo on 22 September. Refresh Colombo is a community of technology enthusiasts & professionals in Sri Lanka who meet once a month to talk about interesting things. The audience ranges from students, enthusiasts to alpha geeks. My talk ran longer than I'd have thought, and I hope it was interesting. Just for information I'm linking the slides and video here. Before you check the video I apologize for my voice. If I sound like I'm saying things like "you" where I should have said "you'd" that's my voice. It has nothing to do with the fine folks who did the recordings. Here are the slides hosted at Slideshare. Building Internet-scale Applications View more presentations from Gaveen Prabhasara If you have a Slideshare account you can download the PDF there. For those who without here's

Let's call it a revolution or just evolution

20 years ago on 25th of August, 1991 a student in Finland posted a message in an Internet newsgroup about a hobby software project he'd been working on. Among other things he mentioned, ...just a hobby, won't be big and professional... ...and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks... History went a long way to prove that guy wrong, and in the process so many others as well. Exactly 20 years later to the hour, I'm sitting in front of a computer powered by the same software, writing this post about what Linus Benedict Torvalds was writing about back then: Linux . This post will reach you dear reader, after going through numerous services, servers, routers and many other technological gadgetry powered by the very same software. It is also quite possible that you might be reading this on a gadget (computer, mobile phone, reader, etc.) powered by the same software. And at the moment when you read this post Linux will be silently powering things f

My Vim Configuration: Take 2

More than a year ago I wrote about my story of switching (completely) to Vim as my primary editor. If you have worked in a Unix/Linux system seriously then you know why your editor (whatever it maybe) is a big deal. If you don't, let's just say as a SysAdmin and a budding DevOps type guy, my editor is a serious thing to me. So here's my Take Two. Why? If you are asking why I would want to write about a boring topic again, then this post of obviously not for you. This post is for anyone who's interested in using the mighty and great Vim editor and it's variations (Eg: vim, gvim, etc.) properly. What has changed? I had pushed my Vim configuration to a GitHub repo named gavim and had been using it for a while. And couple of people even forked the repo. Despite how proud I was about my editor configuration, ;) there were some obvious problems. First, a few things were broken (Eg: proper snippet usage) and some plugins weren't working any-more (Eg: Fuzzy_