Gaveen's Blog - Archive (2005 - 2017)

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 o...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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_...

Edit: There's no need to compile Docky from source on F14 any more. The packages have landed on the official repos. If you still want to build from source, you are welcome to use this post. For everyone else, just fire a terminal and type: $ su -c "yum install docky" If you already had installed it from source, see the Step 0 below to uninstall it. About five months ago I posted a blogpost named " Howto Install Docky on Fedora ". Little did I know that people will be using my guide as much as they have being doing. A few things have changed since the original post which assumed that the Fedora version running is 13 (please see the comments on the original post) and also Fedora 14 has come out. Therefore, I though of writing a wee bit more up-to-date post eventhough any of this isn't anything remotely serious. This is just to avoid answering question on the original post, as much as for the sake of everyone. Also the official install guide from Docky wik...

If you know me personally, then you know that I'm a big fan of GNOME Do . As a keyboard savvy person I use Do extensively. Do is an application launcher similar to the Mac app Quicksilver. However the GNOME Do team has been putting a lot of research and development into it from the initiation. Result: probably the best application launcher out there for any platform. Some months ago, Do included an interesting theme called Docky which made the launcher acts as a dock (a la Mac, Avant, Cairo Dock, etc.). With the integration of GNOME Do, there's no need to say that Docky was super cool. And it started gaining features in a high speed. Ultimately Docky was getting so developed that it became a separate project. Installing GNOME Do on a Fedora system is as easy as: $ sudo yum install gnome-do There are some packages with the names starting from gnome-do-plugins*. With the addition of these GNOME Do can truly enhance your desktop experience. Give it a fair try, I'm pretty...

The October meetup of Lanka Ruby User Group was help on 28 October evening. This month also Sameera organized the meetup at Ridgecrest Asia premise with the backing of Sanath (their CEO). As usual we went with the two technical sessions setup where Sameera took the first session. Unfortunately I could not make it to the first session. However people who were available claim that it was great. Anyone interested can see the slides from Sameeras presentation at Slideshare . The topic was "Agile Software Development with Scrum" by the way. My session was named "Ruby beyond Rails". It talked about why most of us came for Rails and stayed for Ruby. My aim was to give an introductory background about various Ruby related projects. The session was much generic, but I believe it paved the way for more technical and/or hands on sessions in future. So here's the slides: Ruby Beyond Rails View more documents from Gaveen Prabhasara . If you have a Slideshare account you can...

As some of you may have already heard, some people who are interested in the programming language Ruby got together and formed a Ruby User Group . Within something around a months time they had their first meetup. If you get my drift, I'm also one of those people. :) Backdrop Sri Lankan software developers have been using Ruby for a while. Some cases were isolated projects but during the time period around 2005/2006 there have been a rise in the usage of Ruby in serious projects. Still the people who loved Ruby coding lived scattered everywhere. When an Italian Ruby coder named Sebastiano visited Sri Lanka by the end of 2007, he asked the few of us he met (individually), why we weren't hanging around with the like minded crowd. True, we had a quite active Linux User Group / FOSS interest group in Sri Lanka. But apart from that there weren't much enthusiasm flying around in favour of technical groups. However Twitter was able to get some Ruby enthusiasts together. Ruby Us...

Pagers If you use a Linux/Unix system using a pager should be quite familiar to you. A pager in the Unix sense is a program which lets you view pages of contents. Examples for pagers are the Unix commands " less " and " more ". It's likely that your man page viewer is also using one of these. The program less is perhaps the most popular of these, with more features than " more ". These pagers are nice to use use and come very handy in day to day Linux/Unix operations. When you just need to view a file (instead of opening it for editing) it's quite natural to use less. If it's a file with a few lines we'd usually use cat , but less is more convenient on longer files. One irritating thing about less is, there is no syntax highlighting support there by default. You can try to use an external program like " highlight " for the highlighting part and then pipe it to less . (Eg: $ highlight --ansi --force my_file | less -R ) But ...

My Editors I have used many text editors. Some for specific tasks such as LaTeX editing (Eg: Texmaker ), coding (Eg: gedit with plugins ) and the others for more generic text editing. As a system administrator I have been using Vi / Vim all along for editing configuration files and the likes. It was always convenient as almost every Unix system has vi/vim. For me the first Unix editor I used was Emacs . I felt more at home with Emacs key combinations than a hard to fathom Vim modes. Time passed and after a little while, I got used to basic Vi concepts. Since then all of my editing in command line was done in vi/vim. As I've said recently, I have been transforming myself from a sysadmin to a sysadmin/developer kind of person. For coding purposes I used gedit. Some people might think of gedit as the notepad.exe of Linux, but that's so not correct. In fact gedit is a powerful text editor with a lot of plugins to extend it's capabilities. For example there there are plugins f...

I know I have been away from this blog for quite a long time. It's been just over 6 months since I've blogged. There are reasons and other stories. But apart from all of those, I'm glad I am writing here again. I don't know how often I'll be writing again, certainly not once a day (like I ever did that). However I'm hoping now I'll have freedom to write whenever I feel like. But the best way to keep in touch with me is to follow me on Twitter . Here's a brief account of how my life's been during the past few months which saw me transform significantly. Microblogging First thing which slowed down my blogging is microbloggin. Yes, I got in to Twitter early last year and since then never look back. I'm an avid Tweeter and it has become a part of my daily routine. One cool thing I like about Twitter is it's no nonsense and does just one thing, and one thing properly. It lets me keep in touch with like minded people and share information as a side...

The small article I did for the Ruby Advent 2008 went up on 9th December. It was aptly named Git it done, Rubyists . I went through the basic steps to create a Git repository and how to play with it using your beloved programming language; Ruby. Two libraries ( Grit and Ruby/Git ) were given a brief introduction and that's almost it. The article was aimed to be an introductory and a short one. I hope someone will find it useful. Ruby Advent 2008 is an advent calendar with the Ruby flavour. Lakshan , a fellow Sri Lankan Rubyist organized this years Ruby Advent following the tradition from 2006 . I can't judge my own article, but I can assure that the rest of the articles are excellent. Ruby Advent 2008 was featured in RubyInside , RailsEnvy podcast , and many other sites including RubyFlow and RubyFu. IMHO, this years calendar was a success. A bunch of awesome Ruby community members contributed contents convering many interesting topics. Mast read for anyone interested in Rub...

This post is a response to a blog post by Chintana Wilamuna . Actually, it's rather an addendum than an answer. I do agree with him. This is something I want to add. It got longer than I thought, but could make good (enough) reading when you ignore the typos. Here we go. There is no denying that Open Source movement has a great impact on the ICT industry and by proxy, to human society. If you don't believe me, clearly you haven't been paying any attention to ICT or mass media for that matter. Do your homework and if you still disagree, you can contact me if you want. Anyway, my point is that the Open Source movement has been a success. It has, in my opinion induced and/or inspired other phenomena such as Wikipedia and the rise of social networking ( Eg : Twitter, Facebook , MySpace , etc.). An Open Source project is usually a software project which is community driven and self centric (the software itself). The community focus is usually on the software it's develo...