Gaveen's Blog - Archive (2005 - 2017)

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...

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...

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...

Setting up a Subversion (svn) repository is something development teams have to do fairly regularly, not that I want to use Subversion. :) If you listen to me, go use Git . Subversion is undoubtedly very good. But after using Git for about a year, you can't simply get me to switch back. Git is that good. :) I've written about Git before . In cases where you can't use Git (or you feel too castrated by TortoiseSVN, pardon me for the pun) you can use Subversion. In this post I'll go through the steps you have to follow to get a basic Subversion setup up and running on a CentOS 5 Linux host. However I think you should be able to use this on other Linux distros too. There's more than one way to host a Subversion repo. I'm going to stick with one way involving WebDAV. Don't mind the buzz word. It's the most common usage for this purpose. If you want a repository where you want to checkout and commit remotely, this is an easy way of getting it done. In addition...

I've been working professionally with Ruby on Rails for a few months. To be exact that's mostly in SysAdmin capacity. During the time, I've seen some weired errors which I had not seen anywhere else. Time rolled on and now those things don't look weired at all. Actually I should have looked more carefully. Later, I did and found my way through. So here's some stuff I found. Hope this will save someones time. (My Ruby servers post is coming shortly,.. really, and will include details about Thin and Passenger too. Actually I was waiting Phusion Passenger AKA mod_rails to be released. For a quick peak of the post, I'm currently running Thin in production and also evaluating Passenger. Update: I've moved about 6 apps to Passenger. So far so good. Thin is still my first choice though. You can look forward to the post along with some Capistrano scripts too, ...soon. :) 1. Errno::EPIPE (Broken pipe - The Major Pain in the Neck) The team I'm working with are usi...

I'm not switching to Java. :) But this particular thing is something I've answered several times. So instead of repeating it every time, I'll put the details here and point others here. Installing Sun's Java (JDK and JRE) manually, without using something like yum, apr-get, urpm, etc. seems to be something many desktop (or whatever) Linux users want. For example they want to run certain applications like NetBeans, FrostWire, etc. which require a JRE to be available. This tutorial is going to take you through the steps you need to setup a working JRE/JDK on a Linux system. You may as well take this idea and tune it for your non-Linux environments like Solaris, *BSD. Note: This howto assumes you have 'sudo' configured for you. If you don't have 'sudo' configured, you'll have to either use 'su' or login as root to use the commands I have provided with 'sudo' at the beginning. Please replace file names and paths in this howto with you...

Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away called the Milky Way, there were phones! Some of the creatures there, were smitten by the iPhone or Nokia N Series or so called smart phones which are jam packed with features. And yet for some of us the whole requirement would be a Nokia 1100 or a Motorola F3 (or whatever brick which can make phone calls). Whatever the cause maybe, you should be well aware that the arena of mobile phones is expanding it's horizons like a frenzy. And being a FOSS geek, I can't help feeling optimistic about the current state of the art. This far the mobile phone has been a gadget we buy from a vendor, use it as it is, not allowed to meddle with, preloaded with proprietary software (which usually is ugly literally and metaphorically) and so on. In regions like US, EU and so most of the phones come bound to an operator (so called locked phoned). Fortunately in Sri Lanka it has not been that ugly where we buy unlocked phones then put a SIM from any GSM oper...