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...

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...

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...

This post is an update of a post I made on 29 May. So if you like you can skip the whole post and just download the diagram ( PDF / PNG ). PDF version looks better. This is a simple diagram to illustrate the use and the difference of a Distributed Version/Revision Controlling System (DVCS) opposed to a traditional/centralized VCS. The post will target a generic audience and will not include in detail technical information. It will rather be an introduction to the DVCS in general. As you already know that Git is my favorite VCS software and the diagram will also have some reference in that sence. My purpose of drawing the initial diagram was to explain DVCS (namely Git) to a client. However I wanted to change a few things and here is the results. I didn't think that this is that important to create a new version. But I wasnted to try out OpenOffice.org Draw as a diagramming tool. The older version was done in Dia. After trying OO.o Draw, I think I'm going to stick with it for m...

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...

Summer is going to be upon us very soon and it looks certainly awesome. As usual Google is brightening it up. Google Summer of Code or more lovingly called GSoC or SoC has been announced for the fourth consecutive run! (Meanwhile let's hope lives would be better for the people affected by the forces of nature in past few days.) Google Summer of Code is a student program where university (BSc, MSc, etc.) students can work for an Open Source software project for 3 months under Google sponsorship. I was one of the lucky students last year (but had to resign due to a couple of domestic bereavements). This years program is announced and I hope at least a few excellent coders will be interested in this news. Please convey this news to relevant students, while I check out any interesting project for me. :) And remember last year about a 20 add students were selected from Sri Lanka. So don't think you don't have any chance. You just have to be enthusiastic, skilled (in coding) and...

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...

The two premier Open Source Database Management Systems were officially launched recently in Sri Lanka. While MySQL itself was launched, PostgreSQL availability was in the form of EnterpriseDB, which is not exactly PostgreSQL. EnterpriseDB Corporation , the maker of EnterpriseDB DBMS (a commercial DBMS based on the advanced Open Source DBMS PostgreSQL) , together with a new IT firm called Fossmart announced their partnership on 10th, May to provide EnterpriseDB Advanced Server to Fossmart customers. EnerpriseDB is well know for it's Oracle compatibly, which means applications written to work with Oracle DBMS (worlds leading DBMS) can be used with EnterpriseDB usually with no or little modifications. MySQL , the popular Open Source DBMS was launched 31st, July in Sri Lanka by hSenid Software International . hSenid will provide MySQL Enterprise Server in Sri Lanka. MySQL, provided by MySQL AB is probably the more popular of PostgreSQL and MySQL. I personally believe this express...

This is for people who try to argue with me that Open Source software is nothing serious. So read the article, research the Net and save me from the arguments. Of course, anyone else is welcome to read this, too. This isn't going to be yet another 'Open Source is the best' article, or another 'Microsoft is evil' article (for that matter I'm not Anti-Microsoft, though I don't, can't and won't accept certain aspects of their vision and practices. Let's just say I'm Pro-FOSS). However this is a sort of an answer to Microsoft fanatics (not mere fans), then people who develop allergies when they hear 'Open Source' and people who are ignorant enough to refrain from opening up their minds. All of them have been saying Open Source doesn't count, Open Source is for hobbyists and Open Source is not for enterprise. They as hard as they, could have been denying the influence the Open Source movement has done to the software, technology and cu...

SugarCRM , probably the most popular Open Source CRM project has decided to release their upcoming SugarCRM Community Edition 5 under the brand new GPL version 3 . It was nice for them to move to a real OSI certified Open Source license, rather than sticking with their own. Wait a minute...... version 2 of GPL doesn't appear in the OSI certified list yet. Well, I guess it's going to make it there. I have yet to study the GPL v3, so I cannot comment on technicalities or personal views. Should be an interesting reading (now, don't look at me like that), after considering the controversies linked with it, Linus Torvalds not being happy about an early draft and all. SugarCRM is a promising project, but it has a little rough memory regarding the flame wars with their vtigerCRM fork. I guess SugarCRM people will have to get used to being used (their code actually) in other projects, if they are switching to GPL (ie: they cannot claim I stole their code, if I use their codebase ...

The popular Linux Community site LinuxQuestions.org (LQ) has turned 7 years old on 17 June 2007. "jeremy" the root annonced this officially on a forum thread . Just within a day, the member count has now reached 300,000! That's a big number. Community driven sites with 300,000 members, isn't something you are going to come across daily. To be more amazing, the 300,000 count doesn't include members who have been staying with 0 posts. For example, the user 300,052 actually has the uid number of 349,117. I (SkyEye of LQ) happened to be that enthusiastic member who kept counting (of course by looking at the counter) and announced both the 200,000 and 300,000 member counts. By revealing this I am practically giving up my anonymity on LQ. :) Anyway I'll consider it as a tribute to LQ. However the distinction of LQ is not just in the numbers. LQ has always been know for the friendly Linux community which was always there to help. Started in 2000 by Jeremy Garcia ...