Gaveen's Blog - Archive (2005 - 2017)

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...

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...

As most you have already heard, Sir Arthur C. Clarke , the British/Sri Lankan writer and visionary passed way this morning in Apollo Hospital. Clarke who was a house hold name in Sri Lanka was living in the country from 1956. It is said that the souther sea is what brought Clarke here. It is a know fact that he really liked the places like Unawatuna, Roomassala, etc. Clarke was a worldwide known person for his famous work like the Odyssey series (2001, 2010, 2061, 3001) and Rendezvous with Rama, Fountains of Paradise, The Deep Range, etc. and also for inspirational visionary work. For me, "The Deep Range" is the favourite, not at any rate because of the Sri Lankan connection in the book, but because of the illustration of Ocean and creatures it creates. I'll always keep re-reading it to experience that wonderful feeling of being in the Ocean. This is also the book where Clarke points that we could look into the sea before going to walk among the stars. Sir Clarkes passin...

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...

Here's a chance to all the geeks who read this blog to contribute to your favorite Open Source security scanner . If any of you have used Nmap please take a couple of minutes to complete this survey I created to capture end user feed back of the new NSE ( Nmap Scripting Engine ). FYI : I'm working with Nmap as a GSoC 2007 participant . I've already contacted some SysAdmins regarding this and this is the turn for you folks of the Blogospere :) Gaveen's Nmap Survey Nmap, the popular Open Source scanner have seen significant and rapid growth recently. Nmap being always a buzzing, swarming active Open Source collaboration, always attracted many (great many) users worldwide from it's early ages. If you are a SysAdmin (I mean a real one :) most probably you have already used it and loved it. As a GSoC 2006 improvement there's a scripting system now available for Nmap. If you want to taste the latest things, try Nmap version 4.21ALPHA4 or the latest SVN snap. The new...

"Bad weather even for ducks" was the term which was used by Arun Dias, who was a presenter at yesterdays ceremony to receive the national Cricket team. He was describing yesterdays bad weather. It was said rain was 121mm during a 3 hour period in Colombo. I didn't think what Arun said was real, not just colourful presenting until I had to reach Colombo from outside today morning using public transportation. What a joy ride it was! I was out of Colombo and today I had to reach there for some important matter. So I took a bus hoping to get to my destination. It was raining heavily (in fact very heavily) in Colombo. Even before we reached the city limits, we were diverted from the main road to take an alternative route. The reason we learned later was a caved-in on the main road which created a huge crater. So we took the alternative route and joined the traffic jam only to be greeted with frequent lightning. The rest is just history, at least for me :) For your information ...

"Before this battle is done, even a god king can bleed" - quote from "300" the movie I remembered this quote today when I tried to recall Sri Lankan Cricket teams feat at the World Cup. Some people thought of Aussie team as an invincible unit. Although they have been the most dominant team of all times they surely are beatable. Everyone watching the game felt that, when Kumar Sangakkara and Sanath Jayasuriya were going at Aussies before the officials claimed "mornie utulie" (darkness has come :) Anyway todays post is about the welcome home the Sri Lankan team received today. "I've taken my bows and my curtain calls You brought me fame and fortune and everything that goes with it I thank you all but It's been no bed of roses - no pleasure cruise I consider it a challenge before the whole human race and I ain't gonna lose And we mean to go on and on and on and on We are the Champions my friends.... And we...