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...

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_...

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...