Gaveen's Blog - Archive (2005 - 2017)

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...