Gaveen's Blog - Archive (2005 - 2017)

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...

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...