Gaveen's Blog - Archive (2005 - 2017)

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...

October of 2011, the history will remember you as the month in which two pioneers of modern technology passed away. First Steve Jobs departed and withing a few days Dennis Ritchie too. I've never been an Apple fan, let alone a customer. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. However hold a deep respect for the man Steve Jobs was. I used to think that he's some rich guy running a tech company. Listening to his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University was life altering for me to say the least. Not only it changed how I saw who Steve Jobs was, it taught me to "stay hungry", "stay foolish" and more. If Steve Jobs was soaring high above there, Dennis Ritchie (dmr) was the giant whose shoulders he stood on. 'Dennis Ritchie' might not be a household name as 'Steve Jobs' is, but his legacy is far more vast. He made C . He co-created  Unix . C is not just a programming language, it's the programming language which paved t...

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...

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...

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_...

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...