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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

I've been working professionally with Ruby on Rails for a few months. To be exact that's mostly in SysAdmin capacity. During the time, I've seen some weired errors which I had not seen anywhere else. Time rolled on and now those things don't look weired at all. Actually I should have looked more carefully. Later, I did and found my ...

This is not about the current trend of slapping 3D on everything these days. Not that they are doing any bad (Eg: Piranha 3D, My Bloody Valentine 3D), however this post is about a mobile phone game developed by a Sri Lankan company. When not trying to get articles on time for diGIT (free online IT magazine) from people like ...

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 ...

PagersIf 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 ...

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 ...

My EditorsI 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 ...

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 ...

This is the last post on my very first blog. Thank you for reading! My new blog is at: gaveen.meAnd, 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...