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. :)BackdropSri Lankan software developers have been using Ruby for a while. Some ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

Setting up a Subversion (svn) repository is something development teams have to do fairly regularly, not that I want to use Subversion. :) If you listen to me, go use Git. Subversion is undoubtedly very good. But after using Git for about a year, you can't simply get me to switch back. Git is that good. :) I've written about ...

This post is an update of a post I made on 29 May. So if you like you can skip the whole post and just download the diagram (PDF/PNG). PDF version looks better.This is a simple diagram to illustrate the use and the difference of a Distributed Version/Revision Controlling System (DVCS) opposed to a traditional/centralized VCS. The post will target ...

As most you have already heard, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the British/Sri Lankan writer and visionary passed way this morning in Apollo Hospital. Clarke who was a house hold name in Sri Lanka was living in the country from 1956. It is said that the souther sea is what brought Clarke here. It is a know fact that he really ...

Summer is going to be upon us very soon and it looks certainly awesome. As usual Google is brightening it up. Google Summer of Code or more lovingly called GSoC or SoC has been announced for the fourth consecutive run! (Meanwhile let's hope lives would be better for the people affected by the forces of nature in past few days.)Google ...

I'm sick of Chain e Mails.I'm so sick of emails some people send me (oh, how much I feel like calling them offensive and degrading names!) saying that "Please forward this e mail if you have a heart" or "Please forward this message to everyone you know" or "Please help to save a life" and might contain a poem named ...

Again, I'm not switching to Java. :) For clarity, I'm helping one of my online buddies to setup and use Ruby even as I write this. This work was something I had to do for a Rails project which used JSPs and stuff with a MySQL database over JDBC. The application setup was quite interesting calling JSPs to work with ...

I'm not switching to Java. :) But this particular thing is something I've answered several times. So instead of repeating it every time, I'll put the details here and point others here. Installing Sun's Java (JDK and JRE) manually, without using something like yum, apr-get, urpm, etc. seems to be something many desktop (or whatever) Linux users want. For example ...

Well, not right away. My health hasn't been good at all from this 17th. I caught what is suspected as a viral fever on 16th night I guess. Anyway, I couldn't get up on 17th Sunday.I took medication, took a medical leave on Monday, and got back to work on Wednesday. I wasn't feeling best, but I could go on. ...

Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away called the Milky Way, there were phones! Some of the creatures there, were smitten by the iPhone or Nokia N Series or so called smart phones which are jam packed with features. And yet for some ...

I know it's been a while since my last post, but I'm still around despite the rumour that I might have been in Fort Railway Station bomb blast. That's a joke, a very bad and a tasteless one, I know. Shouldn't joke about security (literally). So let me apologize from everyone and convey my condolence to the close ones of ...

This is the last post on my very first blog. Thank you for reading!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 ...

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 ...