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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 of us the whole requirement would be a Nokia 1100 or a Motorola F3 ...
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 ...
