SkyEye

Departing Giants

2011-10-14T12:24:00.000+05:30

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 the way for all the programming languages we have today. Without Unix, there would be no Linux and no Mac OS X. It's easy to overlook Dennis Ritchie's contribution to modern computing, but without those, computers and software would be a lot different today. You can read Herb Sutters post about why dmr's work considered "doing the impossible".

I used to tell my friends in other fields that our field has the privilege of living heroes and pioneers. Sadly, the times seem to be changing. With giants such as Steve and Dennis gone, it falls to our generation and ones to come, to carry on the good work. With that thought in mind, I'll mark this post my own little tribute.

Good bye, Steve... Good bye, Dennis... And thank you.

My talk at Refresh Colombo - September

2011-09-29T09:57:00.000+05:30

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 another link (via Dropbox).

Here's the video hosted in Refresh Colombo YouTube channel. My talk starts at about 06:50 into the video.

Next months Refresh is on 20 October. Drop by.

Let's call it a revolution or just evolution

2011-08-26T05:06:00.002+05:30

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 from wrist watches, refrigerators to nuclear submarines and super computers. It will also be powering the most of the Internet among other things. Today Linux is silent, powerful and ubiquitous. Today my friend, Linux has won. It has been the foundation stone of a greater change for better in the course of our civilization.

The Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) movement is in full flow. Individuals and companies enjoying the benefits of successful FOSS projects like Linux, Apache, Firefox, etc. are starting to think of it as a part of life, a way of thinking. As I type this, somewhere out there is a new computer user learning computer basics, a hacker coding the next big thing; FOSS eco system is ever evolving and developing. As we all reap the benefits of the technological advancements and software freedom, we also take that inspirations to other fields and disciplines. We debate, we write code, we make sure that humankind is not condemned to keep re-inventing the proverbial wheel. And this is why Linux and its success, as big as it is, is still bigger than Linux itself.

Yes mates, while you read this post Linux is making friends for you in Facebook, Twitter and other social media services, it's making clouds for you on Amazon, Rackspace and other places, it's showing off your photos in Picasa, Flickr and others, it's hosting your code in GitHub, SourceForge and elsewhere, it's delivering your email with Gmail, Yahoo and other places, it's running your businesses, small ones to multi-billion dollar enterprises, it's making phone calls for you, it's playing your TVs, it's washing your cloths, and way more things I can possibly fit in to a book let alone a meagre blogpost. The best thing about Linux though in my opinion is none of the above. That wonderful thing is, who makes Linux work. The community; it's that person, the other one, everyone else, us,... yes, you and me.

During the span of two decades a revolution has been happening. When some change happens over that kind of a time period we could rather call it evolution than revolution. Whatever you call it, aren't you glad you are part of it?

You go, Linux!

PS: I consider myself privileged to be a part of the Linux (& FOSS) community for about 10 years. My years with Linux were long and fruitful. I found a living, learned a lot, not just technical things. It generally made me a better person. In short, I thoroughly enjoyed the ride and I plan to continue doing so for years to come.

My Vim Configuration: Take 2

2010-11-08T02:45:00.000+05:30

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_Finder_Textmate) and I wasn't using some of the plugins and wanted to used some other plugins. ~~Also importantly, I started using gvim (package name vim-X11 in Fedora) most of the time instead of just the terminal based vim.~~ Edit: Since then I've moved back to using just vim mainly and gvim as a secondary. Apart from being leaner, it makes it possible to work in full-screen mode.

More than anything maintaining a Vim configuration was messy because you had to copy all the files from all the plugins into one hairy ball of a directory. I never liked that. Along came Tim Pope with Pathogen which changed how people can manage Vim configs.

So I sat down, threw away most of my old configuration files and started anew; Gavim2

Gavim2

Let's start with my .vimrc file. As usual I had copied over some default configuration stuff from Fedora's default system-wide vim configuration file. And started adding my preferences.

The option 'nocompatible' tells Vim that it doesn't have to try to be "exactly" like its father; the venerable vi. This is a must have if you are to enjoy the niceties Vim has. So instead of trying to be completely 'vi' compatible we can exploit additional features of 'vim'.

The 'bs' (settings for backspace) options allows me to backspace over a few things I like. For example "eol" will name vim allow me to use backspace to get to the previous line (above the line termination). The next two lines asked vim to keep a '.viminfo' file and to limit the command line history to 50 entries respectively.

The 'number' option tells vim to show line numbering. What I actually wanted to have was 'relativenumber' (commented-out line) which shows the line number relative to the line where the cursor is. This is handy when I'm deleting lines or yanking them. Unfortunately it's only available from vim version 7.3 (Fedora as of this writing uses a revision in 7.2 range). If I wanted to know the actual line number, I could always look at the status line at the bottom anyway. I hope Fedora updates to Vim 7.3 soon. Edit: It has. :) But I'm no longer using 'relativenumber' because it can be a little distracting.

'incsearch' allows to search incrementally while typing in the search pattern. This way I don't have to wait till I enter the full pattern to see results. 'modelines' value is set to "0" because I've read somewhere that it can be exploited as a security vulnerability. Although I can't remember exactly how it is done, I set the value to 0 because I'm not using modelines.

While 'ignorecase' disables the case-sensitivity in search patterns, 'smartcase' requires "ignorecase" and overrides it if the pattern contains any uppercase characters.

I've set the F2 key to toggle the "paste" option by setting it as the value for 'pastetoggle'. This is really useful if you want to copy something into what you are editing and temporarily turn-off auto-indentation.

The options 'wildmenu' and 'wildmode' works together to make the vim command line operate more like bash (i.e., shows the completion options when the tab key is pressed instead of traversing between options) and with a prettier menu mode. The latter invokes the first, if it's enabled.

Edit: I've also made vim use 2 spaces instead of a tab character. This is set with the options 'tabstop' (number of spaces for tab), 'shiftwidth' (number of spaces for an autoindent step), 'softtabstop' (number of spaces for tab when editing) and 'expandtab' (expand tabs into spaces). By using all 4 of these options I've made sure that what I write isn't messed up when viewed elsewhere.

I've also used used 'mouse' option to enable mouse use in plain vim. This makes the select with mouse behave more like gvim (Eg: do not select line numbers). For word and code completions sake I've also set 'ofu=syntaxcomplete#Complete'. Among other goodies, I've configured a keybinding (i.e.: ,?) to show the changes made since the last save.

The following things are explained in the comments.

Plugins & Bundles

What I've done with plugins is managing them with Tim Pope's pathogen plugin with the use of Git submodules.

As you might have already figured out my while Vim configuration is a Git repository, which makes managing things far easier and better. Since the use of pathogen makes plugins easier to manage separately and as bundles, I had all the plugins which had a git repository placed as git submodules. The rest are also added as bundles with a version number.

Here are the plugins I'm using.

1. pathogen
I have already explained s few things about pathogen. Seriously you need to consider using it if you are serious about maintaining your Vim configuration.

Pathogen had to load first. That is why I'm disabling filetype before pathogen and load it later, elsewhere.

2. nerdtree
This is a really cool file explorer as I've said before. I'm using it with the following config:

Which means I can use ",d" to toggle the tree pane and use "Enter" key to toggle collapsing the tree.

3. nerdcommenter
From the same guy behind nerdtree, this plugin makes commenting a breeze.

4. scratch
This plugin gives you a temporary buffer area which never gets saved. Nice to have something jotted temporarily.

5. conque
This is a nice little plugin which gives you a terminal. It acts pretty similar to a standard bash. However you need to have Python ready in your system (which most common Linux do have usually).

6. ack

This plugin acts as a frontend to ack. Obviously you need to have ack in the system ready.

7. snipmate

This allows the use of some of TextMate snippets in Vim.

8. vcscommand
This is a frontend for many VCS tools including Git, hg, bzr, SVN, SVK, CVS

9. fugitive
This is a very col Git wrapper. If you don't want many VCSs and just need Git, this is the plugin you need.

9.1 gitv

gitv is a git commit history browser similar to gitk/gitg. It depends on fugitive.

10. bufexploreer

Is a simple buffer explorer plugin.

11. matchit

A pair matching plugin.

12. rails
A handy plugin if you are into Ruby on Rails web applications.

~~13. guicolorscheme~~
~~This enables the use of GUI based Vim colorchemes in just the command line vim version.~~

13. csapprox
I've moved on to csapprox since. It's more accurate and works most of the time unlike guicolorscheme. The purpose is the same. It enables the use of GUI based Vim colorchemes in just the command line vim version.

14. latex
This very useful if you plan to use vim as a LaTeX editor/IDE. I've left the configuration in ".vimrc" but I usually install the plugin using package management tools.

I also have a few lines configured in ".gvimrc" file.

What these lines are configuring is how the gvim specific settings. For example I prefer to use Deja Vu Sans Mono font at 11pt as my font. Also I have set that the maximum number of characters per line is 80. After that I have disabled the toolbar, right scrollbar and left scrollbar (when the screen is split). Edit: Since then I've moved all these lines in to my "vimrc".

The Result

Click on the image to see the final outcome in actual size. I don't have a fixed colorscheme preference, but I've been using the colorscheme named "monokai" for a while. Edit: I still don't have a fixed preference. However I've added a load of 'colorschemes' to pick from.

If you want to see how things are organized, or grab my configuration files for Vim, you can get them from the GitHub repository. I've commented on my configuration with the file, just in case. Please note that you'll need git to set it up properly (i.e., it uses git submodules). For further instructions please see the README file.

I know this works straight away in latest Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, Ubuntu and Mint Linux systems. I haven't used it on any other systems, but if you want to try, I'm not stopping you.

Howto Install Docky on Fedora 14 (Laughlin)

2010-11-07T23:08:00.004+05:30

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 wiki hasn't still been updated for Fedora 14. So here goes. :)

Installing Docky 2.0.7

If you got to see my earlier post or had try to run Docky on Fedora 13, then you know that gio-sharp software didn't have a packages version of Fedora. However Fedora 14 has a packaged gio-sharp, other required packages and related *-devel packages. It's the gio-sharp-devel, ndesk-dbus-devel and ndesk-dbus-glib-devel I'm actually looking for. Unfortunately packaging these made the situation worse if you plan to use the latest Docky source (E.g.: cloned bazaar repo).

Why? Because the latest version of Docky as of this writing requires higher versions of (some of) the above mentioned software. So what we are going to do is, just sacrifice running the latest snapshot and run the latest stable release (which is 2.0.7 as of this writing).

0. Remove any version of related packages you have installed from source (i.e. without using a package managing tool). If you followed my original post, this means you'll first need to uninstall Docky (do to the build directory and run su -c 'make uninstall' ) and gio-sharp package. If you have any package installed using the package management system you'll need to uninstall it the same way (i.e., # yum remove your-pacakge).

Also, needs to removed is the environment variables set on behalf of Docky. If you followed the original post, those would be PKG_CONFIG_PATH and MONO_PATH. If you had set them manually before, unset them now (i.e., remove or comment out the necessary lines in the file you used).

If you don't do these two things, you are highly likely to run into trouble. If you didn't have any prior Docky installation in your system, just skip to step 1.

1. Install the dependencies by running the following command. You'll need root password when prompted.

su -c 'yum install mono-devel bzr bazaar automake intltool gcc GConf2-devel gtk-sharp2-devel gnome-desktop-sharp-devel gnome-keyring-sharp-devel mono-addins-devel dbus-sharp-devel gtk+extra-devel notify-sharp-devel gio-sharp-devel ndesk-dbus-devel ndesk-dbus-glib-devel'

Or, you can do the same with using "sudo" instead of "su -c" (and minus the quotes as well) if you have your system configured to use sudo.

2. Download Docky version 2.0.7 from launchpad.

3. Extract the downloaded source archive.

4. Open a terminal in the extracted directory (or just 'cd' into it).

5. Run:

./configure

If everything is Ok, it'll show the state, or else it'll show some error message. Provided you follow the instructions correctly, you should be fine.

This step will generate the data for the compiler to use such as directory locations among other things. So after you finish this step, don't try to change the directory locations and names.

6. Run:

make

This will do the compiling and building for you. If everything went well, you are ready to install.

7. Run:

su -c 'make install'

sudo make install

based on your preference.

That's it. If everything worked for you this far, you can try launching Docky using 'docky' command or create a shortcut (which should already be created in Applications --> Accessories menu if you are using a GNOME desktop).

Living on the Edge (Installing Docky from latest snapshots)

I'm not going to give specific steps here because this is a moving target. But I'll point you towards the right direction.

A. Make sure that you have uninstalled and removed all the remnants from earlier Docky installations. Also see Step 0 in the previous section.

B. Install the dependencies (see Step 1 of the previous section) minus dbus-sharp-devel and gio-sharp-devel.

To be honest I haven't tried this method myself beyond this. And it might not be possible at all to install the latest Docky without completely ruining your Mono environment or worse. But if you are feeling up to it go ahead. Just don't pretend I didn't warned you. ;)

C. Grab the latest (or the necessary) versions of the dbus-sharp and gio-sharp packages from source, build and install them.

It's much better to find SRPMS from Koji or elsewhere and rebuild the RPMs for the latest version, then install using package management tools. Explaining this is well beyond the scope of this post. If you already know how to do that, I have no idea why you are reading this post. :)

D. Hopefully this should be enough to run configure and make steps (See also Step 5 & 6). If this is not the case and the configure/make is complaining about version mismatches, you'll need to remove the package in question (using package management tools) and build them from source.

This is a slippery slope, which is why I didn't try it in the first place. So be warned, YMMV, very much.

E. Once you successfully compiled the system you can run it as usual. Just make sure whenever you update, to read the documentation and update (i.e., uninstall and install the latest) the dependencies.

It maybe not perilous as it sounds. But if you are not up to taking the risks, I'd suggest you follow the first method (installing the stable release) and be happy.

Honestly I'm a little amazed about the number of hits (and feedback) my original post ("Howto Install Docky on Fedora") is getting. I know these are things that's quite easy to figure out if you know your way around a Linux system. But for a new user simple things can make a big difference.

Howto Install Docky on Fedora

2010-06-09T15:58:00.019+05:30

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 sure you'll be impressed.

However installing Docky on Fedora is a different story. So here I am having being fiddling with Mono tools for a hour or two and successfully installed Docky, to help you.

I started with the above linked guide, found some info on the Net and had to figure out a few things for myself. So I'm taking some fine information from the respective sources, as usual. :)

Note: BTW, I tried this on my Fedora 13 system. I believe for closer Fedora releases should also behave similarly. My intention was to get Docky running. So if your Mono development environment breaks, don't blame me. ;)

1. Install dependencies from package repositories.

$ su -c 'yum install git mono-devel bzr bazaar automake intltool gcc GConf2-devel gtk-sharp-gapi-devel gtk-sharp2-gapi gtk-sharp2-devel gnome-desktop-sharp-devel gnome-keyring-sharp-devel mono-addins-devel ndesk-dbus-devel ndesk-dbus-glib-devel gtk+extra-devel notify-sharp-devel'

2. Get Gio# source (for dependency)

This step is not listed in the official guide. But since Fedora doesn't have the "gio-sharp" package in the repos, you'll need to build it from source, install and configure a few things.

For the simplicity let's assume that you are fetching the Gio# source to your home directory.

$ cd

$ git clone git://gitorious.org/gio-sharp/mainline.git gio-sharp

This command will fetch the source code of Gio# and place it in a directory named "gio-sharp". Alternatively you can instead use:

$ git clone http://git.gitorious.org/gio-sharp/mainline.git gio-sharp

3. Compile Gio#

Change into the directory with the Gio# code and compile.

$ cd ~/gio-sharp

There should be a file with a name similar to autogen-X.YZ.sh. In my case it was "autogen-2.22.sh". Run it like:

$ ./autogen-2.22.sh

$ make

$ su -c "make install"

Give the root password when prompted and it'll be installed.

4. Get the Docky source

Docky project uses Bazaar version controlling system (it's hosted on Launchpad). You can do:

$ bzr branch lp:docky

Needless to say, you'll need Internet access for the first few steps of this howto. The last command will create a directory named "docky" in your current directory.

5. Set a couple of Environment Variables

In order to build Docky properly we need to set a couple of Environment Variables. We can do this inside a configuration file such as ~/.bash_profile. (To set proper variables system-side you can use a file like /etc/profile)

Open the ~/.bash_profile file in your favourite text editor. Mine's Vim. :)

$ vim ~/.bash_profile

Enter these lines in the file

PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

MONO_PATH=/usr/local/lib/mono/gio-sharp-2.0/

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH

export MONO_PATH

If you look carefully you'll noticed that what we set as MONO_PATH is the location where the gio-sharp.dll file was installed after the compilation.

Finally we need to either log out and log in to the system or run the following command:

$ source ~/.bash_profile

Now you are ready to compile and run Docky.

6. Compile Docky

Go to the directory with the Docky source (i.e. docky directory from Step 4)

$ cd ~/docky

Then run the configure and make commands:

$ ./autogen.sh

$ make

$ su -c "make install"

Now that you have Docky installed you may want to add it the startup programs. However make sure you try it first. Just run from any terminal

$ docky

And enjoy your work.

As you saw we a couple of unpackaged software at our hand, namely Gio# and Docky. You might even ask me to maintain those packages for Fedora. While I'm actually working towards becoming a Fedora package maintainer, I'm not sure I want to package Gio#. Someone who knows her/his way around the Mono dev environment should be better take care of it rather than me.

Anyway, I've written this down quickly after finishing my installation. So there might be mistakes. Let me know if you bump into a mistake done by me while writing thing. You can alway use the official guide as the baseline.

Disclaimer: I'm not a pro-mono or anti-mono zealot. I do have concerns about Mono's legal standing. But this post is just for people who want to get the awesome Docky running under Fedora.

Colombo Ride 3D Mobile Game

2010-05-04T11:08:00.013+05:30

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 me, Gihan Fernando does other interesting things like running quite a few operations related to publishing, educating and much more including gaming. One of his teams creations is the "Colombo Ride" mobile game.

The original version which came out in 2008 had already seen quite a following and so had the version 2 which was released in 2009. To be honest, I've not played any of the versions. But from what I've heard both had special competitions organized to promote giving away prizes including mobile phones.

Gihan now informs that the 3rd incarnation of the popular game named "Colombo Ride 3D" is ready to hit the shelves (I mean your phones) in July. In fact there's a competition going on to promote the new launch, which will giveaway a shiny Nokia 5230 phone for the winner plus many consolation prizes. So read the rest of the post and then head directly to the website to find out about the prizes. :)

What we hear is that the UI would be in Sinhala and there's also a voice instructor to point the player to the destination. The popular commentator and presenter Palitha Perera is to be that voice.

Players would be delighted to hear that the multi player mode is available as in the version 2 plus with the option to select the vehicle from a different choices, including the police car. This reminds me of the old PC classic GTA2 (minus the thieving, mugging and shooting). ;)

Well, I as maintain I haven't played much mobile games. But this seems to be a good time to play some. I'm guessing it'll be fun to drive (virtually) through the familiar road of Colombo and find popular locations. The setting alone must make it full of fun. So if you couldn't race by BMICH with your friend, this might be a chance for you.

So you might be wondering why I posted this article. Although I'm a bit of a gamer once in a while (big fan of Quake, Doom, Half-Life franchises) I've not posted game related stuff much. So why indeed? Simple. To applaud the efforts by a Sri Lankan company and to create a little buzz for them. It's always interesting to see us pushing the borders. I happen to know about the production, so I though to give a shoutout.

Now you can head to http://games.lk/ to find more about the promotion. And, is it's heard that a competition is planned for once the game is out in the wild.

My 2009... (Cross-post)

2009-12-31T15:09:00.003+05:30

I've posted the rather incomplete account of my year 2009 on my new blog:

My 2009...

And BTW, Now this is my Tech blog. Prabhasara.com is my poetry/arts blog. And my new miniblog is my generic blog. :) I also have microblogs too, you know. ;)

In case you don't choose to see it on the other side,...

Wish you all a very happy new year 2010!

Slides from my session at LKRUG October Meetup

2009-11-15T06:57:00.004+05:30

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 log in and grab the PDF file.

Update: Thanks to the guys at SinhalenFOSS podcast for the mention about the Ruby User Group. We couldn't make it to the last recording session, but we'd love to be there in a future session.

Get to know a Fedora Ambassador or User

2009-11-15T05:25:00.006+05:30

Name: Gaveen Prabhasara
IRC Nickname: gaveen
IRC Channels: #fedora and a lot more on freenode.net
Location: Colombo, Sri Lanka

Following the tradition.

Lanka Ruby User Group - 1st Meetup

2009-10-05T13:10:00.003+05:30

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 User Group

Anyway, the history behind, they formed a Ruby User Group quite recently. I am personally very excited about it and the progress so far.

If you are interested in Ruby (and Ruby on Rails) programming or you are interested in learning more about them you are welcome to join the Google group, which is currently named Rubyologists.

1st Meetup

1st meetup was held on 30th September evening at the RidgeCrest Asia premises. Laktek (Lakshan) already has a blogpost about the event.

I was very happy to see more than 20 Ruby enthusiasts showing up and getting to know each other. I was even more happy to see that the group consists of people from a wide range of backgrounds. There were two CEO/CTOs, couple of web/visual/experience designers, web applications developers, software engineers, trainee developers, people from category combos and etc. Me and Yajith (who by the way was delighted to see the healthy participation of ladies) were mainly SysAdmin types. :) Humour apart, it was really encouraging to see that a few of our female colleagues showing up. It's a good sign that the group has a balanced eco system.

We are planning to abide by the golden principle: MINASWAN (or MINSWAN, depending in how you write). After all, I personally believe the biggest strength of Ruby is its friendly community. For people who didn't know, MINSWAN stands for "Matz Is Nice, So We Are Nice".

Anyway here are some snaps from the meetup. You can find the full set from here.

Aslam doing the session "HTML 5 and Semantic Web"

Lakshan (Laktek) doing his talk "Evolution of Rails"

Thanks

A big thank should go to Sameera Gayan who stepped up and coordinated the meetup. Another thank goes to Sanath for allowing us to use Ridgecrest premises for the meetup, ans also for the snacks/refreshments.

Aslam also deserves a big thanks from us for the great session about HTML 5 and Semantic Web, and more than everything, travelling all the way from Kandy just for the meetup despite the bereavement in his family.

Even though Laktek (Lakshan) is a little worried that he scared/bored the girls away with his session about Evolution of Rails, I have to admit it was a good details session. :) Further more he gave us a teaser trailer of a cool project he's working on (which would be an upcoming Open Source project). For everyone interested, his slides of the session can be found at slideshare.

And finally a big thank to every guy and girl who showed up that eve to get to know and have a chat about Ruby. We appreciate it very much and hope to see you all in the future meetups and other events too. :)

PS: If you are interested in Ruby, consider joining the User Group. In a future meetup I'm going to do a session about "Ruby Beyond Rails" which would talk about use of Ruby for non-web projects such as system infrastructure (mainly), security, etc. If the time allows you should be able to join that session in the next meetup.

Syntax Highlighting Pager: Vim

2009-07-23T14:32:00.005+05:30

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 that's tedious. If the filetype isn't supported by "highlight" you need to add them manually.

Enter Vim

If you have painstakingly tuned a beautiful Vim environment like I did, you might be wondering if there's a way to use Vim as a pager. In fact you can.

The good folks at the Vim project ships a nice configuration file and a shell script just in case you love Vim so much that you want it to be your pager too. It's usually located under the macros directory in your Vim installation directory. For example in my case it's: /usr/share/vim/vim72/macros/

The file we need is named less.sh. It in turn uses a file named less.vim. Which means you can edit the less.vim file in order to introduce your custom changes, if you need any. In that case it's better to copy the two files to somewhere else and do it. That way you leave the original files untouched.

However, if you simply just need to use Vim as a viewer we can do it easily.

1. Create a bash alias to /usr/share/vim/vim72/macros/less.sh
Eg: in your .bashrc specify,
alias vess='/usr/share/vim/vim72/macros/less.sh'

2. Next time you log in the alias you created will be ready to use. Or you can just reload the .bashrc again by running
Eg: $ source ~/.bashrc

Now you are good to use vess instead of less. You can use any name you instead of vless as long as it doesn't conflict with existing commands, aliases, etc.

You can always create a link named less so that your custom configuration is used instead of the original less. But I'd rather keep it as it is and use my new "vess" whenever I need a pager.

The final result acts like less. You can traverse with arrow keys, exit with pressing "q" and do on. If you need to edit the file you are viewing you can press "v" to start editing.

My Vim Configuration

2009-07-15T18:45:00.005+05:30

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 for LaTeX, Python consoles, bash terminal, snippet completing, snap open, integration with VCSs, smart tab/space, code formatter, class browser, Ruby on Rails modes, encryption, smart indentation, ToDo list, web browser, full screen editing, split screen, PO file editing, markdown preview, etc. among other things. As you can see, it's no toy editor. It's fully fledged editor for serious work.

Let's get back to the topic. I love gedit and I use it whenever I need. But from a couple months ago, my main editor is Vim. Vim is the most popular improved clone of the original Vi editor. It's been around for about 18 years. So you too might be wondering "Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?" or why Vim, an 18 year old, hard to learn terminal based text editor?!

I can take a lot of posts to answer that or assume you will try it yourself and get into your own terms with Vim. I'll go with the latter and share with you what my current (as of 15 July 2009) Vim configuration is.

My Vim configuration: Gavim

Note: I'm working on a Fedora Linux system. By default there's a very decent Vim configuration in Fedora. So I took the default global Vim configuration file in a Fedora 10/11 system and did the tweaks to get it to my liking. As you would have expected, a significant part of the vimrc is straight from Fedora.

Some of the plugins I use are taken from vim.org, while some are taken from their sources (mostly from GitHub repositories).

And oh, I only use Vim not gVim (Vim with a GUI).

In the first few lines of my Vim configuration file is an entry which says,

Eg:
set nocompatible

which is to tell that it shouldn't try to be compatible with older Vi, and just use the Vim behaviour. I also liked to have the editor show the line numbers on left. There are other other small tweaks I like to have.

All these things are included in my V im configuration files repository, and the files are well (hopefully) commented. So anyone interested can refer to my vimrc and find more about those.

One thing to notice is I'm using the key "," as my leader key.

Eg:
let mapleader = ","

Vim 7 also has built in spell checking abilities. I find this very useful as I use Vim for every typing needs these days. I have configured 2 keyboard shortcuts to enable and disable spell checking.

Eg:

map <F8> <Esc>:setlocal spell spelllang=en_us<CR>
map <F9> <Esc>:setlocal nospell<CR>

This means that I can press F8 key to turn spell checking on with language set as English (USA) and turn off by pressing F9.

I also like to have the ability fold/unfold code blocks when coding. For this I used another Vim built in.

Eg:
setlocal foldmethod=syntax
setlocal nofoldenable

which sets the folding based on syntax (i.e. programming language), and doesn't enable it by default.

I also have set a place holder character to be displayed while typing "space" and "tab" characters. These are displayed until you type a new character after the tab/space.

Eg:
set list
set listchars=trail:⋅,nbsp:⋅,tab:▷⋅

And BTW, the theme (colour scheme) I'm using for Vim is called "darkblack". It's a dark theme which provides very good readability. It is included in my repository.

To get the best view for most of the themes and the smoother fonts you need to tell Vim to use 256 colors in the terminal.

Eg:
set t_Co=256

As you already know most Linux systems have excellent font rendering. The default on Ubuntu systems are not good, but other systems like Fedora was having quality font rendering by default for a while. So having a nice colour theme with smooth fonts is a very pleasant experience. See the screenshots for proof. :)

Those are the major Vim features I'm using. You can see everything in the configuration files. Now let's check the major Vim plugins I'm using.

Plugins I use

Different plugins may have different installation steps. Check the "Readme" files of the plugin for more details. Generally it involves copying the .vim file in the plugin package into the plugin directory of the vim configuration directory.

Eg:
$ cp ./NERD_tree.vim ~/.vim/plugin/

1. NERDTree

The NERDTree plugin by Martin Gre nfell is an excellent file system tree browser plugin for Vim.

You can set the exact key binding to activate NERDTree by specifying

Eg:

nnoremap <leader>d :NERDTreeToggle<cr>

Once installed you can toggle the tree browser pane by pressing [leader]d in command mode. Eg: ,d

I have also set this:

Eg:

let NERDTreeMapActivateNode='<CR>'

which aloows you to toggle the expanding of directory views by pressing "Return" (Enter) on the directory node.

2. Scratch

Scratch gives a temporary scratch buffer area which will be discarded when you exit vim. This is not saves in a file. It's quite useful to jot down something quick while you are editing.

I'm using s to toggle the scratch area.

Eg:

function! ToggleScratch()
  if expand('%') == g:ScratchBufferName
    quit
  else
    Sscratch
  endif
endfunction

map <leader>s :call ToggleScratch()<CR>

3. Snipmate.vim

Snippet completion is a very useful thing to have when you are coding. This is a feature which can be found on almost all Integrated Development Environments (IDE). Snipmate is a cool plugin with brings some of snippets from the popular test editor TextMate to Vim.

Martin Grenfell have a useful collection of snippets to use with Snipmate.vim.

4. Bufexplorer

This is a simple Buffer Explorer plugin which with list the open buffers and let you go to any of them.

5. VCSCommand

This plugin takes care of working with different version controlling systems such as Git, Bazaar, Subversion, CVS, etc.

How to use this for you

That's all I have to tell about my Vim configuration for now. Some of the general configuration and some plugins I use are not mentioned in this post. But you are welcome to check it out.

Just in case if you are interested in using these for your Vim setup, be my guest. Be informed though. This works fine with Fedora 10/11 systems. I haven't checked on other systems, which might ot might not have differently compiled Vim setups. In any case you are welcome to grab the files and tweak it to your liking.

Here's the link to my Vim files repository: gavim

You can find more instructions in the "Readme" file there.

Still Blogging. Yes, I am

2009-07-06T15:25:00.003+05:30

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 benefit. It's the one social network service which I found non-obtrusive. Another thing Twitter did was killing my dilemma about write or not about every interesting thing I came across. It's a good thing. Now I can write here only the things I feel like.

Employment

My professional life has not been so good. I got to learn a few important lessons about how *not* to do things. I'm glad I got to learn those things but I'm really disappointed about a certain few people, whom I thought had the guts to walk the talk. I'm not without error in this interest. So I am not blaming anyone for taking my own enthusiasm about FOSS (and computing in general) and hanging myself with it. I did that to myself. Those people just gave me a place to do just that. :)

To be concise, I left one place and joined a new place hoping that there's much to do and gain. Unfortunately it was not so to be. If it hadn't been my parents, that patch was enough to see me to financial oblivion. I'm all grateful to my family including my love and my good friends for helping me to hold up. Being said all that, today I'm doing as well as any time else. Life's good. There's a lot of challenges to be faced, but I'm up to it.

Education

I've been an undergraduate from the beginning of the recorded history I guess. When some of my friends have achieved their masters I was still in my bachelors. To my justification I've been working and doing my studies part time.

This year, finally, I finished my undergraduate studies by completing Business Computing program of the University of Wolverhampton. The lecturers were wonderful and they flew all the way from UK to deliver the lectures. Academic staff at IDM did a very good job coordinating the process.

Unfortunately I missed this years graduation ceremony. No worries, I can wait for the ceremony.

Maturity

I assure you that I've seen a a lot of maturity in the last few months. A lot of people close to me might beg to differ. ;) But hey, I know how I think better.

I used to be this guy who went with the flow and thought everything would be more or less OK (in life). Maybe not exactly in the way it sounds like, but there were certain things I thought I took serious. But really I had no idea how serious they were. And I always felt a little shy/awkward to discuss about my girlfriend with my parents, even when they've known her for a long time and considered her to be one of their own. :)

From that I went on to being the guy who sat down and had 5.5 hour discussions with family about marriage, wedding, career, and etc, etc. It might not sound convincing, but I know who I am now.

New Computer

Just last Friday, I bought a new computer. Which reminds me that I have to get my old laptop into repair. I didn't feel like buying a new laptop because I hope I can get the old one working and because I can get a lot of power for a low cost if I bought a desktop. Core i7 is still a little pricey, so my bargain was a Core 2 Duo.

I got a machine with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHz processor, 4 GB memory, 320 GB SATA disk, DVD burner, Intel motherboard, 17" widescreen LCD display, Foxconn casing, etc. all under 60k rupees.

My Main OS

If you are reading this anyway the chances are, you already know that I use Linux 100%. Sometimes I've dual booted with FreeBSD and OpenSolaris, but I'm mainly a Linux user. I have long given up using Windows. I've been running Red Hat (until version 9), then Fedora, then completely Debian, then Ubuntu for a while and finally Mint until recently.

I still run Mint at home where my father, brother, cousins, etc. all who are not Linux folks are happily using Linux Mint. Kudos to the Mint team for making a very new / convert user friendly distribution of Linux. Whenever a new Linux user asks for a first distro I hand out Mint these days. It's very good. Their latest version (7), named Gloria gives a superb 1st impression.

However my personal favourite distro now is Fedora. I've run Fedora 9 alone with Mint and it was solid. So I switched to Fedora as my main OS when Fedora 10 was released. It didn't disappoint. To me Fedora has the perfect balance between use friendliness and power user convenience. It doesn't stay on my way and in the same time it makes a lot of things I regularly do (coding, documenting) really convenient. Fedora is a solid distribution of Linux and probably the one who's riding the innovation / cutting edge tide at the foremost. So I installed Fedora 11 on my shiny new desktop PC, and I'm loving it.

Contribution

I've always been contributing to FOSS projects whenever I could via bug reports, mailing lists, forums, helping out new users, public events, etc. Now I'm comfortable enough reading code (remember, I'm a SysAdmin) so I might take more active roles in near future.

I've also started lurking more in IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channels at Freenode.net. My nick on Freenode is "gaveen".

I also started contributing to the monthly, free, online IT magazine, diGIT. I'm writing a Linux basics article there. It's good to see a free magazine with good content. Gihan Fernando is leading and coordinating this effort. It should be much commended how much he takes with his crew to get diGIT out by the 1st day of every month.

Professional Transformation

From the regular System Administrator, I've gone into become more coding loving (thanks to Ruby) and more cloud aware, agile aware. I'm so glad that I looked into Ruby programming a few years ago. For the record Ruby has a great assortment of system administration / infrastructure related projects in its ecosystem.

As they say, I came for Rails and stayed for Ruby. The attraction which caught me was Ruby on Rails web application framework. But what kept me all interested was the language behind it.

I'm much interested in following things these days: Puppet (configuration management), Hudson (continuous integration), RabbitMQ (AMQP/message queuing) among many others as usual. As you can see, I've taken quite an interest in the next generation of system infrastructure. ;)

About version controlling systems, there's been no hiding how much I like Git. There's no need to repeat it. My stance haven't changed. Again for the record I started using Git before the Ruby crowd changed from Subversion (seemingly over one night) into Git users. :) I've used Mercurial, and also closed a repo using Bazaar ;) but Git is still my favourite.

My main text editor was gedit (with a few plugins) for a while. I always used vi/vim on a terminal, but on a desktop, gedit did well for me. Then a few months ago I had the opportunity to use Vim for things other than just basic editing. I used, I witnessed and now I am a believer. :)

In fact, I'm loving Vim so much that my next blog post will be about the Vim configuration I'm using. To be fair gedit is a very good editor and I also have good expectation from the new Redcar editor. However I don't see myself switching away from Vim in the foreseeable future.

That's all for this post. I'm not going to say I'm back (because I've done that before). But I'm saying I'm blogging again. I'll be back soon with a post about my Vim configuration. If you like to keep more in touch follow me on Twitter.

Git it done, Rubyists

2008-12-25T13:17:00.006+05:30

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. The article was aimed to be an introductory and a short one. I hope someone will find it useful.

Ruby Advent 2008 is an advent calendar with the Ruby flavour. Lakshan, a fellow Sri Lankan Rubyist organized this years Ruby Advent following the tradition from 2006. I can't judge my own article, but I can assure that the rest of the articles are excellent.

Ruby Advent 2008 was featured in RubyInside, RailsEnvy podcast, and many other sites including RubyFlow and RubyFu. IMHO, this years calendar was a success. A bunch of awesome Ruby community members contributed contents convering many interesting topics. Mast read for anyone interested in Ruby.

For those of you who have no idea what an advent calendar is, here's what Wikipedia says. "An Advent calendar is a special calendar which is used to count or celebrate the days of Advent in anticipation of Christmas". Lakshan and other Ruby developers around the world shared a wealth of information, one article per day in good Cristmas spirit. That's another reason why I also did what I could to give a hand, eventhough my religious beliefs are different.

For anyone interested in Ruby programming, I'd highly recommend the advent series. So head to Ruby Advent 2008 now.

Open Source, FOSS Politics, GitHub and rise of a new era

2008-11-17T14:50:00.003+05:30

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 a great impact on the ICT industry and by proxy, to human society. If you don't believe me, clearly you haven't been paying any attention to ICT or mass media for that matter. Do your homework and if you still disagree, you can contact me if you want. Anyway, my point is that the Open Source movement has been a success. It has, in my opinion induced and/or inspired other phenomena such as Wikipedia and the rise of social networking (Eg: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.).

An Open Source project is usually a software project which is community driven and self centric (the software itself). The community focus is usually on the software it's developing. This common goal combines with a loose set of standards makes them bridge gaps that would otherwise divide them and build barriers. This is how the human kind created the web server which powers most of the Internet. This is how they created an Operating System which rivals and in many cases, out performs proprietary systems built at the expense of great amounts of money, propaganda, organizing, quality control, etc. This wonderful concept of collaboration, freedom and development today powers many things from the tiniest of embedded computers, mobile phones to the most powerful computers ever built. They power from handhelds, game consoles to massive data centers. All buy utilizing the power of people. Believe it or not, it's a fact.

However, Open Source movement isn't the realization of a Utopian dream. It's just a way of getting things done by collaboration. We as in our nature, have a habit of incorporating a certain notion of order and politics in and group/social activity. This, I'm not going to say is good or bad. But I'm going to say that the Open Source movement has not eluded that. So there is Open Source politics (Free and Open Source Software Politics that is, to be politically correct ;) ).

Traditional political methods usually and largely worked. Some famous successful software projects have known structure and way of doing things (Eg: Apache Foundation, Mozilla Foundation), and it works. Among many techniques used, we can see some dominant model. For example there is governance of projects and governance of the specifically code base. As some of you may know, in a traditional Open Source projects not everyone can be a "committer".

The commit access in the traditional approach, is considered a special privilege which was granted usually in recognition of the skills, talent and more importantly the contribution to the project. It has worked beneficially for may years. This approach has the upside of having low noise, better quality and control of contribution and may others. But it also has the downside of not being able to utilize the possible contributor base and among others, the tendency to annoy / offend contributors and users. The psychological image of an elite team of contributors worked, but also deterred some other possibilities. If someone did not like the way the project was heading, she could grab a copy of source code (remember, Software Freedom) and start developing to fit her will. This process, known as Forking was sometimes viewed as hostile and was thought to cause division of the community. So some good ideas inevitable had to fall through cracks.

So the million dollar question: How do we develop Open Source software, getting contribution from more crowd, enable free flow of ideas and still retain the stability of the project?

The software used in the traditional approach enabled the traditional approach and enforced it. Their relationship was somewhat symbiotic. Certain core components especially like version controlling systems (CVS, Subversion, etc.) could not cater our requirements here. As good as they are (they are good), their philosophy and design usually make them more suited in the traditional, centralised approach.

Enter, Distributed Version Controlling Systems (DVCS). Distributed VCSs are nothing new. They have been around and watched the centralised systems be the de-facto standard in Open Source management. DVCSs enable more collaborative kind of development. It can be argued that this is not essentially a feature of a DVCS and is possible to have in a centralised system. I agree, kind of. Although it might be the case, let's say that the software available so far do not support that arguement.

From the many distributed VCSs around, some of them have more success than the rest. Namely Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and Monotone seems to be more popular than the others. Git and Mercurial seems to have more high profile customers among the lot. Both of the projects share similar goals and is of roughly the same age (Git predates Mercurials in a few weeks). I've blogged about Git before, have been using it for more than a year and is very fond of it.

If you have read so far, you might be thinking that I haven't done justice to the last part of the title of this post, the GitHub thing and the rise of something. This is that part.

Stealing part of a comment by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH - the creator for Ruby on Rails web application framework), I believe that a Killer App can make a breakthrough for a platform. So GitHub is the Killer App of Git these days. GitHub blasted earlier this year in to the source code hosting scene which was dominated by the likes of SourceForge.net and commercial offerings. It created tremendous buzz even before it was launched.

GitHub is a site providing both paid and free Git version controlling service. So what's Killer or revolutionary about it?

What sets GitHub apart and makes it a trendsetter rather than a follower is the approach they've taken. They go back to the basics of the Open Source concepts in a cool, Web 2.0-esque way, so to speak. GitHubs focus is on the individuals (building blocks of an Open Source community) and their interaction and collaboration. Being powered by Git, they happily drop the dogma related to the concept of forking while passionately crying "Fork You"!

Technically speaking, any Git working copy (in comparison to a Subversion/CVS checkout) is a full repository, which in turns make it a separate fork. So GitHub connects people who work on different projects, let's anyone create her own fork with it and lets her do anything she desires about it. If she feels like she have something to share it later she can ask anyone else (including the original author) to fetch her modifications and try them out. If they like the changes the user made, they can incorporate it to their repository. The beauty it this is (inherited from the DVCS), one can manage the projects as a true distributed way or in a centralised way. Whatever you choose, you could still use the social networking approach to get the most out of it, and avoid the political barrier for contribution.

This is not to tell that the GitHub approach eliminates project politics. It does not do that, but it prevents politics getting in the way with people who want contribute. This I think is the dawn of a new era in Open Source software development. It signifies preservation of the community while giving everyone more value and respect, appeal to a broader audience. We can already feel the waves ripping through making other Open Source projects to try this out. More than anything, this enable the coder to move freely doing that neat hack on the random project they stumbled upon, without having much to worry about projects politics. I know they would agree, it means a lot.

Clarification and a disclaimer: I'm openly a Git/GitHub fan/user and I chose Git after using it and learning it, and that was before the Ruby on Rails community went crazy about Git. So I may be biased, but don't discount anything on Git, GitHub, Ruby, Rails and Open Source movement as a whole. Read and make up your mind.

I haven't discussed any down side of the new approach, which I'm sure is something will be analysed and told in great detail in the may years to come.

This post took surprisingly short time for a long post, so you are bound to run into typos and other language abuses. If you read this far, don't forget to leave a comment. I think I find your ideas interesting. ;)

Howto Setup a Subversion (svn) Repository for a Rails Project + Bonus

2008-08-26T03:10:00.007+05:30

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 Git before.

In cases where you can't use Git (or you feel too castrated by TortoiseSVN, pardon me for the pun) you can use Subversion. In this post I'll go through the steps you have to follow to get a basic Subversion setup up and running on a CentOS 5 Linux host. However I think you should be able to use this on other Linux distros too.

There's more than one way to host a Subversion repo. I'm going to stick with one way involving WebDAV. Don't mind the buzz word. It's the most common usage for this purpose. If you want a repository where you want to checkout and commit remotely, this is an easy way of getting it done. In addition to that I'll have some information targeting Ruby on Rails projects. However, I think it's not Rails specific, but also useful with other things too.

In addition I'll mention about a problem I came across where act_as_ferret caused an error and what was the reason.

1. Selection of Tools

We are going to use the following tools:

Apache HTTPD (Web Server) 2.2
mod_dav_svn for Apache
Subversion

If these are not installed already, go ahead and install them. You can use any method you like. This is how you do it using YUM tool

# yum install mod_dav_svn subversion httpd

You can verify whether you have them installed via the RPM system by using

# rpm -qa subversion httpd mod_dav_svn

If installed it'll show something similar to
subversion-1.4.2-2.el5
mod_dav_svn-1.4.2-2.el5
httpd-2.2.3-11.el5_1.centos.3
Note: If you didn't use yum/rpm to install, most probably you won't be able to use the above rpm command.

Now that you are set to it let's move forward.

2. Create the Subversion Configuration File for Apache

For this create a file under /etc/httpd/conf.d/ which has a name ending with .conf and enter the following lines
(Eg: /etc/httpd/conf.d/subversion.conf)

LoadModule dav_svn_module modules/mod_dav_svn.so
LoadModule authz_svn_module modules/mod_authz_svn.so

<Location /repos>
 DAV svn
 SVNPath /var/www/svn/repos
 AuthzSVNAccessFile /etc/svn-acl-conf
 AuthType Basic
 AuthName "UberCool Subversion Repository"
 AuthUserFile /etc/svn-auth-conf
 Require valid-user
</Location>

Replace the values for the following according to your requirement

Location - The location you want in the URL (In this case: http://example.com/repos)
SVNPath - The path to the directory you wish to store your repositories
AuthzSVNAccessFile - The file where you would hold the access control details for users
AuthName - A description you like the users to see
AuthUserFile - The file where you would hold the username/passwords for your users

Note: In CentOS 5 files with a *.conf name under the /etc/httpd/conf.d/ will get automatically get loaded. If you want to change the behavior or add another location for configuration files, the magic line is in the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file
...
Include conf.d/*.conf
...

3. Create Subversion Users and Set Access Control

Here I'll tell how to manage Subversion users and their access levels (basic).

3.1 Manage Subversion Users

Let's now add users to our little still non-existing repo. This step is not mandatory to precede the repo creation.

What we are going to use is basic HTTP authentication. If you want to use different authentication systems like LDAP you'll have to look elsewhere for that.

Use htpasswd command to create a password file and then to add/modify/remove users

Create a Password file:
# htpasswd -cm /etc/svn-auth-conf yourfirstuser

Add/Modify Users:
# htpasswd -m /etc/svn-auth-conf yourseconduser
# htpasswd -m /etc/svn-auth-conf yourotheruser

Remove User:
# htpasswd -D /etc/svn-auth-conf yourotheruser

3.2 Set Access Control

What happens if you want certain users to have full access to the repository, but only read-only access for a few users. You can achieve this level of access control easily. This is the purpose we mentioned a file called /etc/svn-acl-conf in the configuration file.

Edit the file with your favorite editor ans enter the details. I'll put some data I have, replace these with your actual users. Please note that "r" stands for Read and "RW" for Read-Write.

[/]
yourfirstuser = rw
yourseconduser = rw
yourthirduser = r

Save the file and restart the Web Server (Eg: # service httpd restart)

4. Create Repository Storage Area

It's not much, nothing too fancy. :) Create the directory you specified in the Apache configuration file, create the repo and change permission so that Apache could read it. Here we go,

# mkdir -p /var/www/svn
# cd /var/www/svn

# svnadmin create repos
# chown -R apache.apache repos

If things went fine this far now you'll be able to see an empty repo. Just start/restart the web server (# service httpd restart) and browse to the relevant URL (http://example.com/repos). If all is good you'll see a page saying Revision 0.

5. Set to Import Your Rails Project to Subversion Repository

**Note: In this post I'll go with creating proper Subversion repo with branch/tag/trunk layout. If you want to host more than one project in a repository, here is a good place to start with. (Which by the way is the source where much of the information in this post came from. I'm just compiling them into my experience) The above link will point you how to do a simple import of an existing project. However, I'm traveling the longer path because it gives us more flexibility in setting repository parameter which you will see in step 6.

I'll assume you already have a Rails project. Since Rails projects will have certain peculiar requirements, it'll be a great way to experiment Subversion. Let's assume your project is in your /bak directory and is called UberCool (directory name is ubercool).

First lets create a proper Subversion top level layout with
# svn mkdir --message="Setting project layout" file:///var/www/svn/repos/trunk file:///var/www/svn/repos/tags file:///var/www/svn/repos/branches

Then, checkout our repository to the project directory by
# svn checkout file:///var/www/svn/repos/trunk /bak/ubercool

Note: We are set to import here. We didn't add or commit any files yet. So if you are following this post (*not* the above mentioned guide from CentOS wiki), please proceed to step 6. We are not done yet.

6. Tweak Your Subversion Repository

Although we are set to import the project in the step 5, we didn't actually import the project yet. What we are trying to do is set the special tweaks we need in the repository before we import the project. So here we go.

Change into the project directory. Then, add the files to the Subversion repo. This is not the same as committing. We are going to mark the files to be imported from the project directory (or technically commit in) to the repo.
# cd /bak/ubercool
# svn add . --force

The --force option is required because Subversion does not know yet that these file are part of the project. So we have to instruct it sternly to add the files. :)

6.1 Stop unnecessary files from being Version Controlled

As you might know there are files that we do not wish to be version controlled. In a Rails project most definitely you don't want to keep track of the history of log files. In most cases you don't want to version track images (and/or binary files such as JPEG, MPEG, FLV, etc. files). You can remove these files from version control. For example, here's a few things I'll do in a typical Rails project:

# svn revert log/*
# svn revert config/database.yml
# svn propset svn:ignore "*.log" log
# svn propset svn:ignore "database.yml" config
# svn propset svn:ignore "database.yml" config
# svn revert public/index.html
# rm public/index.html

The above will remove log files and database.yml from version controlling and will ignore future versions of those file. It will remove the public/index.html file from version controlling too.

Rails projects also usually require a tmp directory which is not available here. So let's create it and but keep it away from version controlling. The tmp directory is required usually. If you've used Mongrel, you know what I mean. :) Whatever else directories or files you need to be available, yet not be version controlled,...... create now and remove from version controlling. (Eg: database migration files)

# svn mkdir tmp db/migrate
# svn propset svn:ignore "*" tmp

6.2 Mark Executable Files

There are files that you'd want to keep as executable files. If you are not sure let's consider a situation where I've been. Skip the background story if you don't want to hear it.

[Start of Side Story]
At my last work place we had a project which refused to obey when we call $ rake db:fixtures:load We knew this error was introduced only after act_as_ferret was introduced to the application. We were able to confirm it when we noticed fixtures without and ferret index could be loaded successfully.

After some work we trace the cause to ferret_server. In fact the ferret_server script failed to run. I know some of you might not have know about such a server was associated with act_as_ferret. But it is. The script should run if act_as_ferret were to function.

So what was the issue? It was the common Unix execution issue. Simply the script/ferret_server did not have execution permission on the deployment. The initiation point was, the ferret plugin being committed from a Windows box where you don't have a notion about execution permission. But even if we committed from a Linux box it would not make any difference for us. Our Subversion repository did not have the execution notion either.

Ultimately I had to solve the issue by modifying our deployment (Capistrano) scripts. Ideally I should have made the Subversion repo execution permission aware, but I didn't have that luxury due to the fact that our particular Subversion hosting was provided by a third party. However you can have that convenience and mark necessary files as executable in your repo. Read ahead.
[End of Side Story]

So let's make sure that contents in the scripts directory (and other required) of our Rails project are executable files. Please note that this works only on files. You cannot set execution property for directories in Subversion.

# svn propset svn:executable script/performance/* script/process/* script/* public/dispatch.*

Or, a better Unix-y way:

# svn propset svn:executable `find ./script -type f | grep -v '.svn'` public/dispatch.*

This was all I was felt was necessary, but browsing the web I found one more important tweak. Since all deployment hosts doesn't handle line ending in the same way (Eg: Unix & Windows) it's best to allow the OS to choose the line ending of the dispatchers.

# svn propset svn:eol-style native public/dispatch.*

According to the above, we just set Unix users will have LF line ending while Windows users will get a CRLF ending. Don't worry about it much if you don't know what I say about line endings. :)

7. Commit Your Hard Work and Sigh

Now you have completed all the hard labor of creating and tweaking a Subversion setup. Let's commit the work we've been doing now.

# svn commit --message="Initial commit, worked hard for this,.. really"

There you go. I know that's some work, but it's not too hard. After all we admins are paid to do these work. :)

Now you can let out a sigh of relief and enjoy your shiny new Subversion repository and work on your Uber Cool project. You can checkout your new repo using any Subversion (SVN) client with the URL of http://example.com/repos/ubercool/trunk

Eg: $ svn co http://example.com/repos/ubercool/trunk ubercool

That's all for now. This post (rather long) was written in haste, so I beg your pardon for any mistake or poor quality you encounter. If you need more information about Subversion administration, don't forget to check the Subverion Book. I've referred to it all the time whenever I'm not allowed to use Git. :P

PS: If you do not believe that Git is so good,............. go fork yourself!

Updated: A Simple Diagram on Distributed VCS (Hint: Git)

2008-07-11T19:10:00.001+05:30

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 a generic audience and will not include in detail technical information. It will rather be an introduction to the DVCS in general. As you already know that Git is my favorite VCS software and the diagram will also have some reference in that sence.

My purpose of drawing the initial diagram was to explain DVCS (namely Git) to a client. However I wanted to change a few things and here is the results. I didn't think that this is that important to create a new version. But I wasnted to try out OpenOffice.org Draw as a diagramming tool. The older version was done in Dia. After trying OO.o Draw, I think I'm going to stick with it for most of my diagramming needs. :) Still Dia is another great tool to use. So here is the documet which came out from my OO.o Draw experiement.

If you are interested in learning more about DVCS here is a few links to get started.

Wikipedia - Revision Control
Wikipedia - Distributed Revision Controlling (not seems to be in the best quality)
Wikipedia - Comparison of VCS Software
Git
Git Wiki
List of projects using Git
A video by Scott Chacon about Git (this is an excellent one, check it out)
A video by Randal Schwartz about Git (at Google Tech Talks)

Without further delay here is the diagram. You may want to download the (PDF/PNG) file for better viewing.

Here is the original post for your convinience:

-- Start of the Original Post --

I'm busy these days everybody. Lot of Rails applications to be deployed on Linux hosts with Thin and also Passenger. :) I know, I know I'm delaying the Ruby hosting post again.

Anyway, I don't have much time right now for a full post. Meanwhile enjoy this diagram about Distributed version controlling systems, especially Git. This is intended as an answer to the people who are new to the Distributes VCS and try to understand why everyone is leaving Subversion to jump into the Git bandwagon. :) If you need a wee bit more info about Git, from me, have a look in my old blog post here.

So here it is. Enjoy it while I get back. And.. oh, you might want to view the image in actual size to read it's content. :)

Image Link: Diagram

Update: Ok, this is the second time Scott Chacon beat me to do something and did it way better than I could've done. What to fret? The guy's awesome. :) If you want to have a better view of how Git works I'll beg you to watch Scotts Git video or at least Randal Schwartz's speach at Google tech Talks.

-- End of the Original Post --

Errno::EPIPE (Broken pipe) MySQL Error in Rails

2008-05-03T22:40:00.012+05:30

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 way through. So here's some stuff I found. Hope this will save someones time.

(My Ruby servers post is coming shortly,.. really, and will include details about Thin and Passenger too. Actually I was waiting Phusion Passenger AKA mod_rails to be released. For a quick peak of the post, I'm currently running Thin in production and also evaluating Passenger.

Update: I've moved about 6 apps to Passenger. So far so good. Thin is still my first choice though. You can look forward to the post along with some Capistrano scripts too, ...soon. :)

1. Errno::EPIPE (Broken pipe - The Major Pain in the Neck)

The team I'm working with are using MySQL extensively. I'm glad they opted for an Open Source DBMS rather than doing what a lot of Sri Lankan IT firms do (i.e. Running the Unity Plaza edition of MS SQL Server). Since Sun's considering close sourcing parts of MySQL, I'll be on their nerve pushing toward PostgreSQL. I've always preferred Postgres (which turns 20 years old from the roots by next year) and even Sun is saying that PostgreSQL is the most advanced Open Source DBMS. Now that I mentioned it, expect the removal of that web page soon. :) Back to the topic.

We had a testing server which crashed overnight. It was a Linux (CentOS 5) installation. So I was pretty much sure that it wasn't about the OS. It worked as usual when we start the web app. Kept working fine. But when we return the next day morning,....... web app is not working, displaying an "Application Error" page.

Day one : I ignored it. Don't blame me. I had other servers to manage, being the only Linux admin might be a privilege, but not always. After all, the server was running an application going through heavy development. In fact, it had several known application errors. I might have not even read the logs.

Day two, day three, day four,....... Ok, there's something wrong. So I started digging through app logs. There it was, a broken pipe (literally).

The error read as Errno::EPIPE (Broken pipe). Quick Googling showed me that it was something reported before, even in pre-Mongrel era of Rails. At this point I was moving to Thin as my preferred Rails backend. So I mailed the friendly Thin Google Group. I will not go into the detailed discussion here. Anyone interested can see it in the above link.

So this is the problem. I had help figuring out what it actually was.

The error was occurring due to 'something' in MySQL driver
The actual error was the termination of DB connection of the app, due to inactivity

After discussing with Thin group and checking a lot of web pages, these were the only sulutions which seemed solutions. Wich means, I'm going to omit the parts where it was adviced to paint your face with salamander blood in a full-moon night and dance around a parking lot.

Set ActiveRecord::Base.verification_timeout = 14400 in config/environment.rb or to any value that is lower than the MySQL server's interactive_timeout setting. Or,
Create a sleeper thread which would use the DB connection periodically

Eg:

Thread.new do
 loop do
   sleep(30*60)
   logger.fatal("ActiveRecord::Base.verify_active_connections!")
   ActiveRecord::Base.verify_active_connections!
   ActiveRecord::Base.connection.select_value('select 1')
 end
end

I tried both. Sometimes they seemed to succeed, but the crashing was not completely eradicated. I was getting really frustrated. There seems to be no other pragmatic solution, and people were starting to doubt whether Rails was enterprise ready. I desperately had to do something. So I went back to the basics and started working up. This is when I remembered that there are two MySQL drivers for Ruby.

Ruby/MySQL is the driver written in Ruby (Listed in MySQL site)
MySQL/Ruby is the driver written in C

This is the point I recalled installing the Ruby/MySQL since a part of the application requited to access a native MySQL driver. And certainly the error generated from mysql.rb. There, I had a break. So as the next natural step I removed the Ruby/MySQL and installed MySQL/Ruby. Although both the drivers were maintained by the same person, I had hope for a fix in the C driver.

Removing Ruby/MySQL proved to be as simple as deleting the mysql.rb from the installation location. Installing MySQL/Ruby was a little tricky. The site listed a two step build process. But the first step had 3 different alternate versions.

% ruby extconf.rb
% ruby extconf.rb --with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql
% ruby extconf.rb --with-mysql-config

The step worked for me was

% ruby extconf.rb --with-mysql-config

Then,

% make

At this point I could make sure it worked by running the compiled thing like:

% ruby ./test.rb -- [hostname [user [passwd [dbname [port [socket [flag]]]]]]]

Then finally,

% sudo make install

That's it. It solved my problem. It's been over several weeks now and the application is running fine with the new MySQL driver. I know this is not a proper solution for the problem. But so far it proved to be better than anything found on the Internet for me. I hope someone else will also find this useful.

2. Proxy Errors

This second error is not related to MySQL at all, but I'll just mention it. It's more of a blunder from my side rather than an actual error.

The same application started giving out proxy errors. It wasn't all of a sudden. I've seen that error when one or more Mongrel instances in a Mongrel Cluster died. So I just restarted the whole Mongrel Cluster and informed the developers. This was the peak of annoyance of that MySQL error. So we were more concerned about that.

But the issue turned out to be a severe pain than I hoped. When developers complained about constant proxy errors, I knew I had to go back to logs. However without much delay I figured out where I've done the mistake. Since MySQL issue was solved, my mind was more relaxed to notice the stupid mistake I've done.

Earlier my mongrel instances were running from port 8000 to 8003. So my apache proxy/proxy_balancer configuration looked more like this:
BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:8000
BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:8001
BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:8002
BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:8003

But at one point of the configuration and tuning, I thought it would make more sense to run mongrels from port 8001 to port 8004. I actually went ahead with that and reconfigured the mongrel cluster so that it was running on ports 8001-8004. During that time I had tested both Nginx and Apache back and forth on the same server. So the web server configurations were being changed all the time. Eventually this ended up in my above shown mod_proxy/mod_proxy_balancer configuration.

It was a funny situation. Apache was looking for ports 8000-8003 where Mongrels were serving ports 8001-8004. Which resulted in Mongrel instance on 8004 being unused and Apache forwarding requests to a port (8000) where nothing was running. That is why the proxy error was regular and consistant. :) Fortunately, I found this before someone else did and saved myself from the ridicule.

So the next time when you get a proxy error which seems rcurring and cinsistant don't forget to check your backend configs (Eg: Mongrel, Thin, Ebb, etc.) Vs the web server proxy configurations (Eg: Apache, Nginx).

Arthur C. Clarke: The Odyssey Concludes

2008-03-19T07:57:00.004+05:30

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 liked the places like Unawatuna, Roomassala, etc.

Clarke was a worldwide known person for his famous work like the Odyssey series (2001, 2010, 2061, 3001) and Rendezvous with Rama, Fountains of Paradise, The Deep Range, etc. and also for inspirational visionary work. For me, "The Deep Range" is the favourite, not at any rate because of the Sri Lankan connection in the book, but because of the illustration of Ocean and creatures it creates. I'll always keep re-reading it to experience that wonderful feeling of being in the Ocean. This is also the book where Clarke points that we could look into the sea before going to walk among the stars.

Sir Clarkes passing away remarks the end of the reign of "The Big Three" (Issac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein) of science fiction. I'll not get into the details of his contributions to the world, Sci-Fi, non-fiction or other. For a start you can read the Wikipedia page I linked above. I just wanted to say that he and his work was inspirational for a number of generations and it will remain so.

Here are some links I found on the Net reporting his death:
Slashdot: Arthur C. Clarke Is Dead At 90
The Associate Press: Writer Arthur C. Clarke Dies at 90
Washington Post: Arthur C. Clarke; Sci-Fi Writer Foresaw Mankind's Possibilities
BBC: Writer Arthur C Clarke dies at 90
LA Times: The passing of a legend: Arthur C. Clarke
National Post: Sci-fi giant Arthur C. Clarke dead at 90
Bloomberg: Arthur C. Clarke, Author of `2001: A Space Odyssey,' Dies at 90

With generations of people whos been inspired by his work, the Clarke mark will be visible in future than it did in past. Whenever we look into the stars, whenever we unravel the mysteries of the deep see, whenever we take steps as a race and whenever a LOLCat meows about stars :) we'll remember him.

PS: A side note. When people in US and similar areas heard that Clarke died on Wednesday, it was still Tuesday for them. So as one person in Slashdot said "He even died tomorrow". Well, he lived the future, and died in future.

Google Summer of Code 2008 Mentor Organization List Announced

2008-03-18T10:54:00.003+05:30

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 Summer of Code is a student program where university (BSc, MSc, etc.) students can work for an Open Source software project for 3 months under Google sponsorship. I was one of the lucky students last year (but had to resign due to a couple of domestic bereavements). This years program is announced and I hope at least a few excellent coders will be interested in this news. Please convey this news to relevant students, while I check out any interesting project for me. :) And remember last year about a 20 add students were selected from Sri Lanka. So don't think you don't have any chance. You just have to be enthusiastic, skilled (in coding) and could allocate time (which I know by experience is important).

Google Summer of Code is one of the best ways to get industry level experience, make connections with a lot of important programmers and projects in the world, contribute to Open Source projects where thousands of people will be using your code. To top it off Google is paying each selected student a stipend of $4,500 which is over LKR4.5 lakhs.

Google Summer of Code, running for the fourth consecutive year is now announced and will accept student application between 24-31 March. Any interested student can see the list of mentoring organizations and their suggested ideas in http://code.google.com/soc/2008
Actually, those ideas are just suggestions and students are welcome to propose their own ideas.

This year 175 Open Source projects are there for the students to work with. Students will find familiar names among them like Apache, Google, Nmap, Fedora, Debian, GCC, PostgreSQL, MySQL, PHP, Git :) , Subversion, Pidgin, Adium, Python, Django, GIMP, OpenMoko, GNOME, KDE, Vim, FFMpeg, VideoLAN, Samba, Sahana, WordPress, Pentaho, OLPC. etc. Please note that this is not about developing applications using those, but developing those themselves. GSoC selection is a very competitive process and good skills in development is required.

The SoC FAQ will answer your burning questions about the particulars like how to apply, eligibility criteria and etc. So please get SoC to the attention and encourage students with strong programming skills to apply.

No! I Will NOT contribute 5 Cents to that Sick Child!

2008-03-12T15:13:00.000+05:30

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 "Slow Dance" or something. They claim they are so authentic (yeah, and I'm Superman in disguise). It might be something else like "forward this 100 time and it will bring you fortune. This is REAL! This worked for me" or "Fwd:FWD: Worst Virus Ever: Be careful !!!". The last one I got was named "Fwd: Pleeeeease forward ...it costs nothing 2 u.". Costs nothing?!!! It costs my patience, my nerves, my bandwidth, my time and sometime my sense also when I notice the sender is sometimes an IT student!

I won't mind promoting a cause which I know of and I could verify, like the fund raiser to support a university student who was dying from a cancer. But all the other things which no one can verify the validity (which is the common case) are not going to pass though me.

To make it clear I'll just say: "Those mails are hoaxes, so stop spamming!". Give some thought on these points. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeese! ;)

1. E mail systems were never designed to track E mails.

E mail which is explained in gory technical details in RFCs, 2822, 2045 through 2049 were never designed with a facility to track the emails sent. Later facilities were added to support delivery receipts and return receipts. But this is just for the servers. This means that as far as I know Microsoft, AOL or any other (unless of course they are employing Hana Gitelman) *cannot* track any emails you send.

So our genius Spammer friends out there will next time tell you that your e mail provider is donating this project, instead of AOL. You are warned. If you are convinced that it is the case, please re-read the privacy statement of your e mail service provider and contact them if necessary.

2. There's no reliable way I know of which can track data across the Internet

Internet had a vast number of server interconnected in some means. I guess all of you remember that basic introduction. So,... when you send a mail, that piece of data travels thought this forest of servers, through numerous nodes and so on. Some servers strip data from that, some add to that. So don't expect that there's a reliable technique to track e mail. So what ever some mails claim, it is not effective up to my knowledge.

3. Some of the things are known Hoax mails/chain mails

I know most of you don't care, but some of these cases are well documented on the Internet/WWW as known junk. Next time when you receive such a mail, do a little background search and see for your self.

Next time you feel like forwarding a mail about Amy Bruce, Craig Sheldon or whoever it is, Stop! Most of the people who forward do not even think of checking a little about these claims. Most organizations have warning pages about chain mails. For example Make-A-Wish has a page saying that Amy (Amrita, etc., etc.) Bruce chain mail is a known hoax.

4. You are helping Spammers!

I once got a chain mail which had over 2000 e mail addresses in it. Yes! over 2000. Some were wide open to read. Some were hidden in the header. However, should a spammer get his/her hand on that mail (which I'm pretty sure of) he/she will have another 2000+ e mail adresses to their database. Just imagine the number of e mail addresses passing in the Internet in pure text format!

It is believed that most of these chain mails originate from professional spammers. :) And I've seen some locally originated stuff too. Whatever the cause may be, it'll still be for spammers advantage.

5. You are offending/harming others

By including your friends e mail addresses in a spam mail list, you are doing a harm to them. Then you are also affecting their productivity, time, bandwidth, etc. You also expose them to phishing and other forms of scams, and also could carry malware like trojans, worms, spyware, etc. If you don't listen to any other reason, at least stop because of this security concern. Need I say anything more? You know the pain for yourself.

6. You are harming yourself

By continuously sending chain mails, you are not only jeopardizing your friends, but also damaging your credibility and reputation. Your email address will shortly enter blacklists and it would be very hard to earn the credibility. For example there are guys that I completely ignore when I check mails or better, completely filter out. Me doing this might not hurt you, but it will when Google does that.

Some of these mails will tell a heart touching story of a sick child, sick husband or someone like that and mention something like "AOL and Microsoft will track this e mail and contribute 5 cents per every message you forward". Else it might me like "Dialog is offering brand new free Nokia phones, forward this 100 times to qualify for a N95 draw." Sounds familiar? It should be. I doubt some of you have even been forwarding such mails. If so please give up in the name of real people suffering from your spam.

I know most (if not all) of the people who send me these kind of emails have a good intention of supporting an innocent soul. But I'm so sorry to tell you that there are jerks you are feeding upon your good human soul. So please stop, now. You are not helping anyone. No you are not donating anything when you forward those mail. For make the point clear, no one is tracking how many times you send that e mail. So stop hitting forward button in vain.

If you are not ready to take my word for it try Googling to be ashamed of continuing chain mails. For those who are too lazy to click on that link, I'll list a few things you should see.

Your mails will not be tracked, will not be counted, will not help, will not bring good luck, will not win you prices, will not do any good.

Drop spamming your friends today!

Howto setup a MySQL Connector/J 5.1 for Tomcat on Linux

2008-03-11T13:36:00.005+05:30

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 a Rails webapp.

Actually the following things are found on the Internet. I cannot remember all the sources I looked at, but one was the MySQLs own documentation and Apache Tomcat documentations. So if this works (which in my case did), credit should not be mine. :)

Here's the setup.

GNU/Linux (in my case CentOS 5, although should work with any Linux distro)
Apache Tomcat (5.5.25, should work with Tomcat 5.5 range)
Sun JDK (1.6.0_04)
MySQL (5.0.22)
MySQL Connector/J (5.1)

1. I assume that Java is setup (See my previous post for more details on setting up Java manually), and your MySQL is running on the same host on port 3306. Please replace your actual settings if they are different.

2. First, lets set up Apache Tomcat 5.5.
If you already have Tomcat up and running, feel free to skip to step 2.
You can download it from (http://tomcat.apache.org/). For my case I downloaded Apache Tomcat version 5.5.25 (Eg: apache-tomcat-5.5.25.tar.gz).

Extract the downloaded archive to get the tomcat (Eg: tar xzvf apache-tomcat-5.5.25.tar.gz). This will give a directory with a name similar to apache-tomcat-5.5.25.

Move this directory to a place where you'd run it as the Tomcat server.
Eg: cp -R ~/apache-tomcat-5.5.25 /var/tomcat

Now set the variables, CATALINA_HOME, JAVA_HOME, JDK_HOME. One way of doing this is by adding those to /etc/profile file (Eg: sudo vi /etc/profile).
Eg: Add these lines to the end of /etc/profile:
CATALINA_HOME=/var/tomcat
JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_04
JDK_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_04
export CATALINA_HOME JAVA_HOME JDK_HOME

To make sure it takes effect, you can log out and log in, or just close the terminal and start a new thing.

Then you can start the Tomcat server by running the startup.sh script which comes with Tomcat. Shutdown script is called shutdown.sh. They are in the bin directory of your Tomcat directory.
Eg: $/var/tomcat/bin/startup.sh

2. Now lets move to Connector/J setup. Download MySQL Connector/J from (http://www.mysql.com/products/connector/j/). In my case I downloaded version 5.1. You'll get a .tar.gz file
Eg: mysql-connector-java-5.1.5.tar.gz

This writeup assumes this connector version. It is the latest as of this writing, but if the version differs, the following configuration instruction may not work.

3. Extract the connector.tar.gz archive to get a .jar file, which is the actual connector.
Eg: tar xzvf mysql-connector-java-5.1.5.tar.gz

This will most probably create a directory with a name something like mysql-connector-java-5.1.5. In that you'll find a directory structure where the .jar file (Eg: mysql-connector-java-5.1.5-bin.jar) will be in the topmost level.

4. Copy the .jar file (Eg: mysql-connector-java-5.1.5-bin.jar) to your $CATALINA_HOME/common/lib (i.e: common/lib directory within your Tomcat directory.)
Eg: sudo cp ~/mysql-connector-java-5.1.5/mysql-connector-java-5.1.5-bin.jar /var/tomcat/common/lib/

5. Create a context configuration file for Tomcat.
Create a configuration file in your $CATALINA_HOME/conf/ which has the file name apps-yourapp.xml
Eg: If your applications name is myapp then,
$ vi /var/tomcat/conf/apps-myapp.xml

6. Enter the things found here or in this file. When you copy and paste these code, please remember to replace values for Context path, docBase, Resource name, ResourceParams name, username, password and url with your values.

Eg: If your application is located under /var/tomcat/webapps/myapp and it's accesible via http://yourdomain.tld/myapp then your Context path would be "/myapp" (where it's accessible in URL) and docBase would be "webapps/myapp" (where it's available on file system).

7. Restart your Tomcat can now you are good to go. In your Java code you can use the JDBC connection in something like:
Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mysql://yourdomain.tld/my_database?" + "user=myuser&password=mypassword");

Howto Setup Sun Java on Linux Manually

2008-03-10T10:18:00.004+05:30

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 they want to run certain applications like NetBeans, FrostWire, etc. which require a JRE to be available. This tutorial is going to take you through the steps you need to setup a working JRE/JDK on a Linux system. You may as well take this idea and tune it for your non-Linux environments like Solaris, *BSD.

Note: This howto assumes you have 'sudo' configured for you. If you don't have 'sudo' configured, you'll have to either use 'su' or login as root to use the commands I have provided with 'sudo' at the beginning. Please replace file names and paths in this howto with your own values.

1. First download the JRE/JDK from Sun (http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/) For the rest of the tutorial I'll use JRE 6 Update 2, but even if you want to setup JDK it's still the same steps. The selection of the package is your choice. Remember, the .bin (not -rpm.bin) file can be used on virtually any Linux distribution, given they have fairly up to date components and correct architecture (Eg: x86, x86_64, etc.).

You can get the JRE as a Linux self extracting file (.bin) or a RPM archive (-rpm.bin) file at the moment. Even if they change these things, I think they'll still provide the archive (not the package).
Eg: jre-6u2-linux-i586.bin

2. After you complete your download, go to the directory you have it on disk.
Eg: $ cd ~/skyeye/Desktop/ if you have it on your desktop

3. Change the permissions so that you can execute the file
Eg: $ chmod a+x ./jre-6u2-linux-i586.bin

4. Execute it
Eg: $ ./jre-6u2-linux-i586.bin

5. You'll have to go through the Sun's license notice and accept it to use the JRE/JDK. After this the package will extract and you will have a directory
Eg: ./jre1.6.0_02 if/ you downloaded the .bin file, or you'll have a jre1.6.0_02-i586.rpm file if you downloaded the -rpm.bin file.

6. If you now have a .rpm file, you only have use rpm (Eg: rpm -U) or a relevant utility (Eg: yum localinstall)
Eg: $ sudo rpm -Uvh jre1.6.0_02-i586.rpm

You are done. Contgratz!

But if you downloaded the .bin in the first place, please proceed from step 7.

7. Move your new JRE/JDK directory where people can access
Eg: $ sudo mv ./jre1.6.0_02 /opt/

8. Add the path to the bin directory within your JRE/JDK directory, to your systems $PATH. Use your preferred editor to edit the relevant configuration file to set the PATH persistently. If you are going to add it to the system wide PATH so that anyone can get it, edit /etc/profile. If you just want it for you, edit your .bashrc (~/.bashrc). As you may have guessed this is for the setups using GNU Bash. If you use a different shell, the lines in step 9 might need to be changed. Luckily almost all mainstream Linux distributions use Bash as the default shell.
Eg: $ sudo vi /etc/profile

9. Add the following lines after everything (replace /opt/jre1.6.0_02/bin with your JRE bin path)

PATH=/opt/jre1.6.0_02/bin:$PATH
export PATH

save (write to) the file and exit. Now, next time you log in, you'll have a Sun JRE ready for you. What step 9 exactly does is, add the path of the Java bin directory to the system PATH variable at the beginning.

That's all. See, not that difficult. But of course, if you are using modern distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, etc. you don't have to go through all these. Sun Java packages are usually available through the repositories. Just use your favorite package management software (Eg: Synaptic, YumEx, apt-get, yum, etc.) to install it.

Off to the Hospital

2008-02-28T22:41:00.003+05:30

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. I thought my weariness was just aftereffects of the fever. In the weekend I made it to my hometown, and just measured my temperature casually at my parents demand.

Bam! I had over 99.2 F (for those who don't know 98.6 F is the normal for an adult). I went to see a doctor and took medication. I thought it was over.

After that day, I noticed that I have fever in the afternoon, daily. So I met a specialist two days ago, who had me do some tests, which turned out to be OK. But she warned me, if I have temperature in two days, I have to admit.

Well, two days are passed, and I still have fever. So I'm getting ready to go in early tomorrow morning. :)

I've not been idle last week or so. I've worked remotely for office, signed up for new cool things like GitHub and Heroku, but more details have to wait. I think I have to wait a little more before I work on my blogposts I promised,enjoy the post about OpenMoko meanwhile. I guess I have to conclude this post like this, and I'm afraid, it looks like that I have to stay couple of days offline.

Meanwhile everyone, take care. I'll be totally fine, I'm with my parents & brother. Nadee is also coming with her mom. So don't worry about me, just look after the Net until I return.

Open Source Revolution: Episode N - Attack of the Phones

2008-02-25T02:08:00.001+05:30

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 (or whatever brick which can make phone calls). Whatever the cause maybe, you should be well aware that the arena of mobile phones is expanding it's horizons like a frenzy. And being a FOSS geek, I can't help feeling optimistic about the current state of the art.

This far the mobile phone has been a gadget we buy from a vendor, use it as it is, not allowed to meddle with, preloaded with proprietary software (which usually is ugly literally and metaphorically) and so on. In regions like US, EU and so most of the phones come bound to an operator (so called locked phoned). Fortunately in Sri Lanka it has not been that ugly where we buy unlocked phones then put a SIM from any GSM operator available here. So freedom of the phone may seem not so affected to some people. But we all know even in the current light of the things, we are bound to the gadgets (hardware) and pre-loaded software.

On hardware side we are we have been using custom designs from OEMs which are relabeled by phone vendors and some times even re-branded by operators. These hardware platforms are usually not available to the public and have never been based on technological commodities. Software is even worse. While some use custom built software, smart phone and PDA, etc. market has been dominated by few closed box, secret things like Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm. May be that can be a reason why I've always been disappointed by the feature/price ratio of mobile phones. You may want to disagree, but I feel as usual, a limited number of players in the game can kill innovation and improvement. How many areas we have seen this happen? Isn't this one of the most compelling reasons why people accepted Open Source movement with open arms, that they we tired of the cartel?

However, in recent years we've seen a developing trends in Open Source software based, namely Linux based phones. Some Asian vendors and even some bigger names like Motorola started using Linux on mobile phones. As the time moved on we could the that it was beneficial in maby aspects, ...just like the Software industry. This is the backdrop where OEMs start making 3G and even 3.5G Linux phones, big firms making consortium to get involved with the FOSS revolution in mobile phones. This is the also the backdrop where Google, who without a doubt a key innovator on the Net, made an somewhat unexpected move. People expects energetic moves from Google and they have indeed skyrocketed technologies before. For the people who's been staying underground at least for the past 5 years, just ask someone about Web Search, Gmail, Ajax, Blogs. Sure they didn't create any of those but they did elevated them in to heights which are now the measuring points.

After the success of Apples iPhone there was a rumor floating about a gPhone from Google. When people was anticipating a phone Google presented a platform: Android. Android is a mobile phone platform initiated by Google and supported by Open Handset Alliance. OHA consists of major names in the industry including Intel, NTT, HTT, Motorola, LG, Samsung, eBay, Marvell, Synaptics, Wind River, etc. Android is yet come out with something solid, but an SDK is out and people are already hacking. Phones based one Android are expected within 2008 from major vendors. However at this stage applications are limited to Java platform (not standard Java ME or SE) and access to low level device APIs are not available. There are some few other catches too. But I for one, welcome our new mobile platform :) and guess we can expect interesting things from Android. However my main expectation and main focus/inspiration of this post is not Android, but OpenMoko.

Although OpenMoko may sound like a funny name, it's catchy. Admit it, and the slogan is also a Matrix kind of "Free Your Phone". Without just working on words let me show you a couple of pictures. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Neo 1973 (and Neo FreeRunner which is not in the pictures).

Well, for some of you, especially for FOSS geeks, this is no news at all. We've been expecting this great gadget for quite some time.

Some might go far enough even to say that it looks awfully similar to an iPhone. That is where I step in again to enlighten you, saying that it is awfully vice-versa.

This cool thing you see in the pictures is called Neo 1973 which is named after the year of mobile phone invention. Neo 1973 which was a developer oriented device is sold out in order to pave the way to it's spiritual successor Neo FreeRunner which I'm told by their sales team, will be available in mid April.

Neo device is the first available mobile phone using the OpenMoko platform. OpenMoko platform is quite similar to Android in it's aims, but is older and much much more open than Android. OpenMoko based phones, namely Neo devices are based on more commodity hardware. Even the CAD drawings for the Neo 1973 is open and CAD drawing for the FreeRunner is also expected.

Here's the hardware spec for the current (FreeRunner) device:
(Only 2.5G is supported for now, will be upgraded to 3G in future)

120.7 x 62 x 18.5mm factor
184g weight (unconfirmed yet)
2.8" 640 x 480 VGA Color TFT LCD
Samsung 2442 SoC (400 MHz)
SMedia 3362 3D Graphics Accelerator
128MB RAM
256MB Flash
2x 3D Accelerometers (wow, cool)
Tri-Band GPRS/GSM - 900 (850 for N. America)/1800/1900 MHz
WiFi 802.11b/g
Bluetooth 2.0 EDR
AGPS (Assisted GPS) receiver
USB 1.1
Micro CD slot
2.5mm audio jack
Replaceable 1200mAh battery
Touchscreen (finger/stylus)

FreeeRunner (which will look strikingly similar to Neo 1973 in look) is operated with a full touch interface, both finger and stylus, supports motion sensing and gesture based operations (sweet, that's what accelerometers do). Neo devices also ship with quite a few goodies like a headset, pouch, lanyard, micro SD card, USB connector cables and an uber cool stylus which is also a pen/laser pointer/flash light (with extra batteries). Now isn't that appealing or what?

Neo FreeRunner prices are yet to be unveiled. Neo 1973 was sold at $399. The software platform is under development. In April, hopefully FreeRunner will make it to the hands of mobile developers, FOSS lovers, enthusiasts, etc. Then given the development and testing exposure, it will be ready for prime time. But I guess I'm looking forward to the April release rather than wait for the public release. :)

As going with the FOSS model, the complete stack of software, the OpenMoko software stack is 100% Open Source. Yes, not only the open API fantasy or the FOSS userland, but the whole thing including the OS (kernel, etc.), Java VM, etc. is Open Source. You are not hindered by a vendors SDK or an API. You are given the whole freedom to to whatever you like with it. Now that's what I call freedom on the phone.

So friends and comrades, let's flock on and walk together to Free the Phone.

Image courtesy: www.openmoko.com, www.linuxdevices.com

I'll be Back on This Blog, Very Soon

2008-02-13T20:00:00.003+05:30

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 all who lost their lives and were affected by recent terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka.

Then let me give this brief note. I've been too busy past couple of weeks (actually months) with a lot of things including my new employment. So I wish to let you know that I'll be back very soon, and I already have a couple of things as drafts. So stay tuned. Good news is that I have loads and loads to say about things (Tech/Non-Tech), especially web servers (Apache, Nginx, Mongrel, Thin, etc.), Ruby, Rails, web hosting (sliced/VPS), rails deployment (Capistrano, etc.), GNU/Linux, Open Source (as usual), Open Source mobile phones (OpenMoko, Android), rants about chain letters, etc., etc...... and why, a few things more about Git. (by which some people call me these days, with my blessing too :)

I even have info about couple of interesting people I talked with lately. One is an Italian Ruby geek and one is a most talented and popular musician in SL. Some long term readers might notice that I'm starting a new blog too (Shout out: Thanks Bo for the inspiration and kind words. My poetry and Sinhala blogging is coming at last), which is going to be bi-lingual and will be about non-geeky things. And I've got twittered too. :)

So thanks everyone for the support so far. It was great to know how many people were actually following my Blog, all because I couldn't blog in a while. :) You can expect a lot of update here after this weekend, after I've finished with some major hauls.

And oh...., Happy Valentines! in advance,.... that's if you are celebrating, of course (unlike me and Nadee). Sorry that I can't try to be funny as usual since I'm busy right now. Even this was squeezed out because a meeting was cancelled. :)

Why I haven't joined MySpace, Hi5, Facebook, etc.

2007-11-05T11:46:00.000+05:30

I don't use any of the normal social networking sites and I don't think I'll join any in near future. I possibly more or less not definitely reject the idea that I undeniably do or do not say that I'd never join. If that indeed wasn't what my stand isn't. Ok, apart from the dialogs from Shrek, I have a couple of reasons. If you are not happy with my first reason, then read the second which is the main point. I you are not happy about that either, ........... and then they lived happily ever after! :)

First thing, I don't like to share too much personal info including a list of my friends in a place where all people can see. It's may be not much of an issue for some of you, but I'm going to stay slightly paranoid and steer clear. At least you don't think everyone out there is not as sweet as they pretend (same in the real day to day life), ...... or do you? I noticed that some people tend to reveal,... may be a bit too much personal info (including photos) in social networking sites. Some of these might sound like "STALK ME" to certain individuals. I have seen and heard (at least on the Net) some pretty nasty cases about privacy. Thanks to my studies, lately I got to read about (actually research about) two more nasty cases related to two facets of on-line privacy. They are the infamous Shi Tao incident related to Yahoo (more reasons to not like Yahoo, but sadly Yahoo is not alone) and the Amy Boyer incident which ended tragically. No telling what kind of scum gets to see my personal information online, and what kind of nice people too. :)

I might sound too paranoid to some of you, but hey, it's just my 2 cents. I didn't ask you to do the same. :)

Second and the most compelling reason for me is, I don't feel like joining anymore social networks. :) I'm already a member of some tech groups. For example I'm a member of LinuxQuestions.org and of a couple of FOSS related mailing lists. Then I'm a member of deviantART art community too. Add it to my presence in the Blogosphere, I'll have to spend a tad bit more time than I like to manage my online presence. :)

Anyway, it's quite OK to assume that I'd not accept the loads of invitations I receive to join Hi5, Facebook, etc. anytime soon. Thanks you very much, you people (especially Yaj, Prasa, Yash (Yasa), Thiwa, Sibba, Kassa, Lalanka, and the all the others) for sending me invitations. If I decide to sign-up for social networks, you'll be the first to know. There I go..... preaching about privacy and jeopardizing privacy of people who were nice enough to send me invitations. :)

Pirated Software has a Significant Negative Impact on the Local Software Industry?

2007-11-03T18:16:00.000+05:30

Last weekend I came across this interesting article in Sunday Observer, titled "Nine out of 10 computers in Sri Lanka use pirated software". To read it online follow this link and scroll down to the relevant section. The newspaper article is about an IDC study about software piracy. It started like this.

"Nine out of ten computers used in Sri Lanka have pirated software, a global study on software piracy has revealed. Sri Lanka is ranked as the sixth highest country using pirated software in the world and the second in the Asia Pacific region.

These facts were revealed at a seminar on business optimisation with good governance and staying compliant with software asset management, jointly organised by Business Software, Alliance (BSA), Ceylon Chambers of Commerce, ICTA, European Chamber of Commerce of Sri Lanka and Intellectual Property Office.

The study was conducted by IDC, the IT industry's leading global market research and forecasting firm and the study for the first time covered Sri Lanka in 2006. "

Before I continue on, let me clarify that I do not promote or encourage Software Piracy. So please do not comment about how ethical or legal is pirated Software. I'm just going to point out and muse about a fact included in the article. Again, I have no doubt about the fact that most commercial Software are not affordable to average Sri Lankan PC user. $200 for an OS might me OK in USA, but in SL that's about the monthly salary of a junior executive or so. So please don't try to argue about that with me either. If you are going to say that price is affordable, don't argue either, because I don't like to waste time on a lost cause. :) End of rules and regulations.

One of the peculiar things mentioned in the article is "The software and additional services derive nearly another $1 of channel revenue and most of these additional service or channel revenue goes to local firms. Therefore pirated software has a significant negative impact on the local software industry, BSA said". Earlier in the article it was said "According to the study Sri Lanka has a 90% software piracy rate and the high piracy rate causes a retail revenue cost of US$ 86 million to the Sri Lankan software industry. The broader economic impact of software piracy is significantly greater than the retail value of pirated software"

So does this mean that Sri Lankan (and other) firms are at a mortal (yes mortal) amount of loss or impact because they don't earn from retailing and service providing? The numbers (oh, well everyone knows commercial vendors are good at this number game) seems to imply so.

Poor Microsoft and others (some say MS run the game at BSA, I didn't say so :), if their retailers and service providers are at a this severe lost, just imagine how much they are suffering?

Or............ are they? It's very very true that they are at a lost (in US$ millions). Then again, what about the effect of pirated software having on the software industry as a whole. Yeah, what about it?

People will use pirated software (like in SL). The home user will learn to work on MS Word, office worker will learn to work in MS Excel, university students will learn to program in Visual Studio, tech learners will learn to use SQL Server, IIS, ISA, Exchange etc. To put the icing on the top, they provide free/cheap subscriptions to academia as a goodwill. Great! All in all we'll have HR factor well capable of industry standard software. Isn't that what happens in Sri Lanka? What's wrong with it you might ask.

This is where I show you how deep the rabbit hole can go, to the other side of the paradise. It's like, they'll get you addicted to booze but then you'll have to BYOB. It's like they'll give free puffs, then you'll have to buy tobacco. Sounds familiar or still doesn't make any sense?

Why, the so called industry leader will have a fully grown and operational, healthy Eco system of their software well established for them to exploit. What will the users choose when they have to spend their precious bucks on software for their business? Just think how many companies in SL use commercial software (Eg: .NET based software)? Why did they choose those particular technologies? What were among the most compelling factors? Technological superiority? Unavailability of quality alternatives? Read ahead, don't mind me. I'm just ROTFL.

Then there's FUD too, which I'll not get started now. Just add FUD to the equation and I see the software industry as it is. :) One might claim I'm so paranoid, anti-MS and fundamentalist. Well, I'm so not. Maybe anti-MS :), but certainly not anti-commercial software, I'm just anti-dirty-business-model. If MS's business model happens to be uncannily similar what can I do? :)

Ok, ok, back to the course. I'm not by any means saying that local firms are not loosing a significant amount of revenue due to piracy of software. I'm just saying I can't agree to the fact that the negative impact for them is far more catastrophic than the revenue lost. The impact on the industry would be much worse should they fortify actions against piracy (I believe they should). Since big names have infiltrated the industry with pirated software, the big names will suffer more than the local industry in such a case. So I don't think that these big names have honest intentions to act against piracy at grassroot level. They are leaving the root causes and roots well intact and are beating around the bush, maybe because then they can hunt the rabbits which respond.

There goes my musing. You are welcome to comment, but don't expect me to reply if you are trying to woo me into an argument. I'd rather say vi is better than emacs or vice versa. :)

My Poetry on deviantART

2007-11-03T17:36:00.000+05:30

Some of you might have been wondering where are all my poems, since I say 'poet' in my profile. Well, my poetry in Sinhala (my 1st language) are with me because I have a tiny idea of publishing a poetry book. So what about my English poetry? Here they are: http://anaron.deviantart.com/

I don't write in English as much as I do in Sinhala, and it's only lately I ventured into letting anyone read my English poetry. However I knew about this great art site called deviantART. It's community of artists and those devoted to art (digital art, traditional art, photography, poetry / prose, skin art, themes, wallpaper art, Art prints, etc. So what else? I just created an account (which is for free) and posted some of my old English poems and a couple of new ones. I have to say I was satisfied with their privacy policy and copyright policy, but if you want to join don't take my my word for it, do your own reading.

Well, in deviantART I go by the handle/nickname of Anaron. I wanted to put my real name, but it was not available. So when I had to pick another name for my account, I just used a nick I've used for a while. For Tolkien fans, Anaron associates with the word Sun in Quenya (Anar). I'm not very good with Quenya, but I just coined a new name (wohooo!) to represent my real name which means "the Sun" (when taken 1st and middle names together). Did someone said 'what a geek!'? I'll just pretend that I didn't hear that. :)

That's it. If you'd like to read some of my poetry (English), go to my deviantART gallery. This blog will also list the 5 latest additions to the gallery. If I feel like it, I'll post some here too.

Back to School

2007-11-02T03:00:00.000+05:30

Well, not exactly. Most of my friends know that I never finished my bachelors. Some of my friends are now doing masters, so I thought that it's high time I finish my bachelors. So now I'm doing the top-up for a BSc (Hons) in Business Computing from University of Wolverhampton, UK. It's an in-country delivery program where lecturers visit us from the Uni. It's a good program and so far I've met a few interesting friends too. And just FYI it's a computer degree, not a management one. Can anyone picture me not doing a computer degree? If you could, you probably don't know me well enough. :)

Nadee always teases me that I could finish my bachelors with our children someday. That picture was not so funny, so I'm keen to finish this on time. For one thing she only entered Uni after I was qualified to do my finals. Now shes in her level 2, while I just started the finals. Hopefully by this time next year I'll be a graduate.

I'm a Git (User)

2007-10-02T18:11:00.002+05:30

Ok, I'm not a git. At least I don't call myself so. I just wanted to say I'm now a devoted Git user (yet novice). There are quite a lot of articles about Git you can find by Googling, so I'm not going to give a detailed technical document. Instead I'll just say why I like Git and why I'm going to stick with it. Some of the things I state are features common to distributed Version Controlling Systems (VCS). According to my experience and according to what I've heard Git excells in these features in a way no other does. For example performance alone is enough to win over users to Git. There are quite a few benchmarks of Git compared to other VCSs.

I first heard of Git when Linus Torvalds announced that he was going to write a new Version Control System in 2005. A few days later the project was announced and in weeks it was out. After reading about it in the Net, I heard that it was aimed at kernel developers, to who I obviously had nothing to do with. Time passed and I never gave git a try. This year I got to see a speech of Linus for Google Tech Talks. After watching it I was really, really convinced that it was time I try it. After all , I felt great about the concept of a distributed version controlling system.

Distributed VCS concept was new to me. All I knew was I really liked Subversion (svn) which I felt was a lot user friendly than CVS. For that matter, it isn't only me. I know for a fact even the largest software firms in Sri Lanka use Subversion internally (yes, even with .NET development. :) More and more people are now switching to svn from cvs. So I was feeling good about it and I told a few people also to switch to Subversion. However Linus's speech sent shudders on my beliefs and understanding about VCSs. And then I started learning about distributed VCS. As you know that I can be obsessive when learning about new technologies, it didn't take me too long to learn about a couple of them. These included Git, Mercurial, Monotone and Bazaar.

After some more researching I realized that if I was to start using a VCS seriously, I'd choose between Git or Mercurial (hg). I cloned a few repos using both git and hg and started using them to see about branching and merging and so on. So here I am, in the Git camp today. Here's a few things why I like Git. Some are my own observations, and some are not thoroughly experienced by me, so I rely on Internet sources.

Speed:

For one thing I can't help but to just admit that Git is blazingly fast. Not hyping you, go and see for yourself. After using Git, anything longer than seconds in a VCS looks pathetic now. :) If you love Linux and the command line, most probably you are going to love git too. For GUI tools, Git have gitk and git-gui among other things. Some Git GUI tools are even used with Mercurial, too.

Some degree of performance is contributed from the fact that some operations on Git are local oppsed to remote operations in centralized systems. But even among distributed systems like Mercurial, Bazaar, Monotone, etc. Git stands high with it's performance. See the above benchmarks for proof.

Work Offline:

With Git I can clone a repo and go home to work with it. There's no need to be connected to a server to see a log or anything else related to metadata. In Git, when you clone a repo, you literally clone it. Which means you have a complete repository with all the history and so and so. Which also means if I clone Linus Torvald's kernel repo on my notebook, it is no less than the official repo (not that I'm also a kernel hacker :)

Working offline is a huge thing for me. I can clone a repo go anywhere I want and continue using it.

Creating a Repository is nothing:

This is another big reason for me to love Git. To create a repo in a directory, I'd just

$ cd myproject
$ git init
$ git add .
$ git commit -a

Just like that I'm ready to go. No need to set up servers, no checking server/network configurations, no imports and no etc., etc. of grunt work. I can just jump in and start working.

Give this ease of creating and using Git repos, I pretty much create repos for anything I'm working on these days. For example if you are working on a research paper, you may well be able to take advantage of Git to keep track of the changes you make. It can be code, research paper, novel, etc. but Git will be able to create a repo to track your content in a snap.

No overhead for SysAdmins:

In a traditional VCS, there's a SysAdmin overhead for creating and maintaining a server, Then there are other important things like backups and security. But with Git you can create as much repositories for you without even thinking about the SysAdmin. You get to keep your repos behind several security measures. Backing up a repo can even be done by the developers.

Since all commits are stored with a SHA-1 hash, any corruption (due to filesystem corrution, hard disk failure, etc.) can be easily traced. Even if you get to loose a repo, most probably someone has cloned it already. Which means you have everything including history and metadata safe. Nice huh?

Branching and Merging a reality:

I have never tried to use branches on svn or cvs servers, mainly I never got the point of being eligible of doing it. :) But people say it's hard,.... I mean put a pen though your eye hard. I've actually tried a few simple things with svn and had no clue how to get past certain things. But with Git branching and merging (if you can't merge back, branches are not much of a use) is easy.

This means if I want to test something, I don't have to plan for weeks in fear. I just can create a branch, work on it and merge when it's ready, without being a nuisance to the project maintainer. I know for real projects this is a big factor.

Commit Access Always:

Although I'm not going to talk about the underlying project politics, I have to talk about how I feel about this commit access thing. It may be ot may not be good to have a separate group who have commit access. But as a developer what affects me most is the thought "what if my commit breaks things?". So I tend to keep my commits till I'm sure of it, and till I have something a little large to commit (that is, if I have commit access).

With Git I don't have to worry about that because I commit to my own repo. And I don't have to have special commit permission from a project leader. I just can commit and keep working. I can commit early and often. When I'm ready with my code I can ask the project leader to pull from my repo or I can push to her repo.

Distributed or Centralized:

Although Git is a distributed system, there's no restriction how you use it. It can be pure distributed or it can be used in the same spirit we use todays centralized systems, but with a twist. We get all the facilities of a distributed VCS, if we know how to use it. Many people believe that a centralized VCS is a must for their project. But after giving some thought I'm beginning to think that in most cases, they can switch to a distributed model without much fuss. This is no accident. If you give some thought, you might see that a centralized system is a special formation of a distributed system. So think again. :)

Lets consider a scenario. For this example lets say I started a project called RailzCRM. I'm the lead developer + maintainer. So I set up a public Git repository in somewhere like ShareSource (they are still working on to set up Git support). I have my working repository on my notebook PC and I can commit as frequent as I like to my own repo. I'll pull from my trusted fellow developers or they'll push to my repo. They in turn will work with their trusted sources and online contributors via push/pull, patches, etc.

When I think my repo is ready, I'll just push my changes to the public repo and then merge them. Then the public can get the latest code of our official development tree. This way a peoples hierarchy can be created if we want, but I can get the benefit of distributed development.

Interoperability with Other VCSs:

Git can work with many other VCSs without making any fuss. End users may most probably not realize that Git is involved. Git can work with CVS, Subversion, Mercurial among other things. For example git-cvsserver can be used to enable end users work with existing CVS clients without problem. Git can import from a good number of VCSs too.

A Brief History of Git:

Git is a version/revision control system software used in the process of software development. Git was started by Linus Torvalds (yes, the same Linus) when he had to stop using BitKeeper, a commercial VCS (Version Control System). BitKeeper was used by Linus and several other Linux kernel developers, to track the kernel source. However there was a fiasco (not a fiaSCO) about licensing which made the Open Source community crave for an alternative to BitKeeper (actually a distributed VCS).

They started considering the available Open Source tools. According to Linus it wasn't much of a trouble. Everything other than Monotone was ruled out early. I haven't heard about Bazaar, but looks like Mozilla people ruled it out later on performance issues. Even Monotone was ruled out at the performance. Then Linus thought that he could write something better than any VCS around, in 2 weeks. It looks like he was right, yet again.

Although Linus started the project, now it's under the patronage of Junio Hamano. Lot of fuss has been made about Git not being a general purpose tool in earlier days since it was started targeting the kernel. However Git has come a long way since and undoubtedly is one of the best VCSs around now.

The only major drawback there as I see is the lack of support on Windows platform (which I don't care much, but obviously not all people think so :). There already are ports for Windows which people claim they are using at their work without any trouble. Even it there are troubles coming up, I believe full Windows support will be available very soon. Anyway just to let you know, Git on Linux is blazing fast and way fast than any other option.

So..... that's all for now folks, on Git. I wrote this in a bit hurry. So I won't be surprised to find mistakes and things. Just let me know. I'll fix them later.

And oh........... I also hope that the projects I keep track of like Nmap and MPlayer will switch to Git. Yes, that's a hope. :)

UPDATE:
Here's a basic diagram which might help you to grok the concept.

ShareSource.org - The Next SourceForge?

2007-10-01T03:24:00.000+05:30

ShareSource is a new site providing hosting facility to FOSS projects. As you might already know, SourceForge is the most popular choice for this type of service. SourceForge (owned by SourceForge Inc, earlier know as VA Systems) is without a doubt the largest FOSS hosting provider. It has been and still continue to be the trail blazer in FOSS project hosting. However I see a lot of promise and potential in ShareSource. Only downside I see is, the name reminds of a Microsoft license. :) ShareSource is maintained by Tim Groeneveld. I guess this is the same Tim Groeneveld who created AgeanLinux (never used it) because aegeanlinux.org now points to ShareSource.org. It's still way too early to say whether ShareSource can be the next SourceForge, but it's definitely worth watching.

The first thing you'll notice is the faster loading of the site (compared to SourceForge). It's interface is simple and nice, and is fast. ShareSource provides many nice services such as VCS support for Mercurial, Subversion and to my utter happiness (very soon) Git. It provides a release management mechanism, bug tracker and so on. True, it has a lot to catch if it is to reach the SourceForge standards, but ShareSource is improving very quickly. It's only 3 months old roughly and already has more than 90 projects registered.

I liked the site and I'm hoping to give it a try. Honestly, I feel like continuing with ShareSource after seeing the nice and flexible features they provide. So I invite you, all the FOSS developers out there to try ShareSource.org too. And let's not forget to give Tim a big round of applause for starting ShareSource where FOSS projects can find a (quality) home for free. Kudos.

For the Love of Rails..

2007-09-30T18:18:00.000+05:30

Most people who know me personally know that I'm an Open Source enthusiast. And they probably know that I'm more of a SysAdmin than a developer. Well, thats quite true. Eventhough I enjoyed programming, my main interest was always System (especially Linux) administration. However in the last 6-8 months aor so I've started getting more and more into Open Source development. A major breakthrough for me was getting selected for Google Summer of Code 2007, to participate in Nmap! (Nmap is much like a grail among SysAdmins :) Unfortunately my persoanl circumstances didn't allow me to finish the work with them. Family matters and other things piled up and I have to give up. Nmap people has been very supportive though and the same was true about the Google people. So after some weeks here I was trying to look more into Nmap, Metasploit and other things. Then I realized that I could give sometime to this Ruby thing which I heard was on Rails or something.

Here I am now, after a few months. Although my software developing exposure hasn't seen a lot more, I've ventured into it. And I have to admit, that Ruby as a language and Rails as a framework has changed my view about the whole software development arena. So what's new? Another fanboy article about Ruby on Rails? Not really. I just want to thank Ruby on Rails. :) If you are offended by Rails please skip this post. I promise there are couple of posts about other things coming up shortly. :)

First I thought of following J2EE and web services, because I knew virtually nothing about them. You know, I can't stop myself getting interested in new technologies. (For example I've started with the Xen tools in Linux and got to like it very much........ Ok, not so new :). But before I did that I gave Ruby a try, and started using Rails to create simple things (which is what I still do. :) And what else? I simply love it. Ruby as a language helped me grok more of OOP concepts. And when I got to try Rails, I just had to hold my breath in amazement (and amusement too).

I always felt that business application level programming was messy, tedious and boring, partially due to the way we were taught about them. However after Rails, I just feel it's not that bad afterall. I'm not saying that J2EE is a bad platform, not even being funny as RailsEnvy people. :) Just as a user, after using Rails I feel, "why the hell it has to be more obscure or tedious?"

Rails uses DRY and Convention Over Configuration concepts. DRY means don't repeat yourself. And Convention over Configuration means unless you make specific changes, there's no need to worry about grunt work in configuration files, XML and etc. Everything has a conventional way of doing it. And if you choose to differ you may well do it.

The scaffolding is great to learn Rails and also give a good idea of how to organize a web app. And migrations!!! Just have to say wow. With migrations one can use the database without worrying about changing database level things. Object-Relational mapping is implemented using a design pattern called "Active Record" opposed to the hibernate technology in Java. With these thing, a Rails developer don't have to worry about the underlying database or the DBMS for that matter. Now, doesn't it sound good? All in all, I've so far loved the learning process, and I have a feeling that I'm going to remain so. For Java, .NET and other framework users, I'm not asking you to throw away your tools. Just give Rails a fair try, totally worth it.

More I use Rails, more I realize that it isn't a toy. It's a serious framework which is giving other frameworks a serious run for their money. As far as I can say, you cannot appreciate the power and ease of Rails without getting your hands dirty with some coding.

For a quick peek of Rails try Rolling with Ruby on Rails short tutorial.

MySQL and EnterpriseDB Launched in Sri Lanka

2007-09-01T14:34:00.000+05:30

The two premier Open Source Database Management Systems were officially launched recently in Sri Lanka. While MySQL itself was launched, PostgreSQL availability was in the form of EnterpriseDB, which is not exactly PostgreSQL.

EnterpriseDB Corporation, the maker of EnterpriseDB DBMS (a commercial DBMS based on the advanced Open Source DBMS PostgreSQL), together with a new IT firm called Fossmart announced their partnership on 10th, May to provide EnterpriseDB Advanced Server to Fossmart customers. EnerpriseDB is well know for it's Oracle compatibly, which means applications written to work with Oracle DBMS (worlds leading DBMS) can be used with EnterpriseDB usually with no or little modifications.

MySQL, the popular Open Source DBMS was launched 31st, July in Sri Lanka by hSenid Software International. hSenid will provide MySQL Enterprise Server in Sri Lanka. MySQL, provided by MySQL AB is probably the more popular of PostgreSQL and MySQL.

I personally believe this expresses the awakening of the Sri Lankan IT industry to FOSS in the enterprise front. As people in Sri Lanka may be aware, there are more and more FOSS based software solutions appearing. I'm very eager to see the future and be a part of it.

Nmap is Ten

2007-09-01T10:17:00.000+05:30

Nmap, the popular Open Source security scanner turns ten years old today (1st September)! Ten years ago, i.e. in 1997, Fyodor released first release of Nmap as an article with the Phrack Magazine. It has since come a long way from that humble beginning into one of the foremost network/security tools on the planet, and also was featured in a couple of movies, including "The Matrix: Reloaded".

Current Nmap stable release is 4.20 and it was released some months ago. However the Nmap developers have been very busy. Nmaps development branch includes quite a few hot and wonderful features including the NSE (Nmap Scripting Engine), a new GUI frontend (UMIT), and many more. You can download both the stable and development releases from the Nmap download page. For cutting edge development the Nmap SVN repository is recommended. The improvements made in the development include development contributions from the Google Summer of Code students (5 Nmap students and 7 UMIT students) also. The two major feature additions have already received a nice reception from the relevant communities. UMIT is full of wonderful ideas such as UmitMapper and other things. And NSE has already received attention of SourceFire, the SnortIDS people.

By the way Nmap still remains humble and excellent. Fyodors very pleasant leadership and the vibrant community has always been and will be a major factor in the Nmaps success. I have to say "very well done" to Nmap which is a true Open Source project, and which didn't give into commercialization. So lets wish Nmap Security Scanner a very happy B'day, one of many more to come.

Edit Note: Some details have been removed from the original post. This was done in order to correct the information I had put about a future Nmap release. I'm sorry for any inconveniences I caused by posting that incorrect information.

Ant Invasion

2007-07-30T12:34:00.000+05:30

I'm being besieged by ants, constantly during the past couple of days. For some odd reason, ants in my home seem to find my notebook computer attractive. Whenever I turn it on and use it, ants (biting red ones, not the harmless black ones) come in a line, get through the space between the lid and the base, walk right over the power button (some over the speakers) and go in through the keyboard. First day I just blew a few. Then I realized that they were really determined. A fair amount of them started to crawl near the computer. The odd thing was they only tried to go in, when it was on. Whenever the computer was switched off, the few who made it in started resurfacing as the computer was cooling down. Was it heat (they should be nuts to seek heat in this climate :) or was it something else? I'm not sure. I was wondering whether it's because I blogged about SugarCRM a few days ago. :)

I've seen what they can do to a keyboard (they literally bites it and takes chews with them). After loosing a PC keyboard due to some spilled biscuit crumbs by a cousin, I was also determined not to let them damage my notebook. After a several tactical moves, and hard defending, I moved everything on the table away, and sprinkled the table with talc (not mine)! I also have a brush ready to defend, in the case of occasional break-ins. It seems to work. I only have a small half-circle shaped DMZ (De-Militarized Zone) around the computer to keep my hands, headphones ans external mouse. It's kind of cool, like working in snow :) when people are not telling me that I've got chalk on my arms.

Fasten Your Seat Belts, IPv6 is Coming!

2007-07-29T22:23:00.000+05:30

According to the researchers and technology experts, availability of IPv4 addresses will exhaust in 2010 at this rate, probably between march and may. Thats less than 3 years from now. Most probably the panic attack will come before that. So I guess it's safe to assume that migration to IPv6 is going to be big after around 2 years from now. So buckle up, road ahead is bond to be a bit edgy (at least for tech people).

Well, I'm not in a mood to explain what IPv4/6 addresses are for non-tech-savvy people. So I'll give a very simple (technically inaccurate) example. Your house is named "Big House", and people know it by the name. Your house also has a number to be refers by the town authorities 63/57. For people and for day to day use "Big House" is more easier and convenient. But the actual representation of your house is 63/57. Taxing and evaluating are done in association with it. Think of domain names (Ex: google.com) as "Big House" and IP addresses (Eg: 64.233.187.99) as 63/57. An IPv4 address is a 4-segment representation where each segment can be a number between 0-255 (IE: 0.0.0.0 - 255.255.255.255). Each computer, router and any node directly connected to the Internet should have an IP address. In lay terms, IP address exhaustion means that by a certain date (Eg: march, 2010), there will be no more address available to be given to the new computers connecting to the Internet.

Even a kid can realize that this is a crisis. But unfortunately, most businesses who influence the IT industry didn't feel it was. They get the wake up call now. Comfort zone invaded, now they have to move to a new system to sustain the growth of the Internet. Solution: IPv6.

Back in early 90s, IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), and other people foresaw the coming of the inevitable exhaustion. So in 1996, IETF released a set of specifications for the version 6 of the Internet Protocol (IPv6), starting with RFC 2460. 11 years later the industry has shown a terribly lukewarm attitude towards adopting IPv6. The concept has remained more academical than practical until recently. However with the predictions available, it can be expected to see more rapid adoption and migration to IPv6 from IPv4. The biggest pain, I guess would be to migrate business applications and legacy systems to IPv6. On system administration front, more and more IPv6 aware applications and tools are appearing.

I guess and hope that we are going to see the mass migration to IPv6 soon. Even the newly appointed IETF chair Russ Housley expects to see this sooner rather than later. He said this in an interview among other things. Russ being having a strong interest in security also expressed his eagerness to improve security of the Internet.

Open Source doesn't count..... Says Who? Not Microsoft anymore

2007-07-27T14:04:00.000+05:30

This is for people who try to argue with me that Open Source software is nothing serious. So read the article, research the Net and save me from the arguments. Of course, anyone else is welcome to read this, too.

This isn't going to be yet another 'Open Source is the best' article, or another 'Microsoft is evil' article (for that matter I'm not Anti-Microsoft, though I don't, can't and won't accept certain aspects of their vision and practices. Let's just say I'm Pro-FOSS). However this is a sort of an answer to Microsoft fanatics (not mere fans), then people who develop allergies when they hear 'Open Source' and people who are ignorant enough to refrain from opening up their minds.

All of them have been saying Open Source doesn't count, Open Source is for hobbyists and Open Source is not for enterprise. They as hard as they, could have been denying the influence the Open Source movement has done to the software, technology and culture. I just wanted to write this since I briefly had the opportunity to be bugged by seeing a couple of know-all tech gurus giving degrading comments about Open Source.

Open Source is a real deal:

Before I go into more things let me answer a few FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Disbelief) facts. Fist there are people who claims Open Source is only for hobbyists. Well, that doesn't explain why Apache is the most deployed web server, when so called industry standard web servers are there. I see no one putting million dollar marketing budget behind Apache. The claim doesn't also explain why Firefox has been downloaded several millions of times. It doesn't explain why operating systems like Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc., server software like Postfix, Sendmail, qmail, Spamassasin, Squid, BIND, Snort, etc. and end user software like OpenOffice.org, VLC, MPlayer, Pidgin (Gaim), Thunderbird, Evolution, Wireshark (Ethereal), Nmap, FrostWire, Azureus, 7-Zip, TrueCrypt, GIMP, Inkscape, etc., programming tools like PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, CVS, Subversion, gdb, etc., Database management systems like PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc. are so popular either. For people who haven't heard of any single thing in the list, I have to tell one thing. You have to use a computer if you want to see software. :)

And about lack of enterprise applications, well.... what should I say. I'll just give another list of names and leave you to check them out. These are Alfresco, WebGUI, Adempiere, Openbravo, Project Open, Pentaho, Jasper, SugarCRM, vtigerCRM, Scalix, Zimbra, Hyperic, Zenoss, etc., etc.

Open Source means business:

Which impact Open Source had on the software industry anf technology? None?

Wrong again. Although I may suggest that ambitious projects like Wikipedia are results of the inspiration, there are more solid examples that businesses and vendors are realizing what Open Source can do for them.

For example lets see a few projects and software which went Open Source after being closed source/proprietary. It includes Solaris operating system, Ingres database, Java programming language, Hyperic HQ IT asset management system, AOLServer web server, and even Quake (1/2/3) game engines.

The latest news about the battle for software freedom is surprisingly coming from the most unexpected source. It'll be interesting to see what the members of Anti-FOSS camp have to say about this.

Microsoft has launched an Open Source software site at
http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/
And they are going to submit their Shared Source License for the approval of OSI (Open Source Initiative).

I hope, after all they have taken one step towards understanding that Open Source is not a rival revolution, but a revolution they can also take part in. I really hope so. Then again, I also hope for peace on Earth. :) Let's see.

Truth Happens:

I'm going to end this post by quoting a little old video from Red Hat (markets leading Linux vendor) which in turn quotes from Mahatma Gandhi.

Despite Ignorance
Despite Ridicule
Despite Opposition

Truth Happens

First they ignore you...

Linux is the Hype du Jour
- Gartner Group [1999]

Then they laugh at you...

We think of Linux as a competitor
in the student and hobbiest market
but I really don't think in the commercial market
we'll see it in any significant way
- Bill Gates [2001]

Then they fight you...

Linux isn't going away
Linux is a serious competitor
We will rise to this challenge
- Steve Ballmer [2003]

Then you win.

SugarCRM going GPLv3.... Others?

2007-07-26T23:55:00.000+05:30

SugarCRM, probably the most popular Open Source CRM project has decided to release their upcoming SugarCRM Community Edition 5 under the brand new GPL version 3.

It was nice for them to move to a real OSI certified Open Source license, rather than sticking with their own. Wait a minute...... version 2 of GPL doesn't appear in the OSI certified list yet. Well, I guess it's going to make it there. I have yet to study the GPL v3, so I cannot comment on technicalities or personal views. Should be an interesting reading (now, don't look at me like that), after considering the controversies linked with it, Linus Torvalds not being happy about an early draft and all.

SugarCRM is a promising project, but it has a little rough memory regarding the flame wars with their vtigerCRM fork. I guess SugarCRM people will have to get used to being used (their code actually) in other projects, if they are switching to GPL (ie: they cannot claim I stole their code, if I use their codebase to create a new software). However SPL (Sugar Public Licese), their previous license also viewed as an Open Source license by some people, although not officiall endorsed by OSI. They claim that's why vtigerCRM could use the codebase in the first place.

Anyway it still means that SugarCRM Community Edition is fully Open Source. Their fork vtigerCRM is and was Open Source all along. They've put together a FAQ about their move to GPLv3. I also hope that companies who claims to be Open Source (and never feel like releasing the code) should consider being actually Open Source. If they are not going to do so, let the customers put pressure on them like SugarCRM customers did (or so I've heard).

Howto Migrate from Thunderbird to Evolution

2007-07-23T01:37:00.008+05:30

I know some of you are asking why, rather than how, regarding migration from Mozilla Thunderbird to Evolution. Maybe that's why there are lot of Evolution to Thunderbird migration guides, but not many vice-versa. Fear not, here is a guide, to assist who dare to migrate from Thunderbird to Evolution. The techniques described here are tested with the newer versions of both the software, namely Thunderbird 2.0.0.4 and Evolution 2.10.2. On higher versions also this should work without an issue.

I think Mozilla people are doing a wonderful job with both Firefox and Thunderbird. From my point of view Firefox is the best general purpose web browser around. It beats most proprietary browser in speed, stability, security, modularity, etc. (and don't start commenting the so and so browsers are greater or so and so is cool too. I know they may be, Fx is simply my choice. This also applies to any comparisons with Evolution too :) However Fxs' counterpart in e mail business, is not yet there at the helm. Thunderbird is a great application especially combined with Lightning addon, but from my point of view it's not there yet where Evolution is.

Evolution on the othet hand, has been the most popular Linux mail client during the past few years. It was started as a project of Ximian (later bought by Novell), but now a part of GNOME Desktop. Evolution now has a Windows XP version too (still in alpha stage as of this writing). To be more true to the point, Evolution is not just a mail client, it's a PIM application.

Evo comes very competitively on par with commercial applications like Microsoft Outlook. If you are looking for a replacement for Microsoft Outlook in a Linux environment, then Evolution is your best bet without a doubt. But on the other hand, I wouldn't use Outlook as an Evo replacement on Windows (if I have to use Windows that is. I don't hate Windows, I'm just Pro-Open Source).

Evolution comes with many rich features like calendar, appointments, tasks, memos, signature management, encryption, filters, Palm device support, developer platform, LDAP support, even Microsoft Exchange Server connectivity and lot more. Evolution is more feature rich, advanced, stable, less memory consuming than Thunderbird. One day Thunderbird might be "the" e mail client for Linux, but today Evolution is simply "the" client.

There are two methods. One is slower, proper method, good to learn more about the process and so. The second method is much quicker and great when you have a lot to migrate. So here are the steps first, then I'll describe each step more (I assume both Thunderbird and Evolution are installed. If not you might want to do it at this point. Most mainstream Linux distros ship with Evolution).

Method 1 (slower): General Steps:

Backup your .thunderbird directory
Configure Evolution
Export your contacts from Thunderbird and import them from Evolution
Import your mail archives from Thunderbird to Evolution

Yes, it's that simple. So let's now dig into details.

Method 1: Detailed:

1. Safety First (Backup your data)

Please backup the data before you try anything. Especially don't forget to get a copy of .thunderbird directory (located in the home directory, usually). All your current mails which you view withing Thunderbird are in this directory. So it is important to back this up.

(I'm not going to tell you how to copy a directory. It's out of the scope of this guide. Please refer to any documents on basic Linux operations.)

2. Configure Evolution

Create the necessary accounts in Evolution. How to configure accounts in Evolution is out of the scope of this howto. So I'll just assume that you created the desired accounts and relevant folders. For example I added my Gmail account and added several folder like Fun, Blog Comments, Personal, etc. to my Inbox folder. This is to organize your mails well. Now we are set to go.

3. Import Contacts

From Thunderbird you can export your contacts (Address Book) to several formats. Since our aim here is to import these back into Evolution, use either csv or ldif. This is how you do it.

In Thunderbird,

Go to Address Book
Select the address book you want to export, then
Click "Export" from "Tools" menu (Tools --> Export)
In the dialog give a name and a location to save the export
Select either "Coma Separated" or "LDIF" as type
Then click "save" to export

Now that exporting is completed, we can move into import these from Evolution

In Evolution,

Go to Contacts Window View
Click File --> Import
Go ahead and select "import a single file" option when asked
Select the file we created when exporting from Thunderbird
Then import the contacts

Note: It's better to create a new address book to import the contacts, but it's rather your choice.

Now the contacts are imported and ready to go. So let us move to the next step.

4. Import mail archives

Now let's migrate your existing mails to Evolution. Thunderbird uses standars "mbox" format for mail folder, which is the most commonly used format in Linux. Your Thunderbird mail archives are at ~/.thunderbird/xxxxxxxx.default/Mail/ (where xxxxxxxx will a different alphanumeric string). In this directory you'll have directories according to your mail accounts. In my case it's /.thunderbird/xxxxxxxx.default/Mail/Local\ Folders/Inbox.sbd/

There will be two types of files there. Files without an extention and files with .msf extention. What we need are the files without extentions. Eg: Fun, Tech, etc.

In Evolution,

Go to mail window view
Click File --> Import
Go ahead and select "import a single file" option when asked
Select the file (mail archive) you want to import and select a location to be imported. Eg: I imported "Fun" archive (not Fun.msf) into a directory named "Fun"
Repeat the last step for every archive you have

Done! Now you are ready to go. Your mails and contacts are now successfully migrated to Evolution. You might ask me why not straight away copy the mbox files? Why import them?
Well, actually I didn't try it. Anyone is welcome to try that and let us know. I've heard it worked for people. But personally I felt like doing this way because it is common sense, to carry out these general steps to migrate to any client using mbox format.

Method 2 (Easier):

Well, I know the above method works, but it's not going to be easy if you are to migrate a large number of mails, or many accounts. Simply the Method 1 is not scalable. :) So I've checked other ways to do this, without the hazzle of going through import and export steps. When you have more than a few folders to import this method should be much much painless and easier. But this method is only for mails, for contacts you still have to do import/export.

1. Create a folder to accommodate your mails.

You can do this either using Evo or by creating a directory under your Evo local folder directory. Better to create a folder and copy a message there (within Evolution), this will create the directory structure under ~/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox.sbd/

2. Copy the mail archive file to the new location in Evo local folder

Copy all the files in your Tunderbird mail directory into the newly created Evo directory. When you are copying files from your TB directory Eg: ~/.thunderbird/xxxxxxxx.default/Mail/
to the new Evo directory Eg: ~/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox.sbd/Thunderbird.sbd/ you only need the mbox files, there's no need to copy the .msf files.

If you don't want a separate folder for Thunderbird mails, you can just copy the files into ~/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox.sbd/

Note: There's a little tweak needed if your Thunderbird directories have spaces in their names. Eg: If your TB directories have a name like "archive prior 2008.sbd" copying it directly into Evo directory the mails would not appear as you would hope. This is because Evo doesn't use spaces in the mail directory names. So just rename them by replacing each space with an underscore ("_"). I cannot verify this note, as I haven't personally tested this. However it was reported by a user in the comments.

3. Restart Evolution

Done! Just like that, all your thousands of mails, hundreds of folders will now appear under the directory you created. Obviously this method is quicker than the previous one. You can consider the previous method a drill to learn the structure and workflow. :)

Whenever you want to backup your Evolution mail archives they are at ~/.evolution/mail/ How to completely backup Evolution data can be seen here. Newer versions of Evolution has a neet function integrated in menus which will allow to backup Evo with settings (File --> Backup settings) and restore (File --> Restore settings). I've used it a couple of times and it works fine.

This post is based on an article I've posted in LinuxQuestions.org Linux Tutorial section. It also has a discussion page. If you have Linux questions you can go and ask the wonderful online Linux community, LinuxQuestions.org.

Jotting the Google Way

2007-07-22T17:41:00.000+05:30

Well, this isn't hot news for followers. But it's good news for Google Apps users.

In this ZDNet article, Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google Enterprise claims that they plan to integrate Jot support into Google Apps. Google last year acquired JotSpot, who was one of the most innovative and advanced wiki providers.

I haven't actually used JotSpot, but I did look into it sometime ago. All in all Jot was quite a promising service. It had very useful features, including web application support, and claimed Jot is not a mere wiki, but an application wiki (if I remember correctly). However I required more flexibility than it was available with the JotSpots free plan. So I resolved to use a free, but not very popular thing called Schtuff. This year Schtuff dissolved their service and came to an agreement with PBwiki to host the existing users. So I also migrated from Schtuff to PBwiki which was more nicer. Since I was from the Schtuff migration, I have some bonus features which a normal (free account) user wouldn't have like larger spaces, page level access control.

Back to the story. I'm willing to see Jot integrated with Google Apps. In fact I've been wondering when they are going to do so, from the day I heard about Googles acquiring. It is however not mentioned exactly when it'll be available. I personally believe. This will enable GA users (especially small businesses) to be a lot more productive. It should cater their need of infrastructure at a fraction of the cost than if they plan to go for hosted things. They'll have email, basic collaboration with pages, docs and spreadsheets, etc. and now application wikis. However larger organizations might want to host their own, because the cost multiplies by the number of user accounts.

Running Debian Etch on my Noebook with an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600

2007-07-15T18:02:00.000+05:30

A couple of days ago I had a bit of a crisis when my Notebook running Fedora 7 refused to boot in the morning. It just hanged up after the line with 'Red Hat nash starting', after a package update. The update however, wasn't anything related to kernel, headers, nash or anything related. It was just a few regular package updates. The Fedora 7 crash was quite a disappointment as I was very impressed with how far Fedora 7 has come since FC3/4. I was using Fedora as my primary working distro, that was until the following incident.

Problem:

So I was stuck with a crashed computer with all my e mails, svn check outs, bookmarks and so on. I tried with modified grub parameters (and various other things) without any success, before deciding to do a fresh installation. The real horror was there.

My Fedora 7 DVD refused to boot into the installer and hanged at Running /sbin/loader. Every time I tried to do an installation it just hanged the same way. By this point I wasn't even sure whether the crash was related to the updates I made. I was worried to see a working system just go out like that (not that I haven't seen anything like that). Even more frustrating was not being able to get the DVD to install. So I downloaded a rescue CD image using another computer and tried to do a Net install with it, still without any success. I will submit these issues to Fedora bugzilla, hopefully soon.

It was about midnight when I had to let go of Fedora, I had to use the computer someway. So I checked my Linux disks. Among old CDs, the only recent thing I could find was the Ubuntu 7.04 CD. I gave it a try. As I expected the X failed at boot complaining about my graphics. Being a Debian fan, I didn't worry much to get Ubuntu boot and then trying to install. After all I was tired with trying so many things.

So ....., I downloaded and burned an Debian Etch NetInstall CD image into a DVD (which was another cause for frustration in a Windows box). Around 4 o'clock in the morning I started my first ever Net installation of Debian.

I set the alarm to 6 o'clock and went to sleep.

Solution:

A fresh day. A fresh OS. I got up (Nadee, if you are reading this, you just didn't see I slept only 2 hours...... Ok, I'm not doing that kind of things nowadays as often as I used to do. Really! Forgive? Yes, you do :). I had shiny Debian Etch installation (so much for the wait to download Debian DVDs).

Fedora and Debian are my favourite Linux distros for my Notebook. I have tried many distros for myself including Fedora, Debian, Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Ubuntu, Vector Linux, Gentoo, Slackware, Mandrake/Mandriva, SuSE, Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, Lycoris Desktop, Lindows/Linspire, etc. and even something called KateOS. I'm not going to list the Live CDs I've tried here, don't worry. After all these years trying and running all these things, I prefer to install Fedora or Debian on my working (desktop) PC.

Anyway, I got the Debian installed and working. First thing I did was to install the graphic drivers for my 256MB ATI Mobility Radeon X1600. Most of you might know that the driver is broken on Fedora 7 and not yet fixed by ATI (AMD). So I was keen to try it in Debian. After several weeks on VESA I wanted to use a proper driver. What was the fun of having a graphic card like X1600 if I couldn't use it?

1.)
First I added non-free to enable using non-free packages in the Debian official repositories.
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free

2.)
Then I installed the driver packages,
# apt-get update
# apt-get install module-assistant fglrx-driver fglrx-kernel-src

(fglrx is the driver, module-assistant was to build the kernel modules from the driver package)

3.)
# module-assistant auto-install fglrx-kernel-src

This builds and installs the driver kernel modules

4.)
# aticonfig --initial
# aticonfig --overlay-type=Xv

Just like that I had my graphic drivers properly set up. So I gave it a run by running a few 3D FPS games like Nexuiz, Sauerbraten, etc. Worked fine. I'm happy and will try a few more games just to be convinced :). This is not to say that I'm happy with the driver scenario. I'm totally, utterly unhappy about the ATIs stand in Linux drivers. As a customer I can be unhappy.

So to finish up the thing. I'm now running Debian 4.0 (Etch) on my Notebook with ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 + 17 inch Widescreen graphics. I've lost my Evolution contacts list during the migration by mistake. I have to get them from Gmail again. I also have to install a few things from source. This include the things I usually install from source like MPlayer/MEncoder, ffmpeg, Nmap, etc. and a thing I usually don't install from source, Pidgin 2.

Altogether, Debian has slightly more things to configure than Fedora or Ubuntu which usually works out of the box. This may be credited to the wider scope of Debian. I can claim that I'm fairly satisfied with Debian Etch on my Notebook. However running Fedora on the Notebook was more smooth for me (I have a fair amount of memory and processor power to waste :). When Fedora 8 comes in a few months, I'll try it again if ATI people are nice enough to provide a working driver, otherwise I guess I'll stay with Debian.

Go Debian!
Note: I sincerely hope this little cheer will convince Debian people to do more frequent releases :) They are doing a great job of providing a stable, relatively less resource eating OS. But release cycle seems a little slower for the desktop.)

Ruby Rocks! ....er, .. Ruby Gems!

2007-07-15T17:09:00.000+05:30

I got Metasploit running ages ago as you may know, and as a result of the prolonged exposure to highly contagious Metasploit 3, I was attracted to Ruby more. I did the Ruby in 20 minutes, then run in the browser lesson. And lo! and behold, I was hooked with Ruby (well, if any of Nadees friends are reading this, I should inform you that Ruby is a computer language. Even she knows that :).

Anyway, I loved the language and the how the OOP concepts are implemented (though I haven't done much with Ruby yet). From what I've seen so far, I have to say,
Ruby Rocks! .....er.... then I realize that Ruby is not a mere rock (alternate interpretation), then here we go,
Ruby Gems! I don't know how you interpret, but there's an alternate alternate interpretation because ruby has a package format called gems. So Ruby indeed does gem :)

I've found some good reading on the Net about Ruby and especially about web apps with Ruby on Rails. Anyway all of you are to make your own decision. After all I'm the guy who still think C is cooler than C++ (hmm.. perhaps it has something to do with me not being too exposed to c++ :).

I Know What Happens to Harry Potter

2007-07-04T19:22:00.000+05:30

Ok, there's a lot of buzz going on about the upcoming Harry Potter book. And not so surprisingly, there are quite a few individuals who claims to know what happens in the book. And there are quite a few versions of the book out there in the wild. If you are someone who are unlucky (actually, lucky) enough not to get your hands on one of these fakes (my, they actually wrote complete books, fake or not), here's my version. Er.. actually a couple of versions.

l33t v3rs10n:

I hacked as fast I could into the Bloomsbury server (or whoever it was) just now. I used several advanced out of this world hacks and kicked the hell out of their server defense systems. And being one of the l33t (a Scr1pt K1dd13) it was nothing for me. So just hacked into their poor box and managed my way to their 3D display of the filesystem. From there on, it was just a few clicks away to navigate and get to their fileserver. I got to the file "HP_Deathly_Hallows.pdf" and downloaded it to my box. Then I replaced the original one with a file containing the "Sw0rdPh1sh wuz here!!!" text in bright red point 45 text. Then I got the hell outta there to enlighten you lay ppl with the new Potter story. So here's it.

While Ron and Hermione are fighting a deadly battle with the dark lords minions, Harry is confronted with the dark lord himself. Although he puts a valiant battle with him, it looks like the dark lord is about to over power the boy wizard. In a cruel irony of life and in that fateful minute Ginny comes to the aid. She saves her love but falls at last and dies on Harrys arms :-( Or was it Ginny kicking dark lords a**, um... I'm confused. Whatever it was, I once again proved I'm da l33t sup4 HaXXor. You better bow down to me.

Lay version:

I was chatting on Yahoo (gosh, I hate even to fake using Yahoo! mail) in this nice literature chatroom. There was this nice lady (identity withheld due to privacy reasons) from USA. We were having this mutual intelligent chat about British writers when I popped the name Rowling. She claimed "Oh, my god!" (it was O,mg!) "u also a potter
fan, I mean a Potter fan?". I said yes and asked why, casually. One thing lead to another and then to another. To make a long story short, that was when she told me how her neighbour bought a dog from an old couple whose daughter didn't have a child, so adopted a Tasmanian devil from a welsh locksmith who happened to be the friend of a friend of a person who was distantly related to a person who knew someone working in the HR department of Bloomsbury!

Wow! She told me very secretly (we had switched to private chat by then) how Neville dies protecting Harry and Ginny and how Luna becomes a professor at Hogwarts later. She was kind enough to tell me that Ron and Hermione marries and Harry has two children with Ginny. There were other yummy details which I'd withhold because I don't want to be such a spoiler. And please don't tell anyone about these things because it might jeopardize my friends situation.

Reality:

I just can't believe I wrote all those. Well, I did and you might want to know why. Top reason is I'm sick of people forwarding fake books and jamming my e mail, and trying to show off saying "I got the leaked Harry Potter book, if you want I can give it to you. Don't give it to anybody else..... etc." Said that I'm not irritated, just amused.

Funniest thing with these Potter things was, when a self-claimed hacker (cracker) posted
a mail claiming about the ending of the book, apparently by hacking (more precisely, cracking) into a publishers system. This story was posted in Insecure.org (yes, the Nmap site) and was covered by popular media such as Reuters, BBC, NY Times, FOX News, MSNBC, Boston Globe and several others more. Fyodor (founder and maintainer of Nmap, and Insecure.org) claimed jokingly "Muggles take over Insecure.Org!" on Insecure.org homepage. Now, don't you go there and add more traffic! :)

Well, that's it. But given the nature of the subject at hand I'd like to post a disclaimer.
(Whatever included in this post, is just imaginary and for pure amusement. Nothing in this is related to 'Harry Potter' titles, movies or non whatsoever. I have no relationship with J.K. Rowling or her publishers or anyone or anything associated with 'Harry Potter' material. If you think this is in violation of any legal aspects, please stop reading. It will work.)

LinuxQuestions.org Turns 7 and Member Count Hits 300,000

2007-06-19T01:45:00.000+05:30

The popular Linux Community site LinuxQuestions.org (LQ) has turned 7 years old on 17 June 2007. "jeremy" the root annonced this officially on a forum thread. Just within a day, the member count has now reached 300,000!

That's a big number. Community driven sites with 300,000 members, isn't something you are going to come across daily. To be more amazing, the 300,000 count doesn't include members who have been staying with 0 posts. For example, the user 300,052 actually has the uid number of 349,117.

I (SkyEye of LQ) happened to be that enthusiastic member who kept counting (of course by looking at the counter) and announced both the 200,000 and 300,000 member counts. By revealing this I am practically giving up my anonymity on LQ. :) Anyway I'll consider it as a tribute to LQ.

However the distinction of LQ is not just in the numbers. LQ has always been know for the friendly Linux community which was always there to help. Started in 2000 by Jeremy Garcia who is more widely called just by his LQ username "jeremy", LQ remains one of the most popular and most active Linux communities in the Net. I wonder how many have noticed the link and description of LQ in Red Hat site. If the Big Red recommends it, it should be good enough, eh? :) I also bet some of you might have stumbled upon LQ threads while searching the web about your Linux questions. That's how I ended up being a member.

So I'd recommend this site for any Linux geek, wannabe and for people who want to believe. If you know how to ask a question, the answer is just a post away. For all sorts of Linux questions, there's LinuxQuestions.org.

My Nmap Survey

2007-06-12T15:59:00.000+05:30

Here's a chance to all the geeks who read this blog to contribute to your favorite Open Source security scanner. If any of you have used Nmap please take a couple of minutes to complete this survey I created to capture end user feed back of the new NSE (Nmap Scripting Engine). FYI: I'm working with Nmap as a GSoC 2007 participant. I've already contacted some SysAdmins regarding this and this is the turn for you folks of the Blogospere :)

Gaveen's Nmap Survey

Nmap, the popular Open Source scanner have seen significant and rapid growth recently. Nmap being always a buzzing, swarming active Open Source collaboration, always attracted many (great many) users worldwide from it's early ages. If you are a SysAdmin (I mean a real one :) most probably you have already used it and loved it.

As a GSoC 2006 improvement there's a scripting system now available for Nmap. If you want to taste the latest things, try Nmap version 4.21ALPHA4 or the latest SVN snap. The new NSE system will launch Nmap to a higher plane of existence with many advanced usage possibilities.

As a GSoC 2007 participant, I'm assigned to develop scripts for Nmap. This is where I need your help. If you have any feedback please let me know. (If you cannot take the survey for any reason, please be kind enough to leave your feedback at least as a comment here.)

Good Bye Prof. Samaranakaye

2007-06-12T14:36:00.000+05:30

Here's my message in the electronic condolence book for Prof. V.K. Samaranayake. If anyone still haven't signed it here is the link. Come on people, show the respect he deserves, if this man was not there, most of you wouldn't even be reading this.

"Despite whatever some may say, this is the one who brought the Sri Lankan ICT to this light. Had it not been him and his inspirational presence, a great number of Sri Lankan ICT professionals including me, would not be what we are.

So may this be a tribute to he who spent a well spent live life, proactively shaping the Sri Lankan ICT; Prof. V.K. Samaranayake. Sri Lanka bows down to their ICT pioneer.

Good bye. May you attain the solace you deserve!"

Google SoC Launched on Fyodors B'day

2007-05-29T13:59:00.000+05:30

Google Summer of Code 2007 which has the most number of Sri Lankan students in the 3 year history of the program, is now officially underway. It started on 28th of May which happened to be the birthday of the popular Open Source developer Fyodor. This reminds me that I haven't posted anything about me being participating GSoC. Well, in fact I am taking part in GSoC 2007, obviously with Nmap :) Sorry, I forget to post that. It has been a very hectic (yes, hectic) few weeks for me (about which I don't feel like writing right now :)

Ok, I know I have to slow down. Well, Google Summer of Code (GSoC or SoC) is a program where Google pays selected students who in turn will work for an Open Source software development project during 3 months of the summer (from end of May to end of August). It draws attention of thousands and thousands of students all over the world. I'm not yet aware if the number of applications received this year, but the number of selected students for this year is 600 according to an unofficial source. I went through the student list and found out that there are 30 (or 29) students from Sri Lanka which is 5%! The official statistics will be available after the program.

Then Nmap is arguably the most popular Open Source security/networking tool around. Nmap was founded by and still lead by Fyodor. To get a picture about the popularity I'll mention this. If you do a Google search for fyodor, the first hit you'll get is about this Fyodor. The very popular writer Fyodor Dostoevsky will come in second to him (who claims he in turn made his handle after Fyodor Dostoevsky :). Anyway, Fyodor of insecure.org remains one of the most respected and most friendly developers around. So to me, it is a privilege to work with Nmap project.

As some of you may remember I applied last year also, but didn't make it there. However I wasn't discouraged by that. As you can see, I applied again this year for the Nmap Scripting Engine - Script Developer slot, and I made it. So now I'm working on creating an interesting set of plugins to utilize the new NSE system. So if anyone of you has ideas about this, please leave a message or try to contact me. Your ideas are welcome. If you are looking for more details about my GSoC work please refer to my Wiki site at Schtuff.

PS: My Wiki site is now moved to PBwiki.

Just Another Week

2007-05-20T15:04:00.000+05:30

Just another week. Not with too many interesting things (except a lot of personal affairs), but some troublesome situations which I can smile at as usual. Well, as usual patchy telephones lines caused Net connectivity blackouts forcing me to stay offline much. This was the centerfold of my week.

There were some notable sports events with mix results from my perspective. Shahid Afridi leading Pakistan to victory against Sri Lanka with his impressive brute force :), wasn't my favorite sports event of the week, naturally. My favorite sports event was Chelsea beating Manchester Unites for the FA Cup yesterday. It was Drogba with support of Lampard, got the goal in the 116 minute of the game (extended time) and won the cup for Chelsea. Not to mention, Chelsea is my favorite Football (Soccer, if you prefer) team. United had already won the FA Cup for 15 times or so where this was Chelsea's 4th time. Chelsea is the winner of this years League Cup too. They also ended up the 2nd in Premier League table this year behind United (but with lesser number of lost games).

For anyone who's not familiar with Chelsea, it's a football club with a long history who has taken the domination in UK football arena lately. I've been following their games (whenever I could) since 2003/2004 Premier League which was roughly the time when it started transforming to the team which it is now. Frank Lampard (vice captain) is their super star player, while others like John Terry (captain), Michael Ballack, Hernan Crespo, Claude Makelele, Didier Drogba, Andriy Shevchenko, Joe Cole, Ashley Cole, Solomon Kalou and Glen Johnson are also popular for their brilliance in the field. If you watched Football World Cup (FIFA World Cup) you'll certainly find most of the names sound familiar.

Nothing much else (to include in a blog post) happened, of course other than me working on some software and ICT related projects (I'm going to put more details in a separate post) and Nadee's mother being hospitalized for some treatment (about which I'll not put anymore details :). Up to now her progress is good, so everyone in the families are happy about that. Her discharge from the hospital is expected on Tuesday.

So my personal front have been somewhat hectic (which got worse by catching flu). That may be excuses for my lower activities in Technology front and on the blog. I've kicked back into action since. So I'll post more about the tech stuff soon. I'm glad to inform that I've got some interesting work to do in Open Source software, on which I'm going to concentrate for the next couple of months (more details on a later post). So as usual, stay tuned :)

Bad Weather even for Ducks!

2007-05-04T20:45:00.000+05:30

"Bad weather even for ducks" was the term which was used by Arun Dias, who was a presenter at yesterdays ceremony to receive the national Cricket team. He was describing yesterdays bad weather. It was said rain was 121mm during a 3 hour period in Colombo. I didn't think what Arun said was real, not just colourful presenting until I had to reach Colombo from outside today morning using public transportation. What a joy ride it was!

I was out of Colombo and today I had to reach there for some important matter. So I took a bus hoping to get to my destination. It was raining heavily (in fact very heavily) in Colombo. Even before we reached the city limits, we were diverted from the main road to take an alternative route. The reason we learned later was a caved-in on the main road which created a huge crater. So we took the alternative route and joined the traffic jam only to be greeted with frequent lightning. The rest is just history, at least for me :)

For your information I'll post a part of a text message conversation with a friend who asked about what it was like reaching Colombo today. Pardon me for the language here :)

Me: Brush up your swimming skills and prepare your amphibious kit :) It's raining cats & dogs out here.
Thila: You mean I'm screwed if I come there?
Me: If it rains like this.... yes.
Thila: Well, I'm on my way. Guess I'll be screwed then. Nice to know what that feels like :)
Me: :) It's like,... you are knee deep in filthy water, You can't see a damn thing because the heavy rain is beating your face. Traffic is jammed, roads caving in, trees fallen on roads, careless drivers splashing you,.. umbrellas wouldn't hold & you are in a flooded city street, nowhere to go for shelter. Hell, that's not so bad!

Well, that sums up most of the things :) Again pardon me for the language. I was feeling funny (humorous) after traveling 4 hours in wet attire. Anyway it is now known that this bad weather has caused more than irritation. There is a few deaths reported over the country. The most notable two are one lady getting killed by falling and downing in a manhole which wasn't seen because of the flooded road, and another lady getting electrocuted to death due to an electricity leakage into the water.

I usually love rain. But this kind of raining cannot be loved like that unless you are gambling something on it :) I hope the weather will get better soon (weather forecasts aren't too positive though) and life returns back to normal.

PS: By fifth of May disaster management authorities have announced the damage so far by the bad weather is 11 deaths and over 50,000 people displaced all over the country.

Warm Welcome Home for the National Cricket Team

2007-05-03T16:07:00.000+05:30

"Before this battle is done, even a god king can bleed"

- quote from "300" the movie

I remembered this quote today when I tried to recall Sri Lankan Cricket teams feat at the World Cup. Some people thought of Aussie team as an invincible unit. Although they have been the most dominant team of all times they surely are beatable. Everyone watching the game felt that, when Kumar Sangakkara and Sanath Jayasuriya were going at Aussies before the officials claimed "mornie utulie" (darkness has come :) Anyway todays post is about the welcome home the Sri Lankan team received today.

"I've taken my bows and my curtain calls
You brought me fame and fortune and everything that goes with it
I thank you all but
It's been no bed of roses - no pleasure cruise
I consider it a challenge before the whole human race and
I ain't gonna lose

And we mean to go on and on and on and on

We are the Champions my friends....
And we'll keep on fighting till the end"

- quote from "We are the Champions" a song by Queen

Today morning the Sri Lnakan Cricket team arrived the island only to be surprised by the reception they would receive. They might not have expected such a warm welcome having reached only the runners up spot in the World Cup 2007.

The team was received with the red carpet at the Katunayake International Airport with traditional "mangul bera" even in the rain. They gave brief interviews to the media at the VIP area. All mentioned the teams gratitude to the Sri Lankan cricket fans for their support and enormous belief in them. They also thanked the cricket fans through out the world (especially from Caribbean, Indian, and other cricketing countries). One special thing to notice during the day was, different media and personnel requesting Sanath to play till the 2011 World Cup, to which he smiled and shook his head disapprovingly (but we hope that he'd stay).

They were scheduled for a grand state honored welcome at the Independence Square in Colombo, but ironically the rain had the final saying again. The ceremony was re-located to the Sri Lankan Cricket head office due to the very heavy raining.

They received welcome from thousands of the public awaiting by the roads from Katunayake to Colombo, despite the pouring rain. The team members (including the coach Tom, assistant coach Trevor, trainer CJ, physio Tommy, manger Michael and others) were seen waving and hand shaking from the bus.

They again received a grand welcome at the ceremony. There the captain Mahela spoke a few words representing the whole team. And several others made speeches. Most notable ones were of the Minister of Sports and the Chief Minister of Western Province. Eventhough everyone want sports kept away from politicians, what they said was agreeable this time :)

CMoWP (as a government representative for the occasion) said that the team achieved something which no president, prime minister or politician could ever achieve; the good name of the country. The team was popular for their sportsmanship, discipline and Sri Lankan style of Cricket in Caribbeans. And the MoS said that we only lacked the cup itself. The country considers our boys the champions, our champions!

Cricket has been the common religion of Sri Lanka and it remains so. Cricket has been the beacon of hope for Sri Lankans who are spending a not so luxurious life. It will remain so until there are people to love the game. May this blog post be a tribute to Sri Lankan Cricket (including the past and present players and fans).

PS: I didn't want to ruin the ending of my post. But I have to admit no Sri Lankan is thankful for the way Arjuna Ranathunga, the former cricket captain (who was the captain of 1996 world cup winning team) acted and commented during the past few weeks. He stated that India was going to win the World Cup. No offense to India (who in fact was a very strong team), but was it the appropriate way for a former captain to send off the national team to the World Cup, especially when they were doing so well? There's an even bad rumor that Arjuna verbally assaulted two of the most promising new players and called the Sri Lankan cricketers "hungers" in an TV show. If this is true it will be so bad even the fact that he lead the world cup victory will not compensate. We all know what guts Arjuna has (just imagine,... calling Aussies premier bowler "over-rated" before a world cup final and go with the bat to prove it), but if these rumors are true...... ?! Some people in SL have gone far enough to claim that Arjuna doesn't like to share the glory. I don't know about these allegations or rumors. So I'll just leave the time to reveal things.

Online on Vesak

2007-05-02T03:02:00.000+05:30

To day despite being the May Day, is also the Vesak full moon poya day, a day with immense importance to the Buddhists all over the world. Think of it as the Buddhist equivalent of X'mas. To day Buddhists celebrated the birth, enlightenment and passing away of lord Buddha, the great one. Anyway, when all the others were out there in the streets and temples, I was right here because I had to try some software very urgently.

I tried Pentaho BI Server and Alfresco CM. Pentaho is the premier Open Source Business Intelligence product while Alfresco is its Content Management counterpart (WebGUI is a very close contender). I have tried Pentaho beforehand, but it was my first experience with Alfresco. Pentaho is a great product. Alfresco seems great, too. But it's too soon to comment on that.

Yesterday I've been playing with Nessus (after updating the plugin set) and Nmap, running them against my new Ethernet router. Results were amazing as usual. Other than that, yesterday was my first experience with so called WebOSes. I heard about Desktoptwo, YouOS and eyeOS. I got to try all except YouOS. It was a good experience and an introduction to a new realm. With all the Ajax buzz going on all around, I'm just beginning to see the possibilities of web applications. Quite a fun ride it was (eyeOS public server had pre-installed Sonic the Hedgehog and Aladdin for users).

Here is a few screenshots to whet your appetite.

This is Desktoptwo running several applications including e mail client, MP3 Player and IM client.

This is eyeOS with an opened window

For anyone interested in more screenshots please visit my Picasa Albums.

World Cup Concludes

2007-04-30T16:58:00.000+05:30

It's not exactly the way I planned to write this post, but anyway the ICC Cricket World Cup 2007 is officially concluded by now. Congratulations for the world champions for the 3rd consecutive run, Australia.

While my favourite Sri Lanka ended up being the runner-up, they showed the unmistakable signs of another great team on the rise. If you are not down with my words Sri Lankan coach Tom Moody (probably the best coach we ever had) said in an interview that "I think we were only half-a-yard away from winning the World Cup. We were very close, so I think this team is capable of winning the next World Cup. There's no reason why Sri Lanka won't continue its upward curve."

Some people have already started trash talking about the loss of Sri Lanka, but I'd like to take this moment to knock them (on the head) and point what SL team been achieving lately. As for the final, I think the only thing we did seriously wrong was to let loose Adam Gilchrist. It was enough though :) When Sri Lankans came to bat we were not worried since we knew as long as Sanath was in there, he was in charge whatever the opposition was. Everything went fine until rain came pouring down again yet again and took away the rhythm of the game. Then the two most hated Englishmen (Duckworth and Lewis) had their saying. Game was still within our grasp until Chamara Silva was clean bowled by a part-time bowler. Anyway all the boys of our team made us proud throughout the tournament. They were nothing but phenomenal. Newer guys like Chamara and Lasith were outstanding. Despite falling just short, they have proved that they are probably better than the 1996 world champion team. This is just the dawn of the rise of a new Sri Lankan Cricket team.

For a brief history, Australia made it to the finals for the 4th consecutive run. Results: 1996 - lost to Sri Lanka, 1999 - defeated Pakistan, 2003 - defeated India, 2007 - defeated Sri Lanka. They even surpassed the feat of the great West Indies team of Clive Lloyd by becoming world champions for 3 consecutive runs (total of 4 world championships). However this 2007 World Cup itself was the biggest and probably the worst. Hosts and venues were great, but there were things which shouldn't be judged against the Caribbeans. For example the communication fiasco at the final, murder of Bob Woolmer are among other things. When Lasith Malinga got 4 wickets in 4 balls (with 5th ball just missing the stumps in the distance of a strand of hair), a feat that has never been done before in the history of the great game, and almost stole the victory from South Africa (then No.1 ranked team) people in concern didn't feel like this world record setter was the man of the match.

To make things worse a few of the cricketing legends said good bye to the field in this world cup. This includes Brian Lara, Glen McGrath and probably a few more (hope not!). It may be the last world cup for (again desperately hoping not) some living legends like Sanath Jayasuriya, Muttiah Muralitharan and Sachin Tendulkar.

Sri Lankan team is in great guns and doing truly amazing things which leave the world shocked. Recently they've been bettering what we crowned in 1996: playing the Sri Lankan style of Cricket! We refuse to go down just like that and will rise to be the champions in 2011. Veterans like Sanath, Vaas, Murali and Marvan will guide the new breed there. So if any Australian Cricket authority happens to stumble upon this blog post by sheer luck, be warned! Don't say we didn't warn :)

Before I start ...again

2007-04-05T14:50:00.000+05:30

I stated in my previous post that I'm going to be back. Anyway, before I start, I think it's better to give a brief description about what happened during the time I was not blogging and what I'm up to.

For the people who were [blank - fill to your satisfaction] enough to read my blog know that I bought "The Lord of the Rings" book trilogy. I am more than happy to announce that it was long ago I devoured the books. And about movie fests, what to say? We passed several movie fests of our own (in fact many, many) until movies became a Saturday night ritual. The movies we watched (quite a lot) deserve a separate post. So look forward to it. Other than that I've watched several TV serials on DVD including Millennium, X - Files, Friends :)

Our little effort to create a live Linux CD for computer forensic purposes didn't succeed, since we gave it up on other priorities. But that effort and several other things took me more and more close to Information and Computer Security. I have developed a strong desire for that area in ICT. In fact I've been following OSSTMM for sometime, and now feel like contributing to it. Other than that I'm paying close attention to what ISECOM is doing. So believe people I'm strongly into InfoSec.

As usual I've been playing with interesting tools. Some people who knows me will remember I've been using Nessus, Nmap, Metasploit and several other tools all along. Actually, I've been writing an article about Nessus called How Nessus Works from February. You can expect it any day after today. It spans around twenty pages in A4 formatted OpenOffice.org 2.2 Writer document. The document is almost finished and will be posted here once it's done. I'll also put a link to the PDF version. Thanks for the people who's been waiting for it.

I applied for the Google Summer of Code 2007. I applied last year too, but wasn't successful. My this year's GSoC application was for Nmap Scripting Engine - Script Developer. The PDF version of the application can be found in my Google pages. For the people who don't know what's been going on with Nmap, try Nmap 4.21ALPHA4. This version includes a nifty and very useful feature called NSE (Nmap Scripting Engine). It enables one to write scripts which can utilize Nmap in complex and advanced ways. More on Nmap, later :)

As for the year 2007, one of the very interesting things I had was the opportunity to attend a seminar on ISO 27001 ((Information Security Management), ISO 20000 (IT Service Management) and TR 19 (Business Continuity Management). It was a great experience. I was naturally attracted to it since I already had experience with ISO 9001:2000 (Quality Management System).

And the biggest thing till now in 2007 for me was buying a new Notebook computer. It's a Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz (with 4MB L2 Cache) with 1GB (DDR 2 667MHz) of RAM, dedicated 256MB ATI Mobility Radeon x1600 GPU, 17 inch Widescreen XGA display, 100GB SATA HDD (5400 RPM), DVD Super Multi burner, Intel PRO Wireless 802.11a/b/g, Gigabit Ethernet, 56k integrated modem, 3 USB, 1 IEEE 1394, DVI, S-Video, 4-in-1 memory card reader (SD, MMC, MS, MS-Pro), PCI Express card slot amoung other things. As you can see, it was a big thing for me :)

I'm running a Fedora Core 6 Linux desktop on the machine. It was really cool to see CPU load balancing graph during the time we encoded 2 movies simultaneously using MEncoder (MPlayer's own encoder). With the x264 codec MPlayer/MEncoder can do magic (what a quality!) also. Many thanks to the FFMPEG team, too. And for the people who have no idea what MPlayer is (or who think it's Media Player), MPlayer is the best media player, the true universal player :) (Obviously I'm a big fan).

I also tried a few games in the new machine (wouldn't it be a sin, not to play any games in a machine with such power? :). I tried Doom 3, Quake III Arena, Quake 4, Tomb Raider - Legend, Prince of Persia - The Two Thrones, Unreal Tournament 2003. Anyway I don't have much time to play games, so apart from Linux, I'll be running OpenSolaris soon.

Nothing much to say about my academic things because there weren't much. I was much concentrated on my professional things. Since I have a plan where I'm going, that's what I was doing. Any way professionally, I was getting ready for the RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer) hands on lab test (RH 302) which is scheduled on 23rd of April. I've registered for the test and looking forward to it. I found a lot of interesting reading regarding Linux in IBM Developer Works Linux section, especially LPI certification article series.

Other than OSSTMM, RHCE, Nmap, Nessus, I have allocated some time here and there to watch the Cricket World Cup these days, which is getting hotter and hotter by match in the Caribbeans.

So that's what's about me. I'm living happily (with Nadee by my side :) Lot more things are there to say. But I think this is enough for you to get a picture of what I've been doing. So other info, later. Thanks for reading and look for the paper, "How Nessus Works".

I'm Back with year 2007

2007-01-13T18:05:00.000+05:30

Hello world,

After several months of non-blogging, I'm back!

I'll be using my blog more and more open and express my views on whatever I think is interesting. So if anyone still bothering to read this blog, stay tuned.

Anyway, wish everyone a very happy new year, 2007!

Saturday Night Movie Fest

2005-10-24T04:34:00.000+06:00

On a Saturday night (I guess it was this 8th) Thilanka, Yajith and I had a movie fest at Yajith's place. It was after sometime all three of us got together. So we had a good time of watching a few movies (not very new ones), do some testings as usual and talking quite a lot.

About the talk, we talked about .... well, quite a lot as I said. We taled what a genius was J.R.R. Tolkien and how nice was Harry Potter series. We talked about Nessus 3 controversy, use of Sleuthkit and Autopsy, Gentoo installation, APT-GET system, etc. More than anything Thila got to knock off Yajith's idea about MPlayer. At last, to our joy Yajith accepted that MPlayer is a really good multimedia player. Anyway Thila had to do a handful of tricks with MPlayer in command line. Not to mention Yajith loves to work in command line. He likes the command line so much, that he opens a console to send click signals to GUI buttons (just joking :-)

Oh, about the movies. Right. First we got to see “Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas”. What do you think about that? We think the movie was nice. But the greatest thing about it was Sinbad was done on Linux (Red Hat Enterprice Linux on 64bit Itanium 2, I guess) And our talk went in to other movies also. If some one is interested in learning what are the movies and studios which uses Linux (at least partially) see this rather incomplete list. Wow, this list contains Final Fantasy, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Titanic, etc.

Around dinner we settled to see “the Siege”, starring Denzel Washington. After that we kept fiddling with several Lord of the Rings DVDs and so on. The third movie was one of our favourite animation films. “Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within”. And finally “National Treasure”

Well it was a nice break. And I was really happy to see both of the guys in great form. I almost forgot to mention our discussion about technical projects. If everything goes fine we'll have something to tell you within a few months. Till then all you would hear from our gang may be .... may be.... a movie fest. Clues,....... people, clues..., these were few keywords. XFCE 4, UnionFS, SquashFS, Sleuthkit, Autopsy, Nessus, Nmap, Filesystems, GNU/Linux Kernel 2.6

Well, you can expect to hear more about the Nessus project from me soon. The story should have hit my blog by now. But due to some reasons, I had to postpone the thing. There are quite a few posts waiting in the queue. So as I usually say, stay tuned.

Inconsistency

2005-09-30T18:49:00.000+06:00

This is the story.

Few days ago one of my friends wanted to use a case-insensitive file system under GNU/Linux. Neither he nor I felt like Samba at that time. So he asked me to produce a FAT32 (because things were easy) by resizing his Swap.

I just did a swapoff, used parted to resize the partition and created a new one, changed the ID to FAT32. Then I did a mkswap and a swapon on the Swap to activate swapping back. After that I used mkfs.vfat –F 32 to create a FAT32. I also edited fstab to set uid=xxx,gid=xxx,umask=xxx, and fat=32,owner as mount options. Issued mount –a. Everything was done.

To test I created a file called “test” by touch. Did a ls –hal. Things were fine. Then I used vi TeST, entered some gibberish and saved it. Did another ls –hal. Oops! I got problems. The file was now named TeST.

So I thought maybe I should create the file system using DOS. I grabbed my UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD v 3.3), booted from FreeDOS, did a formatting. Got back to Linux and followed the testing a few times with a different file names, like sss. Yes! I got it this time. So I handed the system back to my friend and thought he would live happily ever after.

Few hours passed seamlessly. Then I found my friend looking at me startled. When I got back to his system I did a test again. No way! The file qqq turned into QqQ. Same things (working fine – not working – working fine – not working) kept happening for several times until we called it a finish.

That’s it. Anyway my friend found things up to the mark. So things got sorted out. But one thing I dislike is when software act inconsistently like that. Maybe afterall it was because VFAT was case-preserving even when it was case-insensitive. But, then why it worked fine sometimes. I’ll look in to it later.

As for me I’m living happily ever after in real world and in cyber world. Well, that was until my friend started bugging me regarding Samba sometime later.

My Light in Hard Times

2005-09-30T18:26:00.000+06:00

Another wonderful morning (yesterday) with Nadee. I really don't know how to tell how much she means to me. Her caring and love keeps me up and working.

Do I sound like I'm through a hard time? Well then, I'm not. I'm busy these days. Yes, I mean it. But I'm really smiling and working. I feel very alive, not worn-out. These are the greatest days in my life. All because of the Happiness you bring to me, Nadee.

Nadee, I just can't express how much you mean to me. All I can say is ....,

I love you.

Taprobane GNU/Linux - A Linux Distribution from Sri Lanka

2005-09-28T11:10:00.000+06:00

Few days ago DistroWatch Announced the release of Taprobane GNU/Linux. This is a live CD distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux created by developers of LKLUG (Lanka Linux User Group). Now it has it's own profile page at DistroWatch.

Its really good to see a good Linux distribution from Sri Lanka. The featured release 0.4.1 has several interesting features. According to the DistroWatch announcement it has "X.Org 6.8.2; official NVIDIA driver support out of the box; KDE 3.4.1; OpenOffice.org 2; Linux 2.6.12.4; SquashFS and Unionfs; Apache, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Zope, started and stopped from the K-menu; excellent hotplug support; saving data to persistent media; educational software such as Stellarium and Octave."

Here are some other links related to Taprobane GNU/Linux

Longing to Read

2005-09-22T13:39:00.000+06:00

For your information, I bought copies of "Fellowship of the Ring", "Two Towers" and "Return of the King" paperback new reset edition from Harper-Collins at the Colombo International Book Fair(CIBF) last week. Since then I tried to read them. I am glad to announce that I finally managed to reach page 40 day before yesterday.

Wondering I'm a real spoiler? Not really. I think I can start properly reading tonight. Last few days were eventful. Few days for ripping packages of a Debian box and fiddling with Netfilter/IPTables (Yeah, I'm thankful about apt-get and debfoster) and a nice weekend with Nadee. Then again IPTables. Did I mention that I was at LinuxQuestions.org all the time as usual?

Well 'there and back again', I'm quite back to normal (even after the bad cold I had).

A Beginning

2005-09-20T18:30:00.000+06:00

At last I've decided to start blogging, too. Await postings from me. I'm also going to use this blog as my on-line diary.

I shall blog my vision and expressions as well as technological & technical stuff. Once in a while you'll be able to read a poem, too.

At this time one can expect to hear about a variety of topics from this blog. Please see my profile to find out what are my interests. For sure expect to see about FOSS and Computers.