Category: FOSS

Me, My Team and The Gran Hotel Elba Estepona

Yes, you read it right! After almost 3 years of working together totally remote, I finally got to meet my awesome colleagues at Scrapinghub back in November 2017 when we had our first ever company get together in Estepona, Spain.

Estepona Sunrises are to die for.

So my flight was around 10:30 pm and I was driven to the airport by my little sister two hours before. She has staff access there and knows everybody so I got the total VIP treatment and the whole process was super comfortable for me.
(Of course It did help that I had all the documents in proper order, as airport security is no joke, no matter how important of a person you are :D)

City of stars forever!

I was just about to step outside of the window for some fresh air when I saw the warning sign =)

I was driven from Malaga airport to Estepona by this wonderful gentleman with a BMW… BMW’s are somewhat of an elite vehicle in Sri Lanka and I had not been in one until this so I was pretty thrilled to have that experience.
It was a comfortable drive; took about 45 minutes to the hotel.

Finally we came to Elba Estepona! It looked just as magnificent as I imagined!

Main entrance was this really cool rotating door which kept the inside of the hotel away from the cold air outside.

To be continued…

As I came out of the hotel, my ride to the airport arrived and the chauffeur put all my luggage into the back of the vehicle. I turned around and took one last look at the magnificent main entrance of the Gran Hotel Elba Estepona, where I had both the most wonderful time with awesome people and also indulged in the luxuries of solitude and quiet with a view that is absolutely out of this world, and whispered to myself “Until next time!”

And then I jumped into the vehicle that was going to take me back to the airport, This time, another Sri Lankas’s favorite, a Mercedes…

Playing with pligg

So I had this idea for a small (i guess) project which uses a digg like voting system. So I installed the pligg cms and tried playing with it for some time and after two days I decided to go with its well known drupal based competitor drigg. Of course pligg is a good cms and I don’t necessarily mean to suggest that anyone shouldn’t use it. But it was a little too messed up. Atleast for me. 😐

The things I didn’t like in pligg includes the not so clean code, which requres to change dozen places when you need to do something as simple as switching a theme, The not so active development of the cms, unlike drupal which has a very powerful developer base. The not so open karma calculation, which obviously gonna be a PITA later on. And the not so friendly user support which is “known” not to listen to its users 😛 (which I did NOT experience btw)
So I switched to drigg and I’m glad I did 🙂 it’s drupal based and you can feel the cleanliness of the code 🙂 of course if you choose to do the manual installation it takes some time to configure the the modules needed to get drigg up and running, And you’re gonna need to know the basics of drupal, but it’s all fun and I don’t think it would be that hard to learn, even if you are completely new to drupal.

So now I’m tweaking the site and I might write a post on getting drupal+drigg up if I have enough time. And yes! of course I’ll reveal the project i’m working 😛 and if you people have any interest in Free Software you might even like it heehee. but that’s yet to see… 😉

Using Huawei E220 HSDPA modem in GNU/Linux

If you’ve been following me on twitter you already know that I got a mobile broadband connection. But if you don’t know it yet, thats a good reason you should follow me on twitter. Anyways! the modem I got with my connection is the Huawei E220, And I’m very happy to say that it works perfectly fine under GNU/Linux. I was actually planning to write a blog post on that but was busy by some projects done with our local kde developer siraj 🙂 (nothing related to KDE by the way)

Few days back I stumbled upon a blog which the blog owner has written a post on switching to GNU/Linux. One of his consernce was getting his Huawei e220 working on Linux. Well, of course its a piece of cake, but I could risk a new linux user steping away from linux because he had a small prob with his 3g modem 😛 so wrote this comment on his blog to realize that I almost wrote a complete blog post on how to get it done. And decided that I should publish it on my blog so anyone else having problems with 3G connectivity on linux can solve them. so here goes my mini tutorial. Btw, I did some adjestments to it so it fits in.

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E220 works perfectly with wvdial on ubuntu Hardy Haron.
Here are the steps…
(1) Plug in the modem and run
sudo wvdialconf
(2) Then edit the wvdial.conf file…
sudo vim /etc/wvdial.conf Uncomment Username and Password lines in wvdial.conf and add the following to the end of the file “stupid mode = yes“
(3) Save the wvdial.conf
(4) run wvdial to get connected 🙂

If you are using ubuntu 8.10 then the Graphical Network Manager recognizes the modem and connects you within seconds.

I usually use kppp with my Slackware installation and it runs really well too. I prefer kppp over wvdial because it even logs the data usage of the modem.

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Thats all folks! if anyone needs help, I’m just a blog comment away, or just send me an @message on twitter and yes I’m the seejay on twitter.

~seejay~

Firefox Inside Firefox

Hellow Fellows!
You know that many of us spend lot of our computing time on the internet and most of that time we use Firefox tabs to open all our favorite sites and services inside Firefox right?, yes, Gmail inside Ff, Yahoo inside Ff, ebay inside Ff, Banking inside Ff ect. ect. ect… With all these favorites inside Firefox, How about opening Firefox inside Firefox? Not bad ha? and its really easy too! just type in this url in a new tab in Firefox and there you go! Firefox inside Firefox!

chrome://browser/content/browser.xul

Disclaimer: I guarantee that this will work with Firefox. But I have no responsibility of any damage that cause Internet Explorer users by Using this with IE to Open Firefox inside IE 😆
C.J.

update: feel free to visit my new blog http://seejay.net for more Firefox tricks!