Mohamed Aslam

The Beginning of a Brand new Experience

Aslam — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 07:39:00 +0000

Today is a very important day of my life. I have been through a lot and gained much experience, which has brought me to where I am now in life. Today is indeed an important day for me, because it will be the beginning of a whole new experience. It is something that I have given much thought to, but have been waiting for the right time. It is with great joy that I declare that I am launching my own web consultation firm!

When it comes to work, I’ve always preferred to be independent. That’s why I love entrepreneurship. Starting from around the second year of my undergraduate studies, I have been working on specific client projects until recent times. In addition, I was also running a very small web hosting company. During that period I realized something interesting. I understood that given a person has the proper set of skills and know how, making money is no big deal! From that realization, I began to plan on starting my career as a full-time freelancer.

Being born a Sri Lankan, I was faced with many challenges for the decision I had thought of taking. The culture and the mindset of the people are far different compared to the contemporary world. Life is looked at as a set of rules. First, you go to school until you’re done with high school. Then you get enrolled to a University, and once you have graduated, you’re supposed to find a 9 to 5 job so that you can make a living for the rest of your life! This is what is referred to as being “successful”. If you present yourself as a freelancer, they would defiantly underestimate your talent and skill and have the general idea of you as a low skilled person who cannot find a proper job.

After I graduated, my parents were eager on me to get a good job which would make them really proud. However I didn’t like the idea of working for a large company which has thousands of employees. I was keener on finding a very agile firm. With that in mind, I applied to Cinergix, the makers of Creately – which is the super awesome online diagramming tool. Soon, I was selected and really enjoyed working there (if you are dreaming of working in a very friendly and open cultured company you should definitely consider applying to work there). Nevertheless, the thought of working for my self and having my own company still lingered in my mind and became an important dream for me.

I recently came a cross a quote by Dale Carnegie in which he says “You never achieve success unless you like what you are doing.” That single quote was enough to change my entire life. Meanwhile, I had a very reputable overseas client base and they always encouraged me to start my own company and work with them. With the hopes of turning my dream into reality, I finally contacted them and informed them that I will be starting my company very soon. After that, I quit my day job and started focusing on starting up my own firm. I picked up some books on freelancing and entrepreneurship and gathered as much knowledge as I could about the skills that would be needed in running a business.

As I finally got started, they accepted the project within 2 weeks. From then I was completely overloaded with projects. So I decided to build a small but solid agile team. We currently comprise 5 members in the team which includes a designer, a developer, a system engineer, a technical writer and me. In addition, we expect to get another SEO person who would be joining with us in the coming months.

Services we provide:

For more information in obtaining our services, please visit our official website FrontCube

Random Posts

Introducing Speedy – Painless rapid Rails deployment

Aslam — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:20:08 +0000

If you’re a Rails developer I hope you too hate to run ./script/server command all the time to start the application server during the development phase. Fortunately Phusion came up with a revolutionized solution to host the Rails application on Apache server using Passenger (aka mod_rails).

To deploy a web application on Apache using Passenger you should perform following initial server configurations.

Create a virtual host
Add an entry to the hosts file
Enable the website
Finally restart the Apache web server

Apparently this is a repetitive task, no doubt it sucks your valuable time for each and every application that you develop and deploy.

Before I bought my MacBookPro, I used Debian based Linux distros like Ubuntu and LinuxMint for my development. So, at that time I noticed that Mac people have a simple solution called Passenger preference pane, which allows them to drag and drop project and deploy. I really inspired by that and I always wanted to create such an automated tool which can use by all Rails developers despite of the platform. So I thought the best solution for this is to create a Ruby gem.

So, as soon after finishing my final year exams, I sat and write the specifications for the tool. First I thought to call this tool as “FireRails”. But, finally it became “Speedy”.

I’ve hosted the Speedy on ~~GemCutter~~ RubyGems, so that you can install in the native way.

sudo gem install speedy

To deploy a web application navigate to the particular application root folder via terminal and simply type

sudo speedy deploy

(Since Speedy deals with many system level commands, you always need to run Speedy with administrator credentials.)

If you need, you can pass the desired hostname for above command.

sudo speedy deploy example.local

If not Speedy will create a hostname and deploy the site with the name of the root folder, enable the site and finally restart the Apache server. All these operations will only take less than 2 seconds, as the name implies.

In addition to that, you can use Speedy for maintain Apache-Passenger clean configurations. Play the video for the instructions.

Currently, Speedy supports Debian/Ubuntu variants only. Hopefully, next release will support both Mac and Linux, and my ultimate goal is to develop Speedy, to use it in production servers, very easily and very happily.

You can visit the official website and the documentation for more information and instructions. Also follow @speedygem in Twitter for stay up to date. If you would like to discuses about the features and suggest new features or to report a bug please visit the official Google group.

How to fix Apache – “Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName” Error on Ubuntu

How to uninstall / remove Ruby Gems (on Ubuntu)?

Aslam — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:44:34 +0000

First we need to find out the exact location that the Ruby installs it’s libraries. In the terminal program, You can type the following command to find out the exact location.

ruby -e 'puts $:'

You’ll get list of paths. This is the output that I got in my machine.

/usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8
/usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/i486-linux
/usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/i386-linux
/usr/local/lib/site_ruby
/usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8
/usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8/i486-linux
/usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/i486-linux
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-linux
.

Next we need to change our directory in to /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8 and type following command to list the files.

ls -la

drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 2009-07-15 12:15 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2009-07-15 12:14 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1415 2009-07-15 12:15 gauntlet_rubygems.rb
drwxrwsr-x 2 root staff 4096 2009-07-15 12:14 i486-linux
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2009-07-15 12:15 rbconfig
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 2009-07-15 12:15 rubygems
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 29116 2009-07-15 12:15 rubygems.rb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 268 2009-07-15 12:15 ubygems.rb

Now we are ready to remove the gems. Type,

rm -r rubygems.rb ubygems.rb rubygems

If you wish to remove all gems installed in your computer, first find out the location by executing following commands

which gem gem1.8

Next you can remove them by using following commands. That’s it!

rm -r /usr/local/bin/gem
rm -r /usr/bin/gem1.8

Screencast: How to Install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu?

Aslam — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:08:48 +0000

This screencast will teach you to set up the Ruby on Rails development environment on Ubuntu.

Don’t forget to toggle the full screen button on the player.

How to setup PHP for IIS 7 server on Vista?

Aslam — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:43:34 +0000

Are you a .NET developer? Looking forward to learn or switch to PHP (which is quit impossible. May be I’m dreaming…! . However if you are, you are mostly welcome to the word of light..! I mean LAMP) You can setup PHP in IIS server. I’ll walk you through step by step. So, are you ready for the journey..? Let’s go..

I’m writing this tutorial to understand even by a newbie. So bare with me for some very basics stuffs.

First of all you need to install PHP to your computer. You can download PHP at

http://www.php.net/downloads.php

PHP installation is pretty straight forward. I believe you can manage it.

Next you need to ensure whether the IIS server installed in your computer. Regular windows installation won’t install IIS server. So, to test whether it is there or not, right click on My Computer icon and select Manage. Then expand the Services and Application node.

If you don’t see Internet information Service, that means that you should install IIS server manually. It’s pretty simple.

Go to Control Panel and select Classic View in the left pane. Then double click on the Programs and Features icon. Now you’ll have a list of option in your right pane. Select Turn Windows features on or off.

Click the Internet Information Server check box and expand the node.

Again expand the World Wide Web Services , Application Development Features and click the ISAPI Extensions. Then click OK. It will take several minutes to installation.

Now you can check whether the server working properly. Open up your internet browser and type http://localhost/ . You’ll get a page as follows

Now you need to configure the server for PHP. Go to the Computer Management window again (Right click on My Computer and select Manage) and expand the Services and Applications node and click the Internet Information Services link. Then in the connection area select Default Web Site.

Click on Handler Mappings.

On the right side of the window, click on “Add Script Map…”

Once you clicked a pop up window will appear. Fill up the fields with following values.

Click OK. Then a Dialog box will appear. Say Yes! to that. Thats it!

Now you need to check whether the server working with PHP. Open up your favorite text editor and type

1
2
3

phpinfo();
?>

Save the file as phpinfo.php under “C:\inetpub\wwwroot”.

Then open up your browser and navigate to http://localhost/phpinfo.php
If you get following page.., you are done..!

How to Install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)

Aslam — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 06:52:09 +0000

Few of my friends have started to learn Ruby on Rails recently. According to my point of view, Windows is not a suitable and enjoyable environment for RoR development. So, I recommended them to start with Ubuntu. Most of them have installed Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04. So, I wish to write a small guide to setup the Ruby on Rails environment on Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04

If you like to watch the screencast of this title, rather than reading whole post, you can find my screencast here.

http://mohamedaslam.com/screencast-how-to-install-ruby-on-rails-on-ubuntu/

Ruby installation

First we need to update the repositories.

sudo apt-get update

It’s always a best practice to upgrade the system.

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

This installation will take few minutes and also require approximately 100 MB disk space.

Now that we are up to date. Let’s start install the RoR recipices. We need following Rails prerequisites.

ruby = An interpreter of object-oriented scripting language Ruby
ri = Ruby Interactive reference
rdoc = Generate documentation from ruby source files
irb = Interactive Ruby

sudo apt-get install ruby ri rdoc irb libopenssl-ruby ruby-dev

Ruby Gem installation

Next we need to install the Ruby gem package manager. You can download the latest Ruby gems by following link.

http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubygems/

Download and extract the files. (By the time I’m writing this tutorial the latest version is 1.3.1)

tar xvzf rubygems-1.3.1.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.1
sudo ruby setup.rb

Once it’s done you can delete the .tgz file and rubygems directory.

cd ..
rm -r rubygems-1.3.1 rubygems-1.3.1.tgz

Next we need to create a set of simlinks. Otherwise it will be a tedious task to type commands with the version (1.8). For an example if we need to call the gem command we’ve to type gem1.8. I don’t prefer that. Hope you too. So, let’s create the necessary simlinks.

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/local/bin/gem
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ruby1.8 /usr/local/bin/ruby
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/rdoc1.8 /usr/local/bin/rdoc
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ri1.8 /usr/local/bin/ri
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/irb1.8 /usr/local/bin/irb

Rails Installation

Now we can install Rails using gem.

sudo gem install rails

Server Installation

Rails by default comes with the WEBrick server. But most Rails developers prefer the Mongrel server. If you satisfied with WEBrick you can skip this step, else type the following command to install Mongrel server.

sudo gem install mongrel

If you got any error while installing the Mongrel server, install the ruby-dev / ruby1.8-dev and try again.

sudo apt-get install ruby-dev

Database Installation

Rails 2.3 shipped with SQLite3 as it’s default database instead of MySQL. You can install SQLite3 libraries by following commands.

sudo apt-get install sqlite3 swig libsqlite3-ruby libsqlite3-dev
sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby

If you prefer MySQL,

sudo apt-get install mysql-client libmysqlclient15-dev
sudo gem install mysql

Create Ruby on Rails App

Now that we have completed everything successfully. You can create your new Ruby on Rail applicaion by following command.

rails test_app

If you need MySQL supported applicaion you need to specify as follows

rails test_app -d mysql

Run the app

cd test_app
script/server

navigate you browser to http://localhost:3000

Wola.. you have done it…!

Happy Rails…!

How to fix Apache – “Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName” Error on Ubuntu

Aslam — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:54:39 +0000

You might probably faced the same following error while you were restarting the Apache server on Ubuntu.

aslam@aslam:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
* Restarting web server apache2 apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName
... waiting apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName

To fix that problem, you need to edit the httpd.conf file. Open the terminal and type,

sudo gedit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

By default httpd.conf file will be blank. Now, simply add the following line to the file.

ServerName localhost

Save the file and exit from gEdit.

Finally restart the server.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Mohamed Aslam

The Beginning of a Brand new Experience

Random Posts

Introducing Speedy – Painless rapid Rails deployment

Related Articles

How to uninstall / remove Ruby Gems (on Ubuntu)?

Related Articles

Screencast: How to Install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu?

Related Articles

How to setup PHP for IIS 7 server on Vista?

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How to Install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)

Ruby installation

Ruby Gem installation

Rails Installation

Server Installation

Database Installation

Create Ruby on Rails App

Run the app

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How to fix Apache – “Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName” Error on Ubuntu

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